Armed Servants: Agency, Oversight and Civil-Military Relations
Peter D. Feaver. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003. 381 pp. Charts. Bib. Index. $49.95.
Reviewed by Lieutenant Colonel Frank G. Hoffman, U.S. Marine Corps Reserve
Anyone who studies civil-military relations toils in the long shadow of Samuel Huntington's seminal The Soldier and the State (Cambridge: Harvard, 1957). With the exception of Morris Janowitz's The Professional Soldier (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1960), no one has seriously challenged Huntington. Thus, no academic or student discusses the topic without genuflecting before Huntington's catechism.
Along comes Dr. Peter Feaver, professor of political science at Duke University. Feaver is no stranger to the subject, having codirected (with Richard Kohn of the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill) the highly regarded Triangle Institute for Security Studies study that resulted in Soldiers and Civilians: The Civil-Military Gap and American National Security (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001). Soldiers and Civilians was an exhaustive examination of the putative crisis in civil-military affairs, and replaced anecdotes and opinions with meticulous research and facts. Armed Servants is no less exhaustive, but is only an opening effort at a reformation. Although Feaver is not quite a heretic, neither is he an abstract theoretician or academic. Armed Servants reflects the author's background as a political scientist as well as his hard-earned experience as a staff member with the National Security Council in the early 1990s. These experiences give the book extraordinary utility as well as additive credibility.
Huntington's 1957 gospel was conceived and written in the early stages of the Cold War, in the midst of a tumultuous era of national security crises that spawned a series of tense debates between politicians and military leaders. In his monumental treatise, Huntington attempted to lay out a theory that would balance civilian control against an anomaly in U.S. history—an increasingly powerful military institution necessitated by the Cold War. His normative theory holds sway today, despite a slowly growing awareness that its prescriptions are not without fault. Eliot Cohen has chipped away at the edifice of the Huntington monument already in his brilliant Supreme Command (New York: Free Press, 2002), but Feaver attempts to push it over entirely and replace The Soldier and the State with his own theory. Whether he has succeeded remains to be seen.
In Feaver's hypothesis, civil-military relations are the product of a strategic interaction between civilian principals and military "agents." This construct subordinates the military to civilian control, but specifies the conditions under which civilian policy makers delegate authority to the military and how intrusively they monitor the military. Conversely, the theory contends that military agents determine whether to accept the mission assigned or "shirk" it based on the monitoring conditions imposed by civilian authority and the expectations the military has about what the consequences might be for noncompliance. "Shirking" is an unfortunate choice of terms, but is defined by the author as anything short of full obedience, which could include overestimating potential costs and casualties, constraining options, or leaking material to political allies to undercut elected officials. Many readers will be put off by the use of gaming theory, economic rationalism, and organizational politics. But Armed Servants, unlike Huntington's explanation about how things ought to work, is about how things really work in Washington.
The book has numerous selling points, but its biggest shortfall is the lack of prescriptive guidance to resolve today's tense relationships. Feaver does well when showing how his theory can describe the past, but he offers little in terms of normative guidance for the future. It is extremely difficult to see how such a theory can be transferred into the classrooms at the service academies or the war colleges. How should we educate young officers to assess the relative power of civilian authority or the conditions under which tomorrow's flag officers accept "intrusive" monitoring by civilian leaders? What scales do we employ to help officers gauge the potential for career-ending punishment?
Of far greater concern is the diminished role of professionalism within agency theory. The professional military ethic is central to Huntington's theory, which carves out a separate and autonomous sphere for the military profession as an incentive to its subordination to civilian authority. But Feaver's use of agency theory equates the military with every other bureaucracy in the government, rather than a professional body with special responsibilities and obligations. Feaver's construct ignores the concepts of honor, selfless sacrifice, and public service that were inherent to the concept of social responsibility and professionalism central to The Soldier and the State and the U.S. military ethic from George Washington to George Marshall.
Feaver has accomplished a prodigious intellectual feat that does not supplant The Soldier and The State but does advance our understanding of the realities of civil-military relations to a higher plane. No curriculum in the country, whether it covers national security, strategic studies, public administration, political theory, or military history, is complete without incorporating and debating Feaver's thesis.
Colonel Hoffman works for EDO Corporation and is employed at the Marine Corps Warfighting Lab in Quantico, Virginia.
Globalization and Maritime Power
Edited by Capt. Sam J. Tangredi, USN. Washington, DC: National Defense University Press, 2002. 653 pp. Charts. Notes. Bib. Index. $14.00.
Reviewed by John E. Carey
Prepare yourself to read the best single definition of the future of U.S. maritime power.
There may be many "vision documents" concerning the future of naval forces and naval warfare written by warfare community leaders or other experts and published by Proceedings. This shows a genuine effort to forge a new future as we move further away from the days of the Cold War. Now a new book has been published that warrants the attention of every member of the naval services, written by some of our smart sailors who are thinking hard about where we are headed. Globalization and Maritime Power is a compendium of the issues we face now and will face in the future, and provides a wonderful perspective on almost every facet of the future of U.S. maritime power.
Although neither a Tom Clancy thriller nor the justification for your favorite visionary aircraft, ship, or weapon system, you might find Globalization and Maritime Power difficult to put down. The book is readable, with each chapter authored by someone who has spent a career thinking about, discussing, and researching his or her topic. Not only is the book deeply thought provoking, but many of the authors offer such new perspectives that you will find yourself looking into the future not with a crystal ball but with the Fresnel lens of a lighthouse, all the time asking yourself, "Why didn't I think of that?"
Naval Postgraduate School Professor Robert E. Looney tackles the difficult question of determining the economic benefits of the peacetime operations of the U.S. Navy. Navy Commander Randall G. Bowdish adds an excellent chapter entitled "Global Terrorism, Strategy and Naval Forces." He provides the single best analysis of al Qaeda seen to date, and he quantifies how important the war on terror is to naval forces. National Defense University Professor Richard L. Kugler writes about the underpinnings of our gradual shift in national military strategy in a chapter he calls "Naval Overseas Presence in the New Defense Strategy."
Other chapters cover mine warfare, amphibious operations, expeditionary maneuver brigades, and other facets of our profession. You might find some chapters you want to skip, but I found when I went back and read the parts I thought too arcane or of little interest to me, my initial impression turned out to be wrong. This is that rare book that needs and deserves a wide naval audience.
Prepare yourself for some challenges. First, many of the authors will force you to reevaluate what you hold true. This is not a collection of past Proceedings articles nor is it the sum total of "the party line." Second, if you live far from the halls of academia, you may look at the list of authors and say, "Oh great, they put all the intellectuals that hang around the Navy into one book." The essays in this book, however, will make you think, sometimes in new and different ways, and you will find much of it enjoyable as well as substantive. A third challenge is the sheer throw weight of the book. At 600 pages and weighing about a pound and a half, it would be easy to skip past it. Do not succumb, however. Globalization and Maritime Power is well worth the time it takes to read it and deserves to become a book used by all of those interested in the future of U.S. naval power.
Captain Sam Tangredi, a frequent contributor to Proceedings, has done a service for the Navy and the nation. Globalization and Maritime Power is an important addition to the ongoing discussion of our future that needs to be read.
Mr. Carey is president of International Defense Consultants, Inc., in Arlington, Virginia.
Liberty
Stephen Coonts. New York: St. Martin's, 2003. 352 pp. $25.95.
Reviewed by Captain George Galdorisi, U.S. Navy (Retired)
Liberty is the latest in Stephen Coonts's Jake Grafton series of novels. The author's 12th novel (and 10th book of the Grafton series, after an unusual departure with his most recent novel, Saucer [2002]) is vintage Coonts and is built on the nonstop action that is one of the author's trademarks.
Readers who enjoyed Coonts's recent books such as Hong Kong (2001) and America (2002) likely will enjoy this book. New readers, however, may struggle a bit getting to know Admiral Jake Grafton. Coonts provides only a narrow window on who Grafton is—which is fine for old readers, but not for new ones.
The book opens with a premise that is all too plausible but in some ways already shopworn: the former Soviet Union has imploded and a rogue general is willing to sell nuclear weapons, with no compunction about to whom he is selling. Predictably, these nuclear weapons fall quickly into the hands of terrorists whose goal is to attack the United States.
As he has done successfully in past novels, Coonts drives the action along relentlessly. Armed with anecdotal pieces of evidence that nuclear weapons could be headed for the shores of the United States, the nation's leaders know they must act, but the existing structures of government are powerless to deal with this terrifying kind of threat.
Enter Jake Grafton. The President has little faith in the combined efforts of the CIA, FBI, armed forces, and Federal Emergency Management Agency and does not think any combination of government agencies can stop these weapons from reaching the United States. Readers might wonder when the author completed this manuscript and whether he thinks the Homeland security Department could begin to deal with this kind of threat.
The President calls on Grafton to lead the effort to intercept these nukes and gives him unlimited and unprecedented authority to do this any way he can. Grafton enlists his old sidekick, Toad Tarkington, in the effort, and in league with Tommy Carmellini, the mysterious Anna Modin, and two computer hackers he has released from prison, Grafton leads his team on a worldwide effort to find the nukes and stop them from being detonated on U.S. soil.
Grafton matures in this book. Rather than forcing readers to suspend disbelief (the author has his main character—an admiral well into middle age-display action-figure—like physical prowess in some of his other recent books), in Liberty Grafton is the leader and organizer of the effort to stop these nukes, but he lets others (especially Carmellini) use their physical skills to deal with the terrorists.
One wonders if Coonts is "grooming" Carmellini to headline a new series of books. In one scene, although injected with a paralyzing drug, handcuffed, literally given "cement feet," and thrown into the back of an airplane by two men in league with the terrorists who intend to dump him into the ocean for a swift descent to the ocean floor, Carmellini manages to kill both his assailants and land the plane.
The action is nonstop throughout the book's 350 pages, but ultimately Liberty disappoints. Perhaps the best way to convey this disappointment is to consider the advice that Ian Fleming gave to aspiring novelists in 1962. Fleming suggested that there was only one recipe for a best-seller: the reader simply must have no choice but to turn the page.
While there are good features—especially for die-hard Coonts fans—in Liberty, the reader is not compelled to turn the page. We learn at the outset of the book that terrorists have four nuclear weapons and that they are heading for the United States, and we can guess that somehow Jake Graf ton will stop them from being detonated. Unfortunately, there is not enough "middleware" to keep readers wondering and guessing or enough surprises as the book lurches along to its predictable conclusion. There is action, but much of it is "reported action" instead of the real thing.
For those who cannot get enough military-techno action and adventure, this book will be of interest, but for those looking for a thriller and a true page-turner, this book will leave something to be desired.
Captain Galdorisi is a columnist for Proceedings and is the author of several novels, including For Duty and Honor (New York: Avon, 2000).