Counterinsurgency strategies employed by the US military in Afghanistan have led to the US military embarking on civil governance reform. This has created new forms of civil-military relations with Afghan and international counterparts. These relations appear less dramatic than 'conventional' civil-military relations, in that they do not create the same visible alignment on the ground between military and non-military identities. In addition, the increased merging of civil and military work areas creates a new complexity that stems from semantic confusion. This complexity is mostly about norms and principles, in that the core puzzle is the more general question of what kinds of tasks the military should and should not do, rather than about violent consequences to civilians and questions of neutrality. This article proposes the term 'third-generation civil-military relations' to capture and examine the conceptual challenges that stem from the merging of military and civil work areas in Afghanistan's reconstruction. [Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications Ltd., copyright PRIO, www.prio.no]
Peacekeeping in the late 1990s is a complex and diverse task. Missions involve military, political and humanitarian aspects and, as a result, civilian and military personnel are working together to a greater degree than ever before. Peacekeeping operations in the 1990s have been marked by insufficient military input at the strategic level; unclear mandates; and weak command and control by the UN. In the field, whether under UN or NATO auspices, missions are hampered by the culture clash between civilians and the military; by poor coordination of civilian and military tasks; by inadequate military training to meet peacekeeping's specific demands; and by differing approaches to human-rights issues and the media. This paper argues that steps must be taken to improve civil-military relations. Measures should include increased military input in framing peacekeeping mandates; improved political guidance for commanders on the ground; and training to meet peacekeeping's particular needs. Civil-military relations in peacekeeping require a continuing dialogue between the two sides to strengthen the effectiveness of international intervention and to minimise competition and argument.
In: Armed forces & society: official journal of the Inter-University Seminar on Armed Forces and Society : an interdisciplinary journal, Band 27, Heft 2, S. 273-294
View that armed forces involvement in politics will be determined by civilian government effectiveness in coping with problems of governance and not threatening military interests. Transition to civil rule, the military and the intelligence agencies, and the governments of prime ministers Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif.
Students of civil-military relations, particularly those in the developing countries, admit having to work on myopic assumptions, meagre data, sloppy conceptualization and inelegant explanations. The relative newness of this area of studies could be one reason for this. The study of civil-military relations in the narrow sense referring mainly to military coups and interventions, has attained importance after World War II. But the study of civil-military relations in the broader perspective of multiplicity of relationships between military men, institutions and interests, on the one hand, and diverse and often conflicting non-military organizations and political personages and interests on the other, has begun to draw academic interest only in the last two decades or so. In the twentieth century, the armed forces, being an universal and integral part of a nation's political system, no longer remain completely aloof from politics in any nation. If politics is concerned, in David Easton's celebrated words, with the authoritative allocation of values and power within a society, the military as a vital institution in the polity can hardly be wished out of participatory bounds, at least for legitimate influence as an institutional interest group with a stake in the political decision-making. The varying roles the military may play in politics range from minimal legitimate influence by means of recognized channels inherent in their position and responsibilities within the political system to the other extreme of total displacement of the civilian government in the forms of illegitimate overt military intervention in politics. This paper seeks to attempt an overview of the existing scholarship on civil-military relations; second, it examines civil-military relations in the world with special reference to major political systems of the world; third, it surveys the literature on civil-military relations in general, and finally, it attempts to develop a general, complex, and hopefully fruitful causal model for analyzing the dynamics of civil-military relations; exploring implications for future research on civil-military relations.
Counterinsurgency strategies employed by the US military in Afghanistan have led to the US military embarking on civil governance reform. This has created new forms of civil—military relations with Afghan and international counterparts. These relations appear less dramatic than 'conventional' civil—military relations, in that they do not create the same visible alignment on the ground between military and non-military identities. In addition, the increased merging of civil and military work areas creates a new complexity that stems from semantic confusion. This complexity is mostly about norms and principles, in that the core puzzle is the more general question of what kinds of tasks the military should and should not do, rather than about violent consequences to civilians and questions of neutrality. This article proposes the term 'third-generation civil—military relations' to capture and examine the conceptual challenges that stem from the merging of military and civil work areas in Afghanistan's reconstruction.
Describes the rise to power of the armed forces in the 1960s and 1970s, and the diminishment of military power and prerogatives in government, 1980-94.
This article accepts the norms related to civil-military relations that Don Snider et al. propose in this special issue as being the appropriate norms for professional military officers. It then reviews the curricula of the six war colleges to see what they are currently teaching about civil-military relations and about civilian society. Next, it examines the views about those relations that war college students report themselves as actually holding. Some of these, i.e., findings related to officers' views about not obeying directives they believe "unethical but legal" and their willingness to obey "unwise" commands may seem to contradict the norm of civilian control. Others that are related to officer responsibility to "advocate" and to "insist" on some policy matters also seem to contradict these norms. The article concludes with some recommendations for curriculum revision.
THE ISSUE OF CIVIL-MILITARY RELATIONS PRESENTS THE new Argentine government with several problems. One is the structuring of government, that is general staff relations. Moreover the new authorities must take a position in the short to medium term over the question of responsibility for the 'dirty war', the plundering of the public purse by the officer corps between 1976 and 1982 and the defeat in the war with Britain. And in the longer term they must confront the wider issue of how to both 'civilianize' the armed forces and 'demilitarize' civil society.
The best recent scholarship on Russian civil-military relations explicitly addresses this issue's importance for both domestic and external security. An inquiry into the present state of those relations under conditions of defense reform and the current international situation is of immense analytical and policy relevance for both domestic and external security in Russia. While the Russian regime is serious about military reform, it is encountering severe objections from the uniformed military, and the military has successfully persuaded the government to accept its expansive concept of the threats to Russia, i.e., its threat assessment. Therefore, we must closely follow those developments to understand more clearly current tendencies in Russian politics and policy as a whole. Specifically, this chapter examines issues pertaining to civil-military relations in several areas of Russian national security policies that suggest some disturbing trends for the future. ; https://press.armywarcollege.edu/monographs/1586/thumbnail.jpg
Die Inhalte der verlinkten Blogs und Blog Beiträge unterliegen in vielen Fällen keiner redaktionellen Kontrolle.
Warnung zur Verfügbarkeit
Eine dauerhafte Verfügbarkeit ist nicht garantiert und liegt vollumfänglich in den Händen der Blogbetreiber:innen. Bitte erstellen Sie sich selbständig eine Kopie falls Sie einen Blog Beitrag zitieren möchten.
We were able to use the patio on roof of the Richcraftbuilding for our lunches.Here we have Maya Eichler, Lynne Gouliquer, Vincent Rigby,Michael Fejes,* and Peter KasurakThis week, in a joint CDSN-CDAI effort, we held an edited volume workshop on Canadian Civil-Military Relations. Our aim is to provide a better understanding of the mess that is Canadian civil-military relations. There really has not been that much work done on the topic although there are plenty of academics studying Canadian defence. Given that the Canadian military is the largest consumer of discretionary money in the Canadian federal budget, that it is a huge employer, that it consistently makes the news for operations at home (domestic emergencies) and abroad (mostly NATO these days), that the 2% stuff dominates discussions of Canada's foreign policy, and given, yes, that the military has largely been autonomous, perhaps the closest to the model defined by Huntington (yuck) more than 60 years ago, there should be more work in this area. Why not? There is the Canadian penalty: academic work that has Canada as its primary case won't get cited that much. One could argue that Canadian civil-military relations is not that interesting because Canada's military is at no risk of overthrowing the government and is essentially a strategy consumer when it is sent abroad, always as part of a larger effort run by someone else. Yet, it is really interesting because of something that came up during our conversations: can we title the volume "Crisis in Canadian Civil-Military Relations" when the crisis is enduring, unending, permanent? Melissa Jennings, the CDSN COO,and Charlotte Duval-LantoineOne of the classic problems in this field of civ-mil relations is: what counts as a crisis? Since we are talking stable democracies, it is not whether a coup is possible or imminent. It is more about the severity of the civilians not doing their job of overseeing the military and/or the military not doing what the civilians want. In the Canadian case, as our volume will eventually argue (it takes a while for academic publishing...), both sides of the civilian-military relationship in Canada are falling short. Some evidence of that:A former head of the military [Chief of Defence Staff or CDS] pled to obstruction of justice--and the justice he was obstructing involved a multi-decade affair with a subordinate at a time where he was supposed to be reducing sexual misconduct in the CAF.His replacement was suspending due to a credible accusation of sexual assault. The military investigation (many reviews of military justice found the system to be quite flawed) did not go anywhere since the investigators claimed too many potential witnesses were to drunk at the time to testify later about it. So, in the big, big, BIG, violation of civil-military relations, that aforementioned officer wrote a letter to all of the generals and admirals in the CAF saying he was exonerated (he wasn't) and he was coming back. Nope, that was not his call to make. So, that letter did more to get him fired quickly than his original alleged offense.The Minister of Defence at this time said it was not just job to track what was going on with the CDS because that would be politicizing things. So, yeah, the Minister had one job really and then said it was not his job.The Prime Minister kept around this Minister of Defense despite him having lost all credibility and despite the PM claiming to be a feminist because the minister was good at raising money for the party. Oh, and that aforementioned effort to address sexual misconduct was after multiple reviews which produced many, many recommendations and precious little implementation. The Arbour report nicely documents how little tracking there had been of the recommendations.The volume will show that none of this is really that new. One of my pet peeves in the conversations was the references to civilian control as "interventions" suggesting that they were episodic at best, rather than a continuous management of the armed forces. In between "interventions" the military was left to its own devices, which often thwarted civilian intent. So, yeah, I am comfy with the notion of permanent crisis. The idea of the workshop was to have a group of sharp folks present their draft chapters and then get a heap of feedback from the group. The aim was both to improve each paper and draw connections among them. It was a great group including both senior and junior academics, former and active military officers, former government officials from DND and other government agencies, historians and political scientists. Our goal is to complete the volume this summer and submit it to a press so that it gets out hopefully in 2025. Some of the things I learned or are starting to think about:How much of the expertise outside of the military is still ... military? That is, how many defence historians, for instance, had significant military careers? One of the few consistent scholars of Canadian civil-military relations, Doug Bland, served for many years inside the CAF. His work tends to take more seriously the challenges of civilian control of the armed forces, so I wouldn't put him into the protector category. That I had wildly overestimated the accountability that the Somalia Affair had produced. My stance had been that Canada had far more accountability as multiple senior folks (Ministers, CDS's) did not last long during the crisis and the relevant unit was disbanded, while Abu Ghraib didn't make much of a difference to the top of the chain of command in the US. That the officer who had led been in charge of the unit that ultimately got disbanded was promoted on his last day in service to brigadier general, which meant not just a higher pension but a lot of back pay. Quite a signal of impunity that sent. Quite a middle finger aimed at the civilians. I suddenly realized the "Decade of Darkness" was not really the shame that the Somalia affair brought on the CAF, but the brief effort by civilians to actually oversee the CAF. That there is a Foreign Affairs and Defence Adviser in addition to a National Security and Intelligence Adviser. I knew about the latter but not the former. Says a bit about my ignorance but it also says something about how there is a person in the privy council office whose job it is to coordinate defence stuff and that position has not made much of a dent in any coverage of Canadian defence stuff over the past dozen years or so. That my least favorite retired general is apparently spending much time cozying up to the leader of the Conservative Party. While I have been critical of Trudeau and his replacement of Anita Anand with a former police chief, I am guessing that a new government would be far worse for civilian control of the military. Anyhow, two days of "I love my job" as I really enjoyed learning from these folks even when or especially when they tell me I am wrong. I love learning and that often means learning that my previous assumptions or understandings or inferences are off target. The hard part is ahead of us: giving comments to each contributor, revising our own chapters, getting the revisions back, writing a proposal for the press, and hopefully getting this thing done. I do think this volume will make an important contribution, as Canadian civil-military relations is, indeed, in crisis, and we need to think more about what has gone wrong for so many decades. Whether the politicians will follow through on our recommendations is a big question and is very much a part of the problem. * Mike completed his dissertation under my supervision, so in a few days, I get to hood him. Hopefully, I will not mess it up, as last year, my student was far, far taller than me, and that presented a wee bit of a challenge.