Contrast this with the situation in foreign policy. Here the political agencies, the President and the State Department, should set the immediate goals, and the military should be concerned with the means to be utilized in the achievement of those goals. Before the United States entered the war, the military did play their proper role in warning of the need for greater military force and urging a delay of conflict until that force could be achieved. Once the United States got into the war, however, they ceased to be concerned about the continuing problem which it was their function to be concerned with — military security — and instead became wrapped up in the achievement of the political goals of the moment. Rather than looking to the future, they sacrificed themselves to the present. The goal posited by the policy agency became so overwhelming in its claim that all else had to be forgotten. This was not the case on the domestic front because at each stage the military requirements goal was challenged. On the strategic front, on the other hand, the military abdicated their responsibility to think in terms of the continuing demands of American security and rushed headlong after the political goal of total victory.
The prime deficiency in the conduct of World War II was, therefore, the insufficient representation of the military viewpoint in the formulation of national strategy. This key interest, which should have played a major role, was downgraded and neglected. On the economic front, on the other hand, with all the controversy, all the interests had their say. The result was that economic mobilization was a brilliant success while the strategic conduct of the war left something to be desired. “The great mistakes of the war” were in the field of strategy not mobilization. Less harmony would have produced better policy. If, instead of moving into the seats of power and embracing civilian goals, the Joint Chiefs had preserved their military roles and warned the political leaders that no war is the last war and that the problem of military security would still be with us after V-day, the United States would have come out of the war in a far better strategic position than it did. The derangement of American civil-military relations was simply the institutional reflection of a deeper malady: the ignorance and naϊve hopes which led the American people to trade military security for military victory.
* Three such agencies existed in the immediate prewar years: the Standing Liaison Committee composed of the Under Secretary of State, Army Chief of Staff, and Chief of Naval Operations; the “Committee of Three” composed of the Secretaries of State, War, and the Navy; and the War Council composed of the same three secretaries plus the Chief of Staff and Chief of Naval Operations. The Liaison Committee and the War Council ceased to operate during the war, and the “Committee of Three,” its members excluded from grand strategy decisions, played only a minor role. It was not until December 1944 that the State-War-Navy Coordinating Committee, composed of assistant secretaries, became the first successful political-military body. Concerned initially with surrender terms and occupation policy, SWNCC was the direct ancestor of the National Security Council.
* Hull’s feelings at this exclusion are well reflected in his Memoirs (New York, 2 vols., 1948), II, 1109–1110:
“After Pearl Harbor I did not sit in on meetings concerned with military matters. This was because the President did not invite me to such meetings. I raised the question with him several times . . .
“The President did not take me with him to the Casablanca, Cairo, or Teheran conferences, which were predominantly military meetings, nor did I take part in his military discussions with Prime Minister Churchill in Washington, some of which had widespread diplomatic repercussions . . .
“The question of where the armies would land and what routes they would take across the Continent in the grand military movement to conquer Hitler was a subject never discussed with me by the President or any of his top military officials, although I was early informed of the decision reached.
“I was not told about the atomic bomb.”
13
Civil-Military Relations in the Postwar Decade
THE ALTERNATIVES OF CIVIL-MILITARY RELATIONS
The outstanding aspect of civil-military relations in the decade after World War II was the heightened and persistent peacetime tension between military imperatives and American liberal society. This tension was the product of the continued dominance of liberalism in the American mind and the continued acceptance of the liberal approach to civil-military relations, on the one hand, and, on the other, the intensified threats to American military security, which increased the need for military requirements and the relevance of the military ethic to national policy. The Cold War shifted the emphasis in foreign policy from diplomacy and maneuver to construction and operation. Under the old pattern of international politics with a number of major powers, the static element tended to be the relative power of the various states. The dynamic element was the shifts in coalitions and alignments among the states. After World War II, however, the diplomatic element was relatively static — countries were generally on one side or the other in the Cold War — and the dynamic element was the relative military and economic strength of the two coalitions. The changes of China and Yugoslavia from one side to the other in the Cold War altered the balance of power, but their significance paled before the relative progress of the Soviet Union and the United States in developing thermonuclear capabilities. Military requirements thus became a fundamental ingredient of foreign policy, and military men and institutions acquired authority and influence far surpassing that ever previously possessed by military professionals on the American scene.
The basic issue raised was: how can a liberal society provide for its military security when this requires the maintenance of professional military forces and institutions fundamentally at odds with liberalism? Theoretically, three answers were possible. The tension could be relieved by returning to the pre-1940 pattern of civil-military relations: cutting military forces to the bone, isolating military institutions from society, and reducing military influence to negligible proportions. American society would remain true to its liberalism, and the American military would return within the shell of professional conservatism. Pursuit of this policy, however, would realize these values at the expense of the nation’s military security. A second solution was to accept increased military authority and influence but to insist that military leaders abandon their professional outlook and that military institutions be reformed along liberal lines. While sacrificing traditional military conservatism, this would assure the continuance of liberalism in American society and would provide, at least temporarily, for the military security of the nation. But, as happened in World War II, it might accomplish these ends at the expense of long-range goals and at the ultimate loss of military effectiveness. Finally, the tension between the military and society could be lessened if society adopted a more sympathetic understanding and appreciation of the military viewpoint and military needs. This would involve a drastic change in the basic American liberal ethic. The most difficult, it would also be the most permanent solution of the problem. In actual practice, American civil-military relations in the decade after World War II followed no one of these paths exclusively. The tension between conservative military outlook, liberal social values, and increased military power largely went unresolved. The dominant tendencies in policy and practice, however, tended toward the first and second solutions: the traditional liberal approaches of the extirpation or transmutation of military values and institutions.
POSTWAR PERSPECTIVES ON CIVIL-MILITARY RELATIONS
THE GARRISON-STATE HYPOTHESIS. The postwar decade saw the appearance on the American scene of the first conscious, systematic, and sophisticated theory of civil-military relations since the business pacifism of Spencer, Sumner, and Carnegie. This was the concept of the garrison state. Originally stated by Harold Lasswell in 1937 as an interpretation of the Sino-Japanese War, the garrison-state idea was not fully elaborated and popularized by its creator until World War II and later.1 It then became a dominant theory of civil-mil
itary relations, adhered to by intellectuals and alluded to by mass media. The significance of Lasswell’s concept derived from its attempt to apply the traditional assumptions and values of American liberalism to the apparent reality of continuing military crisis. It combined three elements: an analysis of twentieth-century international conflicts; a prediction that the result of permanent warfare would be the general emergence of a particular form of social organization, the garrison state; and a statement of preference for a world commonwealth as the only possible alternative to the garrison state.
Lasswell’s analysis began where Herbert Spencer left off. The natural course of history is progressive and upward from bellicose, militaristic caste society to pacific, bourgeois, democratic society. The polar opposite of the war state or garrison state is the business state, which in the nineteenth century was becoming increasingly dominant. The goals of society at that time were economic — “the peaceable pursuit of prosperity” — and the rise of complex commercial relations “seemed to create a world market which would furnish the material basis for a limited world order.” Beginning about the time of World War I, however, history went off the track. The trend was reversed “from progress toward a world commonwealth of free men, toward a world order in which the garrison-prison state reintroduces caste bound social systems.” As a result of this interruption or deflection of history, the tendency “of our time is away from the dominance of the business man, and toward the supremacy of the soldier.” War hastens this tendency, but even the “continuing threat of war can bring about a reversal in the direction of history.” Lasswell was vague as to the causes of war, crisis, and insecurity. Looking out on the mid-twentieth-century world, he accepted the fact of their existence. Starting from the liberal theory of progress, however, he had no real explanation of why they did exist. They were apparently linked to the “world revolutionary pattern of our times” which began with the Communist seizure of power in Russia in 1917. This caused continuing tension between the universal ideas of communism and the particular needs and institutions of the Russian state. The garrison state is either the logical product of the world revolution or a reaction against it. In his earlier writings Lasswell appeared to assume the latter; in his subsequent ones the former. Once one state adopts the garrison state form of social organization, the pattern tends to be universalized. In both the United States and the Soviet Union, the garrison state will be the necessary product of the prolonged continuation of the Cold War.
Inherent in Lasswell’s prediction as to the nature of the garrison state were many misconceptions with respect to the content of military values, the possibility of militarization in a liberal society, and the relation between patterns of civil-military relations and forms of the state. Basic to the garrison state, in his view, was the subordination of all other purposes and activities to war and the preparation for war. The preëminence of bellicose intentions and values is reflected in the dominant role which the military play in the state. Lasswell here made the traditional liberal identification of the military with war and violence. Holding to the erroneous view that the military have a greater preference for war than do civilians, he easily arrived at a magnified estimate of their strength in modern society, concluding that the militarization of belief systems would be relatively easy under the threat of war. In his earlier formulations, he stressed the predominant role of the military skill group in the direction of the garrison state. In subsequent essays, he broadened his view of the ruling elite to include the police as well as the military; the specialists in violence, foreign and domestic, were now the top group. Coincidentally, he spoke more of the “garrison-police” state or “garrison-prison” state than just simply the garrison state. Lasswell continued the liberal pattern of linking the military with the enemy, identifying them here with the totalitarian police. He also tended, more specifically, to identify the garrison state with the immediate threat of the moment. In 1937, Japan was its closest approximation; after the beginning of the Cold War, Soviet Russia most fully manifested garrison-state tendencies.
The garrison state requires the centralization of power in the hands of the few. The executive and the military gain power at the expense of the legislature and civilian politicians. Democratic institutions are abolished or become purely ceremonial. “Authority flows downward from commanders at the top; initiative from the bottom can hardly be endured.” Lasswell assumed that military control is incompatible with democracy, identifying a form of civil-military relations with a form of government. With the garrison state, the scope of the government eventually expands and becomes practically coextensive with society. Technology, industry, science, and labor are all regimented for the purposes of war. This utilization of the resources of society for military defense is essentially unproductive. The garrison state differs from both capitalism and socialism where production is for use: indeed, at one point Lasswell defined the “dominant crisis of our time” as “socialism and capitalism versus the garrison-prison state.” The garrison state has an egalitarian aspect but it is the egalitarianism of the camp: an equality of short rations and much danger. The garrison state is, in short, Ludendorff’s nation at war, Spencer’s militant society plus modern technology. In its ultimate form it is indistinguishable from modern totalitarianism.
Lasswell variously rated the emergence of a garrison state as “probable,” “likely,” or “what might happen.” The only admissible alternative to the garrison state, the “triumph of human felicity” in a world commonwealth is, however, “at least not out of the question.” Modern science and technology bind the world together. The fundamental aspirations of mankind are the same the world over. Even Russian and American cultures share many points of similarity. The self-interest of the ruling elites in raising the standard of living and the level of scientific knowledge will lead them to reduce the likelihood of war. If war can be deferred, the factors of “common consciousness and enlightenment” will permit the “steady resumption of cooperation.” Once this begins, the “meagre trickle of pacific contact between the two polar camps will swell into an enlarging stream, inaugurating a new era of peaceful association in which the world community makes direct progress toward a more perfect community of free men.” The end result will be “a homogeneous world culture combining science and democracy,” a “global correlation of power,” and an “eventual integration of humanity.” Lasswell combined a variety of liberal approaches in his stress on the formative influences of science, culture, reason, psychiatry, economics, and technology.
World unity should be the end of American policy. “Our goals are, in fact, positive and world-embracing.” Just as the maintenance of liberal institutions and military institutions is impossible within the same society, so also is the continuance of two conflicting social systems in the same world. Either there is peaceful unity or there is the continued development of garrison states eventually coming into mortal conflict. This conflict can only mean the “near-total annihilation of humanity.” It will produce not one Rome but two Carthages. By that time, however, destruction will be preferable to continued life in a militarized society. The undermining of free institutions by war preparation is a “more insidious menace” than a third world war even though this would “devastate man and his works on a scale without precedent.” The “final fact of war is likely to be less perilous than perpetual preparation for war.”
Lasswell held that there must be either total peace in a world commonwealth or total war and destruction. He ruled out the possibility of continuing strife and adjustment. In this he reflected the liberal refusal to tolerate the prospect of continuous friction among social units. History must come to a stop in one way or another. At the root of this outlook is the psychological intolerance of difference and the psychological craving for universality and harmony. The alternatives are world oneness or world war: the unattainable or the unbearable. Lasswell’s theory was a measure of the pessimism and, indeed, desperation to which the liberal was driven in c
ontemplating the post-World War II scene. His was the voice of despair and hopelessness, the anguished recognition of the extent to which liberal illusions had been shattered by the stubborn grimness of the human situation.
POLITICAL-MILITARY FUSION. The theory of the garrison state was an effort to adjust to the fact of protracted military crisis. The theory of political-military fusion was an effort to adjust to the fact of enhanced military power. While the garrison-state hypothesis was a passive expression of helplessness in the face of world-wide conditions, the demand for fusion was a positive attempt to solve one aspect of the problem by denying the possibility of functional specialization. This theory started from the undeniable fact that military policy and political policy were much more closely interrelated in the postwar world than they had been previously. It went on, however, to assert that it had become impossible to maintain the distinction between political and military functions at the highest level of government. Over and over again it was argued that new developments had rendered the old categories of “political” and “military” sterile, obsolete, and meaningless. Fusionist theory dominated civilian thinking on the administrative problems of civil-military relations in the postwar period.2 In the specific forms in which it was applied to the analysis of governmental institutions, this demand for the merger of political-military functions was itself a new element in the American approach to the military. In part it reflected the inherent constitutional difficulties of maintaining a clearcut delimitation of military responsibilities, and in part it derived from the feeling that because war had become total, so also had the sphere of military affairs. To a greater extent, however, it simply reflected liberal fear that the increased power of military leadership would mean increased acceptance of the professional military viewpoint. Consequently, it attempted to weaken and subordinate the professional military approach and to reconcile increased military power with liberal values by positing the inevitable transmutation of military leadership. In effect, the fusionist theory attempted to solve the postwar problem of civil-military relations by denying its existence.
The Soldier and the State Page 42
