The Soldier and the State

by Samuel P Huntington

  Academic Realism. The postwar decade saw a startling change in the prevailing academic approach to international relations. In the 1930’s, the emphasis had been almost entirely upon the questions of form and structure studied in courses in international law and international organization. The basic value premise was usually the desirability of world organization. By the late 1940’s, however, American writers were vying with each other in denouncing the moralism, legalism, utopianism, Wilsonism, and sentimentalism of the American diplomatic past. The State Department Policy Planning group, particularly George Kennan, played some part in the new appreciation of power politics, but the preeminent figure was Hans J. Morgenthau, whose books on international relations achieved an unrivaled acceptance during this period. “The statesman,” Morgenthau warned, in contrast to earlier American viewpoints, “must think in terms of the national interest conceived as a power among powers.” In this new realism, American civilian thought essentially accepted the interpretation of international politics preached by American military writers since the 1870’s.2 Another aspect of the academic change was the increasing attention given in colleges and universities to the problems of national security. Courses were established in foreign policy, military history, and defense policy, and institutes blossomed to further research in these areas. Most of the earlier American writing on military affairs had focused primarily upon the danger the security programs presented to other social values such as civil rights and free enterprise. Much of the immediate postwar writing continued in this vein. By 1955, however, concern for the achievement of security itself was the more frequent motivation apparent behind the scholarly studies of military affairs.

  The Waning of Fusionism. By the end of the postwar decade some doubts were being expressed as to the advantages of encouraging political thinking by professional military officers and the assumption of political responsibilities by professional military institutions. It became obvious that the Joint Chiefs of Staff could not participate in the “good” politics of policy without also becoming enmeshed in the “bad” politics of partisanship. The need for some secure fount of impartial professional judgment became more widely accepted.3 If military considerations are vital to national policy, and if the generals and admirals do not represent the military viewpoint, who will? Considerable uneasiness was aroused by the role of the Chiefs in the MacArthur controversy and the subsequent Republican attacks on the Truman Chiefs and Democratic attacks on the Eisenhower Chiefs. As Walter Lippmann warned at the time, a schism between the generals of the Republican Party and the generals of the Democratic Party would be “an almost intolerable thing” in the Republic. The conflict between the Senate Permanent Investigations Subcommittee under the chairmanship of Joseph R. McCarthy and the Department of the Army dramatically demonstrated some of the more blatant results of the prostitution of military organization to political goals. It was one of the few instances in American history where the organs of opinion rallied to the defense of military institutions against the attacks of a civilian politician with a sizable popular following. The coalition of interests and viewpoints on the Army side extended from the extreme left which had previously been so bitterly critical of the “military mind” to rightist groups as far over as The Chicago Tribune. If they accomplished nothing else, the Army-McCarthy hearings made many reform liberals aware for the first time of the fundamental distinction between traditional conservatism and nihilistic reaction.

  Restoring Military Integrity. The early postwar drive to civilianize the military services which had been symbolized by the Doolittle Board lost some of its momentum during the Korean War years. In its place appeared a fairly widespread concern in civilian as well as military circles for the declining prestige of the military career and the shaky morale of the officer corps. The Womble Committee report in 1953 and the persistent warnings of Hanson Baldwin and others called public attention to the plight of the military, the press generally reacting favorably to the military pleas, and even Congress manifesting a sympathetic interest. While this shift in intellectual environment did not reverse the tendencies in the opposite direction, it did enable a number of measures to be taken in 1953–1955 toward restoring the integrity of the officer corps and the attractiveness of the military career. Congress improved retirement benefits, liberalized promotion opportunities, and increased military pay. Within the services, more emphasis was placed upon developing combat leaders instead of technical specialists. The Uniform Code of Military Justice was widely criticized, and proposals were submitted to restore the authority of commanding officers to punish minor infractions without court martial. While measures such as these did not immediately stop military deterioration, they were, nonetheless, signs of a widespread apprehension as to the ultimate affects of any further encroachment upon the integrity and status of the officer corps.4

  The Literary Image of the Officer. Changes in the fictional portrayal of any social type usually reflect and help shape more general changes in public attitudes. Perhaps one of the more significant developments toward the end of the postwar decade was the appearance of a more appreciative interpretation of the military in popular fiction. This represented a distinct change from the main tradition of American literature on military subjects which had carried over into the early postwar years. The first outstanding postwar “war” novel, Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead published in 1948, presented the traditional liberal stereotype of the Regular Army officer: Major General Cummings is a fascist at heart, expounding a philosophy derived from Nietzsche and Spengler of power for its own sake and of fear as the basis of authority which would have well become Dostoievski’s Grand Inquisitor. Cummings’ foil, and the book’s principal hero, is Lieutenant Robert Hearn, a Harvard-educated intellectual liberal, who, however, agrees with the major general that the power morality is the wave of the future. Hearn thus reflects the liberal pessimism of Lasswell’s garrison-state theory, a pessimism evidently shared by Mailer who titles his flashback of Hearn’s early life “The Addled Womb” while that of Cummings is described as “A Peculiarly American Statement.” The Naked and the Dead falls squarely within the great American tradition of antiwar, antimilitary literature.

  Three years after the publication of Mailer’s novel, however, definite signs of change were evident. The second great war novel, James Jones’s From Here to Eternity, appears also to have a simple liberal theme: the individual versus the organization. There is, however, more to Jones’s book than this. Running throughout it is a sense of identification with the Army and the military way of life which begins with its dedication to “The United States Army” and its prefacing quote from Kipling: “I’ve eaten your bread and salt . . .” The Army and its values are necessary to the individual. The hero, Private Robert E. Lee Prewitt, an ideal military type (symbolized in his name), finds a home in the Army, but comes to a tragic end because, like all human institutions, the Army falls short of its ideal. Prewitt is destroyed in the gap between the Army Militant and the Army Spiritual. In contrast to Mailer, Jones’s ideals are military ideals; his heroes, Prewitt and Sergeant Warden, are true soldiers; the villain, Captain Holmes, falls short of the soldierly code. Like Mailer, Jones focuses on the psychological implications of the conflict of freedom and authority. But while Hearn’s rebellion against Cummings is fundamentally petty, meaningless, and negative, affirming nothing except ego-irritation, Prewitt’s rebellion against Holmes is the affirmation of the true spirit of the Army, an appeal to the military conscience of the Army, from which it has departed in practice. Infused throughout From Here to Eternity is a sensitivity to the beauty, appeal, and meaning of the military life, its rewards and richness.

  The third outstanding war novel was Herman Wouk’s The Caine Mutiny, which sold two million copies after its publication in 1951 and also appeared in highly successful screen and stage versions. Throughout most of the book, Wouk deceives his readers as to the moral of his tale. Captain Queeg, the Regular Navy officer, combines t
he vices of Cummings and Holmes into a distinctly psychotic personality. His opponents are Keefer, the liberal intellectual, and Maryk, the simple fisherman representing the Rousseauian natural goodness of the common man. Only after the court martial in which Maryk is acquitted for relieving Queeg of his command does the author suddenly reverse direction and bluntly reveal his true point in black and white terms. Queeg was right. Maryk was wrong. Keefer, who prompted Maryk to the mutiny, is the real villain. And the real hero is none of the individual figures, but the United States Navy itself. The junior officers of the Caine should have served in silence under Queeg because he was part of the system, and the disruption of the system does more harm than the suffering of individual injustice. The court martial repudiated Queeg because Queeg, like Holmes, had failed to measure up to the military ideal. While the citizen officers of the Caine were freely pursuing their own delights in peacetime civil life, however, Queeg and the Regular Navy were mounting guard over the nation’s security. Whatever Queeg’s faults, the regular officers are a superior breed: “you can’t be good in the Army or Navy unless you’re goddam good,” drunkenly argues Greenwald, Maryk’s attorney, “though maybe not up on Proust ’n’ Finnegan’s Wake and all.” In the few years separating The Caine Mutiny from The Naked and the Dead the regular officer and the liberal intellectual had neatly exchanged roles.

  CONSERVATISM AND SECURITY

  The problem of civilian control and military professionalism has existed on both sides of the Iron Curtain. American and Soviet patterns of civil-military relations have been similar in many respects. In both countries the dominance of a single antimilitary ideology has put obstacles in the way of military professionalism. In both countries, also, the professional officer corps when it did emerge became a force for caution, sanity, and realism. The stronger the military voice, the less the likelihood of conflict. The probability of continued peaceful adjustment between the two nations depends to a large extent on the degree to which communism in the Soviet Union and liberalism in the United States are supplanted by a conservative outlook, divorced from universalistic pretensions, and simply content to preserve and secure what it has. In the Soviet Union, as well as in the United States, this event is not beyond the realms of possibility.

  The emergence of a conservative environment in the United States would reduce the danger of progressive deterioration in American officership. The leadership produced by the American officer corps has so far been extraordinary. Only a small handful of the hundreds of general and flag officers have proved incapable in battle, and the top commanders in all three twentieth-century wars have been men of exceptional ability. This success, however, was to a large extent the product of the old pattern of civil-military relations. Since 1940 the American people have been coasting on the quality of the past. Unless a new balance is created, the continued disruption of American civil-military relations cannot help but impair the caliber of military professionalism in the future. A political officer corps, rent with faction, subordinated to ulterior ends, lacking prestige but sensitive to the appeals of popularity, would endanger the security of the state. A strong, integrated, highly professional officer corps, on the other hand, immune to politics and respected for its military character, would be a steadying balance wheel in the conduct of policy. During the twenty years prior to 1939 the political leaders of Europe brushed aside the warnings of the professional diplomats who were working cautiously and quietly to protect their nations from disaster. Even greater calamity would follow if in the twenty years after World War II the voice of the professional soldier went similarly unheeded. In a liberal society the power of the military is the greatest threat to their professionalism. Yet, so long as American military security is threatened, that power is not likely to diminish significantly. The requisite for military security is a shift in basic American values from liberalism to conservatism. Only an environment which is sympathetically conservative will permit American military leaders to combine the political power which society thrusts upon them with the military professionalism without which society cannot endure.

  THE WORTH OF THE MILITARY IDEAL

  Just south of the United States Military Academy at West Point is the village of Highland Falls. Main Street of Highland Falls is familiar to everyone: the First National Bank with venetian blinds, real estate and insurance offices, yellow homes with frilly victorian porticos, barber shops, and wooden churches — the tiresome monotony and the incredible variety and discordancy of small-town commercialism. The buildings form no part of a whole: they are simply a motley, disconnected collection of frames coincidentally adjoining each other, lacking common unity or purpose. On the military reservation the other side of South Gate, however, exists a different world. There is ordered serenity. The parts do not exist on their own, but accept their subordination to the whole. Beauty and utility are merged in gray stone. Neat lawns surround compact, trim homes, each identified by the name and rank of its occupant. The buildings stand in fixed relation to each other, part of an over-all plan, their character and station symbolizing their contributions, stone and brick for the senior officers, wood for the lower ranks. The post is suffused with the rhythm and harmony which comes when collective will supplants individual whim. West Point is a community of structured purpose, one in which the behavior of men is governed by a code, the product of generations. There is little room for presumption and individualism. The unity of the community incites no man to be more than he is. In order is found peace; in discipline, fulfillment; in community, security. The spirit of Highland Falls is embodied in Main Street. The spirit of West Point is in the great, gray, Gothic Chapel, starting from the hill and dominating The Plain, calling to mind Henry Adams’ remarks at Mont St. Michel on the unity of the military and the religious spirits. But the unity of the Chapel is even greater. There join together the four great pillars of society: Army, Government, College, and Church. Religion subordinates man to God for divine purposes; the military life subordinates man to duty for society’s purposes. In its severity, regularity, discipline, the military society shares the characteristics of the religious order. Modern man may well find his monastery in the Army.

  West Point embodies the military ideal at its best; Highland Falls the American spirit at its most commonplace. West Point is a gray island in a many colored sea, a bit of Sparta in the midst of Babylon. Yet is it possible to deny that the military values — loyalty, duty, restraint, dedication — are the ones America most needs today? That the disciplined order of West Point has more to offer than the garish individualism of Main Street? Historically, the virtues of West Point have been America’s vices, and the vices of the military, America’s virtues. Yet today America can learn more from West Point than West Point from America. Upon the soldiers, the defenders of order, rests a heavy responsibility. The greatest service they can render is to remain true to themselves, to serve with silence and courage in the military way. If they abjure the military spirit, they destroy themselves first and their nation ultimately. If the civilians permit the soldiers to adhere to the military standard, the nations themselves may eventually find redemption and security in making that standard their own.

  NOTES

  INDEX

  Notes

  Chapter 1 — Officership as a Profession

  1. This author has discovered only one volume in English which analyzes officership as a profession: Michael Lewis, England’s Sea Officers: The Story of the Naval Profession (London, 1939). More typical is the standard history of the professions in Great Britain which omits mention of the military “because the service which soldiers are trained to render is one which it is hoped they will never be called upon to perform.” A. M. Carr-Saunders and P. A. Wilson, The Professions (Oxford, 1933), p. 3. Sociological studies, following Max Weber, have usually analyzed the military as a bureaucratic structure. See H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (eds.), From Max Weber (New York, 1946), pp. 221–223; C. D. Spindler, “The Military — A Systematic Analysis
,” Social Forces, XXVII (October 1948), 83–88; C. H. Page, “Bureaucracy’s Other Face,” Social Forces, XXV (October 1946), 88–94; H. Brotz and E. K. Wilson, “Characteristics of Military Society,” Amer. Jour. of Sociology, LI (March 1946), 371–375. While bureaucracy is characteristic of the officer corps, it is, however, a secondary not an essential characteristic. Other writers have followed the liberal tendency to identify the military with the enemies of liberalism and have stressed the feudal-aristocratic elements in militarism. See Alfred Vagts, A History of Militarism (New York, 1937), and Arnold Rose, “The Social Structure of the Army,” Amer. Jour. of Sociology, LI (March 1946), 361–364. For definitions of professionalism, see Carr-Saunders and Wilson, The Professions, pp. 284–285, 298, 303, 365, 372; A. M. Carr-Saunders, Professions: Their Organization and Place in Society (Oxford, 1928), p. 5; Talcott Parsons, “A Sociologist Looks at the Legal Profession,” Essays in Sociological Theory (Glencoe, 111., rev. ed., 1954), p. 372, and The Social System (Glencoe, 111., 1951), p. 454; Abraham Flexner, “Is Social Work a Profession?” Proceedings, National Conference of Charities and Correction (1915), pp. 578–581; Carl F. Taeusch, Professional and Business Ethics (New York, 1926), pp. 13–18; Roy Lewis and Angus Maude, Professional People (London, 1952), pp. 55–56, 64–69, 210; Roscoe Pound, The Lawyer from Antiquity to Modern Times (St. Paul, 1953), pp. 4–10; R. H. Tawney, The Acquisitive Society (New York, 1920), p. 92; Graham Wallas, Our Social Heritage (New Haven, 1921), pp. 122–157; M. L. Cogan, “The Problem of Defining a Profession,” Annals of the American Academy, CCXCVII (January 1955), 105–111. Professional education is discussed in T. Parsons, “Remarks on Education and the Professions,” Intntl. Jour. of Ethics, XLVII (April 1937), 366–367, and Robert M. Hutchins, The Higher Learning in America (New Haven, 1936), pp. 51–57. The ups and downs of the legal profession in the United States may be traced in terms of the liberal education requirement. See Pound, Lawyer from Antiquity to Modern Times, p. 229; M. Louise Rutherford, The Influence of the American Bar Association on Public Opinion and Legislation (Philadelphia, 1937), pp. 46ff. On professional ethics, see Taeusch, Professional and Business Ethics; Benson Y. Landis, Professional Codes (New York, 1927); R. D. Kohn, “The Significance of the Professional Ideal: Professional Ethics and the Public Interest,” Annals of the American Academy, CI (May 1922), 1–5; R. M. Maclver, “The Social Significance of Professional Ethics,” ibid., pp. 6–7; Oliver Garceau, The Political Life of the American Medical Association (Cambridge, 1941), pp. 5–11; James H. Means, Doctors, People, and Government (Boston, 1953), pp. 36–40; George Sharswood, An Essay on Professional Ethics (Philadelphia, 5th ed., 1907, first published 1854); Samuel Warren, The Moral, Social, and Professional Duties of Attornies and Solicitors (Edinburgh and London, 1848); Henry S. Drinker, Legal Ethics (New York, 1953); “Ethical Standards and Professional Conduct,” Annals of the Amer. Academy, CCXCVII (January 1955), 37–45. For the origins of occupational values in general, see E. C. Hughes, “Personality Types and the Division of Labor,” Amer. Jour. of Sociology, XXXIII (March 1928), 762.