Clausewitz, Military Professionalism, and the Myth of a “Apolitical” Military
No major proposal required for war can be worked out in ignorance of political factors; and when people talk, as they often do, about harmful political influence on the management of war, they are not really saying what they mean. Their quarrel should be with the policy itself, not with its influence. If the policy is right-that is, successful-any intentional effect it has on the conduct of the war can only be to the good. If it has the opposite effect the policy itself is wrong. - Carl von Clausewitz, On War1
Since its publication in 1957, Samuel Huntington’s The Soldier and the State has largely stood as the “normative framework” for thinking about civil–military relations in the United States.2 Generations of American military officers have been educated in its core premise of “objective civilian control,” the notion that a highly professional, apolitical military can coexist with “civilian supremacy” through a strict division of labor: the armed forces manage the “means” of war while elected leaders determine the “ends.”3 Those views are so strong that the former commandant of West Point and the U.S. Army War College, Major General William Rapp wrote, “Huntington’s 1957 The Soldier and the State has defined civil-military relations for generations of military professionals. Soldiers have been raised on Huntingtonian logic and the separation of spheres of influence since their time as junior lieutenants.”4 To partly illustrate this ideal, Huntington turned to nineteenth-century Prussia, portraying its reformed officer corps as the origin and apex of military professionalism. Yet this historical foundation was far less stable than Huntington’s narrative suggests. In practice, the professionalization of the Prussian army often amplified, rather than diminished, its political power, thus enabling senior officers to act as autonomous agents in shaping state policy.
No comments:
Post a Comment