[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
.14 Federalist Papers, Nos.10 and 51 in Isaac Kramnick (ed.), James Madison, AlexanderHamilton, and John Jay: The Federalist Papers (New York: Penguin Books, 1987). 82 Securing the Statecivilian counterparts).Similarly, Feaver contends that civilians possess a politicalcompetence (the ability to judge risks, weigh casualty predictions and make thebest decisions about what is in the nation s best interests) that cannot be equaled bytheir military counterparts.15This often may be the case in practice, but there is a problem with making thisclaim a priori and without specific case-by-case analysis.In earlier research, I foundexamples that contradicted all of these assumptions.16 First of all, at times the US hashad civilian leaders with previous decorations for valor in combat in bureaucraticdisagreements with military officers with no combat pedigree (granted, this is muchless likely these days, but it has occurred in the past and it s reasonable to concludeit could happen again).At the same time there have been occasions when militaryofficers have had ascendancy beyond their civilian counter-parts by virtue of theirother than military experience General Powell, for example, could speak powerfullyon matters of race given his status as both a general officer and prominent blackAmerican.To be clear, Feaver is right that asymmetry of information and knowledgeis a relevant factor in civil military relations; however, these terms are not staticwith preordained values and ascendancy.To the contrary, knowledge, expertiseand even moral competence vary depending on the situation and actors involved,sometimes dominated by civilian or military officials and at other times balancedamong these agents in the Department of Defense.For this reason, and becausemanaging asymmetry of knowledge and expertise is so central to preserving balancein a relationship, it is strongly recommended that this kind of information be trackedby DOD personnel offices.There will be more on this later in the final chapter.Still the parsimony of Feaver s model coupled with its known utility within thebusiness community portends its usefulness for civil military relations.Later in thetext when the Madisonian approach is outlined in detail it will employ key aspectsof agency theory, even as it offers a different definition for agents. But first theargument turns to two other commentaries on normative civil military relations inthe post-Cold War era the return of objective and subjective control as approachesto control the military.The Objective Control RepriseOne of the responses to the perceived civil military imbalance during the 1990swas a call for the military to stop inserting itself into the political process.Theleading voice among those scholars was Richard H.Kohn of the University of NorthCarolina.17 Kohn is a renowned and accomplished military scholar who for many15 Feaver, Delegation, Monitoring, and Civilian Control of the Military: Agency Theoryand American Civil Military Relations, John M.Olin Institute for Strategic Studies, Projecton US Post Cold-War Civil Military Relations, Working Paper No.4, p.17.16 Gibson, Countervailing Forces, PhD Dissertation, Cornell University, pp.135 177.17 At the 2007 USMA Senior Conference on civil military relations, and earlier at theauthor s workshop in March, Professor Kohn repudiated objective control as a normativeapproach to controlling the military.This came as a surprise to some in attendance, includingthis author.In this section I will describe, analyze, and critique Kohn s earlier publications The Search for New Normative Theory 83years served as the official historian of the US Air Force.He has written many booksand professional journal articles and is considered an expert on the Founding Era andcivil military relations scholars.18Kohn rightly urges military officers to stay out of partisan politics and to respectnational leaders, but the effect of his analysis and recommendations found in hispublished works conveys the message that military officers should play a diminishedrole (if any) in the civil military nexus.Given his status as one of the leading scholarsin US civil military relations, Kohn s ideas as found in his published works (at leastprior to 2007), even if unintended, have likely contributed to the fostering of normswithin the officer corps that devolve the constitutional authority for civilian controlof the military to the position of Secretary of Defense when the Founders intendedfor those responsibilities to be retained and shared by the President and Congress
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]