Americans’ Changing Views of Civil-Military Relations
Update: 2024-04-08
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Are current trends in civil-military relations antithetical to healthy democratic norms? What can be done to ensure the civil-military relationship is a healthy one? And most fundamentally, how are Americans' views of the proper delineation of civilian and military authority changing? Dr. Ron Krebs is a professor of political science at the University of Minnesota and Dr. Scott Limbocker is an assistant professor of American politics at West Point. Both guests focus their research on critical issues related to civil-military relations and they join Major Gabriel Royal on this episode to explore these deeply important questions.
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Transcript
00:00:00
Welcome to the Social Science of War. This podcast is brought to you by the Department
00:00:07
of Social Sciences at West Point. We bring together scholars and practitioners to better
00:00:12
understand warfare, the Army, and national security strategy. The views expressed in this
00:00:17
episode do not represent the views of West Point for any agency of the U.S. government.
00:00:22
We hope you enjoy the show!
00:00:28
In civil military relations is taught at West Point, we often focus on the military side
00:00:32
of the equation. Most discussions center around questions of how to ensure officers submit
00:00:37
and defer to civilian control. Dr. Ron Krebs Research focuses on the civilian side of
00:00:42
the equation. His research finds Americans are increasingly deferential to the judgment
00:00:47
of military leadership regarding the use of force. Additionally, Americans are seemingly
00:00:52
undisturbed by active duty officers and retired military leaders publicly intervening in
00:00:57
policy debates. On the other hand, Dr. Scott Limbacher teaches civil military relations
00:01:02
to future Army officers at West Point. Scott finds the principal agent bureaucratic framework
00:01:07
as a useful lens for thinking about civil dynamics. He is a knack for challenging civil
00:01:12
assumptions and encourages officers to avoid distilling complex theories and to convenient
00:01:17
catch phrases that often obscure their meaning. Today, Dr. Ron Krebs helps us understand
00:01:22
new trends in civil military relations and why they are antithetical to healthy democratic
00:01:27
norms. What can and should military officers do to stop this trend? What about civilian and
00:01:33
political leaders? Dr. Scott Limbacher asks us to consider whether we've oversimplified
00:01:37
the concept of civilian leaders right to be wrong and helps us compare and contrast the
00:01:42
political appointee and senior military officer approval processes. Dr. Krebs has published
00:01:48
a great deal on civil military relations and we've provided our listeners to his work
00:01:51
in this field in the show notes. Today's discussion primarily focuses on a study he co-authored
00:01:56
and perspectives on politics titled "No Right to Be Wrong" when Americans think about civil
00:02:01
military relations. Dr. Limbacher will mostly comment on an article he co-authored in law
00:02:06
fair titled "Senate confirmation is a recipe for politicizing military personnel policy."
00:02:13
Without further ado, here's my conversation with Ron Krebs and Scott Limbacher.
00:02:17
All right, as I said in our intro, my guests today are Dr. Scott Limbacher and Dr. Ron Krebs.
00:02:23
Ron, if you could introduce yourself and then kick it to Scott if you want to introduce
00:02:27
yourself a little bit about what you do and how you got interested in Siv Mill.
00:02:31
My name is Ron Krebs. I'm a professor of political science at the University of Minnesota.
00:02:38
I've been interested in broadly in the relationship between military and society essentially for
00:02:43
as long as I can remember. We're going to be talking a bit about some of the research I've
00:02:48
been doing in the last few years. But my very first book was about military service in the
00:02:53
politics of citizenship that is broadly about how do and when do minority groups succeed
00:02:58
in using military service to achieve first-class citizenship for themselves. So this is long
00:03:04
been an air of interest and I'm thrilled to be here. Thanks for inviting me, Gabe.
00:03:08
Thank you, Ron and Scott. So I am far more newer to Siv Mill relations.
00:03:16
I come to political science probably looking at federal agencies and how federal agencies
00:03:22
can be politicized in the consequences that politicization of agencies have. And when
00:03:27
I got to West Point, I was asked to teach the intro to American politics course and that
00:03:33
course as a Siv Mill component that was an entirely new literature to me. However, I found
00:03:39
many parallels between what was being discussed in the literature and what I studied across
00:03:44
all other agencies. And so much of what I look at the Siv Mill problem through is a lens
00:03:50
towards how the federal government runs more generally with the Department of Defense
00:03:55
being a very large but one of 15 cabinet departments and under constraints that are similar
00:04:01
to other agencies. And so that's sort of the world view that I approach this question
00:04:06
with as I'm starting to enter into this literature.
00:04:10
Excellent to have two very different perspectives looking forward to it. Okay, so first starters,
00:04:15
I think it is valuable to ground our discussion in a common understanding of what we mean when
00:04:20
we say that there is a general agreement around the idea that civilian politicians and
00:04:25
officials have this right to be wrong. Ron, we'll start with you. What does the right
00:04:30
to be wrong mean to you and why is that so critical to our ideal model of Siv Millitary relations
00:04:37
in a democracy?
00:04:38
To understand the right to be wrong, which is an expression to which we owe the sort of
00:04:44
the need formulation of Peter Fever of Duke University. We have to start with our basic
00:04:49
understanding of democratic theory. At the heart of democracy our conventional conception
00:04:55
of democracy is rooted in the folk wisdom. The democracy means government of the people
00:05:02
by the people and for the people. Scholarship on democracy has raised lots of questions
00:05:07
about that basic folk wisdom and that notion of responsiveness. At the heart of any conception
00:05:13
of democracy must be the reality though of critical decisions being made in ways that
00:05:18
are accountable to the people. So that even if people don't know their will ahead of time,
00:05:24
don't elect figures who necessarily represent their interests, they can punish decision-makers
00:05:31
for making bad decisions. That is fundamental to the idea that civilians have the right to
00:05:38
be wrong because they either directly because they're elected officials or indirectly because
00:05:43
they are appointed by elected officials. They have accountability to voters in a way that
00:05:51
military officials are much more indirectly accountable and really not particularly directly
00:05:58
accountable to the people. The idea that civilians have the right to be wrong means that
00:06:04
on the largest questions about when to use force and even how to use force, about questions
00:06:11
of strategy which is really our theory of victory about how do we align military means
00:06:17
and political ends that civilians are the ones, those who are accountable to people are the
00:06:22
ones who are making those fundamental decisions. That does not mean that they will always make
00:06:28
good decisions. One of the lessons of the Iraq war may be that civilians have the right
00:06:32
to be wrong but when they are wrong, watch out. Democratic civil military relations is
00:06:39
not just about the right to be wrong, however. It is also as Elliott Cohen once memorably
00:06:45
put it an unequal dialogue that with rights always come responsibilities. Part of that responsibility
00:06:53
is that civilians have a responsibility to listen to those who are expert in the application
00:06:59
of military force, that is military officers. They have to listen to that military advice,
00:07:06
take it into account, not follow it slavishly and then make their own decisions.
00:07:13
Excellent. Broadly bringing it back to democratic civil norms, I think, framing that really well
00:07:19
for us. Thank you. Scott, I think you have a really interesting take on the right to be wrong.
00:07:24
As a bit of an oversimplified and maybe perhaps misleading bumper sticker or catchphrase.
00:07:31
Maybe we are by just repeating this phrase and just telling whether it's human eye teaching
00:07:36
cadets or other officers and training. Hey, civilians have the right to be wrong that
00:07:41
we're maybe missing the full picture of beaver and or could be like a poor way to teach
00:07:47
it if we just leave it at that. Can you elaborate on that and kind of give us your perspective
00:07:51
there? Yeah, no problem at all. I think this is taken out of an academic article. It's a
00:07:59
very well formed position to get to the phrase, the civilians have a right to be wrong.
00:08:06
I think it's interesting. It's a right versus the right how we framed it sometimes, which
00:08:10
can imply a choice set of rights that civilians have or is there just one's right that civilians
00:08:16
have. But funding on sort of the little grammatical difference there. The paragraph that precedes
00:08:23
this last sentence, it's the concluding sentence in the fever article talks about Plato's
00:08:27
philosopher King. It talks about how the military has really the ability to be an expert but
00:08:34
not be judge. And so the lead up just before that sentence or the claim of the civilians
00:08:41
have a right to be wrong is, you know, the military quantifies the risk and the civilian
00:08:46
judges it. Regardless of how superior the military view of a situation might be, the civilian
00:08:51
view trumps it. Civilians should get what they ask for even if it's not what they really
00:08:55
want. And to Ron's point that's framing it around democratic norms, it actually is suggesting
00:09:01
the military has no seat at the table here in the ultimate decision. Now, yes, there's
00:09:05
an unequal dialogue. But the frame here is that the choice is that of the civilians and
00:09:08
only the civilians. And what I worry about is that sort of nuance that leads up to the
00:09:14
point that leads up to saying civilians have the right to be wrong or make a call that
00:09:18
goes against military expertise is that it can imply different things about where the
00:09:23
military is role and is with this decision making. So civilians have a right to be wrong
00:09:29
is the implication then that the military does not have a right to be wrong. I think it can
00:09:34
also go to a perversely it can metastasize to a point where the military is not wrong. Its
00:09:41
decisions are coming from expertise and their technocratic and the what they reach and
00:09:47
anything that deviates from that. Well, now the military is not responsible for its actions
00:09:52
any longer. I think that's where oversimplification can lead us astray is that if we view this
00:09:59
as civilians have a right to be wrong, they chose something counter to my advice. Therefore
00:10:03
anything that goes wrong is because you deviated from my plan and there's no other counterfactual.
00:10:08
I think that's where we can get into a slippery slope with democratic accountability in the
00:10:13
military's role in society as if it becomes an unassailable opinion that whatever the military
00:10:19
says is infallible. It's correct. And it's something that we can't challenge.
00:10:24
I think that segues quite nicely into beginning to look at Ron's work. The title of the article
00:10:32
I mostly want to talk about amongst your research, Ron is no right to be wrong and it's this
00:10:36
idea that when we look at public opinion polling amongst civilians, we on the siv mill side
00:10:42
of the equation that you found some interesting trends as it relates to deference to military
00:10:48
authority instead of that civilian authority. But you begin the article in kind of setting
00:10:54
the stage in the winter of 2017. So what was significant about that time as a backdrop for your
00:11:00
research? Thanks Gabe. I think there are two really important things that I would note about
00:11:06
this period in the second half of the 2010s. Obviously we start the story in 2017. The poll
00:11:13
that we're going to be talking about was conducted in 2019 and then another one in 2021. Donald
00:11:20
Trump of course is elected to office in 2016. He enters office in January of 2017. And Trump in
00:11:27
ways that it's easy to forget. Trump enters office already contravening basic norms of civil
00:11:35
military relations with constant references to my generals. Trump who did not serve in the
00:11:41
military who we know evaded military service during Vietnam. So many people did. Donald Trump surrounds
00:11:48
the swathes himself and appoints more former generals to the cabinet than anyone had before him.
00:11:56
And as we will come to see over the next four years, Trump contravenes all sorts of norms of
00:12:01
democratic civil military relations. He goes and gives speeches before military audiences that
00:12:06
transforms them into a political rally. He seeks to use the military as a prop that's not unique
00:12:11
to Trump but he does it more than anybody else. The larger backstory here is the story of the
00:12:18
polarization, the partisan polarization of American politics that has been building for the last
00:12:26
25 to 30 years before Donald Trump enters office. And that partisan backdrop, this sorting of
00:12:35
American politics into tribes, the decline of bipartisan, which we can easily romanticize and
00:12:42
idealize. But really, but in certain critical ways was real. All of that is sort of a critical
00:12:49
backdrop to transformation and the challenges that American civil military relations has faced in
00:12:58
2017 and 2019 in faces today. It's interesting. You say that when I teach one of our
00:13:04
civil lessons and ensure to American politics, which is mostly second year cadets, I show them
00:13:10
Lieutenant General retired Mike Flynn speech at the Republican National Convention and then I
00:13:14
show them General John Allen speech endorsing Secretary Clinton at the Democratic National Convention.
00:13:22
And it's it's absolutely fascinating hearing their takes and how do we parse whether or not
00:13:28
those kinds of partisan statements are okay. I want to read a quote from your article. You say
00:13:33
public opinion thus features in the background of peabers talking about Peter Feaver's theory.
00:13:39
The less the public buys into civilian supremacy, the greater are the potential costs of disciplining
00:13:44
shirking military officers. The less likely civilians then are to punish them and the less
00:13:50
effectively civilian monitoring then produces military compliance. So based on this, measuring
00:13:56
public opinion of this deference to authority should be a critical indicator of the state of
00:14:01
civil military norms that we look at. So you fielded the survey in 2021 meant to replicate questions
00:14:07
from a comprehensive survey on sivmail that was originally conducted between 1998 and 1999. So
00:14:14
what did you find regarding American feelings about civilian supremacy? And more broadly,
00:14:19
why do you think public opinion is such an important aspect when we look at sivmail?
00:14:23
Great questions. So remember I said a few minutes ago, there are two way, there are two fundamental
00:14:31
basic challenges to democratic civil military relations. And one that we rarely talk about,
00:14:36
your cadets get training in civil military relations. They at least have some exposure to
00:14:43
civil military relations, but civilians get zero training in civil military relations. They never
00:14:50
think about it, right, until they enter, until they are faced with it. And the great danger
00:14:56
than to civil military relations, to democratic civil military relations is deference. The concern
00:15:02
that simply civilians will simply do whatever it is that military officers tell them because they are
00:15:08
the experts. And in part because they are the product of the same American political culture
00:15:14
that venerates military officers. And we have now fascinating experimental evidence showing us
00:15:20
that people think that military officers are expert on all kinds of things well beyond the use of
00:15:26
force. So we went into this research really wanting to get at this notion of deference. And what we
00:15:32
realize actually is that the ways in which polling questions have been posed in the past were not
00:15:38
very helpful. The only question that is asked regularly on polls is the general question of confidence
00:15:44
or trust in the armed forces. But again, they weren't posing the questions that really got at
00:15:51
deference. And so we posed our questions in the following way. We asked people, if senior US military
00:15:58
officers object to a proposed military mission, should the president reject the proposed mission,
00:16:05
even if the president thinks the mission worthwhile, or should he reject the proposed mission only
00:16:10
if the president agrees the mission is not worthwhile? Democratic civil military relations would say
00:16:17
that the president should follow their own judgment. Once they've listened to the military and
00:16:23
taken that into account, it is fundamentally their decision. We found, and we've done the run the survey
00:16:29
a couple of times now, roughly half of our US-based respondents think that the president should reject
00:16:37
the proposed mission even if the president thinks the mission is worthwhile. If we frame that same
00:16:43
question in the affirmative rather than in the negative, that is, if we say, if senior US military
00:16:49
officers approve of a proposed military mission, should the president approve the proposed mission,
00:16:55
even if the president thinks the mission not worthwhile, that is against the president's own
00:17:00
better judgment, here we are 40% of US-based respondents adopting that supremely differential position.
00:17:08
The same thing is basically true with another critical aspect of democratic civil military relations.
00:17:14
Do you think that senior military officers should get involved publicly in policy debate?
00:17:22
Democratic Civ Mill says they should be consulted behind closed doors,
00:17:28
but in public where they can be shifting the political debate in their direction,
00:17:33
like when General Colin Powell wrote an op-ed in the New York Times opposing deploys
00:17:39
beat skippers to Bosnia, that is a violation of democratic civil military relations norms,
00:17:45
and we found that people generally support the military getting involved in those kinds of
00:17:51
public debates, utterly contrary to what democratic civil would have us believe.
00:17:57
We also asked questions that tried to, as you were asking Gabe, get at changes over time.
00:18:04
In 1998, 53% of people agreed only 53% that civilians should make the final call.
00:18:13
We found that that number 25 years later, not even 25 years later, had declined significantly,
00:18:23
had declined to about 43% of respondents in 2021 said that.
00:18:29
So we are not all seeing significant difference, but significantly more difference over time.
00:18:34
Great, and Scott, I want to ask you sort of a follow-up question to one of the points he made,
00:18:39
and then shift the conversation a bit to trust.
00:18:42
Can you speak to do civilians that work for the government in an official capacity?
00:18:47
Do they get any formalized training that you know of?
00:18:52
Well, I think the interesting notion is that your first disposition is to train civilians,
00:18:57
as though they don't have opinions of their own that are formed from their own expertise,
00:19:02
and that's what they're selected to be in the position from.
00:19:04
And so before getting into that concept exactly, I more want to split out what civilians actually
00:19:12
look like across the country, because much of the civil literature actually conflates types
00:19:17
of civilians. There's the US electorate, which is a group of civilians that seeks to influence
00:19:23
policy through elected officials, but then there are the elected officials, which hold different
00:19:27
responsibilities and rights and authorities over the military. The Constitution speaks to these
00:19:33
roles explicitly. And so once you then look at what's going on at the elected level, there's an
00:19:40
inherent tension that our Constitution frames out. The Congress, the Article I branch, has different
00:19:45
powers than the president, the Article II branch. But the president now, or the presidency, has now
00:19:50
evolved to a point where it's not just the president making decisions. The president has a cadre
00:19:56
of appointed officials at different tiers and levels working within the Department of Defense.
00:20:01
They're the traditional Senate confirmed appointees that we all think about, but then there's also
00:20:06
non-career SES members, schedule C members that all told end up where there's a couple
00:20:10
hundred people representing the president at any point in time in different levels, layers of OSD
00:20:16
or the service branches. And so at what point then are you interacting? So you mentioned
00:20:21
DOD civilians. I'm one of them. I would not put myself in the category of a political appointee,
00:20:28
nor would I think I'm a representative of the military, nor a member of Congress. So where am I in
00:20:34
this dichotomy of someone who works in the organization does not have a military background,
00:20:39
but I'm doing my best to stick around for a while and be a part of the organization long term.
00:20:44
We hope so. I'm giving it a go. And so at that point in time, where am I in this? I am a technocratic
00:20:52
expert that doesn't wear the uniform. Am I not having some sort of institutional loyalty that's
00:20:59
being pulled here? I would not view myself as responsive to the president in the sense of a
00:21:05
political appointee. He doesn't have at will ability to fire me. And so the question then becomes
00:21:13
when we think about where are we granting deference into whom at what layer are we talking? So like
00:21:19
Lloyd Austin represents the president. He serves at the pleasure of the president as the secretary
00:21:25
of defense. And so he's an extension of the civilian component right now, but his background arguably
00:21:32
blurs that somewhat with the military. And so a lot of the divide that is born out of sort of
00:21:38
Samuel Huntington's framing of the military, where is the uniform and everyone else's civilian,
00:21:42
can lead to where the theorizing about the role of society or the role of elected officials gets
00:21:48
blurred between the two. And there's a connective tissue that sort of dictates where
00:21:53
the overall policy is going to come through them, the vehicles through which elected officials
00:21:59
take messages and form their policy. And I think that needs a little more unpacking to sort of
00:22:06
talk about where trust might enter into this or where deference becomes a problem or deference is
00:22:10
a good thing. And so I'll leave it there and let Ron reactor bring him back into the conversation.
00:22:16
Ron, please, yeah. I think Scott's point is excellent, right? There are different kinds of
00:22:24
civilians and are thinking about civil military relations has not usually taken that into account.
00:22:30
I think it's fair to say, it's not about training, but it is about do you have an opportunity
00:22:36
and have you taken the time to think about your respective roles? And at least formal military
00:22:43
training creates such an opening. I think it's fair to say my understanding is that civilians
00:22:51
up and down the chain have not had those formal moments where they are being asked to think about
00:22:58
if national security professionals are thinking about their relationship to the military. We all do
00:23:05
better when we're prompted to think about those things in a more formal way. I wanted to return,
00:23:11
before we move on, I want to return Gabe to a point that you made, introducing this discussion
00:23:17
about our work on deference in distinguishing between retired and active duty military.
00:23:25
Right, yeah. It seems from the perspective of democratic theory, once someone's a retired
00:23:29
military officer, they're a private citizen and they should be able to do whatever they
00:23:35
like. And yet, two points. One, as it's often said, when someone retires as a general,
00:23:43
they have a new first name for the rest of their lives. And that first name is general. They never
00:23:49
stop being a general. They're not purely a private citizen. And that's important. They are understood
00:23:56
to have an expertise. And there's a reason that, as you pointed out, Republicans and Democrats
00:24:02
alike have been seeking the endorsements of senior military officers. Second point is that what I
00:24:10
found and what Peter Fever finds in his new book is that the general public makes basically no distinction
00:24:18
between retired and active duty. We see essentially the same support or objection to retired and
00:24:26
active duty military officers participating in public debate. Peter Fever finds basically the same
00:24:33
thing. And that should give us pause because if the general public is not drawing a distinction,
00:24:38
they don't know who's retired and active duty. They don't see any distinction between retired and
00:24:44
active duty. Then that probably means that we should be thinking about retired military officers
00:24:50
not really as private citizen because the general public doesn't see them that way in public debate.
00:24:57
Either. And that should be worrisome to active duty military officers who are for the most part
00:25:03
pretty careful in not getting involved in partisan political events and debates.
00:25:11
I think that raises an interesting question though about where the electorates supposed to get
00:25:16
information about the military. If not using the heuristic of a title that this person has spent
00:25:24
a considerable amount of time in the military, how else do we expect proper democratic accountability
00:25:30
through an informed citizenship to go get that information they need to make a decision?
00:25:35
Someone has to be the information gatekeeper and we know we're dealing with shorter and shorter
00:25:41
attention spans and a media environment saturated with alternatives to anything that you want.
00:25:48
And so how would you go about having an informed electorate that's going to have these simple cues
00:25:53
if you don't want them participating in public life? I think that's one of the tricky parts of
00:25:58
the retired officer class taking a backseat and discussing military affairs is then who else
00:26:05
is there to provide information. We might draw some distinctions perhaps between participating as
00:26:12
there I mean a lot of the conversation does not but we might begin to draw distinctions between
00:26:17
endorsing political candidates participating as talking heads and writing off heads.
00:26:25
There was a new article just came out a rare opportunity a completely unrepresentative sample
00:26:32
of flag rank officers and their own views of what kinds of behaviors are acceptable in their
00:26:39
retirement or not. Obviously views run the gamut according to this piece not surprisingly.
00:26:45
Some people say we shouldn't be doing anything right and some see no issue with any but of course
00:26:50
most people occupy the muddled middle and in that muddled middle I think it's pretty clear there's
00:26:57
a lot more discomfort amongst those who responded to the survey who are probably people who are
00:27:02
again not representative who are more discomfortable endorsing political candidates then they are
00:27:10
bringing their lifetime of accumulated expertise into public debate via writing off heads and serving
00:27:18
as talking heads. I completely agree about there being a spectrum of participation that are
00:27:25
more or less politicized. I think even within the realm of being a talking head on television is
00:27:32
that the cable news networks now have stretch a strong partisan connotation not even saying if it's
00:27:37
right or wrong but you can get visceral responses when you mention a particular network from someone
00:27:42
of another partisan and to think that if you're the expert because the title you mentioned they also
00:27:47
they put general in front of their name but they also will have some senior of foreign affairs
00:27:53
analyst expert or some title that goes along with it that connotates that they are the news stations
00:27:58
expert on the policy and so I think even when they're appearing in those worlds they're going to
00:28:04
get attached as oh this is Fox News's general or this is MSNBC's general and to think that in a very
00:28:12
I'm trying to think about a phrase this politely but in a vacuum of information where people
00:28:17
mostly are uninformed it's the simple cues that they're going to stick and have heuristic
00:28:22
stewards that are going to be what ultimately shapes the opinions that are espoused on those programs.
00:28:27
If you're a retired senior military officer flag officer it's interesting when we look at UCMJ
00:28:34
title 10 you retain a commission like what does that mean how does that how should that change
00:28:40
your relationship to partisanship versus and then of course further muddling in the middle there is
00:28:47
you know reserve officers we see hold very high positions in Congress some of our most prominent
00:28:55
front facing senators you know these are reserve officers so obviously that's a highly political
00:29:02
partisan position to hold so how do we make how do we make sense of that I think there's very
00:29:07
interesting discussions to be had there Ron you had one more and then I'd like to maybe shift us
00:29:13
to a brief chat about trust I actually what I was going to say I think sort of segues us perfectly
00:29:19
right because in an environment Scott as you're suggesting in an environment where it is so deeply
00:29:27
partisan as it is today where there are so few people that are crossing political lines and on
00:29:34
any policy issue even sort of expert policy debate becomes inherently partisan it's almost impossible
00:29:41
to extend than any policy question without being seen as being loyal or disloyal to a particular
00:29:46
political party perfect segway so Scott what we teach cadets sivmille and intro to AP and we talk
00:29:54
about the importance of trust and building trust and on the military side and you know we we we
00:30:01
mention what the research says about how public perceptions of that trust can get shaped and
00:30:07
we're starting to talk about politicization of the military or at least perceptions of the
00:30:12
politicization there so what do we do when trust leads to some of the results we're seeing in Ron's
00:30:19
research it when the trust becomes you know almost so strong maybe arguably I don't think you can
00:30:27
say trust is can be too strong but if it leads to deference to military authority seeing them as
00:30:34
the expert and maybe just a blind trust and I'm curious your thoughts there on trust and how it
00:30:41
may be a contributing factor to these issues of deference and then Ron will we'll go to you on that too.
00:30:48
So I think it's it's interesting how you alluded to like maybe there is no level of trust that's too
00:30:54
high and I think that's largely because trust is such a charged charm no one is going to argue they want
00:31:01
to be the opposite of it you're not going to have someone say I want to be untrustworthy please do not
00:31:05
find me trustworthy and so the question then become is what is that latent concept actually mapping or
00:31:13
tracking and so if it's a general statement about American foreign policy arguably it shouldn't be
00:31:19
100% there of times we have misstepped there are ways in which we have done things that the public probably
00:31:25
perceives is un or policy outcomes that they wouldn't want and so you know you look at Ron's work
00:31:32
where he has the first figure that talks about public confidence in the US military from the 60s up
00:31:38
into 2018 you see the greater war on terror is where this partisan split begins now yes it's also
00:31:44
a time where we have greater polarization into the United States but we have a near 30 year history
00:31:50
proceeding that where Republicans and Democrats are not very differentiated and they're overall
00:31:56
trust and so I think the the first question to think about with trust is what are we actually
00:32:01
mapping here is this a confidence in the military or is this a statement on the US foreign policy
00:32:08
and so if you think about a protracted war where the two parties disagree about whether or not we
00:32:14
should be waging war in a particular way then you might see trust in the military split because
00:32:19
it's becoming a statement on the overall foreign policy that the US government's taking because
00:32:24
people are putting that sentiment of their feelings towards the military onto the overall actions
00:32:30
that the military are taking they're not differentiating whether or not they think the military is
00:32:36
trustworthy in this abstract sense as you know the the barrier isn't like are they weighing will the
00:32:42
military conduct a coup today or not it's a broader commentary on probably larger things going
00:32:48
on with the American politics that they're conflating the military itself with the policy that
00:32:52
the militaries task to carry out great I uh I think that's that final point there about conflating
00:32:59
those two um footstop that so um Ron returning to maybe some specifics in your your research you
00:33:06
know you find that Americans don't all trust the military to the same degree and for the same reasons
00:33:11
so what do we know about these partisan dimensions of trust in the military and of their view of
00:33:16
civil military relations both deference to the armed forces and people's attitudes towards officers
00:33:22
roles in these policy debates me get a surprise no one to hear that uh those who self-identify as
00:33:31
Republicans and conservatives are more likely to trust the military and I think it will surprise
00:33:37
no one to hear that the reason that people generally trust the military is that they think that
00:33:42
the military is extremely good at what it does they think the military is highly ethical and uh they
00:33:50
think that the military is highly patriotic to the degree that people distrust the military they are
00:33:55
most likely to distrust the military because they think the military is quite political and of course
00:34:00
that's a charge term because what exactly would a a political military look like they're operating
00:34:05
in a deeply political environment known as Washington and they are a political actor seeking to get
00:34:11
their way in a very in a deeply political environment part that we found really surprising is that we
00:34:19
just looked at simple cross tabulations of the data and we found that quite to our surprise in 2019
00:34:25
those who were most distrustful of the military were also those who were most deferential to the
00:34:33
military and that sounds on its face to be really surprising except when you take a step back and
00:34:39
realize wait a second those who are most distrustful of the military are also those who are likely to be
00:34:46
most self-identify as democrats most likely to be self-identify liberals and to rank highest on
00:34:53
distrust of the political leader at the time at the president at the time Donald Trump and our
00:35:00
and those who were in fact most trusting of the military were least deferential toward the
00:35:05
military and our inference was that those who distrust the military say we distrust the military
00:35:12
but you know who we distrust even more Donald Trump and that they saw the military as a check on a
00:35:18
politician whose judgment they fundamentally distrusted when we see we see sort of similar patterns
00:35:26
when we compare questions that we reproduce from other surveys that show that the American body
00:35:32
politic basically has no principled commitment to democratic civil military relations it's not rooted
00:35:38
in ideology it's rooted largely in their understanding of politics we made one strong prediction based
00:35:46
on the 2019 data and that strong prediction was that well if once Joe Biden was elected and we
00:35:53
finished the article justice but it was about to be published just as Biden was elected we expected
00:35:58
a flip we expected the democrats extreme strong democrats distrusters of Trump who were most deferential
00:36:05
to the military should now be least deferential to the military and we found that Republicans
00:36:11
flipped but only to a very small degree and democrats didn't flip at all in fact they were more
00:36:17
deferential toward the military this seems to largely be a product of a really surprising shift
00:36:25
that took place in the fall of 2020 into 2021 which is that something that we never expected to see
00:36:33
anyone which is that Republicans went from venerating the military to denigrating senior military officers
00:36:40
lots of accusations about the woke military serving a political agenda within the military
00:36:45
and this had an effect on both democratic and republican voters
00:36:49
Scott I want to bring you in here if you want to respond to that more generally you can but
00:36:53
I would like to get to your law fair article you and your co-authors you're arguing that the current
00:36:59
process for approving senior military officer promotions might lead to some of this increased
00:37:04
polarization of the military that we're seeing so I'll pick up what with where Ron left off just
00:37:11
to to note that the parties have actually moved quite a lot on their attitudes I don't think anyone
00:37:17
would accuse George W. Bush of having the same foreign policy worldview as Donald Trump
00:37:22
and so the fact that public opinion is malleable as the parties shift really speaks to
00:37:28
the strong relationship between voters and their partisanship and how they see the world
00:37:34
and the worldviews that are largely driving behavior are not profoundly rooted in some political
00:37:42
or some dimension that's orthogonal to politics it's not coming from a worldview that's
00:37:48
agnostic on whether I'm a republican or a democrat it's largely taking cues from elites on what
00:37:54
they are saying their position is and adopting that as my own worldview which I think speaks to like
00:38:00
where are Americans going to get information from I'll sort of pause there and pivot back to
00:38:06
the law fair article that just came out to talk about or to give a little context to this a couple
00:38:13
years ago former social faculty member current major in the army scraped a bunch of data on senate
00:38:21
confirmations with general officers so he had all this information about how long it was taking
00:38:25
for general officers to confirm by the senate and so this is a little different than a political
00:38:30
appointee in the sense of the president has a it is sort of loosely involved in vetting a slate
00:38:36
that can go up through the department of defense it's not as though it's routing through the White House
00:38:40
like it would for other appointees but this point eventually it goes to the senate floor where the
00:38:45
senate must take a vote to confirm these officers promotions and so over the last year there have
00:38:52
been a hold put in place which is a procedure done by an individual senator where they can
00:38:58
slow these nominations because there are so many that go up at this point the way that they
00:39:03
eventually get confirmed is typically a unanimous consent vote which means one person can say no
00:39:09
and they can't do this and then they have to go through a formal process to actually go through
00:39:14
the senate procedure I think the estimate was from a CRS report in August that this was something like
00:39:20
300 plus hours of senate floor time that it would take to confirm these people I don't know if you
00:39:25
keep up too much on the senate calendar but they are not in working 300 hour work weeks or anything
00:39:31
approximating close to like a time to clear that slate given they have lots of other business to take
00:39:37
care of there are many other things yeah and none of us have 300 hours to just largely be it
00:39:43
be the HR department and do something that everyone is sort of green lighting or rubber stamping
00:39:48
and so the we went through and actually looked to see how different this was historically and
00:39:54
in kind it is different it's a wholesale block from one individual but there are historical examples
00:39:59
where we have seen individual senators use a hold to stop different nominations and slow different
00:40:05
procedures interestingly enough it's typically done in conjunction with stopping political
00:40:10
appointees as well that maybe do not share that worldview and so this brings up a really interesting
00:40:16
tension as we think about this process on its face we have an input from both elected branches
00:40:24
picking who will be the general officers and so that seems like it's good democratic accountability
00:40:29
however do we think we want general officers that are democratically accountable in a sense that
00:40:36
a political appointee are elected officials or are they doing something now that is so
00:40:41
technically advanced and requires so much skill that we should be better thinking of these people
00:40:47
as merit employees senator read even use that phrase in discussing the holds over this debate
00:40:52
this last year and so merit employees has a very different connotation we think about civil service
00:40:59
protection we've had the Pendleton Act in the 1800s we've done the hatch act we had a civil
00:41:03
service reform act we've been slowly giving protections to protect rank and file members of the
00:41:09
civil service and so we need to think about in the civil military frame where in the spectrum do we
00:41:15
think general officers fall do we think that they are merit employees that require certain protections
00:41:22
do we think they fall closer to political appointees because right now other than the DOD
00:41:28
handling the slate and coming from a pool of oh sixes that could get promoted up serving at the
00:41:34
pleasure of the president where you can be relieved by an administration describe political point
00:41:39
having your job contingent on a senate vote describes a political appointee and so this is just
00:41:45
inherently inviting political actors to do political things as it relates to the military
00:41:51
and it might be that our desires for democratic accountability through this process outweigh the
00:41:56
political sedation costs that we're paying where it might not be and we should have that debate and
00:42:01
discuss whether or not we think these are merit employees that require merit protections like we've
00:42:08
given much of the other parts of the federal government or do we need a level of accountability
00:42:14
that differentiates general officers in a way that actually makes them more political
00:42:19
because putting the senate vote in place putting the president in place for selection
00:42:25
is inviting politics into personnel decisions and when you invite politics into personnel
00:42:30
you are going to politicize the agency. Ron I want to bring you in here because you kicked us
00:42:34
off with a great explanation of why democratic accountability is central to the right to be
00:42:43
wrong thing that we started with but it also matters here and Scott framed that very well about
00:42:49
democratic accountability versus the sort of potential political cost or maybe the potential
00:42:56
for politicization is the cost or the price we pay for maintaining a strict adherence to that
00:43:04
democratic accountability so to kind of circle back to that discussion I want to bring you in on
00:43:09
your thoughts there. Yeah these are great questions and that's a really interesting formulation Scott.
00:43:14
You're the expert on bureaucracy might sort of broaden this out the American system is cross
00:43:21
nationally really unusual in the in how deep our political appointees go so when you're making
00:43:29
a point about appointment to general officers I'd say that sounds roughly parallel to how deep
00:43:35
political appointees go throughout the bureaucracy and again that same tradeoff between expertise
00:43:42
and politicization and of course the huge numbers of political appointees slots that simply never
00:43:50
get filled or filled in a very very desultory fashion when a new administration comes into office.
00:43:57
So my inclination would be a little bit with I think what you were implying but I think it goes
00:44:02
well beyond the military that is you know a one star is not making policy in the same way that a
00:44:10
three star is and in the same way in which you might say look a three star maybe there should be
00:44:16
should be essentially a treated like a political appointee that the civilians in order for them to
00:44:21
have the right to be wrong are entitled to have people at the very highest levels who basically
00:44:27
they have a real connection with and real trust with and don't necessarily are not really merit don't
00:44:32
need merit protections are not civil service but then we should think about that as we think about
00:44:37
the assistant secretaries and the deputy assistant secretaries who are political appointees and
00:44:42
should that really go all the way all the way down I think that cross national conversation is
00:44:47
something that's often missing from discussion of American civil military relations in general
00:44:53
and so I'd like to maybe segue to that for just a moment when we think about trust in the military
00:44:59
we think we often have this really parochial American conversation but in fact the United
00:45:07
States is not nearly as unusual as we think trust in the military around the world is extraordinarily
00:45:16
high we don't know about whether publics in general are deferential to the military around the
00:45:21
globe because frankly no one's asking the question but we are asking questions about trust and we have
00:45:27
data going back about 25 years around the world and some places farther back than that and the US is
00:45:36
not as much as an outlier as we often think across the democratic industrialized world in particular
00:45:44
across the west we've had a falling we've had falling trust in political institutions in general
00:45:51
that goes hand in hand with paralysis of our political institutions since the 1980s we've been
00:45:58
seeing the judicialization of politics when political institutions are stalled people turn to
00:46:04
the justice to the judicial system to try to break that deadlock and to try to make policy but the
00:46:10
other side of that the one institution that is also so aspirationally apolitical that is at least
00:46:16
it legitimates itself in apolitical terms is the military and so low and behold as we've had a
00:46:22
declining trust in political institutions around the globe we see rising trust at least in the
00:46:29
military at least if the military doesn't get to involved in politics and so I have an article
00:46:36
that has not yet been published oddly no one else no one has done this yet that in fact finds an
00:46:41
inverse relationship between trust in other political institutions and trust in the military
00:46:49
and I think that this is not just a product of people's general approach to form on policy
00:46:56
but rather it is because of a very conscious political strategy on the part of politicians
00:47:02
around the globe that as their own legitimacy declines they have an incentive to promote trust
00:47:09
in the military and to swad themselves in the trust in the military very very interesting all right
00:47:16
so Scott we've got the comparative perspective a little bit and we'll certainly get more from
00:47:22
Ron's forthcoming work can you give us maybe a comparative perspective of trust here as maybe the
00:47:28
Americanist on on the on the call here like comparing us between I say us the military to other
00:47:36
bureaucratic organizations and in trust and then even to to circle it back to some of your work as
00:47:42
you were talking about political appointees like are there proper reasonable analogs in the military
00:47:49
to someone appointed to a position and say the EPA like can you give us maybe the comparative
00:47:54
perspective from within the U.S. across bureaucratic organizations sure I mean so I think at least in
00:48:02
terms of statute the way to think about it is if you go look where the secretary of defense has
00:48:07
called out to exist it's alongside the other cabinet departments the chairman of the fed it's
00:48:12
put in a position where the civilian positions within the DOD sit alongside every other equivalent
00:48:18
position in the federal government and so that the military wants something different out of the
00:48:26
secretary of defense arguably is the military wanting the secretary of defense to adopt its policies
00:48:33
and it's not a proper waiting of what are presidents going through when they're trying to make this
00:48:38
decision and there's a literature on this within the American politics literature talking about a
00:48:43
competency loyalty tradeoff every appointee that a president chooses between is making a tradeoff
00:48:50
between how loyal that person will be to the president's policy positions juxtapose against
00:48:55
their competency to make sure that the agency does its job because really the federal government is a
00:49:01
giant blame machine for the president anytime something goes wrong it's going to fall back on the
00:49:06
president you're never see a headline all planes successfully land today you will not see the USDA
00:49:12
catches all forms of equal lie on their screens what are you here you hear we have a problem with our
00:49:19
food supply or you'll hear about any sort of calamity that's produced by government falling back
00:49:26
on the administration and so presidents are making a tradeoff between wanting someone to speak for them
00:49:32
across a huge huge entity where they can't possibly be in every room for every decision that's why
00:49:37
we delegate authority to the appointees to speak on behalf of the president and you have to weigh
00:49:42
that against having someone with enough expertise to make sure things don't go poorly because the way
00:49:48
we find out largely that the public sector entities are failing unlike a business where if you make a
00:49:54
bad widget you end up going out of business because no one buys it largely public sector entities will
00:49:59
persist until they get hit by something exogenous and we get revealed to them that there's a failure
00:50:05
and so we learn about the problems that FEMA when hurricane Katrina hits we learn about the
00:50:10
problems in government coming about because of some exogenous shock and the scary part about the
00:50:16
military is that the exogenous shock will be losing a war it'll be losing on the battlefield and so
00:50:21
you always want to be persistently avoiding that and thinking about how best to avoid it
00:50:27
but the tradeoff that is being made at the political level from the civilian appointees
00:50:34
is one that is not the same game that the military once played if you look back to fever's description
00:50:41
about assessing the merits of military the military's action and juxtapose it against what the civilians
00:50:47
are weighing the costs of new things for the department of defense comes at the expense of other
00:50:52
government programs it's coming in a tradeoff at least it's not poli zero sum but it's at least
00:50:59
pitted as if I spend one place I can't spend as much somewhere else and so this game that civilian
00:51:07
elected officials are playing is just not the same thing that the military is doing so there is
00:51:12
going to be a friction there is going to be a tension that draws across the two and to to Ron's
00:51:18
point about the United States we have a lot more political appointees in our government than anybody
00:51:23
else there's just a lot more of them and so given that there are so many more the question is what
00:51:30
are we getting for that and is it necessary because we are different in size and scope at least in
00:51:36
terms of the department of defense then lots of other countries as well okay um yeah Ron if you
00:51:41
I want to let you reply to that really quick and then we'll move to final thoughts here as we wrap
00:51:46
up my only very brief point I think Scott has brought a really important perspective which is very
00:51:52
rare in fact almost unheard of in the civil military relations literature that is thinking the military
00:51:57
as just another bureaucracy within the US government and I think that's really important but I also want
00:52:02
to um push back against it just a little bit I think there's uh it contains really fascinating
00:52:07
insights but we also shouldn't lose sight of the fact about why we have a literature on civil
00:52:14
military relations that perhaps is distinct from our literature on principle agent problems
00:52:20
in bureaucracies those dynamics exist those tensions exist and Scott is right to raise them but
00:52:26
there I think there are two things that make the military different so that we can have this
00:52:30
conversation but we should recognize that it is distinct one is that I'm not afraid of moles with
00:52:36
green eye shades in the EPA overthrowing the government they might not always do the will the
00:52:44
democratic of our democratically elected representatives but they that is not fundamentally the same thing
00:52:51
as overthrowing regimes they can undercut right the policies that the democratically elected
00:52:58
officials pursue hence the insight of principle agent problems but they don't pose a threat
00:53:04
to the entire regime of democracy and the second the decisions made by bureaucracy in a variety of
00:53:11
ways do ultimately have implications for life and death what kind of welfare state we provide what
00:53:17
kind of public health system we have absolutely but that is not quite the same as holding the power
00:53:24
of life and death as directly as the military does especially over non-U.S. citizens and so that is
00:53:33
also something that makes the military distinct and is why we have a conversation about civilians have
00:53:38
the right to be wrong in a way that we don't even have that conversation about other bureaucracies
00:53:45
because it's recognized with other bureaucracies right the stakes with the military are indeed higher
00:53:52
I take that point entirely I think the scope of what the military can do with coercion and force
00:54:00
fails in comparison to anyone else but I would push back a little bit with the notion of
00:54:05
there's the Department of Justice in the FBI where the FBI certainly uses force and deprives life
00:54:10
and liberty of U.S. citizens it's inward facing and so I think you know the different vehicles within
00:54:16
the state that use force in ways that we should potentially think about bringing the civil literature
00:54:23
and theorizing about I mean the notion of a police force protesting against the mayor were used to
00:54:30
seeing those occur and the idea that if the president walked into the room the military would all turn
00:54:35
their back on the president is an affinate our understanding of what good civil relations look like
00:54:41
and so arguably there's a borrowing that should be going on elsewhere in government to talk about
00:54:45
what sort of norms are useful to carry forward and I think that's the you're exactly right that we
00:54:53
should be well aware of the capacity of what the military has to do to undercut or end democracy
00:55:00
it's just that they're not so unique and solely isolated they're the only ones with that as well.
00:55:05
My point I love it I uh I could do this forever but for the sake of our uh for listeners let's I'd
00:55:12
like to go to just some some final thoughts so Scott I want to start with you I'm going to make you
00:55:16
king for a day whatever that means um it's very dangerous all right so yeah especially in the context
00:55:22
of a democracy right so what do we what do we change or do we need to change do we change how we
00:55:29
educate officers in civ mill something that you and I are actively involved with and do we make
00:55:35
changes to advice and consent for a certain senior military leadership positions and if you take
00:55:41
issue with the fundamental framing of those questions feel free to say so.
00:55:44
So I definitely won't take any issue with it um I think what I would encourage
00:55:51
us to think about and discuss and actually legislate and go through a normal channel for
00:55:57
are are sort of being clear where policy should meet first principles.
00:56:01
Whether the things that we think are most important with our society and do the policies that we
00:56:07
have today meet and match with those principles I think a lot of if you look specifically at the
00:56:13
confirmation debate the um discussion that happened over the last year it was a a lot of sort of shame
00:56:19
on the senator for doing the thing that the senate's allowed to do like this is the senate being
00:56:24
a creature and I'm not making a commentary on whether I think the decision to have the hold is right or
00:56:28
wrong um that so that that's not the the way I'm trying to go with this at all it's more to say that
00:56:34
a senator uses a tool of the senate should not surprise us if we don't like the outcome that it
00:56:39
produces we should be thinking what are the principles that we do want what are the guiding
00:56:44
lights that are going to carry us forward so that then we can articulate policy that matches what
00:56:49
we think those principles ought to be if we think it is a protection of expertise then we lean more
00:56:55
towards merit principles if we think we need democratic accountability where elected officials
00:57:01
have more control then that means a different vehicle that we just sometimes have to be okay with
00:57:06
politics making things messy and no one likes the sausage getting made as a viewer of the process and
00:57:12
that's just the nature of politics though I mean you look at surveys of the American public most
00:57:18
people want change that's a feature to going back at least to the Clinton elections in the early 90s
00:57:24
there's been a call for change to take place and that's just largely a dissatisfaction with people
00:57:30
feeling politics is icky and it probably is but that we bring something that we think is a little
00:57:37
distasteful into something we want to keep pristine I think that's a debate that we should
00:57:44
have as to where in the spectrum we want protections for expertise and where we want democratic accountability
00:57:52
awesome and so we're on you are on a civil military relations panel hosted by a podcast called
00:57:58
horns of a dilemma I'm a big fan of them and happy to point our listeners in that direction
00:58:03
last year I think a little bit a little bit earlier in the year perhaps and in your concluding thoughts
00:58:08
you said the challenge ahead of us on the civilian side of this civil equation is to find some
00:58:13
middle ground between denigration which you talk about a lot in some of your foreign affairs
00:58:18
pieces recently and maybe sort of this blind patriotism or veneration of military leaders and of
00:58:25
course the deference issue that you've spoken about on on on this podcast today so it's been over a
00:58:31
year how are we doing what do you think and then what's the what's the prescription well I want to
00:58:38
sort of both echo a point that scotchess made and then I want to sort of sit just something a little
00:58:44
bit different to echo scotts point right we should not be surprised when people are given every
00:58:50
incentive to behave in particular ways and then do it and then we get upset about it and retire
00:58:56
generals going and when going and giving their endorsements to political figures they want to make
00:59:03
a you know at the end of the day they want a prominence seat at the table they want to make a
00:59:07
buck they're going to go on the networks um we don't have rules against any of that and no surprise
00:59:14
therefore they are going to do that and we shouldn't be upset about that when they follow the rules
00:59:18
one difference is we can actually control what retire generals do at least if they want their
00:59:23
pension check uh and that requires um some real choices being made by our nation's politicians
00:59:32
to change the code and to say if you do these things you will not get your pension check which means
00:59:38
that everyone but the greatest of those superstars right who could do says well I'll go on CNN because I
00:59:44
don't care about my pension check compared to the money I'm getting from CNN and CNBC and Fox News
00:59:49
everyone else is going to follow uh follow their financial incentives uh and it's not going to
00:59:55
get involved there the same thing is true by the way with the retire generals going and
00:59:58
immediately becoming part of the military industrial complex if we don't like it we can change the law
01:00:03
um however there are limits to that because one of the lessons I think that we've seen over the years
01:00:12
since 2017 uh and as we approach the prospect of Donald Trump potentially being elected a second time
01:00:21
as he seems almost a sure lock things can change but almost a lock for the republican nomination
01:00:27
and running neck and neck if not ahead of Joe Biden as things stand now uh is that institutions
01:00:35
and policies uh have a really hard time uh are really backed by informal norms and the end of the day
01:00:43
we can design the best policies and the best institutions that we want but when you have a leading
01:00:49
political figure who is steadfastly determined to undermine them and to undermine all checks on their
01:00:56
authority fundamentally they can do it fundamentally we do not have those institutions and policies
01:01:04
will never be strong enough and that is why ultimately so much of our conversation of civil
01:01:10
military relations is auditory it's auditory toward our military officers and it's auditory
01:01:16
toward our civilians which is essentially do better civilians visit find a middle course
01:01:23
between veneration and vilification resist the urge to swathe yourself in the protective blanket
01:01:31
of the military or alternatively resist the urge to make the military a punching bag and we ask
01:01:37
our senior officers to resist the urge to play the system the way they can but to retain an adherence
01:01:45
to principle and so I fully agree with Scott let our policies and institutions match our values
01:01:51
and let's not um and if we think there's a problem with them change the policies change the institutions
01:01:59
we can do that but by the same token we also need to remind people about the values that are at stake
01:02:06
because those institutions and policies as we've been reminded in the last several years
01:02:12
are actually more fragile than we had long thought
01:02:26
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01:02:46
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