Right or Wrong? The Civil-Military Problematique and Armed Forces & Society's 50th

The central concern of civil-military relations theory is how to have a military institution simultaneously strong enough to protect society and the state from enemies while also properly sized and obedient enough not to pose a threat itself to that society and state. When scholars wrestle with this question, they must engage the seminal contributions from Samuel Huntington and Morris Janowitz, as I did in "The Civil-Military Problematique: Huntington, Janowitz, and the Question of Civilian Control." In hindsight, it is clear that I was right enough in theory but perhaps not in practice. Thirty years of American civil-military relations shows the importance of norms and the strain on military professionalism imposed by the principal norm for democracies: that civilians have the right to be wrong. Future scholars must emphasize the shoring up of norms that build the trust that lubricates day-to-day civil-military interactions.