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.