Civil Military Relations

A while back I posted on the death of Professor Sam Huntington, here.

When I was writing I was thinking also about an essay by then Colonel Charlie Dunlap, now Major General Dunlap, Deputy Air Force Judge Advocate General. I came across it today at another post. Here it is.

To quote Wikipedia: "Dunlap wrote an essay in 1992 called The Origins of the American Military Coup of 2012 in which he claims that the blurring of the military role of the armed forces into civilian missions might be dangerous to democracy and civilian government."

This problem of the military doing more than is in its charter, because no one else is prepared to step up and do the job, is the kind of issue that Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has recently spoken about.

When the essay was written, Charlie Dunlap was a student at the National War College, in Washington, DC. It was his idea alone, and became a prize winner--co-winner of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff 1991-92 Strategy Essay Competition, in which students from all six senior service colleges compete.

Secretary of Defense Robert Gates sees this same problem of the Department of Defense being asked to do too much. On the pages of the current edition of Foreign Affairs he says:

The military and civilian elements of the United States' national security apparatus have responded unevenly and have grown increasingly out of balance. The problem is not will; it is capacity. In many ways, the country's national security capabilities are still coping with the consequences of the 1990s, when, with the complicity of both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue, key instruments of U.S. power abroad were reduced or allowed to wither on the bureaucratic vine. The State Department froze the hiring of new Foreign Service officers. The U.S. Agency for International Development dropped from a high of having 15,000 permanent staff members during the Vietnam War to having less than 3,000 today. And then there was the U.S. Information Agency, whose directors once included the likes of Edward R. Murrow. It was split into pieces and folded into a corner of the State Department. Since 9/11, and through the efforts first of Secretary of State Colin Powell and now of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, the State Department has made a comeback. Foreign Service officers are being hired again, and foreign affairs spending has about doubled since President Bush took office.

Good food for thought.

Regards -- Cliff