Military Leaders and Foreign Policy-Making

A survey of the literature of the last decade in the burgeoning interdisciplinary field which has come to be known—rather imprecisely—as civil-military relations, reveals a large number of descriptive and prescriptive, operational and theoretical studies, but little unity of focus or method. The interested shopper finds himself in a veritable department store filled with a wide assortment—including those in the bargain basement. Spurred on by wartime experiences and Cold War exigencies, historians and social scientists, physical scientists and journalists—above all in the United States—have covered reams of paper with discussions of the relationship between arms and men, war and peace, strategy and policy, defense and diplomacy. Displaying a great variety of analytical depth, breadth and sophistication, some of these studies have advanced our knowledge of civil-military relations—particularly in contemporary America—while others have failed to survive changes in international politics and weapons technology. Some writers, both of conservative and liberal orientation, have focused on the “appropriate” role for the military in state and society; others have sought to remain detached from such normative questions in order to concentrate on micro-descriptive phenomenal studies or more or less abstract macro-analytical theoretical models. Between the earth-bound descriptive and prescriptive studies on the one hand, and the soaring theoretical efforts on the other has loomed a wide gap, all too familiar to students of international relations, comparative politics, and public administration, waiting to be bridged—if bridged it can be—by empirical theories of civil-military relationships.