The Pentagon and the Presidency: Civil-Military Relations from FDR to George W. Bush (review)

In writing The Pentagon and the Presidency, Herspring has performed a useful service for students of American civil-military relations. Herspring's academic background lies primarily in Russian and Soviet bloc military affairs. His experience balancing thirty-two years of active and reserve Navy service with a long career in the State Department's Foreign Service left him feeling that civilians tended to be ignorant of the military's perceptions and assumptions in its interaction with civilians, a problem he sought to address by providing a window into the American civil-military relationship from the military point of view.

Rather than tracing trends primarily on the military side of the relationship over time, Herspring focuses on the changing patterns of civilian interaction with the military as experienced by the military leadership during each successive presidential administration. The key to understanding why some presidents experience congenial relations with the military and others do not lies in the extent to which each administration's policies and approach to the military meshes with or clashes with military culture, he argues.

Herspring draws largely on a wealth of secondary works to provide a systematic analysis of the civil-military interactions of each successive presidential administration from Franklin D. Roosevelt's through that of George W. Bush, laying out a two-part analytical framework through which he examines each administration. The first element consists of analyzing the president's leadership style as it affects civil-military interactions, including such elements as the president's personality and management style as well as bureaucratic structures and power relationships within the administration. The second major element of Herspring's analysis involves tracing the ways that each administration resolves potential conflicts with service and military culture in four major areas: (1) the use of force and its management; (2) roles and missions and resources assigned to the military; (3) personnel policies, including both appointments to senior positions and policies affecting the forces generally; (4) the president's willingness to take responsibility and conduct himself in a manner in keeping with military notions of honor.

After tracing major incidents in the civil-military relationship in each administration, Herspring makes two major summary arguments. First, the U.S. military is no longer apolitical, but has rather become an active player in the bureaucratic competition, willing to reach out to congressional allies or the press to resist presidential initiatives it opposes. Secondly, although this new reality results in increased civil-military tensions, the level of conflict is directly related to the level of presidential accommodation to military culture. The military leadership has been more accepting of policies it dislikes when they are presented by civilian leaders who display respect for the military and its traditions—the experience of Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird in the Nixon administration being the most notable example.

Specialists may take issue with some of Herspring's generalizations, or his decisions regarding which events to focus on and which to leave out. Beyond the pressure imposed by limited space, some of these omissions result from a structural problem: by focusing the analysis on each administration, Herspring tends to submerge longer-term trends in the evolution of the military and its culture that could affect the analysis.

Despite these reservations, Herspring generally succeeds in his effort to present a systematic overview of military perceptions of the civil-military relationship. For nonspecialists, it offers a readable and informative introduction to the subject; for specialists, it is both a useful reference and a potential jumping-off point for debate on the subject.