Armed Agents: Agency, Oversight, and Civil-Military Relations (review)

Peter D. Feaver of Duke University and the Triangle Institute for Security Studies has written this book with no lesser aim than to offer a new theory of American civil-military relations that will become the standard in place of Samuel P. Huntington's The Soldier and the State: The Theory and Politics of Civil-Military Relations (1957). It is no small ambition, but Feaver comes at least admirably close to achieving it.

A more rigorous, precise-minded social science theorist than Huntington, Feaver has been troubled by, among other aspects of Huntington's classic formulation, the prediction that unless liberal American democracy altered its values the better to accommodate the conservative professional military ethos, the United States would eventually lose the Cold War. Instead, the United States won, yet Feaver is rightly unpersuaded that there occurred a sufficient alteration of values to meet Huntington's criterion.

His theoretical rigor notwithstanding, Feaver seeks a model of civil- military relations that will not only be less questionably pessimistic about American prospects, but will more flexibly account for variations along a spectrum of the effectiveness of civilian control than does Huntington's postulation of ideal types. Feaver bases his approach on "relatively recent advances in the study of political oversight of the nonsecurity bureaucracy" (p. 2). Specifically, he draws on "the principal-agent framework, which is designed to explore problems of agency, how political or economic actors in a superior position (principals) control the behavior of political or economic actors in a subordinate position (agents)" (p. 12). From that framework, he builds his theory "that the essence of civil-military relations is a strategic interaction between civilian principals and military agents" (p. 2). Civilians appoint, encourage, and monitor the military to bring about obedience that will assure the reaching of the security goals of the state. Influenced by the degree and nature of the civilian monitoring and encouraging, as well as by their own value system, the military work or shirk in varying degrees to fulfill or undermine civilian goals.

Working and shirking are not terms that Feaver uses in their everyday senses. Shirking does not imply laziness or treachery. It serves rather to describe the reality of differing measures of acceptance and cooperation of military agents with civilian principals. It seeks to encompass the full range of varying day-to-day behavior in civil-military relations. It recognizes that in the United States, the central problem has long ceased to be that of a military coup. Rather, the central problem is how to assure full working obedience to the civilian principals. That problem emerged conspicuously during the Cold War, when differences between civilian and military values and the problems of monitoring and encouraging the military led to three notable examples of military shirking:

Douglas MacArthur's resistance to President Harry S. Truman's conduct of the Korean War; Curtis E. LeMay's subversion of civilian authority in nuclear strategy; and Matthew B. Ridgway's efforts to undermine President Dwight D. Eisenhower's massive retaliation strategy.

The need for a theory of civil-military relations that encompasses degrees of working and shirking has become increasingly evident with the tensions of post-Cold War relations. During the Cold War there were other, less conspicuous, and more debatable instances of shirking than the three just mentioned. During the most difficult episode of the Cold War, Vietnam, there were, however, fewer instances of shirking than might have been expected. Feaver mainly agrees, however, that after the Cold War civil-
military relations became more strained. He explores possible explanations for this phenomenon, including the decline of external pressures to lead the military to work rather than shirk, the decline of civilian monitoring capability in the absence of such pressures, the growing divergence of civilian and military values...