Pragmatism and Practicality: Rethinking U.S. Civil–Military Relations Models for a Turbulent Era

• Author: Ionut Popescu
• DOI: 10.1177/0095327X18765473
• Published date: 01 January 2019
• Date: 01 January 2019
• Subject Matter: Essay

Essay
Armed Forces & Society
2019, Vol. 45(1) 198-205
Pragmatism and
ª The Author(s) 2018
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Practicality: Rethinking
DOI: 10.1177/0095327X18765473
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U.S. Civil–Military
Relations Models for a
Turbulent Era
Ionut Popescu1
Abstract
In his recent article Saving Samuel Huntington and the Need for Pragmatic Civil–Military
Relations, Travis proposes a model of civil–military relations based on “pragmatic
civilian control.” This model has three main shortcomings. First, it does not ade-
quately answer the question of “professional supremacy” versus “civilian
supremacy” in making crucial decisions during wartime. Second, the distinctions
between “wars of choice” and “wars of necessity,” and about the “kind of war” being
fought, key theoretical variables mentioned by the author, are hard to judge
objectively. And third, the new model would likely exacerbate rather than diminish
the problem of military leaders getting involved in political and even partisan
controversies; this is particularly problematic, given the unusual situation of many
military leaders in the Trump administration occupying civilian positions of authority.
If it is to be of practical use to policy makers, future scholarship on pragmatism and
civil–military relations must address these weaknesses.
Keywords
civil–military relations, Trump administration, defense policy, military operations,
political science
1 Texas State University, Austin, TX, USA
Corresponding Author:
Ionut Popescu, Texas State University, 601 University Dr., Austin, TX 78666, USA.
Email: icp11@txstate.edu

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Popescu
199
At least since the publication of Huntington’s classic The Soldier and the State,
scholars argued over the right model to organize and manage relations between the
military and its civilian superiors in a democracy such as the United States. Donald
Travis’s recent article (Saving Samuel Huntington and the Need for Pragmatic
Civil–Military Relations) is a worthy contribution to this ongoing debate, and its
timing is indeed excellent. The first year of the new Trump administration raised
new worries among scholars and commentators regarding the state of American
civil–military relations, thus giving this academic debate even greater urgency in
light of its policy implications (Owens, 2017; Price, 2017). Having said that, Tra-
vis’s theoretical argument in favor of a new model of “pragmatic civilian control”
has three major shortcomings, and as such his theory does not represent a practical
alternative to Huntington’s well-known “objective civilian control” framework.
This essay begins by briefly outlining Travis’s model and then discusses the
following three problems associated with it. First, Travis does not adequately answer
arguably the most contested issue in the civil–military relations scholarly debates,
that is, the question of “professional supremacy” versus “civilian supremacy” in
making crucial decisions during wartime. Second, the distinctions between “wars of
choice” and “wars of necessity,” and about the “kind of war” being fought, key
theoretical variables mentioned by the author, are hard to judge objectively. And
even if it were easier to separate such concepts, the idea that civilians and military
leaders could simply flip a switch and shift their interaction models from one para-
digm (objective control) to another (pragmatic control), based on the kind of external
circumstance they encounter, is very unlikely to work well in practice. And third, the
new model would likely exacerbate rather than diminish the problem of military
leaders getting involved in political and even partisan controversies; this is partic-
ularly problematic, given the unusual situation of many military leaders in the
Trump administration occupying civilian positions of authority. The challenges for
civil–military relations during the turbulent Trump era, in other words, are unlikely
to be successfully addressed by the “pragmatic civilian control” model proposed by
Travis. Lastly, my article concludes with suggesting an area of future research for
the ongoing scholarly conversation on civil–military relations models.
A Model of Pragmatic Civilian Control
Drawing on the classic civil–military relations works of Janowitz and of scholars of
pragmatism and public administration such as Shields and Soeters, Travis (2017)
proposes a model of pragmatic civilian control based on the proposition that “the
methods used by civilians to control the military . . . should be determined by the
kind of conflict that is waged and the context of the environment (practical)” (p. 400;
Janowitz, 1983; Shields & Soeters, 2013). In this view, the Huntingtonian objective
control should apply in some cases but not others. High-intensity conflicts or
“conventional wars” are better suited to the classic paradigm, as are “wars
of necessity,” Travis argues, while...