This work sits at the busy, but poorly illuminated, intersection of strategy and civil-military relations. As both process and product, American strategy pulls from both sides of the Potomac as it attempts to harmonize resources and objectives through planning and execution. While civil-military relations in the United States are generally healthy, military and civilian policy makers do not always agree on the proper means to secure their common ends. Even the best of civil-military relationships must endure a messy hybrid of cooperation and resistance between principal stakeholders. A military that believes in and submits to civilian control is still a...

Refusing a popular mandate for leadership after the Revolutionary War, Gen George Washington chose instead to resign his military commission and return to his farm at Mount Vernon. In this iconic act, Washington firmly established the ethic of civilian control over the military in the infant United States.¹ Over two centuries later, the principle of civilian control still prevails, and the reality of military subordination is an article of faith for the nation’s uniformed servants. Despite the seeming absence of civil-military conflict, the issue of civilian control is rooted in the tenuous paradox of armed delegation. As Peter Feaver’s opening...

The principle of civilian control stems from the essence of democratic theory and the nature of war as a political instrument. In a democracy, the military serves a circumscribed and delegated role to provide security for the nation. The military’s interests are never autonomous, but must remain subordinate to the interests of the polity. The preeminent military theorist Carl von Clausewitz canonized this subordinate role in his enduring work On War.¹ Clausewitz explains, “The political object is the goal, war is the means of reaching it, and means can never be considered in isolation from their purpose.”² As an executor...

The rational framework of agency theory aptly models the structural incentives that inform civilian and military behavior. This chapter complements that top-down approach with a bottom-up analysis of the cognitive dimensions of the military’s behavior. Political scientist Elizabeth Kier suggests that “making sense of how structure matters or what incentives it provides often requires understanding the meanings that actors attach to their material world.”¹ An organization’s culture supplies that meaning to make sense of its external and internal environment. Furthermore, the potency of organizational culture is particularly strong for military organizations given their unique parameters of entry and advancement.² As...

Both politically and militarily, Operation Desert Storm appears to be a triumphant declaration of the right way to fight a war. From Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait on 2 August 1990 through the ceasefire on 28 February 1991, the American military machine proclaimed its coronation as the world’s only military superpower. The US military titan marshaled massive and overwhelming force, leveraged superior technology, obliterated the enemy, and achieved the limited political objective of ejecting Iraqi forces from Kuwait. For the generation of officers whose careers began in the jungles of Vietnam, the Gulf War offered a striking rebuke of quagmire conflicts...

For the US Air Force, the satisfying triumph of Operation Desert Storm slowly deteriorated into an interminable decade of frustration. The heady days of stealthy precision bombing against leadership targets in Baghdad devolved into a protracted cat-and-mouse battle of wills with Saddam Hussein. The 40 days of well-planned bombing became a distant memory, replaced with the routine monotony of enforcing no-fly zones, punctuated by an occasional strike against a fleeting mobile radar. Having proved its effectiveness, the Air Force became the policy instrument of choice in the years that followed. The employment of airpower, however, often ran counter to the...

George Washington’s legacy of principled civil-military relations has endured for over 200 years, strengthened over time by the shared benefits of precedent, virtue, and accountability. In service to the American people, the government and its military have successfully negotiated the tenuous paradox of armed delegation. The ethic of civilian control over the military continues to undergird the civil-military relationship, with neither side having to remind or be reminded of its rightful place. This macroscopic bill of health, however, belies the spirited and subtle negotiations that comprise the civilmilitary dynamic in the grind of daily affairs. Civilian and military leaders share...