The candidates are copying my old pseudonym!
You know him from his Clash of Civilizations book, however he's done some other damage over the years...He wrote a book in the fifites called The Soldier and the State. In it he mapped out his ideal structure of civil military relations. Outside of a Junta there were two possibilities as he saw it. Subjective civilian control and objective civilian control. Subjective meant that civilians use the military as a part of or mirror of society and manipulated the military to their own ends. the other objective form meant that civilians would leave the military alone to do as it wished, and the military would withdraw from politics. Sounds great don't it? However he thoerized that for this "objective state" to happen society would have to become conservative...This has unintended consquences....
The American tradition of apolitical professional soldiering is under enormous pressure in the early 21st century. In conflicts ranging from paramilitary dominated narco-wars in Columbia and occupation policy in Iraq where mercenary forces actually outnumber certain regular troop formations, we see a highly politicized and increasingly paramilitary structure emerging from the furnace of combat. Huntington's The Soldier And The State hypothesizes that America`s army should be under objective civilian control, firstly to promote high degrees of professionalism and secondly to check undue political influence originating from the army. In order for this civilian/military equilibrium to be achieved Huntington takes aim at the defects of liberalism and its supposed tendency toward subjective civilian control, and promotes the idea that American society needs to become more conservative in order to ensure its own security from external threats and thus promote harmony between civilian authority and military leadership. The distance between the type of military advocated by Huntington, and the actual army is one that is simply getting wider. This is happening largely because of the recommendations made by Huntington, rather than the rejection of them. The forces of the free market, often touted by conservative theoreticians and economists as a fix all for all problems is the singular force currently transforming the army's military functions from a bureaucratized civil service into a highly politicized mercenary instrument of warfare.
During the nineties we witnessed political squabbling between an elected Democratic administration and the Army's professional officers represented by the Joint Chiefs of Staff. These squabbles have ranged from questioning policy commitments to nation building and peacekeeping (Bosnia, Kosovo) to outraged reactions to casualties, case in point the reaction to Mogadishu, no matter how small or worthwhile the cause. Since the publication of The Soldier and the State the professional officers of the army have become solidly partisan Republican, bitterly resentful of deployment whilst there are political opponents are in office. This process accelerated during 1990s to such a point that political directives were, in the words of Huntington's student Peter Feaver, "shirked". This level of partisanship is illustrated by polling conducted by the Army Times in 2004, where the army showed 72% support for the Republican candidate. Policies including `nation building' in Bosnia and `human rights' in Iraq, that provoked scorn whilst Democrats held office, were magically embraced as proper tasks once the favoured conservative party issued the orders. The relationship between the military and administration degenerated so spectacularly that during the conflict in Kosovo 1998 there was never a question that the political policy of checking Serbian `ethnic cleaning' of Albanians and Bosnians was worth a single combat casualty. One dead pilot would have provoked a political firestorm enthusiastically embraced by senior army officers. The thought of commiting infantry to the task was considered an abomination. 17 dead Rangers and Delta Force Commandos in Mogadishu in 1993 lead to the resignation of the current defense secretary. Fast forwarding to 2004 we see casualty levels previously found to be an unacceptable cost and cause for cabinet level resignations (somewhere in the region of 1,500 dead and 10,000 seriously injured in Iraq) are now accepted without fuss in the fulfillment of nearly identical policy of `nation building'. Huntington's thesis that an army can be a sterile apolitical instrument of the state is a fundamentally flawed chimera. It would be a good thing to have a `sterile instrument of policy' but the facts speak for themselves.
Even more improbable is his hypothesis that a conservative ideology ensures an apolitical and highy professional army. The characteristics of recent conflicts like Iraq and Kosovo tend to suggest the opposite is the case. The growth of conservative ideology has proved to be a serious impediment to objective civilian control, and in some cases crossed over the line into provoking insubordination. & nbsp;Furthermore conservative ideology has prompted the privatization of a profession and radically changed the structure of the American armed forces. A technology dependent conventional army has had to resort to the expediency of hiring a huge private army of civilian contractors to fill in the gaps in its capabilities and training. Huntington's thesis is therefore narrow minded and itself a good example of politicization. The separation of objective civilian control and subjective civilian control is simply unworkable in practice.
In Iraq there are an estimated 20,000 mercenaries working for the coalition or groups friendly to the coalition. These mercenaries are euphemistically called civilian contractors by the authorities and press corps even though they clearly play a significant role in the military strategy of occupation. They provide a level of expertise, because many are retired military personnel themselves they provide a quick way of increasing boots on the ground and make up the core of personal body guards for high profile politicians from Iraq or abroad. To give some context to the general numerical impact of these 20,000 mercenaries we can contrast their numbers to the numbers of the British Army serving in Iraq. Britain only maintains a force level of about 10,000 military personnel. So the second largest military force in Iraq is actually made up of civilian contractors. Clearly the disparity between the British and Army and the estimated numbers of mercenary troops represents a seismic shift away from the equilibrium of civil-military relations idealized by Huntington but also in large part because of his own recomendations. It is a situation that harkens back to Italian mercenary Condittieri (a melodious word that conveniently translates into English as: Contractor), or the British East India Company's royal charter to raise and deploy a private army combining a mixture of private and public funds. The televised lynching of four of these American contractors working for the euphamistically named Hotel Hospitality Corporation in Falluja during 2004, significantly contributed to the US decision to level the city as a reprisal in 2005. This high profile episode highlighted the new civilian contractor trend very dramatically, but it also illustrates the operational impact of this sort of unaccountable contractor force. What were these contractors doing in the most hostile city in Iraq? Why couldn't regular troops do the job? Why did the army respond to the lynching with a full-scale assault? Why are these guys paid five times the salary of the average soldier? These sorts of questions are only possible because the blurring of professional soldiering and civilian profit has occurred under the watch of a conservative minded professional military where new unaccountable forces are deployed outside of a professional structure.
We have also seen trends toward paramilitary organization to supplement a muscle bound professional force trained for Air Land warfare unable to adapt to a vicious counter insurgency campaign. In this sense Huntington's recommendations are extremely narrow and do not touch on the organizational structures demanded by policies of occupying invaded territory. The professional force was razor sharp for invading Iraq however it has proved to be a blunt instrument for settling the aftermath of deposing Saddam Hussein, and has been forced to fight an intractable and bloody guerrilla campaign. This unexpected fight is characterized by much higher casualty rates than to the lightning fast invasion that the force was actually suited. In the frustrated situation of the army in Iraq, strategic discussions have now begun to focus on the deployment of paramilitary forces as part of an `El Salvador Option' to squash stubbornly resilient insurgent organizations. Popularly these types of paramilitaries are known as Death Squads, and were controversially deployed in South America during the 1980s to destroy communist guerrilla forces, kidnap leaders and terrorize local populations. The paramilitary squads generally consisted of off-duty policemen and soldiers with right wing political sympathies, and their existence clearly represent a blurring of professional military and political civilian boundaries. The military strategy in Iraq is shifting towards these extra-professional methods, because conventional armoured and infantry tactics provide no answer to widespread insurgent style warfare. Quite apart from legal and ethical objections the strategic and tactical requirements of occupation fall far outside the bounds of Huntington's civilian directed professionalism, and require alternative sets of civil military relationships and controls. Martin Van Creveld touched on this problem with his observation that `the concept of strategy is hard to apply in low intensity warfare.' This insight has implications for the relationship between profession armed forces and their civilian masters. The well oiled professional machine breaks down once it has defeated an opposing profession force and instead faces the guerrilla. Paramilitary forces outside the conventional rules of military conduct will inevitably begin to monopolize violence as a logic consequence of occupation policies. If the policy is to be fulfilled the armed forces will have to become intermingled with each other and with the civilian population, if they don't they must concede defeat of resort to the paramilitary solution. "Bases will be replaced by hideouts dumps large geographic objectives by the kind of population control that is achieved by a mixture of propaganda and terror."
Huntington's ends his book with a sylvan description of of West Point the top American military academy, and contrasts it with the monotous commercialized town nearby. The Ivory tower of West Point with its neatly laid out barracks town houses, parade grounds and Spartan like order bears little resemblance to the reality of a booming security business or the dirty methods of Death Squads. Huntington's vision of an apolitical US Army willing to faithfully carry out the policies of any legitimate civilian Commander In Chief bears little relationship to the reality of a highly partisan organization, that has adopted conservatism as its creed and fallen into the mire of Iraq as a willing victim.
(This is an introduction to a 20,000 word dissertation writen in 2004.)