The primary responsibility of a sovereign state is to defend its territory. This is precisely the duty of the country’s military establishment, security being the major aspect of the national budget. There are, however, more than twenty sovereign countries that do not have either a standing military of its own or, at the most, have a limited military.

These countries are either under an arrangement worked out by their erstwhile occupying powers or their neighbour takes care of their territorial security and protection. In Mauritius, it is the police which is responsible both for military security and police functions. For a country with such an arrangement both for internal and external protection, the advantage is that it can save scarce resources and spend the entire national budget on its economic growth. The government puts in place the military establishment to protect the nation from external aggression and conduct wars according to foreign policy imperatives.

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The military can also be used to assist the civil authorities in the event of natural calamities or domestic unrest. The question is; How does the State maintain a strong and effective military that poses no threat to the civilian political authority? In every country, the answer is influenced by its history, sentiments and tradition. It depends on the role of the army as a state institution as defined in laws, constitutional arrangements, safeguards and guidance on political affairs. The very nature of the problem is changing because both society and the military are continuously evolving.

A new dimension has been added after World War II in the context of civil-military relations due to transnational military involvement, political alliances, peacekeeping and humanitarian intervention. It was only in the 20th century that attempts were made by political scientists and sociologists to study the relationship between the military and the society with theoretical and empirical underpinning and arrive at results more precise and accurate than what was available in historical records and philosophical ideas.

Among those influential scholars who realized the importance of civil-military relations in the first half of the 20th century, Max Weber was by far the most prominent. Weber’s views were stated explicitly in his seminal treatise, Theory of Social and Economic Organization, published posthumously in 1922. Weber, who had served a short military service in Kaiser’s Germany, stated that an effective bureaucracy would help promote military professionalism through a formal, neutral, and rationally organized structure and hierarchy. He recommended a supportive bureaucracy for matters military in terms of recruitment, training, deployment, procurement, construction and logistics management. This paradigm was totally different from an old order of patronage and favour that dominated the military in the past.

However, the bureaucracy’s red tape could be a source of frustration for the military, more so in times of mobilization not least because the bureaucracy tends to be rigid and resistant to change. Major theories of civil-military relations, as applicable to Western countries, were developed in the 1950s and 1960s by Samuel Huntington and Morris Janowitz. The size of the military in those countries in the latter half of the 20th century was extremely large. It was the era of the Cold War and the world was relatively at peace. The US military alone consisted of about three million personnel. Maintaining such a large force ran the risk of a distinctly military culture being imposed on liberal democratic societies.

Samuel P Huntington in his The Soldier and the State, published in 1957, described the differences of the two worlds, military and civilian, as a contrast between attitudes and values. It was necessary to evolve a method to ensure that the political masters would be able to dominate and control the military establishment. Huntington, in the manner of Weber, also recommended that the army should be thorough and professional and restrict itself to its assigned role. Civilian authority should direct the military without unduly intruding into the latter’s prerogatives. The civilian authorities must define the national security policy, and the military will implement the same. The civilian leadership will decide the objective of any military action but then leave it to the armed forces to plan the strategy to achieve the objective.

Excessive control over the military could result in weakening the force, and this may result in failure in the battlefield. Too little control would create the possibility of a coup. That may result in failure of the government. Many military experts believed that the United States had lost the Vietnam War because of unnecessary civilian meddling in military matters. Iraq is also a story of humiliating military failure due to excessive civilian control. The political leadership failed to understand the goal, which was victory in the war, and improperly restrained the use of force denying them professional autonomy.

Morris Janowitz in The Professional Soldier, published in 1960, agreed with Huntington about the existence of separate military and civilian worlds. Due to their fundamental differences, confrontations could occur, thus undermining the objective of civilian control of the military. His diagnosis was that the military should be ingrained with the norms and expectations of the society that created it. That would ensure a new and higher standard of professional military education in tune with ideals of a civilian society.

Janowitz encouraged conscription and mass military service from various walks of life that would bring a wide cross-section of individuals into the armed forces. However, conscription since World War II did not find political support in the democracies of the West. Writing in Armed Forces And Society, 2002, James Burke summarized Huntington and Janowitz thus: “To protect democratic values, the military needs to be subordinate to civilian power. To sustain democratic values, the military must substantively embody the values of the society it defends”. Huntington and Janowitz had influenced research on civil-military relations for about sixty years. Samuel E Finer, in his book, The Man on Horseback, published in 1976, observed that many governments that were weak and lacked administrative authority to govern efficiently may open opportunities for military intervention.

Finer’s observation was made in the context of political upheavals and military coups that swept Africa and South America in the 1960s and 1970s. Those were extreme cases where the military assumed power. Bolivia witnessed close to 200 military coups in the first 169 years of its existence. He added that in established and mature democracies, the military would never attempt to intervene or overthrow a civilian government. The classical theories of Weber, Huntington and Janowitz, though not comprehensive and perfect, carry a uniform message. A strong and effective military institution is needed to protect the state in the conflictridden world.

But the guardians of a nation’s security need masters to guard them. Political scientists agree that the military institution created to protect the polity should not have overwhelming powers to become a threat to the polity but remain subordinate to the political authorities that are chosen by the people in fair and frequent elections. Peter D Feaver stated that “civilians have a right to be wrong”. All civilian governments in the world, not only democratic ones, want to follow the principle. Yehuda Ben Meir in CivilMilitary Relations in Israel, published in 1995 stated,” True, there can be no democratic government without civilian control of the military, but many totalitarian systems of government are also characterized by a high degree of civilian control ~ in some instances even much more so than in Western democracies”.

These strong words reinforce the concept that the State must remain a sovereign power and an appropriate level of civilian control is necessary to bear on the military. The military is a respected profession. In today’s world, the domain of civil- military relations has expanded beyond sovereign states. They have now become transnational.

The European Union and NATO are the two contemporary examples. Peacekeeping missions, military observer missions, humanitarian interventions and military cooperation confirm the intensive civilian coordination and support across borders for extremely difficult, complex, and often insurmountable tasks.

(The writer is a former central civil service officer who retired from the Ministry of Defence)