Chapter 1

Armed Forces and what they are meant for

Strangely enough, most writing about the military and the state (or ‘civil-military relations’) assumes that, rather than being of use or value to society, the armed forces are actually a threat to it. Civil-military relations, then, in the work of well-known writers like S E Finer1 and Samuel Huntington,2 consist of making the military as powerless and useless as possible. This is a strange thing to ask taxpayers to spend their money on. This approach is rejected — which is, in any case, a product of 1950s political science theories applied to an area where the authors have no personal knowledge or experience. Instead, this chapter is concerned with how, as part of the transformation process, the most basic questions of all are asked: why is the military necessary and what is it to be used for?

Why is the military necessary?

If civil-military relations were only about the reduction of military power, then the sensible thing would be to abolish the military altogether. The fact that this is hardly ever suggested points to two issues:

What, therefore, must military forces do? Clearly, it cannot be as simple as "to fight and win wars."3 Not only would many — including most of the military — argue that their role is to prevent war, but, by this definition, the military of, say, Fiji and Botswana are wasting their time, since they would be most unwise to fight another country, and virtually certain to lose. And how, at the time of writing, would the role of military forces operating in Sierra Leone or Bosnia be explained? Obviously, a more complex answer is needed.

All states pursue a variety of domestic and foreign policies. Sometimes, these policies need to be underwritten by the use, the threat, or the appearance of violence, and military forces exist to supply this. Some readers may be upset by this emphasis on violence. It is true that many in the military do not actually use weapons, and also that many military skills are used in non-combatant contexts, such as disaster relief. But these skills and tasks are essentially secondary: if a state wants to concentrate on tackling natural disasters, it is better to set up a civil defence organisation.

The limitations of threatism

Part of the problem is the impact of the Nuremberg trials, during which defendants were charged, among other evils, with waging an aggressive war. To many nations, especially those with no immediate enemy to fight, ‘defence’ seemed a better term, and ministries of war and ministries of the armed forces became ministries of defence in almost every country. Today, the military is described, in almost every country, as being for ‘the defence of the nation’. The problem, of course, is that ‘defence’ implies an actual or potential threat. There may not be a plausible villain available, especially after the Cold War, or, in contrast, a neighbour may be so big that defence is pointless. It is therefore not surprising that ‘defence’ has proved to be an elastic concept, and the military has been described, for example, as defending, among others:

vital national interests;

an established way of life;

a constitution; and

common values.

But, these are only rationalisations to hide the fact that states will use, or threaten to use military force if they think they will benefit from doing so, and if it is politically acceptable. (Of course, large states tend to have larger national interests than small states.) These formulae can also be dangerous: if a nation’s constitution prescribes the separation of church and state, for example, then the army could legitimately act against a religious political party which won a free and fair election.

Why the military pose a problem

Once it is understood that the military’s role is to provide violence, or the threat of it at the behest of the state, it becomes more clear why civil society — especially democracy — has a potential problem with the military. Simply put, the military cannot be run like a democracy, and civil society cannot — and must not — be run like the military. The military needs to be able to perform its violent tasks in a way which is responsive to public opinion, without compromising the political process, but it must also perform them effectively. Modern military forces are very expensive. The voter and taxpayer expect the military to do a good job, but the way in which it acts, although it should rest on a clear political mandate, cannot be according to the norms of civil society. This is not to say that it should contradict these norms, but they cannot be the same. There have been various unsuccessful attempts to pretend that this problem does not exist, but these are essentially ways of disguising the problem:

Military forces exist only to deter war, and should never be used.

The military consists of citizens in uniform.

The military exists to defend the constitution.

The military is a source of stability for the region.

 How the military work for the state

The military exists and has legitimacy, because in all societies, most people think that the use or threat of violence is acceptable under certain circumstances. But, the use or threat of violence, even on a small scale, can have catastrophic practical and political consequences if it goes wrong, and so all aspects of planning and carrying out military operations, and training, equipping and organising the necessary military forces must be carefully handled in a way which combines practicality with acceptability. Military officers, but also civilian politicians, diplomats and officials, somehow have to work together to produce a defence policy which makes sense and can be afforded, to structure the military forces properly, to equip and train them and, if necessary, to make use of them, all in a context of general public acceptance. How these various actors work together best will necessarily differ from country to country, and there is no magic formula which works well everywhere.

Historical and cultural differences

In spite of the (literally) uniform appearance of military forces, and the superficial similarities of behaviour and doctrine which can be found, military forces vary from one another at least as much as other parts of nations do. In turn, this is partly because they occupy very different places in the security communities of different countries, and because each country has a different set of experiences in war and peace. It is for this reason that the process of conceptualising defence transformation has to begin from the situation in which the country finds itself.

Geography

Most nations have military forces which are based on either a maritime or a continental tradition, or a tradition of isolation. These traditions are not immutable, of course, and in some cases have changed quite sharply over time. But, geography in the widest sense (including the power and position of a nation’s neighbours) will have an important influence on the policies to be adopted. Islands and littoral states without an isolationist tradition frequently develop navies for protection of trade and have only small armies. Conversely, a landlocked state will concentrate on territorial defence by its army. There are anomalous cases: Japan, although an island, did not develop a navy until the late 19th century, partly because of a policy of deliberate isolation, and partly because of dangerous seas and limited trading opportunities in the region. The development of the army coincided with a move to copy Western imperialist practices, and it was the army which dominated Japanese politics in the 1920s and 1930s, with disastrous effects. Size or isolation can confer effective immunity from attack, so military planning in, say, Australia, has always emphasised meeting threats as early and as far away as possible, preferably before they arise. In turn, this orientation implies small, but high-quality forces, able to operate far from home, as well as the maintenance of a technological edge, and considerable investment in intelligence and surveillance assets. On the other hand, a country like South Korea, with a large land-based threat, will need to have large (and therefore conscript) forces permanently on a high state of readiness, and most of its investment will go into land and air power.

Size and power

Small and weak nations are generally more peaceful than large and powerful ones, even though the latter seldom face threats of any kind. For large nations, defeat may be a nuisance, but is not disastrous, and there is a relaxed attitude to the use of violence among the population as a whole. Military operations tend to be seen as a component of foreign or economic policy. Some small nations, like Canada or New Zealand, without a threat and with small forces, tend to devote themselves to the provision of limited, but high-quality contributions to regional or global security.

History

The Anglo-Saxon tradition of the role and place of military forces, from which most writers on this subject come, is not found in most of the world. The place of the military in the life of a nation will be affected by factors such as:

its involvement in domestic politics in the past;

its use as an internal security force;

its past status, and the use it has made of that status;

its success or otherwise in foreign wars; and

its regional or international reputation.

In some cases, the military (and especially the army) is seen as the founder or saviour of the nation. In Vietnam, for example, the army wields considerable influence, largely because of its historical record of fighting successfully against the Japanese, Chinese, French and Americans, and its role in the final unification of the country in 1975. In much the same way, the Chinese military is still referred to as the People’s Liberation Army, although it did its liberating half a century ago. Conversely, the Japanese military now has little influence or social standing. After the disastrous experiences of the 1930s and 1940s, the military today is a low-status profession, resented or ignored by most Japanese, and feared by every other country in the region.

Cultural factors

Few societies are inherently militarist: all societies seem to pass through stages, in reaction to the kind of factors listed above. But, there are certain cultural factors which have an impact on the place and influence of the military in society. War was originally, of course, the business of the aristocracy, and societies where the aristocracy has retained political and social power (such as Britain, and to a lesser extent France) tend to give them a larger place. There is also the tendency, much stronger in some societies than others, for retired military officers to go into politics. In most cases, and as will be shown later, the military is not very good at politics as such, and tends to shun it. But, individual officers may come to power, often in conditions of crisis, and may be accepted as interim rulers, above politicians, even if their rule is not democratic. Certain countries have a history of attracting such individuals, and, if their interventions are generally thought to have been useful, then the status of the military (as the provider of occasional national saviours) will be enhanced. Finally, of course, everyone who is not a complete pacifist is prepared to admire the military for some things. A military which has kept out of politics and won wars without attracting opprobrium, which has the respect of its citizens and can be sent overseas without embarrassment, will come to have a stronger role in society as a result.

Professionals and conscripts

For the politician, public official, diplomat or journalist, the military is a caste apart, the object of ignorance and even fear. In turn, the military is often in-grown and separate from society, and does not realise how it is perceived. The rest of this chapter is concerned with the military as it is, and how to make the best use of it. In writing this, it has been assumed so far, for simplicity’s sake, that the ‘military’ is the same thing as military officers. In fact, the vast majority of the armed forces (up to 90%) are not officers, but soldiers, sailors and air personnel. While it is understandable that these individuals are not focused on in books about the military and politics, since they have carried out few coups, there are a number of important civil-military issues which flow directly from the fact that the non-officer classes make up the vast majority of the military.

The most important is the balance between national service and professionalism. While the idea of arming the population has always made national leaders nervous, there was a long period of time, roughly from 1850 to 1950, when modern war, with its requirement for very large numbers of infantry, made sheer mass, and therefore conscription, inevitable. Even today, a state which believes that it faces a major conventional threat to its own territory will probably have a national service system of some kind to produce large numbers of trained people to flesh out the military to its required war establishment in a time of crisis. But, conscription was seldom politically popular, and least of all with those who were conscripted.

Some societies have seen powerful arguments in favour of conscription. It avoids the risk of a professional military caste distinct from society as a whole, and can also bring together young people from different social and regional backgrounds. The ‘school of the nation’ argument for conscription is very powerful in certain societies, and there are some countries where the military performs a whole series of social and educational roles which require conscription for it to be effective.

Yet, even in the days of massive conscription, there was never a simple antithesis between professional officers and conscripted other ranks. All military forces have always depended on non-commissioned officers (NCOs) for much of their effectiveness: the career soldiers at corporal and sergeant level who provide the glue which keeps a military unit together, and in many cases, will go on to be officers themselves, late in their careers. Attracting and retaining such individuals, even in an army where conscription is normal, are very important for any military force. One of the major weaknesses of the old Soviet Army was its almost complete lack of an NCO corps, and the consequent massive misemployment of officers to do any job which required thought or training. In modern times, moreover, navies and air forces have become largely professional, even in states which formally retain conscription, given the complexity of the work involved.

A modern military force is therefore a complex and varied institution. Increasingly, the modern officer — usually a graduate — commands a group of well-educated professionals who are there because they want to be, and who, within reason, have the right to leave and go somewhere else if they desire. Issues such as remuneration and allowances, education and training, posting policy and family welfare increasingly preoccupy the modern officer, if he or she is to retain a skilled and motivated military force, and so become important issues in the management of defence.

Likewise, the military is no longer (if it ever was) a self-sufficient caste, separate from society as a whole. Increasingly, the military has come into contact with civilians from all walks of life: diplomats and public officials, but also scientists and engineers, salespersons and even journalists. Recent moves to cut the size of armed forces have led to civilians being employed in jobs that used to be military ones. These new individuals — mostly poorly paid and untrained casual workers with little motivation — constitute an especially large problem for the traditional military ethos within which the two worked together. In any event, the military career is not what it was. In most countries, retirement is at 55, or even earlier. Many officers do not wait that long: once the last guaranteed command appointment (a ship or regiment, for example) has been attained or been withheld, many of them leave anyway.

The military as a public service

The first characteristic of any military force is that it is part of the public service. The nearest analogues of the soldier are therefore the diplomat, the public official, the teacher, and, in some societies, the doctor. Public service occupations tend to have a number of distinguishing features in any society. They include:

Vocation: The public official has an interest in the job for itself, and believes it to be worthwhile. Job satisfaction is usually high, and is more important than material rewards, which are often modest.



Collectivity: The public official is part of a larger, similarly motivated group pursuing the same broad objectives.



Continuity: The public official generally stays in, or near the same organisation, and makes a long-term commitment to it.



Rationality: In general, public service institutions try to behave in a rational fashion. Recruitment, promotion and posting are generally carried out according to some reasonably rational criteria, and the kind of nepotism and irrationality which typify the private sector are less common.



Predictability: Public services are generally governed by rules and regulations which, while they may limit individuals in some ways, also protect them, and generally ensure uniformity of treatment.



Hierarchy and structure: It is generally clear who is responsible for what, and work will naturally tend to find its own level. Personalised power plays less of a role, and the mixture of fear and sycophancy by which the private sector runs is much less common.

These characteristics — which generally result in reasonably effective organisations — are not the product of chance. They are the kind of pragmatic rules which sensible people make for themselves as they observe what does and does not work, and are characteristic not only of many public sector institutions — the Roman legions and the Chinese Civil Service appear to have worked much like this — but of large, successful private sector organisations as well.

This leads to questions of ethos. Here, use is made of the helpful distinctions made by Francis Fukuyama, between high trust and low trust societies.4 Low trust societies are atomised structures, where individuals trust no-one outside their immediate family, and seek to maximise their personal wealth and power, often to the detriment of others. High trust societies are where there are bonds between individuals who are part of groups, and those individuals are socialised to pursue the good of the group in preference to their own good. In all areas of life, and with great predictability, high trust structures are more successful than low trust structures.

There are three particular characteristics of high trust societies which are relevant in any discussion of the military:

Personalisation: In any structure, even the smallest, everyone depends on everyone else. Structures work best when this co-operation is instinctive and far-reaching. Military institutions have always known the value of personal bonding at all levels, and learned many centuries ago that people work far harder for the approval of their peers than for any amount of money. This, in turn, produces (as indeed does most traditional public sector culture) a sense of obligation to and fellow-feeling with co-workers, and a willingness to ‘get the job done’. This enables arrangements with the military (and for that matter the public sector as a whole) to be much less bureaucratic and legalistic than in the private sector.



Non-financial ethos: Military institutions have always realised that, in an effective organisation, personal rewards must not be linked to personal effort, except in the obvious sense that successful people are promoted. Once performance and rewards are linked, people become obsessed with their own situation and trust rapidly disappears. It is interesting that, in military forces where senior office opens the possibility of substantial earnings and even corruption, the cohesion, morale and fighting ability of the force declines. In China, for example, the People’s Liberation Army was encouraged to supplement the defence budget by setting up business ventures, with the inevitable corruption this brought.



Dedication: The military commitment to the job — even more than in the public sector in general — is absolute. In certain cases, grievous bodily harm, or even death can result. The officer has no contract which would enable him or her to cease work if things get too rough. In turn, of course, the officer expects the same treatment, not only from immediate colleagues, but also from the institution as a whole. The officer knows that the parent service — if it is worth joining — will not look for exclusion clauses or fine print as an escape from obligations to its members.

Institutionalising excellence

The great strength of any effective organisation is not so much excellence as institutionalised excellence, that is, the expectation of a continuous high standard of performance. Most writing about the military is produced according to Anglo-Saxon cultural assumptions: important among them is the heroic concept of leadership, which sees leaders — in politics, war, even in business — as fundamental to the success of any organisation, and gives them enormous prestige, and, in some cases, enormous amounts of money. But, in reality, even the most wonderful leader can only directly affect a small part of what goes on in an organisation as a whole. Far more important is the everyday competence and consistency displayed by people much lower down, whom the charismatic leader has perhaps never met. What is important is the excellence with which the organisation as a whole conducts itself, since mediocre people can be brought on by a good organisation, but a mediocre organisation will probably overwhelm even the most capable individual.

In general, and rightly, successful organisations have preferred the route of institutionalising excellence rather than cultivating heroic leaders. This has been especially true in the military. In the last century, a genius like Napoleon, Wellington or Chaka, in a sense, could command an army of 50 to 100 000 troops. He could get a general idea of what was going on, and pass orders, even appear at a critical moment on the battlefield. But, quite obviously, overall success depended on having some subordinates of good quality, who would not only do sensible things, but would also know what was in the commander’s mind. This last point is critical. As armies have increased enormously in size, and the density of troops on the battlefield has reduced with the increase in firepower, so the subordinate is increasingly on his or her own, in a situation where urgent decisions must often be made. In such a situation, the question is not simply: What do I do? It is rather: What would the commander expect me to do? or even: What would my colleagues expect me to do? In this way, a military force can act as a reasonably articulated whole, even when central direction is not possible. This is not done by telepathy, of course, but by careful training and long experience of working together. It is the process of institutionalising excellence described above, and it is fundamental to any understanding of how the military works.

Finally, and at somewhat greater length, the characteristic of the military which is assumed to come before all others must be addressed: obedience. (Here, reference is made to internal obedience: questions of obedience to civil authority are treated later). Military obedience is usually presented in rather extreme terms by outside commentators. It is often conceived as a machine-like obedience to superior orders, procured by threats of terrible punishments for dissent. Each level of the military owes "explicit and peremptory obedience to the orders of its superior."5 This is true up to a point, but there are some significant qualifications to be made.

Firstly, obedience is never and never has been absolute. The concept of the ‘lawful order’ is deeply enshrined in codes of military law, and, in practice, an order must meet at least three criteria before it can be regarded as acceptable:

It must be legal in terms of the law of the state, since an order to break the law is by nature invalid. Sometimes, the law of the country where persons are stationed also has an influence: in the Gulf War, women in the military could not have been asked to perform driving jobs, because local law in Saudi Arabia prohibited this.



It must also be consistent with military law which, on occasion, is more restrictive than civil law. To take an extreme case, for example, a soldier could not be ordered to go absent without leave.



Finally, it must not be repugnant to the spirit of the military, ie it must be for what are often described as ‘military purposes’. Orders should not be given trivially, so that, for example, it would be a badly run military where soldiers were ordered to exercise the commanding officer’s dog.

Secondly, obedience is not a cult in itself. Its purpose is to produce effective performance on the battlefield, where there is seldom time or opportunity to debate whether an attack on a particular hill makes sense. Because battles of true annihilation are very rare, victory usually goes to the force which keeps its discipline and coherence the longest. But, victories on battlefields are not won by automata. Indeed, there is evidence that military forces which encourage initiative at all levels succeed much better than those which require unquestioning obedience to orders. It is not hard to see why: "No Plan", as Moltke said, "survives contact with the enemy." As a result, prescriptive orders will rapidly cease to have anything to do with reality, and the military force, not knowing what to do next, will simply do nothing.

The military has learned by experience that individual initiative is essential to success in battle, as well as that such initiative will not arise spontaneously in a difficult situation if it has not been practiced in easier ones. Thus, initiative, rather than blind obedience, is sought in everyone, not just in officers. Indeed, modern military thinking has canonised this type of thinking as mission-oriented orders: a commander will be told what the objective is (‘take that hill’), but it will be left to him or her, within certain limits, how this is done.6 This state of affairs is not universal. The old Soviet Army, for example, which had great problems of education and diversity as a result of its multiplicity of ethnic and linguistic groups, adopted a policy of rigid drills and training programmes in an attempt to remove the need for initiative. There are also a number of Asian armies where initiative is not greatly encouraged. In both these cases, it must be said that, compared with the rest of society, the military officer probably has as much initiative as anyone else. Indeed, in most societies, the junior officer, and even the NCO probably have more scope for decisionmaking than the average middle manager in the private sector.

One of the secrets of military discipline is the legitimisation of the process of giving orders. In a properly regulated military, the one who orders has some advantage of ability, training or experience over the one who is ordered, and this, in turn, results from the general rationality of the system in which they both work. In theory, the superior officer could do (and probably has done) the job of the junior officer. The junior officer knows that, with training and experience, he or she will be able to give these orders too.

The other secret, and perhaps the most important single aspect of military obedience, is that of the institutionalisation of the process. It is not individual obedience which matters, but the efficiency of the system in turning directions into practical results. Military institutions, like those in the public sector in general, are mainly geared towards action, and thus systems are set up with the primary purpose to transmit instructions to get things done. This way of working (generally described as ‘bureaucracy’ by outsiders) is extremely efficient in ensuring that things are done, and usually contains a degree of redundancy to allow for things not happening — or ‘disobedience’.

The question of the clear control and effectiveness of the institution as a whole is critical. Although the virtues of superior organisation claimed by the military are often true, it is not always like that. Everyone who has worked in a large organisation knows that unpopular orders are somehow never carried out: papers are lost, promises are not kept, meetings are not held, and so forth. The military, like every other organisation, does not have the resources to track the progress of every order and see that it is followed up. Much relies on trust and the sense of legitimacy. When these are lacking, the problems for a military force can be acute. In most failed military campaigns, problems of command and control are somewhere implicated.