Chapter 2

Politics, the Military and 'Control'

For many countries grappling with defence transformation, there is no more difficult a problem than that of the military and its relationship to the political process. Circumstances will vary. In some cases, transformation may be away from a system where the military had the decisive voice in defence and security policy. In others, the military may have dominated the entire political process. In still others, the military may have been the servant of a political, ethnic or religious group now out of power. If it is accepted that transformation is into, as well as out of a certain state, then the objective (the ‘end-state’ as the military usefully call it) is one where the military plays a correct and useful role in the political process. This problem is itself made worse by the words which are used to pose it. Thus, by ‘the military’ is generally meant officers, usually of a rank above colonel. ‘Politics’, of course, can mean many things, ranging from debates and elections to power politics and the process of government. If the totality of the political process is considered, however, most people would agree that the military should be involved in certain technical aspects of policymaking and implementation, but that they should not be involved in fundamental decisions about how the country is run. Examples of a proper role for the military might include:

a full and appropriate part in the policymaking process;



appearance by military officers before parliament to explain technical military issues;



appearance by military officers, in support of ministers, at press conferences and presentations of government policy; and



on or off the record briefings of the media on military issues.

Yet, the military of many countries have taken a much greater role for themselves than this, and some feel entitled to it now. Many nations undergoing defence transformation have a legacy of this kind to deal with. How should the motivation of the military be understood in such situations?

The roots of military interventionism

Although there have been many brutal and disastrous military interventions in the political process, the vast majority have been for reasons which the perpetrators themselves believed good, or even worthy of praise. Although there have perhaps been cases where desire for power or wealth has prompted military involvement, these cases are not numerous. Usually, the military itself — if often wrongly — sees its intervention as safeguarding the country in some form. But, what gives a general the idea that he or she has any right, let alone duty to intervene, even in a situation of great national danger?

By its very nature, democracy is divisive. Political parties survive and seek power by emphasising their differences from one other. In turn, groups within these parties also seek mutually to distinguish themselves. Individual politicians try to carve out a public profile by associating themselves with a particular tendency or group. Particularly during times of political conflict, there is always space at the fringes for a more extreme party or grouping, but politicians who move to the centre or seek openings with political opponents will find that they lose clarity and definition, and are elbowed aside by more extreme and less scrupulous colleagues.

This kind of thing is containable in a society where the differences between parties are mainly ideological, running in a reasonably orderly way from left to right. But most nations are not like this. Political parties are often the product of personal, family or local loyalties; they may also be the expression of religious or ethnic groups. In such cases, the interests of one party can be impossible to reconcile with the interests of another. Particularly when the electoral process is not perfect, losing parties may well cry foul, and either refuse to accept the result, or work to overthrow the government by extra-parliamentary means. In a family or clan-based political system, the successful party will often feel obliged to reward its supporters with jobs and contracts, thus opening the way to charges (and often the reality) of corruption.

Moreover, parliamentary democracy, admirable in itself, contains a number of covert assumptions which must be met if it is to function as intended. Politics has to be seen, if not as a game, then at least as a process where defeat is something that has to be accepted. As a political loser, a person may have said in public that a victory for his or her opponents will be a disaster for the country, but that is a rhetorical point, rather than a genuine belief. The idea would rather have been to win, of course, but it is better to settle down with good grace to opposition. But what if a person really believes that opponents’ rule will be a disaster? He or she may be from an ethnic group which greatly fears for its safety under the new government, or from a religious party which regards some of the policies of the opponents as sinful. People may simply fear that the new government does not care very much for democracy or human rights. In such circumstances, it can be almost impossible for parliamentary democracy to function, since the minimum necessary commonality of views which it demands does not exist.

Likewise, there is an assumption that, in some form at least, parliament is putting into effect what the people want. But, even a functioning parliament may not actually represent public opinion very well. Politicians may confine themselves to squabbles and manoeuvres for advantage as the nation falls apart. The divisions in the country and in parliament may be so deep that there is no chance of putting together a workable government anyway. This judgement about the danger of political disunity provides a semi-intellectual underpinning for intervention by the military.

Most work on military intervention has been done, it must be recalled again, in the comfortable West, where it is normal to see the military a bit like a rather expensive insurance policy; necessary, perhaps, but not very welcome when the bill has to be paid. With a few exceptions, Western states run reasonably well, and have not disputed their boundaries by force very much for fifty years now. Classical liberal economics, moreover, finds the military an expensive nuisance, pre-empting resources which could be used for more productive purposes. The military forces of such states will generally be as small and cheap as the finance ministries can get away with.

It is necessary to insist (though it should not be) that the whole status and position of the military vary greatly from this model in the rest of the world, not only in terms of history and culture, as outlined in chapter 1, but in the function that the military performs, and always has done. The military may have a role in development, it may have a large civic action programme, it may own and run factories. It may even be the only institution in the country which has any real legitimacy with all ethnic and religious groups. It may be more acceptable than a discredited police force, and may be admired more than a corrupt government. For all these reasons, therefore, the situation in which the military finds itself, even before a crisis develops, can be completely different in every country, and is most unlikely to conform to Western liberal-democratic norms.

Moreover, if military intervention is analysed in terms of these Western norms, which has usually been the case, a number of important hidden assumptions about the government which might be intervened against must be accepted in turn:

The government has an effective majority in the legislature, and is able to carry out its programme.



The government is at least passively accepted as legitimate by all its citizens.



The government is minimally popular with the electorate.



The government is minimally competent.



All interest groups in the country obey the laws promulgated by the government.



Political opposition and dissent may be expressed without fear.



The government is reasonably united within itself.



Government ministers are regarded as honest.

This is a demanding list, and one which every Western country could perhaps not confidently claim to be fulfilling. But, the roots of military intervention frequently lie in the inability of governments to satisfy many (or any) of these criteria. This can be a comment on the quality of the government or the political class. It can also be a comment on the sheer impossibility of maintaining a working democracy in situations of great ethnic and religious diversity, or in a state whose infrastructure is not advanced enough to tolerate the stresses which such democratic functions as elections place upon it.

Another frequent cause of military intervention has been because of a dispute about the legitimacy of the government itself. Several hundred years ago, the position was fairly clear-cut. The army was, in effect, the private property of the ruler of the country to be used in such a ruler’s wars. The loyalty of the Egyptian, the Zulu or the Chinese army was to its ruler, and that was all. The democratisation of the past couple of centuries has complicated this position greatly. It is easy enough to agree, in the abstract, that the military owes its loyalty to the government of the day. But, this incorporates the assumption, not merely that the government (ie the party or coalition) is accepted, but that the type of government which is in office is also regarded as legitimate. There will clearly always be a minority who are unhappy with the system of government they live under, but they will not usually challenge it openly.

Problems have arisen where there is a fundamental division at the heart of a society about what kind of a government is legitimate, and therefore an uncertainty about to what (or to whom) the army is ultimately loyal, or indeed whose army it actually is. The general tendency of the 19th and 20th centuries was to replace authoritarian monarchies with democratic republics, although not everywhere, and not always at the same speed. Yet, if this transition is now regarded as a positive development, it was not always thought so at the time, and there have been recent cases of armies which have intervened because they genuinely believed that democracy was a threat to the nation itself — not least by making its citizens inferior soldiers.

‘Control’ of the military

It was noted in chapter one that the minimisation of the power of the military was not the only question of interest in civil-military relations, and that, by implication therefore, the military did have a useful role to play. Clearly, such a role cannot be limited to actual military operations: an army cannot be taken out of cold-storage and sent off to war. But neither would anyone want to, because the existence of the military is always an important domestic and foreign political fact and, in turn, influences the formulation of many government policies. Some of these are fairly obvious: a well-trained and equipped military may provide foreign policy options which would otherwise not exist. Likewise, emergency planners need to know what the military could offer in the case of a national disaster, and the police will be interested in the help which the military could provide in certain situations. But some are less obvious. If it is decided that a country should develop an aerospace industry for wider strategic reasons (as a number of governments are now doing), then the size of the existing air force and the plans for it will be ingredients in the discussion. Similarly, an upcoming military procurement programme may provide opportunities for the government to secure important civil technology transfers as an offset.

Thus, the military and, indeed, the whole bureaucracy of defence have to be brought into the general process of government. But how should this be done? The place to begin is with the question of the overall position of the military which, in turn, means bringing some clarity to the confused and confusing issue of civilian control.

Civil control and civilian control

These are two separate, but related concepts which are often confused. They are:

civil control of the military; and

civilian control of the military.

By civil control is meant the obedience which the military owes to civis, the state. The military is one of a number of instruments of the state, of which other examples are the police, the fire service, the diplomatic service, and, in many countries, the medical service. Like these other bodies, the military has a duty of loyalty to the state, which employs it on behalf of the citizen and the taxpayer. The military, among its other functions, thus advises on the formulation of defence policy and helps to carry it out. But it does not make defence policy, of course, any more than doctors make health policy, or police officers make policy against crime.

In almost every society, it is likely that the individual personalities to whom the military has this civic duty — a president, for example, or ministers in a government — will be civilians. But, this is an accident of language rather than anything else. The important concept here is that the military, individually or in groups, accepts itself that it is the servant of a nation and a society, of which the state is an agent. It takes orders from the state, and in practice from the government of the day, in the same way that the police do. It follows that, if there is something wrong with civil-military relations, it will be because the military is not prepared to acknowledge this allegiance, and puts itself outside or above the state, arguing that it is better placed to decide on certain questions than those who serve the nation in politics or government.

The essential question is whether the military obeys the state, or whether, in contrast, the military tries to usurp the functions of other parts of the state apparatus. In the latter case, the consequences may not just be serious for civil-military relations, but disastrous for the interests of the state.

In practice, it is likely that the agencies of the state which the military obeys will be staffed wholly or mainly by civilians. But this duty is owed, for example, by an attaché to an ambassador, not because the latter is a civilian, but because he or she represents the state in its entirety for this purpose. In the event of a defence minister being a serving officer (which is quite common in certain parts of the world), the military would, of course, owe obedience to him or her, but in his or her capacity as a minister, not as a serving officer.

The idea that civilian control of the military is necessary, good and efficacious, is so widespread that it has become something of a truism. In the rest of this chapter, four questions will be addressed:

Does civilian control have any real meaning?

Is it necessarily always a good thing?

Are there practical ways of bringing it about?

What benefits does it actually provide?

One American theorist argues that the ‘key issue’ of civilian control is of "setting limits within which members of the armed forces, and the military as an institution, accept the government’s definition of appropriate areas of responsibility."7 This is, in fact, what has been described above as civil control, ie the government, rather than the military, rules on questions such as these. Similarly, Huntington argues that civilian control (or what is described as "objective civilian control") exists when "a highly professional officer corps stands ready to carry out the wishes of any group which secures legitimate authority within the state."8 This is effectively also a definition of civil control, with the added stipulation that the state must be represented by civilians.

However, authors — even the same authors — clearly have something else in mind as well. It is also argued that "[t]he heart of civilian control occurs within the corridors of government, far removed from the usual ambit of scholars."9 In other words, it is not only an institutional question, but also a question of the control of individual officers by individual civilians. There are, perhaps, three cases where something vaguely like ‘control’ could be said to exist:

Ministers are, by definition, the political heads of their departments and can reject any proposal put to them by the military. In a well-run bureaucracy, however (as will be shown later), things should not be allowed to get this far.



Civilians (including diplomats and officials outside the ministry of defence) can tell the military that a certain proposal is contrary to expressed government policy, and that it should therefore be abandoned. Equally, they may tell the military that, if it is put to ministers they will oppose it, or simply that they judge it unlikely that ministers will like the idea, and it is better forgotten.



Finally, in most political systems, the permanent head of the ministry (who may be called the secretary, the permanent secretary or the director-general) is responsible to parliament for the use of his or her budget. He or she, or his or her representative, is thus able to refuse sanction of expenditure if it is deemed improper. But, of course, the same individual could also refuse ministers sanction for the expenditure.

Apart from these three cases, it is doubtful whether it makes much sense to talk about civilian as opposed to civil control of the military. This is also helpful in avoiding the common assumption that civilian control is the same as democratic control; the two can be quite different. Moreover, it depends which civilians are to do the controlling.10 In Germany between 1933 and 1945, civilian control was the problem, rather than the solution. Stalin, Pol Pot and Saddam Hussein were, or are all civilians. Indeed, there is some evidence that the abuse of the armed forces for widespread atrocities is actually far more common under civilian (albeit undemocratic) regimes. As a whole, the military has a conception of itself which excludes this kind of behaviour, since it contradicts its professional self-image and is bad for morale.

The immediate problem, of course, is the difficulty of deciding what a legitimate government actually is, and who has the right to make such judgements. Westerners, and notably Anglo-Saxons, tend to talk in terms of democracy and the rule of law. Other cultures would regard a government which connived at high levels of unemployment and child poverty as illegitimate. The fact is that the only real test of legitimacy is whether the government in question is accepted as legitimate by its people. The key word here is ‘accepted’, since there have been many regimes which have been unpopular, but are nonetheless tolerated.

Given these complexities, even if civilian control of the military can be defined and is felt to be useful, how can this desirable state of affairs be brought about and maintained? More pertinently, perhaps, how will one know that the military is actually subject to civil control? A number of methods have been proposed. They share the general weakness that they address process rather than substance, and effects rather than causes. A typical list includes:

constitutional constraints;

social or other ties binding civilians and the military together;

party political controls;

restrictions on size; and

delineation of spheres of responsibility.11

It is clear that there is confusion between evidence that civil-military relations are good, on the one hand, which implies the co-operation of the military, and attempts to coerce the military into behaving acceptably, which implies the opposite. In turn, this reflects the confusion about the nature of civilian control described earlier. It could be argued that all of these factors, except perhaps the third, are signs, in general, that the military is reconciled to its position and does not wish to challenge it, but, of course, all of these factors, including the third, will only have any effect if the military is prepared to co-operate. A few examples may make this clearer.

Many authors have argued that a constitution is the basic document which keeps the military in its place by including among its provisions something which places it firmly under civilian control, usually that of the president. But, in practice, the wording of a constitution or other laws is dictated to some extent by the correlation of political forces at the time. (Clearly, no-one who has written on this subject intends to evoke images of a group of concerned officers thumbing through a constitution trying to work out whether they are allowed to stage a coup or not.) But, even when a constitution specifies a satisfactory degree of civilian control, this is meaningless unless the military agrees to abide by the constitution, which means, in turn, that it accepts that its duty is to civis, the state, finally implying that intimidatory constitutional provisions are beside the point, anyway. Moreover, military coups are often justified (as was Chile’s in 1973) by the argument that the government has itself violated the constitution, of which the military presents itself as the defender.

A second, and superficially more useful way of coercing the military is that which political dictatorships have often adopted, of building up a parallel force or forces to keep the military under control. The example most frequently cited is that of Germany under Hitler, when the Nazi Party developed a formidable apparatus of oppression answerable only to itself. As a means of controlling the civilian population, this policy was certainly effective. In practice, however, the Nazis failed to control the German military in any meaningful sense. From 1938 onwards, the army was laying plots to kill Hitler and take power. Although these were an open secret, and very high-level officers were involved, the Nazi apparatus completely failed to discover or prevent them.

What these two examples (and many others like them) have in common is an adversarial assumption that the military at all times needs to be controlled, since it will otherwise burst out of its chains and take over. There are certain cases where this may be true (a point returned to below), but the problem is much more complex and subtle. Depending on the overall political situation, the real task is either (or both) of:

binding in the military to society and the civil power, in such a way that they never grow into a separate group with their own agenda, and are, in turn, accepted by civil society as legitimate themselves; and/or



demonstrating in practical and symbolic terms the subordination of the military to the orders of the civil power.

Thus, to take the example of the constitution again, a statement that the president is the head of the armed forces has no prescriptive force unless the armed forces themselves accept this situation. But a statement of this kind is, nevertheless, a helpful reminder and public symbol to both the military and to civil society, of what the relationship between the military and the civil power should be.

In general, there has been far too much concentration on formal and institutional methods of ‘control’, no doubt because these are easy to understand and document. Yet, as has been suggested, these methods are largely useless, unless the assent of the military is first obtained, in which case they are pointless anyway. Far more effective are informal methods of ‘control’. These vary greatly between countries, but are especially strong and important in consensus-based societies such as many in Africa and Asia. These methods include:

interpenetration of the military and civilian élite;

involvement of civil society in policymaking;

frequent contacts between the military and civil society groups; and

military and civilians working together.

These are difficult to document, and may not always be visible, but, as will become apparent in the remainder of this monograph, they are the heart of civil ‘control’, in the best sense of the term.

Equally, it must be recognised that the nature of relations between the military and the state varies enormously from country to country. In countries with developed political cultures, problems of civil-military relations are often those of fine-tuning. In countries where this culture is less developed, the problems can be much more fundamental and their resolution can be critical to the future of the country itself. There will be many cases where a civilian government has taken over from a brutal, dictatorial and corrupt military, and is concerned to ensure that a fragile democratic regime stays in place. In this context, ‘control’ should perhaps be written without the inverted commas, since the objective is actually to try to stop the military from being tempted to regain power. There are a number of techniques which can be employed. They are a mixture of formal and informal, and they are unashamedly drawn from the world of practical politics, rather than from textbooks:

Normalisation therapy: Members of the military are acutely aware that they are members of an international brotherhood which itself has norms and standards. The military of a previously isolated regime will look for acceptance by its equals abroad, and will be disappointed not to get it. Most democratic states place some kind of limitation on contacts with the military of other nations, and a military which has not given up political ambitions will find itself unwelcome and frozen out of the military tourist circuit of staff colleges, conferences and defence trade fairs. Adoption of international norms thus offers considerable personal rewards for those who might otherwise be tempted to return to bad ways. In addition, it is important not to overlook the sheer importance of exposure to new ways of doing things which foreign travel and contact with foreigners tend to produce. Quite often, unacceptable behaviour by the military is the product of ignorance and isolation, rather than anything more deep-seated.



Doctrine therapy: As already suggested, a military which has no proper role will often turn to politics instead. A new democratic regime should devote time and effort to defining roles and missions for the military which are more professional, and so exclude politics by implication. Again, contact with other militaries will be helpful here.



Patronage: A government should not have scruples to use the natural ambition of individuals as a weapon. Promotion can and should be restricted to those who demonstrate a commitment to democratic politics. While genuine change at the deepest level will take time, much can be achieved by identifying able and ambitious officers at middle rank, and making it clear to them that their careers have the potential to be glittering, provided they play according to the rules the government sets out.



Intelligence: For the reasons which are given in the discussion of intelligence below, it is not a subject in which the military should dominate. A new democratic regime will need to build up a civilian intelligence capability quickly, not only to infiltrate the military, but also to provide a non-military analytical capability to help the government to avoid domination by military thinking.

The problem of how to deal with a corrupt military is more complex, and will vary to some extent on whether corruption is endemic in society, or whether it is confined to the military, or at least very much worse there. It is unusual for the military to be more corrupt than the norm (usually, it is less so), but it can happen where the military has had its hands on the levers of power for too long. Everyday corruption is best seen as a kind of tax or levy on a society which is unwilling to pay for an adequate level of public service from taxation. Public officials who are underpaid and overworked will often feel justified in accepting bribes as a way of getting back at the system which is cheating them. The first remedy, therefore, is an adequately paid and staffed public sector. This is not to say that salaries need to be as high as in the private sector: few of those who work for the public good expect to be as well-rewarded as those who work for their own enrichment. But, remuneration should not be so much lower that cynicism and corruption set in. The second remedy is not to place temptation in people’s way. The privatisation or outsourcing of services, for example, is a bad idea, because it generally leads to corruption. If catering for an officers’ mess is carried out by soldiers, then opportunities for corruption are very limited. If it is entrusted to a private company, corruption will almost certainly follow.

There are, of course, goods and services which the state will always have to procure from outside, and major items of defence equipment will often be part of this. At this level, scrutiny and oversight are seldom effective. Greed tends to distort people’s perceptions of the risk they are running, and investigators themselves can become simply another target for bribery. A reasonably transparent process will help, of course, but the only long-term answer is to have a procurement system which is complex, lengthy, and involves so many people that, cynically put, no-one could hope to bribe everyone who had an influence on the decision. It also helps if the process flows through a number of committees (with members who have no narrow sectional interest to pursue), and involves representatives from outside the Ministry of Defence.

Civil control and civilian control: Some concluding remarks

Civil control is a valuable concept in that it reminds the public and the military that the latter owes a duty of obedience to the state, which acts as the agent of all citizens in this respect. By contrast, the concept of civilian control, popular as it is, adds little in clarity, and indeed confuses the issue in a variety of ways. As a term, it should rather be discarded.

This is true especially in countries where civil-military relations have been poor in the past, and where the military is, in effect, being asked to become used to a less powerful or influential position than it used to have, even if it is more professionally satisfying in the end. Nothing is more unwise in such a situation than to tell a general that he or she is henceforth going to be subject to ‘civilian control’. As was shown, control of individuals by individuals is scarcely practicable. Yet, officers of the South African Defence Force said, in 1993 and 1994, that they were sure that the African National Congress, when it took power, was going to introduce a commissar system, where each officer would have a civilian in a position of power over him or her. (In fairness, the ANC’s thinking on defence issues at that time was at an early enough stage that such an impression might have been given.)

Moreover, the word ‘control’ itself is potentially unhelpful, because it implies a relationship of power and superiority, and evokes, once again, the picture of a rabid military desperate to grasp the reins of power, held back only by some finely judged constitutional phraseology. It is a theme of this monograph that relationships of power and subordination do not work very well: in the end, they encourage resentment, lack of co-operation and circumvention, and may well create exactly those conditions they are designed to avoid. The rest of this monograph is therefore devoted to ways in which the best use can be made of the military’s talents.