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March 20, 2025

Civil-Military Relations and Democratic Backsliding

Carrie A. Lee

 

Keywords: civil-military relations, strategy, decision making, recruiting, defense budget

 

Why do we think about civil-military relations? Civil-military relations impact strategic assessment, strategy and decision making, and professional ethics and effectiveness. The military’s relationship with society influences recruiting and retention (and, therefore, the sustainability of the force), defense budgets, and foreign policy preferences. Moreover, the military’s relationship with political leaders influences the quality and content of military advice, oversight, and accountability, and even decisions about whether and how to go to war. Civil-military relations, put broadly, underpin any country’s ability to make decisions about and support its national defense.1

Yet, in addition to its functional importance, civil-military relations also matter for democracy. After all, the military is the most coercive instrument a state has—it is an enormously powerful institution with ready access to weapons and training designed to suppress and repress. Peter Feaver identifies this paradox as the central problematique of civil-military relations: How do you develop a military capable enough to defend the state while ensuring that it does not overthrow the regime?2

This traditional characterization of the challenge puts the onus on civilian leaders to either train or entice the military to remain out of politics. Nevertheless, if one makes a small but important shift in framing the problem, it reveals a new set of questions. If, rather than asking, “how can civilians entice the military to stay out of politics,” we instead ask, “what are the factors that encourage militaries to support the regime,” it opens up a new set of questions and an avenue of study that could prove critical to understanding political change across the world.

There is no shortage of normative discussion about the importance of maintaining civilian control of the military and the need for the military to stay out of domestic politics—particularly in the American context. There is, however, a noticeable lack of empirical work in civil-military relations and comparative politics that either describes or explains the military’s domestic political power and role as an institutional guardrail in democracies. To the degree that scholars have studied it, it is usually in the context of outright military coups and the coup-proofing techniques employed by civilian leaders. Short of a coup and subsequent military rule, though, the field has paid relatively little attention to the military’s role in facilitating or denying other forms of regime change. Yet by definition, any military capable of overthrowing the state must also be—at a minimum—complicit when the regime or form of government changes. How can we understand what motivates the military to intervene during times of crisis to protect the existing government or step aside?3

This omission is most glaring when we look at the now robust and growing literature on democratic backsliding. Over the last 10 years, the global regression in the prevalence and quality of democracy has drawn the attention of scholars and journalists seeking to understand and explain how and why democracies die. So, it is particularly curious that none of the dominant explanations for democratic erosion explore the critical role the military plays as a guarantor of state security—both internal and external. It is instead either ignored outright or assumed that the military is aligned with the dominant party (and therefore the consolidation of power by would-be authoritarians goes unchallenged). Yet, recent examples in Brazil, South Korea, Türkiye, and the United States challenge these treatments. Indeed, in professional militaries like the United States, where officers swear an oath to the Constitution (that is, a form of government) rather than an individual leader, any study of democratic erosion that does not include an explanation of how the military is either coopted or circumvented is necessarily incomplete.4

A few scholars are investigating the relationship between the military and the quality of a democracy, but the literature is nascent. Risa Brooks has been doing interesting work with a variety of coauthors on civil-military relations, autocracy, and democracy. David Auerswald, Philippe Lagasse, and Stephen Saideman have a forthcoming comparative book on the relationship between legislatures and ministries of defense, with a particular focus on the (lack of ) oversight that would normally be seen as a check and balance on executive power. Even beyond these promising projects, there are still critical questions to be asked and answered.5

At a time when democracy around the globe is receding rapidly, understanding the role that militaries play in its decline (or sustainment) is more important than ever. As I and others have argued elsewhere, healthy democracies on average make for more reliable long-term strategic partners—and better war fighters. To that end, a better understanding of the relationship between militaries and democracy may then help the United States to target security assistance and partnerships abroad more effectively, ensuring that the militaries of our partner nations remain committed to democratic norms and principles. In this era of strategic competition, every extra advantage could make the difference.6

 
 

Carrie A. Lee
Carrie A. Lee is the director of the US Army War College Civil-Military Relations Center and chair of the Department of National Security and Strategy. Her award-winning research and writing have appeared in publications such as Foreign Affairs, Texas National Security Review, Journal of Conflict Resolution, War on the Rocks, and The Washington Post. She is a term member with the Council on Foreign Relations, a contributing editor for War on the Rocks, and an adjunct fellow with the Center for a New American Security. She received a PhD in political science from Stanford University and a bachelor of science degree from MIT.

 
 

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Endnotes

  1. Risa A. Brooks, Shaping Strategy: The Civil-Military Politics of Strategic Assessment (Princeton University Press, 2008); Pauline Shanks Kaurin, “An ‘Unprincipled Principal’: Implications for Civil-Military Relations,” Strategic Studies Quarterly 15, no. 2 (Summer 2021): 50–68; Nathalie Grogan, “The All-Volunteer Force: Civil-Military Relations Hit Home—and Abroad,” Center for a New American Security (September 17, 2020), https://www.cnas.org/publications/commentary/the-all-volunteer-force-civil-military-relations-hit-home-and-abroad; Peter D. Feaver, Thanks for Your Service: The Causes and Consequences of Public Confidence in the US Military (Oxford University Press, 2023); William E. Rapp, “Civil-Military Relations: The Role of Military Leaders in Strategy Making,” Parameters 45, no. 3 (Autumn 2015): 13–26, https://press.armywarcollege.edu/parameters/vol45/iss3/4/; Colton C. Campbell and David P. Auerswald, eds., Congress and Civil-Military Relations (Georgetown University Press, 2015); James T. Golby, “Duty, Honor . . . Party? Ideology, Institutions, and the Use of Military Force” (PhD diss., Stanford University, 2011); and Carrie A. Lee, “The Politics of Military Operations” (PhD diss., Stanford University, 2015). Return to text.
  2. Peter D. Feaver, “The Civil-Military Problematique: Huntington, Janowitz, and the Question of Civilian Control,” Armed Forces and Society 23, no. 2 (Winter 1996): 149–78. Return to text.
  3. Ashton Baldwin Carter et al., “Open Letter – To Support and Defend: Principles of Civilian Control and Best Practices of Civil-Military Relations,” War on the Rocks (September 6, 2022), https://warontherocks.com/2022/09/to-support-and-defend-principles-of-civilian-control-and-best-practices-of-civil-military-relations/; Kathleen J. McInnis, In Focus: Congress, Civilian Control of the Military, and Nonpartisanship, Congressional Research Service (CRS), CRS Report IF11566 (CRS, June 11, 2020), https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/IF/IF11566; Naunihal Singh, Seizing Power: The Strategic Logic of Military Coups (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014); Erica De Bruin, How to Prevent Coups D’État: Counterbalancing and Regime Survival (Cornell University Press, 2020); for an exception, see David Kuehn and Aurel Croissant, “The Effect of Civilian Control on Democracy,” in David Kuehn and Aurel Croissant, Routes to Reform: Civil-Military Relations and Democracy in the Third Wave (Oxford University Press, 2023): 133–68. Return to text.
  4. Nancy Bermeo, “On Democratic Backsliding,” Journal of Democracy 27, no. 1 ( January 2016); Ellen Lust and David Waldner, Unwelcome Change: Understanding, Evaluating, and Extending Theories of Democratic Backsliding (United States Agency for International Development, 2015): 1–15; Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, How Democracies Die (Crown Publishing, 2018); and Anne Applebaum, Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism (Doubleday Publishing, 2020). Return to text.
  5. Risa Brooks and Avishay Ben Sasson-Gordis, “How Military Leaders Can Navigate a Crisis of Democracy: Lessons from the Reservist Protests in Israel,” Just Security (August 17, 2023), https://www.justsecurity.org/87683/how-military-leaders-can-navigate-a-crisis-of-democracy-lessons-from-the-reservist-protests-in-israel/; Risa A. Brooks et al., “Following Orders or Following the Oath? Assessing Democratic Norm Endorsement Among Service Academy Cadets,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 68, no. 7-8 (August-September 2024): 1279–1306; and David Auerswald et al., Overseen or Overlooked: Legislators, Armed Forces, and Democratic Accountability (Stanford University Press, forthcoming). Return to text.
  6. Dan Reiter and Allan Stam, Democracies at War (Princeton University Press, 2002); and Carrie A. Lee, “Why Democracy Promotion Is in the Strategic Interest of the United States,” Truman National Security Project (blog), September 10, 2018, https://medium.com/truman-doctrine-blog/why-democracy-promotion-is-in-the-strategic-interest-of-the-united-states-ae959c111b2f. Return to text.