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32 of 35 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The best book ever written on civil-military relations, August 8, 2002
At the time of its original publication in 1957, Samuel Huntington's The Soldier and the State reflected a new age in American history--the Cold War era. Huntington, a young Harvard professor of government, focused on policy problems concerning civilian direction of the military under the terms of the Cold War. Basically, he contended that traditional American liberalism was outdated and in fact had begun to pose a national security danger. Until this era, the absence of an overt military threat to American security allowed for a policy of civilian control of the military compatible with liberal democratic values. Traditionally, liberal solutions to domestic problems had likewise been applied to military problems, frequently resulting in failure.Huntington offered a theoretical framework for modern civil-military relations. He insisted that liberalism was fundamentally opposed to the proper military ethic; the application of subjective civilian control over the military actually aimed at weakening military professionalism, which was viewed as a threat to democracy, liberalism, and American values. The Cold War, though, required America to keep a large national army during peace time; the army could not return to its traditionally subordinate role. There was perpetual tension between the demands of national security and the values of American liberalism: either American security must be compromised or the influence of liberalism weakened. Only a conservative environment allowed for equilibrium between political influence and the military professionalism that ensured national security. This balance could only be achieved, Huntington argued, by objective civilian control of the military. By maintaining independent spheres of power, with no fusion of civil and military control, national security goals could be maximized with a minimum sacrifice of social values. Objective civilian control allowed for the proper growth of military professionalism while keeping the military a subordinate tool of state policy. The fulcrum of civil-military relations was the relation of the officer corps to the state. Huntington was successful in presenting the military as inherently conservative and unwarlike. The military prepared for war but never sought such engagement. Huntington encapsulated the premise of the military mindset as conservative realism. This mindset "holds that war is the instrument of politics, that the military are the servants of the statesman, and that civilian control is essential to military professionalism." This military ethic contrasted with the stereotype of the military as dangerously warlike. A weakness of the book is Huntington's description of military trends between the Civil War and the Great War. Huntington argued that the officer corps remained isolated during this period, allowing it to develop a professionalism free of civilian interference. This isolation theory has been largely disproved by pointing to the military's involvement in putting down labor strikes, relations between officers and the business community, etc. This defect should not detract from the importance of this book as a virgin exploration into a comprehensive history of the American military tradition. With its conservative thesis, it remains in my mind the seminal work on civil-military relations.
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by Samuel P. Huntington
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