← New Books Network
New Books Network
Kori Schake, "The State and the Soldier: A History of Civil-Military Relations in the United States" (Wiley, 2025)
01:04:23
Loading summary
Transcript57 lines
- [00:01]
A
Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [00:05]
B
Welcome to New Books Network. My name is John Armenta, your host for this episode today. I'm with Corey Shoffe, the author of the State and the A History of Civil Military Relations in the United states, published by Polity 2025. Corey, welcome to New Books Network.
- [00:21]
A
Thank you very much.
- [00:23]
B
All right, so let's get started. Can you tell us a bit about yourself, your background, and what led you to write this book?
- [00:30]
A
Sure. Well, I lead the foreign and defense policy team at the American Enterprise Institute. I'm an itinerant schoolteacher. I taught at West Point, at Stanford, at the University of Maryland, and at Johns Hopkins. And I also spent some time in government in the Pentagon, in the military staff and the civilian staff, in the State Department and on the National Security Council staff.
- [00:53]
B
And could you tell us about some of your previous books?
- [00:56]
A
Sure. Let's see. I wrote Safe Passage, which is a history of the transition from British to American hegemony, exploring what made that the only peaceful transition between a rising challenger and a dominant great power. I wrote a book called State of Disrepair, about how to make the State Department better at the management of its people and its resources. I think those are the two I like best.
- [01:28]
B
Yeah. Great. And what led you to write this book?
- [01:31]
A
So I was struck that there's not a basic history that tries to answer the question, how is it that a country founded in fear of a standing army has come to think of its military as a major bulwark of democracy? Most of us who are civil military experts, we write at the postgraduate level. We're political scientists, so we're interested in theory and modeling, and we write at a level of altitude for each other. I'm not worried about deep disagreements on civil military issues, but I'm very worried about apathy in the expert community, in the policy community, and in the general public. So I wanted to write a book that, while I hope is serious scholarship, is also accessible to people who are just think the picture on the COVID is interesting and want to know what it's about.
- [02:36]
B
Yeah. And I will say that it is written at a. It is a very readable book. The stories that you go through here are all very entertaining, even though some of them are a little worrying at times. And we'll get into that as we go. But I actually want to start with the title of your book, the State and the Soldier. Anyone familiar with the field of civil military relations will immediately recognize this as a reference to Samuel Huntington's 1957 book, the Soldier in the State. And the epilogue of your book here discusses Huntington as well as Morris Janowitz's the Professional Soldier. But for our listeners who may not be familiar with the references or the field of civil military relations itself, can you tell us what is this field of civil military relations, cmr. And what is the title in your book trying to indicate?
- [03:29]
A
So the study of the relationship between the American military and its political superiors is the major focus of the academic field of civil military relations. And Samuel Huntington's the Soldier and the State is sort of the foundation stone of the field. It was the first book that took seriously as a subject of academic research the field of civil military relations, and it is still taught as a cornerstone of contemporary civil military relations. And I titled my book the inverse of his, because I hate Sam Huntington's book the Soldier and the State. I think it's a terrible basis for. For policy on the relationship between the military leaders and the political overseers. And let me just give you my top three reasons that Huntington's Soldier in the State is a terrible book. First, in over 400 pages, he never addresses what is the central area of concern in the field and in the history of the relationship between militaries and in democracies. He never addresses the risk of the military thinking itself different and better than the society it protects and taking over the government, either formally in a military coup or informally by state capture, the way the military in Egypt has, for example. So it ignores the central issue in the field. The second reason I hate Soldier in the State is that Huntington genuinely believed that American democracy was incompatible with an effective military and that democracy in America needed to change. And he was writing at a time when you had 200 years of American history in which the military had never been a threat to the democratic leadership. And the third reason I hate this book is because he believed in World War II that civil military relations were in a crisis in the United States. And his argument was that the military had permitted the president of the United States to draw World War II to an end after the surrender of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. Huntington believed that the military should have forced the president to pivot and fight the Soviet Union, our wartime ally. And the notion that the military, not the political leadership, should determine the war aims, the resources, the duration, or the nature of the peace is a fundamental perversion of. Of democratic control of the military.
- [06:38]
B
Yeah, thank you for that.
- [06:42]
A
That's my jeremiad.
- [06:44]
B
No, yeah, no, that. That. That's great. And, you know, like, I'm. I'm also not that big of a fan of that book, and really not a fan of some of his later books either. But let's. Let's stick in that. In that time period that he and then later Janowitz were writing, so that the field developed at this particular time in post World War II and beginning of the Cold War. What were some of the other animating questions or problems it was trying to address then? And then what are the people like yourself who say that they are civil military relations scholars? What are the animating questions and problems that you study?
- [07:25]
A
So the animating question, I think, both for Huntington and Janowitz, is how much autonomy does a military need to be effective? And how do we give them that autonomy without them becoming a threat to the society they're protecting? So how do you have a military strong enough to protect a democracy without that military becoming a threat to it? And I think that's still the animating question in the field. And the American military is such an anomaly because it's so powerful, it's so influential in policy formation, and it's the most popular governmental institution in the American public's mind. And so what has changed in the field isn't so much the question. It's the relative weight of the participants in what is designed as an Unequal dialogue, that is the civilians are superior. Since the late 1970s, you still have a very high level of public trust in the military as an institution, but public trust in everything else has collapsed in political, in elected officials, in Congress, as an institution, in the courts, in journalism. And so that has sort of catapulted the military into a much more prominent role in the public's estimation. And that occurred at the same time that we transitioned away from being a large conscript military to being a volunteer force that by our policy decisions, we've decided needs to be only 1/10 of, of 1% of the, or less than half of 1% of the American public. So it's a small force relative to the population. Most people don't know anybody in military service, but they admire both the people in the institution much more than anything else. And that, to some extent, unbalances the civil military relationship.
- [09:43]
B
Okay, great. Thank you. So now let's get into your book and into the history of these problems. What did the framers of the Constitution think about the relationship between the state and its military? And then how was that reflected in the document itself?
- [10:03]
A
So there was no subject on which the founders were more anxious than a standing army. So the risks that a military poses to a free Society are prominent in the Declaration of Independence 13 of the 85 Federalist Papers. The debates over the ratification of the Constitution 13 of 85 directly address the risks of a standing army. You don't get the Constitution ratified without the second and third Amendments expressly addressing the risks that a standing army could pose to the Republic. And in the debates over the ratification of the Constitution people were very anxious about this. I love the way the historian Gary Wills puts it that more Americans believed that George Washington should command the revolutionary army than believed there should be a revolutionary army. They were really worried. Even the Back Bay Colony in Massachusetts. So when they were under siege in 1776 by the British army, they nonetheless passed a resolution saying we look with trepidation on having a soldiery even though comprised of our fellow citizens in our midst. So it was a central concern. And the reason is there hadn't been a democracy in more than a thousand years that wasn't overtaken by its military. That's the story of Cromwell and the English Revolution. It's a story of the fall of Rome. And America's founders were intensely concerned about not replicating those experiences.
- [11:59]
B
And so how did they set up the government and the constitutional government in order to alleviate some of those concerns?
- [12:08]
A
So I love that question. So there's this wonderful passage in Herman Wux novel the Caine Mutiny where he describes the United States Navy as an organization created by geniuses to be run by idiots. And I think about the American government in that way. I think the important thing to understand about the Founding Fathers is that they feared governmental power. And they thought that our society, because the civic culture was so pervasive and deep seated of self governance. They believed that the distribution of power, letting ambition check. Ambition was the solution. And you see it. Absolutely. I mean the second amendment is in the Bill of Rights in order that states have an organized militia to fight the federal government if need should come to it. That's how worried they were. So you have militia both by design as a counterweight to any potential federal overreach. But you also have militia on the frontier because the federal government could neither afford nor marshal a force large enough to protect settlers as they pushed further and further into Indian territories. Ready to soundtrack your summer with Red Bull Summer All Day Play? You choose a playlist that fits your summer vibe the best. Are you a festival fanatic, a deep end dj, a road dog or a trail mixer? Just add a song to your chosen playlist and put your summer on track. Red Bull Summer All Day Play. Red Bull gives you wings. Visit red bull.com brightsummerahead to learn more. See you this summer.
- [14:05]
B
Thank you. And that's a good transition. To my next question. We have this concern about the military basically overthrowing the civilian government. And part of that is just the military or military commanders doing whatever. Doing whatever they want to. And that did happen on, especially on the frontier. Let's talk about some of the examples of this. I have a couple like, you know, from before the Civil War and during. And then also after. And get John Fremont both in California and then later in Missouri and. Well, let's start with John Fremont and then we'll get to the other example and talk about.
- [14:47]
A
So you're right that there are quite a number of examples of charismatic military leaders who are good at the profession exceeding their political instructions. That's the nature of civil military infractions in American history. There are no examples of charismatic military officers raising a force to threaten civilian control. It's always people that the military leadership keeps making excuses for when they break the rules. And so they break the rules more. And John Fremont is, I think, the classic example as a major. So we get the term for the opening to San Francisco Bay as the Golden Gate from John Fremont because Congress commissioned him to map the California and Pacific Northwest Territories. But he was court martialed for insubordination during the Mexican War. He represented himself as having political authority to instruct the Navy to take Yerba Buena harbor, that is San Francisco, when that was not his political direction. And so he gets drummed out of military service. He becomes a politician as senator from California. He was the first Republican party presidential candidate. He married the daughter of a senator in Missouri. And when the Civil War broke out, Lincoln made him a political general and made him the military governor of, of Missouri. And as the military governor, he enacted emancipation of slaves, which was not Lincoln's policy at the time and which risked provoking the secession of the border states, which would have been a political disaster for the Union. And he, he did that to try and position himself to be Lincoln's political successor. Right. So he wanted to be a more ardent abolitionist than Abraham Lincoln. And I love. It's such a nice fingerprint of how the civil military relationship works in the US because the army was outraged that Fremont was posing this political problem to the president in wartime. And so the army leadership cashiered him for administrative incompetence three months after the emancipation of slaves in Missouri in support of the President and bringing the military back into subordination.
- [17:53]
B
Yeah, that old apologize rather than ask for permission. Now, a similar. We have another general who's acting on his own Authority, Ranald Slidell McKenzie. What did he do in Mexico?
- [18:13]
A
So I love the story of Raynald McKenzie. He's my favorite soldier, but he's also an example that there can be too much trust in the system and that an excess of trust also removes the checks and balances that are supposed to govern the civil military relation. So Raynald MacKenzie was described by Ulysses Grant in his memoirs as the most promising soldier in the Union Army. At the age of 25, with three years of active service, he was a corps commander in the Union Army. And after the war he remained in military service, became the Commander of the 4th infantry, one of the early integrated units, racially integrated units, both of black Americans and of Native Americans, and went on the Indian fighting frontier in the West. And the story that I tell in the book is one where the American southern border was rustlers territory and the rustlers were Native Americans, the Kickapoo, the Comanche. And what they would do was come across the Mexican border into the United States, rustle cattle and horses and go back into Mexico. But the Mexican government was totally, understandably given that we'd just taken a third of their country, unwilling to let the American military cross the border into Mexican territory. And so MacKenzie, on a handshake of request by the commanding general of the Army, General Sheridan, the Secretary of the Army, William Tecumseh Sherman, and the President of the United States, Ulysses Grant, told to raid into Mexico, a punitive raid. So not taking territory, but imposing a lot of casualties and taking women and children hostages to get the male Kickapoo tribesmen to surrender so that they could be moved onto reservations in the US you should not accept handshake orders for the commitment of lethal force in the American military. And the President does not have the authority without congressional authorization to have given that instruction. And yet, because you had a daisy chain of military and former military officers who trusted each other, it happened anyway.
- [21:01]
B
Right? And you indicate that in the book that the fact that all of these men were like, if not friends, were at least close colleagues, and that intimate trust they had with each other because they had fought with each other during the Civil War, they were able to just kind of like, yeah, you go do what you need to do to take care of this problem, you know, like, but, but yes, like you said, always get orders in writing.
- [21:27]
A
The system is not supposed to work without checks and balances and the civilian leadership not playing by the rules because they had a sort of under the table option is bad civil military relations.
- [21:42]
B
Right, right. So obviously the Civil War was a point of civil military conflict. But let's look past that a bit to Reconstruction, and we see you talk about fights over not so much civilian control over the military, but which branch of the civilian government would control the military. Can you talk about that a bit?
- [22:06]
A
Yeah. I think the most fraught moment in American civil military history is during the constitutional crisis of 1866 and 1867. And exactly as you said, John, this was about who is in charge of American policy. Is it the president or is it the Congress? And after Lincoln's assassination, Andrew Johnson becomes President of the United States. What were then called radical Republicans were in charge of Congress. And you have this sweeping policy of Reconstruction by The Congress, the 14th, 15th and 16th Amendments, and the three major pieces of legislation known as the Reconstruction Acts. President Johnson opposes all of them. He vetoed the largest number, 22. He issued 22 presidential vetoes, the largest number of any president in American history. And he was overridden 15 times by Congress, also the largest number of veto overrides in American history. And it was all about the nature of citizenship for emancipated slaves and what the 11 states that had seceded would need to do to be readmitted into political life in the Union. And the American military was an ardent advocacy, was in ardent advocacy of the Congress's policy. And General Grant at that time, the senior general in the army, was asked by President Johnson, if it came in the constitutional fight to the president disbanding Congress or Congress impeaching the president, who would he side with? And Grant cryptically answered, I expect I should do my duty. And when that crisis came, when the Congress started impeachment proceedings, President Johnson objected to, obviously objected to the move to impeach him, but he also objected to a law Congress passed as part of that process called the Tenure in Office act, in which Congress made it illegal for any president to fire from political office from executive office anyone the Congress had confirmed into that role. President Johnson proceeded to fire Secretary of War Edwin Stanton and try and replace him with General Grant while Grant was also on active duty. Congress threatened Grant with five years in prison and a $10,000 fine if he accepted the job. President Johnson offered to do the time and pay the fine if Grant would uphold his constitutional authority. And so Grant was thrust into the position of having to choose between the two constitutionally authorized sources of civilian control over the military. And Grant determined that in wartime, the Commander in chief's authority is supreme, but in peacetime, it is Congress's authority over the military that should be held in supreme. Now, it's such a difficult case because, of course, Grant shouldn't be the person making that decision. The courts should be making that decision. But the moment was so politically fraught, Grant didn't think he could wait for the system to work as designed.
- [26:00]
B
Yeah. Also during this period, the end of Reconstruction, we saw a law constraining the domestic use of the military. What is tassicomitatus? And it is unfortunately relevant today. And I think a lot of times I hear people talking about it, they don't get it exactly right. So what is posse comitatus and what does it actually mean?
- [26:27]
A
Yes, so Posse Comitatus is the Name of the 1878 law passed by Congress as part of bringing reconstruction to an end. So it prohibits the use of the American military for domestic law enforcement unless one of three conditions is met. A governor requests support from the president of the American military, Congress passes specific legislation explicit to something going on that permits it, or a governor is failing to enforce people's constitutional rights. Those are the only three. Excuse me, there is a fourth. The President can invoke the 1807 Insurrection act, claim that a state or a community is in rebellion against the federal government. So those are the only conditions in which the American military can be used for domestic law enforcement. And it's really important. It is a huge part of the reason that the American military is so popular with the American public, because mostly. Well, first of all, the American public doesn't have to fear its military. And second of all, usually the only time anybody has any interaction with a soldier is when they're fighting fires or evacuating people in a flood. And so that's a very positive interaction between the public and the military. The reason this is exactly as you suggest, John. A current issue is that President Trump last year attempted to deploy National Guard troops and some active duty Marines in Los Angeles, and he did deploy National Guard troops in Oregon, Illinois and Minnesota over the objections of the governors of those states. The governor of Illinois brought suit, and the Supreme Court determined that President Trump had neither the constitutional nor statutory basis for the deployments and brought them to an end. And so an 1878 law designed for utterly different circumstances continues to be really important as a restraint on executive power even today.
- [29:01]
B
Thank you. And in another case of these older institutions being more relevant today, you note in your book, kind of around the end of the 19th, beginning of the 20th century, we start to see professionalization of the forces, especially like the establishment of the War Colleges. So this was a time when we were fighting overseas colonial wars, but also really trying to figure out what industrialization was doing to the military. But what were the concerns that required the establishment of things like the War College that you've taught at, right?
- [29:38]
A
Yeah, that's right. So the Spanish American War is really consequential. And in the 1880s and 90s, the United States Navy started to operate globally, right? The forced opening of trade with Japan, the accession of Hawaii as an American territory. So the United States starts, as you have the closing of the American west, you see American business and American government start to be interested in international influence. And so the military, the Navy is at the vanguard of thinking about what would it take to make the American Navy capable of being a war winning Navy. So you have Alfred Thayer Mahan teaching at the Naval War College, you have the establishment of the Naval War College. And in the Spanish American War, the advantage of this professionalization really comes to the fore. The Navy sinks the Spanish Navy in Havana harbor in about 45 minutes. They do the same in Manila Bay in less than a day. And the other major military service, the army realizes it's way behind. Even though they get a lot of good press out of the Rough Riders and Teddy Roosevelt, they understand that they are underperforming and need to think seriously. So they start studying other nations militaries, in particular the Prussian and later German military. So they begin to think of themselves as professionals. And in the vanguard of these thinkers in the Navy is a guy named William Sims. And he comes to prominence in the 1890s when the Navy is refusing to adopt a technological innovation called continuous aim gunfire. This is a way to stabilize the cannon on the deck of a lurching ship at sea. And it produced a 3,000% increase in the accuracy of fire. But the Navy didn't want to adopt it because it was so counter to the culture of what the Navy did. It seemed to make to automate what should be heroic and individualistic. And Sims forces the Navy's hand. He's a Navy lieutenant at the time, but he knows Theodore Roosevelt, who's at that point President of the United States. And he gets a political override and so goes on to found the to be the leader of the Naval War College in Rhode island and is put in charge of American naval forces in World War I in the European Theater, where he subverts President Wilson's political direction. And it's one of only two examples in the 20th century of military insubordination.
- [33:01]
B
Well, and I think that's a good segue to the other example of that type of military insubordination. Sims is quite a character, and so is one that's maybe a little more familiar is Douglas MacArthur. So how did. What were his fights with his civilian superiors?
- [33:22]
A
So MacArthur was famous from about 1932, when he, as Chief of Staff of the army, had led a cavalry charge against veterans who were encamped on the National Mall in Washington, protesting for their pensions. Franklin Delano Roosevelt described Douglas MacArthur as one of the two most dangerous men in America. The other was Huey Long, Governor of Louisiana. And when MacArthur led this charge against the bonus marchers, it was during the 1932 campaign. And when Roosevelt heard about it, he celebrated. He said, Douglas MacArthur has just elected me President. Because it was such a political disaster for the Hoover Institution to have the military doing a cavalry charge on their fellow Americans. But During World War II, Roosevelt was intensely aware of the need to create and maintain public support for the war. So he appoints MacArthur to command in the Philippines. He even has him awarded the Medal of Honor. And when the army objects that MacArthur hasn't done anything deserving of it, the President said the country needs a hero. And MacArthur blossoms under the attention. He's such a nightmare for Admiral Nimitz to deal with during the Pacific campaigns and then when the Korean War breaks out, which, you know, a lot of the. Which was intensely unpopular. And a lot of the public blamed the Truman administration for bringing it on because the Secretary of State had given a public speech announcing that Korea was outside the American perimeter of defense interest. TRUMAN Nominated the 72 year old Douglas MacArthur to command the United nations forces. And MacArthur. This is a time where it's the dawn of the nuclear age. The defense thinking is obsessed with are the only wars we are ever going to fight, total wars, or are there limited wars short of nuclear use that are still worth fighting by the United States? And Truman is the architect of that limited war. And MacArthur is his ferocious opponent. He keeps requesting authority to do things beyond the limits of political guidance. And then what gets him fired is he openly campaigns against the President's strategy. He writes a letter to the Republican speaker of the House to be read on the floor criticizing the President's policy. And that's what forces Truman's hand firing. MacArthur's an easy case because he's so clearly insubordinate and he's so clearly attempting to work with the President's political Opposition to undercut the Commander in Chief's policy and war. So that's the reason it's the canonical case, because it's the clearest violation.
- [36:58]
B
And there's another similarity with Sims. There is, or that is the other similarity with Sims is they both enlisted political enemies of their opponents in order to help do the fight. You note that 1920, there's congressional investigation into some of the allegations that Admiral Sims had laid on his superiors too. How, how common is that? Where military leaders, either openly or covertly, you know, get politicians like members of Congress to do some of this dirty work for them.
- [37:37]
A
So openly is a great rarity and should be right. Because it is the military attempting to subvert an executive leader, an elected leader's policy. And that is a violation of civil military relations when it happens covertly. It's otherwise known as policymaking in the American government because every two star and above who goes into the Senate for confirmation to their position, they sit in front of a placard that quotes Article 1 of the Constitution saying it is the authority of the Congress of the United States to raise armies and maintain navies. And the second thing that Congress does to underscore its authority is it makes everybody two star and above promise that if they disagree with the President's policies, they will come and tell Congress. So the fair game way for the military to object to a President's policy is to get called to testify before Congress and give an honest answer when asked what they think of the President's policy. Now most military leaders are fleet enough afoot to thread the needle without overtly saying this is a terrible idea, to instead filibuster a little, give their opinion, decline to say what classified advice they offered the President. That's the fair game way to do it. And Congress, I mean, the American government was set up precisely to ensure that the President of the United States was not the only voice on the use of lethal force on behalf of the country.
- [39:43]
B
It seems that many of the disagreements over. Oh, let me back a bit, a bit is it seems that a lot of the problems of the conflicts between civilian authorities and military authorities are kind of backburner issues because the real conflicts are between the services themselves. And so rather than fights between military and civilians, we see factions of the military and their civilian supporters versus other factions with their civilian supporters. So how do these intra military rivalries take the place of conflicts between military and civilian leadership?
- [40:27]
A
Oh, I love that question. So there are very rare instances of civil military friction during the wars. The majority of civil Military friction comes in the aftermath of wars, and it's in budget fights. And that's where you get the services fighting each other for limited resources. And what is called the Revolt of the Admirals is one of these examples where after World War II, the United States had had 12 million soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines under arms, and an enormous amount of the country's economic output was directed towards the war. So the wrenching of that back into civilian hands and the military drawdown gets caught up in a fight over the amount of resources and which service they are going to. With the advent of the nuclear age, the Navy and the emergent Army Air Corps, what becomes the United States Air Force, are fighting over who's going to be the delivery force for nuclear weapons. The Air Force had been the delivery means when the atomic bombs were dropped on Japan. But the Navy wanted a piece of the action and argued that you shouldn't focus everything on this unproven new Air Force. And so the Revolt of the Admirals isn't an actual revolt, it's a budget fight. And on the Navy side, Nimitz, Halsey, all of the highly decorated World War II admirals come out and are testifying before Congress in support of the Navy. Eisenhower, MacArthur, everybody in the army comes out in support of the Air Force. And the Congress decides that they will let the President decide. So it's. But it's fairly typical of the way that an enormous advantage civilians leaders have in the civil military relationship is that the military is so often consumed with internecine arguments over who gets what.
- [43:04]
B
Yeah, and Congress is the same, because I can imagine a representative from a district that includes a shipyard is going to be on the Navy side.
- [43:13]
A
Absolutely.
- [43:15]
B
All right. And so there's a similar event. It didn't have the name of a revolt, but the army leadership in the 1950s pushing back against the Eisenhower administration one of their own. What was going on there? What did the army leadership in the late 50s have problems with in terms of policy?
- [43:37]
A
This, too was about warfare in the nuclear age. Eisenhower, in one of his National Security Council meetings, challenges the military leadership to explain to him why he should spend more than a single nickel on anything other than the ability to use nuclear weapons or protect the United States against nuclear weapons use. He did not imagine that the United States was going to fight large land wars without recourse to nuclear weapons use. And so was advantaging the army, excuse me, the Air Force and the Navy over the Army. And the army fought their corner pretty well, arguing that, for example, nuclear weapons Use on a battlefield would kill so many soldiers. You need a larger army, not a smaller army. They do a series of exercises called Oregon Trail where they actually use a nuclear weapon on a battlefield. You can still see the video of it, and you see the mushroom cloud and the flash, and then you can count to about five. Then all these rows of soldiers start falling over. So it's a time of fulgent experimentation to figure out how nuclear weapons are going to change warfare. And Eisenhower believed that the role of the military was simply to hold things in place while the American economy and the American way of life won the Cold War. He did not want an army to fight the Soviet Union. And because he was the guy who won World War II in Europe, none of the army's objections got any traction at all.
- [45:31]
B
Yeah, he was able to use his own celebrity, his own military background in order to get his policy preferences out there. So we've been talking a bit about fights over strategy, but let's talk about some fights over personnel policy. And the two big ones are really racial integration in the forces in the late 40s, and then also the don't ask, don't tell. So how did the fights between the civil authorities, the civilians, civilian authorities, and the military come up in the advancement of these personnel policies?
- [46:10]
A
Yeah, the two cases are incredibly similar. I'm impressed that you see the parallel, because in both cases you have the political leadership wanting to impose a policy on the military in order to create broader public acceptance for the policy. And in both cases, you have the military leadership saying, we don't want social experimentation. What we do is already incredibly difficult. Don't make us be the vanguard of social change. You have lots of other ways to change the United States. You don't need to use the military for it in the case of racial integration. So the military's clearly right. We're a deeply segregated country at the time that Truman issues his executive order. And he issues the executive order because he couldn't get Congress to pass a law of it. So he's clearly working the system to try and make the hierarchy and responsiveness of a military organization Set an example. The Air Force is the only military service that favors it and implements it immediately and quite admirably. The Navy has a bad policy well enacted, and the army has a good policy unenacted. But what happens in the racial integration case is that the desperate need for manpower because of the Korean War begins to create acceptance within the military. And then, most importantly, the combat performance of black Americans creates advocacy by war fighting Leaders, I mean, Matthew Ridgway in Korea, the commandant of the Marine Corps, they turn on a dime and say, these are great soldiers. We want more of them. And that once you have a battlefield necessity, the military attitude changes very quickly. And I think you see the same with don't ask, don't tell, where the military leadership is very hesitant. They just don't want to take this on because what they're doing is already incredibly hard. Please don't make it harder. But in fact, the political leadership, especially in Congress, is what sets military policy, not the military. And Congress decided it was time. And so I was working for General Powell during the Clinton administration, and he went to the National War College to announce the policy change. And an officer stood up and asked him, said, I don't think I can support this policy. What should I do? And it was a reminder of why it is that civilians use the military to advance social issues. Because Powell said, you either salute and carry out the policy or you resign your commission. Those are your only two choices. So if you really feel you cannot in good faith have your fellow Americans serving alongside you, you don't belong in the military. And no other place in American society can you enforce that kind of claim. Which is why Presidents and Congresses are tempted to advance social causes using the military.
- [49:57]
B
And did Powell support getting rid of Donastone Tell or he did not. He did not. So even though his personal beliefs and his military judgment were going one way, he also said it's like, well, if. If boss says I have to do otherwise, I have to do it.
- [50:17]
A
Absolutely. That's the way the American system works. The military has an enormous amount of influence in policy formation. Once either Congress or the President has set policy, you can only either salute and carry it out or resign your commission. You do not get to shirk your responsibility to carry out policy to the best of your ability.
- [50:41]
B
Okay, thank you. So we're getting close to the end of our time. I'd like to kind of turn away from the book and look at some of the issues that you see now. I mean, as you mentioned at the top, that you wrote this book during a particular time of. Of civil military tensions and conflicts. So what are some of the, you know, maybe one or two big issues that you see, and then maybe some that are probably not so obvious to others but you think are really important.
- [51:16]
A
Sure. Well, the first thing I would say is that we should be very proud that our military is. Are such disciplined professionals because they are under an enormous amount of social and political pressure right now. Not Just from the Trump administration. But the Trump administration are the arsonists of politicization. And the military's actually holding up incredibly well. And the example I would give is the meeting of several hundred military leaders, as Secretary Hegseth called in Quantico last fall. And you can see in the video the military doing exactly what they're supposed to. Everybody showed up because the secretary has a right to demand their presence. And when the secretary and the president were carrying out political speechifying, every single one of those officers and non commissioned officers sat there in stony, stoic silence, refusing to participate in a political show. That's exactly how the system is supposed to work. And that all several hundred of them got it right is a real testament to their professionalization. Second thing I would say is that the pressure that the Trump administration is putting, and not just the Trump administration, some members of Congress like Senator Tuberville from Alabama, holding up 400 and some promotions and assignments to pressure the Biden administration on abortion policy, something the military has no control over, that kind of pressure will eventually break the nonpartisan nature of our military. It's not close to breaking it now, but unless the civilians behave with more restraint, eventually this system's going to break and it will be a very dangerous thing when it does. The only third thing I would say, I think there is a tendency in this febrile political moment to think the military is going to save us. Right. That the military won't obey an illegal order or that, you know, the president and I think we need to be very careful about encouraging that line of thought for two reasons. First, because for soldiers to refuse to obey an order puts them in jeopardy. They will be arrested, court martialed. And in that court martial, the burden of proof that an order was illegal is on the serviceman or woman refusing to obey it. And at a time when the Secretary of Defense's lawyer, the Department of Justice, and the President of the United States have said something's legal, that's a very big burden to put on the shoulders of a young man or woman who are already serving our country. And the second reason it worries me is because it removes from us the responsibility that the system is designed to place on civilian shoulders. Not to issue illegal orders, for the Secretary of Defense, not to transmit illegal orders, for Congress to oversee and repudiate illegal orders, and for the American public to demand that all of our political leadership do their jobs. So I worry that we're expecting our military to be heroes instead of us doing our civic duty.
- [55:13]
B
Thank you. And I'm really glad you stressed that point at the end there, that if the problem is, say, a bad war for bad reasons, like what we're doing in Iran, the fault is with the people who gave the initial order, you know, like, and also for Congress for not doing their job of, of, of pulling, of pulling the administration in. And, and yeah, like I, the, like you said, like there, there appears to be the military as the savior for everything. And we want to militarize everything, you know, from, you know, healthcare, education to policing. You know, they, so they are there. What does the future of. This is a hard question for somebody who just wrote a history book, but what does the future of civil military relations look like in the United States?
- [56:07]
A
So one of the really wonderful things about the American military is how deeply they understand themselves as citizen soldiers. And I think about this, I live in the District of Columbia where the president has National Guard troops on the streets, which is outrageous and can only happen because the District of Columbia isn't a state, so it doesn't have a governor to object to this. But those National Guard soldiers on the streets, they walk around in Santa hats at Christmas time. They say, be careful, ma'. Am. The sidewalks icy. There's, they want so much not to be the bad guys and they want so much for the American public to like them and respect them that they are behaving with enormous restraint and genuine niceness in terrible circumstances the political leadership has put them in. I actually genuinely believe that the long term outcome of the Trump presidency is going to be much tighter restraints on executive power because many of the things the president is doing are aggressive executive overreach, but he's not using the levers of power that would make them lasting. He's not getting it codified in legislation. He's not persuading governors, he's not persuading the American public. And so all of the aggressive executive overreach is going to get overturned, and I believe it will get overturned in a way that prevents future iterations. Just as the Posse comitatus Act restrained 150 years of American policy by not letting the American military engage in domestic law enforcement, I think we are going to see a lot more of that, just as we did with the Supreme Court reinforcing Posse Comitatus last year.
- [58:19]
B
Great. Thank you so much. So one last question before we end here. Is there any other writing projects that you're working on, either book length or maybe articles?
- [58:30]
A
Yeah. I have the great good fortune to be the Kiss center chair at the Library of Congress this year. And I am writing a book on why it is so hard for the United States to win wars. And so I'm appreciative that the president is losing a war right now to help my book project along.
- [58:52]
B
And yeah, you have some cases to work with. That sounds great. Any timeline on when we should be expecting it?
- [59:00]
A
Oh, it'll be a while, but thank you very much for asking, John. I appreciate it.
- [59:06]
B
Yeah, no, I look forward to it. Okay. Well, Corey, thank you so much for your time. This has been New Books Network. I've been sitting with Corey Shockey, author of the State and the A History of Civil Military Relations in the United states, published in 2025 by Politique. Thank you.
- [59:23]
A
It was a pleasure. Thank you for listening to this episode of the New Books Network. We are an academic podcast network with
- [59:30]
B
the mission of public education.
- [59:32]
A
If you liked this episode, please share it with a friend and rate us on your preferred podcast platform. You can browse all of our episodes on our website, newbooksnetwork.com Connect with us on Instagram and bluesky with the handle EW Books Network, and subscribe to our weekly substack newsletter@newbooksnetwork.substack.com to get episode recommendations straight to your inbox.