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Scholars have contended that norms of professionalism are critical to understanding how militaries interact with civilian leaders and when they intervene in politics. Yet, few studies have directly examined the normative structures of military officers. Through a survey of 1468 US Military Academy cadets, this study evaluates cadets’ views toward professionalism, and in particular what is often presumed to be the dominant framework of those norms based on Samuel Huntington’s The Soldier and the State. We identify five patterns of normative beliefs based on cadets’ views of civil–military interaction and the nonpartisan ethic: orthodox, unorthodox, inconsistent, non-committal, and motivated norms. Cadets fall into each of these categories, but approximately one-quarter demonstrate motivated norms, adhering when convenient, and otherwise dispensing with them when the rules they prescribe clash with their partisan identities. These findings, especially our novel conceptualization on norm adherence, contribute to a greater understanding of military culture and professionalism.

The U.S. military's prevailing norms of professionalism exhibit three paradoxes that render the organization poorly suited to meet contemporary challenges to its nonpartisan ethic, and that undermine its relations with civilian leaders. These norms, based on Samuel Huntington's objective civilian control model, argue that the military should operate in a sphere separate from the civilian domain of policymaking and decisions about the use of force. The first paradox is that Huntingtonian norms, though intended to prevent partisan and political behavior by military personnel, can also enable these activities. Second, the norms promote civilian leaders’ authority in decisionmaking related to the use of force, yet undermine their practical control and oversight of military activity. Third, they contribute to the military's operational and tactical effectiveness, while corroding the United States’ strategic effectiveness in armed conflict. These tensions in Huntington's norms matter today because of intensifying partisanship in society and in the military, the embrace by civilian leaders of objective control and their concomitant delegation of authority in armed conflict to the military, and growing questions about the causes of the inconclusive outcomes of the United States’ recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It is time to develop a new framework for military professionalism.

Civil–military relations affect three major dimensions of grand strategy. They first shape the core principles, or substance of a state’s grand strategy. For example, relations between military and political leaders may determine whether a state is inclined toward a grand strategy that entails significant global commitments and military ventures, one that is revisionist towards the regional or global order, or that is more cautious in its use of military power and foreign interventions. Second, civil–military relations affect the character of a state’s grand strategy. Specifically, they help determine whether a state is able to align its grand strategy’s political, diplomatic, military and economic components, or whether the state instead is prone to pursue a poorly integrated strategy composed of irreconcilable approaches across these different domains. Last, relations between military and civilian leaders influence the execution or implementation of a grand strategy and therefore, whatever its putative merits, whether the state can in fact achieve the promise of the principles they espouse.

Civil–military relations varied dramatically in Egypt and Tunisia under their former dictators, Hosni Mubarak and Zine El Abedine Ben Ali. The leaders relied on alternative strategies of political control to accommodate the military to their rule and maintain themselves in office. Mubarak forged a grand bargain with his senior officers, while Ben Ali sought to contain the military. These strategies had important implications for how they met the imperatives of autocratic civil–military relations—keeping the military from engaging in coups and ensuring it would defend them against societal opponents, while retaining the latitude to govern. The cases illustrate the importance of studying variation in patterns of civil–military relations independently of regime type and of examining the overarching logics through which political leaders control the military.

While social pressures have long been a theme in the targeting scholarship, this article develops and evaluates a theory for how social forces affect militant groups’ tactical choices to target civilians. It first identifies a class of groups that exhibit community ties, which occur when a group operates in proximity to a referent society that is geographically concentrated and comprised of dense social networks. Through observable indicators of endorsement and condemnation to their tactics, groups gain information and are subjected to normative pressures from community members, which constrain their leaders’ willingness to harm civilians. The argument is evaluated through within-case process tracing in qualitative case studies of the Provisional IRA during the Troubles and Palestinian Hamas in the 1990s. The findings demonstrate that both groups modified their tactics in conformity with social pressures, even when it was costly and contrary to their ideology, strategic, and organizational goals.

The subfield of civil–military relations has experienced a remarkable revitalization in recent years, yielding a wealth of intriguing insights. Yet, despite these auspicious developments, research remains unnecessarily divided across multiple dimensions: along the subdisciplinary boundaries of comparative, international, and American politics; within these subdisciplines by independent and dependent variables; by regional focus; by regime type analyzed (democratic, democratizing versus authoritarian); and by scholars' emphasis on normative versus positive analysis. This article aims to bridge existing divides and reduce fragmentation. It proposes several pathways forward, including proposing innovations in deductive theorizing, developing new analytical frameworks, and synthesizing and adjudicating empirical findings. It also suggests ways of bridging to research beyond the study of civil–military relations, such as that on the global phenomenon of democratic backsliding, the efficacy of nonviolent strategies of political struggle, military effectiveness, and the causes and outcomes of interstate war.

Through a survey of 1,470 cadets at the U.S. Military Academy, we measure the strength of civil-military norms in the midst of their socialization to civil-military values. In addition, we use an embedded list experiment to measure true preferences to controversial questions in civil-military affairs, such as competing loyalties to democratic governance. To analyze cadet adherence to norms we first articulate a framework of various conceptions of professionalism. While cadets do not exhibit adherence to one particular framework, we find limited adherence to a purist Huntington model, and more of a conflicted reading of Huntington, as well as selectivity and superficiality in their commitment to norms, largely driven by their own partisan preferences. Lastly, we find concerning evidence that a significant number of cadets prioritize following orders over upholding democratic traditions, justifying Janowitz’s concerns that a military separate from society could breed attitudes among military personnel antithetical to democracy.

Civil-military relations are fundamental to the fabric of American politics. Throughout the country’s history, relations among military institutions, the civilian leadership, and American society have experienced periodic challenges and frictions. Since the late 1950s, sociologists, historians, and political scientists have sought to document and analyze these tensions. The issues include the perennial topic of how best to assure civilian control of the military; the nature and consequences of the gaps between American society and the military; the military’s involvement in politics; and the appropriate roles of civilian and military leaders in strategic assessment. This chapter explores these scholarly debates and discusses their practical implications for contemporary American civil-military relations.

The protests that began in Tunisia in December 2010, and quickly spread across the Arab world, have drawn significant attention to the impact of militaries and coercive institutions on protests and revolutionary movements. The actions of the militaries were a central determinant of the outcomes of the uprisings of 2010–2011. In Tunisia and Egypt the decision by military leaders to abstain from using force on mass protests to suppress them led to the downfall of the countries’ autocrats. In Syria and Bahrain, militaries defended political leaders with brutal force. In Yemen and Libya, militaries fractured, with some units remaining allied to the leader and using force on his behalf and others defecting. In still other states, leaders and militaries were able to forestall the emergence of large, regime-threatening protests.To explain these divergent outcomes, scholars and analysts have looked to a variety of explanatory factors. These focus on the attributes of the militaries involved, their civil-military relations, the size and social composition of the protests, the nature of the regime’s institutions, and the impact of monarchical traditions. These explanations offer many useful insights, but several issues remain under-studied. These include the impact of authoritarian learning and diffusion on protest trajectory. They also include the endogeneity of the protests to the nature of a country’s civil-military relations (i.e., how preexisting patterns of civil-military relations affected the possibility that incipient demonstrations would escalate to mass protests). Scholars also have been understandably captivated by the aforementioned pattern of military defection-loyalty, focusing on explaining that observed difference at the expense of studying other dependent variables. The next generation of scholarship on the uprisings therefore would benefit from efforts to conceptualize and investigate different aspects of variation in military behavior.Overall, the first-generation literature has proved enormously useful and laid the foundation for a much richer understanding of military behavior and reactions to popular uprisings in the Arab world and beyond.

This article seeks to answer several vital questions about contemporary American civil- military relations. For example, why might the most professional military in United States history seem to be especially likely to engage in public dissent and advocacy? Why might political dissent and activity hold appeal for current and upcoming generations of military officers? And, how can present day officers be persuaded that retaining an apolitical ethos is fundamental to the American military, not just because of tradition but because public dissent can do real damage to the military institution and to the country it serves?

Many analysts have focused on the Tunisian protests and the economic and political grievances that fueled them. Equally central, however, was the role played by the military leadership and the decision to forgo using force to actively suppress the protesters. Contrary to arguments that stress the reflexively apolitical or professional nature of the military, or its leaders' normative commitment to supporting the protesters, this article explains how the decisions made reflected political calculations and served the military's organizational interests. Although heralded as the savior of the revolution, the Tunisian military acted out of its own organizational self-interest in defecting from the Ben Ali regime.

Since the September 11 attacks, analysts and public officials have expressed growing concern about the potential of Muslim citizens and residents of the United States to plot attacks within the country's borders—a phenomenon sometimes referred to as “homegrown” terrorism. To assess this apparent threat, it is necessary to examine what is known about the willingness and capacity of Muslim Americans to execute deadly attacks in the United States. Three conditions, either alone or together, could contribute to an increasing threat of homegrown terrorism. The first concerns what is known about the radicalization of Muslim Americans and whether a surge in arrests in 2009 indicates a growing trend in Muslim American terrorism. The second relates to the capacity of aspiring militants to avoid detection as they prepare attacks. The third depends on the skills of aspiring terrorists and therefore their capacities to execute increasingly sophisticated attacks. The analysis should be generally reassuring to those concerned about Muslim homegrown terrorism. On both analytical and empirical grounds, there is not a significant basis for anticipating that Muslim Americans are increasingly motivated or capable of successfully engaging in lethal terrorist attacks in the United States.

Strikingly, little systematic study of the relationship between democracy and terrorism has been undertaken. This article addresses this lacuna by laying some groundwork for further analytical study of the issues. It does so, first, by suggesting a family of independent variables related to the concept of political access that might be employed in this research; and second, by introducing a more expansive set of dependent variables, which will help capture the diverse effects of political access on militant group activity. The bulk of the paper examines the variety of causal logics that could potentially connect democracy and terrorist group activity, drawing from five analytical approaches to understanding terrorist motivation evident in the literature. Two major conclusions follow from the analysis. First, the democracy and terrorism debate constitutes not one research question, but many. Second, the prediction that follows from many approaches to terrorist motivation is not that democracy should promot...

In the June 1967 Arab-Israeli War, Egypt shocked the world with its atrocious performance in battle, only to stun the world again with its remarkable military turnaround in the October 1973 war. Existing studies, which emphasize culture, social structure, and regime type, have a difficult time explaining why this single autocratic state, in such a short period of time, exhibited such extremes in its military competence. None can explain both why Egypt performed so poorly in 1967 and improved so significantly in 1973. Other explanations such as military strategy and learning explain the puzzle in part, but they alone cannot account for the outcome. This article presents a theory that accounts for the divergence in effectiveness, focusing on underlying differences in the fabric of the autocratic regime. It argues that changes in the balance of civil-military power in the state—born from more fundamental differences in domestic politics in the autocracy—shaped three areas of military activity critical to mil...

Dan Reiter and Allan C. Stam III, Democracies at War. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2002. Throughout history, states have exhibited a puzzling degree of variation in their capacities to create military power. Some consistently excel at warfare. Germany in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, for example, has long been singled out for its military's exceptional tactical proficiency, especially in the battles of both world wars. Others-such as Italy in those same conflicts-often perform poorly, demonstrating endemic weaknesses in their abilities to generate military force.' Yet a third category of states exhibits curious variation in military effectiveness over time. Most analysts, for example, count Egypt's performance in the 1967 Six Day War against Israel among the most dismal of contemporary military history. They also tend to agree, however, that in the 1973 October War Egypt was able to dramatically improve its effectiveness, manifest most vividly in the military's textbook crossing of the Suez Canal. Why are some states, at some times, better able to translate their basic material and human strengths into military power? Sociologists and military historians have long been interested in this question, often focusing on the human relations among soldiers and quality of leaders that make some militaries exceptional. More recently, political scientists have evinced growing interest in

(2002). Sanctions and Regime Type: What Works, and When? Security Studies: Vol. 11, No. 4, pp. 1-50.

This review summarizes the literature on randomized, controlled, published studies involving medical, behavioral, psychological, and biofeedback treatments for encopresis/functional constipation and stool-toileting refusal in preschool-age and school-age children. Nine such studies were located in the literature involving school-age children. No randomized, controlled treatment studies involving preschool-age children have been published. This review revealed no evidence to support the routine use of psychotherapy or anal sphincter biofeedback in the treatment of pediatric fecal elimination dysfunctions, beyond those benefits derived from a comprehensive medical-behavioral intervention. Further, this review indicated that paradoxical constriction of the External Anal Sphincter does not influence the treatment outcome of either biofeedback or medical-behavioral interventions. There are remarkably few controlled treatment outcome studies in this most important clinical area. More research is needed that employs standard treatment outcome variables.

This study compared lesbian and heterosexual parents' division of household labor, satisfaction with division of labor, satisfaction with couple relationships, and associations of these variables with psychological adjustment of children. Participating lesbian (n = 30) and heterosexual (n = 16) couples all became parents by using anonymous donor insemination and had at least I child of elementary-school age. Although both lesbian and heterosexual couples reported relatively equal divisions of paid employment and of household and decision-making tasks, lesbian biological and nonbiological mothers shared child-care tasks more equally than did heterosexual parents. Among lesbian nonbiological mothers, those more satisfied with the division of family decisions in the home were also more satisfied with their relationships and had children who exhibited fewer externalizing behavior problems. The effect of division of labor on children's adjustment was mediated by parents' relationship satisfaction.

Contents Contributors Acknowledgments 1. Introduction: The Impact of Culture, Society, Institutions, and International Forces on Military Effectiveness 1 Risa A. Brooks 2. Nationalism and Military Effectiveness: Post-Meiji Japan 000 Dan Reiter 3. Social Structure, Ethnicity, and Military Effectiveness: Iraq, 1980\-2004 000 Timothy D. Hoyt 4. Political Institutions and Military Effectiveness: Contemporary United States and United Kingdom 000 Deboroah Avant 5. Civil-Military Relations and Military Effectiveness: Egypt in the 1967 and 1973 Wars 000 Risa A. Brooks 6. Global Norms and Military Effectiveness: The Army in Early Twentieth-Century Ireland 000 Theo Farrell 7. International Competition and Military Effectiveness: Naval Air Power, 1919\-1945 000 Emily O. Goldman 8. International Alliances and Military Effectiveness: Fighting Alongside Allies and Partners 000 Nora Bensahel 9. Explaining Military Outcomes 000 Stephen Biddle 10. Conclusion 000 Risa A. Brooks Index 000