Armed Servants: Agency, Oversight, and Civil-Military Relations

Armed Servants: Agency, Oversight, and Civil-Military Relations by Peter D. Feaver. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003. (pp. 381 / $49.95 [cloth])

Since its publication in 1957, Samuel P. Huntington's The Soldier and the State has been the landmark work on the study of civil-military relations. Nevertheless, the end of the Cold War brought back a renewed institutional analysis focus on this issue. There have been many worthy entrants in the competition to supplant, or at least supplement, Huntington's work. The worthiest among these so far have been Deborah Avant's Political Institutions and Military Change, Eliot Cohen's Supreme Command, and Michael Desch's Civilian Control of the Military. With the publication of Armed Servants, Peter D. Feaver has added yet another essential candidate to the literature.

Feaver, Professor of Political Science at Duke University and the director of the Triangle Institute for security Studies, has spent a decade-plus meditating and writing on the question of civil-military relations. He has complemented his academic qualifications with the practical experience of service at the highest policy-making levels (he served as the director for defense policy and arms control on the National security Council Staff from 1993-94) and in uniform (he is a lieutenant Commander in the Naval Réserve). This combination of theory and practice pays large dividends in this book.

In Armed Servants, he uses formal analysis methods and agency theory to present a rich descriptive and prescriptive theory of civil-military relations. Under this conception, the military (the agent) can work or shirk. Working means doing things to the principal's (civilians') satisfaction; shirking means not doing something to the principal's satisfaction. Civilians may then monitor intrusively or not monitor intrusively to ensure that the military works. The military determines, based upon their preferences, the costs and payoffs of working or shirking under intrusive or non-intrusive monitoring.

The most valuable contribution of this approach is that it proves very useful for examining the day-to-day conduct of civil-military relations. For instance, Feaver's model shows the troubles that Huntington's objective control schema faced under the conditions of the Cold War (chapter 5). Civilian principals monitored intrusively - at a fairly low cost due to the external threat environment - to ensure that the military worked rather than relying on military professionalism to thwart off shirking. Subsequent chapters (6 & 7) offer plausible explanations for the civil-military friction evidenced in the post-Cold War period.

As Feaver notes, the realities of the American constitutional system make the military agents to both the Executive and to the Congress. This in turn can make murky exactly what constitutes shirking. He favors the notion that the Executive branch has the lead due to the "commander in chief clause, but this gets very messy - particularly in instances of the use of force - as his chapter 7 proves repeatedly. He also does not completely explain away the notion that, as Don Snider and Christopher Gibson have argued, experiential learning curves may put the military at an advantage at the beginning of presidential administrations when party affiliations switch; this rationale holds not only for the first Clinton administration but also for the civil-military problems of the Rumsfeld Defense Department prior to 9/11. Most controversial, perhaps, and in contradistinction to his theory, is that under certain circumstances military shirking may be, in a broader sense, "working" because the resulting civilmilitary conflict may create superior policy outcomes and strengthen democratic control writ large.

Quibbles aside, Feaver has written a potent book that will help define the terms of debate and inquiry about civil-military relations from the institutional perspective for the foreseeable future. His methodology should prove to be particularly useful in examining democratic civil-military relations in parliamentary systems. This is rigorous scholarship that will greatly enhance the study of civil-military relations.

Reviewed By:

Michael P. Noonan

Foreign Policy Research Institute

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Copyright Dr. George Kourvetaris Summer 2004
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