The Civil—Military Paradox of National Security Policies
2018.10.01
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By Wilfried von Bredow
We are currently observing a paradoxical development of civil-military relations in Western democracies. Civil-military relations appear to be characterized by a widening gap between civil society and governments on the one hand, and the armed forces on the other. At the same time, when engaging in crisis stabilization around the globe, security policies of Western governments are forced to come to terms with the dynamic process of overlapping, even with the fusing of the political and military spheres.
This civil-military paradox makes itself noticeable in all Western societies, but not always in the same way. Despite the politico-military cultures and traditions varying considerably among Western societies, they all substantially influence their national security policies and strategic outlooks. In other words, these societies are confronted with the same kind of security challenges, which compel their government and their military leadership to adapt, transform and refine their mental and their material instruments in order to protect the security of their nation. The process of adaptation, transformation and refinement is difficult, often painful and expensive, and furthermore, follows a different script in each society.
Tripartite Relationship
It makes sense to conceptualize civil-military relations as a tripartite relationship – involving (1) civil society, (2) the political system (government) and (3) the military.
The argument of a widening civil-military gap is based on the observation that Western societies today are what some observers call post-heroic societies. Post-heroic societies have no or not enough understanding for the needs of an organization that has as its most important mission the use of physical violence in order to defend the territory and the democratic order against external threats and aggressions. There are at least four dimensions of this gap which they call cultural gap, demographic gap, policy preference gap, and institutional gap.
Most authors share the conviction that the armed forces and, more general, the military way are currently not in the focus of attention of democratic societies, despite of some very visible and dangerous violent threats of their security. In Europe after 1990, military budgets suffered considerable decreases.
This alone may be a reason for reconsidering “healthy” civil-military relations in our societies. It is, however, only one aspect of a more complex development. The phenomenon I call the civil-military paradox results from the strange juxtaposition of a somehow widening civil-military gap on all three levels of analysis and an opposite trend within the realms of security policy, military strategy and the utility of force. In short, traditional security policy becomes more civilized and military missions include more and more civil activities.
Whether we speak of “war amongst the people”, of “soldiers drawn into politics” or of a “revolution in strategic affairs” – at the heart of these semantics lies the analytic finding that there is a kind of overlapping, of fusion even, of the military and the civil spheres. This is also one of the basic features of what has been baptized as “new” or “asymmetric” war.
It is puzzling to see both new gaps and new bridges emerge at the same time, hand in hand so to speak. These two developments do not neutralize one another, but in fact together they shape the features of modern security policies as well as of stabilization missions and warfare. Unfortunately, the paradoxical nature of this phenomenon all too often opens the door for misunderstandings and serious misjudgements on the side of political and military leaders. In many European countries, the public uneasiness with the “expeditionary security policies” of governments and, to a lesser degree, with the performance of the armed forces in missions like the intervention in Iraq or Afghanistan is both an expression and a consequence of these misunderstandings.
The Political Context
The armed forces are the masters of organized physical violence and must be contained by normative, institutionalized mechanisms of control in order to internalize the role of “armed servants” of society. The gap literature reverses this view direction. Here, it is not the military which might overwhelm civil society. On the contrary, civil society and its political institutions are building a wall of benign indifference around the armed forces. Whether in political, cultural or demographic terms, the armed forces are put at the margins of national identity. Security is becoming a concept with more civil than military aspects. Even if there are military threats a growing part of the public seems convinced that the root causes of these threats could only be cured by overcoming poverty and deficits of economic development.
The concept of post-heroic societies in the West implies that military values are to a certain extent devaluated nationwide. The warrior ethos appears as mostly anachronistic and, even if not completely obsolete, only useful in a few exceptional cases of incomprehensible violence. Post-heroic societies prefer to use their armed forces in missions other than war, e. g. rescue missions, peacekeeping, reconstruction missions. They like to restrict military expenditure to narrow limits, and some of them make extensive use of private security companies. The details vary, of course, from country to country due to different politico-military cultures.
The triangle of political leadership - military establishment-civil society came under pressure when, after the end of the East-West conflict, the Bundeswehr was no longer an element of the deterrence-defence-posture of NATO.
The Military Context
At this point it is necessary to mention an issue that is often overlooked when public discourse is absorbed by discussion of a certain mission like the war in Iraq or in Afghanistan. These are certainly very important events, but they must be regarded as special cases within a much broader range of missions which Western armed forces are called upon over the past two and a half decades. The long list of names which are or were in use for such post East-West conflict missions indicates the variety of activities which the soldiers have to perform. To mention just a few: peacekeeping (traditional and robust), peace enforcement, peace building, peace support operations, military missions other than war, crisis response operations, stabilization missions, humanitarian intervention, and so on. Other missions are military training missions, observer missions, various kinds of supervision missions in and for the containment of non-military threats and dangers. Not all of these missions include fighting, but many do. Sometimes the “real conflict” starts only after the more traditional war fighting seems to have come to an end. On May 1, 2003, US President George W. Bush, when looking back to the combat operations in Iraq over the past months stated proudly “mission accomplished”. In fact, it was most certainly far from it. On the contrary, for more than ten years now, insurgency is regarded as “the most widespread form of warfare today”. Therefore, Western armed forces are now shaped in such a way that they are fit for counterinsurgency (COIN) operations. COIN soldiers are warriors and homini politici at the same time.
The Confluence of the Political and the Military Spheres
The idea of the confluence of the political and military spheres in counterinsurgency operations but also in other kinds of modern military missions is convincingly illustrated in case studies about the war in Afghanistan.
On the ground, soldiers in missions like ISAF are required to be military experts and diplomats, convincing communicators and mediators. Since they are deeply immersed in an often completely different cultural environment, they are obliged to respect the local culture which may go against the official political program of the intervening countries. The balance between the respect of the local culture and the Western political and humanitarian values can be extremely difficult. Mistakes are made public by the local, but also by international media. The latitude of professional requirements puts an enormous stress on the soldiers in such missions.
This situation is further exacerbated by the variety of missions. The Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP) of the European Union has launched, since 2003, a bit more than 30 civilian and military missions. In spite of this distinction, most of the civilian missions are embedded in a military context and vice versa.
Case Study: Germany
In the decades after the foundation of the Bundeswehr (1955/56) the political authorities in the country as well as in the supervising Western alliances emphasized the necessity of a basic compatibility of the armed forces with the norms and values of democracy. This implied a tight and institutionalized democratic control of the Bundeswehr and various attempts to integrate it as much as possible into the democratic society. Before the background of Germany’s politico-military past in the 19th and 20th century, this was surprisingly successful.

Belgium, Canada and Germany take up air policing duties. Ceremony at Estonia, making handover of Baltic Air Policing mission from the French to the German. (Source: NATO)
The triangle of political leadership – military establishment – civil society came under pressure when, after the end of the East-West conflict, the Bundeswehr was no longer an element of the deterrence-defence-posture of NATO, but instead was called upon to take part in out-of-area missions of different dimensions. This demanded deep-cutting reforms of the Bundeswehr (including the introduction of an all-volunteer-force in 2011) which could only be realized in a step-by-step process.
In 1990, neither the German politicians nor the solders of the Bundeswehr disposed of any practical experiences with intervention in out-of-area conflicts. Over the following two decades, a certain pattern emerged in the public debates and perceptions of the German participation in multinational peace, stabilization and crisis management missions of the Bundeswehr. This pattern was and still is dominated by the overwhelming conviction that military instruments in such missions are secondary (for some even evil) and should better be used only for limited and tightly defined tasks.
The civil-military paradox has, therefore, a quite unique shape. A Swiss journalist remarked some years ago that Germany is the only power in the world which keeps armed forces in order not to make use of them. This is certainly a sarcastic exaggeration, despite having a true core. Opinion polls in Germany about civil-military relations usually reveal that the Bundeswehr is regarded with high respect. Non-military missions on a small scale are gladly supported. Military missions like the Afghanistan mission are, however, quite unpopular. The government and the military establishment often regard this discrepancy as a product of insufficient communication (also as a consequence of a non-military bias in the media). This is only partly correct.
For some authors this civil-military paradox is a typical ingredient of post-heroic societies. Other Western societies also display features of post-heroism but remain not so deeply guided by mistrust against the military aspects of what soldiers in modern armed forces are expected to do. Is Germany then a kind of advanced post-heroic society? The last seven or eight years of the Afghanistan engagement of the Bundeswehr amplified the public rejection of this kind of mission, but in turn deepened the disappointment of the German ISAF soldiers with the military leadership. Their anger is expressed in a wave of books and articles by Afghanistan veterans. It is noteworthy that the grievances of the soldiers are mainly put forward by the rank and file. On the ground in Afghanistan, the German soldiers had to struggle with many professional problems, deficits of the military equipment and list of instructions which curtailed their scope of actions (“caveats”) being the most visible one. In retrospect, it has become evident that the political and military leadership had no clear idea about the nature of the Afghanistan mission. The reason for this deplorable fact is not recklessness or strategic over-ambition but, on the contrary, a preference for what was thought to be politically correct – a preference for civil conflict management, possibly even conflict prevention and a complex, but mostly rhetoric “multidisciplinary” strategic approach. This approach was impressively put forward (albeit in vain) in the following passage of the White Paper on German Security Policy of 2006: “In the future, national preventive security measures will be premised on even closer integration of political, military, development policy, economic, humanitarian, policing and intelligence instruments for conflict prevention and crisis management. Operations at the international level will require a comprehensive, networked approach that effectively combines civilian and military instruments.”
The new military must be effective warriors, but at the same time also a kind of social worker in the jungles of weak states.
The notorious “Kunduz shock” of September 4, 2009 served as one of two crystallizers for an urgent reform of the Bundeswehr in order to make its soldiers more combat-ready. Because the public debate was centred around the Kunduz air strike, this reform did not stir much opposition in the public. Still, the predominant attitude of the German public when confronted with the question of a possible intervention of the Bundeswehr in conflicts like the ones in the Near East or the Ukraine is Bartleby-esque: better not. The second crystallizer was the Russian occupation of the Crimea and the politically sophisticated hybrid war in Eastern Ukraine. These events generated a reform of NATO’s strategic priorities which implied, among other, the increase of Germany’s military expenditure and a re-formulation of the Bundeswehr’s role within NATO. This is again a difficult and cumbersome change which will need not months, but years.
Conclusion
The German case is special, but some of its features can be found in other European countries. Do these considerations lead to a clear conclusion about the current state and the future development of civil-military relations in Western societies? A positive answer would be presumptuous. The differences in the politico-military cultures of the nations are serious and it is unwise to overlook them. On the other hand, globalization and the recent developments in the direction of war are equal challenges for all Western democracies.
These democracies can be described as post-heroic societies, some more so (like Germany), some less (like Great Britain and, less so, France). All of them have problems to convince the electorate to provide a bigger portion of the budget for the armed forces. The new many-facetted professionalism of the armed forces after the end of the mass army format is markedly different from the mainstream lifestyles in post-heroic societies.
This is, indeed, an indication for a widening gap between civil society and the military. So it may come as a surprise to learn from opinion polls, again and again, that the public has much respect for the armed forces. Evidently, the professional values of the soldiers, though clearly different from those in the civil world, are regarded as functional and acceptable.
In many of their new missions the armed forces have to increase both their military skills as soldiers and their non-military skills as diplomats on a local scale, mediators and communicators. War “among the people” implies best possible relations with the people under the circumstances of conflict and violence. The new military must be effective warriors, but at the same time also a kind of social worker in the jungles of weak states. Here, they cannot afford a broad civil-military gap.
The most acute aspect of this inquiry is what might be called (certainly a bit exaggerated) the out-of-sync situation with regards to the military and the political leadership. The loss of weight and influence of the military leadership within the governmental system, which decries the former French general Jean Cot, is probably not so much the consequence of a willful neglect of military advices on the part of civil government. It is primarily, I suppose, an expression of the new entanglement of military and civil aspects which currently dominate the security policies of Western democracies. Today, military advice at the top must be, like military practice on the ground, more so than in former times, substantially enriched by civil considerations. And the political leadership today must have, more than in former times, substantial expertise of military strategy. This is a challenge for both.
Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c. Wilfried Freiherr von Bredow (ret.) was a professor of political science at the University of Marburg from 1972 to 2009. He was research fellow and guest professor at Oxford, Toronto, Saskatchewan, Toulouse, Lille and Chiayi, Taiwan. From 2011 to 2018 he was a Faculty-Member of the Geneva Graduate School of Governance. Prof. von Bredow focuses on German foreign/security policy, military-society relations, transatlantic security policy and the international roles of Canada.