Damon Coletta

Civilian Monitoring of U.S. Military Operations in the Information Age

Recent research on U.S. civil-military relations has applied principal-agent logic to analyze the post-cold war friction between civilian authorities and top military commanders. This article proposes a greater emphasis on bargaining to focus on the effects of new monitoring technologies available to the civilian principal in the information age. As monitoring capabilities increase and military agents perceive their autonomy disappearing, tacit bargaining over the president’s level of resource commitment to a crisis should become more prevalent. This idea receives support from a comparison across case studies of the limited use of force taken from different technological eras. A new style of civil-military bargaining presents both challenges and opportunities to the traditional conception of military professionalism.

Courage in the Service of Virtue The Case of General Shinseki's Testimony before the Iraq War

Army Chief of Staff Eric Shinseki testified to the Senate Armed Services Committee before Operation Iraqi Freedom that several hundred thousand American Army soldiers were needed to occupy Iraq following a successful completion of the war. In hindsight, after many postwar problems occurred during Army and Marine efforts to stabilize Iraq, General Shinsekis action has been almost universally praised as prescient and courageous. This article counters that, from a civil-military relations perspective, Shinsekis testimony was neither sufficiently accurate nor sufficiently respectful of civilian control to serve as a healthy model for future officers. The U.S. civil-military relationship framed by the 1986 Goldwater-Nichols Act, which preserved the power of individual service chiefs to provide independent testimony, is better served when high-ranking officers adopt a notion of courage in light of military authority delegated to regional combatant commands and in consideration of the political vulnerabilities of their civilian masters.

Principal-agent theory in complex operations

Originally developed for identifying costs of coordination between labor and management in economics, principal-agent theory challenged traditional explanations for friction in political relations, especially in a democracy, between elected officials and the permanent bureaucracy. Not without controversy, the approach recasts democratic civil–military relations, featuring as agent a unique, military ‘bureaucrat’ refining goals of the state, a role normally assigned to the principal. At the same time, principal-agent applications reached international institutions as a collective actor in their own right. Drawing from civil–military relations and international institutions, this article poses still greater expansion for principal-agent dynamics. Principal-agent theory offers significant promise in complex international operations mixing inter-state, state, sub-state, and nongovernmental organizations because it clearly delineates culturally bounded normative arguments from resource-based logics; it also suggests moves such as building flexible membership institutions ahead of time to improve cooperation among international actors during the next crisis.

NATO from Kabul to Earth Orbit: Can the Alliance Cope?

It is widely acknowledged that NATO has multiple rationales. What is more contestable is the view that the burgeoning complexity of the security environment feeds these rationales and that NATO may not be able to cope. If each rationale is like a personality, then NATO’s multiple personalities have a corrosive effect on the Alliance since they prevent it from setting consistent goals and pursuing them. The prescribed cure is a clarified personality that emphasises one rationale at the expense of others. This paper questions the metaphor behind this debate. NATO’s multiple rationales are built into the Alliance, we argue, and a better metaphor may be NATO as a congress whose members are independent yet tied to an overarching political project. Such a congress will never be unitary, but it can at times make decisions. Sometimes decision-making will require grand and thus elusive bargains; sometimes it can be moved from formal committees to backroom caucuses that eschew big questions of rationale and instead focus on problem-solving. In any case, congresses can cope with persistent, competing preference orderings and divergent resource bases among constituent states. Where the split personality analogy leads to the collapse of NATO as a coherent actor, the congress metaphor affords better notional explanations for what we actually observe, a messy, raucous alliance that muddles through from Kabul to Earth orbit.

Venezuelan Civil-Military Relations as a Coordinate System

Venezuela, one of few Latin American countries that did not have to democratize during the Third Wave, veered hardest to the left at the turn of the century. Now, this country, despite its democratic tradition, apparently has most to fear with respect to continued civilian control of the military. This article shows how Venezuela’s democracia pactada (democracy-by-pact) and its Bolivarian Revolution both permitted fusing of military with political power across policy areas. However, the emergence of a coordinate system for civilian control of the military protects Hugo Chávez even as it places certain constraints on the anti-American president. Moreover, this form of civilian control matches elements of the U.S. example. Accurate description, or coding, of Venezuela opens an avenue for improved military-to-military relations, which could, in turn, lay the foundation for constructive U.S.-Venezuelan engagement in the Western Hemisphere.

Space and Deterrence

Regardless of whether the United States decides to extend deployment of its weaponry beyond land, sea, and air to the medium of outer space, military dependence on assets stationed between low Earth orbit and geosynchronous orbit for communication, navigation, and surveillance will likely remain high. Deterrence as a strategy to protect these assets carries with it the risk that a crisis over satellites will escalate out of control. Nevertheless, when evaluated against other options on the agenda—such as space control and space avoidance—it is the only strategy for which the United States is currently equipped militarily and politically. In order to mitigate the downsides of deterrence, in particular to stave off a decision that would require disproportionate retaliation, the new United States Administration is likely to mix in tactical elements of control and avoidance. These elements, however, will not subvert deterrence as a core strategy, nor will they obviate uncomfortable and undemocratic compromises that have marked deterrence since the Cold War.

Book Review: Dempsey, J. K. (2010). Our Army: Soldiers, Politics, and American Civil-Military Relations. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press

In a recent New York Times editorial, columnist David Brooks remarked on dramatic change in U.S. Army thinking since the institution entered the crucible of postwar stabilization operations in Iraq. Much of the innovation, he judged, came from officers below or barely into the generals’ rank. This cohort had an amazing capacity to lead ‘‘with two minds’’—one steeped in army tradition while the other peered from a critical distance. The latter perch came after long labors, under a different set of mores, inside the Ivory Tower. Indeed, this group of Army officers formed a kind of human bridge between West Point, the war experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan, and prestigious graduate programs in history and social sciences across academe—among them the University of North Carolina, Ohio State, Oxford, Harvard, Princeton, Cornell, Stanford, and now Columbia. Army Lieutenant Colonel Jason Dempsey makes his mark in the scholarly literature as others in this Army group have. David Petraeus, H. R. McMaster, and Christopher Gibson all distinguished themselves with dissertations in the arena of civil-military relations. Dempsey, however, takes a truly unique approach in Our Army. For him, the question of civilian control under American democracy rests heavily on political socialization of individuals at all ranks within the armed forces. It is safe to say that most readers of the literature on American civil-military relations are familiar with the informed speculation of Samuel Huntington and Morris Janowitz on professional military attitudes. At the same time, few are experts on the process of political socialization. Here, Dempsey is at his best, reconstructing the entire U.S. Army as a political entity, step-by-step. Building beyond the anecdotes of journalist Thomas Ricks and the limited public opinion surveys of the Triangle Institute of Security Studies, Dempsey adds analysis of an impressive 2004 ‘‘Citizenship and Service’’ survey that he helped design (Our Army, Appendix A). As Peter Feaver’s important book, Armed Servants, applied contemporary public administration scholarship from the subfield of American Politics, Dempsey clarifies how modern techniques measuring political socialization from this same subfield can be used to compare the army against the civilian sector. Dempsey’s first seven chapters progress from classic attitudinal questions on economic, social, and foreign policy issues— mirrored in perennial polls and national election surveys; through indicators of ideological affiliation; party identification; and finally forms of conventional participation. Dempsey presents his data and the results in rigorous, innovative fashion without being obtuse. For example, he creates a ‘‘Virtual Army’’ and ‘‘Virtual Officer Corps’’ out of the general National Annenberg Election Survey as a concrete way of distinguishing between army institutional effects on political behavior and the influence of demographic factors such as income, education, race, and gender, which in nature differ substantially between army and civilian populations.

The Perilous Gulf between National Space Strategy and International Security

In his article on ‘‘Space and Strategy: A Conceptual versus Policy Analysis,’’ James Clay Moltz lays out four criteria for evaluating national space strategy. Such a strategy needs to articulate an overarching purpose for the use of space; it needs to account for the response of other actors in the global system; it must heed the financial constraints imposed by increasing concern over the national debt; and finally, it must meet the threshold of environmental sustainability. These recommendations make a good deal of sense, especially when one considers that the legacy documents of National Space Policy under some critical interpretations do not score particularly well against such requirements. It remains to be seen how the Obama Administration’s new National Space Policy of 28 June 2010, in the context of national security and federal budget crises, will employ Moltz’s leitmotif (‘‘guiding motif’’) of strategic restraint in the pursuit of national interest. Even if eminently rational, however, strategic restraint involves risks, both at the level of meeting international threats and parrying the opposition in domestic politics. In order to work, strategic finesse has to be executed meticulously well. With this small margin for error in mind, two areas of tension in Moltz’s article merit greater attention: (1) the difference between technology-based and geopolitical strategy; and (2) the difference between national strategy and international security. On the first issue, it is remarkable that the essay derives its space strategy principles from an analysis of U.S. nuclear strategy while its history of attempts at space strategy, particularly on the academic side, largely refers to space as a