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Jefferson Memorial in Washington, DC (Courtesy J. Church)

It is not uncommon to hear the phrase “civil-military relations” used as shorthand for “subordination of the military to civilian authority.” Certainly, it is correct to state that one of the hallmarks of healthy democracies is that their militaries are, in fact, subordinated to the control of civilian authority. However, to merely equate the two notions would be a bit like stating “to be a child” equals “to be legally subordinate to a parent.” While that is also true, it completely ignores the reality that “childhood” is intricately connected at many points with the warp and woof of the social fabric more generally, and not just to parent(s)—hence, the now-famous African proverb that “It takes a village to raise a child.” In this respect, the civil-military relationship is strikingly similar in that the idea of “subordination of the military to civilian authority” is by no means descriptive of the whole of the military-civil relationship. This relationship exists not only between the military and the duly elected representatives of the body politic—representatives who are here today and gone tomorrow—but also more profoundly between the military and the body politic itself, of which the duly-elected authority is a part and to which, in healthy democracies, both the military and the duly-elected authority are themselves ultimately subordinate.

Thomas Hobbes and British Precedent

Subordination of military to civil authority is a heritage from well-established British precedent, the most comprehensive philosophical treatment of which comes from Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan or The Matter, Forme and Power of a Commonwealth Ecclesiasticall and Civil—known more commonly as simply Leviathan, published in England in 1651.1 In addition to this work’s holding a secure place in the canon of political-philosophical literature, it is also distinguished for having what is perhaps the most famous frontispiece of any book in the English language (see figure 1). Of the many fascinating features of this frontispiece, the one of greatest present interest is the human-appearing giant—the sovereign power of government—which holds in one hand the sword, symbolic of the temporal power, and in the other hand the crosier, symbolic of the spiritual power. At first blush, one might not think it extraordinary that a state like England, with an established church, should understand the convergence of these two powers in the person of this sovereign giant. However, a close inspection reveals that only the giant’s head is that of a single person. Its torso is composed of many, many persons representing the body politic, without which the giant itself is powerless—for the concept of “government” is meaningless without the “governed.”

Figure 1. Frontispiece of Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes

Engraving by Abraham Bosse; originally published by Andrew Crooke, 1651 (Courtesy British Library)

The fact that government and governed form a cohesive whole is not insignificant. Rather, it points to Leviathan’s central proposition: a social contract which, according to Hobbes, binds together the sovereign power and the body politic as a single polity, and under the terms of which each member of the body politic effectively surrenders the right of self-government to a sovereign power in exchange for the sovereign’s protection, both from external invasion and from domestic disturbance of the peace. As Hobbes argues, this contract is not merely one among many ways to form a state that secures the safety, security, and tranquility of all parties, it is the only way:

The only way to erect such a Common Power, as may be able to defend them [of the body politic] from the invasion of Forraigners, and the injuries of one another . . . is, to conferre all their power and strength upon one Man, or upon one Assembly of men, that may . . . Act, or cause to be Acted, in those things which concerne the Common Peace and Safetie . . .This is more than Consent, or Concord; it is a reall Unitie of them all, in one and the same Person, made by Covenant of every man with every man, in such manner, as if every man should say to every man, “I Authorise and give up my Right of Governing my selfe, to this Man, or to this Assembly of men, on this condition, that thou give up thy Right to him, and Authorise all his Actions in like manner.” This done, the Multitude so united in one Person, is called a COMMON-WEALTH, in latine CIVITAS.²

While the formula for the covenant itself may appear only to obligate the governed, it also obligates the sovereign:

And because the End of this Institution [that is, the covenant by which commonwealth is established], is the Peace and Defence of them all. . . ; it belongeth of Right, to whatsoever Man, or Assembly that hath the Soveraignty . . . to do whatsoever he shall think necessary to be done, both beforehand, for the preserving of Peace and Security, by prevention of discord at home and Hostility from abroad; and, when Peace and Security are lost, for the recovery of the same.³

Hence, the covenant entails a bond of moral obligation that, on the one part, binds each member of the body politic to render obedient submission to the sovereign power acting on behalf of them all and, on the other part, binds the sovereign power to guarantee the security of the body politic from both internal and external threats. With respect to the latter, the sovereign power maintains the exclusive “Right of making Warre, and Peace with other Nations, and Common-wealths; that is to say, of Judging when it is for the publique good, and how great forces are to be assembled, armed, and payd for that end; and to levy mony upon the Subjects, to defray the expenses thereof.”⁴ In addition to organizing such armed forces and appointing its officers, the sovereign retains the right of supreme command; for regardless even of “whosoever is made Generall of an Army, he that hath the Soveraign Power is alwayes Generallissimo”_⁵—that is to say, “the supreme general of all the generals”—or, as came to by styled in the American system, “commander-in-chief.”

Thus, Hobbes highlights the first principle essential to understanding the true nature of the civil-military relationship, namely, that the sovereign power retains ultimate political control over the entire defense apparatus regardless of whomever else it may appoint to fight a war. In other words, the military is, by definition and necessity, strictly subordinated to the sovereign political authority. However, one should also take care to note several principles which are implicit, but no less essential, in Hobbes’s explanation.

The body politic is bound to the sovereign power to provide both wealth and manpower to enable the defense of the commonwealth, and there is only one source from which these means can come, namely, from the body politic itself. Thus, those persons who undertake, or are enjoined, to protect the commonwealth come from among the very people who surrendered to the sovereign power the right of self-government in exchange for the sovereign power’s protection. Thus, in a twist of irony, these protectors must forfeit their own protection (and possibly their own lives)—the very things the sovereign power guarantees to defend in exchange for the right of government—as guarantors, under the sovereign, of the protection of all the other members of the commonwealth. The military must, therefore, not only render complete allegiance to the sovereign but also demonstrate complete reliability to the members of the commonwealth they protect and complete fidelity to one another. Thus, the commonwealth becomes united in interlocking bonds of moral obligation—the people toward the military and the sovereign, the military toward the sovereign and the people, and the sovereign toward the military and the people:

• The people must render obedience and surrender the right of the conduct of war to the sovereign and must render support to the military by providing the essential wherewithal for its successful accomplishment of purpose; and, when called upon by sovereign or circumstance, they must actually participate in the defense of the commonwealth.
• The military must faithfully execute the commands of the sovereign and willingly sacrifice as necessary to ensure the protection of the people.
• The sovereign must direct the military in such a way as to guarantee insofar as humanly possible the defense of the people and must honor the service of those sworn, under the sovereign, to their defense by not wantonly jeopardizing their safety and well-being beyond the demands of exigent circumstances.

In sum, it is these interlocking bonds of moral obligation among the body politic, military, and the sovereign power—and not the mere subordination of military to civil authority—that constitute the true essence and nature of the civil-military relationship. When this true nature is understood, a much richer conception of that relationship presents itself in ways that otherwise would elude, and indeed impoverish, the understanding of what may well be the most sacred of all political interactions. This is an ancient understanding that did not begin with Hobbes or even in Britain. In fact, important and unmistakable traces of the true nature of this relationship can be found throughout the history of the Western intellectual tradition, as the following examples illustrate.

Plato’s Ideal Republic

In The Republic, Plato, speaking by the mouth of Socrates, offers a model (figure 2) for the ideal commonwealth. Its tripartite division resembles, in remarkable degree, Hobbes’s description of the properly ordered commonwealth. The people at large (or as Socrates styles them, the “craftsmen”) constitute the economic engine of society and are, in many ways, the prime object of the commonwealth’s defense. The “auxiliaries” are the members of the warrior class, which defend both the “craftsmen” and the “rulers.” The “rulers”—and in particular, a “philosopher king,” is responsible for the administration of the affairs of state and, implicitly, for direction of the commonwealth’s defense.

Foundational to Socrates’s design is the idea that each segment of the republic must function in a complementary way. To that end, each of the four Cardinal Virtues of antiquity—wisdom, courage, justice, and temperance—play prominent roles in the republic’s proper functioning. Wisdom, or sophia (σοφία) in the Greek, is the distinguishing feature of rulers.٦ It includes such meanings that can be translated into English as “clever,” “skillful,” “intelligent,” or “wise”; but it also suggests the ability to discern the appropriate course of action to be taken in a given situation and at the appropriate time, with consideration of potential consequences. Courage, or andreía (ἀνδρεία), is the distinguishing feature of the auxiliaries. It can connote a wide variety of associated traits such as bravery, boldness, valor, daring, forbearance, strength, endurance, patience, perseverance, dedication, and the ability to confront fear, uncertainty, and intimidation. The rulers and the auxiliaries, operating in concert, are bound by a special distinction: “Guardians of the State”; for, without the wise direction of the rulers and the manifest courage of the auxiliaries, the defense of the commonwealth simply would not be possible.

However, that is not the only bond which enables the security of the republic. The bonds between “craftsmen” and “rulers” and between “craftsmen” and “auxiliaries” also deserve specific attention; for, without the “craftsmen” neither the rulers nor the warrior class could function. Moreover, without them and the more general population of citizens they represent, there would not be anything to defend.

Figure 2. The Socratic Model of the State

A still more thoughtful inspection of Socrates’s model reveals yet a more subtly manifest but no less essential bond, characterized by the remaining two ancient Cardinal Virtues of justice and temperance. “Justice” is actually an inadequate translation for the original Greek word, dikaiosýnē (δικαιοσύνη), which seeks to convey a much more profound meaning than merely giving one his or her due—although it comprehends that meaning as well. It also conveys the notion of equity of character or action; impartiality; fairness. In the New Testament, it translates into English as “righteousness” before God or in interactions with one’s fellow human beings or, indeed, the “fulfilment of the law”⁷—meaning the divine law. “Temperance,” or sōphrosýnē (σωφροσύνη), includes such notions as restraint, self-control, discretion, moderation, the ability to avoid unnecessary belligerence, “knowing the right amount,” and so forth. Plato considered temperance to be the most important virtue. Both justice and temperance are essential qualities of a well-ordered republic. In figure 3, justice and temperance may be understood as the red dotted lines that form interlocking bonds of moral obligation. These illustrate, as in Leviathan, that the civil-military relationship—far from being merely subordination of the latter to the former—is in reality a subsidiary part of much more extensive bonds of trust that bind each societal component to the two others such that, if any portion of the bond is weakened (or worse, broken), the security of the whole republic is placed in jeopardy. These interlocking bonds of moral obligation include not only wise administration and oversight by rulers and courageous action by war fighters but also each societal segment reliably performing its proper function (that is, justice), and each performing its proper function in proper measure or degree (that is, temperance). Properly understood, the ultimate aim of these bonds of moral obligation is something more than the present security of the state; it is the realization of what the ancient Greeks referred to as eudaemonia (εὐδαιμονία)—human flourishing, the highest form of human societal existence—in short, happiness. It is eudaemonia—essentially that state that the American Founders had in mind when they identified life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness as those intrinsic goods for the security of which governments are instituted in the first instance.⁸ Once again, therefore, the civil-military relationship manifests itself as something far more expansive than merely the subordination of warfighters to rulers. It is, rather, an indispensable part—but only a part—of the comprehensive moral bond that binds citizens, sovereign, and military.

Figure 3. The Medieval Latin-Western Social Model

The Medieval Western State

After the fall of the Roman Empire in late antiquity, as the church became the unifying element of otherwise fragmented European society, the kingdoms and principalities of the Latin-speaking West found themselves organized in ways that mimicked earlier tripartite divisions. In broadest terms, these societies were divided into three principal segments, each of which received oversight from a sovereign: those who produced, those who fought, and those who prayed (figure 3). The people at large—those who produced—constituted, as in previous generations, the very raison d’être and the sine qua non of the state. However, their safety and continuity required not only the intercessory prayers of the clergy but also security guarantees (of the kind that Hobbes describes) from the political sovereign as God’s lieutenant upon the earth. However, the sovereign could only make good on those guarantees through the instrumentality of those who fought (which, in practice, was often the repurposing, in varying degrees of formality, of a segment of those who produced). Of course, in the temporarily (often seasonally) formalized role as subjects sworn to serve as the sovereign’s warfighting instrumentalities, the strict subordination of military to sovereign continued to be as important as ever. Nevertheless, the temporary conversion of producers to fighters did nothing to negate the importance of the other equally interlocking societal bonds. For, without temporal sustenance, the battle was lost; without spiritual sustenance (in the medieval world view), eternal salvation was placed in jeopardy if not lost altogether.

Figure 4. Clausewitz’s “Paradoxical Trinity”: First Formulation

Clausewitz and the Modern State

Surprising as it may be, Carl von Clausewitz provides, even if not intentionally, an important perspective which further illuminates the nature of the civil-military relationship as something far more comprehensive than the simple notion of subordination would suggest.

Key to any study of Clausewitz is the realization that Clausewitz’s aim is strictly descriptive—a statement of how things actually are and by nature actually must be, rather than prescriptive—a statement of how one might wish things to be. The latter is simply nonsensical from a Clausewitzian perspective; for although war’s character may change, its nature is immutable and always consists of three invariables: “primordial violence, hatred, and enmity”; “the play of chance and probability”; and war’s “element of subordination as an instrument of policy.”⁹ This first formulation of what he refers to as a “paradoxical trinity” (figure 4) accentuates the essential tendencies of the actors in the trinity (which he identifies in a second formulation) and not the actors themselves.¹⁰ That it is a trinity is evident in the tripartite nature of his formulation. However, why it is “paradoxical” (Clausewitz himself never explains why) deserves additional consideration.

The Contemplation of Justice by James Earle Fraser, installed in 1935, sits on west side of U.S. Supreme Court building (Courtesy Matt H. Wade))

Violence, hatred, and enmity can, and often do, exist in the lives of many individuals as well as in many human interactions without any connection to the institution of war. War, or the threat of war, is only one of many instruments of national power, along with those instruments found under the diplomatic, informational, economic, financial, intelligence-related, and legal elements of national power—all of which (and not just the capacity to wage war) are subordinate to the political authority in the well-ordered state. Violent human interaction, wherever it occurs, is ultimately subject to invisible forces manifested in “the play of chance and probability” that can never be fully anticipated, accounted for, or prepared against. Wherever these three paradoxes—or perhaps more correctly, paradoxical tendencies, since their proportions may change although their aggregated effect does not—may manifest themselves, they are always present in the institution of war. “These three tendencies,” according to Clausewitz, “are like three different codes of law, deep-rooted in their subject and yet variable in their relationship to one another,” such that a “theory that ignores any one of them or seeks to fix an arbitrary relationship between them would conflict with reality to such an extent that for this reason alone it would be totally useless.”¹¹ The task, therefore, becomes one of developing “a theory that maintains a balance between these three tendencies, like an object suspended between three magnets.”¹² This brings us to Clausewitz’s second formulation (figure 5).

Here one can see Clausewitz’s general identification of these three paradoxical tendencies with the three societal elements already encountered in Hobbes, Plato, and in the Medieval Latin-Western world construct, namely, “the people,” “the commander and his army,” and the sovereign power (styled by Clausewitz as “the government”). Clausewitz has already made unmistakably plain the subordinate relationship of military to government. However, to focus on this aspect of the military at the expense of all other relational aspects would be to miss Clausewitz’s far more important point: As necessary a component as subordination of military to civil is to his theory, the tripartite nature of the dynamism that must exist among people, military, and sovereign is even more important; for without this dynamism the institution of war would not only be hobbled, it could not, in fact, even exist. The government and the military crucially interact with respect to political direction for the war on the one hand and with respect to miliary advice for its conduct on the other.

But that interaction is manifestly only one-third of Clausewitz’s overall formulation. It also crucially includes interaction between the military and the people in terms of moral support for the war on the one hand (to include that support being realized in the form of popular “hatred and enmity” for the perceived or actual enemies of the state) and the provision by the people of human capital and other wherewithal to the commander and army on the other. It equally crucially includes popular support for the government and the ability of the government to rally the people. Thus, although subordination of military to government is essential, it is insufficient to understand the true extent of the civil-military relationship: Remove any of these three components from the civil-military relationship and the entire warmaking project of the state collapses.

Conclusion

History is replete with evidence in support of this claim. In living memory, dramatic examples from the American experience in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq illustrate what happens when the bonds of moral obligation between people and military, people and government, and military and government are frayed or broken. Each illustrates that to understand “civil-military relations” merely in their narrow and all-too-parochial construal as the subordination of those who wear uniforms to those who wear business suits in the nation’s capital altogether misunderstands the far broader societal dynamics at play—dynamics which tie the people to the sovereign authority and to their military, the military to the people and to the sovereign authority, and the sovereign authority to the military and the people.

That tripartite dynamic is itself the civil-military relationship properly understood. Moreover, it is a relationship founded on mutually supporting bonds of moral obligation. Each party in the relationship both must act and be perceived as acting in good faith with respect to the other two parties. That is the fundamental requirement of any contract or covenant, nonperformance of which renders the whole null and void. In the end, no amount of subordination of military to the sovereign authority—essential though it be to a healthy democracy—can fully express the much broader extent of the tripartite civil-military relationship of which subordination alone is merely a component. JFQ

Notes

¹ The author is indebted to Professor David C. Arnold, National War College, National Defense University, for this observation.

² Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan [1651] (London: Penguin Books, 1985), 227. Original spelling and grammar preserved in this and all subsequent references to Leviathan.

³ Hobbes, 232, 233.

⁴ Hobbes, 234, 235.

⁵ Hobbes, 235.

⁶ For this and subsequent references to ancient Greek definitions, see, for example, “Eulexis-web,” Outils Biblissima, n.d., https://outils.biblissima.fr/en/eulexis-web/index.php.

⁷ See, for example, LXX Isaiah 26:2, https://www.septuagint.bible/-/hesaias-kephalaio-26) and Matthew 3:15, https://biblehub.com/text/matthew/3-15.htm, where δικαιοσύνην is regularly rendered in English as “righteousness.”

⁸ Declaration of Independence: A Transcription [July 4, 1776] (Washington, DC: National Archives and Records Administration), https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/declaration-transcript.

⁹ Carl von Clausewitz, On War, trans. Michael Howard and Peter Paret (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976), 89.

¹⁰ Clausewitz.

¹¹ Clausewitz.

¹² Clausewitz.