How Civilian Control May Breed the Use of Force

This article is about a puzzle: strong civilian control of the military may promote the use of force not lessen it. Existing theories about civil–military relations and militarism do not adequately resolve this puzzle because they neglect the link between civilian control and the legitimacy to use force. The argument here is that an increase in the civilian control of the military may promote the use of force by legitimizing it under specific cumulative conditions: the existence of a previous militaristic infrastructure in the civilian political culture, which is triggered by an external event, and is augmented by three mechanisms deriving from civilian control that increase the legitimacy of using force by reducing deliberative decision-making. These three mechanisms are: (1) the depoliticization of the military caused by reinforcing civilian control, so the professional opinion of the military reigns supreme; (2) the militarization by inflating threats and setting ambitious war goals to remove such threats, which balances out the aversion to sacrifice for war that civilian control produces; and (3) the transition produced by civilian control to a volunteer, technology-intensive, downsized military that reduces the stake of citizens in military policies. The plausibility of this argument is explored by reference to the cases of the United States, Israel, and Russia.