Janowitz and Huntington—Better Together: A Response

Armed Forces & Society (AF&S) recently published an article on the continuing relevance of society founder Morris Janowitz’s seminal work The Professional Soldier (1960/2017). In their essay, Nielsen and Liebert (2020) argued that after American victory in the Cold War, students of civil–military relations and the profession of arms neglected important findings in Janowitz’s study. Prescriptions there would serve military officers well in this century, when the United States by some lights suffers declining resources to address a panoply of threats—from terrorist groups and unpredictable rogue states pursuing asymmetric means of attack to resurgence of great power competition amid a global pandemic.

According to the article, one factor in civilian decision makers and military advisers losing their way is the pernicious influence of Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington’s Soldier and the State (1957). Huntington’s ideal type for the “military mind” preceded publication of Janowtiz’s sociological survey by a few years. In his treatise, Huntington held out the promise of greater autonomy for the military services, that is, less interference from civilian politicians, if military officers conformed to type and maintained rigorous separation between their professional inputs and the political sphere.

Over six decades of U.S. defense and national security policy, military leaders grasped Huntington’s model and strived to follow it, emphasizing professionalization for rising officers and cultivating an ethos of staying apolitical through the topmost ranks. The harm, charged in the essay for AF&S, is that senior military advisers after World War II also developed tone deafness for novel, multidimensional threats confronting the United States. “Continuing Relevance of Janowitz” touched on a genuine concern, the bumbling of uniformed leaders when they are cast into the political spotlight, but the admonition to jettison Soldier and the State remains dubious. Better it would be to read Huntington and Janowitz together as evoking republican virtue among military professionals operating close to the heart of executive power in American democracy.

At the time of Janowitz’s Professional Soldier, the United States faced rapidly evolving national security challenges across a broad spectrum, from communist-inspired wars of national liberation in the developing world to nuclear-tipped intercontinental ballistic missile arsenals on both sides of the Cold War. In Janowitz’s so-called Fifth (and final) Hypothesis on adaptation of the military profession, he projected that senior officers at the top of their vocation, and at the nexus of national security decision making, were acquiring a sixth sense for anticipating consequences of their military operations—on foreign societies and on political dynamics in Washington, DC.

Janowitz did not think these new sensibilities would tempt the military to insubordination against their civilian masters. Nevertheless, civilian control would become more challenging as the military profession itself bifurcated among talented officers, some of whom insisted on organizing for absolute victory while more approached irregular warfare as pragmatists, deviating from old doctrine and inventing constabulary practices to protect foreign populations along with their fragile governments from communist insurgencies.

The AF&S article on the “Continuing Relevance of Janowitz” implied that the Fifth Hypothesis, the one that fused political sensibilities with military professionalism, applied equally to both absolutist and pragmatist officers. This is not, however, entirely clear. Officers who insisted in dedicating their energies to absolute victory after 1960, when it was clear that both the United States and the Soviet Union would build indestructible nuclear forces, were going the way of the dinosaurs precisely because they blithely went about their business, setting aside political implications of mutual assured destruction. In caricature, the aim of absolutist officers was to provide the American president with options for winning nuclear war. The political price, whether victory was worth it, was for politicians to weigh. Pragmatist officers directing counterinsurgency operations in Latin America or Southeast Asia, on the other hand, embraced the political consequences of their military action, making these central to their plans for saving friendly governments. Contra recent analysis, Janowitz’s Fifth Hypothesis on increasing political indoctrination of senior officers might not have applied equally across absolutist and pragmatist camps within the profession.

This dispute casts a shadow on the education policy recommendations from “Continuing Relevance of Janowitz.” Who are the descendants of absolutists and pragmatists in today’s officer corps? The United States confronts a terrorist threat against governments it supports in the greater Middle East and North Africa at the same time it responds to rising great power competition, including brandishing of nuclear weapons in Europe and East Asia. A constabulary force for maintaining political stability under law cannot address the latter challenge, so following Janowitz’s claim on political indoctrination of the officer corps of the 1960s must mean something different than promoting pragmatists ahead of absolutists to advise the civilians on today’s National Security Council.

In order to appreciate an alternative path emerging from Janowitz’s Fifth Hypothesis, it helps to reclaim Huntington from the wilderness. Janowitz and Huntington, after all, collaborated in founding the study of civil–military relations as a study of professions. While Janowitz indeed favored pragmatists, he need not be read as a fusionist, someone who denied a role for the conservative realist military ethic in the formulation of national policy. Huntington thanked Janowitz, then at the University of Michigan, for reading every word and commenting on the manuscript for Soldier and the State. In turn, when Janowitz in Professional Soldier cited Huntington, it was approvingly to confirm an analytic separation between military and civilian spheres.

Janowitz’s line separating absolutist from pragmatist officers clearly ran wholly within a viable military identity; it did not erase Huntington’s boundary distinguishing military from civilian. Janowitz welcomed the secular trend of more pragmatist officers reaching senior positions and greater influence as counselors for improved American foreign policy. Armed with sophisticated understanding of political consequences from military actions, in an age when escalation to major war was exceedingly dangerous for the state, pragmatists were likely to supply options that would carry the country closer to its political objectives, without having along the way to deliver absolute victory. This did not mean, however, that the new breed of military professionals would insist on competing directly with politicians for the privilege of directing foreign policy or, as Huntington put it, supplying political assumptions for themselves. It did mean political indoctrination, or education, ought to include habituation toward republican virtue.

“Continuing Relevance” quoted Huntington warning the military to remain apolitical and noted how Department of Defense guidance and uniformed officer mores reinforce the notion of a bright line separating military judgment from political questions. This interpretation clarifies and underlines opposition between Huntington and Janowitz, but it overlooks their rich collaboration and the persuasive subtlety of Huntington, once he established in Soldier and the State the military mind as a Weberian ideal type. Huntington, for example, was well aware that American separation of powers under the Constitution placed military chiefs of staff between the executive and Congress, that both political groups would try to pull professional expertise onto their side of partisan policy debates. “Complete silence before Congress or rigid adherence to the presidential line is no longer the proper behavior…” Rather than opposing Janowitz, Huntington argued that “maintenance of this pattern of behavior” to illuminate the proper path between speaking up before Congress or guarding silence (to avoid politicking against the commander in chief) required virtue, “mutual restraint and conscious cooperation of military man, legislator, and executive” (Huntington, 1957, pp. 416–418).

Moderation of all parties, especially on the part of apolitical senior officers, was necessary for uniformed professionals to meet their social responsibility. Such moderation restrained the officer from adopting the role of kingmaker, venturing to tilt the contest among civilian groups. It certainly did not enclose uniformed leaders in some fantastical bubble, inert to political considerations. From Huntington’s approving portrait of Army Chief of Staff Ridgway during Senate Appropriations Committee hearings on President Eisenhower’s austere New Look defense budget, the political education welcomed by Janowitz and touted by the recent AF&S article was required. Without it, Huntington’s socially responsible self-restraint and conscious professional cooperation with competing political entities—politicians from rival parties and both policy branches—could not be put into practice.

After the AF&S article on the “Continuing Relevance of Janowitz” was written, a mini-crisis of American civil–military relations erupted like a Washington, DC, thunderstorm in the late spring of 2020, illustrating the difference between caricatures and sophisticated interpretations of Huntington’s apolitical officers. During the protests for police reform and racial justice in June, major newspapers and expert blogs decried the use of Joint Chiefs Chairman Mark Milley in his Army Combat Uniform as a prop in a presidential photo-op near cleared Lafayette Square across from the White House. General Milley’s walk with the president, it was claimed, encouraged Americans to suspect the highest ranking military officer stood not with the commander in chief per se but with the Republican Party against political opponents in the Square peacefully assembled. As if on cue and within days, General Milley apologized for his poor judgment, telling officer graduates at National Defense University, Fort McNair, Washington, DC, that he had been wrong to appear with the president and that he learned an unforgettable lesson in preserving appropriate civil–military relations.

All this, the indictment for a mortal civil–military relations sin and subsequent contrition, aligned with purportedly obsolete prescriptions of Huntington that officers remain apart, steadfastly apolitical. On the other hand, it was orthogonal to Janowitz’s newly celebrated call for political indoctrination of the officer corps designed to lead rising professionals during the irregular warfare of the 1960s away from military science and single-minded pursuit of absolute victory, toward a heterodox constabulary force fit for maintaining stability in a complicated world (Travis, 2020).

Our analytical focus for what went wrong at Lafayette Square is sharper and the civil–military lessons clearer if we resolve what both Huntington and Janowitz wrote about military politics as being consistent with civic republicanism and political virtue (Roennfeldt, 2019). Janowitz hoped that more military officers at the top of their profession would understand political consequences—external and domestic—of their decisions, not to displace civilian strategists or thwart presidential judgment, but to find the proper path, under scrutiny of the media, of moderation in their dealings with the president and Congress. Conversely, balanced judgment and civil–military equilibrium treasured by Huntington would not obtain unless senior officers before Congress and the press could anticipate political implications of their behavior.

By the joint Huntington–Janowitz standard of political virtue, the military professional’s public apology for appearing with the president at Lafayette Square fell short of resolving the civil–military issue. Americans watching were left to wonder why the general did not know something “political” was happening as soon as he started walking with the president’s entourage. His mea culpa revealed lack of awareness (Janowitz’s political indoctrination) at the top of the officer corps about how things get done in Washington. Attentive graduates at National Defense University could also be forgiven for asking about the military sense of duty. What was the Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman intending to do for the country, emerging before the cameras in the square near St. John’s Church? The subsequent apology advanced no explanation, no historical appreciation of the long record on conditions under which U.S. Military and National Guard units responded to lawful orders and acted under the Constitution to restore domestic order. There was that day a legitimate military concern, at least the kernel of an argument that General Milley’s appearance at the damaged church was a nonviolent show of force, a warning against widespread rioting, looting, and vandalism, with the political purpose of avoiding resort to blunt use of force by the federal government in burning U.S. cities.

In any case, for senior officers navigating American civil–military relations with nonpartisan, objective control as their standard, political virtue—prized by both Huntington and Janowitz—is in ever-present demand. Military competence alloyed with political virtue rarely accompanies theatrical contrition or, for that matter, pedantic devotion to standing up and speaking out regardless of political implications. As might have been expected, elite opinion in this case processed the flat, cartoonish video apology as yet another faux pas. The tape provided unwitting political compensation, this time for Democrats in the form of rhetorical ammunition to lampoon the president. In light of the general’s penance, the civilian commander in chief appeared to have casually denigrated military prestige for a capricious political stunt.

Civil–military experts, the vast majority who instinctively oppose Huntington against Janowitz, pay scant attention to key planks on which they agree, including the contribution of an analytically distinct military mind, or military point of view, with capacity to enhance civilian approaches to national security challenges (Brooks, 2020; Cohen, 1997; Feaver, 1996; Popescu, 2019; Schiff 1995; Travis, 2017, 2019). The ideal of a military science that supplies critical information to political authority while remaining subordinate in the state’s discussion and formulation of foreign and defense policy is common to both schools. The concept of a profession with social responsibility that values at once autonomy and obedience to civilian authority demands commitment to a professional code. Because of the nature of the uniformed officers’ principal, the democracy they serve, this professional ethic so vital to balanced civil–military relations, for both Huntington and Janowitz, must be steeped in political virtue.

This moral quality, quintessentially republican and exemplified by General George Washington’s composure at Newburgh, NY, in 1783, has been discounted by authors who exclude it from Huntington’s apolitical soldier on the one hand or on the other Janowitz’s pragmatic constabulary force. The oversight is serious for students most interested in immediate policy—Huntington and Janowitz never forgot virtue in their classic works on perpetuation of the Republic. This alone warrants a cautionary comment on the AF&S article. “Continuing Relevance of Janowitz” is best understood when Professional Soldier (1960/2017) is read not as refutation but as an elaboration of ideal types, the starting blocks previously set out in Soldier and the State (1957). Taken in isolation, neither work offers a complete portrait of political virtue as it applies to the American officer. Huntington and Janowitz, on this score, are better together.