LOSS OF CIVILIAN CONTROL OF THE MILTARY RISKS MILITARISM AND ENDLESS

WAR
Andrew Bacevich, professor of international relations at Boston University, THE NEW
AMERICAN MILITARISM: HOW AREMERICANS ARE SEDUCED BY WAR, 2005, pp. 32-3
In fact, our present-dav military supremacy represents something quite different. All of this-seeing armed force as the
preeminent expression of state power and military institutions as the chief repositories of civic virtue, the expectation that
revolutionary advances in military technology might offer a tidy solution to complex problems, the outsourcing of
defense to a professional military elite, the erosion of civilian control-distorts if it does not altogether nullify important
elements of the American birthright. Recall that at the outset the New World was intended to be radically and profoundly
new. The vision of freedom animating the founders of seventeenth-century Anglo-America and of the eighteenth-century
American republic distinguished their purpose from that of the Old World, constantly embroiled in bloody disputes over
privilege and power. Princes, armies, and perpetual war defined Europe. The absence of these things was to provide a
point of departure for defining America. Determined to preserve their freedom and their experiment in popular self-
government, Americans knew instinctively that militarism was perhaps the foremost threat to their prospect of doing so.
Richard H. Kohn is Professor of History and Chair, Curriculum in Peace, War, and Defense at
the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, CIVIL-MILITARY RELATIONS IN THE
UNITED STATES TODAY, November 12, 2005, p.
http://web.mit.edu/ssp/seminars/wed_archives_05fall/kohn.htm.
One the oldest fears in civil military relations is militarism the displacement of civilian government by the military
and the imposition of military values, perspectives and ideals on the rest of society. This fear is rooted in the fear of
standing armies and embedded in the US Constitution. The word militarism was invented by European leftist opponents
of their government in the eighteen sixties. Militarism came to be seen in the United States as a threat to freedom and
democracy. The fear of militarism was articulated in academia and Congress in the nineteen thirties. In the United States,
this fear was expressed primarily toward internal problems, but after World War I, it was also seen as having caused
German aggression and thus as a force that created foreign threats.