An Agency Theory Explanation of American Civil-Military Relations during the Cold War
Peter Feaver
Abstract
The question of how to secure civilian control over a standing army without enfeebling national security was one of the two or three central issues preoccupying the original framers of the U.S. Constitution. Despite its prominence in the constitutional debates of the time, however, the issue received scant scholarly attention for the first 150 years of the American Republic. Perhaps it was thought that the Constitutional framework solved the problem; or perhaps the luxury of distance from the endless cycle of European conflicts, which permitted a relatively tiny professional army, allowed civilian society to largely ignore military policy except for the brief spasms of war. Whatever the reason, the trauma of World War II and the seemingly permanent contest with the Soviet Union that followed occasioned the first wave of systematic study of American civil-military relations. The theory of American civil-military relations, for better or for worse, is largely a creation of the Cold War. And the two great theorists who did the most to establish the field, Samuel Huntington and Morris Janowitz, conceived of their projects as ways to solve problems arising out of the Cold War.
It is not surprising, therefore, that the end of the Cold War has produced something of a crisis in both the practice and the study of American civil-military relations. The practical crisis, epitomized in the extraordinary level of civil-military friction, has received ample discussion elsewhere. The practical crisis has also highlighted what might be called a theoretical crisis: the lack of significant conceptual progress in the theoretical tools used to explain American civil-military relations. What is needed is a deductively grounded, empirically plausible alternative to Huntington and Janowitz.
This paper is excerpted from a larger book manuscript, Agency, Oversight and Civil-Military Relations, which advances precisely this kind of theoretical framework. In that manuscript, the deductive framework of agency theory is developed at length and the simple game theoretic model utilized here is introduced. The book also devotes considerable energy in critiquing the established theories, especially Huntington’s own interpretation of the Cold War. This preparation is necessary context for the argument presented here, but for considerations of space I will only cover them lightly in this paper.
This paper proceeds as follows. I briefly sketch the empirical puzzle raised by Huntington’s theory of American civil-military relations. I introduce the basic workings of the agency model, an alternative way of conceptualizing civilmilitary interactions. The bulk of the paper consists of applying the model to the Cold War case. This involves first mapping the Cold War experience onto one of the outcomes identified by the agency model, characterizing the nature of civil-military relations in agency terms. Next I use the model to generate hypotheses linking the observed civil-military outcome and other factors affecting the relationship including the costs of civilian monitoring and the likelihood that military misbehavior will be punished. Finally, evidence supporting the hypotheses is presented and evaluated.