No Right to Be Wrong
What Americans Think about Civil-Military Relations
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 6319481 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Ronald R Krebs (0000-0001-6504-060X, University of Cambridge), Robert Ralston (0000-0002-4470-1242, University of Cambridge), Aaron Rapport (0000-0001-9787-8685, University of Cambridge) |
| Year | 2023 |
| Volume | 21 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 606-624 |
| Publication date | 2023-06-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Perspectives on Politics (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1537-5927 • E-ISSN: 1541-0986 |
| Publisher | Cambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1017/s1537592721000013 |
| OpenAlex | W3136112471 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 36 |
| References cited | 50 |
An influential model of democratic civil-military relations insists that civilian politicians and officials, accountable to the public, have “the right to be wrong” about the use of force: they, not senior military officers, decide when force will be used and set military strategy. While polls have routinely asked about Americans’ trust in the military, they have rarely probed deeply into Americans’ views of civil-military relations. We report and analyze the results of a June 2019 survey that yields two important, and troubling, findings. First, Americans do not accept the basic premises of democratic civil-military relations. They are extraordinarily deferential to the military’s judgment regarding when to use military force, and they are comfortable with high-ranking officers intervening in public debates over policy. Second, in this polarized age, Americans’ views of civil-military relations are not immune to partisanship. Consequently, with their man in the Oval Office in June 2019, Republicans—who, as political conservatives, might be expected to be more deferential to the military—were actually less so. And Democrats, similarly putting ideology aside, wanted the military to act as a check on a president they abhorred. The stakes are high: democracy is weakened when civilians relinquish their “right to be wrong
Civil–military relations · Democracy · Ideology · Military relations · Military science · Military theory · Military threat · Political science · Politics · Defense, Military, and Policy Studies · Gender, Security, and Conflict · Law · Military and Defense Studies
Deafening Whisper
No Time to Explain
Return to Sender
Delusions and Grandeur
Missing in Faction
The Domestic Sources of Grand Strategy
That Fair and Warlike Form
Dangerous Instrument
Civilian control and casualty sensitivity in a pacifist democracy
Parameters Autumn 2021
The Politics of Restraint in the Middle East
The Military and the Election
Mistrusted to Serve? Discrimination in the Military and Its Impact on Public Support
Bargaining with the Military
The national security state and the uses of militarism
Polarization, casualty sensitivity, and military operations
A “journey to trust” for AI
Why civilians don’t defer to military preferences about cyber strategy like they do for other domains
Calling out the Troops to Manage Environmental and Health Crises in Australia
Is There a Public–Military Gap in the United States? Evaluating Foundational Foreign Policy Beliefs
National Guard Command Authority and the Black Lives Matter Protests of 2020
Does the military lose public confidence without compliance with civilian control? Experimental evidence from Japan
Military Experience and Casualty Sensitivity in Elite Discourse
You and Whose Army? How Civilian Leaders Leverage the Military’s Prestige to Shape Public Opinion
Polarization versus professionalism
Do Soldiers Get a Say? Soldiers’ Views and Public Support for Military Operations in Four Democracies
Armies and Influence
Why They Fight
Lottocracy or psephocracy? Democracy, elections, and random selection
The Soldier in the State
Urban-Rural Differences in Respect for the Norms of American Civil-Military Relations
Leaders but Not Authorities? Gender, Veterans, and Messages about National Security
Citizenship Traditions and Cultures of Military Service
Right or Wrong? the Civil-Military Problematique and Armed Forces & Society'S 50th
Civil-Military Relations
Measuring the unique effect of pro-military messaging on American public health behavior during Covid-19
Soldiers and Civilians
Supreme Command
Shaping Strategy
Civilian Control of the Military
Political Institutions and Military Change
The Market for Force
Armed Servants
Explaining Conservative Beliefs and Political Preferences
The New American Militarism
Man on Horseback; the Role of the Military in Politics
The Ethics of Deference
The Oxford Handbook of International Security
Our Army
Maneuvers
Validating the demographic, political, psychological, and experimental results obtained from a new source of online survey respondents
Are the reluctant warriors out of control? Why the U.S. military is averse to responding to post‐cold war low‐level threats
What do we do now? Examining civilian masculinity/ies in contemporary liberal civil-military relations
Revisiting Hiroshima in Iran
A School for the Nation? How Military Service Does Not Build Nations, and How It Might
The Right to Be Right
Paradoxes of Professionalism
Political Institutions and Military Change
Party, Politics and Deciding What Is Proper
Gaining Trust While Losing Wars
Dissent and Strategic Leadership of the Military Professions
The Perils of Politics
Soldiers, Statesmen, and Cold War Crises
The Generation of Trust
Self-Interest Well Understood”
Partisan Dimensions of Confidence in the U.S. Military, 1973–2016
The soldier and the state
On the Varieties of National Attachment
Not Just a War Theory
Integrating the Civil–Military Relations Subfield
Civil-Military Relations
Are Patriots Bigots? An Inquiry into the Vices of In‐Group Pride
The Reconstruction of Patriotism
Civil-Military Relations Reconsidered
Civil Supremacy over the Military
Patriotism or Paychecks
The Virtues of Military Politics
Elite Military Cues and Public Opinion About the Use of Military Force
Wearing Politics on Their Sleeves
The Citizen-Soldier Tradition in the United States
Theories of Democratic Civil-Military Relations
| Unique citing works | 36 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 7,2 |
| Citation span | 2021 - 2026 (6) |
| Citation velocity | current |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 36 |