It’s Time to Ditch Huntington
Samuel Huntington’s 1957 classic The Soldier and the State has guided military thought on civil-military relations for over half a century. Controversial in its time, his ideas continue to shape officers today. Is it any wonder that the US military has been unsuccessful in long-term counterinsurgencies since? All war is political; at its most straightforward, wars are organized violence to serve political ends. Like Anton-Henri Jomini wrote before him, Samuel Huntington tried to separate military operations from their political nature.
To poorly distill Huntington’s main ideas into a few sentences, he argued that “objective control” is the ideal state of civil-military relations. Huntington’s objective control is akin to a deal with the devil. It fosters an attitude that if politicians give the military autonomy, the military will leave the politicians alone. As Samuel J. Watson wrote, “No coup, no problem.” While that’s an overly simplistic distillation of the Huntingtonian ideal, it is a good summation of how officers tend to view civil-military relations.
Huntington’s antithesis, “subjective control,” involves politicians who are deeply involved in military affairs. Objective control requires a professional officer corps that can be given autonomy within a clearly defined military sphere. Army officers take his ideas to heart and believe that military officers should be given complete independence once the shooting happens. That there exists a separation between politics and war. Once unleashed, they should be given free rein to do as they must to achieve victory.
Nothing about the profession of arms could be more incorrect. If officers digested Clausewitz as much as they quote his most famous zinger – war is a continuation of politics by other means – then they would understand there is no separation. There exists no clearly defined military sphere. The political dimension has been much more critical than tactical operations in the ambiguous “low-intensity” counterinsurgency-type conflicts of the past twenty years. Risa Brooks has eloquently written, Huntington’s apolitical prescription encourages an officer corps that believes “engagement in debate about political considerations and political thinking in war are antithetical to the roles and responsibilities of a military professional.” Therein lies the problem, as war is politics, and to wage it well and win requires political considerations and thinking.
Congress has abdicated its constitutional role by giving such autonomy to define its mission and problem set to an organization that eschews all things political. As Huntington prescribes, autonomy creates a feedback loop where the military defines which missions it will perform, develops expertise, and creates solutions to the problems it defines within those missions. In demonstrating their hard-won expertise through self-created training and testing scenarios, the military then reinforces the idea that they had identified the correct solutions to the problem. Their preferred problem. Not the reality of the global environment.
This is where the US Army, my focus in this article, often “shirks” its duties. The Army chose its potential mission-set and had a very professional force well-prepared for that one mission type. The US Army excludes other mission sets by focusing on large-scale ground combat because multitasking takes away valuable resources from its fighting large-scale combat operations. Any other duties would distract from fighting and winning the nation’s wars. This deliberate decision is expected, as the service will ultimately focus on espoused institutional priorities, in this case, “sustained land combat to defeat enemy ground forces and seize, occupy, and defend land areas.” There is a long history of the Army preparing for the wars it wants to fight rather than the wars it is likely to fight.
The United States has failed to win protracted conflicts since 1945 due to its cultural inability to cross spheres of influence with civilian partners. This is thanks, in large part, to an institutional focus on Huntingtonian objective control.
The eschewing of all other duties besides “sustained land combat” was highly evident in the post-Vietnam era. General James McConville addressed this in his preface to the 2022 Field Manual 3-0, where he recognized the 1973 Arab-Israeli War as instrumental in refocusing the army away from messy counterinsurgency as in Vietnam, and on to large-scale operations then known as AirLand Battle and its subsequent success in Operation Desert Storm.
Yet the Army was ill-prepared for the insurgency that developed after the post-9/11 invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. It could occupy the terrain but was ill-prepared to do anything about it. It was not prepared for the complex counterinsurgency and nation-building tasks—diplomacy backed by the threat of force—that it found itself performing in Afghanistan and Iraq. This is true even though those two conflicts are what the US military has done most throughout its history.
In addition, the decades of Huntington have made politics such an undesirable topic and made being apolitical so idealized that anything involving the word politics is revolting to Army officers and has precluded the US from success in conflicts since. Huntingtonian separate spheres of influence preclude army officers from properly welding tactical gains with political ends because officers cannot fathom anything political. Rather than consider the difficult work of counterinsurgency, officers prefer to remain in their comfortable bubble of killing people and breaking things. This presents a danger of over-militarizing foreign policy when the military is relied upon to lead the way in strategy.
In the modern sense, this includes the US Army defining large-scale ground combat as its priority while failing to account for twenty years of failure in Iraq and Afghanistan. Rather than rectify that and deal with why the service failed to achieve national political goals, military leaders are much more comfortable washing their hands and moving on to the next—desired—threat. This decision is the direct result of the autonomy given by the Huntingtonian ideal, which has led to not only cherry-picking its mission but also a lack of accountability to Congress and, by proxy, the people.
Military leaders need to ditch the Samuel Huntington ideal and instead realize that they are an integral part of the political process. This is not a clarion call to ditch the idea of civilian control; no, that is a republican tradition that goes back (in the United States case) to George Washington and even further in global history. Washington is an excellent case study insofar as he was immersed in politics yet did not interfere and certainly did not place his or the military’s needs above that of the nascent independence movement. And still, the Continental Congress influenced many of his strategic decisions. Throughout the war, he had to consistently reinforce his subordination to civilian control while staving off mutineers frustrated with an ineffectual Congress. All while understanding that the war was political. The most important events of the war were, in fact, political—not tactical. Thanks to Huntington, officers today expect clear guidance so they can go ahead and execute their mission—this is antithetical to the political process, where officers must be prepared to discuss and debate with civilian leaders while providing their best military advice.
To be fair, the challenge of balancing military professionalism with civilian control affects all branches of the armed forces. I focus specifically on the U.S. Army based on my extensive firsthand experience through years of active service and later academic study of the institution. What’s particularly noteworthy is how uniformly the entire Department of Defense has embraced Huntington’s principles. This consensus stands in stark contrast to the frequent inter-service disputes over defense budget allocations, missile procurement, and the like.
The United States has failed to win protracted conflicts since 1945 due to its cultural inability to cross spheres of influence with civilian partners. This is thanks, in large part, to an institutional focus on Huntingtonian objective control. In focusing on the military sphere of influence, the Army has managed to maintain professionalism while placing the responsibility for losing wars at the feet of politicians. Army officers must understand the fluid nature of politics and war and understand themselves as political actors—which is not the same as being partisan. If the Army is to succeed in its next war, it’s time to ditch Huntington.
Disclaimer: The views presented in this article reflect the authors and do not reflect those of Army University Press, the Combined Arms Center, or the United States Army.
