Beyond Huntington - US Military Professionalism Today
Beyond Huntington - US Military Professionalism Today
Beyond Huntington - US Military Professionalism Today
Volume 51 Article 8
Number 1 Parameters 51(1) Spring 2021
Spring 3-2-2021
Part of the Defense and Security Studies Commons, Military History Commons, Military, War, and
Peace Commons, and the National Security Law Commons
Recommended Citation
Risa Brooks, "Beyond Huntington: US Military Professionalism Today," Parameters 51, no. 1 (2021),
doi:10.55540/0031-1723.3036.
This Article is brought to you for free and open access by USAWC Press. It has been accepted for inclusion in The
US Army War College Quarterly: Parameters by an authorized editor of USAWC Press.
Prospectives 2021: US Civil-Military
Relations
Beyond Huntington: US Military
Professionalism Today
Risa Brooks
©2021 Risa Brooks
Concept of Professionalism
Before delving into a discussion of Huntington’s approach to
professionalism, it is useful to consider the origins of the concept. The
notion of professionalism originated with social scientists in the late
nineteenth century to describe a distinctive form of organizing work
among those with specialized knowledge such as the law, medicine,
and clergy. Broadly understood, professions are granted autonomy
contingent on maintaining the trust of the society they serve; their
members cultivate expertise and acquire knowledge within a community
of experts who share a commitment to common values and ethical
principles. The concept has been applied to the profession of arms since
the late nineteenth century, although its meaning and usage has varied.
Historically the emergence of professional militaries was often
associated with changes in military organization and recruitment. For
example, the professionalization of European armies commonly refers
to the end of the practice in the late nineteenth century of selecting
and promoting officers based on social class and the purchase of
commissions, in favor of the adoption of meritocratic criteria. The
concept of a professional military is also used to describe one maintained
largely through career military personnel versus one primarily built
of conscripts. Globally the professionalization of militaries may be
associated with improved training and the adoption of technically
sophisticated equipment, standardization of merit-based recruitment
and promotion practices, the routinization of organizational processes,
and increasing specialization within the organization.4
Today, however, military professionalism in the United States
is an encompassing concept comprised of skill and organizational
attributes as well as ideational components. A professional military
acquires expertise and masters a body of knowledge, but it also aspires
to uphold particular values and embody particular principles of action
Norms of Professionalism
While many scholars might agree on the core attributes of military
professionalism, especially the need for ongoing education and
expertise, no single conceptualization of the professional ethic exists;
what constitutes an appropriate normative construct for professionalism
has long been debated by historians and social scientists who study the
military.9 There are different ways of understanding the core principles
to which a military officer should adhere and articulating the essential
elements of professionalism.10
Nonetheless, Huntington’s approach is arguably the dominant one
within the US military today.11 As noted above, according to Huntington
the military and civilian leadership spheres must remain separate.
The military focuses on cultivating its expertise in the management
of violence, free from interference by civilian authority; the military
leadership then abstains from engagement in the civilian world of politics
and policy. Isolated from society and focused on cultivating its expertise,
5. Don M. Snider, “The U.S. Army as Profession,” in The Future of the Army Profession: Revised
and Expanded, 2nd ed., ed. Don M. Snider and Lloyd J. Matthews (Boston: McGraw-Hill Education,
2002), 14; Don M. Snider, “Will Army 2025 Be a Military Profession?” Parameters 45, no. 4 (Winter
2015–16): 39–51; and Nathan K. Finney and Tyrell O. Mayfield, ed., Redefining the Modern Military: The
Intersection of Profession and Ethics (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2018).
6. Theo Farrell, “World Culture and Military Power,” Security Studies 14, no. 3 (2005): 455.
7. Sophie Legros and Beniamino Cislaghi, “Mapping the Social-Norms Literature: An Overview
of Reviews,” Perspectives on Psychological Science 15, no. 1 (2020): 62–80.
8. Theo Farrell and Terry Terriff, “The Sources of Military Change: Culture, Politics,
Technology,” in The Sources of Military Change: Culture, Politics, Technology, ed. Theo Farrell and Terry
Terriff (Boulder, CO: Lynne Reinner, 2002), 7.
9. Ronald Spector, Professors of War: The Naval War College and the Development of the Naval
Profession (Honolulu, HI: University Press of the Pacific, 2005).
10. Morris Janowitz, The Professional Soldier: A Social and Political Portrait (New York: Free Press,
1960); and Sam C. Sarkesian and Robert E. Connor Jr., The US Military Profession into the Twenty-First
Century: War, Peace and Politics (London: Frank Cass, 1999).
11. Huntington, Soldier and the State; Risa Brooks, “Paradoxes of Professionalism: Rethinking
Civil-Military Relations in the United States,” International Security 44, no. 4, (Spring 2020): 7–44; and
Risa Brooks, “The Paradoxes of Huntingtonian Professionalism,” in Reconsidering American Civil-
Military Relations: The Military, Society, Politics, and Modern War, ed. Lionel Beehner, Risa Brooks, and
Daniel Maurer (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020).
68 Parameters 51(1) Spring 2021
Civilian Control
Prevailing norms may first have some unconstructive consequences
for military leaders’ relationship to civilian leaders and practices
of civilian control in the United States. To see this point it is helpful
to consider what civilian control encompasses. The concept can be
construed narrowly to refer primarily to the exercise of authority—
to political leaders’ power to make decisions. Consequently by this
definition, as long as civilians are giving orders and military leaders are
following them, civilian control is observed.
Yet while the authority to give orders and have them followed is
an essential feature of civilian control, this decision-making authority
is not sufficient to allow civilian leaders to realize their objectives.
Civil-military relations must be organized in a manner that supports
civilian needs in advisory processes and interactions with military
commanders. This arrangement helps ensure the policy or strategy
preferences held by civilians, who are making these decisions on behalf
of the electorate, prevail.
For civilians to control effectively, or more aptly, shape military
policy and activity in conformity with their larger political objectives,
the structure and character of those processes must conform to their
needs and proclivities in policy making and strategic assessment. As
Janine Davidson cogently argues, civilians may require a nonlinear and
fluid process that simultaneously considers both political goals and
resources; assessing goals may be best accomplished from a civilian
leader’s perspective inductively and in tandem with consideration of
military means.21 That is, when weighing the utility of using the military,
civilians are searching for a theory for how force might (or might not)
advance some acceptable political outcome—an outcome they may not
have arrived at before engaging military leaders in an advisory capacity.
Yet the current norms of professionalism do not prepare officers well
for these demands and roles in strategic assessment. The Huntingtonian
model supports a modal understanding of the military’s role in advisory
processes at odds with an inductive and dialectal process for the
integration of ends and means.22 Rather such a model leads military
officers to expect definitive guidance and then respond in a potentially
iterative but inherently transactional process. That transactional concept,
based on the idea there are inviolable boundaries between military and
political domains, is inherent in Huntingtonian professionalism.
To be sure the fluidity with which civilians may desire military
leaders to speculate on military options may not always be feasible given
the challenges inherent in planning for complex military operations.
Civilian leaders also need to work to understand military constraints
21. Janine Davidson, “The Contemporary Presidency: Civil-Military Friction and Presidential
Decision Making: Explaining the Broken Dialogue,” Presidential Studies Quarterly 43, No. 1 (March
2013): 129–45.
22. Davidson, “Contemporary Presidency.”
Prospectives 2021: US Civil-Military Relations Brooks 71
23. Tami Davis Biddle, Strategy and Grand Strategy: What Students and Practitioners Need to
Know (Carlisle, PA: Strategic Studies Institute, 2015), 8, https://press.armywarcollege.edu
/monographs/430.pdf.
24. R. D. Hooker Jr. and Joseph J. Collins, “From the Chairman: An Interview with Martin E.
Dempsey,” Joint Force Quarterly 78, no. 3 (July 2015): 2–13.
25. Tami Davis Biddle, “ ‘Making Sense of the Long Wars’ – Advice to the US Army,” Parameters
46, no. 1 (Spring 2016): 9.
26. Davidson, “Contemporary Presidency,” 131.
27. Huntington, Soldier and the State, 77.
28. Janowitz, The Professional Soldier; and Tony Ingesson, “When the Military Profession Isn’t,”
in Redefining the Modern Military: The Intersection of Profession and Ethics, ed. Nathan K. Finney and
Tyrell O. Mayfield (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2018).
72 Parameters 51(1) Spring 2021
29. Heidi Urben, “Party, Politics and Deciding What Is Proper: Army Officers’ Attitudes after
Two Long Wars,” Orbis 57, no. 3 (Summer 2013): 360.
30. Urben, “Deciding What Is Proper,” 360.
31. James Fallows, “The Tragedy of the American Military,” Atlantic 315, no. 1 (January/
February 2015): 72–90; Kori N. Schake and Jim Mattis, eds., Warriors & Citizens: American Views of
Our Military (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 2016); and Peter D. Feaver and Richard H.
Kohn, eds., Soldiers and Civilians: The Civil-Military Gap and American National Society (Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 2001).
32. Phil Klay, “The Warrior at the Mall,” New York Times, April 14, 2018, https://www.nytimes
.com/2018/04/14/opinion/sunday/the-warrior-at-the-mall.html.
33. Headquarters, US Department of the Army (HQDA), The Army Profession, Army Doctrine
Reference Publication 1 (Washington, DC: HQDA, June 2015), 7-4, https://fas.org/irp/doddir
/army/adrp1.pdf.
34. Thomas E. Ricks, “The Widening Gap between the Military and Society,” Atlantic 280, no. 1
(July 1997): 66–76.
Prospectives 2021: US Civil-Military Relations Brooks 73
35. Feaver and Kohn, Soldiers and Civilians; and Schake and Mattis, Warriors and Citizens.
36. Gregory Foster, “Civil-Military Relations on Trial: Through the Eyes of Tomorrow’s US
Military Leaders,” RUSI Journal 161, no. 4 (2016): 34–41.
37. Amy Schafer, “Generations of War: The Rise of the Warrior Caste and the All-Volunteer
Force,” Center for a New American Security, May 8, 2017, https://www.cnas.org/publications
/reports/generations-of-war.
38. Feaver and Kohn, Soldiers and Civilians; and Heidi A. Urben, “Civil-Military Relations in a
Time of War: Party, Politics, and the Profession of Arms,” PhD diss., Georgetown University, 2010.
39. Russell F. Weigley, “The American Military and the Principle of Civilian Control from
McClellan to Powell,” Special issue, Journal of Military History, 57, no. 5 (October 1993).
40. James Burk, “Theories of Democratic Civil-Military Relations,” Armed Forces & Society 29,
no. 1 (October 2002): 7–29.
41. Huntington, Soldier and the State, 465–66.
74 Parameters 51(1) Spring 2021
42. David Barno, “Dave Barno’s Top 10 Tasks for General Dempsey, the New Army
Chief of Staff,” Foreign Policy, January 21, 2011, https://foreignpolicy.com/2011/01/21
/dave-barnos-top-10-tasks-for-general-dempsey-the-new-army-chief-of-staff/.
43. Celestino Perez Jr., “Errors in Strategic Thinking: Anti-Politics and the Macro Bias,” Joint
Force Quarterly 81, no. 2 (2016): 10–18.
44. See Frank G. Hoffman, “Dereliction of Duty Redux?: Post–Iraq American Civil-Military
Relations,” Orbis 52, no. 2 (2008): 217–35; Mackubin Thomas Owens, “Civil-Military Relations,”
Oxford Research Encyclopedia of International Studies (website), https://oxfordre.com
/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780190846626.001.0001/acrefore-9780190846626-e-123, November 30,
2017; Hew Strachan, “Strategy or Alibi? Obama, McChrystal and the Operational Level of War,”
Survival 52, no. 5 (October 2010); and Carnes Lord, “On Military Professionalism and Civilian
Control,” Joint Force Quarterly 78 (3rd Quarter 2015): 70–74.
45. Sarkesian and Connor, US Military Profession, 180.
Prospectives 2021: US Civil-Military Relations Brooks 75
Conclusion
If the prevailing conception of military professionalism is flawed,
what should be done? First it would be helpful to reconsider the
way current norms of professionalism conceive of a military officer’s
relationship to politics. The current approach lumps a variety of
phenomena together. Particular forms of political activism or
engagement in partisan activity during elections are problematic and
should be proscribed. But to be a good strategist and participant in
strategic assessment, a military officer must think about and engage in
politics.
Moreover political acumen is required to keep oneself out of partisan
politics. An officer needs to understand him or herself as a (potential)
political actor to know best how to minimize his or her impact on political
outcomes. Sarkesian, writing in 1981, said it well: “Political knowledge,
political interests, and awareness are not the same as political action and
bipartisan politics. Indeed the more of the former, the less likely that
military men [and women] will develop the latter.”50 In other words it
is time to leave behind the reflexive and encompassing call for officers
to remain apolitical for a more constructive understanding of how they
might best engage with politics and political thinking.
Second, it may be helpful to move beyond the separation-of-spheres
conception of civil-military relations. On many levels the notion that
there are clear and constant spheres of political versus military activity
is flawed.51 Rather than seeing their roles and responsibilities as fixed,
officers might be encouraged to view political and military calculations
and roles as fluid—varying with a given situation and as often
intersecting. This is especially important at the strategic level where
politics and military considerations are by their very nature intertwined.
Finally, it may be time to address the military side of the civil-military
gap. More work must be done to address attitudes of disparagement
of civilian society, civilian politics, and civilian leadership. That such
attitudes are apparently pervasive is a troubling feature of the culture of
50. Sam C. Sarkesian, “Military Professionalism and Civil-Military Relations in the West,”
International Political Science Review 2, no. 3 (1981): 293.
51. Cohen, Supreme Command.
Prospectives 2021: US Civil-Military Relations Brooks 77