The Military Role in International Relations

Military participation in major international negotiations, whether bilateral talks or large international conferences, has been steadily increasing over the past few years. In the 1950s and '60s, apart from such directly combat-related diplomatic activity as the Panmunjom armistice talks or the periodic crises over access to West Berlin, military officers seldom ventured further into international diplomacy than to conduct base rights negotiations or work out a military assistance package. The 1970s, by contrast, have seen the military assume active roles in such major international negotiations as the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT) and the Law of the Sea Conference. Base rights negotiations have become major political events in their own right, as in the case of the recent treaties with Spain, Panama, and the ongoing talks over the status of Micronesia .

These changes have pushed the military professional into a new and difficult role. A great deal has been written about the soldier-statesman, but much less notice has been given to the soldier-negotiator, aside from accounts of the diplomatic experiences of such atypical figures as General George C. Marshall or Walter Bedell Smith. Military participation at the staff level as a normal element in the diplomatic process is a relatively new phenomenon, and one that deserves closer attention than it has yet received.

The question is how best to integrate the specialized expertise of the military officer, with his own bureaucratic and professional concerns, into the complex and delicate process of international negotiations. The subject is of interest because all the usual questions of civil-military relations recur with new complications introduced by the diplomatic environment.

The inclusion of military staff officers as a significant part of a negotiating team did not come about by accident. In SALT I it was recognized from the first that the professional expertise of the military was essential. Despite the Strangelovian overtones of some of the analyses, such matters as weapons effects or the balance of strategic forces could not be left out of account.¹ Similarly, the military took the lead in U.S oceans policy; U.S. Navy and Air Force concern over shrinking operating rights heavily flavored the American position in the early sessions of the Law of the Sea negotiations.²

The intrusion of the military into affairs normally left to civilian policymakers grew out of the realization that if the legitimate though specialized concerns of the military were excluded from the policy process, the result would inevitably be bad policy--just as if marine biologists were excluded from involvement when drawing up a position on fisheries regulation. The real danger, however, was not that flawed positions might result but that the nonspecialists would not realize that they were flawed. A delegation could thus easily find itself committed to a seemingly plausible position which was in fact unrealistic, or which might work against the national interest, despite the best intentions of its sponsors.

Military participation in international negotiations has therefore generally been accepted as a requirement of the situation, though with varying degrees of enthusiasm on both sides of the civil-military divide. The hard questions have been about how the military should proceed to fill the new role. Recent experience has raised many new problems for both sets of participants.

The first difficulty encountered is that when dealing with experts of whatever persuasion, once one has intruded on the specialist's domain, the expert tends to take over. While critics exaggerate the degree to which military participation in policymaking automatically leads to military dominance of policy, there is some basis for their concern, as was shown by the, early prominence of military factors in shaping the American law of the seas positions previously cited, or by the U.S. willingness to subordinate concern for human rights to the need for military alliances and foreign bases.

The layman faces much the same problem when dealing with a doctor, a plumber, or any other specialist. This is not necessarily a bad arrangement--few advocate do-it-yourself brain surgery--but a note of skepticism remains a necessary part of the policymaker's equipment. As the old adage has it, you don't ask the barber whether you need a haircut.

The problem is highlighted by a necessary distinction between direct and indirect influence on policy. Direct military influence on policy flows through formal and explicit recommendations or derives from control over operations. Indirect influence stems from the military's ability to shape the premises and provide the critical information on which civilian decisions are made. Direct military influence on policy has declined since its peak during World War II, when the military virtually ran U.S. foreign policy. Paradoxically, indirect influence has tended to grow over the same period. Military factors largely defined the Cold War environment, giving military experts significant policy leverage, even though civilians were making the final decisions.³

The situation brings to mind C. P. Snow's warnings about the danger of placing scientists in sensitive political positions. While modern governments cannot afford to do without senior scientific advisors, a respected scientist speaking from a policy position can introduce an aura of bogus infallibility to the decision-making process. It is worth repeating Lord Snow's point that the problem exists independently of the professional ability of the individual in question. In fact, the higher his professional reputation, the more difficult it becomes to argue effectively against his policy recommendations.⁴ As former Secretary of State Dean Rusk- commented in the context of SALT, the "problem for the policy officer is to know whether a scientist is speaking as a scientist or a politician."⁵ It is a distinction which one suspects even the scientist is often hard-pressed to make.A second difficulty the military staff has to resolve when functioning as part of a diplomatic mission is that of conflicting loyalties. The sense of responsibilities to the individual military service or bureaucratic agency is often more concrete than the concept of the national interest, especially when the latter is still being formulated. The main task of the negotiating team, however, is often precisely to determine just what the national interest is or requires in a particular diplomatic context. The temptation is thus to define national interest largely in terms of subordinate bureaucratic interests.

The desire to defend service autonomy can even be justified by reference to the principle of civilian control of the military. From the military perspective, civilian control is often interpreted along the lines of an old-fashioned division of spheres of influence. While usually content to let civilians make their own choices, the military is almost universally resentful of any perceived nonreciprocity, i.e., civilians telling them how to run their show.⁶

A corollary to this outlook, which is common to all parts of the bureaucracy and not just the military, is that U.S. military participants in diplomatic negotiations occasionally find themselves in the uncomfortable position of having more in common with, say, British or even Soviet military counterparts than with their own civilian representatives. On issues such as narrow territorial waters or a freer hand to test new strategic weapons, higher political authorities in London, Moscow, and Washington may all be leaning in one direction, while their respective military staffs incline toward the other. This is simply one aspect of the growing importance of transnational relations, not particularly different from the international confraternity of central bankers, who have for decades made common cause against the free-spending ways of their respective higher authorities.⁷

The third problem that military staffs encountered as they began operating in the diplomatic arena stems from the fact that defining the rules of the game is not the same as playing it. While player involvement may be helpful when making the rules, the players must function in radically different fashion when doing so than when battling it out on the field. Although it would be going too far to say that all diplomatic activity is of a rule-setting nature, the major diplomatic negotiations of the recent past have certainly had a large element of this about them. The Law of the Sea negotiations are an effort to draw up a constitution for the world’s ocean space and the air space above it. The 1976 base rights negotiations with Spain resulted in a complex treaty which, with its supplements and annexes, frames the whole range of U.S.-Spanish bilateral relations. The SALT agreements are likewise efforts to set the terms and outer limits of allowable strategic competition between the two major powers.The problem of defining limits is complicated by the fact that it is never neutral to the outcome of the game. Expanding or contracting the arena invariably favors one player over another.⁸ The essence of the limit-setting debate is political, though all sides use the technical issues to shore up their political and strategic biases.⁹ This was the reason why SALT could not be left to the technicians, though that was the initial impulse. The magnitude of the task exceeded the competence of a bureaucracy split among specialized interests; and what is true of SALT applies to other negotiations as well.

Beyond these three general issues—relating experts to the policy process, bureaucratic parochialism, and the special constraints of international negotiations as limit-setting exercises—certain attitudes that may have some survival value in the Pentagon produce less positive results when carried over to a diplomatic delegation. The tendency of any bureaucracy is to hedge against those irrational or unpredictable elements that cannot be satisfactorily handled by its standard routines. In the case of the military, this is most often done by overconservative force estimates and worst-cast analysis, neither of which is particularly helpful, for example, when engaged in realistic arms limitations negotiations. Moreover, within the bureaucracy "facts" often derive their salience from their usefulness in advancing one’s case. SALT I showed that military staffs are not above an advocacy that relies on occasional rigging of the assumptions or manipulation of data to favor the case that one believes correct, usually from the best of motives. This is not so much a matter of duplicity as a reflection of the truth of one observer’s lament: "Advocacy, alas, often relies on a stiff dose of self-deception."¹⁰

Finally, the military component of a U.S. delegation is likely to feel that its main job is to keep civilian policymakers from formulating agreements whose net effect would be to diminish military control over factors in the international environment which the military considers important. The closer these factors impinge on actual military operations, the more inclined the military is to veto changes. This was particularly evident in the Law of the Sea meetings, where freedom of transit over the high seas, through international air space, and across international straits were major agenda items.

The net results of these attitudes tends to be a conservative drag on policy innovation. Samuel P. Huntington has dubbed the distinctive outlook of the military profession in international politics as "conservative real-ism," though heads of delegations have been known to come up with more colorful phrases to describe it.¹¹ Tactically, senior civilian officials faced with this dislike of new departures tend to react by retaining all the important decisions in their own hands, sometimes not even informing lower level officials of significant changes in policy. Or they may resort to an equally unfortunate tendency to overcontrol, the senior civilian officials taking sweeping personal charge; the military come to feel their role has been preempted by amateurs at the higher reaches of power.¹² Neither approach particularly enhances the conduct of American diplomacy.

Before attempting to evaluate recent experience in this field, one should note that the changing role military officers play in diplomatic negotiations reflects wider changes in the nature of international relations. According to the earlier, realist school of thought, international politics were characterized by three broad assumptions: (1) states act as coherent units and are the chief figures in world politics; (2) international relations are in essence a series of power struggles, in which force or the threat of force is the policy instrument of ultimate effect; and (3) international political issues fall into a natural hierarchy, with the quest for military security dominating questions of economic or social adjustments between societies.¹³

Increasingly, however, U .S. policymakers find themselves confronting a different environment today. In the present international situation, multiple channels connect governments, usually complementing though sometimes competing with the single, senior "official" channel, as in the multifaceted Law of the Sea negotiations. Second, the U.S. Government is committed to many important relationships in which the threat of military force is not a significant element through our numerous bilateral ties to friends, allies, and trading partners abroad. Third, contemporary international agenda are more comprehensive in the range of issues covered and more characterized by the lack of clear priorities than in the past. Even the broad strategic balance defined in SALT I and II is only a part of a larger U.S. -Soviet dialogue that includes such diverse matters as patent and copyright arrangements, joint space ventures, and long-term wheat sales.

This does not mean that force has ceased to matter in international relations, by any means. Drastic changes in economic or political conditions could once again lead to major or minor war. As Soviet activities in the Horn of Africa and Cuban incursions in Angola and Zaire remind us, military leverage remains a popular way to seek political ends short of war. But the changed role of force in contemporary international relations does complicate the integration of military and political considerations, for both the substance of policy and the process by which it is formulated.

The field of international relations has grown looser, broader, and more diffuse than it used to be. Traditional points of contact between nations have become centers of multiple informal networks. Less than a fifth of American officials in diplomatic posts abroad are State Department representatives, according to one estimate; the other 80 percent are scattered among several dozen U.S. Government agencies.^l4 Almost every major Washington department or agency has developed "miniature foreign offices, " usually headed by an Assistant Secretary for International Affairs (or variously, International Security Affairs, International Labor Affairs, etc.), to handle its particular interests in the international arena. There are no less than six separate staffs in the Pentagon directly concerned with foreign policy, with a combined budget and manpower exceeding that of the State Department itself.¹⁵

Like the expanded scope of international negotiations, the proliferation of intergovernmental organizations since World War II has speeded the erosion of traditional "single-channel" bilateral diplomacy. As a current survey concludes, we need to think of international relations less in terms of institutions and more as "clusters of intergovernmental and transgovernmental networks associated with the formal institutions."¹⁶

One of the chief lessons that can be gleaned from our experience with military participation in international affairs to date is that in this new environment the professional military officer has moved far beyond the role of a simple "manager of violence." As force loses its relative preeminence, so does the direct importance of the military manager of force; but as force retains its absolute importance, the military professional cannot afford to ignore those political factors that condition its use and likely results.¹⁷

There has been a growing feeling in some quarters that military participation in international relations is an unwarranted incursion that can only lead to the militarization of U.S. foreign policy. As one writer recently put it, "The most important institutional step that can now be taken to reestablish a proper balance between military and nonmilitary considerations in foreign policy would be to substantially reduce the role of military men in the policy formulation process."¹⁸ The argument that it is not up to the military to integrate nonmilitary factors into policy recommendations, however, is something of an oversimplification. In most instances the distinction between military and nonmilitary factors, like the boundaries between policy and policy advice, is not so clear-cut as to permit that neat a separation.

Nor will it suffice to invoke the spectre of a militarized foreign policy, since senior military advisors are not demonstrably more hawkish than their civilian counterparts. A recent survey of all major Cold War decisions in which the use of force was considered concluded that "The stereotype of a belligerent chorus of generals and admirals intimidating a pacific civilian establishment" is simply not supported by the evidence.¹⁹

The theoretical basis advanced for excluding the military from sensitive foreign policy matters is that civilian officials are more accountable to the people, through the democratic process. Whatever the validity of this as a general proposition, another of the lessons to emerge from recent experience is that bureaucrats are bureaucrats whether in uniform or out, and all follow their own bureaucratic bent. There is little difference in accountability between the usual civilian and military participants in any major international negotiation. Though the channels of accountability may show minor variations, a ranking foreign service officer is hardly more subject to higher authority than an army colonel, and an ambassador is not less accountable than the head of a unified command; nor is there any real difference in accountability at the senior levels, say as between the Secretary of State, the Secretary of Defense, or the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.The feeling against military participation in international negotiations is not confined to civilians. Some military officers still believe they can safely ignore what the striped pants set" is up to, though few display such indifference when the international community begins to impose restraints on their activities. Often those restraints are indeed unsafe, unwise, and motivated chiefly by extraneous political concerns that make little real sense to anyone.

Yet simple impatience on the part of the military is a shortsighted reaction. Whether the development is welcome or not, more and more matters of concern to military operations are coming under the purview of international agreements—the impact of the Law of the Sea negotiations on shrinking international air space and seaways is only one of the more pressing examples.²⁰ A more constructive approach on the part of the military is to accept the need for continued involvement in the diplomatic process through which the new consensus is hammered out.

In highly institutionalized societies, defining the relationship of civilian leaders to senior military professionals is often a complicated problem. Though only a variant on the old conundrum of how to integrate the generalist and the specialist, in the case of civil-military relations, as Huntington points out, the integration acquires a special urgency from the vital nature of the common task (ultimately, assuring national survival) and from the prominent influence the military wields in most modern governments. He suggests that the correct formula is to maintain the differences between the military profession and the civilian society around it, while minimizing the distance between the two.²¹

To accomplish this linkage in the specific context of international negotiations requires chiefly that both sets of parties accept the need for it. Continued educational opportunities for career officers in programs and institutions that will acquaint them in depth with the full range of international policy issues is thus a clear necessity, especially as they move toward the higher ranks.²² But education alone is only half the story; the other vital means by which Huntington's difference/ distance formula can effectively be implemented is for military officers to continue to share in the policy formulation process, both in Washington and at the scene of international negotiations.

John E. Lawyer, Jr., (A.B. and M.P.A., Harvard University; Ph.D., Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University) is Associate Professor of Political Science, Bethel College, Saint Paul, Minnesota. As an Air Force officer, he served as navigator in the United States and the Mediterranean area, logging some 2500 flying hours. As a civilian, he has been assigned to the Office of the Secretary of Defense (International Security Affairs) as country director for Spain, Portugal, and Malta. He is a regular guest lecturer in international political-military affairs at the University of Minnesota. Dr. Lawyer is a previous contributor to the Review.

The conclusions and opinions expressed in this document are those of the author cultivated in the freedom of expression, academic environment of Air University. They do not reflect the official position of the U.S. Government, Department of Defense, the United States Air Force or the Air University.

Air & Space Power Home Page | Feedback? Email the Editor