Nix, Dwayne. "American Civil-Military Relations: Samuel P. Huntington and the Political Dimensions of Military Professionalism." Naval War College Review, 65:2 (Spring 2012): 88-104.

Samuel P. Huntington died in December 2008, but this Harvard academic continues to have a significant impact on the conduct and state of American civil-military relations. Mackubin Owens’s recent US Civil-Military Relations after 9/11: Renegotiating the Civil-Military Bargain and Suzanne Nielsen and Don M. Snider’s 2009 edited work American Civil-Military Relations: The Soldier and the State in a New Era both challenge and contextualize Huntington’s work for contemporary theorists and practitioners of civil-military relations. This is indeed a worthwhile effort, as America’s civil-military relations have received much “airtime” over the past few years. General Stanley McChrystal’s seeming challenge to the political leadership over proposed Afghanistan troop levels, Lieutenant Colonel Andrew Milburn’s Joint Force Quarterly article challenging traditional conceptions of civilian control, and Bob Woodward’s revelations in Obama’s War regarding the 2009 tensions between the Pentagon and the administration over Afghanistan strategy highlight the relationship between the military and our civilian leaders while raising the issue of the military’s participation in political discourse. Do these instances point to “the troubled quality of American civil-military relations,” or do they serve as continuing proofs of the vitality inherent in the American constitutional system as created by the founders?

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