Policy and System in Defense: The Australian Case

1963 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 236-261
Author(s):  
B. B. Schaffer
Keyword(s):  
Political Science ◽  
Policy Making ◽  
Defense Policy ◽  
Civil Military Relations ◽  
Australian Case ◽  
Military Relations ◽  
And Control

Defense policy and civil-military relations are now well established fields for political science. They raise problems that are important and exciting in their own right and as dramatic instances of general institutional problems of policy-making and control. Comparative and particular aspects of this field should be appreciated. What are the special characteristics of the Australian type of situation?

Cyber Operations, Legal Secrecy, and Civil-Military Relations

2020 ◽  
pp. 245-262
Author(s):  
Dakota S. Rudesill
Keyword(s):  
Decision Process ◽  
Low Cost ◽  
Decision Processes ◽  
Cyber Warfare ◽  
Civil Military Relations ◽  
Military Commanders ◽  
Conventional Weapons ◽  
Planning Decision ◽  
Military Relations ◽  
And Control

What civil-military challenges will arise from the virtual world of cyber warfare? Congress and the president have grown increasingly comfortable with permissive grants of authorities and decentralized delegations—including via classified documents with legal force (secret law)—, allowing military commanders to operationalize cyber tools in both defensive and offensive modes with greater ease and frequency. These cyber tools are unusually complex in their variety, design, and potential uses, at least relative to more traditional and conventional weapons. Their technical attributes render them difficult to monitor and regulate because those responsible for decisions to use such weapons—civilian officials—are often least likely to have experience or familiarity with them. The relatively low-cost, rapid-effect nature of cyberwar also encourages not just use in armed conflict, but also below the standard threshold of war. Cyber operations initiated without careful inter-agency planning, decision process, and presidential review drive up operational risk and undermine civil-military norms. To foster more effective civilian oversight and control of the nation’s military’s cyber sword, and to encourage more deliberative application of ever-evolving technologies, Congress should use its constitutional authorities over “the [cyber] land and naval Forces” to craft better decision processes and better civil-military and legal transparency balances.

Presidents and Generals: Systems of Government and the Selection of Defense Ministers

2020 ◽  
pp. 0095327X1990036
Author(s):  
Octavio Amorim Neto ◽  
Pedro Accorsi
Keyword(s):  
Selection Criteria ◽  
Defense Policy ◽  
Military Officers ◽  
National Data ◽  
Civil Military Relations ◽  
Military Relations ◽  
Selection Of ◽  
Cross National

Defense ministers are among the most central players in democracies’ civil–military relations. This article aims to identify the determinants of the selection criteria of defense ministers in democracies and semi-democracies. More specifically, it attempts to measure the effects of systems of government on decisions to appoint civilians or military officers to head the defense ministry. We argue that some characteristics of presidentialized regimes lead to the appointment of military defense ministers. This is a novel contribution, one that connects the literature on civil–military relations and that on systems of government. To assess our hypothesis and its mechanisms, we use comprehensive cross-national data in 1975–2015. Our tests indicate a robust association between presidentialized systems of government and the appointment of military ministers. We also show that military defense ministers are associated with some relevant outcomes. These findings have important implications for the study of civil–military relations, defense policy, and democracy.

scholarly journals EL PLANEAMIENTO ESTRATÉGICO MILITAR EN ARGENTINA (2003-2013): REFLEXIONES EN TORNO AL GOBIERNO POLÍTICO DE LA DEFENSA

2015 ◽  
Vol 3 (6) ◽  
Author(s):  
Luciano Anzelini ◽  
Iván Poczynok
Keyword(s):  
Armed Forces ◽  
Defense Policy ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
The Political ◽  
National Defense ◽  
Civil Military Relations ◽  
Military Relations ◽  
The Military ◽  
First Time ◽  
Core Problem

The national defense policy of Argentina has experienced advances and regressions since the democratic return in 1983. This result has been connected to the dynamics that civil-military relations have inherited from the dictatorial period. The necessity to subordinate the Armed Forces dominated the defense agenda during most part of the democratic period, constituting the core problem of this jurisdiction.The democratic governments implemented various initiatives that underpinned the civil control of the Armed Forces and that also caused, from a normative point of view, what has been characterised as a “basic consensus”. These measures restricted the autonomy of the men in uniform, whether through the demilitarization of civil functions or through the specific delimitation of the martial responsibilities.The habilitation of the spaces required for the exercise of the political administration of the jurisdiction did not necessarily implied, however, that civilians have fully developed this task. The performance of the democratic authorities in the area of defense had its ups-and-downs. At times, these deficiencies were associated to the very restraints of the domestic political conjuncture; at others, they resulted from the planning of the specific agenda of the sector, though.This paper studies the performances of the Ministry of Defense demarches during 2003-2013. The analysis focuses on the conduction of the strategic dimension of the sector; punctually, on the relative responsibilities of the military strategic planning. In this frame, the demarches of ministers José Pampuro (2003-05), Nilda Garré (2005-10) and Arturo Puricelli (2010-13) are resorted to.The temporal cutout of the study object assumes that a battery of unprecedented measures were implemented. For the first time since the return of democracy, for example, an effective debate on the conduction of the strategic dimension of the defense policy was addressed. Nevertheless, for reasons that are object of analysis during this article, the empowerment process of the political conduction survived along with ambiguities and retrogressions that, during the same period, made the absence of solid consensus regarding the results of the sectorial agenda evident.

Civil-Military Relations in Latin America: New Analytical Perspectives. Edited by David Pion-Berlin. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001. 352p. $55.00 cloth, $22.50 paper.

2002 ◽  
Vol 96 (4) ◽  
pp. 861-862 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ariel C. Armony
Keyword(s):  
Latin America ◽  
Political Science ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Comparative Politics ◽  
Free Market ◽  
Potential Contribution ◽  
Military Studies ◽  
Civil Military Relations ◽  
Theoretical Approaches ◽  
Military Relations

As David Pion-Berlin explains in his Introduction, this collection of essays seeks to link the field of Latin American civil-military studies to major theoretical approaches in mainstream political science. Accordingly, the contributors draw from the rationalist, structuralist, and culturalist approaches in an effort to break what the editor of this book views as a long-standing isolation of Latin Americanists in general, and the region's civil-military specialists in particular, “from the major intellectual traditions, currents, and debates in political science and in the field of comparative politics” (p. 16). Therefore, the stated purpose of this volume is to reexamine civil-military relations in Latin America, taking into account major contextual changes (the wave of democratization in the region, the transition to free market economies, the end of the Cold War) and the potential contribution of mainstream analytical perspectives to new insights into this important theme in Latin American politics.

India

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vipin Narang
Keyword(s):  
Nuclear Weapons ◽  
Command And Control ◽  
Optimization Theory ◽  
Civilian Control ◽  
Nuclear Forces ◽  
Civil Military Relations ◽  
Nuclear Tests ◽  
Military Relations ◽  
And Control ◽  
Control Apparatus

This chapter explores India's nuclear posture. Like China's, India's nuclear posture is classified as one of assured retaliation. There have been various dramatic moments in India's nuclear weapons history that were often driven by domestic political considerations, most notably its nuclear tests in May of 1974 and 1998. Nonetheless, the capabilities, envisioned use, and command-and-control apparatus that Delhi has erected for its nuclear forces have been persistent and consistent with an assured retaliation posture since 1974. The reason for this, as illustrated by optimization theory, is that India is in a relatively secure position but with highly assertive civil–military relations, driving it toward an assured retaliation nuclear posture that emphasizes firm civilian control over the arsenal.

scholarly journals MISSÕES DE PAZ E RELAÇÕES CIVIS-MILITARES: REFLEXÕES SOBRE O CASO BRASILEIRO

2018 ◽  
Vol 7 (14) ◽  
Author(s):  
Adriana A. Marques
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Armed Forces ◽  
Defense Policy ◽  
Primary Sources ◽  
Public Security ◽  
The Political ◽  
Peace Operations ◽  
Political Class ◽  
Civil Military Relations ◽  
Military Relations

The article discusses the interconnections between the participation of the Brazilian military in peace missions and civil-military relations in the country. For its elaboration a bibliographical revision and the collection of primary sources, like governmental documents, articles published in newspapers and magazines and interviews were realized. It is concluded that, instead of contributing to the improvement of the articulation between foreign policy and defense policy, the Brazilian participation in peace operations has been instrumentalised by the political class and indirectly contributing to the militarization of public security and the policialization of the armed forces.

scholarly journals Civil-Military Relations in Asia

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aurel Croissant
Keyword(s):  
Social Science ◽  
Political Science ◽  
Single Case ◽  
The Political ◽  
Science Literature ◽  
Military Rule ◽  
Civil Military Relations ◽  
The Social ◽  
Military Relations ◽  
The Military

The social science literature on civil-military relations—a concept that encompasses the entire range of interactions between the military and civilian society at every level—falls into a sociological and a political science strand. The former is concerned primarily with the military as a social organization and the social functions of military systems, as well as the ways in which these factors have changed over time. The political science strand, in contrast, more narrowly focuses on political-military relations, that is, the structures, processes, and outcomes of the interactions between the institutions and organizations of the political system, on the one hand, and the armed forces and their members, on the other. As is the case with other continents, the study of civil-military relations in Asia is both normative and positive, often within the same work. While normative contributions ask what “good” civil-military relations should look like, positive analyses seek to describe and explain the actual relationship between the soldier and the state in Asia, examine the effects of military coups and military rule on other political or socioeconomic activities, and predict the consequences of political-military relations for the persistence and performance of political regimes. Perhaps as a consequence of the highly diverse cultures, colonial histories, political legacies, and modes of postcolonial governance, single-case studies and small-N comparative analyses dominate the field and systematic intra-regional comparisons and cross-national studies are rare. Since its inception in the 1960s, research on Asian civil-military relations in social science has moved in various directions: as elsewhere, its initial preoccupation was with the role of military institutions in processes of decolonization, modernization, and nation-building. In the 1970s, scholarship moved toward analyzing the origins of military coups d’état and policy consequences of military rule. A second line of research investigated party-military relations in Communist Party regimes, which operated under societal and institutional circumstances that were quite different from those in the non-socialist states. From the late 1980s onward, the so-called third wave of democratization inspired a new generation of civil-military studies, which illuminate the military’s role in the breakdown of authoritarianism and how young democracies struggle with the double challenge of creating and preserving a military that is strong enough to fulfill its functions, but that is subordinate to the authority of democratically elected institutions. In the 2000s, the study of security sector reform has become the most recent addition to the literature. This article is primarily concerned with the political science strand of civil-military research. It focuses on the positive literature and gives priority to research on Southeast Asia and East Asia, but also includes comparative works and collections that illuminate civil-military relations in South Pacific countries.

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