Janowitz and Huntington—Better Together: A Response

Abstract

Suzanne Nielsen and Hugh Liebert recently published “The Continuing Relevance of Morris Janowitz’s The Professional Soldier for the Education of Officers” in which they argued that officer education is too enamored with Samuel Huntington’s aging theory of civil–military relations from Soldier and the State. Huntington’s ideal of objective control grants senior military advisors autonomy within their professional sphere, and it best ensures that unvarnished military expertise survives politically charged national security decision making processes intact, regardless of which party controls the White House. While these features explain Huntington’s traditional popularity with the military, Nielsen and Liebert warn that Huntington’s separation between military and civilian matters in theory engenders wishful thinking in practice, so much so that officers neglect, to the detriment of national policy, Morris Janowitz, Huntington’s cofounder of the modern study of civil–military relations. However, the civil–military community should reconsider banishing Huntington in order to appreciate Janowitz.

The Utility of Janowitz’s Political Awareness in Officer Education

“…As a second substantive area of disagreement, Huntington and Janowitz did not agree on the centrality of “republican virtue” or “political virtue” to the military officer’s identity, as the commentary claims (Coletta & Crosbie, 2021, p. 2, 5). It is misleading to speak of “the joint Huntington-Janowitz standard of political virtue,” as the commentary does (Coletta & Crosbie, 2021, p. 5). The terms “republican virtue” and “political virtue” do not appear in Huntington’s The Soldier and the State .…”

“…The commentary’s embrace of the idea that political awareness is important against only a subcategory of strategic challenges is evident in the authors’ assertion that pragmatists in the US armed forces may be helpful against terrorists, but the US needs absolutists to address the challenges of great power competition (Coletta & Crosbie, 2021, p. 3). We disagree.…”

“…We read with interest the commentary by Coletta and Crosbie (2021) on the article that we published in this journal entitled, “The Continuing Relevance of Morris Janowitz’s The Professional Soldier for the Education of Officers” (2020). In that article, we argued that Janowitz’s emphasis on the need for political awareness in the US military should receive greater attention than it currently receives in the education of today’s officer corps (Janowitz, 1960; Nielsen & Liebert, 2020).…”

“…As a first clarification, Coletta and Crosbie mischaracterize our perspective on the continuing value of The Soldier and the State . In their commentary, they claim that we want to “banish” or “jettison” Huntington owing to his “pernicious influence” (Coletta & Crosbie, 2021, p. 1–2). This is not an accurate restatement of our argument, nor our general perspective on the matter as reflected in our publications elsewhere (Nielsen, 2012).…”

“…As a final point of clarification, the commentary implies that the incident involving chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley in Lafayette Square in 2020 happened after we published our initial article (Coletta & Crosbie, 2021, p. 4–6). In fact, we discussed that case (Nielsen & Liebert, 2020, p. 11).…”