Brilliant

One of the field's most interesting scholars in civi-military relations writing on a very important and timely target.

Civil-Military Relations in the Prevention of Democratic Backsliding Christoph Harig Abstract Most civil-military relations scholarship implicitly or explicitly sees the military as a threat to democratic institutions and governments. In recent years, however, there have been several instances in which democratically elected governments tried to use the armed forces for undermining democratic institutions. Hence, military leaders may sometimes have to contest lawful political decisions if these potentially threaten democracy. This challenges fundamental normative assumptions in civil-military relations research. The present article therefore asks: Which analytical tools does civil-military relations scholarship provide for assessing the appropriate role of military leaders in the prevention of democratic backsliding? Should there be general, prescriptive normative theories for military leaders’ appropriate behaviour in contexts of democratic backsliding? The article begins by reviewing civil-military relations scholarship’s perspectives on the appropriate political role of armed forces and discusses how these are challenged by democratic backsliding. Building on previous attempts to conceptualise military dissent and the military’s role in autocratization processes, the article argues that military behaviour in backsliding processes cannot be assessed without taking military role conceptions as explanatory variable for military leaders’ ideas about appropriate behaviour into account. Illustrative examples from the Americas then assess military leaders’ reaction to backsliding attempts and their consequences for democracy and civil-military relations. The findings underline that prescriptive guidance for military disobedience should be treated with caution.

Can civil-military relations scholarship provide prescriptive normative guidance for military leaders' appropriate behaviour in democratic backsliding?

My new article in @journalofgss.bsky.social debates this civil-military conundrum

academic.oup.com/jogss/articl... #CivMilSKy

I would spend foolishly on trucks and air lift. They will not go out of trend.

(And if an ICE truck, make the body and works modular so electrics can be adapted when it is robust enough for military use.)

Cover photo of a translation of Herodotus's history of the Persian Wars.

If Putin insists on playing Xerxes, then Poland will have to be Sparta, and Germany Athens. Maybe UK and/or France will play Corinth. As the kids say, "read theory."

Gulf chaos further compounds European states' incentives to arm selfishly & wastefully now versus collectively & cost-effectively later. Germany/Poland generate most new capability; France/UK nuclear deterrence & mild power projection. It's probably enough. www.foreignaffairs.com/europe/europ...

chat i'm going to ask a somewhat prickly question:

what do you (fellow political scientists) want out of your professional association right now

(knowing that this is a sample of Very Online People and folks with wildly differing opinions)

America keeps bailing out Trump The country’s underlying strengths are absorbing his erratic choices, including the war on Iran

Adam Smith observed that there’s a lot of ruin in a nation, I continue to be surprised by how much ruin there is in a hegemon. www.ft.com/content/a6d0... America keeps bailing out Trump

Cargill uses AI to get more meat from the bone as beef prices soar System called CarVe spots flecks of meat on carcasses as they move along the production line

There is a metaphor here somewhere….

www.ft.com/content/9089...

Occam might prefer your explanation over mine.

How Hegseth Came to See Moral Purpose in War as Weakness

Secretary Hegseth's public comments reveal a key shift in US civil-military relations that hasn't gotten enough attention. NYT recently described his view of war as without "moral purpose" but more accurately he assigns war *no* political or strategic purpose. 1/7 www.nytimes.com/2026/03/12/u...

The Iran war could sap American military power for years It is devouring munitions and exhausting an already stretched navy

I wrote this week with @sambeal.bsky.social on how the Iran war might affect US military power for years to come, depleting stockpiles & eroding naval readiness. The war is a testing ground for new technologies. But it could also reveal some tactics to China. www.economist.com/briefing/202...

One of the first things I learned in the military is that leaders can delegate authority but not responsibility. It's an open question whether that is actually the case in a pragmatic or political sense. If it's not, then the entire US government is the junkyard dog. 7/7

So the Secretary has pushed up all strategic and political decisions to POTUS, and pushed down all operational decisions to combatant commanders. A secretary-as-junkyard-dog theory explains/justifies a focus on "side" issues generally beyond uniformed leaders' purview in pursuit of "lethality." 6/7

Hegseth’s Boasts of ‘Maximum’ Engagement Authorities Face Scrutiny After School Is Hit

He's also publicly delegated “authorities”—decision-making on levels and targets of violence—to combatant commanders (not just CENTCOM, but SOUTHCOM & INDOPACOM). Civilians normally guard these to control the political effects (& fallout) of using military force. 5/7 www.nytimes.com/2026/03/13/u...

But a junkyard dog has no purpose or effect without an agent holding the leash or building a fence. You need civilians for that. Hegseth's clear focus on maximizing violence yields the calibration of military force for political and strategic ends solely to the President. 4/7

The military wants to be the professional specialists in violence. Huntington argues that this requires it to avoid "politics," not just wokeness or partisanship but also the purpose behind a use of force. The military wants to be a junkyard dog, focused & optimized on lethality/warfighting/etc. 3/7

Paradoxes of Professionalism: Rethinking Civil-Military Relations in the United States Abstract. The U.S. military's prevailing norms of professionalism exhibit three paradoxes that render the organization poorly suited to meet contemporary challenges to its nonpartisan ethic, and that ...

Understanding this requires going back to Huntington and his famous description of West Point as (ahem) "Sparta in the midst of Babylon." The uniformed services looove Huntington's clear division of civil-military labor (see Risa Brooks on why this is a problem) 2/7 direct.mit.edu/isec/article...

How Hegseth Came to See Moral Purpose in War as Weakness

Secretary Hegseth's public comments reveal a key shift in US civil-military relations that hasn't gotten enough attention. NYT recently described his view of war as without "moral purpose" but more accurately he assigns war *no* political or strategic purpose. 1/7 www.nytimes.com/2026/03/12/u...

It is remarkable how little industry knows about the Navy and vice versa.

Ever word is calculated here: I'll be fine, keep my titles and credentials, and expect the world to still take my calls and publish my work.

This is especially the case for defense software. Palantir, Anduril, etc. physical wares are loss-leaders for the underlying OS. If you think Lockheed’s path dependent power is high, just wait until defense’s Microsoft Windows emerges.

Back in 2020, Lindsay Cohn, Dani Lupton and I wrote about the danger of domestic law enforcement making itself indistinguishable from the military

www.washingtonpost.com/politics/202...

I agree, which is why I fear Jay Kelly will win all the Oscars.

The Regime Change Temptation in Venezuela If past is prologue, a U.S. attempt to overthrow Maduro would not end well.

“Even if a regime change operation succeeds at first, history again shows that long-term outcomes are often disappointing,” write Alexander Downes and Lindsey O’Rourke.

hey fellow authors, I received my Anthropic copyright settlement materials in the mail today. I thought I'd filed a claim already, but it turns out I needed to do so again. Might be worth double-checking or filing a new claim, just to be sure

You can do so here: www.anthropiccopyrightsettlement.com

Returning today from some European events on transatlantic relations. No doubt the colleagues I met are revising their priors further.

All such documents are tools of domestic as much as international politics. This one seems almost entirely aimed at the former.

www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/u...

Write that book ("Globalkanization") now!!!!

This is dead right. Elites in China, India, the US and elsewhere took Huntington’s naive essentialism and turned it into an instruction manual for mobilization. academic.oup.com/edited-volum...

Indeed: Huntington was an early warning sign of how, amidst skyrocketing inequality, a small coterie of unpatriotic super elites would seek to tear down state structures while shouting racist narratives of blood and soil into the media that they control