A Historian's Fallacies: A Reply to Bacevich

Armed Forces & Society

Volumn 24, Issue 4, 1998, Pages 589-594

  Desch, Michael C ^a  

^a HARVARD UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 84992903445     PISSN: 0095327X     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/0095327X9802400408     Document Type: Article

References (19)

1. See Kohn's “Out of Control: The Crisis in Civil-Military Relations,” The National Interest 35 (Spring 1994): 3-17, and “Upstarts In Uniform,” New York Times, 10 April 1994, 19, and Weigley's “The American Military and the Principle of Civilian Control from McClellan to Powell,” The Journal of Military History 57 (Special Issue October 1993): 27-58.
2. On “crucial tests” of theories, see Arthur L. Stinchcombe, Constructing Social Theories (New York: Harcourt, Brace, & World, 1968), 24-28.
3. Arthur Ekrich, The Civilian and the Military (New York: Oxford University Press, 1956); Marcus Cunliffe, Soldiers and Civilians: The Martial Spirit in America, 1775-1865 (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1968); Walter Millis with Harvey C. Mansfield and Harold Stein, Arms and the State: Civil-Military Elements in National Policy (New York: Twentieth Century Fund, 1958); and Louis Smith, American Democracy and Military Power: A Study of Civilian Control of the Military Power in the United States (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951).
4. Samuel P. Huntington, The Soldier and the State: The Theory and Politics of Civil-Military Relations (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1957).
5. Allan R. Millett and Peter Maslowski, For the Common Defense: A Military History of the United States of America, rev. and enl. (New York: The Free Press, 1994), 88-90, and Geoffrey Perret, A Country Made by War: From the Revolution to Vietnam-The Story of America's Rise to Power (New York: Vintage, 1989).
6. For a fuller articulation of my theory, see my Soldiers, States, and Structures: Civilian Control of the Military in a Changing Security Environment (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, forthcoming).
7. Allan Millett, The American Political System and Civilian Control of the Military: A Historical Perspective (Columbus, OH: The Mershon Center, Ohio State University, 1979), 1. Also see Richard H. Kohn, “American Generals of the Revolution: Subordination and Restraint” in Reconsiderations on the Revolutionary War: Selected Essays, ed. Donald Higginbotham (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1978), 104, and David E. Engdahl, “Soldiers, Riots, and Revolution: The Law and History of Military Troops in Civil Disorders,” Iowa Law Review 57,1 (October 1971): 2-22.
8. For discussion of these incidents, see Millett and Maslowski, 88-90, and Ekrich, 19-20,22, and 32.
9. See Weigley, The American Military, 32-39, and Ekrich, The Civilian and the Military, 96-7 and 104.
10. Huntington, The Soldier and the State, chapter 9.
11. For a good discussion of this see Stephen Skowronek, Building A New American State: The Expansion of National Administrative Capacities, 1877-1920 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 89-90, and John B. Wilson, “Army Readiness Planning, 1899-1917,” Parameters 64,7 (July 1984): 61.
12. Millis et al., 139-40.
13. Harold Lasswell, “The Garrison State,” The American Journal of Sociology 46, 4 (January 1941): 455-68.
14. Huntington, Soldier and the State, 315, in a Lasswellian mode, argued that the “military ran the war.”
15. Millis et al., 10.
16. See his America's Strategy in World War II: A Reconsideration (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1963), 49-84. Also see Mark A. Stoler, “U.S. Civil-Military Relations in World War II,” Parameters 21, 3 (Autumn 1991): 60-73, and Forrest C. Pogue, “George C. Marshall on Civil-Military Relationships in the United States” in The United States Military Under the Constitution of the United States, 1789-1989, Richard H. Kohn (ed.) (New York: New York University Press, 1991), 193-222.
17. See his discussion of U.S. and Soviet Cold War civil-military relations in Political Order in Changing Societies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968), 194. Also see his “The Soldier and the State in the 1970s” in Civil-Military Relations, Andrew J. Goodpaster (ed.) (Washington, D.C.: American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, 1977), 5-28.
18. Millett, The American Political System and Civilian Control of the Military, 38.
19. See his “Clinton's Military Problem-and Ours,” National Review XLV, 24 (13 December 1993): 36-40.