Securing the State Reforming the National Security Decisionmaking Process at the Civil-Military Nexus

Focusing on top civilian and military advisors within the national security establishment, this significant book looks at four case studies with a focus on civil-military relations within the US Department of Defense. It investigates whether balanced approaches produce more effective policies and outcomes than dominating structures. The culmination of Gibson's treatise is the advancement of the 'Madisonian approach' to civilian control of the military, a normative framework designed to replace Samuel Huntington's 'Objective Control' model and also the 'Subjective Control' model, initially practised by Defense Secretary Robert McNamara and most recently by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. The Madisonian approach calls for changes in US law and new norms to guide the interactions of key participants who populate the civil-military nexus. This book is destined to influence US strategic thinking and should be added to the syllabus of courses in civil-military relations, strategic studies and military history. Given the struggling US policy in Iraq, the time is right for a critical review of US civil-military relations and this book provides the departure point for analysis and a potential way forward.

Contents: The civil-military dynamic: a relationship adrift; Excesses and over-corrections in the US civil-military relations since the Second World War and the return of Donald Rumsfeld in 2001; The search for role models; Normative theory in civil-military relations during the Cold War: the objective control and subjective control models; The search for new normative theory in the post-Cold War era; A Madisonian approach for civil-military relations; Bibliography; Index.

Christopher P. Gibson was former Assistant Professor of American Politics with the Department of Social Sciences at the United States Military Academy at West Point, and is currently Hoover National Security Fellow at Stanford University, USA.