Military Review English Edition September-October 2013 | Page 52

In contrast, then-chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Colin Powell lamented the lack of guidance from Bush in response to the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait.11 While the military as an institution might prefer latitude to constraining guidance, as Powell recognized, it creates the danger of military operations becoming divorced from the strategic and policy objectives of our civilian masters, which is arguably what happened when the first Gulf War failed to unseat Saddam, the implicit policy goal of the first Bush administration.12 There are similar critiques of U.S. policy objectives in Iraq and Afghanistan.13 Contrary to this conventional wisdom on professional, apolitical armies, the author of this essay accepts Hew Strachan’s thesis “that armies are inherently political institutions only restrained from intervention by the political environment in which they find themselves,” irrespective of their level of professionalism.14 Theo Farrell likewise notes it is possible to have a “professional” military that does not adopt “norms of civilian supremacy as part of its professional identity and

practice,” depending upon “circumstances . . . peculiar to the state in question.”15 The institutional construct and norms internal to the military may reduce its propensity to intervene in domestic politics, but more important are the institutions of the wider polity. In the context of the United States, the danger of the most explicit form of military involvement in domestic politics—a coup—is unthinkable. However, this is because of the health of democracy and its institutions and not because of an inherent unwillingness of the state’s military to intervene (though the military itself continues to cultivate the “apolitical” myth).16 Thus, so long as the domestic political structure maintains its legitimacy in the eyes of the electorate, efforts to increase the political understanding of the military should not threaten democracy in America. Rather, it should be possible for the military to be political, but nonpartisan. Whether by Huntingtonian professionalization or other means, attempts to depoliticize the military jeopardize the ultimate effectiveness of the

President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama applaud U.S. service members and their families at Pope Field at Fort Bragg, N.C., 14 December 2011, during a speech about the end of the war in Iraq and military families’ sacrifices.

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September-October 2013 ? MILITARY REVIEW

(U.S. Army, Sgt. Victor Ayala)