How, if at all, has September 11 changed the dynamic of the civil-military relationship?

US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was in a very difficult position before September 11. A lot of his ideas for change had not been going very far, and his management style may be particularly effective in wartime. Also, in wartime there were more resources coming into the military, and it is easier to manage the military when there are more resources coming in than when there is a sense of budget austerity. Civil-military relations when the military is conducting operations are different from civil-military relations when it is talking about force structure and organization.

We have talked about the focus of this dynamic on the executive branch of the US government. What is the role for other branches of leadership, like the legislature, or other non-governmental avenues of leadership, such as the private sector or civil society?

In wartime, the US Congress plays a role, but much less of one than at any other time. There have been some exceptions to that—the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War during the US Civil War is the most important example—but generally, the Congressional role tends to be limited to encouraging the decision to go to war. In terms of the actual conduct of operations, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) play a much larger role than they ever have in the past. But beyond that, I am not sure that they end up shaping the actual higher-level direction of the war very much at all.

Do you think the NGOs, local and global civil society, and foreign governments can impact the civil-military relationship that we have been discussing?

Not much. There are different kinds of politics, and the civil-military relationship strikes me as the kind of politics that very much takes place in rooms in the Pentagon. There is a larger political environment out there that does affect civil-military relations, but I am not sure that globalization or anything of that nature has a large effect. This is politics of small groups of people interacting with one another, what the British novelist C.P. Snow once called “closed politics,” and I think that is basically right.