The Governance of the Military

Abstract

First, this paper traces the root sources of the crisis of legitimacy now gripping both the civil and military components in the governance of the American military establishment. Then it shows how our national reactions to revolutionary changes in post-World War II military technology and in world politics shattered the long-standing 1789 constitional formula for a controlled military impulse. Next it focuses on certain aspects of the legitimacy crisis. Constitutional assumptions underlying amateur-expert relations in military governance have been unhinged by the tendency of the civil order to subordinate its own judgment of an "emergency need" to the judgment of the professional military experts. Further, old constitutional fiscal controls over the military establishment have been shattered by the Congress, and Congress has allowed its own constitutional power to "declare war" to be swallowed up by the grants to the president or his assumption of a unilateral discretionary power to "make war." Finally, it examines some remedies for the crisis of legitimacy, focusing not only on congressional reform, but on the role of the electorate and the indispensable need for a president to place himself under a self-denying ordinance.