Armed servants : agency, oversight, and civil-military relations / Peter D. Feaver.
"In this book, Peter Feaver proposes an ambitious new theory of civil-military relations in which the civil-military connection is best conceived as a principal-agent relationship, with the civilian executive directing and monitoring the actions of military agents, the "armed servants"...
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| Main Author: | |
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| Format: | Book |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
Cambridge, Mass. :
Harvard University Press,
2003.
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| Summary: | "In this book, Peter Feaver proposes an ambitious new theory of civil-military relations in which the civil-military connection is best conceived as a principal-agent relationship, with the civilian executive directing and monitoring the actions of military agents, the "armed servants" of the nation-state. Military obedience is not automatic. It depends on the calculations of both parties, which determine whether the connection will be tight or loose." "This model challenges Samuel Huntington's professionalism-based model of civil-military relations, and provides an innovative way of making sense of the U.S. Cold War and post-Cold War experience - especially the distinctively stormy civil-military relations of the Clinton era. In the decade after the Cold War ended, civilians and the military had a variety of run-ins over whether and how to use military force. These episodes, as interpreted by agency theory, contradict the conventional wisdom that civil-military relations matter only if there is risk of a coup. On the contrary, military professionalism does not by itself ensure unchallenged civilian authority. As Feaver argues, agency theory offers the best foundation for thinking about relations between military and civilian leaders."--BOOK JACKET. |
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| Physical Description: | xi, 381 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm |
| Bibliography: | Includes bibliographical references (pages 337-369) and index. |
| ISBN: | 0674010515 9780674010512 |