"Book Review: Civil-Military Relations and Shared ..." Topic

…Responsibility.

"The 2013 book Civil-Military Relations and Shared Responsibility by Dale Herspring is a valuable and deeply researched source that provides a rarely-so-comprehensive comparative analysis of civil-military relations across four distinct nations; Canada, Russia, Germany, and the United States. Given the critical importance of Civil-Military relations in preparing for and conducting warfare for all nations, such a comparative analysis of countries big, small, rediscovering their heritage, updating their doctrine, or defining themselves for the first time, is extremely valuable. The specific concept explored is a situation of ‘shared responsibility' between the military leadership and civilian leadership in working to set defence, procurement, or international policy, as well as in strategic decision making. While a seemingly obvious approach to government, such a situation exists only fleetingly in contemporary history, and Herspring brings key moments in each of the four nation's civil-military histories under inspection in order to test for its existence and determine if it lasted; The particular lenses applied are those of interpersonal, group, and institutional interactions, and through these Herspring provides an engaging historical narrative and compelling analysis of a potentially very useful theory.

Within the analysis of each nation, different leaders, defence ministers, and governments are compared chronologically from a given starting point that generally marks the start of the contemporary period for the relations between that particular state and its military. Specific relationships between individual leaders and groups are highlighted in order to show how different dynamics impact military performance in the field, as well as the relationship between the government and its armies. The central question the book seeks to answer is at what points, if ever, have the nations of Russia, Canada, the United States, or Germany achieved a civil-military relationship describable as ‘shared responsibility'. The idea of shared responsibility is described in the text by first surveying what several authors have put fourth in describing the civil-military relationship, but is best captured in a quote by Douglas Bland, the work of whom Herspring is generally building off. Bland describes shared responsibility as:…"