by Xenophon
(translated by Rex Warner, with introduction and notes by George Cawkwell)
Penguin Books, 1950.
To encourage fidgety school boys to pay attention to their Greek lessons, English and American headmasters would frequently assign Xenophon’s Anabasis (“The March Up-Country”), usually titled The Persian Expedition. Xenophon told the thrilling story of what became known as the Ten Thousand, a Greek mercenary contingent engaged during the summer of 401 B.C. by a Persian prince, Cyrus the Younger, to support his campaign to claim the throne from his brother, Artaxerxes II. These events took place shortly after the Spartan-led coalition, with aid from Persia, had defeated Athens and its allies in the decades-long Peloponnesian War. Sparta now quietly supported Cyrus’s ambitions. According to the Anabasis, Cyrus concealed his intentions to attack Artaxerxes; but he eventually persuaded the Greeks, led by the Spartan exile Clearchus, with promises of higher pay. After a march of hundreds of miles from Sardis, the two sides met at Cunaxa, north of Babylon. The Greeks dominated their portion of the battlefield–supposedly only a single Greek hoplite was wounded by an arrow–but Cyrus was killed and his troops routed. Clearchus and four senior commanders of the expedition were lured into negotiations with the Persians, and were then captured and executed. The Greeks elected new generals, including a young Athenian, Xenophon, an acolyte of Socrates, who throughout his life was at odds with his city’s democratic leadership. Xenophon played a key role in persuading the Greeks to stay together and march to safety, despite the apparently desperate situation, rather than surrendering to the Persians.
Xenophon detailed the fighting retreat of the Ten Thousand through northern Mesopotamia and the independent or autonomous lands of the Kurds, Armenians and other peoples. (The original size of the Greek expedition was slightly larger than ten thousand, and that number did not include camp followers and slaves.) The Greeks must overcome the lack of supplies, brutal weather, difficult terrain, sickness, limited and misleading tactical and strategic intelligence, treacherous allies, and resourceful enemies who possessed knowledge of the ground and were highly motivated to fight off the invaders. After weeks on the move Xenophon, in command of the rearguard, heard great shouting from the troops on the high ground ahead of him. Alarmed, he assumed that the Greek vanguard must be under attack. But as the sound made its way through the ranks, he finally distinguished the words: “thalatta, thalatta!” “The sea!” The sea!” The troops on the heights had spotted the Black Sea and the relatively safety of the coast, which was dotted by Greek settlements. Five out of six men have survived the march. Their adventures were not yet over, however. Not all their local Greeks are friendly. The Ten Thousand divided into several distinct contingents. Unable to obtain ships to sail back to Greece, they marched along the shore to reach the Bosporus. Some of the troops, including Xenophon, crossed into Europe and fought with Suethes, a Thracian warlord, to obtain the kingship of Thrace, before being incorporated into the army of the Spartan general Thibron for further battles in Asia against the Persians.
The Persian Expedition is one of the classic adventure stories and military chronicles of the ancient world. Xenophon’s Greeks walked in the shoes of Herodotus and foreshadowed the battles of Alexander the Great. (Some contemporary analysts have read Xenophon for lessons on how a Western empire might extract its forces from a difficult situation in the Middle East.) The literal accuracy of Xenophon’s account–told in the third person–and his role and importance during the campaign were challenged by his contemporaries and by later scholars. But many in Greece, recalling also their triumphs in the Persian Wars, took the lesson from Xenophon that the Greeks were so superior to the decadent “East” that its conquest was possible and desirable.
Greek chauvinism aside, serious scholars have noted the differences between the Greek and Persian worlds and have explored the reasons for the apparent advantages enjoyed by the Greek expedition. Historian Victor Davis Hanson describes the Ten Thousand as “a marching democracy”–a polis in motion. “The soldiers routinely held assemblies in which they voted on the proposals of their elected leaders. In times of crises, they formed ad hoc boards to ensure that there were sufficient archers, cavalry, and medical corpsmen. When faced with a variety of unexpected challenges both natural and human … councils were held to debate and discuss new tactics, craft new weapons, and adopt modifications in organization. The elected generals marched and fought alongside their men–and were careful to provide a fiscal account of their expenditures.” Greek successes on the battlefield, according to Hanson, had less to do with superiority in technology or tactics and more to do with their way of life. “The peculiar way Greeks killed grew out of consensual government, equality among the middling classes, civilian audit of military affairs, and politics apart from religion, freedom and individualism, and rationalism. The ordeal of the Ten Thousand, when stranded and near extinction, brought out the polis that was innate in all Greek soldiers, who then conducted themselves on campaign precisely as civilians in their respective city-states.”
As we delve into the details, however, we see that Xenophon relates a complicated story, not merely one of Greek superiority and unchallenged success. The Ten Thousand was indeed a polis in motion, one plagued by factionalism as well as civic virtue, divided by allegiances to their respective native Greek cities and roiled by personal ambitions. They were not, or were not simply, a happy band of brothers. They were often their own worst enemies. Troops struck out on their own and disobeyed orders, frequently to plunder, which endangered the expedition as a whole. The unexpected arrival of thousands of armed men was viewed suspiciously by many of the Greek communities along the Black Sea; these cities warned that they would ally with the local non-Greek peoples to oppose the expedition if it plundered them or otherwise threatened their security and interests. Xenophon often must persuade the troops under his command and the army in general to follow what he regarded as the sensible course, especially the need for discipline and unity. (This included strict observance of religious ceremonies and paying heed to omens, even when military factors indicated otherwise.) But Xenophon must overcome suspicions that he was hardly a disinterested party himself, especially given his expressed desire to found a city as a way out of the dilemma of the expedition–which was not precisely what his mercenary colleagues had in mind–and his argument that it was necessary to defer to Spartan concerns because of Sparta’s established position of leadership among the Greek-speaking world.
The military success of the Ten Thousand had less to do with the famous hoplite tactics than with the ability to adapt on the fly to widely different fighting conditions, especially marching while under pursuit (Xenophon, for instance, urged that they deploy in towns and villages when threatened in the rear by an attacking force, rather than engage in a fighting retreat). The Greeks jury-rigged a cavalry force and slingers to replace the capabilities lost with the destruction of Cyrus’s army. They reduced their baggage and animals, and recently-acquired slaves, to the bare minimum to ease logistical demands. Diplomacy proved to be essential to the success of the expedition. After the capture of Clearchus and the other senior Greek leaders, Xenophon and his colleagues refused further talks with the Persians, so as not to undermine the morale of their forces. But as they moved into the territories outside Persian control, they must find ways to address the “security dilemma” to avoid unnecessary battles without undue risk of being lured into a trap. They struck agreements with cities and tribes to fight their local enemies in return for safe passage, guides, and supplies. They told their prospective allies that they would never again have at their disposal such a force with which to obtain their objectives. The leaders of the expedition negotiated truces to retrieve and bury bodies, in exchange for promises not to burn villages. One of Xenophon’s fellow commanders offered this message to the Persians and other potential opponents: “we shall go through the country doing as little damage as possible, but if anyone tries to stop us on our way, we shall fight our way out as hard as we can.”
Xenophon’s overriding operational plea to his colleagues and troops was that of unity, even when they reached the relative safety of the Black Sea coast: “So long as you keep together in your present great force, you are sure both of respect and finding supplies. One of the results of power is the ability to take what belongs to the weaker. But if you became dispersed, and this force of ours was broken up into small detachments, then you would not be able to secure your food, and it would be a sad business getting away from here. … if anyone is discovered leaving us before the whole army is safe, I think he should be put on trial for misconduct.” Unity was necessary to obtain decisive victory. Unless the Greeks were seen as being absolutely superior on the battlefield, they would lose their ability to deter and coerce the local peoples, who would soon learn to play upon the factionalism among the expedition.
Throughout the Anabasis, Xenophon offers his reflections on the nature of military command. He told his newly-elected fellow commanders that they could not display any discouragement or indecision before their soldiers. “In peacetime you got more pay and respect than they did. Now, in war time, you ought to hold yourselves to be braver than the general mass of men, and to take decisions for the rest, and, if necessary, to be the first to do the hard work.” Leadership consisted in creating a sense of direction and purpose: “there will be a great rise in their spirits if one can change the way they think, so that instead of having in their heads the one idea of ‘what is going to happen to me?’ they may think ‘what action am I going to take?’” The commanders of the expedition must especially overcome despair because the quantitative advantages that the Persians possess: “You are well aware that it is not numbers or strength that brings victory in war. No, it is when one side goes against the enemy with the gods’ gift of stronger morale that their adversaries, as a rule, cannot withstand them.”
— Patrick Garrity, March 6, 2009
An American Classic
Samuel P. Huntington
Cambridge, Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1957
While the average political scientist is lucky to make a name for himself in one area of the field, Samuel Huntington has made major contributions to three: civil-military relations, democratic theory, and international relations. And while most people think of The Clash of Civilizations when they hear his name today, his most influential book—for better or worse—remains one that he wrote exactly a half-century ago: The Soldier and the State. Here, Huntington advances an institutional theory of civil-military relations, one that "focuses on the interaction of political actors played out in the specific institutional setting of government."
A good theory possesses three elements: a descriptive or empirical element that accounts for and explains relevant phenomena; a predictive element that enables its adherents successfully to argue that, under such-and-such conditions, a certain outcome can be expected to occur; and a prescriptive or normative element that provides a guide to policy based on the descriptive and predictive qualities of the theory.
Huntington’s main descriptive or empirical claim in The Soldier and the State was that American civil-military relations have been shaped by three variables: the external threat, which he called the functional imperative, and two components of what he called the societal imperative, "the social forces, ideologies and institutions dominant within the society."
The first component of the social imperative is the constitutional structure of the United States, the legal-institutional framework that guides political affairs generally and civil-military affairs specifically. The second is ideology, the prevailing worldview of a state. Huntington identified four ideologies—conservative pro-military, fascist pro-military, Marxist antimilitary, and liberal antimilitary—and argued that the fourth was the dominant ideology of the United States.
Huntington also argued that both components of the social imperative—the constitutional structure and the American ideology of antimilitary liberalism—had remained constant throughout U.S. history. Accordingly, the entire burden of explaining any change in civilian control or level of military armament would have to rest with the functional imperative; that is, the external threat.
He further contended that liberalism was "the gravest domestic threat to American military security. The tension between the demands of military security and the values of American liberalism can, in the long run, be relieved only by the weakening of the security threat or the weakening of liberalism." The requisite for military security is a shift in basic American values from liberalism to conservatism. Only an environment which is sympathetically conservative will permit American military leaders to combine the political power which society thrusts upon them with the military professionalism without which society cannot endure.
According to Huntington, America’s antimilitary liberal ideology produces "extirpation"—the virtual elimination of military forces—when the external threat is low and "transmutation,"—the refashioning of the military in accordance with liberalism, which leads to the loss of "peculiarly military characteristics"—when the external threat is high. The problem for the United States in a protracted contest such as the Cold War (or the war against radical Islam) is that, while transmutation may work for short periods of time during which concentrated military effort is required (a world war, for example), it will not assure adequate military capability over the long term.
In the context of the Cold War, Huntington argued that the ideological component of America’s societal imperative—liberal antimilitary ideology—would make it impossible to build the forces necessary to confront the functional imperative in the form of the Soviet threat to the United States and to permit military leaders to take the steps necessary to provide national security. The predictive element of Huntington’s theory held that, without a change in the societal imperative, the United States would never be able to build the necessary military forces necessary to confront the Soviet Union.
The prescriptive or normative element of Huntington’s theory was to suggest a way for the United States to deal with the dilemma raised by what Peter Feaver has called civil-military problématique: How to address the tension between the desire for civilian control and the need for military security, or how to minimize the power of the military and make civilian control more certain without sacrificing protection against external enemies.
In particular, Huntington argued that he was prescribing a means for enabling the liberal United States to effectively meet the Soviet threat without forfeiting civilian control. His prescription, which he called "objective civilian control," has the virtue of simultaneously maximizing military subordination and military fighting power. Objective control guarantees the protection of civilian society from external enemies and from the military themselves.
In Huntington’s prescriptive or normative theory, the key to objective control is "the recognition of autonomous military professionalism," respect for the independent military sphere of action. Interference or meddling in military affairs undermines military professionalism and so undermines objective control.
This constitutes a bargain between civilians and soldiers. On the one hand, civilian authorities grant a professional officer corps autonomy in the realm of military affairs. On the other, "a highly professional officer corps stands ready to carry out the wishes of any civilian group which secures legitimate authority within the state."
In other words, if the military is granted autonomy in its sphere, the result is a professional military that is politically neutral and voluntarily subordinate to civilian control. Of course, autonomy is not absolute: Huntington argued that while the military has responsibility for operational and tactical decisions, civilians must decide matters of policy and grand strategy.
While objective control weakens the military politically, rendering it politically sterile or neutral, it actually strengthens the military’s ability to defend society. A professional military obeys civilian authority; a military that does not obey is not professional.
At the opposite pole from objective control lay Huntington’s worst case situation—"subjective control"—which constituted a systematic violation of the autonomy necessary for a professional military and produced transmutation. He argued that subjective control was detrimental to military effectiveness and would lead to failure on the battlefield by forcing the military to defer to civilians in the military realm.
The key to objective control of the military is professionalism. According to Huntington’s reading of American history, the origin of American military professionalism is to be found during the period following the Civil War. During this period, Huntington claimed, the military was isolated—not only physically, but also socially, politically, and intellectually—from the mainstream of American life.
Huntington writes that this period constituted the "dark ages" of the Army and the "period of stagnation" for the Navy. He quotes one officer to the effect that, in America, the United States Army had become "an alien army" existing in "practically complete separation from the lives of the people from which it [was] drawn." Huntington contends that the physical isolation of the armed services during this period was mirrored by its intellectual isolation: "The military were also divorced from the prevailing tides of intellectual opinion. West Point, for example, gradually lost contact with the rest of American education to which it has made such significant contributions, and went on its own way."
But although these years may have been the dark ages of the military, there was a positive outcome. The "isolation and rejection" of the military "made those years the most fertile, creative, and formative in the history of the American armed forces." This is because "the withdrawal of the military from civilian society produced the high standards of professional excellence essential to national success in the struggles of the twentieth century."
In other words, isolation acted as a crucible for the creation of a professional military.
As Peter Feaver has argued in his formidable challenge to Huntington, Armed Servants, Huntington’s theory has survived numerous challenges over the decades. His core claims—that there is a meaningful difference between civilian and military roles; that the key to civilian control is military professionalism; and that the key to military professionalism is military autonomy—have been contested on numerous occasions. But Huntington perseveres "while the challengers drift into obscurity."
Why? To begin with, Huntington grounded his theory in a "deductive logic derived from democratic theory while his critics did not," writes Feaver. And despite the claims of many of those who look at civil-military relations through the lens of sociology, analytically distinct military and civilian spheres do appear to exist. Moreover, Huntington’s theory is the source of what Eliot Cohen has called the "normal" theory of civil-military relations, which holds that, during wartime, civilians determine the goals of the war, then stand aside to let the military run the actual war.
The Soldier and the State has had a great and lasting effect within our uniformed military. Indeed, the military has come to endorse many of Huntington’s general conclusions and has made it central to its civil-military relations education. But there are a number of flaws in Huntington’s theory.
First, as Feaver points out, elegant as it may be, his theory doesn’t fit the evidence of the Cold War. For instance, one of Huntington’s testable hypotheses was that a liberal society (such as ours) would not produce sufficient military might to survive the Cold War. But the United States did prevail during the Cold War despite the fact that the country did not abandon liberalism. Indeed, "the evidence shows that American society as a whole almost certainly became even more individualistic and more anti-statist than when Huntington warned of the dangers of liberalism in 1957."
The same problems affect Huntington’s prescriptive theory. During the Cold War, the military became more "civilianized," the officer corps more politicized, and civilians habitually intruded into the military realm: "According to many of the indicators Huntington cited as critical," writes Feaver, "civilians did not adopt the objective control mechanism he claimed was the crucial causal mechanism between the explanatory variable of ideology and the dependent variable of adequate national security."
Huntington’s historical generalizations concerning the alleged isolation of the military during the late 19th century are also at odds with the evidence. For example, in a 1980 article for the journal of the Army War College, John Gates pointed out that Huntington had vastly overstated the physical isolation of the Army officer corps during the decades following the Civil War. Gates found that a significant number of officers served in or near large urban areas during this period and that there was much greater civil-military social intercourse than the conventional wisdom would suggest.
Using reports of the Army’s adjutant general during 1867-97, Gates discovered that anywhere from "17 to 44 percent of all officers present for duty in established army command… were serving in the Department of the East or its equivalent, living in the most settled region of the United States, often on the Atlantic seaboard." Of those not serving in the East, a substantial proportion were serving in urban areas of significant size, including such cities as Chicago, Omaha, St. Paul, Salt Lake City, San Antonio, and San Francisco: "In a nation that numbered only 100 cities with more than 20,000 inhabitants in the 1880 census, many of the western cities in which officers found themselves were of significant size. One should not consider individuals posted to such locations isolated."
Gates went on to note that there were also a large number of officers on detached duty, which often included assignments that brought them into close contact with civilians, and that there was a great deal of social contact between officers and civilians. This contact between officers and civilians, including powerful and prestigious individuals, was a part of military life in both urban and frontier assignments. This is not surprising, given the middle-class origins of the officer corps. Huntington claimed that, because they were middle-class, officers were affiliated with no social group. On the contrary, argues Gates: They "had more in common with the ruling elite than with any other societal group in the nation."
Finally, the line of demarcation mandated by Huntington’s theory is not as clear as some would have it. As Eliot Cohen has shown in Supreme Command, democratic war leaders such as Winston Churchill and Abraham Lincoln impinged upon the military’s turf as a matter of course, influencing not only operations but also tactics. The reason that civilian leaders cannot leave the military to its own devices during war is that war is an iterative process involving the interplay of active wills. What appears to be the case at the outset of a war may change as the war continues, modifying the relationship between political goals and military means. Wars are not fought for their own purposes but to achieve policy goals set by the political leadership of the state.
There is also a practical problem arising from the military’s reading of Huntington’s theory. Contrary to the real conduct of war, officers often infer that military autonomy means they should be advocates of particular policies rather than simply serving in their traditional advisory role—indeed, that they have the right to insist that their advice be heeded by civilian authorities. Such an attitude among uniformed officers is hardly a recipe for healthy, balanced civil-military relations.
And yet, despite its flaws, The Soldier and the State continues to provide useful insights into the nature of civil-military relations, especially our own. Huntington’s theoretical framework consists of a few tightly reasoned, deductive propositions. It addresses the central problem of civil-military relations: the relation of the military as an institution to civilian society. And its best empirical insights—the civilian-military distinction, the idea of military subordination, essential to democratic theory, the importance of military professionalism—do not depend on the problematic parts of Huntington’s model.
Huntington was the first to attempt a systematic analysis of the civil-military problématique: the paradox arising from the fact that, out of fear of others, a society creates "an institution of violence" intended to protect it, but then fears that the institution will turn on society itself. That was very much on the minds of the Founding generation, which had to strike a balance between vigilance and responsibility. It is still on our minds.
— Mackubin T. Owens, October 26, 2009
