Dissent and Strategic Leadership of the Military Professions

One of the central difficulties to a right understanding of American civil-military relations is the nature of the U.S. military. Are our armed forces just obedient bureaucracies like most of the Executive branch, or are they vocational professions granted significant autonomy and a unique role in these relationships because of their expert knowledge and their expertise to apply it in the defense of America? To a large measure, the answer to this question should determine the behavior of the strategic leaders of these professions, including the uncommon behavior of public dissent. Using the “Revolt of the Generals” in 2006 as stimulus, the author develops from the study of military professions the critical trust relationships that should have informed their individual decisions to dissent. After doing so, he makes recommendations for the restoration of the professions’ ethic in this critical area of behavior by the senior Officers who are the professions’ strategic leaders.     

Editorial

Professor Maitland liked to point out that the beginnings ofthe trust are discernible in a ‘slight but unbroken threadof cases, beginning while the Conquest is yet recent.’¹This forensic Methuselah retains its vitality today becausereams of contractual boilerplate cannot compete with the efficiencyof equity's default rules. These were famously expressed bythe great Chief Judge of the New York Court of Appeals—laterto become a Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States—BenjaminCardozo, in Meinhard v. Salmon, 249 NY 458, 464 (1928):

Manyforms of conduct permissible in a workaday world for those actingat arm's length, are     

U.S. Bases and Democratization in Central Asia

Under the Pentagon's current Global Defense Posture Review (GDPR), the United States is reducing its forces in several major Cold War base hosts and establishing a global network of smaller, more flexible facilities in new areas such as Central Asia, the Black Sea and Africa. Drawing upon recent evidence from the Central Asian base hosts of Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan, this article cautions that these new U.S. overseas bases, despite their lighter footprint and regardless of the prevailing security situation, risk becoming enmeshed in the local struggles and political agendas of elites within these hosts. Periods of turbulent democratic transition and regime instability may encourage host country politicians to challenge the legitimacy and terms of the U.S. basing presence for their own political purposes. These are important lessons for U.S. planners who are simultaneously promoting democratization while they negotiate basing and military access agreements in these same politically volatile hosts.     

Research Note: Randomized field experiments published in the British Journal of Criminology, 1960–2004

Randomized controlled trials have become an important component of evidence-based policy in criminal justice. Because searches of electronic bibliographic databases often miss relevant trials, handsearch – or the visual inspection of the contents of an article – is recommended as an additional search strategy. In this paper, we conducted an electronic handsearch of every available issue of the British Journal of Criminology (1960–2004) to determine how many randomized field experiments were published. We compare these results to earlier manual handsearch efforts to augment the Campbell Collaboration Social, Psychological, Educational and Criminological Trials Register (C2-SPECTR). We find only nine trials (although two used quasi-random allocation such as alternation), and just one published in the past 20 years. We discuss some possible reasons for this, and conclude with a modest agenda for improving the reporting of evidence in the age of evidence-based policy.     

Lawyers for Conservative Causes: Clients, Ideology, and Social Distance

Scholars have devoted attention to "cause lawyers" on the political left, but lawyers who work on the conservative side of the American political spectrum have received relatively little academic consideration. This article presents systematic data on the characteristics of and relationships among lawyers affiliated with organizations active on a selected set of 17 conservative issues. We find that the lawyers serve several separate and distinct constituencies—business conservatives, Christian conservatives, libertarians, abortion opponents—and that the credentials of the lawyers serving these varying constituencies differ significantly. The greatest degree of social separation occurs between the business constituency and the abortion opponents, with another clear separation between libertarians and the interest groups devoted to traditional family values and order maintenance. The divisions among these constituencies appear to reflect the difference between "insider politics" and "populism," which is manifested in part in actual geographic separation between lawyers located in the District of Columbia and those in the South, West, and Midwest. In the center of the network, however, we find some potential "mediators"—prominent lawyers who may facilitate communication and coordination among the several constituencies. These lawyers and the organizations they serve attempt to merge morality, market freedom, and individual liberty concerns, and they convene meetings of diverse sets of lawyers and organizational leaders to seek consensus on policy goals. Nonetheless, the findings indicate that most organizations are seldom active on issues that lie beyond the relatively narrow boundaries of their own interests.