Armed Servants: Agency, Oversight and Civil-military Relations - Tapa dura

"Peter Feaver's excellent new book, Armed Servants, sheds much-needed light on civil-military relations in the U.S., indeed, it may come to supplant Samuel Huntington's classic 1957 study of American civil-military relations, The Soldier and the State. Armed Servants should be read not only by academic specialists in national security, but also by military professionals - it will change the way they think about these issues." - Mackubin Thomas Owens, National Review; "Feaver

How do civilians control the military? In the wake of September 11, the renewed presence of national security in everyday life has made this question all the more pressing. In this book, Peter Feaver proposes an ambitious new theory that treats civil-military relations as a principal-agent relationship, with the civilian executive monitoring the actions of military agents, the "armed servants" of the nationstate. Military obedience is not automatic but depends on strategic calculations of whether civilians will catch and punish misbehavior.