Research
My research focuses on military organizations and civil-military relations, mostly in OECD countries. I am currently working on several projects, dealing primarily with domestic use of military force for law enforcement, as well as determinants of manpower systems, professional ethics, how the US public perceives "cost" with respect to military operations, and what drives the "thank you for your service" phenomenon. I am also interested in public opinion on military and foreign policy issues, comparative political economy, innovation in organizations, asymmetric conflict, and international law.
Current book-length projects:
Posse: Domestic Use of Federal Forces and U.S. Civil-Military Relations
Translation (German to English) of multiple lesser-known writings of Clausewitz for a companion volume to On War
Current article-length projects:
“Posse Comitatus and the End of Reconstruction”
“Men in Uniform and Damsels in Distress: Race, Gender, and Military Service in the US Imagination”, with Meredith Kleykamp, Gilad Wenig, and Sarah Croco
"Against Domestic Violence: the US Army and Domestic Policing"
PUBLICATIONS: BOOK
On Order, Authority, and Modern Civil-Military Relations will be available in January 2025 from Bloomsbury Academic
This book is designed to investigate the long-standing problem of how to have a military professional ethic that, in James Burk's words, "sustains" democracy rather than simply "defending" it. I establish a few key organizing questions, then explore them through the thought of Augustine of Hippo, of democratic theorists such as Locke, Rousseau, and Habermas, of civil-military relations theorists such as Huntington, Sarkesian, Fitch, Burk, Feaver, and Brooks, and of the empirical literature on militaries in situations of mass civil unrest. These questions are: what is the prime political value? How does the society legitimize the use of force or violence? How does the society balance the competing demands of achieving both control over the military and effectiveness of the military? and, how does the society conceive of the soldier's role in politics, in four different senses: soldier as politician, as advisor, as enforcer (of the law), and as citizen?
I conclude that this is a problematique similar to that proposed by Peter Feaver, in that it concerns how to have members of the military be politically savvy enough to do their jobs well, but not to use that political savvy to undermine democracy. This presents us with a problem of infinite ethical regression, in which military people must develop both competence and savvy, but only ever use them for the good. The difficulty for democratic governance arises from the fact that there is no universal fundamental consensus over whether democracy is valuable because the process itself is the basis for legitimacy (i.e., that the people should get whatever they want, a la Mill), or because democracy is the form of governance most likely to produce the best governance (i.e., that representation and other institutions will, via deliberation and checks and balances, produce good policy, a la Rousseau or Madison). This means that there are times when the "good" will mean protecting the process, and others when the "good" will mean protecting the outcome. Unfortunately, there is no way to form a professional ethic that tells members of the military exactly which of these they should do in any given situation.
PUBLICATIONS: PEER REVIEWED JOURNAL ARTICLES
“I’m From the Government and I’m Here to Help: public perceptions of coercive state power”, with Jessica Blankshain and Danielle Lupton, American Political Science Review online first 2024.
“Citizens to Soldiers: Mobilization, Cost Perceptions, and Support for Military Action”, with Jessica Blankshain and Doug Kriner, Journal of Global Security Studies 7(4), 2022.
“Markets and Manpower: the Political Economy of Compulsory Military Service”, with Nathan Toronto, Armed Forces and Society 43(3): 436-458, 2016.
“How Much is Enough? Military Compensation and the Civil-Military Contract”, Strategic Studies Quarterly 9(3), 2015.
"Drones and Targeted Killing: Costs, Accountability, and US Civil-Military Relations", Orbis 59(1). Winter 2015.
“Who Will Serve: Labor Markets and Military Personnel Policy”, Res Militaris 3(2). Winter/Spring 2013.
“Relations Between Uniformed and Contractor Personnel in Operations” Small Wars and Insurgencies special issue on complex operations 24(2): 295-305, 2013.
“It Wasn’t in my Contract: Civilian Control and the Privatization of Security”, Armed Forces and Society 37(3): 381-398, 2011.
PUBLICATIONS: CHAPTERS IN EDITED VOLUMES
“Modern Day Minutemen? Public Opinion and Reserve Component Mobilization”, with Jessica Blankshain, in Checking the Costs of War: Sources of Accountability in U.S. Foreign Policy, eds Doug Kriner and Sarah Kreps, forthcoming at Chicago University Press
“To Execute the Laws of the Union: domestic use of federal military force in the United States”, in Military Operation and Engagement in the Domestic Jurisdiction: comparative call-out laws, eds Pauline Collins and Rosalie Arcala-Hall, Brill-Nijhoff, 2022.
“Dissents and Sensibility: Conflicting Loyalties, Democracy, and Civil-Military Relations”, with Michael A. Robinson and Max Z. Margulies, in Reconsidering American Civil-Military Relations: the military, society, politics, and modern war, eds R. Brooks, L. Beehner, and D. Maurer. Oxford University Press, 2020.
“Conscription and the Politics of Military Recruitment”, with Nathan W. Toronto, in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Politics, 2020.
“Political Realism and Civil-Military Relations” in The Edinburgh Companion to Political Realism, edited by Miles Hollingworth and Robert Schuett. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018.
"The U.S. Approach to Countering Violent Extremism" in Extremisms in Africa, edited by Alain Tschudin and Stephen Buchanan-Clarke. Johannesburg, SA: Fanele (an imprint of Jacana Publishers), 2018.
“Civil-Military Relations” in The Oxford University Press Handbook on International Security, edited by William Wohlforth and Alexandira Gheciu. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. Co-authored with Peter D. Feaver and Damon Coletta.
“Thanks for Your Service: Civilian and Veteran Attitudes After Fifteen Years of War” in James Mattis and Kori Schake (eds), Warriors and Citizens: American Views of Our Military. Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 2016. Co-authored with James T. Golby and Peter D. Feaver.
“American Civil-Military Relations and the Use of Force” in Encyclopedia of War and American Society, edited by Peter Karsten. London: Sage Publications, 2006: 133-137. Co-authored with Peter D. Feaver and Christopher Gelpi.
“Civil-Military Relations in the US” in Armed Forces and International Security: Global Trends and Issues, edited by Jean Callaghan and Franz Kernic. Piscataway, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2003: 65-72.
“Introduction” in Peter D. Feaver and Richard H. Kohn, eds. Soldiers and Civilians: the Civil-Military Gap and American National Security. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001: 1-11. Co-authored with Peter D. Feaver and Richard H. Kohn.
PUBLICATIONS: NON-PEER-REVIEWED
“Civil-Military Relations One Year In”, Texas National Security Review “Policy Roundtable: Civil-Military Relations Now and Tomorrow”. 27 March, 2018.
“Kampf dem Chaos: die klassischen Formeln der Counter-insurgency und warum man mit ihnen im Irak nicht weit kommt” [Fighting Chaos: why classic counter-insurgency doctrine may be insufficient in Iraq], in Internationale Politik 14(1): 40-44. Berlin: German Council on Foreign Relations, January 2008.
The Evolution of the Civil-Military “Gap” Debate. Working Paper of the Triangle Institute for Security Studies (Project on the Gap Between the Military and Civilian Society), Durham: TISS, 1999.
Dissertation
My dissertation, "Who Will Serve? Education, Labor Markets, and Military Personnel Policy", assessed how differences in educational systems and labor market structure across states affect military policies on selection/accessions, occupational specialty assignment, and terms of contract. Fundamentally, military personnel policies are likely to be a compromise between the military's functional demands of both high levels of firm-specific training AND fairly high levels of labor turnover, and what the national labor market context incentivizes the individual laborer to expect. In more highly regulated labor markets, where turnover tends to be low, militaries will have to behave differently from firms in order to avoid having large numbers of expensive but redundant personnel. In less regulated labor markets, where turnover tends to be high and employers must incentivize laborers to invest in firm-specific skills, militaries will have to behave differently from firms by providing far higher levels of job security and less opportunity to leave employment voluntarily.
Using in-depth studies of five developed democracies (the USA, UK, Ireland, the Netherlands, and Germany), I determined that labor market structure had the expected effects on specialty assignment and terms of contract.