In his important new book, Supreme Command, Eliot Cohen describes all this as the “normal” theory of civil-military relations: the idea that civilian control must be exercised firmly within the political sphere but barely at all within the military sphere. Cohen challenges that theory, however, by arguing that such a model bears scant relationship to what is actually required for success in war.
Cohen has strong things to say about the recent cases that have helped forge the current conventional wisdom. But to make his point he ranges further back in time, assessing the performance of four civilian leaders of democracies who guided their countries to victory in major wars, even after facing serious early setbacks. The first two of his examples, Abraham Lincoln and Winston Churchill, are well known; less so are Georges Clemenceau, France’s leader for the concluding stage of World War I, and David Ben Gurion, Israel’s leader during its wars of independence. Cohen’s accounts of their wartime experiences are marked by good writing and good sense, and are worth reading on their own terms, regardless of any general lessons they might teach.
