Civil-Military Relations Gone Wild?

War on the Rocks

News, Politics

4.6 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 18 March 2019

⏱️ 50 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Debates over civil-military relations have reached a fever pitch since the 2016 presidential campaign and the beginning of the Trump administration. Many have focused on the top-down questions: What role should retired generals play in our political system? What are the consequences of having so many former military leaders at the upper-most ranks of a presidential administration? Should we be worried about the state of civilian leadership in the Pentagon? But to put those in their right context, it is important to look at civil-military relations from the bottom-up. How are ethics taught to our soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines? What is the state of the profession of arms? What does it really mean for the American people to honor their troops? In this episode, we tackle many of these questions from the top-down and the bottom-up with a terrific panel of experts: Loren DeJonge Schulman of the Center for a New American Security, Alice Hunt Friend of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, and Steven Foster of the U.S. Army and one of the contributors to Redefining the Modern Military: The Intersection of Profession and Ethics.

Transcript

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0:16.2	You are listening to the Warm on the Rocks podcast on strategy, defense, and foreign affairs. My name is Ryan Evans, I'm the editor-in-chief of War on the Rocks.
0:19.0	From professional ethics to civilian oversight military advice to the role of generals and politics and beyond,
0:24.0	civil military relations in the United States has become a heated topic of debate since the beginning of the Trump administration.
0:30.0	In this episode, we gathered three friends of Warren the Rocks, port a few drinks and tried to sort it all out.
0:37.2	So this thing called civil military relations has been in the news a lot lately.
0:41.9	Topic of heated discussion not just in War on the Rocks,
0:44.4	but in major newspapers and cable television shows.
0:49.5	Everything from issue of generals and politics, retired generals in politics, retired generals getting civilian jobs and
0:55.8	playing such prominent roles in the current administration all the way to sort of lower-level
1:00.2	issues and have a great panel to talk about these things. These issues often get talked
1:05.4	about from the top down in Washington, including on War on the Rocks. We have an interesting
1:10.8	panel here that is not only going to be able to handle the top-down
1:14.0	angle, but also the bottom-up.
1:16.1	Just go around and introduce yourselves.
1:17.8	I'm Lauren D. Young-Shelman.
1:19.0	I am a War on the Rocks fan girl and also senior, on top of being one of the co-host of the
1:24.4	podcast Bomb Shell.
1:25.8	Which was just ranked, one of the top 30 podcasts for Curious People by Wired UK, which is a pretty big deal.
1:31.2	Now and Curious People should definitely listen to this podcast though.
1:36.2	My name is Alice Friend.
1:37.2	I'm a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
1:41.0	I am a contributor to War on the Rocks and I'm also desperately trying to finish
	...

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