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The US military should refrain from seeking political power and avoid partisan politics. However, to insist that officers should remain apolitical ignores the fact that in the American system policy making and the development of strategy cannot be easily separated from the political process. Yet such a separation is what many scholars suggest. For officers to avoid the world of politics would mean removing them from the debates about policy and strategy that require their input. Military leaders must contribute to the policy process and navigate the shoals of politics while maintaining trust between the civilian and military sides of policy formulation.
It is a pillar of American civil-military relations that military officers are expected to remain apolitical in the performance of their duties. As Risa Brooks writes in a chapter for a recent collection of essays on American civil-military relations, "When individuals join the armed forces, they commit to act in service of the country as a whole and to forego political activity. Military personnel are charged with protecting the security of the country and with performing their functional responsibilities with efficiency, commitment, and skill. Officers are socialized to believe that the world of politics is exclusively a civilian arena."1
But what does political mean in the context of policy making in a democratic republic? Is it possible for an officer to avoid involvement in the political arena and still do his or her job? The answer depends on how one defines political. The term has three meanings in the context of civil-military relations. The first definition is seeking power at the expense of other government institutions. Samuel Finer's The Man on Horseback is the classic study of this meaning of the word.2 The term's second meaning is participation in the policy-making process. This is the sense in which many contemporary writers use the term.3 While Brooks has previously used the term in the same sense as Finer,4 she has recently adopted this second definition.5 The third meaning of political is involvement in partisan politics.6
Of course, the US military-as an institution and as individual service members-should refrain from seeking political power and avoid partisan politics. This political refrain should be a cornerstone of military professionalism. However, to insist that officers...