What are the limitations of the civil-military relations (CMR) concept? How can the CMR concept be adapted to better reflect the actual roles of security forces and the relationships between security forces and democratic governments? This article from Democratization sets out a new conceptualisation and framework for understanding what security forces actually do and how they interact with democratic governments. It argues that the focus on civilian control in the CMR literature hinders an understanding of the more complex relationships between democracy and security forces. We therefore need to extend the conceptual breadth of the CMR concept to include not only democratic civilian control, but also effectiveness and efficiency.
CMR literature currently focuses overwhelmingly on civilian control over the armed forces. The literature tends to give little attention to police forces, which in many democratising countries undertake military-like roles. It also gives little attention to democratic consolidation, particularly in relation to what security forces actually do and the implications for democracy. Finally, the literature tends to overlook the roles of the military beyond national defence. While the security sector reform (SSR) concept fills in some of these gaps, there is a lack of consensus on the definition and conceptualisation of SSR.
Since the concepts of both CMR and SSR are in some ways lacking, a new framework for conceptualising CMR is needed. In order to capture the priorities and requirements of both democratic consolidation and contemporary security challenges, a framework for analysing CMR should include:
- Democratic civilian control – Democracies should consider how to control not only the military, but also the police and intelligence services. Control involves three sets of mechanisms: institutional mechanisms, oversight and professional norms.
- Effectiveness – Effectiveness is determined by a state’s preparedness to fulfil a number of roles including fighting wars and carrying out peace support operations. This requires a strategy, effective structures and processes, and sufficient resources.
- Efficiency – Efficiency in the area of security is problematic, since common measures of efficiency are not easily applied to the security sector. However, there is still a need for institutions to carry out oversight of the allocation and use of resources.
Each of the above three elements of CMR is necessary within the democratic context, but none is individually sufficient. Civilian control is basic and fundamental, but how effectively and efficiently a government handles defence and security issues can also influence its legitimacy. Balancing these three elements may require a number of tradeoffs:
- Too much civilian direction and oversight can hamper security services’ capabilities or reveal sources and methods in intelligence. However, increased democratic control can improve effectiveness in military, intelligence and police forces.
- Democratic direction and oversight are costly, requiring security institutions to use resources to provide data and report to oversight bodies. Despite this, democratic control can increase efficiency, particularly with regard to police reform.
- Changes in management and leadership that increase effectiveness may also yield positive results in terms of efficiency. However, it is more often the case that an operation may be effective while being quite inefficient.
