ABSTRACT
Civil-military relations are complicated by a bumper crop of substantive issues for fueling high-stakes disputes between senior officers and their political masters. The modern civil-military problematique, at least for American political science, emerged out of work by a young professor in the Eisenhower era who would go on to become one of the most famous academics of the twentieth century. Moreover, the American Constitution secured democratic control of defense policy and the military arm by limiting the executive commander-in-chief through checks and balances. The ideological dimension of the problematique received its fair share of attention during the 1990s. Even when freed from the Cold War threat, attitudes mixed across civil-military boundaries, and in any case they managed to retain at least a working level of tolerance for one another's world view. Empirical research into Cold War cases and civil-military frictions during the Clinton administration confirmed that pressures to shirk rose during Presidential uses of force.
