ABSTRACT
This conclusion presents some closing thoughts on the key concepts discussed in the preceding chapters of this book. The book focuses on the historical development of civil-military relations in nine Communist countries have provided important material in this area. It shows protracted periods of army-party fusion in Cuba, China, Yugoslavia, and Vietnam. The book suggests that such a model can help to explain the development of Communist civil-military relations, especially in the first generation after the seizure of the power. A major gap in the emerging literature on Communist civil-military relations has been the lack of systematic attention to armies other than the Russian or Chinese. Theorists of civil-military relations traditionally have assumed a rigid separation between civilian and military institutions. The explicit inclusion of the consolidation phase is useful in fitting Cuba into the second pattern of countries in which civil war created a fused civil-military elite.
