ABSTRACT
The responsibility of a profession, according to Huntington (1985), is the provision of certain services, which are essential to the existence and functioning of the state. These services require a specific kind of expertise and a duty to exercise professional judgement. In Huntington’s civil-military relations taxonomy, the responsibility and the expertise of the officer profession are limited to the ‘management of violence’ (p. 9), and proper military professionalism is to practise it expertly on behalf of the state and in a politically disinterested manner. To Huntington, the domain of the military is limited, and its professionalism is what ensures the proper relationship between the military and the state, which he calls ‘objective civilian control’ (p. 83). Although Huntington’s taxonomy has faced criticism from a number of different perspectives (Rønnfeldt, 2019), it has still ‘defined civil-military relations for generations of military professionals’ (Rapp, 2015, p. 13). In this chapter, Enstad argues that the narrow conception of the military domain in Huntington’s taxonomy produces an untenably restricted notion of the military profession’s responsibility.
