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This chapter introduces the ideas of subjective and objective civilian control over the military. The U.S., having a system of objective control, pushed Iraq to adopt the same system. Maliki, however, fearing a coup, pushed for subjective control over the Iraqi Security Forces to replace individuals unfavorable of him.

This chapter looks into India’s civil-military relations and its impact on India’s military effectiveness. It discusses the theory of civil-military relations and identifies that while Huntington’s ‘objective control’ best describes civil-military relations in India, it does not, contrary to Huntington’s claim, maximize military effectiveness. Borrowing from Risa Brook’s approach, the author analyses Indian military effectiveness by examining its four crucial determinants—weapons procurement, defence planning, integration and human resource development. He argues that the current structure of civil-military relations, more accurately described as an ‘absent dialogue’, has an adverse impact on its military effectiveness. While the Indian state has acknowledged some of these problems and has made some attempts at defence reforms, more forceful political intervention is required.

Any attempt to understand the war-waging responsibilities of senior political and military leaders must examine two important civil-military theories: the principal-agent theory and its antecedent, the objective control theory. Both approaches analyze the interaction between senior civil and military leaders and the bureaucracies they head. This is the intersection at which waging war occurs. Both theories use a paradox to identify the core issue of the civil-military relationship in a democracy. On the one hand is a functional imperative: to provide security, which is a military force’s function, a nation’s military must be large enough and have sufficient skills, leadership, and materiel to create and sustain the capacities the nation needs to be secure relative to the threats that nation faces or believes it faces. On the other hand is a social imperative: a nation’s military cannot be so strong that it ends up destroying the very state it is designed to serve. Achieving a proper balance between the functional and the social imperatives is, for both the objective control theory and its principal-agent successor, the crux of the relationship between civil and military leaders as well as the bureaucracies that they lead.

Samuel Huntington’s objective control model of civil-military relations has had profound effects on contemporary norms of military professionalism. Huntington anticipated that objective control, premised on a clearly defined division of responsibility between the military and civilians, would create an apolitical ethos among officers. The military’s apolitical character then would ensure its deference to civilian authority and reinforce its professional character. The approach would also enable the military to cultivate expertise in the “management of violence” and guarantee its effectiveness in armed conflict. Those norms, however, are more complex than is sometimes appreciated. They exhibit four paradoxes, producing the very behaviors and outcomes they aim to prevent: they can promote actions and mindsets within the officer corps that work to facilitate political behavior, subvert civilian control of military activity, compromise strategic effectiveness, and even undermine some aspects of military professionalism itself.

This chapter explains the book’s theoretical underpinnings. It begins by discussing the contrasting views of Samuel Huntington and Eliot Cohen on the preferred role and “balance” of civil–military relations. Next, it examines patterns of democratic civil–military relations to argue that they are shaped largely by three factors—the struggle over military autonomy, the issue of civilian expertise, and institutional design, specifically the manner in which the Ministry of Defence interacts with the services. The next section discusses the concept of military effectiveness as adopted in this book. Drawing inspiration from previous works, it examines five processes associated with effective militaries. These variables, analyzed subsequently in separate chapters, are weapons procurement, jointness, professional military education, officer promotion policies, and defense planning. The chapter then discusses the study of the Indian military and its effectiveness and concludes by describing the analytical framework adopted in the rest of the book.

The architecture of objective control has informed a great deal of the development of civil-military norms and the professional education of military officer corps, particularly in the democratic West. But while this idealized vision of civil-military relations has been influential, it is incomplete in its accounting of the moral, ethical, legal, and political structures surrounding the military service member. In practical terms, it is not a simple task to divide problems into purely military and purely political aspects, nor is it easy to determine how to reconcile conflicting imperatives. This chapter attempts to provide a comprehensive typology of the various loyalty structures within which military personnel are located and the various ways in which these structures can conflict. It discusses how democratic theory and classical principal-agent models may prescribe different outcomes for such conflicts and provide a granular understanding of the sources of civil-military friction.