Civilian Control, Civil–Military Friction, and Foreign Military Intervention

Abstract

The relationship between domestic civil–military relations and the use of foreign military force has been long debated. The two primary perspectives on the issue, civilian conservatism and military conservatism, are antithetical. The former maintains that military authorities are more likely to advocate for the use of military force than civilian counterparts, while the latter advances the opposite argument. Empirical research to date has added little clarity to the relationship. We shed new light on this long running controversy through analyses of a different, and arguably more appropriate, set of measures for the key variables of concern: civilian control, civil–military conflict, and the use of foreign military force. In zero-inflated negative binomial estimates of 165 countries from 1946 to 2010, we find consistent support for civilian conservatism. More specifically, when civilian control erodes or civil–military conflict reaches particularly high levels, the likelihood that a state will launch a foreign military intervention increases.