Civilian monitoring of U.S. military operations in the information age

Recent research on U.S. civil-military relations has applied principal-agent logic to analyze the post-cold war friction between civilian authorities and top military commanders. This article proposes a greater emphasis on bargaining to focus on the effects of new monitoring technologies available to the civilian principal in the information age. As monitoring capabilities increase and military agents perceive their autonomy disappearing, tacit bargaining over the president's level of resource commitment to a crisis should become more prevalent. This idea receives support from a comparison across case studies of the limited use of force taken from different technological eras. A new style of civil-military bargaining presents both challenges and opportunities to the traditional conception of military professionalism. © 2006, Inter-University Seminar on Armed Forces and Society. All rights reserved.

Duke Scholars

Author Peter D. Feaver Political Science