Policy by Other Means
Prussian general and late military theorist Carl Von Clausewitz famously wrote that “war is merely a continuation of policy by other means.”Footnote 1 This oft-quoted passage from his famous On War outlines what military scholars have come to call the “Clausewitzian Problem”; how governments grapple with the challenge of using appropriate military means to achieve desired political ends. The Clausewitzian problem—as a broad framework—dominates the pages of strategic studies and security studies scholarship. However, the quote’s namesake discipline—policy—generally ignores military and defense matters in both its scholarship and education, despite the remarkable irony that “the policy science movement was born with the purpose of counseling the Department of Defense on a plethora of matters.”Footnote 2 The public policy field traces its roots to defense matters in the 1940s while military and defense-related issues continuously rank as top voter-interest areas today. According to a recent NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, the top 5 voter-interest policy issues as of May 2019 are healthcare, immigration, and border security, job creation and economic growth, national security and terrorism, and climate change.Footnote 3 Similarly, a 2019 Gallup poll shows that 68% of Americans consider foreign affairs as “extremely important,” along with other policy issues like taxes, healthcare, and the economy.Footnote 4 Most public policy and administration schools, departments, and scholarly outlets claim to confront the most pressing policy issues; to take on the difficult policy challenges of today and tomorrow. Top voter-interest areas naturally have a place in public policy and administration curricula and scholarship. Why, then, do defense policy issues, or those related to it, remain absent from most public policy and administration schools and scholarly mediums today?
Through an historical analysis, this article posits answers to this question and recommends future actions to reintegrate defense policy into the conversation. The article’s central premise is not new. Other scholars have noted this curious phenomenon through the years.Footnote 5 Most recently, Archuleta reviews contemporary literature to support his argument that while international relations and security studies scholars have made substantive contributions to the field, few policy scholars have done the same.Footnote 6 What Archuleta’s article contributes in premise it lacks in context. How did we go from defense issues catalyzing policy studies as an academic field in the 1940s to relative absence in 2019? Archuleta’s piece is a continuation of Ripberger’s article assessing the burgeoning defense and security scholarship in the post–9/11 era. Ripberger notes that 9/11 “propelled defense and security back onto the disciplinary research agenda”Footnote 7 but opts to focus his research note solely on “research related to civil defense and homeland security policy designed to protect the United States against terrorist activity.”Footnote 8 This focus represents a common fallacy within the policy literature equating defense matters to those of the domestic homeland security and emergency management agenda; a fallacy we see in Comfort, Waugh, and Cigler’s Public Administration Review (PAR) article chronicling the evolution of emergency management research and practice in public administration and in so doing subsuming defense policy within the broader context of emergency management.Footnote 9
Archuleta, Ripberger, and Comfort et al. serve as relevant departure points for this discussion. This article continues in the spirit of Comfort et al.’s approach detailing the evolution of emergency management as a policy subfield. As defense policy lacks a substantive anchoring scholarly subfield, this article draws literature from various complementary fields and uses a similar framework to detail the evolution and future direction of defense policy. To fully consider defense policy in this regard, we first need to understand its scholarly progression and disciplinary boundaries.
What Defense Policy Is and Is Not
Guy Peters defines public policy as “the sum of government activities, whether pursued directly or through agents, as those activities have an influence on the lives of citizens.”Footnote 10 Accepting Peters’s definition of public policy as our base, we turn to defense matters within this context. In Peters’s current edition of American Public Policy, he opts not to offer a definition of defense policy despite devoting a chapter to the defense and law enforcement policy environment. His chapter references largely come from news magazines such as the New York Times rather than scholarly publications; an indication of the lack of academic scholarship dedicated to the topic. To this end, one of the only scholarly definitions of defense policy available is found in American Defense Policy. With eight print editions spanning 1965 through 2005, American Defense Policy (ADP) purports to be the seminal work in the subfield. ADP defines defense policy as “a plan or course of action regarding the recruitment, training, organizing, equipping, deployment, and use of military forces.”Footnote 11 Such a definition, though seemingly broad, is narrow relative to the modern complexity of the twenty-first-century defense establishment. Since the Department of Defense’s (DOD) mission, as stated by the National Defense Strategy (NDS), is to “provide combat-credible military forces needed to deter war and protect the security of our nation,”Footnote 12 the ADP definition is limiting.
The defense enterprise does far more today beyond recruiting, training, organizing, equipping, deploying, and using force; and its policies go well beyond simply planning for these requirements. The DOD, and the military forces it provides to deter war and protect the nation, is a focal contributor to United States (US) national security abroad, and also at home. The military is an instrument of national power that provides for the common defense of the nation, thus contributing to the production, maintenance, and advancement of US national security interests. Whereas ADP’s definition is too narrow, Archuleta’s definition of defense policy is too broad. Archuleta defines defense policy as “deliberative actions (or nonactions) taken by government to ‘protect fundamental values’ and meet core (and peripheral) national security interests necessary to the continued existence and vitality of the state.”Footnote 13 In this attempt at defining defense policy, Archuleta conflates—as many scholars do—defense with nondefense issues and fails to establish a disciplinary boundary specific to military matters alone. Government actions protecting values and meeting national security interests, per Archuleta, can extend well beyond defense matters into economic, diplomatic, homeland security, and other complementary policy foci. We need a better, more appropriate, definition of defense policy befitting the twenty-first-century defense environment. Considering Peters’s public policy definition relative to the defense environment, we should adopt a definition of defense policy as the sum of activities governing the military instrument of power in the pursuit, preservation, and promotion of national security. Using this definition helps to clearly establish what defense policy is … and what it is not.
The disciplinary boundaries of defense policy encompass all things military. From defense budgets to force structure; strategy to technology; weapons procurement to logistics; civil-military relations to women in combat; defense policy deals with the who, what, when, where, and why of how the United States employs its military forces. There are several complementary specializations that remain outside the defense policy sphere, yet are often—mistakenly—assumed equivalent within public policy and administration discourse.
Whereas defense policy is specific to military matters, it is often— incorrectly—subsumed within scholarly literature under broader policy subfields, namely, homeland security and emergency management. The homeland security and emergency management establishment no doubt contributes to US national security, but they do so within complementary yet distinct functions from the US military. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS), for instance, serves to “safeguard the American people, homeland, and values.”Footnote 14 Likewise, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), as the lead emergency management arm, serves as the government agency responsible for “helping people before, during, and after disasters.”Footnote 15 The DOD historically supports DHS and FEMA in these efforts, but does so within narrowly defined roles. There is a seam of distinction defined by policy and law separating these national security entities. Homeland security and emergency management, both in policy and practice, are relatively new government functions separate and distinct from the Constitutionally-rooted history of defense.
The Common Defense
The US Constitution established the basis of US defense policy that we use today. The Preamble to the Constitution forms the five focus areas of the proceeding document and codifies the fundamental responsibilities of the federal government. In addition to justice, ensuring domestic tranquility, promoting general welfare, and securing the blessings of liberty, the Preamble requires the government “to provide for the common defense” (US Constitution preamble). The Constitution language follows the Preamble and prioritizes defense more than any other area of governance as evidenced by the prominence, frequency, and specificity of defense matters relative to other issues. To this point, Article I, Section 8, of the Constitution grants seventeen legislative powers to the Congress. Of those seventeen powers, more than a third (six) are exclusive to defense matters.Footnote 16 Additionally, whereas many Constitutional powers are permissive—i.e., allowable but not required—the Constitution stipulates on two occasions that the government and Congress are required to provide for the common defense and further lists specific wording to this effect. Article IV, Section 4, as an example of this common defense requirement, specifies that the government “shall protect (the states) against invasion.”Footnote 17 Moreover, the Constitution further establishes the common defense requirement by restricting the states from maintaining standing armies or navies and engaging in war. Specifically, Article I, Section 10, notes that “no state shall … keep troops, or ships of war … or engage in war, unless actually invaded, or in such imminent danger as will not admit of delay.”Footnote 18 While states can maintain a “well-regulated militia”Footnote 19—what we know today as the National Guard—these are not standing military forces reserved to the states but rather a regulated militia called into service as needed. In essence, the federal government—not the sovereign states though they maintain militias—is responsible for providing for the common defense of the states and the nation. And with this clearly and repetitively codified requirement comes the Constitutionally-established defense policy guidepost that “the President shall be commander in chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the militia of the several states, when called into the actual service of the United States.”Footnote 20 The US Constitution offers an unambiguous defense policy framework; one that establishes the common defense as an undeniable primary, priority, and exclusive function of the federal government. This framework still influences the identification, formulation, adoption, implementation, and evaluation of defense policies today.Footnote 21
Do today’s policy scholars and educators take this Constitutional charge for granted? Modern defense policy came to being with the passing of the National Security Act (NSA) of 1947. The NSA of 1947 restructured the US military (then the Department of War and the Department of the Navy) into the National Military Establishment (NME) with three civilian secretaries for each of the military departments and established the civilian cabinet position of the Secretary of Defense.Footnote 22 Amendments to the Act in 1949 expanded the Secretary of Defense’s authority and renamed the NME as the Department of Defense.Footnote 23 A central tenet of defense policy in this post–World War II era was communist containment. After the conflict in Korea and with expanding military efforts in Vietnam, rising US-Soviet tensions ushered in the civil defense era and a renewed focus on defense policy in higher education. Scholars during this time pontificated about nuclear war and the threat of such punctuated scholarly and societal discourse. Civil defense preparations and response frameworks soon emerged as burgeoning scholarly subfields. Sociologists took note of this evolving social phenomenon. By the mid-1960s, the scholarly subfield studying societal responses to emergencies and disasters emerged. According to Quarantelli, disaster research continued to evolve through the years as it demonstrated relevance beyond the sociology discipline.Footnote 24 Eventually, FEMA, the National Association for Schools of Public Affairs and Administration (NASPAA), and the American Society for Public Administration (ASPA) took note of the field’s relevance to their respective aims.
Comfort et al. outline the resulting FEMA/NASPAA partnership as well as ASPA’s creation of a section on emergency management in 1985. According to Comfort et al., the ASPA Section on Emergency Management “merged with the Section on National Security and Defense Policy in the 1990s, becoming the Section on Emergency and Crisis Management”Footnote 25 (SECM). This decision serves as another notable point of departure that contributes to the lack of defense policy material in the public policy and administration teaching and scholarly landscape today.
According to their mission statement, SECM “seeks to improve the quality of emergency management in the public sector … (and) seeks to bring emergency management into the mainstream of public administration and increase its effectiveness at all levels of government.”Footnote 26 In adopting this as their mission, the SECM establishes emergency management (and homeland security by extension after 2002) as the preeminent foci of the section’s research. Comfort et al. label this a “merger” despite the section’s complete dismissal of defense policy from its mission and research scope after the change.Footnote 27 This was a fundamental disbandment of defense issues coupled with a simultaneous migration toward emergency management. This “merger” marginalized—and eventually dissolved—defense policy as a recognized subfield within ASPA. Incentives for policy scholars to pursue defense-oriented research and design classes disappeared as the community no longer seemed to value the subject matter. This is evident not only in the historical context of ASPA’s section rebranding effort but also in the (non)prevalence of defense policy scholarship in top-tier journals in the field today.
Defense Policy in Scholarship
A search of top-tier public policy and administration journals for articles related to or containing the term “defense policy” or “military policy” yields an obvious conclusion: such scholarship is substantively absent in the field. Searching these terms in the field’s top-ranked journal—Public Administration Review (PAR)—absent any other search criteria and inclusive of the journal’s publication history since 1940—produces 8 article hits, each with at best tangential relevance to defense policy. In contrast, the same unfiltered search in PAR’s database for “homeland security” produces 230 hits. As an even greater disparity, there are seventy-two articles mentioning emergency management for every one article mentioning defense policy in the Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory (JPART) despite JPART’s stated commitment to embracing “policy sciences as they apply to government.”Footnote 28 The Policy Studies Journal (PSJ) produced the most search hits for defense policy of any journal ranked in the top ten, with forty-six article or chapter results. Public Administration returned forty-seven results for defense policy upon initial search. However, a more thorough review of the results includes numerous works with no relevance to US defense policy. Table 1 below depicts the number of total search hits for four generic terms relevant to the article discussion.Footnote 29 The selected journals reflect the top five (in order) public policy and administration journals (as of July 2019), ranked by a combination of h index and impact factor ratings. The search queried each journal’s database for the terms listed below, unfiltered.
Table 1. Search Results by Journal
We see an obvious disparity throughout the searches between defense and military policy (3 percent of total results) in comparison to homeland security and emergency management (97 percent). The stark contrast departs further considering the total rate of incidence normalized over available publication years of each term. Table 2 depicts the total publication years for each term, as determined by subtracting the years available (i.e., the term’s adoption in scholarly lexicon) from the publication’s founding. The disparity is even greater when normalized over an “available years” measure. For this analysis, we calculate the available years measure to equal the sum of publication years for each journal minus years previous the establishment of the measured department (DOD or DHS). As an example: PAR was founded in 1940, nine years prior to the establishment of the Department of Defense as a named entity. Thus, we exclude nine years from the PAR search hit calculation for defense policy given the absence of the department name from 1940 to 1949. Since the Department of Homeland Security was not founded until 2002, the available publication years for this term runs from 2002 to 2019, or seventeen years. The same method applies to the remaining terms relative to each journal’s founding. As all of the selected journals were founded prior to the establishment of DHS in 2002, the available years calculation for DHS is constant at seventeen for all publications. Both emergency management and military policy are generic terms in which an origination date cannot be established. For consistency, no limits are set for these terms as they are assumed to be inclusive of all available publication years for each journal in the table below.
Table 2. Available Publication Years by Term and Journal
With the total number of search hits (Table 1) and total publication years available for each term (Table 2), we can calculate the rate of incidence for each term, by journal, per year. From this number, we then establish an average rate of incidence for each term, irrespective of the other terms. Table 3 below depicts the average rate of incidence in terms of article hits per year for the four chosen terms across the top five public policy and administration journals in the field today. The numbers are telling.
Table 3. Rates of Incidence by Term and Journal
Based on the above data, we can expect approximately fourteen articles per year in PAR to address homeland security in some capacity; twenty-five articles per year in the JPART to mention emergency management. A brief look at the first page of the PAR database search results shows that homeland security features prominently in numerous articles. At six issues a year, we therefore expect to see two or more articles addressing homeland security in some capacity, on average, per issue of PAR. Compare this to .1 (PAR) and .3 (JPART) articles per year in any way mentioning defense policy; or approximately one article every eight to nine years. The difference is staggering, especially considering the continued military engagements in the seventy years from 1949 to 2019 and the wealth of data the DOD keeps on nearly every conceivable function of its operations. In the seventy-five years since the end of World War II, numerous university scholars and institutes outside the public policy and administration sphere have contributed to defense policy research.Footnote 30 The United States has been involved in five prolonged conflicts (Korea, Vietnam, Gulf War, Iraq, and Afghanistan) and dozens of smaller military skirmishes throughout the world during this time. The irony is the perceived omission of defense policy in policy scholarship despite the renewed focus on defense policies within complementary fields in the post-9/11 era. Another observable result stemming from the dearth of scholarship is the apparent lack of higher-education programs offering classes or specializations in defense (or even national security) policy. But until the topic is revived in scholarship, it will remain conspicuously absent higher education curricula as well.
Defense Policy in the Classroom
Despite the continued prominence of military and national security issues in national polling data and the prevalence of these issues in the nightly news headlines, defense policy is equally absent outside the military service academies and professional military education system. Whereas programs emphasizing homeland security and emergency or disaster management have ballooned into the university landscape from R1s to community colleges, from certificate programs to doctorates nationwide, defense policy issues are similarly scarce. Several schools of international affairs, foreign, or international service contain national security and defense concentrations, but these concentrations tend to approach defense matters from the international relations perspective rather than a policy-specific orientation. Traditional policy approaches to defense and military issues are uncommon in the higher education landscape currently.
Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA) offers a masters of public administration (MPA) degree with an optional concentration area in international security policy (ISP). The ISP concentration “provides conceptual foundations and practical policy analysis of … defense policy and military strategy … and related issues.”Footnote 31 The program offers numerous courses in defense and military issues within the policy sphere and serves as a prime example of how such material can be successfully integrated into a public policy and administration curriculum. As another related example, The George Washington University’s Trachtenberg School of Public Policy and Administration offers separate fields of study for its students. One such field is National Security and Foreign Policy. This specialization offers courses in defense policy processes and analysis and is one of the only programs in the country to do so.Footnote 32 The Trachtenberg School also offers a separate field of study in Homeland Security and Emergency Management supporting this article’s position that the fields are, in fact, different. Both GWU and Columbia’s programs are graduate programs, but such material is available to undergraduates as well.
The Peace, War, and Defense (PWAD) program at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, is one of the only such programs in the United States (beyond the military service academies) to offer defense-related education to undergraduates. Affiliated with the university’s public policy program, PWAD offers myriad classes in military and defense issues, some of which are taught by public policy faculty also involved in the global conflict and cooperation research area.Footnote 33 Outside of established degree programs like those discussed, other university public policy schools maintain dedicated research centers examining defense topics. The University of Virginia’s Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy and the University of Michigan’s Ford School of Public Policy host national and international security policy cohorts and centers, respectively.Footnote 34 The University of Chicago’s Harris School of Public Policy and Texas A&M’s Bush School of Government offer classes and certificates in defense matters, but do not have established research centers or cohorts similar to Michigan and Virginia.Footnote 35 While others no doubt exist, the list is small. Considering this, what are some of the reasons we got here?
The Dissolution of Defense Policy
The merger of national security and defense policy into the ASPA’s Section on Emergency and Crisis Management serves as a perceived line of demarcation for the dissolution of defense policy as a recognized specialization in policy studies. But did this one change make the subject irrelevant across the entire field? This section presents arguments tracing each to some observed effect on the incidence and prevalence of defense policy in contemporary public policy scholarship and education.
The Peace Dividend
The early 1990s saw the end of the decades-long Cold War with the Soviet Union and a swift, decisive military domination in the Gulf War. The United States stood alone as the only military superpower and enjoyed the status as global hegemon via an unfettered strategy of nuclear deterrence complemented by combat superiority. Within three years of the end of the Gulf War and cessation of Cold War rhetoric, ASPA disbanded the continued study of defense policy. The 1994 dissolution of the National Security and Defense Policy section in ASPA is evidence of Betts’s assertion that military power was subjected to little analytical rigor after 1990.Footnote 36 The postwar peace dividend bred defense complacency, an overconfidence of the US defense posture relative to existing and evolving threats. The reduced emphasis on defense and military affairs during this period of détente sent a visible message to policy scholars that defense policy was no longer considered worthy of study. When the United States was attacked on September 11, 2001, the peace dividend came to an abrupt end. However, rather than catapulting defense policy back into the policy conversation, 9/11 had a near opposite effect.
The 9/11 Effect
Despite terrorist attacks both at home and abroad, as well as military engagements throughout Africa, Eastern Europe, and the Middle East from 1991 to 2001, defense matters garnered little attention from policy scholars during this period. The events of 9/11 propelled the United States into a global war on terror (GWOT) that would not end “until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped and defeated.”Footnote 37 One might logically expect a coordinated terror attack spurring military response to generate some scholarly attention. However, 9/11, it seems, produced precisely the opposite effect for policy scholars: rather than attending to the GWOT and the evolving conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq, scholars affiliated with traditional public policy and administration programs instead turned their focus inward on the processes, policies, and procedures for homeland security and emergency management.
The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, brought US vulnerability to the forefront of the conversation and sparked a reinvigorated discussion of the importance of securing the homeland. The emphasis on homeland security and emergency management produced a scholarly and educational fascination with the “shiny new object” in the community. The establishment of DHS in 2002,Footnote 38 as well as the agency reorganization that occurred thereafter, presented an opportunity for scholars to claim the space and establish a new and contemporary policy specialization open for contribution. In doing so, policy scholars focused their attention inward on the new novelty subfield and continued, ironically, to disregard defense matters despite the immediate—and sustained for the past eighteen years—military action in the global war on terror. The 9/11 Effect resulted in the casting aside of defense policy in the public policy discipline while simultaneously presenting an opportunity for other disciplines to capitalize.
The pre-9/11 defense discharge from public policy coupled with the post-9/11 emphasis on homeland security and emergency management led to a migration opportunity for scholars in emerging fields to carve out new scholarly territory. Strategic studies and security studies curricula emerged as the default landing spots for defense policy as a subfield. The ideational shift in emphases within public policy and administration resulted in a field that now largely neglects defense and military affairs. In doing so, other disciplines seized the opportunity and established a territorial foothold in the subfield. Academic think tanks beyond the Ivory Tower also contribute to the defense policy subfield, so much so that some university scholars refrain from working in the field due to the perceived domination of resource-rich research centers detached from university politics.
Federally Funded Research and Development Centers
Government-backed research centers dominate the defense policy research landscape. Evolving nuclear capabilities throughout the latter half of the twentieth century raised the stakes of the strategic challenges for intellectual inquiry. The literal and figurative costs of engaging in the nuclear arms race catalyzed the evolution of deterrence scholarship still influencing military affairs and defense policymaking today.Footnote 39 Think tanks like RAND and the Brookings Institution produced lengthy monographs examining various aspects of deterrence policy and strategies, defense budgeting, and other technical analyses. As the defense industry expanded, so too did the federally-funded research ventures intent on enhancing our understanding of military affairs. Today, federally-funded research and development centers (FFRDCs) continue their defense policy domination. FFRDCs may lead the subfield sufficiently to dissuade substantive university scholarship, but they do not hold a disciplinary monopoly. Moreover, a critique levied against FFRDC defense policy research is that it is often technically focused on the mechanics of policymaking, the inputs and outcomes, and that it lacks theoretical base and analytical narrative designed to further the debate.Footnote 40 So whereas FFRDCs may give the perception that they dictate the scholarly discussion, the reality is there are ample avenues of approach for interested scholars to contribute. This call comes with the understanding, however, of perhaps the most significant reason for a lack of defense policy scholarship and teaching in the field: distance apathy.
Distance Apathy
During periods of conscription in the United States, masses of the population served in the military. There were more people close to the military both in service and support. As more people served, a greater percentage of the population had a vested interest in and, by extension, familiarity with the defense industry. Since the end of conscription in the United States in 1973, far fewer people have service in or connection to the US military as a result of the all-volunteer force model. Today, approximately 1.3 million people serve in the US armed forces, or less than .5 percent of the total population.Footnote 41 Even by adding the approximately 18 million living US veterans to this number, we still fail to eclipse 10 percent of the US population that has ever served in the military. This small fraction of the population with military service further separates an already unique institution from the rest of society. With fewer serving military members, institutional knowledge declines. In the age of conscription, the societal connection to the military was robust. In the postconscription era, this relationship struggles for connection.
Whereas there was a required linkage between society and the military under conscription, under the all-volunteer-force model the military’s relationship with society fractures. This distance apathy is furthered by the view that scholarship pertaining to the military supports violence. As Betts notes, research examining military affairs typically concerns itself with preventing rather than promoting war. Still, military research is seen by some as “the work of the devil.”Footnote 42 This needs to change. Hyperbole aside, distance apathy produces a scholarly reticence to examining the military and defense industry. Is it a sense of prideful arrogance that deters scholars from this subfield? Or is it that the inertia behind defense policies defends against making any meaningful scholarly contribution effecting change?
The defense community is difficult to breach. In contrast to the whole community concepts of emergency management encouraging public inclusivity and contribution, the military and defense industry is relatively inaccessible to the general public. Perhaps the inaccessibility relieves scholars of their motivation and interest for defense policy research. Additionally, institutional and disciplinary parochialism acts as a barrier in that factions of committed scholars tend to hold their own disciplines in high regard while denouncing the contributions of others. As well, the perceived liberal political biases of the broader academyFootnote 43 are antithetical to the perceived conservative biases of the military.Footnote 44 With defense policy, we see both scholarly reticence due to the subject content as well as general opposition to its legitimacy as a subfield within policy studies. Thus, the impetus to adoption of defense policy within traditional public policy scholarship and curricula remains with scholars’ collective resistance to acknowledge defense policy as a peace contributor rather than a war promoter. Changing paradigms and weakening the cultural resistance to defense matters is a necessary precondition for successful adoption of defense policy scholarship and higher education. If this can be done, the next step requires successful application.
Reintegrating Defense Policy
With 3.2 million employees among the active servicemembers, reservists, national guardsmen, and civilians, the US Department of Defense is the world’s largest employer.Footnote 45 The world’s largest employer also accounts for, on average, greater than 50 percent of annual US discretionary spending requirements. At $750 billion, the fiscal year 2019 defense budget exceeds the total discretionary spending on health, energy, education, housing, transportation, space, homeland security, and all other federal agency programs—and related policy areas—combined. Footnote 46 Such a large bureaucracy is prone to mismanagement, waste, and abuse of resources. This begs scholarly expertise to weigh in on taxpayer-funded policy choices. The following sections detail actionable recommendations to address such an issue.
ASPA/DOD Partnership
ASPA should reestablish the National Security and Defense Policy Section as a stand-alone section. The 1994 merger of the former section with the Section on Emergency Management was not a merger in any sense of the word. It dissolved at least the defense policy aspect of the section’s focus and effectively removed the subfield from scholarly and educational relevance. In discussing the rise of emergency management as a defined subfield, Comfort et al. noted that the 1983 NASPAA/FEMA partnership agreement was designed to “create a community of scholars ‘teaching and doing research in emergency management and interacting with each other synergistically so that the whole of their effort exceeds the sum of its parts.’”Footnote 47 NASPAA currently has a dedicated “Emergency Management and Homeland Security” section. Likewise, the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management (APPAM) has a section on “National Security and Homeland Security,”Footnote 48 which defines the policy area as one focusing on “core security issues such as traditional intelligence and defense analysis, international security problems in general, homeland security and emergency preparedness, and emerging issues such as peace operations and intricacies of information warfare.”Footnote 49 This is at least an acknowledgment of defense issues as relevant to the conversation that stands as one of few such defense-specific foci in the public policy and administration profession. Finally, ASPA maintains twenty-eight dedicated policy-issues sections, including the aforementioned SECM. Today, none of these twenty-eight sections reference the military or defense in their mission statements. ASPA did, however, publish a “Military | Defense Through the Public Administration Lens” issue in 2017 via its Public Administration Times outlet. Richard Keevey’s commentary on defense policy in this issue calls for a “detailed discussion of military improvements … including those in nuclear deterrence and capacity; missile defense for troops, ships and the homeland; and robotics and artificial intelligence.”Footnote 50 This is perhaps a start to the dialogue that then requires the establishment of defense policy within the disciplinary boundaries of national security policy.
The Case for a Subfield
Defense policy warrants its own subfield within the public policy sphere. Using Betts’s argument to distinguish strategic studies from both military science and security studies, a parallel approach within the broader public policy sphere should be considered. According to Betts, a subfield “must be broad enough to encompass a significant range of problems, but narrow enough to be a coherent area of inquiry, distinguishable from other subfields and the parent field.”Footnote 51 The proposed defense policy subfield meets each of these requirements in spades.
A Range of Problems:
Policies and procedures concerning military recruitment, training, organization, equipment, deployment, and the use of force in myriad capacities are all ripe for exploration. Defense policy examines aspects of strategy development, defense postures such as isolationism and interventionism, political party affiliations and the influence on military applications, and others. Within each of these areas, there are matters of budgeting, sociological and organizational behavior, ethics, law, and more. We can question policies banning certain persons from military service; the sociological aspects of women in combat roles, and the various services’ differences in their respective policies on such. We can inquire about the use and merits or limitations of a socialized medical system in the DOD or the long history and utility of educational programs for veterans such as the GI Bill in its various forms. We can examine the status of protected veterans in diversity-based hiring initiatives and the effects of these policies on the national workforce. The vast range of problems goes on and begs rigorous academic analysis from a policy process lens. These and other issues require committed scholarly study examining the driving agendas behind defense policies, the formulation and implementation processes, and, perhaps most important, a rigorous evaluation of the same to inform more effective future defense policies.
Coherence of Inquiry
In defense policy, we seek to examine the military instrument and its policies. With defense as its focus, we can thereby exclude homeland security and emergency management from the policy inquires, save for those particular topics with overlapping relevance. Even in these and other areas, defense policy will emphasize only those policies specific to the military and defense industry, which is also precisely how one will distinguish this subfield from others.
Distinguishable from Subfields and Parent Field
Other relevant policy subfields include homeland security, emergency management, and disaster studies. The parent field to each of these, including defense policy, is national security. National security is parented by public policy and administration. When we think of the proposed definition of defense policy as the sum of activities governing the military instrument of power in the pursuit, preservation, and promotion of national security, establishing defense policy as a subfield parallel to homeland security and emergency management but within national security makes sense.
The Policy Spheres
A subfield must specialize sufficiently that it contributes to the body of knowledge such that it is not abandoned. To clarify how defense policy should fit within the broader public policy and administration field, consider three overlapping spheres shown in Figure 1 below. The spheres include public policy and administration (sum of government activities and their influence on society) as the outermost, largest sphere; national security policy (framework describing how a country protects its citizens) as the center sphere; and defense policy (sum of activities governing the military in pursuit of national security) as the smallest, most specialized sphere within.
Figure 1. Public, National Security, and Defense Policy Spheres.
Since only national security policy has current academic standing in public policy programs nationwide, defense policy must be defined within this sphere but relative to—and distinguishable from—both homeland security and emergency management. In sort of an intellectual paradox, defense policy as a subfield will strengthen with its connection to national security, whereas its academic standing and credibility will also increase with scholarly detachment from it. In returning to the essential Clausewitzian problem, scholars and analysts should focus on whether, why, and how the US defense polices produce sufficient means to enable military forces to achieve political ends and how war really is—or is not—a rational continuation of policy by other means.
Specializations and Research Centers
Having established the place of the proposed defense policy subfield in higher education—i.e., where it should reside—the next logical question is how to accomplish this proposal in the face of resistance. Betts argued that “given the policy-oriented nature of strategic studies, graduate schools of public policy and international affairs should be a logical locus.”Footnote 52 Whereas strategic studies programs have evolved since Betts’s call, defense policy specializations are woefully behind. The existence of strategic studies as a discipline complements the establishment of defense policy as a subfield. Defense policy can leverage strategic studies scholarship as an informative basis for its own scholarly territory. In this way, defense policy will not focus on the technical functioning of strategy; rather, strategy focuses on or is enabled by the technical functioning of defense policymaking. Under this model, there is an opportunity to further define and establish defense-oriented programs within public policy schools.
Colleges and universities must follow along and expand their profiles to include defense policy within their curricula. Numerous government agencies have Centers of Excellence and the like at large research universities. The DHS maintains a robust university-based research profile with nine university research centers examining various issues of interest to the department.Footnote 53 While the DOD has similar efforts known as University Affiliated Research Centers (UARC), it does not—currently—have a policy-specific research center or institute. DOD UARCs emphasize technology and engineering research; not policy-relevant social science research. The DOD Minerva Research Initiative is a longstanding DOD social science research vehicle that “focuses on areas of strategic importance to the US national security policy.”Footnote 54 The Minerva Research Initiative is an elite research funding opportunity for defense-inclined social scientists, but it lacks direct university attachment similar to the DHS Centers of Excellence. To better establish defense policy in the public policy discipline, DOD should consider extending its funding to designated universities with affiliated research centers akin to the DHS Center of Excellence model. This is an opportunity that must be pursued.
Conclusion
We cannot predict with any certainty when and where the next military conflict will arise. The only thing we can predict is that there will be a next conflict. The United States has used military force—multiple times—each decade from its founding to today.Footnote 55 We already saw a twentieth-century punctuation of military affairs in higher education as departments once unconcerned and apathetic toward the military “scrambled to build their staffs again as superpower competition reheated, the Vietnam hangover dissipated, and realist conceptions of world politics rebounded.”Footnote 56 The same will come to fruition today. The United States no longer sits atop the international security throne absent a suitable foe. As the GWOT hangover dissipates and the renewed great power competition evolves, twenty-first century defense policy requires attention to these and other challenges.
We must reconcile the fact that the military is a professional organization unto itself that remains under civilian control. As such, senior civilians make defense policy while the professional military carries out its operations. Strategy links the two in that policy informs strategy and strategy informs operations. Hence, military strategy is the translation of defense policy guidance into military operations. We expect our professional military to execute sound strategies and operations informed by civilian-created defense policies. We should expect our military to understand our policies the same as we expect our policymakers to understand our military. Uninformed—or even irresponsible—defense policymaking cannot be permitted simply because policy scholars are apathetic to the topic and leave it to others to grapple with. As Betts notes, “Who can rationally recommend whether the budget should be higher or lower, or what it should buy, without any expertise on the nature of military forces and what combinations of them are necessary to achieve objectives set by elected officials?”Footnote 57 It is therefore necessary for scholars informed in defense policymaking to be involved in discussions on the use of military force to achieve political objectives—the essence of the Clausewitzian problem—or we risk ignorance in an area where ignorance can lead to death. More aptly put: “The nation that will insist on drawing a broad line of demarcation between the fighting man and the thinking man is liable to find its fighting done by fools and its thinking done by cowards.”Footnote 58 Our policymakers should be just as informed in the use of military force as our military officers are informed in the policymaking process, otherwise sound defense policies will elude us in favor of superficial analyses.
To reach sound policy requires going beyond the basic consumption of the so-called power indices (gross domestic product; size of the military; population) as the formative basis for the national defense posture. This approach produces gross generalizations regarding the effect of defense policies relative to those indices. Fully grasping defense policies to reach a desired political end requires understanding the nuance of the defense policy process and the myriad factors influencing it.
At over $700 billion, the Department of Defense budget is greater than the gross domestic product (GDP) of Switzerland.Footnote 59 Passing a $700+ billion dollar defense budget is not the end unto itself for defense policy but rather sets in motion all those considerations informing its development. Much like strategic studies in the late 1990s, defense policy deserves an “autonomous institutional home in higher education and scholarship today.”Footnote 60 This is not a plea for supplanting other established fields but rather an attempt to convince the readership of its relevance and place in traditional policy schools and scholarly mediums. We must reintroduce it as an equal subfield warranting the same attention we give others in both our teaching and scholarship. To paraphrase Frenchman Georges Clemenceau’s often-quoted line: “War is too important to be left to the generals.”Footnote 61 Taking this a step further: defense policy—the very fabric informing and enabling military strategy and operations—is too important to be left to the bureaucrats and politicians. We need civilian experts in the myriad elements of defense policy, and this starts with an understanding of its history and subsequent reintegration into scholarship and education. War is a constant; studying war and its informative policies should be a constant too.
