Recent analyses of the armed forces as a political actor push the envelope that has kept research on civil-military relations separate from scholarship in comparative politics. Alice Hunt Friend’s Mightier Than the Sword (2024) makes the important point that existing studies focus almost exclusively on the armed forces while mentioning civilians only in passing. To redress this shortcoming, Friend hypothesizes that in the United States there exist two analytically distinct types of civilian actors: politicians, whose actions are driven by the need to attract popular votes, and administrators, whose actions are driven by the institutional interests of their respective government agencies. Both types of civilians are additionally propelled by the desire for individual prestige (p.58). Yet the question remains: under what circumstances does one type of civilian or the other become more likely to take steps to control the armed forces?

Whenever politicians and administrators do set out to exercise control over the armed forces, they can accomplish this in two ways: by constraining the actions of the military, or by compelling the military to act contrary to its interests (p.53). Civilians will be more likely to pursue one or both of these strategies under three conditions: if they have access to accurate, useful information (pp.59–60); if they have a high tolerance for risk (p.61); and if they have sufficient resources to carry out their intentions (p.63). It would be worth investigating what James Rosenau calls the “relative potency” of each of these three causal factors, as well as their differential impact across the two types of civilians (James Rosenau, “Pre-Theories and Theories of Foreign Policy,” in R. Barry Farrell, ed., Approaches in Comparative and International Politics, 1966).

Like all-too-many analyses of civil-military relations, Mightier Than the Sword often adopts a normative and prescriptive posture, and declaims what various actors “must” do or “need” to do in order to ensure civilian control. Readers are told, for instance, that “civilian expertise in politics is essential in the civil-military context” (p.25, italics added), as well as that “to formulate policies, civilians must come to a consensus among themselves about preferences” (p.51, italics added). More pertinently, the text asserts that “civilians not only have to devise a military policy that other civilians will help them enforce—or at least not hinder—they must also come to a policy they are reasonably confident the military will implement” (p.52, italics added). One wonders what is likely to happen whenever civilians fail to devise such a policy.

Also, in common with much writing on civil-military relations, the book is not as clear as it might be concerning what it proposes to explain. Friend frequently articulates her aim as determining why some “civilians proactively attempt to exercise control [over the armed forces and other civilians] or [instead] choose to defer to others,” particularly military commanders (pp.53, 68). Yet the book tends to slip into a quite different analytical project, investigating why civilians at times “will attempt to compel the military or other civilians to use force in specific ways” (p.63). Chapter 3, for instance, explains why one influential politician, Senator Samuel A. Nunn Jr. of Georgia, set out during the early 1990s “to press the Bush administration to present a coherent plan” to deal with the changed strategic circumstances of the post-Soviet world (p.77). The chapter also addresses the matter of why President George W. Bush tried to slash the budget of the Department of Defense (pp.80–83). On the other hand, it does lay out the initiatives taken by Secretary of Defense Richard B. Cheney to impose tighter supervision over senior officers in the Pentagon (pp.90–92). Mixing these two different analytical projects together makes it hard for readers to make sense of either one.

Chapter 5 addresses the question of why civilians in Washington have largely deferred to military commanders on whether and how to deploy “uninhabited [sic] aerial vehicles” (UAVs) (p.142). The text opens with the reasonable observation that “the military played a more authoritative role in decisions about building and using UAVs given the technical expertise often required to understand what the platforms could do” (p.142). Yet this way of posing the problem slants the analysis in the direction of explaining why civilian leaders ended up deferring to the armed forces on whether to build and how best to make operational use of UAVs. It does not explain why successive presidents, Senate chairs, and secretaries of defense loosened their supervision of the military establishment. It is not clear in any case that they have done so.

Friend expresses the hope that studies of civil-military relations, like hers, will be extended to cover cases outside the United States (pp.177–178). One region in which scholarly interest in military politics has recently rebounded is the Middle East and North Africa, so it makes sense to consider how her analysis can elucidate the conditions under which civilian leaders in, say, post-2011 Egypt might try to exert control over the military establishment. Sharan Grewal’s Soldiers of Democracy? (2023) deals with this matter indirectly, although it too devotes most of its attention to the military.

Grewal argues that the armed forces will be more likely to resist falling under the control of an emerging civilian leadership whenever it—or at least its senior commanders—has been accorded opportunities to augment its power, status, and wealth by the outgoing authoritarian government (p.65). As a result, “many new democracies inheriting empowered militaries make the fatal mistake of moving too quickly [to reduce the military’s existing prerogatives], sparking a coup” (p.5). Conversely, the armed forces is apt to accept control by an emerging civilian leadership whenever it has been “marginalized” by the outgoing government (pp.2–5). Thus the “legacy” of earlier governments determines the extent to which later civilian leaderships can exercise control over the armed forces.

It should be kept in mind that a high degree of civilian control over the armed forces does not necessarily imply the existence of liberal-democratic governance. Grewal points out that a previously marginalized armed forces becomes susceptible to being drawn by civilian leaders into an “incumbent takeover” (p.47). An instance of this phenomenon can be found “in Nepal in 2005, [when] King Gyanendra declared a state of emergency, dissolved the parliament, and deployed the military to enforce a curfew” (p.47). Military commanders on such occasions willingly do the civilian leadership’s bidding, in the words of Risa Brooks, “because they believe that staying apolitical requires deferring to civilian authority, whatever the request” (p.48).

Soldiers of Democracy? reports that after winning the popular election of June 2012, Egypt’s first-ever civilian president, Muhammad Mursi, quickly “challenged the military’s privileges in the constitution, removed its veto power over national security policies, and limited its control over major economic contracts” (p.137). The Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF), whose long-pampered members harbored deep misgivings about the new president and his supporters on ideological grounds, had prepared for such an assault in the interval between the election and Mursi’s inauguration (pp.148–149). A skirmish on the border with Gaza nevertheless accorded the president an opening to replace several senior commanders and rescind an order issued by SCAF that had given it final authority over the military establishment (pp.150–151). More fatefully, President Mursi appointed as head of SCAF someone he expected to be a comrade, the chief of military intelligence General ‘Abd al-Fattah al-Sisi. As the president and his allies pushed through a revised constitution that imposed constraints on the military’s prerogatives, al-Sisi orchestrated opposition to the government not only inside the armed forces but also among civilian dissidents (pp.168–170). A government directive opening the military to members of the Muslim Brothers proved to be the last straw (pp.164–165), and as soon as the opportunity arose, al-Sisi headed a coup d’etat that brought in a military leadership that has ruled Egypt to the present day.

This story is familiar to observers of Egyptian politics, who might well wonder if it overstates the degree to which the newly elected civilian government moved against the armed forces. President Mursi did seem to have expected to work with SCAF once the dust had settled. More intriguingly, a strong case can be made that at the time of the 2010–11 uprising, the regular army had lost most of its influence to the internal security services. Military commanders might therefore have turned against the post-uprising government less to protect their current standing than to recoup their earlier losses. In this particular case, the economic perquisites enjoyed by the armed forces might not be an accurate indicator of the military establishment’s “empowerment.”

Such specialist quibbles aside, how could Soldiers of Democracy? be enriched by incorporating the analysis formulated by Friend? First, it would be useful to reorient Grewal’s narrative to incorporate the impact of other civilian actors besides President Mursi. How key members of the legislature and pivotal administrative officials acted during these momentous months might well shed light on puzzling aspects of the whole episode. Why, for instance, did the civilian leadership move so hastily and implement such a wide-ranging attack on the military establishment, and what made it possible for the president to shake up SCAF? Second, it would be enlightening to know what sort of information civilian leaders possessed concerning the attitudes and capabilities of the armed forces. This could help explain why their understanding turned out to be so disastrously wrong. There must be more to this than Mursi’s personal misjudgment of al-Sisi (pp.172–173).

Undertaking research on military politics in most parts of the world is a difficult and dangerous enterprise. How any researcher could find out what politicians, administrators, and senior commanders in Cairo were doing and thinking during President Mursi’s short time in office is hard to envisage. Nevertheless, taking up Alice Hunt Friend’s call to abandon the twin convictions that the institutions and practices of military politics in the United States are unique and that they deserve to provide the model for countries around the globe will not only improve future analytical perspectives on US civil-military relations but also facilitate the kind of comparative inquiry that the field struggles to engender.