Civil-Military Gap Issues and Dilemmas: A Short Review

The world of military uniforms has always attracted attention by the rest of society. The film and literary image of the military in the history lays stress on power, honour, discipline, privileges, high social position of warriors and also dependence of the social welfare on military power and military campaigns. Those images impose to our minds that the military was an important institution and also that it was something really special. How does the society see the military today? And how does the military regard itself and its functions? Since the development of military sociology in the middle of the 20th century, there have been two opposing views on civil-military relations: one that strictly differentiates the military and society and the other that seeks the similarities between them. The recent military-sociological debate in the United States has also been devoted to the issue of the relationship between the military and its parent society. The experts found important differences between the US military and US society (including cultural ones) and some are very concerned about a growing gap between them. The classical antagonism between Huntington's uniqueness of the military and Janowitz's convergence of the military and civil society is renewed in debates about a so-called civil-military gap (e.g., Ricks, 1997; Holsti, 1998; Cohn, 1999; Snider, 1999; Hillen, 1999; Feaver, Kohn, & Cohn, 2001).