Bibliographic record
Abstract
CIVIL-MILITARY RELATIONS AND SHARED RESPONSIBILITY: A FOUR-NATION STUDY Dale R. Herspring Baltimore, Maryland: Johns Hopkins University' Press, 2013 368 pages, hardback, $65.00Dale Herspring's book comes at a perfect moment as we are witnessing instances of healthy frictions in American civil-military relations (CMR). This time bone of contention is Obama administration's strategy towards Afghanistan and ISIS threat in Syria. Herspring, a reputable scholar of CMR, broaches subject by inviting us to stop employing a binary view of separate and military spheres and competences. He asks his readers to rather pay attention to the interactive nature of political-military decision-making process (p.3) because it is too simplistic to think of civilian-military relationship in terms of a zero-sum game as if civilians win and generals lose when their preferences diverge. This is why he puts forward notion of civilian direction instead of civilian/political control. He employs a new conceptual framework of shared responsibility in a comparative study of four cases-United States, Germany, Canada, and Russia-where conflicts between civilians and soldiers occur but dictum of civilian has been accepted and upheld.The book deserves special praise in terms of its purposeful effort to consider civil-military nexus from point of view of men in uniform, as against treatment of military officers as objects or agents. This perspective may help politicians glean a few important lessons from conditions, as provided by author, to elicit military's most effective participation in an understanding of shared responsibility. The method employed by author warrants compliments as well, since lack of comparative case studies in CMR literature has been a nagging problem. Unfortunately, students of CMR rarely studied more than two cases comparatively to come up with more comprehensive generalizations and build stronger hypotheses.1 Janowitz's assessment regarding absence of comparative studies of armies in Muslim world is still valid and is indicative of larger problem in literature. According to him, scholarship on Muslim military institutions has been mainly descriptive... field of Middle Eastern studies generally is characterized by particular outstanding monographic contributions and a growing body of highly competent writings. Analytic and comparative studies have not been pursued with vigor or intensity.. .2There are, however, a few issues that may be raised. The Russian case studied in light of shared responsibility appears problematic for two reasons. The author warns in early pages of book that notion of shared responsibility may only be applied to countries where supremacy is firmly established. Yet, Herspring does not show reader that it was so in time of Soviets in order to justify his selection of Russian case. Add to that coup attempt in Russian Federation in 1991, in which the military played a critical role, one that was far more important than Trudeau's use of CF [Canadian Forces] in Quebec in 1970 (p. 212). That coup attempt and following events during Yeltsin and Putin periods may cast doubt on claims of unquestioned superiority in Russia. The selection of post-Cold War period to study Russian case as opposed to covering rest of cases (Germany, Canada, and U.S.) from aftermath of World War II requires justification as well. If military largely stayed out of politics and embraced supremacy while Soviet generals resisted or party interference in what senior officers considered military decisions (p.263) at same time, we are left in dark as to why Herspring omitted discussing CMR in Soviets during Cold War? It may be just because of practical concerns, but it still needs to be stated. …
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.011 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.013 | 0.020 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.025 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".