Four Guardians: A Principled Agent View of American Civil-Military Relations

by Jeffrey W. Donnithorne

Exploring the profound differences between what the military services believe—and how they uniquely serve the nation. When the US military confronts pressing security challenges, the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps often react differently as they advise and execute civilian defense policies. Conventional wisdom holds that these dynamics tend to reflect a competition for prestige, influence, and dollars. Such interservice rivalries, however, are only a fraction of the real story. In Four Guardians , Jeffrey W. Donnithorne argues that the services act instead as principled agents, interpreting policies in ways that reflect their unique cultures and patterns of belief. Chapter-length portraits of each service highlight the influence of operational environment ("nature") and political history ("nurture") in shaping each service's cultural worldview. The book also offers two important case studies of civil-military one, the little-known story of the creation of the Rapid Deployment Joint Task Force in the early 1980s; the other, the four-year political battle that led to the passage of the Goldwater-Nichols Act in 1986. Donnithorne uses these cases to demonstrate the principled agent framework in action while amply revealing the four services as distinctly different political actors. Combining crisp insight and empirical depth with engaging military history, Four Guardians provides practical utility for civil-military scholars, national security practitioners, and interested citizens alike. This timely work brings a new appreciation for the American military, the complex dynamics of civilian control, and the principled ways in which the four guardian services defend their nation.

288 pages, Paperback

Published February 2, 2021

Reviews

[Eileen Seitz]

A quick read giving a detailed overview of the 4 military branches. The Four Guardians is a great book for civilians trying to familiarize themselves with the the Army, Navy, Marine Corps, and Air Force, their cultures, histories, their ethos, and the politics surrounding each branch. I recommend this book, enjoyed it, and it helped me differentiate each branch from the other. I am hungry to learn more. See which one is your favorite!

[Morgan · Rating 2 out of 5]

Ugh. A work that is both sloppy and largely unoriginal, Donnithorne claims to build on Feaver’s Agency Theory, while really refuting it. Most of the book examines the culture of the services, and while the construct the author introduces is novel, the summary is basically just a rehash of Builder’s work from the 80s. The case studies seem cherry-picked and inductive, and the author seems to be more worried about justifying service shirking through unique service cultural prisms than in addressing the normative question of whether this kind of shirking is healthy for civ-mil relations. Feels like the author’s real thesis is “they may shirk but they come to it from a place of honesty”, which is not a helpful contribution to the civ-mil dialogue.