Professionalism

My latest column at WPR is about norms of military professionalism and the Egyptian Army:

The integration of Egyptian soldiers into an international community of professional military officers has inevitably helped to spread the norms associated with that community. For military professionals, those norms increasingly include a reluctance to engage in direct, explicit political activity, and a respect for objective civilian control of the military.

Professional military officers constitute an international community of individuals with similar interests, education, and norms. Military officers from different countries regularly meet to discuss technical issues, to smooth over difficult problems, and to facilitate cooperation on common problems. Other community-building activities include bilateral and multilateral military exercises, officer exchanges, technology-oriented training missions, and a wide variety of conferences and other events. For example, the International Fellows Program at the Army War College includes officers from 40 different countries. While this process is not as simple as a direct transfer of norms and training from the U.S. Army to the Egyptian army, initiatives like the International Fellows Program facilitate the development of a sense of community.

One of the key norms that the community of military professionals can inculcate is respect for civilian control of the military. In many parts of the world, the military still plays an active, explicit role in politics, either through the seizure of power or through the intimidation of civilian authorities. However, in others, the idea that the military should refrain from direct intervention in politics has become a settled question.

I think that this phenomenon is almost more interesting on the naval side than on the Army. One of the motivating concepts behind CS-21 is the creation of linkages between the USN and other navies that go deeper than governmental and senior level contacts. These linkages also inevitably act as conduits for the propagation of norms, rules of appropriate behavior, and so forth.