Principal-Agent Misperceptions, Civil-Military Relations, and the Iraq War

• In Event: Militaries and Democratic Process

Abstract

Why might military leaders fail to give civilian principals additional military strategies? More generally, what is the nature of the strategic interaction surrounding military expertise and advice in the American context? Using insights from formal theoretic approaches to information, expertise, and bureaucratic discretion, this paper argues that the military’s perception of the president’s ideological position and political strength is a crucial factor in the type of policy options the military presents to the president. While in many circumstances this is unproblematic, when generals misperceive a president’s true preferences or willingness to take an electoral risk they might fail to invest their time and resources in developing additional options that a president might actually desire and which might lead to superior policy outcomes. Analyzing the Bush Administration’s policy process in the run-up to the 2007 troop surge in Iraq as a typical case of decision-making, I use process-tracing to argue that the then-serving US military commanders in Iraq did not propose a troop surge, in part because they misperceived President George W. Bush’s political strength and risk tolerance. Had Bush been able to more credibly signal to his commanders his ability to withstand domestic political opposition to increased troop levels, they would have been more likely to propose such a strategy. I argue the paper makes at least three contributions. Firstly, it contributes to better understanding the historiography of the Iraq War, and the Surge in particular, a focus of debate within international security (Sayle et al 2019; Feaver 2011; Desch 2011). Second, the paper presents the initial stages of a larger project to more explicitly model the politics surrounding military advice and expertise, which are at the core of the civil-military relations problematique (Brooks 2007). And finally, the paper contributes to our comparative understanding of foreign policy processes by identifying one pathology democracies might suffer disproportionately from, namely the beliefs held by military experts about political constraints on leaders in relatively open political systems.

Author

• Benjamin Mishkin, Georgetown University