How Democracies Control the Military

Richard H. Kohn is professor of history and chairman of the Curriculum in Peace, War, and Defense at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. An expanded version of this essay appears as “The Forgotten Fundamentals of Civilian Control of the Military in Democratic Government,” Working Paper 11 in the Project on Post-Cold War Civil-Military Relations, John M. Olin Institute for Strategic Studies, Harvard University, and will be published in a volume of essays on civilian control in small democracies sponsored by the Arias Center for Peace and Reconciliation, San José, Costa Rica.