S E Finer, The man on horseback: The role of the military in politics, Pall Mall Press, London, 1962, p 6.

S P Huntington, The soldier and the state: The theory and practice of civil-military relations, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1957, p 90.

Ibid, p 7.

F Fukuyama, Trust: The social virtues and the creation of prosperity, Hamish Hamilton, London, 1995.

Finer, op cit, p 7.

This is an American formulation. The German army practiced the same idea very successfully in two wars as Auftragstaktik.

C E Welch Jr, Civilian control of the military: Myth and reality, in CEWelch Jr (ed), Civilian control of the military: Theory and cases from developing countries, State of New York Press, Albany, 1976, p 2.

Huntington, op cit, p 84.

Welch, op cit, p 9.

Huntington, op cit, p 81.

Welch, op cit, pp 6-34.

C von Clausewitz, On war (translated and edited by M Howard & P Paret), Princeton University Press, 1976, Princeton, p 99.

Welch, op cit, p 2.

H Millis, Reorganization, in H Millis, with H Mansfield & H Stein, Arms and the state, Twentieth Century Fund, New York, 1958.

Although ministers will still, of course, have to present the defence budget to parliament and, in many cases, secure agreement for individual programmes within it.

M Weber, Bureaucracy, originally published as Part III, Chapter 6 of his epic Wirtshaft und Gesellschaft. There is an English translation in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, (translated and edited) with an introduction by H H Gerth & C Wright Mills, Routledge, London, 1991, pp 196-244.

The concern is here with military functions. Many constitutions make the president the head of the armed forces, but this is a way of underlining that the political leadership should have the final say on issues of war and peace, not a description of a day-to-day command relationship.

C Smith, India’s ad hoc arsenal: Direction or drift in defence policy, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1994, p 65.

As an extremely bright officer said some years ago, about a report which a committee we both sat on had produced: "I agree with the conclusions, but please don’t issue it until my Annual Report has been done"!

More information on Tungaru appears in Appendix I.

Not only the Americans. What some in Japan have derided as "the politics of masochism" is the biggest single influence on relations with China, for example.

Unless the problem is clearly insoluble, in which case there will be competition to avoid it. Yet, even problems which are, in the last resort, insoluble — such as drug-trafficking — can attract interest as a short-term way of boosting one’s credibility and budget.

See Appendix 1.

I have deliberately excluded consideration of the collection of domestic intelligence from this chapter, since this is a monograph about civil-military relations. The military has no business involving itself in domestic intelligence collection.

Although a state may well, of course, decide to use its intelligence services to keep discreet channels open to a neighbour with whom its formal dealings are very circumscribed. In such circumstances, the other side must be at least aware of your own organisations’ existence.

I am not employing the technical vocabulary of HUMINT (human intelligence) or SIGINT (signals intelligence) here, because I am more concerned with political than with technical distinctions.

In all of this, I am making the assumption that a country’s intelligence agencies are under such a degree of control that rational planning like this is possible. This is not always the case, and agencies may work to different masters with different agendas.

To be fair, another problem was the tendency, noted earlier, to elevate what can be measured above what cannot. The Americans thought they were fighting an attrition war (the Vietnamese did not), and so their assessments were bound to be as flawed as their strategy, since they were measuring the wrong thing. See, for example, L Cable, Unholy grail: The US and the wars in Vietnam 1965-8, Routledge, London, 1991.

A Perlmutter, Politics and the military in Israel 1967-77, Frank Cass, London, 1978, p 94.

See D Chuter, Triumph of the will? Or, why surrender is not always inevitable, Review of International Studies 23, 1997, pp 381-400.

Cited by D M Shafer, Deadly paradigms: The failure of US counterinsurgency policy, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1988, p 244.

S P Cohen, The Indian Army: Its contribution to the development of a nation, Oxford University Press, Delhi, 1990, p 176.

Almost, because energy efficient measures, for example, do save money in the long term,

An example from the files of the Tungaran ministry of defence is given in Appendix III.

Although a number of new nations (Israel, South Africa, Singapore and Korea) are establishing themselves in certain niches.