Description
Has British Civil-Military Leadership Failed? This paper explores the role Britain’s senior officers can, should, and do play in shaping their political environments, at home and abroad through its comittments to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). Serious concerns about the competencies of British senior officers have recently been registered in the public sphere (Akram 2019). These officers confront a volatile geostrategic climate, characterised by the targeting of political vulnerabilities in order to encourage democratic backsliding and hinder decision-making. This paper marks a radical break with orthodox theories of civil-military relations, linking concerns about British senior officership to a larger effort by scholars internationally to theorise military politics in a new era of sophisticated political warfare. Drawing on a Grounded Theory methodology, the project explores whether current and future British senior officers have the political skill-set necessary to navigate core challenges of military politics today: horizontal alignment across agencies and security organizations, and vertical alignment with national decision-makers.
