Neil Snyder

There is a pervasive fear among scholars of civil-military relations that excessive
military influence could undermine civilian control of the military. However, scholars
have yet to assemble empirical evidence that military elites can influence the American
public in ways specified as problematic for control of the military. Is there an empirical
basis for scholars’ concern about military influence? In this project, I apply a principle agent
approach to the question of military influence, identify several conditions that
would make the American public vulnerable to military “shirking,” and then leverage
results from multiple waves of novel experimentation to assess whether military elites
can influence the public under those specific conditions. This analysis serves as an
empirical foundation to inform the normative debate about military influence. Altogether,
the findings are mixed: in some cases military elites can influence the public in
ways that would be problematic for American politics by making the public vulnerable
to shirking, in others there is little reason for concern. Though existing concerns about
the dangers of military influence are well-founded, these concerns must be tempered
with the knowledge that military influence is limited in several important ways.