Soldier and State: Officership, Leadership, and Society

BY LT. COMMANDER KEVIN DUFFY

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Nearly 60 years ago, political scientist Samuel Huntington analyzed military officership in terms of what he called the “distinguishing characteristics of a profession”: Expertise, responsibility, and corporateness. This discussion of “Officership as a Profession” formed a chapter in Huntington’s seminal work, The Soldier and the State, which is widely and justifiably considered to be one of the most important studies of civil-military relations ever written. The book is at the center of “civ-mil” curricula at service academies and war colleges to this day. But for all of its prominence, The Soldier and the Statehas been largely absent from conversations on leadership development in the armed services. This absence is unfortunate, as the framework of expertise, responsibility, and corporateness is remarkably applicable for understanding and assessing the development of military officers as leaders today.

To understand why this is the case, it’s necessary to establish what Huntington meant by each of the three terms he used. Noting the centrality of a specific skill set in any profession, he defined expertise as “specialized knowledge and skill in a significant field of human endeavor…acquired only by prolonged education and experience.” The mastery of skill, he noted, endows the professional with a special responsibility. He held that “[t]he essential and general character of his service and his monopoly of his skill impose upon the professional man the responsibility to perform the service when required by society…The professional man can no longer practice if he refuses to accept his social responsibility.” Ultimately, Huntington describes how the “lengthy discipline and training necessary” to attain professional expertise and “the sharing of a unique social responsibility” among members of the military both necessitate and create corporateness: “A sense of organic unity and consciousness of themselves as a group apart from laymen…manifests itself in a professional organization which formalizes and applies the standards of professional competence and establishes and enforces the standards of professional responsibility”.