Sarah Paine: uncertainty

Transcript context

…What is the process that leads to the loss of civilian control of the military? For example, in Japan. And why has the US been robust against this? In Japan, it's interesting. If you go back to the Meiji leaders, who are they? They're the people who won the civil war against the last Tokugawa Shogun. If you look at their career paths, they had civil and military jobs as they swapped around, and they all knew each other. The head of the Army and the Navy and the prime ministers, they all interacted. But they didn't create an institutional mechanism. They did have a cabinet, but they didn't have a full up legal forcing together of all the civil and military parts of the government and have them operate on a rather level playing field. The Army dominates. So when that generation dies, everyone gets much more stovepipe careers. They're much better educated than their parents and grandparents have been but their education would be strictly in the Army, as opposed to, “Oh, well. The founder of the Army also founded the police force. And he knew the finance minister and had great respect for the finance minister.” And then you have people not respecting each other. I'm making this up because I don't know the details of China but if you think about Deng Xiaoping, he's on the long march, he's one of the younger members. He must know everybody. And I know he's in and out of prison. So he knows the people who are in and he knows the people who are out. Then when you get to Xi Jinping, they're a much more stovepipe group of people. They don't have the institutions. Actually, in China, they do have institutions for party control over the government. So that's how communist governments have maintained very good control over their militaries. In fact, if you look at Communists, they're really good at civilian control over militaries. In fact, that was Trotsky's contribution back in the Russian Revolution of how you take a bunch of white officers and veterans of World War One and keep track of them. It has to do with political and military commissars. The military commissar is the officer who's actually a professional. The political commissar is the one who's got a connection with the secret police, who if the military commissar doesn't do as told, they'll come in and kill him and maybe also his whole family for good luck. And it's very effective in the commissar system. In the U.S., though, in the Naval War College, you have these systems of the officers from West Point or whatever, I don't know what the actual progression looks like. Are they seeing the civilian from their education to their promotion? Are they in the military the entire time, or do they also have this wide spread of experience?…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.