The Army Officer and the Constitution

Thursday, 17 September 1987, marks the 200th anniversary of the United States Constitution. To ensure that this historic event is properly commemorated, Congress created the Commission on the Bicentennial of the United States Constitution. As its Constitutional Bicentennial feature, Parameters publishes Professor Coffmans article on the officer and the Constitution. The article was adapted from a lecture Professor Coffman presented at Carlisle Barracks as part of the U.S. Army Military History Institutes lecture series, Perspectives in Military History. Basic for any consideration of the officer and the Constitution is the relationship of civil and military power in the American military tradition. This point deserves emphasis because, too often, commentators who know little or nothing about that tradition substitute inappropriate foreign models which have the military contending for dominance in contrast with the actual and much less dramatic American experience. There is and always has been in the U.S. Army officer corps an implicit -- one could almost say instinctive -- acceptance of the civil powers superiority to the military in government. Inherited from the English, nourished throughout the colonial period, and confirmed during the Revolutionary War, that understanding has prevailed throughout our history, with only one major threat. That was the Newburgh Conspiracy of 1783. What are we to conclude about the Constitution and the officer Even in the time of the greatest threat to the Union, the American Civil War, virtually all officers made their decision to support or fight against the United States with little or no thought of the Constitution. As long as officers accept the traditional civil-military arrangement and are willing to fight and die for the Constitution and the Nation, it really does not matter whether they are scholars of the founding document itself.