Gonzaga Debate Institute 2010

CMR Adv. – Impact – Extinction

its history, the U.S. military was remarkably politicized by contemporary standards. One commander of the army, Winfield Scott, even ran for president while in uniform, and others (Leonard Wood, for example) have made no secret of their political views and aspirations. But until 1940, and with the exception of periods of outright warfare, the military was a negligible force in American life, and America was not a central force in international politics. That has changed. Despite the near halving of the defense budget from its high in the 1980s, it remains a significant portion of the federal budget, and the military continues to employ millions of Americans. More important, civil-military relations in the United States now no longer affect merely the closet-room politics of Washington, but the relations of countries around the world. American choices about the use of force, the shrewdness of American strategy, the soundness of American tactics, and the will of American leaders have global consequences. What might have been petty squabbles in bygone years are now magnified into quarrels of a far larger scale, and conceivably with far more grievous consequences. To ignore the problem would neglect one of the cardinal purposes of the federal government: "to provide for the common defense" in a world in which security cannot be taken for granted.

CMR Adv. – Impact - Genocide

Flawed CMR results in genocide and a nazi-esque state, while reducing the state’s military’s effectiveness

Biddle & Long 4 (Stephen Biddle, Stephen Long The Journal of Conflict Resolution, Vol. 48, No. 4 (Aug., 2004), pp. 525-546 Published by: Sage Publications, Inc. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4149807)

Conflictual civil-military relations could interfere with battlefield effectiveness in a variety of ways. At the highest levels, civil-military conflict can interfere with the smooth functioning of senior policy-making councils and thereby undermine national strategy. Sound grand strategy requires that military considerations be integrated with nonmilitary concerns involving diplomacy, economic policy, and domestic politics (Kennedy 1991; Liddell Hart 1954). To bring such disparate elements together requires close collaboration and frank, honest exchanges between civilian and military leaders. Friction, distrust, dislike, or simply unfamiliarity between the civil leadership and senior officers can impede such collaboration and result in poorly formulated strategy and military policy (Kennedy 1988; Feaver 2003; Feaver and Kohn 2001).'o This in turn can undermine battlefield performance: strategic or policy choices that leave an army with outdated or insufficient arms, commit it to battle in an unpopular cause, or compel it to fight at prohibitive odds against a coalition of enemies obviously make battlefield success less likely. Civil-military conflict can also interfere with the officer corps' military proficiency per se. In states where the military poses a threat of political violence against the regime, for example, civilian leaders often adopt self-defensive measures that interfere with the effective conduct of war. Such interventions can include frequent rotation of commanders and purges of the officer corps, restriction of enlisted service time, sup-pression of horizontal communications within the military hierarchy, divided lines of command, isolation from foreign sources of expertise or training, exploitation of eth-nic divisions in officer selection or combat unit organization, surveillance of military personnel, promotion based on political loyalty rather than military ability, or execu-tion of suspected dissident officers (Huntington 1957, 82; Perlmutter and Bennett 1980, 205-8; Cohen 1986, 168; Kier 1997). Such techniques can be effective barriers to coups d'dtat, but they systematically discourage soldiers from focusing on disinter-ested technical expertise, and they make such expertise hard to obtain for those few who seek it anyway (Biddle and Zirkle 1996; Brooks 1998; Kier 1997; Pollack 1996). One might thus expect highly conflictual civil-military relations to reduce a state's military effectiveness.

CMR Adv. – Impact – Iraq

Effective CMR is critical to solving the situation in Iraq – war is unconventional

Cronin '8 (Patrick, "Irregular Warfare: New Challenges for Civil-Military Relations")

Success in the highly political and ambiguous conflicts likely to dominate the global security environment in the coming decades will require a framework that balances the relationships between civilian and military leaders and makes the most effective use of their different strengths. These challenges are expected to require better integrated, whole-of-government approaches, the cooperation of host governments and allies, and strategic patience. Irregular warfare introduces new complications to what Eliot Cohen has called an “unequal dialogue” between civilian and military leaders in which civilian leaders hold the true power but must modulate their intervention into “military” affairs as a matter of prudence rather than principle. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have demonstrated that irregular warfare - which is profoundly political, intensely local, and protracted—breaks from the traditional understanding of how military and civilian leaders should contribute to the overall effort. One of the key challenges rising from irregular warfare is how to measure progress.

While there is disagreement about the feasibility or utility of developing metrics, the political pressure for marking progress is unrelenting. Most data collection efforts focus on the number of different types of kinetic events, major political milestones such as elections, and resource inputs such as personnel, money, and materiel. None of these data points serves easily in discerning what is most needed - namely, outputs or results. A second major challenge centers on choosing leaders for irregular warfare and stability and reconstruction operations. How to produce civilian leaders capable of asking the right and most difficult questions is not easily addressed. Meanwhile, there has been a general erosion of the traditional Soldier’s Code whereby a military member can express dissent, based on legitimate facts, in private to one’s superiors up to the point that a decision has been made. Many see the need to shore up this longstanding tradition among both the leadership and the ranks. A third significant challenge is how to forge integrated strategies and approaches. Professional relationships, not organizational fixes, are vital to succeeding in irregular war. In this sense, the push for new doctrine for the military and civilian leadership is a step in the right direction to clarifying the conflated lanes of authority.


The wars that follow in Iraq will spur World War III

Corsi 7 (Jerome R. Corsi, http://www.wnd.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=53669, January 8^th 2007)

If a broader war breaks out in Iraq, Olmert will certainly face pressure to send the Israel military into the Gaza after Hamas and into Lebanon after Hezbollah. If that happens, it will only be a matter of time before Israel and the U.S. have no choice but to invade Syria. The Iraq war could quickly spin into a regional war, with Israel waiting on the sidelines ready to launch an air and missile strike on Iran that could include tactical nuclear weapons. With Russia ready to deliver the $1 billion TOR M-1 surface-to-air missile defense system to Iran, military leaders are unwilling to wait too long to attack Iran. Now that Russia and China have invited Iran to join their Shanghai Cooperation Pact, will Russia and China sit by idly should the U.S. look like we are winning a wider regional war in the Middle East? If we get more deeply involved in Iraq, China may have their moment to go after Taiwan once and for all. A broader regional war could easily lead into a third world war, much as World Wars I and II began.