General Officer Education and Generalship: Military Civil Relations

Howell, Jen Patja. “The Lawfare Podcast: Congress's Control over the Military.” September 17, 2020. Streaming audio. 51:00. “In recent years, Congress has taken unprecedented steps to push back against the Trump administration's efforts to pull U.S. troops from certain long-standing deployments overseas. The most recent such provision is contained in the House version of the National Defense Authorization Act for 2021 that is currently being debated and would prohibit the president from reducing U.S. troop levels in Germany and Europe unless certain conditions are met. But does Congress have the authority to direct these deployments, or does doing so interfere with the president's constitutional authority as commander-in-chief? To discuss these issues, Scott R. Anderson sat down with two legal experts who have written extensively on the subject: Ashley Deeks of the University of Virginia School of Law and Zachary Price of the UC Hastings College of Law. They discussed the legal limits on Congress's authority over the military, what the president's commander-in-chief authority actually entails and what it all means for the future of U.S. troop deployments overseas.”

Howell, Jen Patja. “The Lawfare Podcast: The Spymasters with Chris Whipple.” September 16, 2020. Streaming audio. 51:48. “What is the proper relationship between the CIA director and the president? How should directors handle arguably illegal orders? How important is the director's role as the nation's honest broker of information during times of crisis?"

Golby, Jim, and Doyle Hodges. “Who Will Guard the Guardians?” Episode of the “Horns of a Dilemma” podcast from “War on the Rocks” and the “Texas National Security Review.” Streaming audio. August 7, 2020. 44:51. "We live in an era of almost unprecedented partisan division and polarization where any issue of policy can become one that is deeply divided along party lines, and many of those issues of policy involve the military. We’ve seen this in examples of troops being deployed to the southwest border of the United States and through the use of federal troops in response to the racial justice protests. How does the military avoid becoming partisan in these divisive times. Doyle Hodges, executive editor of the Texas National Security Review, explores this question with Jim Golby, senior fellow at the Clement Center at the University of Texas at Austin.”