Supreme Command: Soldiers, Statesmen, and Leadership in Wartime

Military generals have expertise in violence that civilian leaders lack, and civilian leaders have expertise in politics and are the ultimate decis- not the military.

Our podcast is produced by the Civil Military Relations Network, CMRN, and I'm your host.

My name is Manaswini Ramkumar.

I go by Manu or M like Dame Judi Dench from James Bond, a reference that unfortunately doesn't land with the students I teach these days.

Prior to that, he worked as a national security associate at the Office of Presidential Personnel at the White House during the Obama administration.

Apart from all of his critical policy work, he is also a frequent speaker and commentator, and has written for various publications like Foreign Policy, The Hill, Just Security, et cetera.

On a personal note, I met Luke in 2024 at the Canadian Defence and Security Network's Summer Institute, and I've met him at other venues and have had ... of hearing about his advocacy journey and efforts, and it gives me enormous pleasure that he'll elaborate on his illustrious career today on the Unequal Dialogues podcast.

Luke, welcome to Unequal Dialogues.

... about the rearchitecture of American foreign politics?

So, well, one kind of, um, conversation would be with people who would be potential presidential candidates, and I, I, I would like some of them to read this book and another book that I wrote called Supreme Command, which is about civil military relations, about politicians dealing with their generals.

Um, and, and that's really a question of preparing people for, uh, you know, for these extraordinarily extraordinary high-level, uh, positions for which, for which nothing, n- no job that they've had, even being governor of a huge state is not like that, and, and just realizing, you know, you're, you're, you will end up making those kinds of decisions.

If you're talking to run-of-the-mill politicians, what, what I hope it would do would be to make them rather more responsible.

E-Elliot, there's a wonderful book I read about 10 years ago, uh, by, uh, Elliot Cohen from, uh, West Point, professor, thought-- deeply thoughtful historian.

He wrote a book called Supreme Command, and it was a book that traces-

Fantastic book

...

There is that advice.

And so the strategist Elliot Cohen, he wrote an excellent book called Supreme Command.

I don't know if you're familiar with it or not.

I actually gave a gift of it to two defense ministers to help the discussion of political military relations.