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Socializing Civil-Military Relations: The Differential Effects of
American and French Training of Tunisian Military Officers
Sharan Grewal1
April 22, 2018
Scholars and policymakers argue that U.S. training of foreign military officers helps to
socialize democratic values in officers hailing from non-democracies. Yet we know little
about what other political attitudes U.S. military training may impart in foreign officers,
and whether comparable effects are found in training programs in other Western
democracies. Drawing on a unique survey of retired military officers in Tunisia, I find
that officers who had trained in the U.S. were more supportive than their counterparts
who had trained in France of the defense minister having a military background, more
supportive of soldiers and officers having the right to vote, and less supportive of
increasing the number of military representatives in the National Security Council. Each
of these differences can be attributed to the host countries’ different patterns of civil
military relations. These results suggest that beyond abstract democratic values, more
specific aspects of civil-military relations may also be socialized through foreign military
training. 1 Ph.D. Candidate, Princeton University. I am indebted to the generous funding of the Project on Middle East Political Science, the Bobst Center for Peace and Justice, the Center for International Security Studies, and the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies. For helpful discussions and comments, I thank Nate Allen, Risa Brooks, Matthew Cebul, and participants in the ISA annual conference. I also thank Intissar Samarat, Hamza Mighri, Mohamed Dhia Hammami, and Safa Belghith for research assistance, and retired Colonel Major Mahmoud Mezoughi for help in administering the survey to the Association of Former Officers of the National Armed Forces. Interviews were approved through Princeton IRB #6749, and the survey through Princeton IRB #7866.
Introduction
Each year, roughly 5000 foreign military and civilian officials spanning 118
countries attend training programs in the United States through the International Military
Education and Training (IMET) program.2 In justifying these trainings, U.S. government
officials have pointed to their potential to inculcate notions of democracy and civilian
control into foreign officers. In their annual defense to Congress, the State and Defense
Departments highlight that one objective of the IMET program is to “increase the ability
of foreign military and civilian personnel to instill and maintain democratic values and
protect internationally recognized human rights in their government and military.”3
General Jim Mattis, the current U.S. Secretary of Defense, has underscored that U.S.
training “has helped [foreign militaries] become the professional forces they are today.”4
While there has been a growing literature attempting to test whether U.S. military
training truly inculcates democratic values,5 this paper attempts to shift this literature in
two directions. First, the paper seeks to examine what other political attitudes, beyond
support for democracy, may be socialized into foreign military officers training in the
United States. In particular, do foreign officers come to value the particular pattern of
2 DOS/DOD, “Foreign Military Training Report, Fiscal Years 2016-2017,” Joint Report to Congress, Volume 1, https://www.state.gov/documents/organization/275295.pdf. 3 Ibid. 4 “Statement of General James N. Mattis, U.S. Marine Corps Commander, U.S. Central Command, Before the Senate Armed Services Committee on the Posture of U.S. Central Command,” March 1, 2011, http://ogc.osd.mil/olc/docs/testMattis03012011.pdf. 5 See, e.g., Tomislav Z. Ruby and Douglas Gibler, “US Professional Military Education and Democratization Abroad.” European Journal of International Relations Vol. 16, No. 3 (2010), 339–364; Carol Atkinson, Military Soft Power: Public Diplomacy Through Military Educational Exchanges (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014); and Jesse Dillon Savage and Jonathan D. Caverley, “When Human Capital Threatens the Capitol: Foreign Aid in the Form of Military Training and Coups,” Journal of Peace Research Vol. 54, No. 4 (2017), 542–557.
U.S. civil-military relations, such as its preference for a defense secretary with military
experience and a relatively partisan officer corps? Second, it seeks to compare these
socialization effects in U.S. training programs to those in other Western countries, in this
case, France, the second most active trainer of foreign officers.
To do so, this study conducts a unique survey of retired military officers in
Tunisia. While most existing work on U.S. military training highlight broad, cross-
national correlations,6 this survey allows us to capture individual military officers’
attitudes towards democracy and towards various aspects of civil-military relations.
Tunisia features important variation in where officers are sent for training, allowing us to
compare the attitudes of those who trained in the U.S. with those who trained in France.
Moreover, given that Tunisia is currently undergoing a democratic transition, exploring
these attitudes here is particularly important from a policy perspective.
The survey results suggest that Tunisian officers who trained in the U.S. hold both
similar and different attitudes from those who trained in France in important and
predictable ways. As both the U.S. and France are stable democracies, I find no
difference in officers’ levels of support for democracy by their country of training.
However, where the U.S. and France diverge in their civil-military relations, important
differences emerge. First, American-trained officers were more supportive than French-
trained ones of a military officer becoming the defense minister, in line with the
abundance of former officers who have become U.S. secretaries of defense and their
relative absence heading the defense ministry in France. However, American-trained
officers were less supportive of increasing the number of military representatives in the
6 For an important exception, see Atkinson, Military Soft Power.
National Security Council – in line with the U.S. having no statutory military
representative in the NSC while France tends to have at least three. Similarly, in line
with the U.S. officer corps’ more openly partisan nature, American-trained officers were
more supportive of granting the military the right to vote. Finally, on issues where the
U.S. and France are similar – the presence of one senior chief of staff to coordinate the
armed forces and the lack of military representatives or advisors to the parliament – no
differences between American and French-trained officers were found.
These similarities and differences, all in line with the pattern of civil-military
relations in the country in which they trained, suggest that officers training abroad may
be socialized into accepting and valuing very specific aspects of civil-military relations.
The growing political power and partisanship of the U.S. military, arguably a worrisome
trend domestically, may therefore also be having important ramifications beyond our
shores. Moreover, these results implore us to take seriously the possibility that U.S. and
other Western training may not be entirely in sync, and could produce important
differences in their graduates' preferences for civil-military relations.
The rest of this paper proceeds as follows. I first outline the literature on U.S.
military training, and demonstrate how my contribution fits in to existing work. The next
section theorizes in what ways U.S. and French military training should impart similar or
different preferences into foreign military officers. The following section describes the
survey used to test these hypotheses, and the subsequent section presents the results. The
final section concludes with broader implications of this research.
Literature
U.S. military training of foreign officers has been thought to help instill
democratic values in officers hailing from non-democracies. Atkinson (2006), for
instance, found that countries that send officers to the U.S. under the IMET program
subsequently see increases in their levels of democracy as measured through Polity
scores.7 In a follow-up study, Atkinson (2010) found a similar correlation between IMET
training and a government's respect for human rights, as measured through Cignarelli and
Richards (CIRI) human rights data.8 Ruby and Gibler (2010) employ a more expansive
dataset of foreign military trainees, both IMET and self-funded, and find that U.S.
training is associated with a lower likelihood of a coup d’etat.9 As the Arab Spring
unfolded, several scholars contended that U.S. training may have played a role in
explaining why some militaries decided to defect from their autocrats and support
democratization.10
However, others have contended that U.S. training is associated with greater
human rights violations and military coups. Historically, the U.S. Army School of the
Americas (SOA) had been criticized as a “school of dictators” for the number of its
7 Atkinson, “Constructivist Implications of Material Power: Military Engagement and the Socialization of States, 1972-2000,” International Studies Quarterly Vol. 50, No. 3 (2006), 509–537. 8 Atkinson, “Does Soft Power Matter? A Comparative Analysis of Student Exchange Programs 1980-2006.” Foreign Policy Analysis 6 (2010), 1–22. 9 Ruby and Gibler, “When Human Capital Threatens the Capitol.” 10 Dennis C. Blair, “Military Support for Democracy,” Prism Vol. 3, No. 3 (2012), 3–16; William C. Taylor, Military Responses to the Arab Uprisings and the Future of Civil- Military Relations in the Middle East: Analysis from Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, and Syria (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014); Risa Brooks, “The Tunisian Military and Democratic Control of the Armed Forces,” in Holger Albrecht, Aurel Croissant, and Fred H. Lawson (Eds.), Armies and Insurgencies in the Arab Spring, Chapter 10, pp. 203–224, (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016).
graduates later implicated in torture and genocide, or in staging coups and ruling as
military dictators.11 More recently, IMET graduates played leading roles in the putsches
in Honduras 2009 and Mali 2012. More generally, Savage and Caverley recently found
that U.S. military training actually doubles the likelihood of a coup from 1% to 2%.12
These cross-national findings, while undoubtedly important in uncovering general
trends, are also limited, in that are unable to demonstrate that is American-trained officers
that are responsible for these positive or negative country-level effects. Atkinson (2006,
2010) and Ruby and Gibler (2010) cannot show that it is American-trained officers that
are pushing for greater liberalization, nor can Savage and Caverley (2017) show that
American-trained officers are leading the coups that they find become more likely. To
actually test the micro-foundations of these theories, we would need systematic data at
the individual level.
Atkinson (2014) has a made valiant attempt on this front, conducting a survey of
244 foreign officers at the end of their exchange in the United States. She finds that in
addition to technical skills, “returning home with the officers are their personal
perceptions of the United States, U.S. citizens, U.S. civil-military relations, U.S.
government, and U.S. foreign policy.”13 Atkinson concludes that U.S. training “led to
11 Richard F. Grimmett and Mark P. Sullivan, “United States Army School of the Americas: Background and Congressional Concerns.” CRS Issue Brief for Congress, 2001. In an important defense of the SOA, Cope (1995, p. 22) noted “during the past 49 years, the School has graduated almost 59,000 military students. Only a very small number of them, less than one-half of 1 percent, have been guilty of subsequent misconduct.” See John A. Cope, “International Military Education and Training: An Assessment,” Institute for National Strategic Studies McNair Paper, No. 44 (1995), 1–71. 12 Savage and Caverley, “When Human Capital Threatens the Capitol.” 13 Atkinson, Military Soft Power, p. 5.
more positive views of the United States and greater understanding of the values that the
United States espouses.”14
While Atkinson asked officers about their perceptions of democracy and freedom,
there are a number of other political attitudes that bear consideration. Attitudes toward
various aspects of civil-military relations may also have been shaped by U.S. training,
and may in turn be affecting officers’ likelihoods of staging coups or supporting
democratic transitions. If training in the U.S., for instance, encourages foreign officers to
prefer a defense minister with a military background, as many U.S. Secretaries of
Defense have, and they are denied one at home, they may apply political pressure or even
stage a coup, all while still expressing support for democracy in the abstract. Similarly, if
foreign officers are molded by their American counterparts’ active participation in
electoral politics, this partisanship may also have important ramifications upon their
return home. This paper attempts to rectify this oversight by examining attitudes not only
toward democracy but also towards various aspects of civil-military relations.
A second limitation of this recent literature is that it focuses almost exclusively on
American military training. In an earlier era, however, scholars had also focused on
military training by European powers. Price (1971), for instance, found that British
military training had instilled an aversion to coups in Ghanaian officers.15 In the other
vein, Nunn (1975) argued that training by the politicized militaries of pre-WWII France
14 Ibid, p. 14. 15 Robert M. Price, “A Theoretical Approach to Military Rule in New States: Reference-Group Theory and the Ghanaian Case,” World Politics, Vol. 23, No. 3 (1971), 399–430.
and Germany had a detrimental effect encouraging coups in Latin America.16 While
today's literature generally assumes that contemporary U.S. and European training should
instill similar values, this assumption has not been subjected to an empirical test.
Moreover, given the differences in civil-military relations even within Western
democracies, it may very well be wrong to assume that they will have similar effects.
Theory
To address these limitations, this paper examines whether French training instills
different values and orientations in foreign military officers than U.S. training. France is a
particularly important comparison case to the United States, given its status as the second
most active trainer of foreign military officers.17 Moreover, in the time period examined
in this study (1970s to 1990s), France differed from the United States in important
aspects of civil-military relations. While a complete account of each country’s military is
beyond the scope of this article, a brief history will be helpful to understand the specific
differences between the countries.
The United States, with its long aversion to a standing army and its ‘anti-
militaristic’ liberal tradition, underwent a significant change in civil-military relations
after the second World War. In The Soldier and the State, Huntington argues that after
WWII, “military men and institutions acquired authority and influence far surpassing that
16 Frederick M. Nunn, “Effects of European Military Training in Latin America: The Origins and Nature of Professional Militarism in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Peru, 1890-1940,” Military Affairs, Vol. 39, No. 1 (1975), 1–7. 17 Savage and Caverley, “When Human Capitol Threatens the Capital,” p. 544.
ever previously possessed by military professionals on the American scene.”18 “Three of
the most significant manifestations of their influence,” Huntington continued, “were: (1)
the influx of military officers into governmental positions normally occupied by civilians;
(2) the close ties which developed between military leaders and business leadership; and
(3) the widespread popularity and prestige of individual military figures.”19 In the decades
since Huntington’s writing, the military has seen an increase in its public confidence,
greater influence over national security decisions, and more open partisanship, especially
with the end of conscription in 1973.20
If the Cold War era brought an increase in the U.S. military’s political influence,
France has witnessed the opposite trend. After French officers stationed in Algeria staged
coups in 1958 and 1961, the pendulum swung against the military. In The Defeat of the
Generals [La Défaite des Généraux], Samy Cohen explains that “the Fifth Republic
[1958-] was a major turning point in the relations between political power and military
leaders. The political order took precedence over the military order.”21 “Compared with
the Third and Fourth Republics, the [military’s] influence has declined in almost all
major sectors: strategic affairs, external military operations, [and] armaments policy. [...]
Political control is a reality. [Civilians...] constantly encroach on what the military has
18 Samuel P. Huntington, The Soldier and the State: The Theory and Politics of Civil- Military Relations (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1957), p. 345. 19 Ibid., p. 354. 20 Richard K. Betts, Soldiers, Statesmen, and Cold War Crises (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991); Peter D. Feaver and Richard H. Kohn, Soldiers and Civilians: The Civil-Military Gap and American National Security (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001); Michael Desch, Civilian Control of the Military: The Changing Security Environment (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001). 21 Samy Cohen, La défaite des généraux: le pouvoir politique et l’armée sous la Ve Republique (Paris: Fayard, 1994), p. 48.
always considered their exclusive jurisdiction.”22 Since the 1960s, the French military
largely left the public eye as the “Algerian taboo” served to silence military officers on
political issues.23
These divergent trends in the American and French militaries are reflected in
several specific aspects of civil-military relations. Below, I detail these similarities and
differences as they concern: 1) Democracy, 2) the Minister of Defense, 3) the National
Security Council, and 4) the right to vote. While similar in terms of democracy, I will
show that the U.S. in the 1970s-1990s was more likely to see a Defense Secretary with a
military background, an officer corps more supportive of voting, and a National Security
Council featuring fewer military representatives. These more specific aspects of civil-
military relations, I will hypothesize, may also be diffused to foreign military trainees.
Democracy
The first dimension of comparison between the U.S. and France is its level of
democracy. In the time period under study, both were stable democracies with high levels
of political freedom. Figure 1 plots the U.S. and France’s respective Polity scores, a -10
to 10 ranking of democracy from the Polity IV Project.24 While France has experienced
greater variation in its Polity scores over the last 200 years, in the 1970s-1990s, the U.S.
and France were relatively indistinguishable. Since 1969, France was ranked an 8, and a
22 Ibid., p. 30. 23 Grégory Daho, “L’érosion des tabous algériens,” Revue française de science politique Vol. 64 (2014), 57–78. 24 Monty G. Marshall, Ted R. Gurr, and Keith Jaggers, “Polity IV Project: Political Regime Characteristics and Transitions, 1800-2016,” Center for Systemic Peace, 2017.
9 since 1986. The U.S., similarly, was ranked as a 10 other than 1967-1973, when it was
8, and today, when it is again an 8.
Figure 1: Polity Scores, U.S. and France, 1800-2016
Accordingly, for the time period in which the officers in my sample studied in the
U.S. and France, I hypothesize that there will be no difference between American and
French trained officers in their level of support for democracy.
Minister of Defense
As we zoom in to specific aspects of civil-military relations, however, important
differences between the U.S. and France emerge. The first is the background of the
Minister/Secretary of Defense. While active-duty officers have not assumed this position
in either country, the U.S. is far more likely to see retired officers assume the post. Table
1 lists each French Minister and American Secretary since 1956, the year of Tunisian
independence. It then classifies each individual into one of three categories: 1) “officer,”
meaning they were at some point before their term commissioned as an officer in the
armed forces, even if they entered the service in an enlisted capacity (such as Secretaries
Melvin Laird and Caspar Weinberger); 2) “enlisted,” meaning they had served (only) in
an enlisted rank, typically through conscription, or 3) “civilian,” meaning they have never
served in the military.
What we see is that American defense secretaries are far more likely to have been
military officers than French defense ministers. The majority of American defense
secretaries since 1956, 64%, have been military officers, while only 22% of French
defense ministers have been officers. The difference is even more stark comparing our
time period of interest: between the 1970s and 1990s, 64% of American secretaries had
been officers, while only 7% of French ministers were officers.
These data corroborate historical accounts of each military. Samy Cohen, the
French political scientist, observes: “The minister’s civilian cabinet is also an important
element of political control over the armed forces. [...] It is, in fact, composed of
personalities without any experience of military affairs. The minister, who is himself
rarely an expert in defense matters, takes with him [...] his men of confidence who, for
the most part, have never rubbed shoulders with defense problems.”25
By comparison, historical accounts of American defense secretaries emphasize
their military experience.26 More importantly, this background appears to be known – and
desired – by the military. In a survey of 2,901 elite military officers, Feaver and Kohn
(2001) find that 42% agreed or strongly agreed that “to be respected as commander-in-
chief, the President should have served in uniform,”27 which is “strikingly at odds with a
classical civilian control perspective.”28 While there is no such systematic data for
officers’ attitudes toward the defense secretary, anecdotal evidence suggests that many
25 Samy Cohen, “Le pouvoir politique et l’armée.” Pouvoirs, Vol. 2, No. 125 (2008), p. 25. 26 Charles A. Stevenson. SECDEF: The Nearly Impossible Job of Secretary of Defense (Washington, D.C.: Potomac Books, Inc., 2006). 27 Feaver and Kohn, Soldiers and Civilians, p. 83. 28 Paul Gronke and Peter D. Feaver, “Uncertain Confidence: Civilian and Military Attitudes About Civil-Military Relations,” in Feaver and Kohn, Soldiers and Civilians, p. 154.
prefer the secretary to also have military experience. For instance, Morton (1966), at the
time a Lt. Colonel at the Army War College, included prior military experience in a
proposed list of criteria for choosing defense secretaries, noting “there is no substitute for
military experience when dealing with military personnel.”29
In short, American defense secretaries are more likely than French defense
ministers to have been military officers. If specific civil-military patterns also socialize to
foreign trainees, we should therefore see American-trained officers more supportive than
French-trained ones of military officers becoming defense minister.
National Security Council
Despite the typical background of the defense secretary, the American set-up is
not required by law to have military officers in positions of influence. Formally, there are
no statutory military representatives in the U.S. National Security Council. 30 The
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff is instead a “military advisor,” but given the
military’s clout, has been regularly invited to the Principals Committee.31
France’s equivalent of the NSC, however, has historically had at least three
permanent military members. Since 1962, the Secrétariat général de la défense nationale
29 Richard L. Morton, “Criteria for the Selection of the Secretary of Defense,” US Army War College AWC Log # 66-4-156 U (1966), p. 21. 30 See 1947 National Security Act. 31 Stanley L. Falk, “The National Security Council Under Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy,” Political Science Quarterly, Vol. 79, No. 3 (1964), 403–434; Peter J. Roman and David W. Tarr, “Military Professionalism and Policymaking: Is There a Civil-Military Gap at the Top? If So, Does it Matter?” In Feaver and Kohn (Eds.), Soldiers and Civilians. The Goldwater-Nichols Act of 1986 made the Chairman the primary military advisor, allowing the Vice Chairman to attend the Deputies Committee, and so on down.
(SGDN), renamed the SGDSN in 2010, 32 formally includes among its permanent
members the Chief of Staff of the Armies, the director general of the gendarmerie (part of
the military), and the “senior defense and security official with the Minister of
Defense.”33 In addition, between 1958 and 1988, the Secretary General of the SGDN had
been a military officer, and since then, the Deputy Secretary General has been.34
While the U.S. military may wield greater informal influence over national
security policy, from a formal institutionalist perspective, the French system features
greater military representation in the national security council. I therefore hypothesize
that French-trained officers should be more supportive of increasing the number of
military representatives in the NSC than American-trained ones.
Right to Vote
A final difference between the French and American militaries concerns their
level of partisanship. American officers and soldiers have had the right to vote since the
Civil War,35 and have become more openly partisan particularly since the Vietnam War.
By 1996, 67% of officers surveyed openly identified as Republican, while only 4%
refused to state their partisan affiliations.36 “While officers consider themselves neutral
servants of the state, the officer corps has developed a distinctive partisan affinity; it is
32 General Secretariat for Defence and National Security (SGDSN). 33 See French Code of Defense, Article R1332-10, https://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/affichCodeArticle.do?cidTexte=LEGITEXT000006071307&idArticle=LEGIARTI000006574333&dateTexte=&categorieLien=cid. 34 See “Le SGDSN, 110 Ans d’Histoire,” http://www.sgdsn.gouv.fr/histoire/. 35 Donald S. Inbody, The Soldier Vote: War, Politics, and the Ballot in America (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). 36 Ole R. Holsti, “The Widening Gap between the U.S. Military and Civilian Society?: Some Evidence, 1976-1996,” International Security, Vol. 23, No. 3 (1998), 5–42.
greater, in fact, than that of civilians.”37 Ricks (1997) claims that “military personnel have
for the past decade been voting in greater percentages than the general population.”38
Beyond privately-held beliefs, “there is anecdotal evidence that the old taboos against
military partisanship are weakening, such as senior officers identifying their party
affiliation in talks with junior subordinates, or writing letters to the editor critiquing one
party over another.”39
The French military, by contrast, has historically been labeled “La Grande
Muette” (the great mute) for its silence on political issues. French officers and soldiers
had been barred from voting between 1872 and 1945, and in the 1920s, when political
parties began to debate granting suffrage, officers themselves resisted these efforts.40
Even after gaining the right to vote in 1945, French officers have remained far from
politics.41 Officers and soldiers were in fact legally barred from discussing political topics
without permission until 2005.42 Only in the late 2000s, after our time period of interest,
has the “ability of the Algerian taboo to silence high-ranking officers” begun to wane.43
37 Feaver and Kohn, Soldiers and Civilians, p. 461. 38 Thomas E. Ricks, “The Widening Gap Between Military and Society,” The Atlantic (1997). 39 Feaver and Kohn, Soldiers and Civilians, p. 465. 40 Andrew Orr, “‘The Consequences Would Certainly be Fatal’: Voting Rights and the French Army, 1920-1928,” Proceedings of the Western Society for French History Vol. 39 (2011), 278–289. 41 Jean Lacroix, “L’armée et la politique.” Espirit, Vol. 167, No. 5 (1950), 749–753; Marie-Héléne Renaut, “Intérieur: Être soldat et citoyen en France de la Révolution à la Libeération,” La Revue administrative, Vol. 58, No. 348 (2005), 625–635. 42 Michel L. Martin, “The French Military and Union Rights: At the Margin of Full Citizenship?” in Richard Bartle and Lindy Heinecken (Eds.), Military Unionism in the Post-Cold War Era: A Future Reality?, Chapter 4, pp. 51 (New York: Routledge, 2006). 43 Daho, “L’érosion des tabous algériens.”
In line with their greater partisanship and voting behavior, I hypothesize that
American-trained officers should be more supportive of granting the military the right to
vote than French-trained ones.
Hypotheses
It is not readily apparent that these specific aspects of civil-military relations
would diffuse to foreign officers training in the U.S. and France. However, training
programs make an active effort to introduce foreign officers to the host country’s system
of civil-military relations. Inside and outside of the classroom, foreign officers are
exposed to these values and traditions. An important goal of the US IMET program,
codified in 1991, is: “greater respect for and grasp of democracy and civilian rule of law,
including the principle of civilian control of the military.”44 Beyond coursework on civil-
military relations, programs organize field visits “to acquire an understanding of U.S.
society, institutions, and values.” Cope (1995) provides a sample list of activities
conducted by the U.S. Army Defense Ammunition Center and School in Savannah,
Illinois. Foreign officers training there “attend[ed] a political debate between a male and
female candidate running for the U.S. Congress [and...] went to the polling place to
witness the election process,”45 providing a clear opportunity to see the U.S.’s acceptance
of military officers voting and being active in politics. Moreover, even in the English
language courses officers take prior to the official training, “subjects such as civil-
44 Cope, “International Military Education and Training,” p. 6. 45 Ibid., p. 19.
military relations and human rights [...] are introduced as vehicles to develop English
language proficiency through group discussion.”46
As a result, I argue that foreign officers training in the U.S. and France should
absorb their specific patterns of civil-military relations. To sum up the hypotheses:
1. American-trained and French-trained officers should be no different in their
support for democracy.
2. American-trained officers should be more supportive than French-trained officers
of military officers becoming the Minister of Defense.
3. French-trained officers should be more supportive than American-trained officers
of greater military representation in the National Security Council.
4. American-trained officers should be more supportive than French-trained officers
of the military having the right to vote.
Methods
Tunisia
To test these hypotheses, this study draws upon a unique survey of Tunisian
military officers. Tunisia is a particularly useful location for comparing French and
American trained officers. A former French colony, Tunisia created its military upon
independence in 1956 explicitly following the French model. The military was apolitical,
with officers and soldiers denied the right to vote or to join political parties, and the
Defense Minister has always been a civilian.47 The military was formed originally from
46 Ibid., p. 20. 47 Risa Brooks, “Abandoned at the Palace: Why the Tunisian Military Defected from the Ben Ali Regime in January 2011,” Journal of Strategic Studies, Vol. 36, No. 2 (2013),
Tunisian troops serving in the colonial French army, and its first cohort of new officers
(the Bourguiba promotion) were all sent to France’s St. Cyr in October 1956 for their
initial schooling.
From 1956-1966, Tunisian military officers received all of their schooling abroad,
primarily in France. Subsequently, with the establishment of the Military Academy in
1967, High Naval Institute (later Naval Academy) in 1978, and Air Force Academy in
1984, officers completed candidacy schools in Tunisia and subsequently went abroad for
their specializations and additional training (Staff and War colleges). After the
establishment of the Tunisian Staff College in 1979 and War College in 1994, only the
top 3-7 officers, based on an exam, would be permitted the repeat the course abroad.
Accordingly to retired Colonel-Major Mahmoud Mezoughi, president of the retired
officers’ association, officers generally did not have a choice of where to go, but rather
were placed wherever Tunisia had a spot in their particular specialty that year.48
To get a sense of how many Tunisian officers went abroad and to which
countries, I collected a dataset of the top 662 military officers (from rank of Major to
General) who had retired by 2009. Their biographies were available in an internal
Ministry of Defense publication, “Registry of Retired Officers: Commanders and Senior
Officers” produced in June 2009 (the most recent version; see more details in Appendix
A). Overall, 69% of these mid-level and senior officers had some training abroad, with
many enjoying multiple stints abroad. Figure 2 plots the percent of officers by country of
205–220; Hicham Bou Nassif, “A Military Beseiged: The Armed Forces, the Police, and the Party In Bin Ali’s Tunisia, 1987-2011,” International Journal of Middle East Studies, Vol. 47 (2015), 65–87; Sharan Grewal, “A Quiet Revolution: The Tunisian Military After Ben Ali,” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2016. 48 Interview with retired Colonel Major Mahmoud Mezoughi, Tunis, January 11, 2017.
training. The majority of these top officers (57%) received training in France. The second
most popular country, with 11% of officers attending, was the United States, with smaller
percentages in Italy and Belgium, among others. This variation in where officers have
trained makes Tunisia a useful case for testing our hypotheses, as we can compare those
with French training to those with American training.
Figure 2: Foreign Training among top 662 Tunisian Officers
Note: Officers trained in multiple countries are double counted.
Beyond this variation, Tunisia is also an exciting location for this study given that
it is currently in the midst of a transition to democracy. As empirically the greatest threat
to democracy is a military coup,49 its officers’ attitudes toward democracy and toward
specific aspects of civil-military relations are particularly important for policymakers and
49 Milan Svolik, “Which Democracies Will Last? Coups, Incumbent Takeovers, and the Dynamic of Democratic Consolidation,” British Journal of Political Science, Vol. 45, No. 4 (2015), 715– 738.
activists. Moreover, if significant differences are uncovered between French- and
American-trained officers, these findings may hold important policy implications for the
Tunisian government in deciding where to send future officers to ensure concordance
with its desired pattern of civil-military relations.
Survey of Military Officers
To gauge officers’ political attitudes, I conducted a survey of retired military
officers in Tunisia. While socialization effects should be strongest immediately upon
their return to Tunisia, active-duty officers are forbidden from speaking with researchers
or the press. Moreover, given that Atkinson (2014) has already shown through survey
data that there are immediate effects of U.S. training, it is anyway substantively more
interesting to examine whether these effects persist. By examining retired officers, we
can determine whether formative experiences abroad in officers’ 30s and 40s continue to
impact their attitudes even after they retire in their 50s and 60s.
The survey was fielded in Arabic in fall 2016 to the retired officers association,
the Association of Former Officers of the National Armed Forces. Established in March
2011, the association was home to 174 members at the time of the survey. The
association hosts social gatherings for its members as well as intellectual discussions on
security related topics. Sixty-two members filled in hard copies of the survey at the
association between August and December 2016, while an additional ten completed an
online version in August 2016, resulting in 72 surveys total.
Table 2 presents demographic information of the survey sample. The sample
consisted of senior and mid-level officers. Of the 72 officers surveyed, 67 (93%) were
Colonels or Colonel-Majors (a unique rank created in Tunisia to avoid having many
Generals). The remaining 5 were Lt. Colonels and Majors. Officers had retired between
2001-2015, with 46% retiring after the 2011 revolution (see histogram in Appendix B).
Note: Numbers in Branch and Foreign Training do not add up to 100, as officers in
Military Security are hosted in another service, and some officers trained in multiple
countries.
Like most other elite surveys, the selling point of this survey is not that it is a
random sample of military officers – it certainly is not – but rather that it provides unique
insight into a hard-to-reach group of elites. Still, to evaluate the representativeness of this
survey, we can compare the survey sample to the 662 officer biographies described
above. While imperfect,50 the dataset of the top 662 retired officers can be seen as the
population from which the survey sample was drawn.
Appendix C therefore presents the demographic comparison of the survey sample
with the retired officers dataset. Since most survey respondents are Colonels and Colonel
Majors, the appendix also presents the comparison for this subset. The comparisons
suggest that the survey sample is almost perfectly representative in terms of branches of
the military, with the vast majority in the land army or in the joint services (logistics,
support, etc.). The survey sample is also fairly representative in terms of birthplace,
although with a slightly higher proportion of officers hailing from the capital, Tunis,
where the association was located. Finally, the majority of officers in both the survey and
population have some form of Western training, although the survey has a significantly
higher proportion of US-trained officers – particularly useful for testing the hypotheses in
this paper. While not a random sample of military officers, the sample is therefore fairly
representative on key demographic characteristics.
50 The MOD publication only included officers who retired before 2009, whereas the survey sample includes officers who retired as late as 2015. Historical reports on the Tunisian military do not mention any difference in recruitment patterns in the 1970s, and thus there should not a major difference in demographics between those who retired in 2009 and those who retired in 2015. See: L.B. Ware, “The Role of the Tunisian Military in the Post-Bourgiba Era,” Middle East Journal, Vol. 39, No. 1 (1985), 28–39; and Ware, “Ben Ali’s Constitutional Coup in Tunisia,” Middle East Journal, Vol. 42, No. 4 (1988), 587–601.
There may, of course, be differences between the sample and the population that
are not measurable in these demographics. It is possible, indeed likely, that the officers
who chose to be members of the association and/or who decided to take the survey are
better networked or more political than the average retired officer, especially given the
intellectual, ‘think tank’ nature of the association. Yet this bias would only enhance the
appeal of the survey sample as the most likely group of officers to consider a military
coup. Moreover, given that we are more interested in comparing U.S. v. French trained
officers among the survey sample, rather than comparing the survey sample to the
population, this overall bias should not undermine the validity of the comparison
highlighted in this paper.
Foreign Training
In this study, we are interested in comparing the political attitudes of Tunisian
officers who studied in France with those who studied in the U.S. I will therefore remove
the one officer who did not train in the U.S. or France. Of the remaining 71, 39 (55%)
trained in the United States. All of the remaining officers trained in France. Given that
the officers in the sample retired between 2001 and 2015, they likely trained in the U.S.
and France in the 1970s, 80s, and 90s.51
Eight officers trained in both the U.S. and France. My strategy is to include these
officers in the U.S.-trained category. As described earlier, the Tunisian military was built
on the French model, with Tunisian troops from the French colonial army forming the
51 For the purpose of anonymity, the survey did not ask officers when they trained abroad. Atkinson (2014), however, finds that the vast majority of foreign officers in the U.S. are in their 30s and 40s, allowing us to narrow the window to the 1970s to 1990s.
nucleus of the new military and with most officers receiving training in France. As we
will see in the survey data, the dominant paradigm is therefore to support the French
pattern of civil-military relations: a civilian Defense Minister and nonpartisan officers.
Given this French influence, I assume that training in France does little in the way of
changing attitudes toward civil-military relations, but rather reinforces the status quo. It is
studying in the U.S., with its primarily former officer Defense Secretaries and partisan
officer corps, that may change attitudes. Accordingly, it makes sense to include these
eight officers as U.S. trained, as that is likely what would have changed their beliefs.
Attitudes toward Civil-Military Relations
To measure American and French-trained officers’ attitudes, the survey asked
seven questions about democracy and civil-military relations. The histograms for each
question appear in Appendix D. The first was an officer’s level of support for democracy,
the primary concept in the existing literature on foreign military training. Rather than
asking about democracy in the abstract, the survey asked particularly about its suitability
for Tunisia:
1. [Democracy] “Suppose there was a scale from 1-5 measuring the extent to which
democracy is suitable for Tunisia, with 1 meaning that democracy is absolutely
inappropriate for Tunisia and 5 meaning democracy is completely appropriate for
Tunisia. To what extent do you think democracy is suitable for Tunisia?”
Figure 9 (Appendix) presents a histogram of the answers. The vast majority of officers
selected either 3, the neutral category, or 4, indicating that democracy is suitable for
Tunisia.
Second, the survey asked two questions about officers' preferences for a Defense
Minister with a military background:
“The Minister of Defense should have a military background:”
2. [MOD-Active] Active Duty Officer
3. [MOD-Retired] Retired Officer
Answers were recorded on a 5-point scale from strongly agree to strongly disagree.
Figure 10 (Appendix) shows that in line with the French model, the vast majority of
officers strongly opposed an active duty officer becoming the defense minister. Officers
were more neutral, however, toward a retired officer assuming the post.
Fourth, the survey asked about officers' attitudes toward increasing the number of
military officers on the National Security Council:
4. [NSC] “The President's National Security Council currently includes two military
officers as permanent members: the chief of staff of the armed forces and the
director of military security. Do you agree that the council should have a larger
number of permanent military figures?”
Figure 11 (Appendix) suggests that the majority of officers agreed or strongly agreed that
the NSC should have more than two military representatives.52 This also corresponds to
the French model, where the SGDN has at least three military representatives.
Fifth, the survey asked officers whether the military should have the right to vote.
While the military later received the right to vote for municipal elections, at the time of
the survey, the Tunisian military had never had suffrage. The survey asked:
5. [Right to Vote] “Soldiers and officers should have the right to vote in elections.”
52 By contrast, in January 2017 (after the survey was completed), President Beji Caid Essebsi removed the two military members from the NSC.
Figure 12 (Appendix) shows that the vast majority of officers opposed the right to vote –
in line with the French model of apolitical officers.
Finally, the survey asked officers about two aspects of civil-military relations that
are the same in France and the U.S., and thus for which we should not expect a difference
by country of training. The first concerns the armed forces chief of staff, the highest-
ranking position in the military. Both the U.S. and France have one professional officer
at the top of the military to coordinate the various services (the Chairman of the Joint
Chiefs and the Chef d’État-Major des Armées). For most of Tunisian history, however,
the military has been deprived of this position, as autocrats feared the concentration of
power in the hands of one officer at the top of the military. The survey therefore asked:
6. [Chief of Staff] “The president should appoint a new chief of staff of the armed
forces and create a plan outlining his duties.”
As can be expected, the vast majority of officers strongly supported this proposal (see
Appendix, Figure 13).
A second similarity between France and the U.S. is the lack of military
representatives or advisors for the parliament/Congress. This aspect captures to what
extent officers are comfortable with the notion of parliamentary control over the armed
forces, or whether they would like some influence over this process. The survey therefore
asked:
7. [Parliament] “A military advisor should be appointed for the parliament for
deputies to consult with on technical and defense matters.”
Figure 14 (Appendix) shows that a majority of officers would like a military advisor for
the parliament. Having outlined the dependent variables, the next section examines
whether American and French-trained officers differed in their attitudes toward these
aspects of civil-military relations.
Results
Tables 7-9 (Appendix E) present the results of U.S. training, with French training
as the reference group. I present two models for each dependent variable: the first is the
simple bivariate correlation, while the second model demonstrates that results are robust
to controlling for a number of covariates. These covariates include officers’ retirement
year (2001-2015), rank (1=major to 4=colonel-major), branch (in particular the army, as
the largest branch, and military security, with the greatest ties to the former
dictatorships), and whether they hail from Tunisia’s interior or coastal regions, one of the
major internal cleavages within the military.53 Figure 3 presents the main multivariate
results graphically, while holding all covariates at their mean (if continuous) or modal
position (if categorical/dichotomous). At the top of each figure is the p-value for the
difference between American and French trained officers.
53 For more on the regional divisions in the Tunisian military, see Grewal, “A Quiet Revolution.”
Figure 3: Attitudes toward Civil-Military Relations by U.S. or French Training
For each dependent variable, the results on U.S. training are in the expected
direction. On the first, support for democracy, U.S. trained officers were no more
supportive of democracy than French-trained ones (Table 8, models 1-2), in line with
hypothesis 1.54 The U.S. and France were both stable democracies at the time these
respondents trained abroad, and accordingly do not differ in their attitudes toward
democracy.
Where the U.S. and France diverge in their civil-military relations, American and
French-trained officers likewise held different attitudes. American-trained officers were
significantly more supportive of the defense minister being an active duty military officer
(Table 8, models 3-4) or a retired officer (models 5-6). U.S. trained officers were about
0.5 to 0.7 points more supportive of these proposals, respectively, representing roughly
10-14% of the 1-5 point scale. In line with hypothesis 2, American-trained officers
appeared to absorb the U.S.’s preference for a defense secretary who had at some point
been a military officer.
This does not imply, however, that American-trained officers across the board
wanted a greater political role for the military. In line with hypothesis 3 regarding the
NSC, American-trained officers were significantly less supportive of having more
military figures in the NSC than French-trained ones (Table 9, models 1-2). However, the
effect here is relatively small: U.S. trained officers were about 0.3 points less supportive
of increasing the number of military figures, representing roughly 6% of the scale.
54 Importantly, note that without a comparison group of officers with no foreign training, we also cannot establish that there is any overall effect of Western training on democratic attitudes.
Hypothesis 4 concerning the right to vote also sees some support. American-
trained officers were marginally more supportive of the right to vote (Table 9, models 3-
4), in line with the U.S. officer corps' greater involvement in politics. Substantively, this
effect size is 0.6 points on the 1-5 scale, or roughly 12% of the scale. Finally, on the two
aspects for which the U.S. and France are the same – an armed forces chief of staff and
(no) military advisor to the parliament – American and French trained officers were also
no different in their attitudes (Table 10).
In sum, each of the hypotheses regarding foreign training of Tunisian officers
were upheld: U.S. trained officers were more supportive of military officers becoming the
defense minister, more supportive of the right to vote, and less supportive of increasing
military representation in the NSC. This suggests that foreign training may have
important effects beyond the (potential) acceptance of democracy currently debated in the
literature. In particular, Western training may socialize foreign officers into accepting the
host country's particular pattern of civil-military relations, including the background of
the Defense Minister, the composition of the NSC, and the officer corps' level of
involvement in politics.
The primary alternative explanation for these results would be some sort of
selection effect: rather than U.S. and French training shaping military officers'
preferences, officers chose to go to the country with the pattern of civil-military relations
that most suited their preferences. It is difficult, however, to envision any specific
selection effect that would fit the precise pattern uncovered in the data. It may be that
more politicized or power-hungry officers chose to study in the U.S., explaining why they
preferred a military officer as defense minister, but this conjecture is unable to explain
why they were not more power-seeking on other questions (parliamentary advisor, chief
of staff), and in fact were less power-seeking on representation in the NSC.
Moreover, the case of Tunisia is also particularly useful in countering any
selection effect, as officers were generally not given a choice of where to go. Given that
Tunisia was offered so few slots abroad, officers went wherever there was an opening
that year in their particular specialty. A retired Tunisian General observed that:
“In some cases, there is choice, but in general, the officer is oriented
towards a certain destination due to his specialty. Let's take for example
the military police. I did my training within the military police in the US
because that was where my specialty was offered. Where there is more
choice is for the War College. When the officers graduate [from the
Tunisian War College], those with excellent records -- usually 7 of them –
[get to repeat the course abroad and] have the right to choose where to go
among France, Germany, the U.S., etc. If one of them speaks English, he
would choose the US, Germany in case he speaks German, and so on.”55
In the cases where they had a choice, officers interviewed universally highlighted
language skills as the factor influencing their choice, with a handful mentioning the
material allocations (“in Germany or Turkey, you could buy a car!”). None mentioned the
pattern of civil-military relations as a reason for choosing a country for training.
While it was not a factor going in, officers did notice these aspects while abroad.
Asked specifically about the right to vote, one retired Colonel-Major observed that:
55 Interview with retired General, Tunis, January 9, 2018.
“The officers I was with in the U.S. could vote for the Republicans or the
Democrats. When we are trained in a country, we are influenced --
whether we want it or not. We are influenced by the environment and
everything that takes place in that country. So, when I came back from the
United States, my supreme desire was to see Tunisia like the U.S. because
I felt how comfortable I was in the States.”56
Another retired Colonel-Major highlighted the opposite lesson he learned in France:
“My understanding of the topic [right to vote] has been shaped by my time
in France, where I studied for all of my higher military education. At the
time, France was debating whether to allow military officers to unionize.
They had a big debate and ultimately decided no, because it would
politicize the military and lead to internal divisions. The same in my mind
applies to the right to vote.”57
Conclusion
This paper attempted to expand the literature on U.S. military training in two
ways. First, it sought to examine what other political attitudes, beyond support for
democracy, may be socialized into foreign military officers. Second, it sought to compare
military training in the United States to other Western countries, in this case, the second
most active trainer of foreign officers, France.
Methodologically, it drew upon a unique survey of retired Tunisian military
officers. While the sample size is limited, the survey provides unique insight into an elite
56 Interview with retired Colonel-Major, Tunis, January 11, 2017. 57 Interview with retired Colonel-Major, Tunis, June 20, 2016.
group of officers roughly half of whom had studied in the U.S. and the other in France.
The survey results uncover important similarities and differences between these officers
that mirror the pattern of civil-military relations in their respective countries of training.
Substantively, these results suggest that civil-military relations can extend beyond
one's shores through foreign training. Whether or not the U.S. military’s increased
political power and growing partisanship are worrisome trends domestically, they may
also be having unexplored and unintended consequences on foreign officers. The results
in this paper may provide one explanation for why Savage and Caverley (2017) find that
U.S. training increases the likelihood of military coups. If foreign officers training in the
U.S. are shaped by the partisan nature of the U.S. officer corps, and its preference for a
defense minister with a military background, they may feel encouraged to seek a greater
political role upon their return home. On the other hand, the results regarding the NSC
suggest that American-trained officers are not across the board more power-seeking, but
rather do so in line with the American model of civil-military relations.
More generally, these findings underscore the need to account for non-US
military training in cross-national analyses. Existing correlations between U.S. military
training and country-level outcomes may be altered when controlling for European
military training. Especially given that non-US training may instill different orientations
in foreign military officers, these training programs also need to be addressed.
Finally, these results have important policy implications for the Tunisian military.
The much higher proportion of Tunisian military officers who have trained in France
rather than the U.S. helps to explain why overall, the Tunisian military tends to prefer a
civilian minister of defense, oppose the right to vote, and seek greater representation in
the NSC. If the Tunisian government, however, continues to increase its military-to-
military engagement with the U.S., as it has since the 2011 revolution, this may
contribute to a long-term change in its officers’ attitudes toward civil-military relations.
If, for instance, the Tunisian government is not willing to appoint a former military
officer as a defense minister down the road, it may wish to reconsider its recent
enhancement of military relations with the United States.
Supplementary Materials for:
Socializing Civil-Military Relations: The Differential Effects
of American and French Training of Tunisian Military Officers
Contents
1 Appendix A: Dataset of Retired Senior Officers 2
2 Appendix B: Survey of Retired Military Officers 3
2.1 Retirement Years . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
2.2 Questionnaire . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
3 Appendix C: Representativeness of Survey Sample 6
3.1 Comparing Colonels and Colonel Majors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
3.2 Covariate Balance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
4 Appendix D: Histograms of Dependent Variables 9
5 Appendix E: Results Tables 12
1
1 Appendix A: Dataset of Retired Senior Officers
The dataset of all 662 senior military officers retired by 2009 was created from a collection
of biographies in an internal Ministry of Defense publication, “Registry of Retired Officers:
Commanders and Senior Officers.” Below is the cover and a sample biography of retired
Colonel Major Mahmoud Mezoughi, head of the retired officers association.
Figure 4: Registry of Retired Officers
Figure 5: Colonel Major Mahmoud Mezoughi biography
2
2 Appendix B: Survey of Retired Military Officers
The survey of retired senior officers was conducted between August and December 2016 with
the help of the Association of Former Officers of the National Armed Forces.
Figure 6: Association of Former Officers of the National Armed Forces
2.1 Retirement Years
Below is the retirement years of the 72 officers surveyed.
Figure 7: Year of Retirement
3
2.2 Questionnaire
Survey questions used in this paper include:
1. What year did you retire from the armed forces?
2. What was your specialty in the armed forces? [Check all that apply]
• Army
• Navy
• Air Force
• Military Security
• Joint services
3. What was the highest rank you reached in the armed forces?
4. Where did you grow up?
• Governorate:
• City/Village:
5. Where did you perform your basic training?
• Tunisia
• Other country:
6. In which countries did you receive additional training? [Check all that apply]
• The United States
• France
• Belgium
4
• Italy
• Greece
• Turkey
• Other:
7. [Democracy] “Suppose there was a scale from 1-5 measuring the extent to which
democracy is suitable for Tunisia, with 1 meaning that democracy is absolutely inap-
propriate for Tunisia and 5 meaning democracy is completely appropriate for Tunisia.
To what extent do you think democracy is suitable for Tunisia?”
8. “The Minister of Defense should have a military background:”
• [MOD-Active] Active Duty Officer
• [MOD-Retired] Retired Officer
9. [NSC] “The President’s National Security Council currently includes two military
officers as permanent members: the chief of staff of the armed forces and the director
of military security. Do you agree that the council should have a larger number of
permanent military figures?”
10. [Right to Vote] “Soldiers and officers should have the right to vote in elections.”
11. [Chief of Staff] “The president should appoint a new chief of staff of the armed forces
and create a plan outlining his duties.”
12. [Parliament] “A military advisor should be appointed for the parliament for deputies
to consult with on technical and defense matters.”
5
3 Appendix C: Representativeness of Survey Sample
Table 3: Officers Survey (N=72)
Demographic Percent
RankGeneral 0Colonel Major 43Colonel 50Lt. Col. 4Major 3
BranchArmy 46Navy 11Air Force 13Military Security 4Joint Services 30
BirthplaceTunis 26Sahel 33North 24Center 6South 11
Foreign TrainingU.S. 54France 55Other 10None 1
Total N 72
Table 4: Retired Officers Dataset (N=662)
Demographic Percent
RankGeneral 5Colonel Major 11Colonel 24Lt. Col. 23Major 36
BranchArmy 43Navy 11Air Force 14Military Security ?Joint Services 32
BirthplaceTunis 20Sahel 44North 21Center 3South 11
Foreign TrainingU.S. 11France 34Other 5None 50
Total N 662
Note: Biographies did not mention whether officers were also members of the directorate ofmilitary security. Officers in military security are also housed in one of the other mainbranches.
6
3.1 Comparing Colonels and Colonel Majors
These tables compare just Colonels and Colonel Majors, who had made up 93% of the survey
sample.
Table 5: Officers Survey (N=67)
Demographic Percent
RankColonel Major 46Colonel 54
BranchArmy 48Navy 10Air Force 13Military Security 3Joint Services 27
BirthplaceTunis 27Sahel 33North 24Center 4South 12
Foreign TrainingU.S. 55France 55
Total N 67
Table 6: Retired Officers Dataset (N=219)
Demographic Percent
RankColonel Major 32Colonel 68
BranchArmy 41Navy 11Air Force 14Military Security ?Joint Services 35
BirthplaceTunis 22Sahel 43North 19Center 2South 13
Foreign TrainingU.S. 20France 61
Total N 219
7
3.2 Covariate Balance
Figure 8: Covariate Balance, American Trained v. French Trained
8
4 Appendix D: Histograms of Dependent Variables
Figure 9: Is Democracy Appropriate for Tunisia?
Figure 10: Military Officer as Defense Minister
9
Figure 11: National Security Council Should Have More Military Figures
Figure 12: Officers and Soldiers Should Have the Right to Vote
10
Figure 13: Appoint an Armed Forces Chief of Staff
Figure 14: Appoint a Military Advisor for the Parliament
11
5 Appendix E: Results Tables
Table 7: Effect of U.S. Training on Democracy and Defense Minister (OLS)
Dependent variable:
Democracy MOD-Active MOD-Retired
(1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6)
U.S. Training −0.092 −0.118 0.410∗∗ 0.521∗∗ 0.315 0.641∗∗
(0.167) (0.185) (0.196) (0.219) (0.229) (0.245)
Retirement Year −0.008 0.001 −0.093∗∗∗
(0.025) (0.030) (0.034)
Rank 0.139 −0.292∗ −0.199(0.130) (0.154) (0.173)
Army 0.136 −0.205 −0.221(0.169) (0.200) (0.224)
Military Security −1.330∗∗∗ 0.350 −0.417(0.489) (0.576) (0.651)
Interior −0.011 −0.362∗ 0.496∗∗
(0.177) (0.215) (0.236)
Constant 3.281∗∗∗ 2.744∗∗∗ 1.062∗∗∗ 2.486∗∗∗ 2.469∗∗∗ 3.869∗∗∗
(0.122) (0.559) (0.142) (0.659) (0.168) (0.744)
Observations 69 69 68 68 69 69R2 0.005 0.138 0.062 0.171 0.027 0.204Adjusted R2 −0.010 0.054 0.048 0.089 0.013 0.127
Note: ∗p<0.1; ∗∗p<0.05; ∗∗∗p<0.01
12
Table 8: Effect of U.S. Training on National Security Council and Right to Vote (OLS)
Dependent variable:
NSC Vote
(1) (2) (3) (4)
U.S. Training −0.319∗∗ −0.320∗∗ 0.558∗ 0.600∗
(0.152) (0.152) (0.305) (0.354)
Retirement Year 0.027 −0.031(0.021) (0.049)
Rank −0.223∗∗ 0.071(0.107) (0.251)
Army −0.221 −0.332(0.139) (0.324)
Military Security −1.321∗∗∗ −0.871(0.404) (0.942)
Interior 0.052 0.109(0.147) (0.342)
Constant 4.563∗∗∗ 5.418∗∗∗ 1.469∗∗∗ 1.534(0.112) (0.462) (0.223) (1.077)
Observations 69 69 69 69R2 0.062 0.332 0.048 0.080Adjusted R2 0.048 0.267 0.033 −0.009
Note: ∗p<0.1; ∗∗p<0.05; ∗∗∗p<0.01
13
Table 9: Null Effect of U.S. Training on Chief of Staff and Parliamentary Advisor (OLS)
Dependent variable:
Chief of Staff Parliament
(1) (2) (3) (4)
U.S. Training −0.137 −0.050 0.014 0.085(0.135) (0.154) (0.154) (0.174)
Retirement Year −0.017 0.007(0.021) (0.024)
Rank −0.067 −0.231∗
(0.109) (0.123)
Army 0.180 −0.149(0.141) (0.160)
Military Security −0.287 0.068(0.410) (0.463)
Interior −0.121 −0.055(0.149) (0.168)
Constant 4.812∗∗∗ 5.181∗∗∗ 4.500∗∗∗ 5.492∗∗∗
(0.099) (0.469) (0.113) (0.530)
Observations 69 69 69 69R2 0.015 0.080 0.0001 0.082Adjusted R2 0.0004 −0.009 −0.015 −0.006
Note: ∗p<0.1; ∗∗p<0.05; ∗∗∗p<0.01
14
