Soldiers, sailors, and statesmen: Military advice during the Franco-American-Austrian crisis and the Virginius affair

In this dissertation, I examine the nature, causes, and influence of military advice to civilian leaders during crises. Broadly speaking, I ask two primary questions that remain unresolved: what is the nature and cause of military advice regarding the use of force during crises; what effect does this advice have on governmental deliberations concerning the use of force?; To answer these questions, I test a number of hypotheses either inferred from the literature on military advice or derived from theories and assumptions about foreign policy decision-making. Specifically, this test consists of case studies of crises involving the United States as it rose to great power status following the American Civil War. These include the Franco-American-Austrian crisis that grew out of the French intervention in Mexico, the Virginius affair, and the Venezuela boundary crisis of 1895--1896.; This examination yielded several important findings. First, I found that the dominant view on the nature of military advice is greatly overstated. Although military advice in these cases was neither uniformly more nor less aggressive than civilian views, military leaders were far more aggressive than suggested by the dominant school of thought. Second, the military's rational estimation of the chances of successfully using force was found to be an important cause of military advice. However, this study suggests that other factors also play a role in influencing the views of military leaders. Finally, military influence was found to be very low as civilian leaders dominated the policy-making process in all of the cases examined here. Yet one of the cases provides a cautionary warning that military influence has the potential to be high under the right circumstances.