Samuel Huntington and communist civil-military relations

Contrary to Huntington's hypothesis, analysis suggests that the relationship between the party-political apparatus and line elements of the armed forces of the former Soviet Union and the former German Democratic Republic was less confrontational and more symbiotic. In the USSR, Huntington's subjective control measures accurately described the situation that existed during the early 1920s. However, as Soviet officers internalized the regime's value structure, the relationship became more symbiotic and was increasingly characterized by what he called objective control measures. In the case of East Germany's National People's Army, the relationship between political and line officers was never as confrontational as Huntington expected. To encompass the communist experiment, Huntington's model would have to be modified to take into account the fact that subjective control measures can change into objective ones over time. The nature of civil-military relations in communist countries was more dynamic than Huntington assumed.