Abstract

The debate on civilian control of armed force usually asks who should hold authority: a professional officer corps that stays out of politics, as in Huntington's objective control, or civilian leaders who question and intervene, as in Cohen's unequal dialogue, or principals who monitor agents who may work or shirk, as in Feaver's account. This article asks a different question of the same debate: who carries the uncertainty that lies between a plan and its execution? It reads Clausewitz's On War, in J. J. Graham's translation, for two claims that can be read apart: that policy remains the governing point of view throughout a war, and that war is a resistant medium in which friction makes the simplest thing difficult and much of what action rests on is hidden in uncertainty. Read together, the two claims set a problem. Policy must govern a medium whose resistance is learned by experience at the point of execution, and a principal who judges its agents by results will mistake friction for failure. The article then reads two records from Meridian, the decision-record platform of the RISCON family, which are modern summaries written by AI about fictional polities: a budget council deciding how to extend an emergency budget for shelters when some payment claims lack delivery confirmation, and a continuity committee deciding who may approve emergency spending while an elected parliament has lost its quorum. Both records keep the decision with civilian bodies and turn uncertainty into scheduled observation, sunset dates and partial stops; the second also shows the judgments parting over whether an argument from speed may move approval to the executive. The article does not judge which option either body should take.