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The Lawfare Podcast

The Lawfare Podcast

Lawfare Daily: Civ-Mil Relations: Where Are We Now and How Did We Get Here?

Dec 23, 2025 · 53m

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On this episode

About this episode

Loren Voss, Public Service Fellow at Lawfare , sits down with Kori Schake, senior fellow and the director of foreign and defense policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, and Carrie Lee, senior fellow with the German Marshall Fund's Strategic Democracy Initiatives. They discuss how they assess a healthy civil-military relationship, the current state of civil-military affairs, potential unlawful orders, and what we should watch going forward. Lee and Schake outline the frameworks they use to assess civil-military relations in the United States and how to think about unlawful orders and an “unprincipled principal.” Both Schake and Lee agree that the military should not bear the…