Civilian control of the military

High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! Civilian control of the military is a doctrine in military and political science that places ultimate responsibility for a country's strategic decision-making in the hands of the civilian political leadership, rather than professional military officers. One author, paraphrasing Samuel P. Huntington's writings in The Soldier and the State, has summarized the civilian control ideal as "the proper subordination of a competent, professional military to the ends of policy as determined by civilian authority.Civilian control is often seen as a prerequisite feature of a stable, liberal democracy. Use of the term in scholarly analyses tends to take place in the context of a Western democracy governed by elected officials, though the subordination of the military to political control is not unique to these societies. One example is the People's Republic of China. Mao Zedong stated that "Our principle is that the Party commands the gun, and the gun must never be allowed to command the Party, reflecting the primacy of the Communist Party of China as decision-makers in Marxist-Leninist and Maoist theories of democratic centralism.