The Democratic Dialogue Project (DDP) is a joint student organization of CC students and United States Air Force Academy (USAFA) cadets that works to build bridges across the civilian-military divide. The club hosts discussion sessions, speaker events and more to encourage students and cadets to debate political issues and build social connections. The goal of the organization is to improve communication and conversation among young leaders about issues central to our democracy.
This year, the DDP launched a new part of our project, with a student-led trip to Washington D.C. Along with the USAFA cadets, we met with State Department officials, Congressional staffers, and others to learn about what civil-military relations look like on the ground in our nation’s capital. The idea of the trip was to meet with professionals from a wide array of departments, agencies, and branches of government to hear different perspectives on civil-military communication and to learn how the Department of Defense interfaces with the rest of the government. We also met with a journalist experienced in national security reporting to get an outside-the-institution look at how the government creates and implements national security policy. As one of the trip organizers, it was important to me to include the press’s perspective on this trip. So much of the interaction between civilian and military leaders happens behind closed doors, so good reporting is often the only way people know what’s going on. It’s the press’s job to hold the government accountable.
Clay Arnold ’24 said that his favorite part of the trip was the Socratic seminar style meeting the DDP had at the National Defense University (NDU). The NDU is the graduate level institution funded by the Department of Defense to create a space for academic research, education, and training on national security issues and strategies. As military officers who attend NDU often go on to interface with groups like the National Security Council and Congress, civil-military relations is an important area of study at the university.
Before our visit, DDP members had the chance to read an essay studying some of the long-standing misconceptions about civil-military relations and the challenges that breakdowns in civil-military communications present to informed and effective decision making. Once there, an NDU professor led a discussion with us and the cadets about some of the more complicated aspects of civil-military relations. We discussed what non-partisanship means in the military, what an officer might do if orders from political leaders seem to conflict with the Constitution or ethics, and how to lessen the distrust and division between senior military and political leaders. The conversation pushed us to consider in detail what it means to have a civilian-led military in a modern democracy and how we may fit into that structure in the future as the next generation of leaders.
One of the most interesting themes that came up repeatedly in our reflections on the trip was the importance of interpersonal relationships. Institutions like the Department of Defense, Congress, and the State Department are large bureaucracies with tens to hundreds of billions of dollars flowing through them. They are such big organizations that it seems like no one person would make much of a difference. But many officials and staffers across the government discussed how important it was to build good relationships with their colleagues, across departments and branches. At the end of the day, our government is still made up of people working with each other. From staffers to military officers, officials said that the central part of civil-military relations was clear communication and trust built between individuals.
USAFA student leaders Kelsey Monaghan-Bergson ’25 and Quintin Kies ’25, along with CC co-chair HeeYeal Lee ’26, plan to make the club’s trip to Washington D.C. an annual event, so that the next class of CC students and cadets have the opportunity to engage with civil-military work in our nation’s capital.
DDP will also be hosting events this spring. If you are interested in getting involved, please email m_mixer@coloradocollege.edu.
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