In gray area warfare, traditional models of civil-military relationships do not explain realities for the populations of the democratic west or their host-nation allies; nor do they provide useful guidance for policymakers. It is therefore unsurprising that the responses to novel and rapidly changing forms of warfare are improvised adjustments that often lead to uncomfortable civil-military relations. The classic Huntington model, rational and elegant in form, posited essentially sequential operations: civilians control the formulation of policy; thereafter, the military executes military operations based on that policy. Then, after fighting subsides, civilian agencies assume responsibility for institutional rebuilding. Yet even after World War II, American and European allied civilian governments proved unequal to the task of reconstructing European institutions; the bulk of institutional reconstruction was performed by the military. As one contemporaneous scholar observed,

The real difficulty with military government operations ... was not so much lack of civilian control, as it was inadequate presentation of the civilian government viewpoint on the higher levels of the military hierarchy. There were civilians (or civilians in uniform) located in G-5 [planning] staffs of theater headquarters, the War Department Civil Affairs Division and elsewhere. But few of them had had major governmental experience … Policy directives, often inadequate, were sometimes contradictory; moreover, staff supervision was almost completely absent.

Japan, which was different in tone, was under the firm hand of General Douglas MacArthur, the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers in the Pacific.

Samuel Huntington's classic civil-military relations model – that of civilian “objective control” over a professional military far removed from politics – was an aspiration and an inspiration. His model envisioned a professional officer corps removed from politics but ready to execute the articulated policy of civilian leadership: “The essence of objective civilian control is the recognition of autonomous military professionalism.” Military professionals, he argued, possess expert knowledge about the management of violence; when civilian leaders have decided on a course of action, they should rely on their military for operational and tactical decisions and action.