Active compliance is often used in the control of robot manipulators for the implementation of complex tasks such as assembly, multi-finger fine motion, legged-vehicle adaptive control,etc. This technique balances the interactive force between the manipulator tip and its working environment with its position and velocity errors to achieve the operation of a damped spring. This paper investigates the effecft of passive compliance on system stability with regard to force feedback implementation for actively compliant motion. Usually it is understood that accurate position control require a stiff system. However, theoretical examination of control experiments on a legged suspension vehicle suggests that, if the control includes discrete-time force feedback, some passive compliance is necessssary at the legs of the vehicle for system stability. This can be an important factor to bl considered in manipulator design and control. A theoretical analysis, numerical simulation, and experimental result, confirming the above conclusion, are introduced in this paper.