ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We are grateful to the Hoover Institution and in particular Robert and Marion Oster, who generously funded this project. Scholars could not ask for a more intellectually inviting environment than Stanford’s Hoover Institution. It is an organization committed to developing and exploring ideas that define a free society. Few issues matter more to the preservation of a free society than the ability to keep it so, and sustaining a symbiotic relationship between our military and our public in America is essential. Hoover’s official title is the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace, and the institution commendably invests in serious scholarship on issues of warfare at a time when this is a rarity in academia. Bob and Marion championed this project—in fact, it was they who pulled us into undertaking it.

Our objectives for this project were twofold: to amass and disseminate research on public attitudes about military issues and to draw into the project leading thinkers on civil-military issues to reflect on different aspects of this data. We are deeply indebted to the people who did the real work of this project: the champion pollsters at YouGov and the authors who assessed the vast trove of data and wrote chapters for this book. Doug Rivers, Ashley Grosse, and Joe Williams at YouGov taught a couple of neophytes the basics of designing survey instruments and trained our judgment about where outcomes were consistent with broader trends in public opinion. It should go without saying that any remaining mistakes of survey design and interpretation are our fault, not theirs.

Our sorting criteria for authors was simple: we chose the people we learn from. The process of pleading with busy people long on competing obligations to carve out time to think and write about this subject was, we are still elated to admit, one hundred percent successful. Everyone we hoped might contribute did, an outcome so statistically improbable that we can only attribute it to the greed of smart people to get their hands on new data about an important issue in our field and make a contribution to the understanding of it. We thank them all.

Patrick Cirenza is the finest research assistant we could have hoped for and was a substantive contributor to our thinking about these issues. Curmudgeonly Dave Brady, Stanford’s American politics ace, and Bill Whalen were very helpful in looking over the initial data and helping us understand whether we had anything interesting as we developed the second survey.

This book is dedicated to those who have served, serve today, and will serve tomorrow in the military as citizens who have carried the patriot’s burden and committed all they have to protecting the country.