CHAPTER 11

 

Ensuring a Civil-Military
Connection

Kori Schake and Jim Mattis

We undertook this project to better understand attitudes of the American public about their military forty years into having an all-volunteer force and after fifteen years of being continuously at war. The project’s goal was to produce data to inform both scholarship on civil-military relations and policy debates about a wide range of defense issues. We were looking to develop data that could help define salient gaps between the American military and the public it serves. Armed with the data from the YouGov surveys we commissioned, authors of the essays in this book explored whether American attitudes are changing toward our military and, if so, what potential consequences of those changes might be. This concluding chapter seeks to highlight and synthesize commonalities in the authors’ findings, provide our thoughts on the issues, and identify potential areas of inquiry emerging from the data that were not taken up by any of the other authors.

In our judgment and that of the authors contributing to this volume, the relationship between America’s military and its civilian society is fundamentally strong and healthy. Coming from varied areas of expertise and different political viewpoints, none of us saw cause for concern. We believe this to be a huge success for a democratic country fighting its fifteenth year of war with an all-volunteer force that was never designed to sustain that burden.[1]

Gaps certainly exist between our civilian society and our military, some of them important. Respect for the American military is widespread, but the public’s knowledge of the military is shallow. Our initial reaction was that an uninformed public does not matter much; it could even be understood as a measure of success that the public does not perceive a need to carefully supervise its military. We have become persuaded by our colleagues in this project, however, that public ignorance about the military is problematic. It contributes to strategic incoherence, encouraging politicians to consider their strategic choices hemmed in by public opposition and to shift responsibility for winning policy arguments onto the military; impedes sustained support for the war effort; permits the imposition of social policies that erode battlefield lethality; fosters a sense of victimization towards veterans that skews defense spending toward pay and benefits; and distances veterans from our broader community.

Scholars of civil-military relations are always fixated on the risk of military insubordination to civilian control.[2] The contributors to this volume saw no evidence that frictions between civilian leaders and our military are at historically high levels. In fact, they appear less contentious than when the last large-scale data were collected in the 1998 Triangle study, despite the fact that public support for elected leaders has plummeted while public respect for the military has remained resiliently strong.

The collapse of public confidence in policy elites is consequential far beyond civil-military issues, but it has important effects on those relations, as well.[3] The changed balance between civilians and the military illustrated in the YouGov data may be informally shifting their respective weights in the policy process, with politicians both pushing the military to take a greater public role but also possibly distrusting military advice as politicized. Survey data show that political elites believe the military behave as politicians, whereas the military’s public standing depends on them not doing so.[4]

In fact, some gaps appear to be wider and more salient between the public and its political leadership than between civilians and the military. Assessments of civil-military relations would thus benefit from something not explored in this project: a better understanding of which frictions are unique to the military’s role in our political structure and which parallel other changes in American society.

An Uninformed but Admiring Public

The most striking data were those that show how reluctant Americans are to express an opinion about military issues (something uncharacteristic of Americans). The YouGov polls provide ample basis for concluding that wide swaths of the public know little about their military or are hesitant to venture an opinion on military matters. Responses to many key questions included high rates of “don’t know” or “no opinion” answers (see table 11.1 for examples).[5]

 

Survey Prompt	“Don’t know”/ “no opinion” responses (%)
Most members of the military have a great deal of respect for civilian society (CM2T 50)	45
Military force should be used only in pursuit of the goal of total victory (CM2T 79)	42
When force is used, military rather than political goals should determine its application (CM2T 79)	40
The American public will not tolerate large numbers of US casualties in military operations (CM2T 79)	52
You have confidence in the ability of our military to perform well in wartime (CM2T 50)	55
Veterans are more reliable and hardworking than the rest of society (CM2T 48)	51
What percentage of young men today can qualify to enlist in the army as a private? (CM2T 12)	48
In general, do you think military leaders share the same values as the American people? (CM2T 16)	24
Even if civilian society did not always appreciate the essential military values of commitment and unselfishness, our armed forces could still maintain required traditional standards (CM2T 50)	44
Would you advise a close friend or the child of a close friend to join the military? (CM2T 11)	28
The American people understand the sacrifices made by people who serve in the US military (CM2T 50)	38
The military should choose its leaders with an eye to diversity (CM2T 48)	42
Help or hurt military effectiveness: a military culture and way of life that are very different from the culture and way of life of the rest of society (CM2T 64)	25
Help or hurt military effectiveness: the military trying to hold on to old-fashioned views of morality (CM2T 63)	19
An effective military depends on a very structured organization and a clear chain of command (CM2T 67)	57
The US military has done a much better job of eliminating racial discrimination within the military than American society has in general (CM2T 68)	25
Overall, how does military pay compare to civilian pay for similar jobs? (CM1T 51)	28
The military has more sexual harassment and assault than the rest of society (CM2T 48)	27
Help or hurt military effectiveness: a ban on language and behavior that encourages camaraderie among soldiers (CM2T 59)	24

TABLE 11.1 “Don’t Know”/“No Opinion” Responses in YouGov Civil-Military Surveys

These are not small numbers; nor are they inconsequential, especially when military issues are frequently prominent in the news, as they have been since 9/11. The high incidence of “don’t know” responses indicates a public not bothering to be informed even when information is plentiful and easily available. Even where respondents perceive themselves as knowledgeable, they were often incorrect: 48 percent of respondents rated themselves knowledgeable about the military, yet the median response to the basic question about the size of our armed forces was off by a factor of six (CM1T 39, 56–58). The uncertainty was highest among women, minorities, those under 30 years of age, those with incomes under $40,000 per year, those living in metropolitan centers, and self-described Democrats. In each case, the percentage of “don’t know” responses ranged between 30 percent and 40 percent for these groups.[6]

Every single author contributing to this book worried about the effect of public ignorance on the issues within their particular focus. Such high levels of admitted ignorance and unwillingness to venture opinions illustrate that Americans have to a significant degree dissociated themselves from defense issues.

Wide as is the breadth of public ignorance about the military, we noticed several heartening things in the YouGov data. The first is that the public’s judgment is fundamentally sound. Where people are willing to express views (excluding the “don’t know” respondents), the vast majority of them hold views consistent with a sturdy and positive civil-military relationship. From our general public’s perspective, there is no crisis of civil-military relations in America.

The substantial segment of respondents who did not believe they knew enough to answer data questions about the military exhibited sound judgment in questions phrased to test for logic rather than knowl-edge. When asked a series of questions that increased their knowledge as the questions progressed, responses showed a strong grasp of the fundamental principles on which the American model of civil-military interaction is based. This was particularly true of the respective responsibilities of civilian and military leaders. For example, the majority of respondents rightly affix responsibility for setting war strategy with political leaders, informed by, but not subject to, the judgments of military leaders.

The majority of Americans have a very high opinion of their military, as well. Eighty-eight percent of respondents describe themselves as proud of the men and women who serve in the American military. On the central issue of the military profession, 93 percent of elites and 81 percent of the general public are confident in the wartime performance of the American military. These are huge majorities, cause for great satisfaction about the civil-military bond in our country.

Our impression from the initial survey that a wide gulf existed between elites and the general public on military issues was not borne out. We had seen hints in the 2013 YouGov survey that public attitudes hewed closely to those common in the military and explicitly designed the second survey to probe for differences between elites and the general public. In fact, elite attitudes were better informed and in many important ways more supportive of the military than were the general public.

For example, one third of the general public thinks the reason the military is less progressive than society relates to the function of war­fighting; an equal number in the general public think this is because the military draws people who are more conservative than our broader society. By contrast 53 percent of elites make the association between organizational conservatism and the military’s function. More elites also think the military provides greater opportunities for self-­improvement than our broader society (62 percent), while only 41 percent of the general public does (and when “or equal to” opportunities are added in, the proportions are 94 percent of elites and 76 percent of the general public) (CM2T 28). And the better educated elites are, the more likely they are to believe the military provides opportunities to excel (CM2T 50).

Since the Triangle study in 1998, it appears that respect for the military among elites has increased substantially. There are many possible explanations for this change: the well educated are likeliest to be informed, so the increased news coverage about military issues since 9/11 may have affected them more than it has the less knowledge-hungry public; and this group may experience greater concern about foreign affairs due to travel or business exposure (both education level and elite signifiers are associated with higher concern about global threats than appears in the general public across a variety of questions) (CM2T 69–72). This was an unexpected finding, one meriting further exploration.

Both elites and the general public believe the military has handled racial integration better than the rest of our society has. Two thirds of the American public believes opportunities for women are greater in the military than in broader society. Three fourths of the public thinks the military provides greater opportunities for the well-­educated than does the civilian economy. Sixty percent of respondents believe the military cares more about the people under them than does ­civilian society (CM2T 25–37). Fifty-two percent believe the military should be paid more; more respondents favored increasing military pay than pay to firefighters, nurses, or police (CM1T 10, 18–29). By contrast, the same respondents considered many other professions overpaid, including elected officials (77 percent of respondents), corporate executives (74 percent), doctors (34 percent), university professors (34 percent), public employees (25 percent), and computer programmers (21 percent).

America is unquestionably a society supportive of its military. The data reveal consistently high levels of support across a wide swath of issues and throughout a cross-section of the public. Moreover, 51 percent of the general public and 53 percent of elites believe the military gets even less respect than it deserves. Only about half of respondents believe the American people understand the sacrifices made by people who serve in our military. Sixty-nine percent of elites believe that veterans are more reliable and hard working than the rest of society (CM2T 50). These are astronomically high levels of approval, unmatched by any other profession or segment of society in America, and unusual internationally.

The YouGov data provide some hints that attitudes may be polarizing, though, as with many other issues in American politics. The survey found more elites concerned about the military getting less respect than it deserves, while the general population is moving in the opposite direction, believing the military gets more respect than it deserves.[7] While still small percentages of the population, public belief that the military gets more respect than it deserves has doubled among veterans and tripled among the general public (9 percent and 12 percent respectively) since the 1998 study. However, these hints are swamped by the high levels of “don’t know” responses, and the field has too little time-series data to judge significance.

As Matthew Colford and A.J. Sugarman suggested in their chapter, the attitudes of 18- to 25-year-olds are closest in some important ways to those of over-65-year-olds. By a substantial margin, fewer respondents in the 18 to 25 age bracket felt the military was out of step with society, which might be the natural result of most active personnel being their age mates, making personal association with someone currently in the military more likely, or the result of military issues being more a part of public discourse while the country has been at war their entire adult lives. Perhaps coming of age during the 2008 financial crisis also shaded 18- to 25-year-old’s attitudes similar to the way in which the Great Depression shaped its generation. Or, a more likely explanation is simply that both cohorts came of age in wartime. The similarities in response between the youngest and the eldest groups raise the prospect that many of the attitudes of civilians toward the military in America may not be unidirectional. That is, the attitudes associated with baby boomers may be unique to their experience rather than a trend in society going forward. And the attitudes of 18- to 25-year-olds may signify a pendulum swinging back in the other direction, as so often happens in American politics.

Seven Days in May?

Scholars of civil-military relations worry inordinately about the prospect of an American military growing resentful of its civilian masters.[8] There is historical basis for this concern, military men having been a threat to civilian governance at least since Caesar crossed the Rubicon with his army in violation of the Roman Senate’s restriction. Historian T. R. Fehrenbach, for example, cautions against an army so professional it looks down on others.

Even in contemporary America, where the military is so reliably subordinate to civilian control, concerns sometimes arise about our military coming to believe itself a praetorian guard to an undeserving civilian society. The 1998 Triangle study authors were alert to this possibility, worried that a military more socially and religiously conservative than governing elites was emerging. In a mild form, this attitude is captured in Phil Klay’s short story “Psychological Operations”: “The weird thing with being a veteran, at least for me, is that you do feel better than most people. You risked your life for something bigger than yourself. How many people can say that? You chose to serve. Maybe you didn’t understand American foreign policy or why we were at war. Maybe you never will. But it doesn’t matter. You held up your hand and said, ‘I’m willing to die for these worthless civilians.’”[9]

Resentments between civilian leaders and the military are natural, given their respective spheres of responsibility, especially in a country with friction built into its government in the form of distributed power and institutional checks and balances. And, as Eliot Cohen reminds us, the dialogue is an unequal one in America, with civilians being paramount. When civilian leaders seem ill informed or are seen by the military to be making decisions insensitive to military concerns, resentment increases. It may also be intensified now for structural reasons, since our military is small (encompassing only one half of one percent of our citizenry), voluntary, and having entrance standards that exclude all but 20 percent of applicants from admission—by definition a select group.[10] Entrance standards associated with physical fitness alone exclude more than 27 percent of applicants. Moreover, American society has been little affected by fifteen years at war, in stark contrast to the demands on servicemen and women and their families since 9/11. And, it must be admitted, democracy in action is often an unedifying spectacle, perhaps even more than ordinarily so in our current American politics.

Feaver, Golby, and Cohn are concerned that public ignorance coupled with respect for the military and disrespect for elected political leaders could cause a shifting of weight on the civil-military scales, resulting in the military having too great an influence on policy issues for which responsibility rightly rests with elected civilian leaders. We agree that this would be a worrisome outcome: military leaders lack the public mandate to make necessary trade-offs between, for example, security and civil liberties. This is a legitimate issue to watch, but we see little evidence of it materializing in contemporary policy debates. In fact, the opposite is more in evidence. In recent policy debates—such as those about allowing homosexuals to serve openly, retaining a residual force in Iraq and Afghanistan, cutting military spending, and assigning women to combat units—military leaders’ counsel and the opinions of rank and file servicemen and women have been dismissed by political leaders and the public.[11]

Moreover, there is an enormous distance between routine tensions and the military usurping civilian authority. Post-9/11 presidents have fired even very popular and well-regarded military leaders without any rumblings of insubordination from the ranks. The Obama administration has imposed onto the military services over explicit objections of military leaders numerous progressive social policies, which are also often unpopular in the ranks, yet they have all been crisply carried out. The most direct recent challenge to civilian authority, the 2005 campaign against Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s stewardship of the Iraq war, came from retired military, not those on active duty.[12] Responses in the YouGov surveys from those who had had military service hewed more closely to textbook responsibilities for civilians and military than did those of the general public, suggesting greater restraint, not less, among our military.

One of the key precursors to alienation would be the military considering itself separate from society. Such separation has always been a tension. Samuel Adams observed in the 1770s that “soldiers are apt to consider themselves as a Body distinct from the rest of the Citizens.” Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., a veteran of the Civil War, described it more poignantly, in a speech delivered on Memorial Day in 1895, as a natural result of “the incommunicable experience of war.”[13] The YouGov data indicate that the American public is concerned about its military becoming isolated from broader society but not overly so: 60 percent think it would be bad for the country were the military to become isolated, and only 32 percent believe the military is isolated (CM2T 23). Of course, it is the military’s attitude, not the public’s, about isolation from society that would be cause for concern, and this project did not explicitly poll active duty military, but attitudes of veterans among the respondents suggest little basis for concern.

Another precursor to an alienated military would be a perception of disrespect from the public it serves. But the proportion of ­veterans who are concerned the public does not respect them enough has increased only slightly since the 1998 study—a remarkably small shift, given how great have been the wartime burdens on many in our military forces and their families and how little affected has been our broader society. While neither veterans nor civil society believe the other adequately respects them, this belief is largely consistent across time.[14] Overall, we find little justification in the data or in contemporary civil-military interaction for the academic preoccupation with a military restive about civilian control.

The first YouGov poll suggested that some gaps that had been thought of as being between civilians and the military are in fact between elites and the general public. That is, the public’s attitudes were more in line with those of the military than they were with those of civilian elites. This seemed apparent, for example, in questions about whether military or civilian leaders better represented respondents’ values.

Based on that first poll, the second YouGov poll was designed specifically to establish attitudes of elites for comparison to those of the general public. The survey separated out elites from the general population and further disaggregated elites in general (by education, profession, income) from those influential in policy (legislators and staffers, journalists and opinion shapers), allowing us to determine whether the greater chasm was between the public and policy elites rather than between civilians and the military. The distinction is between elites who shape the culture versus those who directly affect government policy. The data turned up little distinction in attitudes between policy elites and the general public but significant differences with cultural elites. Those people making decisions about military issues are generally in line with public attitudes, but those elites who shape the cultural environment create pressure on politicians to make choices not in line with the traditional values of military culture or the attitudes of the general public.

This is where public ignorance of the military again becomes salient. With few Americans directly affected by changes in the military, cultural elites’ desires for our military to become indistinct from the broader society, and politicians naturally responsive to activism, we could be moving toward a military that is more representative of the values of the 5 percent of very liberal Americans than those of the vast majority of our fellow citizens, liberal and conservative. Such an outcome would distance the military from American society. It would also force the military to sacrifice practices it perpetuates not for reasons of social conservatism but for reasons of military practicality and battlefield success. To the extent that sustaining a military is fundamental to sustaining the American Experiment, decisions made for nonmilitary reasons and against military advice are potentially reckless.

The YouGov data show a dramatic drop in confidence that political leaders share the public’s values when compared with the 1998 study. While the data do not reveal differences in attitudes between policy elites and the public, the perception is that the military is not diverging from American society but rather policy elites are diverging from American society. Civilian elites do consider political leaders’ values different from the values of the public, and only a quarter of civilian elites believe they share political leaders’ values.[15] We are seeing a crisis of confidence among the public about policy elites.

Veterans voice a concern similar to the general public’s about political leaders: about a third believe political elites do not share their values. The military’s leaders are slightly less likely to believe political leaders are out of step with their values than are enlisted troops—the belief is stronger among rank-and-file than elite military respondents.[16]

Disaffection toward elites is thus not unique to the relationship between the military and society; it is part of a more general discrediting of elites.[17] But even if alienation from political elites is occurring across the spectrum of American life, it may still have important effects on the civil-military relationship: it could informally change the relationship between military leaders and their civilian superiors, even as civilians retain their constitutional and statutory primacy.

For example, 83 percent of civilians without military experience believe civilian leaders do not rely sufficiently on military advice.[18] The last two Republican presidential nominees stridently criticized the sitting presidents (both Bush and Obama) for not taking the military’s advice, reinforcing the misperception that the commander in chief has an obligation to accept the military’s recommendations. Scholars of civil-military relations—including those in the military—emphasize that the president has no such responsibility. The president is elected to determine the amount of effort to direct toward a war and has the right to disregard the military’s counsel. Military leaders lack the public mandate to make necessary trade-offs between, for example, security and civil liberties.

In the YouGov data, more veteran respondents than civilians were concerned about the military becoming too involved in nonmilitary policies such as social issues affecting the broader public or budgetary matters.[19] Civilian respondents were much more willing than they have been previously to give the military a broader role than our traditions of civil-military relations and the restraining professionalism of our military allow. It turns out that the American military itself is currently a better guardian of the restraints on policy activism by the military than is the American public.[20] From this it is possible to conclude that our military is policing itself: it understands better than do civilians that its high stature with the American public depends on respecting the prohibition on activism beyond the military realm.

But is the military standing guard at its own boundaries an adequate or enduring check on its influence? Juvenal cautioned about entrusting the guardians of the republic to guard themselves.[21]The disparity between the public’s attitude toward political leaders and their attitude toward the military is a strong incentive for change in the traditional scope of involvement by the American military. Peter Feaver, Jim Golby, and Lindsay Cohn conclude from the YouGov data that attitudes once anathema to the American military are eroding. For example, the data from veteran respondents about resigning in protest of civilian leaders’ policies, not carrying out orders they do not agree with, or leaking internal government deliberations to the media all show significant change since the 1998 TISS study. In these authors’ view, relying solely on the military’s professionalism encourages use of the military for political purposes in what are properly civilian roles, incentivizing the military to behave just like civilian politicians with parochial, partisan interests.

Like so much else in the American system of federal government, civil-military relations are a negotiation. Leverage shifts to the military in wartime and away in peacetime. Adroit politicians in suits or uniforms are highly advantaged because the system is fundamentally political, not technical. The process of budgeting and war planning, which requires the input of political objectives and resource parameters, is likely to receive legislative scrutiny—a process in which military leaders have loyalty to the Congress as well as to the president—and relitigation in the media. In our view, if there is a contemporary departure from the American norm, it is that military commanders are more, not less, hemmed in by political leaders because the wars we are fighting are more removed from the everyday experience of most Americans.

Whether or not military views are effective in public debates, Cohn, Feaver, and Golby suggest that concern by political elites about public deference to military attitudes may be causing political elites to scorn the advice of military leaders. This dynamic, also suggested by Mackubin Owens, is borne out by some aspects of the YouGov data: only 7 percent of the public consider political leaders very knowledgeable about military issues and elites are more concerned than the general public is about the military educating the public on their concerns with the president’s policies (CM2T 18, 75, 77). The combined effect is worrying, since elites without military experience alienated from the advice offered by the military are more likely to use military force ineffectively. We believe we have been seeing exactly this in American national security policies over the last dozen years.

Strategic Atrophy

The YouGov data show that Americans understand fundamental responsibility for war strategy lies with elected political leaders. It also shows that the public is dissatisfied with their leaders’ performance in developing coherent strategy. The public sees policy elites incapable of winning our ill-defined wars, implausibly expecting military force to produce sophisticated political, economic, and cultural outcomes.[22]

Strategy divorced from politics is unsustainable.[23] As Colin Gray instructs us in The Future of Strategy, “the core challenge of strategy is the attempt to control action so that it has the politically desired effect.”[24] There is no abstract purpose, or practice, of strategy from which politics can be effectively leeched. It is inherently a political undertaking. In free societies, politicians must choose the political ends. They must also determine what price—in blood, treasure, and national credibility—to pay for those ends.

Yet Nadia Schadlow argues that political leaders wrongly believe themselves to be constrained by public attitudes on defense issues. Politicians fear public opposition to their policies—and especially public reaction to casualties—as though attitudes were immutable. President Obama’s vacillation over enforcement of his Syrian red line is said by his supporters to have been significantly affected by the belief that the public would not back another war in the Middle East.[25] Yet the YouGov data demonstrate that public attitudes are actually quite malleable. Political leaders just are not expending the effort to change attitudes; they are instead decrying their lack of public support to justify inaction. But by expending political capital to engage and educate the public, political leaders could create larger decision space: they could expand their strategic options by fostering an educated public and choosing strategically sound courses of action that would draw and sustain public support.

Benjamin Wittes and Cody Poplin raise the related point that an uninformed public is less likely to sustain over time policies necessary to succeed at the wars we are fighting. They view the YouGov data as illustrating numerous contradictory attitudes that, while not uncommon in surveys of public opinion, impinge on policies ranging from domestic surveillance to military justice. They emphasize that the types of threats America currently faces are low in visibility for the public but long in duration, thereby putting a premium on sustained effort—and, unguided by political leaders routinely educating the public about threats and policy trade-offs, the public is unlikely to sustain support.

We share these concerns about political leaders shying away from their responsibility to shape public attitudes. There has developed a tendency for political leaders to rely on the credibility of their military commanders to garner support for their policies. President Bush left to General David Petraeus the task of overcoming Congressional opposition to the 2006 Iraq surge. President Obama has been mostly silent on the war in Afghanistan since 2009; the case for continuing American troop presence has been made entirely by the military. And while we believe military commanders have a responsibility not only to carry out, but also to advocate for, a president’s policies, this does not remove elected officials from their responsibility to win political arguments instead of depending on the military to do so.

Relying so heavily on military credibility to deliver their policy preferences only further erodes the public standing of elected officials. It sets up military leaders as the guarantors of public support, something that should be anathema to the long-standing balance of civil-military roles in America. And the near-term gain of public support for a particular policy may result in a long-term erosion of the military’s standing with the American public if the people come to see military leaders as politicized.

Public attitudes are especially inconsistent about legal issues associated with the use of military force. Law being an area the public has direct experience with, Benjamin Wittes and Cody Poplin suggest there is a tendency by the public to overstate its comparability: the data suggest the public struggles to understand why laws governing our military are different from those governing civilian society. They have no comprehension of whether the laws of war are applicable in other circumstances nor of how to ethically balance the humanitarian issues that arise with the military necessity also recognized under international law.

Our enemies have structural advantages in our current wars because they are fighting a total war, and we only limited wars. They are also proving adept at establishing a higher standard of battlefield conduct for us than for them. We are limiting ourselves beyond what the law of war calls for because our vibrant civil society recoils from the inexorable human suffering that is intrinsic to achieving political aims by military force. We believe this is influenced by the fact that so few Americans have experience of warfare. We have people in policy circles who are as familiar with the humanitarian and legal aspects of human interaction as they are unfamiliar with military necessity and battlefield realities, including what is permitted, from military necessity, under international law and conventions.[26] And we often lack people at the top level of policymaking who have an innate, studied appreciation for what it takes to win wars and who are willing to expend the political capital to build a sound basis for sustained public support. Here again, political leaders are creating the very conditions they decry for limiting their strategic options by not explaining and defending views for which survey data suggest there is a bedrock of opinion among the public on which broader support could be built.

Acting strategically does not require intellectual elegance; it requires political leaders making clear but difficult decisions to use military force effectively. As Carl von Clausewitz wrote in On War, “in warfare everything is simple, but the simple is exceptionally difficult.” An American public unknowledgeable about military issues gives political leaders a pass on their essential function in wartime. It is not good enough in a free society to shift that responsibility to the military, which is what the YouGov polling suggests the public supports doing. To do so would absolve the political leadership of their responsibility to aggregate societal preferences within the dictates of sound geopolitical judgment. That judgment is rightly exercised by elected and politically appointed civilian leaders who weigh strategic choices and make decisions about when to employ military force. It is their job.

Defense spending is another military tool that is atrophying due to the public’s ignorance and political elites’ reticence. Rosa Brooks argues that the combination of ignorance about, and admiration for, our military inclines the public and the Congress toward funneling defense spending disproportionately toward pay and benefits rather than training or the development and purchase of equipment.

While military compensation exceeds that of 90 percent of civilian counterparts, 70 percent of respondents to the YouGov polls believe pay for officers is either too low or about right; 82 percent consider enlisted pay too little.[27] Members of Congress fear looking as though they do not support the troops by not voting for pay raises and benefit increases, even when (as for the past four years) the Pentagon’s civilian and military leadership oppose the expense. The U.S. Army chief of staff testified in 2013 that at current pace within a decade 80 percent of the army’s spending will be for personnel.[28]

A volunteer force requires the government to pay the market rate for military personnel. That rate fluctuates with the rate of unemployment and degree of uncertainty about funding for defense but is certainly higher than required to produce a conscripted force. The rate is also rising dramatically, because some elements of personnel policy (such as twenty-year retirement) were deemed unaffordable by the architects of the all-volunteer force but have never been changed.[29] This is not unrelated to public attitudes about the military, since Congressional unwillingness to reduce pay and benefits to servicemen and women has become a major problem for the sustainability of the all-volunteer force.[30] And the data from the YouGov poll illustrate that the public knows very little about the cost of the American military. When combined with high levels of public support for the military, the public ignorance creates a political dynamic in which apportionment of the defense budget skews strongly toward pay and benefits to the detriment of training, equipment, and numbers in the force, key factors in sustaining a strong military capable of winning battles and bringing more troops home alive from war.

Ken Harbaugh characterizes the effect thus: “a political class with almost no military experience that feels it lacks the moral authority to say no.”[31] As the YouGov poll illustrates, the American public is generally ignorant of the facts about pay and benefits in the military and generally supportive of greater personnel spending. Representative Adam Kinzinger, himself a combat veteran, reinforces this view: “The average person who has never been in the military is scared to death of talking about it because they’re afraid of being labeled anti-veteran or anti-military.”[32] The problem gets exacerbated by the huge drop in confidence among the public that political leaders share their values, now hovering between 25 percent and 30 percent, as evident in the YouGov data.

Our views accord closely with those of former Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman General Martin Dempsey: “We owe much to our veterans and their families, but we shouldn’t view all proposed defense cuts as an attack on them. Modest reforms to pay and compensation will improve readiness and modernization. They will help keep our all-­volunteer force sustainable and strong. Keeping faith also means investing sufficient resources so that we can uphold our sacred obligations to defend the nation and to send our sons and daughters to war with only the best training, leadership and equipment.”[33]

Martial Values

Attitudes on social issues, in particular, show significant differences between the public and the military—and especially between the public and those veterans who are classified in the YouGov surveys as elites (a designation based on factors such as education, income, and profession after military service).[34] For example, 49 percent of veteran elites consider the male-dominated aspects of the military important to its culture; civilian elite and veteran nonelites both clock in at 37 percent support for this view, but only 21 percent of the civilian public agrees (Golby, Cohn, Feaver Crosstabs 41C). The pattern holds across issues of military language and behavior that instill camaraderie and whether military leaders share the public’s values. It would seem the military has figured out how to persuade civilian elites of the reasons for maintaining a distinct culture in the military but has not similarly persuaded the general public—or perhaps the public is tone-deaf or insufficiently interested in military matters to consider the impact of the battlefield on military culture.

Public attitudes are deeply divided on whether the military attempting to hold on to “old-fashioned values” helps or hurts the war effort. Almost as many respondents thought it helps the war effort for the military to become less male dominated.

But what is most interesting for us is that even among Americans critical of our military’s conduct, the majority believes the military may need different and less egalitarian standards than civilian society. Even on issues where the public is skeptical of military actions, the majority still believes the military should have the latitude to set its own standards. So, for example, 35 percent of respondents consider the military’s treatment of women less fair and 54 percent believe homosexuals should be able to service openly; only 25 percent of respondents believed the military should have to change and become more like society (CM2T 25, 54, 48). There remains an underlying deference by the public to allow the military to operate by its own rules, an interesting factor since our political leadership has not advocated for such a difference. In recent years political leaders have instead often used the military as a vehicle to lead social change in the broader society.

The YouGov data reveal an American public much more willing than we had expected to tolerate our military continuing to have different practices and even different values than our broader society. Public debates about allowing open homosexuals to serve and opening combat assignments to women show civilian attitudes strongly at variance with those of the military (especially those serving in ground-combat units, where the atavistic nature of warfare is most pronounced). And yet the YouGov surveys show the public deferential to the military’s differences from civilian society. Seventy percent of civilians believe that the military’s “bonds of loyalty” are different and therefore the military is entitled to retain different values from civilian society. Elites are even more convinced of the case for a military culture distinct from that of our broader society. The YouGov survey shows a general acknowledgement that the military is different from society and support for it remaining so.

The underlying public deference is in keeping with what the founding fathers—whose political liberties and even lives relied closely and immediately on the warfighting abilities of their military—­established for our republic: military jurisprudence was to remain separate from the civilian justice system, allowing the military to establish and enforce codes of conduct appropriate to the demands of the battlefield.

A significant proportion of Americans, roughly one third, believe the military is diverging from society but are unconcerned; respondents who had had military service were even less concerned.[35] In fact, the surveys suggest the public is less concerned about the academic preoccupation of undue military influence in politics than it is of undue political influence over the military: 84 percent of civilian elites and 48 percent of the general public worry about too much civilian intrusion into the military (CM2T 61). Strong majorities of veterans and 44 percent of civilian elites do not think the military should become more like society (Golby, Cohn, Feaver Crosstabs 8D).

Contemporary public attitudes displayed in the YouGov surveys suggest the public understands that what our military does demands different practices from those we enjoy in civil society. The data show a 30 percent jump in support for military policies when respondents were told the policy served a functional military purpose. Glimpses of that understanding also come through in specific questions about military practices; for example, very high percentages of the public—96 percent of civilian elites and 71 percent of the general public—consider the infantry’s opposition to including women important (Golby, Cohn, Feaver Crosstabs 51). When informed, the public tends to support military policies it would not tolerate in civilian society.

If the public is willing to indulge our military in operating by different rules, sustaining a culture at variance with our broader society, why then are civilian leaders imposing so many changes the military as an institution is clearly uncomfortable with? Tod Lindberg posits a partisan answer drawn from the YouGov data, which is that people who identified themselves as “very liberal” for the poll are disproportionately influential in shaping the culture. Mackubin Thomas Owens concludes that a more ominous force is at work: public ignorance about military issues allows elected leaders to utilize the military for progressive social purposes. Having so small a military that only one half of one percent of the public will be directly affected and so inattentive a public ensures that political leaders pay no real price for diminishing combat effectiveness. At least there is no visible, near-term price.

We are persuaded by Lindberg’s and Owens’s arguments that public ignorance or indifference to military issues provides leeway for liberal shapers of culture and politicians with a progressive agenda to impose their ideas on the military. The command hierarchy and subordination to civilian superiors so deeply engrained in our military make it responsive in ways much more difficult to enforce in our broader society and therefore provide a controlled environment in which to advance social change.

In addition to the arguments put forward by Lindberg and Owens, we think the superior fighting force of America’s military is also contributing to this activism. Since the end of the cold war, the United States has not faced in battle a military of equivalent combat power. Our dominance has driven the strategy of our enemies away from fighting symmetrically, because they could have no hope of winning; instead, America’s enemies have been driven to the ends of the combat spectrum rather than being allowed to contest for primacy at its center. Our political leaders and public have lost the consciousness of military defeat. They do not operate in fear of the degradation of thousands of American prisoners of war starving in captivity, as at Bataan. Casualty counts in the hundreds are sufficient to cause reconsideration by political leaders of the worthiness of the war effort. The idea of an enemy subjugating our country to its political will is unimaginable for our political leadership. It is increasingly difficult for our political leaders and our public to understand that an undefeated army can lose a war.[36] So wide is our margin for error that political leaders and the public think little of chipping away at it by our own choice, as if American victory is preordained.

We believe the American public is not nearly as concerned as it should be that changes to military policies are accruing risk to our force. We fear that an uninformed public is permitting political leaders to impose an accretion of social conventions that are diminishing the combat power of our military, disregarding our warfighting practitioners’ advice. These demands impose a burden the public and political leaders refuse to acknowledge and will only be evident in the aftermath of military failure. We vociferously support the standard for determining military policies outlined by U.S. Marine Corps general John F. Kelly (Ret.): every change to established practice should be judged on whether it increases battlefield lethality.[37] Americans ought to fear more than we do the consequences of our prevalent lassitude about warfare.

Post-traumatic Strength

Tom Donnelly suggests that the public’s unfamiliarity with our military has another worrisome effect: that unfamiliarity leads to pity rather than respect. One of the most important gaps that seems to have emerged during our current wars is the perception that most veterans suffer from post-traumatic stress, even that they pose a danger to themselves and others as a result. This has been disproven (only about 15 percent of veterans experience post-traumatic stress disorder [PTSD]) and is inconsistent with recent attitudes of employers, for whom veterans are generally preferred hires.[38] Only 6 percent of respondents disagreed with the statement that “veterans have a very strong work ethic” (CM1T 48), yet concern about PTSD contributed to higher rates of young veteran unemployment from 2005 to 2013.[39] And data from the YouGov surveys show that 78 percent of respondents still in 2014 agreed with the statement that “many veterans
 have difficulty
 adjusting to civilian 
life because of
 stresses they have experienced in the 
military” (CM1T 47). Yet this is at wide variance with the experience of most veterans: 89 percent of post-9/11 veterans would join the military again if they had the chance.[40]

For at least the first six years of President Obama’s term of office, when ending American involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan was his principal foreign policy objective, he was more likely to visit Bethesda Naval Hospital than Fort Hood, with its 52,280 active duty soldiers.[41] The criticism is not intended to discourage the president from condoling with wounded servicemen and women or from grieving the costs of any president’s policies. But emphasizing the wounded to the exclusion of those still in the fight, without conveying to the wounded and to the broader public the crucial importance of what they were trying to achieve, is to send a cultural message that casualties are more important than what we are fighting for.

Encouragement of victimization is also evident in well-meaning government programs intended to benefit servicemen and women. The Veterans Administration (VA) now coaches men and women transitioning out of military service to maximize their benefits, specifically for disabilities that bring payments even when some, such as sleep apnea for example, seem unconnected to any specific military activity. Forty-three percent of veterans now receive some disability rating, with an average of 6.3 medical conditions per veteran.[42] Suffering or witnessing violence is no longer required for the VA to categorize a veteran as suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder; and claims once made are almost never downgraded with time.[43] Disability payments to veterans—not the cost of medical treatment for injuries but the compensation for an assumed inability to work—have doubled, and the average payout has increased by 60 percent since 2000.[44] Removing veterans from the workforce further isolates them from broader society, whether we do so by classifying them as disabled, paying for disabilities that are questionable, or removing the work incentive that characterized previous generations of veterans returning from war.

There has been an explosion of news stories about a crisis of suicides in the military, nearly all of which suggest the trauma of war is the cause, when in fact suicides among servicemen and women do not correlate with combat, with frequency or length of deployment, or with military culture.[45] Suicides in the military correlate with the same factors that drive suicides in our broader society.[46] By treating military suicides as an epidemic unique to military service, we discourage recruitment into the military and hiring of veterans when they leave the military and encourage their isolation from their fellow citizens. As with many other aspects of contemporary civil-military relations, well-intentioned attention but ill-designed programs and processes work to the detriment both of our national security and the well-being of our veterans.[47]

We disagree with Rosa Brooks’s suggestion that the military needs to change to better reflect American society. YouGov data show that the public is actually pretty tolerant of sustaining a military organized along different lines from those of civilian society. And the large segment of the public that hesitates to even venture opinions on military issues is a winnable constituency. A nonmilitarized society—one in which human aspirations are enabled to craft a fairer, inclusive, and friendly environment—is fundamentally different from the battlefield, which is the auditor of our military. The public seems to sense the danger of imposing kinder values on a force that exists to preserve our freedoms by winning on an unkind battlefield.

But it is not just our military’s job to remain visible to our broader public. It is our civic responsibility as beneficiaries of a free society to understand our military and reward their sacrifices by giving them the gift of inclusion, of living among us and being organically connected to us, without making them into comic book heroes or treating them like victims irreparably damaged by their service.

Jim Hake encourages Americans to close the distance between the American public and its military and has modeled this in Spirit of America, a nongovernmental organization unapologetically committed to bringing private support to our troops and diplomats in ­foreign service. Our military are part and parcel of our society, deserving of special attention, to be sure, for their sacrifices but also deserving of unexceptional attention that will knit them more closely with the rest of us. The very best kind of civil-military relationship in a free society is one in which we celebrate those who serve by holding them close to us.

Conclusion

The great experiment of a free society eschewing compulsory military service has unquestionably produced a superior fighting force for the United States of America. Soldiers, sailors, airmen, Marines, and coastguardsmen serve by choice, which makes them more motivated to join and also more accepting of the burdens of service than those forced into the military are. The American military managed in the 1970s the difficult transition to a volunteer force, increasing professionalization in the noncommissioned officer ranks at the same time such that the institution became more proficient and also rose in the esteem of the general public. Competitive pay made it a viable option for higher quality enlistees to join and remain in the service for a career.

Even quite recently in American history, military service has not always been respected by our public. We tend to think that Americans have always had a close and affectionate relationship with their military. In part, this construction is consistent with our national self-image as a society forged in military rebellion, one with strong state militia balancing the power of the federal government, Constitutional protection of the right to bear arms, and an elegiac attraction to the conquest of the American west. We are culturally a more militaristic society than most of the developed world. But these attributes mask considerable friction that has also been central to the American civil-military relationship, a phenomenon that Mackubin Thomas Owens’s chapter reviews.

Our widespread contemporary practice of thanking those in uniform for their military service was anathema to Americans forty years ago, when, during the Vietnam War, colleges shuttered Reserve Officer Training Corps programs on campuses (many of which—including Stanford University’s—remained closed until very recently, another reminder of the persistent friction between civilian institutions and the military). Veterans returning from the Vietnam War were cautioned against wearing their uniforms to avoid public scorn. But the period of the unpopular war in Vietnam is just one of many examples of a time when the relationship between the American public and its military has been frayed. Most often, friction has resulted from controversy over not just the cause but the conduct of a war: draft riots in New York City during the Civil War had their roots in the magnitude of the levy, unfairness of some being able to purchase indemnity from conscription, resistance by new immigrants to involvement in the war, sympathy for the confederate cause by many New Yorkers (the reflex of a commercial hub toward neutrality in wartime), and seeming stalemate in the war’s progress. This underscores how important are the government’s choices about defense policy for the civil-military relationship.

Political leaders now take for granted an abiding respect by the public for our military, as though it were immune to any effect from their policy choices. This is a deeply flawed, and potentially deeply costly, mistake. American public respect for our military has ebbed and flowed over time. These tidal changes have been significantly affected by the uses to which political leaders have put our military and the responsibility those leaders take—or fail to take—for their policy decisions.

Our central concern about America’s civil-military relationship is that the combination of public ignorance of and public admiration for our military is accruing unexamined risk that will not be apparent until it is revealed in war. As a political culture, we are becoming insensitive to the trade-offs between effectiveness of our fighting forces and the nonfighting demands we place upon them. Public ignorance allows political leaders to put military forces into action with little prospect for success. The public has so strong a belief that our military can achieve anything it sets out to do that we inadequately prepare to avoid failure. We are so far removed from outcomes such as the fall of Corregidor or tens of thousands of American prisoners of war being held by North Korea that political leaders are inadequately fearful of bad outcomes.

In short, because the American public holds its military in such high regard, we are putting it at greater risk. We have allowed our strategic thinking to atrophy, allowed our policymaking to become flabby because our military’s high level of performance has lulled our sensibilities. This is both a policy failure and a moral one. And we should not avert our eyes from the very real consequences of these failures, such as those we have experienced in recent wars that lacked clear political objectives and carried self-imposed limitations such as troop caps, campaign end-dates disconnected from conditions on the ground, and restrictions on using ground troops at all (or that allowed them in only incremental numbers).

In addition to illuminating the civil-military gaps in American society, the YouGov surveys also point toward successful policy redress of the concerning gaps. For example, one solution to the disproportionate influence of “very liberal” cultural elites is, of course, for the other 95 percent of Americans to compete in those arenas. What is needed is not necessarily a diminution of liberal views but their diffusion in a broader mix of cultural influences that is more knowledgeable about, and less wary of, military experiences. We believe we are beginning to see this occur with the renaissance of literature by veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.[48] We believe it is also beginning to occur in politics, with a disproportionate number of recent veterans running for political office.[49] It also is occurring in civil society, and for similar reasons: veterans have a strong sense of civic obligation. Eric Greitens, founder of The Mission Continues and author of Resilience, counsels veterans that civic involvement is a natural transition from the military: “You have to make this transition because your community still needs you, because your country still needs what you have to offer.”[50]

Veterans groups such as Team Rubicon, Team Red, White and Blue, and The Mission Continues all serve the function that Veterans of Foreign Wars and American Legion did for earlier generations of veterans, namely, giving them the comradeship of their fellow veterans. As Bernard Trainor argues, “often the best medicine for bruised bodies and psyches is communion with those who have supped from the same bitter cup.”[51] But the new generation of organizations founded by veterans from our current wars also serves to get veterans out into, and contributing to, our broader society. As Eric Greitens says, “They realize that they know how to inspire people in difficult circumstances, which is useful not only in Afghanistan, but in helping third graders who are struggling to read. They realize that they have what it takes to bring together a team of people who have no common background.”[52] We believe this is important not only for reintegrating our veterans but also for rebuilding a sense of common purpose and a capacity to solve our problems in American society.

Veterans have a leading role to play in bridging the civil-military divide by showing civilian society new ways to address domestic concerns. Sustained pressure from military leaders will be required before Congress slows the rate of increase in military pay and benefits and veterans are developing test programs that, for example, provide disability assistance while incentivizing work—something important for disabled veterans to reintegrate with American society.[53] Currently, civilian and military leaders are relying on sheer political courage in Congress to do the right thing for national defense when it exposes them to charges of having “voted against the troops,” which is seldom a winning strategy in American politics.

There exists a general belief, as evidenced in the YouGov data and castigation of the VA, that our current approach is making the all-volunteer force unaffordable and is badly failing our veterans. This perception can be worked with to build support for an approach that reins in personnel spending in order to serve our forces well by training and equipping them better. It can also be worked with to smash Veterans Administration practices, such as restricting veterans to care at VA facilities, that are destructive to the welfare of our servicemen and women. Creative approaches should be experimented with, such as the Independence Fund, which would retool disabled veterans services to be more empowering, creating “personal rehabilitation accounts” of $10,000 to $20,000 for veterans to use for education or starting a business or whatever path they are drawn to and providing wage support that incentivizes getting out into the work force.[54]

All these developments make us hopeful that the gaps between civil society and the military in America can be bridged. The bridging is not solely or even principally the military’s job, as Jim Hake points out. We as citizens need to find, take, or make opportunities to involve ourselves in the war effort and with our veterans. With the end of conscription and the much smaller size of our military forces, most Americans are not organically connected to the military through service by family members. Political leaders have encouraged dissociation—think of President Bush trying to reassure the country of normalcy after 9/11 instead of binding the public into sharing the burdens of a long war or President Obama declining to make the public case for his war policies.

The dissociation between civilian society and the military has served short-term political ends (preventing panic after a terrorist attack, rebalancing attention from foreign to domestic priorities). However, it has several detrimental long-term effects—even in narrowly political terms—for the country’s political leaders. As Benjamin Wittes and Cody Poplin point out, an uninformed public is ill prepared for the steady, long-term commitment necessary to fight wars whose progress will not be immediately evident. We will overreact to incidents (ISIS executions, for example) and undervalue endurance (progress in Iraq that by 2010 needed only a modicum of US forces to be sustained, for example). As Pakistan’s former ambassador to the United States summarized the problem, “America doesn’t lose wars, it loses interest.”[55] These are predominantly the kinds of wars American will be confronted with, but politicians have not yet become convinced they have a self-interested reason to rebuild a closer, more organic relationship between our military and our broader society. Wartime presidents—commanders in chief—including Lincoln, Wilson, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Johnson, Nixon, and both presidents Bush, led by engaging the country with its military.

In any event, we ought not expect political leaders to solve what problems exist in civil-military relations in America. As Thomas Jefferson instructs us, “Every government degenerates when trusted to the rulers of the people alone. The people themselves are its only safe depositories.”[56] We, the people, are the only safe repository of sound civil-military relations.

Civic activism is the long suit of American society. During the Barbary Wars, privateers were at least as important a factor as the Navy. In the War of 1812, citizens raised private funds for Navy ships. Jim Hake’s Spirit of America is only the latest example of our tradition of civic involvement with active military, allowing Americans to directly support deployed troops outside government channels.

The question that animates this study is whether a free society can maintain the strong military necessary for defending that free society, despite their often differing values. We believe that it can, but only if the broader society understands and accepts why its military is organized differently and rewards behavior at odds with the very society it protects.

The YouGov data show that too much of American society does not understand this, although the broader public has an underlying disposition to accept the military’s arguments for its differences. Some of the authors in this study (Peter Feaver, Jim Golby, and Lindsay Cohn; Rosa Brooks) have concerns that this underlying disposition, when coupled with public disaffection for elected political leaders, could thrust military leaders into too influential a role in policy decisions properly made by elected political leaders.

Conversely, others (Thomas Donnelly, Mackubin Thomas Owens, and ourselves) worry that it has lead political leaders to distrust military advice—and the YouGov polls show there is continuing support from the public for aggrandizement by the military of more political roles. As Owens persuasively argues, the American system of civil-­military affairs relies on a high degree of trust between civilians and the military; this trust is eroding. Senior military leaders have a right to be heard on military and warfighting policy; they do not have the right to be obeyed. The question today is more whether they are being heard by the political leadership as this trust is eroding.

America’s founding fathers had great concern about military heroes subverting civilian power; yet they accepted that an effective fighting force would require separate rules governing the military’s conduct and order. They wrote into the Constitution a completely separate military justice system, autonomous from civilian oversight. The wrenching experience of the Civil War and the danger and physical exertion of settling the West meant that martial virtues were never remote from Americans’ reality. Mobilization of ten million Americans into military service during World War II likewise kept a consciousness of the military’s differences from society—and their purposes—as general knowledge. But these events are past, and the decision to maintain, even during America’s longest war, an all-volunteer force, has removed a sense of shared danger from 99 percent of American families.

We now find ourselves as a society in circumstances in which our national security does not require mass mobilization of our citizens, and we have elected a voluntary system of military service. We have not truly felt that our way of life is at risk since well back into the cold war. We fear terrorist attacks, rightly, but not ISIS flags flying over the Capitol or an enemy being able to impose their manner of governance or social organization on America. We sense that our military is strong enough to keep us free and maintain our way of life unfazed by external danger.

Military presence is a novelty on many college campuses, especially the most effete, and military history largely purged from college curricula. These and many other factors have created a nonchalant attitude among the public about warfare, leaving absent in our scholarship the grim consequences of failure on any battlefield. Few Americans recall the surrender of our troops to Japan and their brutal treatment on the Bataan Death March. The failures of our forces, from the battles of Kasserine Pass to Osan, are known only within military circles today. It is difficult to imagine a time when negotiations took years before American prisoners of war were repatriated from North Korea. We are treating our wars as though they have no strategic consequence—we elected defeat in Iraq and Afghanistan. As a society, we are underestimating the profound consequences of failures on the battlefield. Theodore Roosevelt’s caution rings even more true today: “Despise that pseudo-humanitarianism which treats advance of civilization as necessarily and rightfully implying a weakening of the fighting spirit and which therefore invites destruction of the advanced civilization by some less advanced type.”[57]

Notes

1. In fact, the TISS study’s authors predicted a civil-military relationship under severe stress as “dangerous schisms and trends” exacerbated the underlying cleavages. See Peter D. Feaver and Richard H. Kohn, “Soldiers and Civilians: The Civil-Military Gap and American National Security,” Foreign Affairs, March 1, 2002.

2. A 2007 survey of the literature by the RAND Corporation concluded that “there is a potential for a civil-military gap to undermine military effectiveness by reducing support for defense budgets, increasing the difficulties of recruiting quality people to join the military, and dwindling public support for using military force, particularly where high casualties are likely. Some observers even worried that a growing civilian-military gap could undermine the principle of civilian control of the military.” Thomas S. Szayna, Kevin F. McCarthy, Jerry M. Sollinger, Linda J. Demaine, Jefferson P. Marquis, and Brett Steele, “The Civil-Military Gap in the United States: Does It Exist, Why, and Does It Matter?” RAND Corportation, 2007, p. xiii.

3. Rigorously defining “elites” is a difficult task. The 1998 Triangle study was criticized by Pew pollster Andrew Kohut for relying on self-selection (such as appearance in a Who’s Who) and not controlling for conflation of profession, income, and political affiliation. The dataset for these surveys conducted by YouGov includes 500 interviews with a sample of elites designed to represent opinion leaders in professional areas of expertise: media, business and finance, state and local government, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), think tanks and academia, religious organizations, and federal government. In the sectors of business and finance, academia, and religious organizations, the elite sample was randomly drawn from publicly available lists of leaders. Academics were selected from the National Academy of Sciences, executives from the largest 500 US companies ranked by total annual revenue as of June 1 of the current year, journalists from the 2013 list of best state-based political reports, and religious figures from a database of religious institutions compiled from the Pluralism Project at Harvard University. Congressional staff, NGO leaders, and think-tank staff were recruited via YouGov’s DC Insider recruiter.

4. Conservative commentators suggest that there is an incapacity among liberals to understand the military’s culture of honor, but the attitude dates back at least to Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Colin Powell’s public advocacy on the Balkans wars and was prevalent in the Bush administration Pentagon as well. See Michael Gerson, “White House Bergdahl Mess,” RealClearPolitics, June 10, 2014; Rosa Brooks, “Obama vs. the Generals,” Politico Magazine, November 2013; and James Taranto, “Suck It Up and Salute,” Wall Street Journal, June 4, 2014.

5. References to the YouGov data by question number appear in parentheses throughout this essay with the abbreviations CM1T and CM2T indicating the 2013 and 2014 surveys, respectively. The complete results are available at http://www.hoover.org/warriors-and-citizens-crosstabs-1 (CM1T) and http://www.hoover.org/warriors-and-citizens-crosstabs-2 (CM2T).

6. General rates of “don’t know” responses in these categories were 37 percent among women, 35 percent among Hispanics, 31 percent among blacks, 40 percent among respondents under 30 and also among those with incomes less than $40,000, and 30 percent among self-described Democrats.

7. The view that the military gets more respect than it deserves has increased since the Triangle study by more than 15 percent among veteran elites and by 10 percent among nonveteran elites, but it has decreased among nonelites by less than 7 percent among veterans and by 13 percent among nonveteran respondents.

8. See, for example, David M. Kennedy, ed., The Modern American Military, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. See especially the chapter by Robert L. Goldich, “American Military Culture from Colony to Empire.”

9. Phil Klay, Redeployment, New York: Penguin, 2014, p. 203.

10. “80% of Military Recruitments Turned Down,” Military Times, May 14, 2014.

11. Micah Zenko, “The Soldier and the State Go Public,” Foreign Policy, September 26, 2013, http://foreignpolicy.com/2013/09/26/the-soldier-and-the-state-go-public.

12. Moreover, according to former national security advisor Steven Hadley in a personal interview, this campaign extended, rather than shortened, Secretary Rumsfeld’s tenure, because in order to uphold the norm of civilian control, President Bush did not want to be seen as capitulating to even retired military pressure on the secretary of defense.

13. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., “The Soldier’s Faith,” address, Harvard University, May 30, 1895.

14. The data from the TISS survey and the YouGov surveys were disaggregated and tabulated by Golby, Cohn, and Feaver. These cross-tabulations are available at http://www.hoover.org/warriors-and-citizens-crosstabs-3. Throughout this essay, references to this source are indicated with the phrase Golby, Cohn, Feaver Crosstabs; a subsequent number indicates the relevant question in their cross-tabulation. According to Golby, Cohn, and Feaver’s cross-tabulations, 15 percent more elites than veterans believe society respects the military; more than 30 percent of veteran respondents disagreed with the claim that society has a great deal of respect for the military; and 10 percent more veterans than civilians believe the military respects civilian society (33A–B).

15. Twenty-five percent of civilian elites and 27 percent of the general public did not believe political leaders shared their values.

16. The phrase “elite veteran” applies to those respondents who specified veteran status and were also coded as elites according to the YouGov methodology. It does not refer to servicemen and women who were officers holding especially senior ranks or prestigious positions or who were career military. Thirty-one percent of elite veterans and 36 percent of nonelite veterans believe that political leaders do not share their values (Golby, Cohn, Feaver Crosstabs 25).

17. Robert A. Lerner, Althea K. Nagai, and Stanley Rothman, American Elites, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996, p. 108; Robert Presthus, Elites in the Policy Process, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974, p. 360.

18. While fewer veterans than civilians believe leaders should rely more on military counsel, the figure is still a very high 75 percent and has remained constant since the 1998 TISS study. Concern about civilian leadership has increased by more than 18 percent since the 1998 study (Golby, Cohn, Feaver Crosstabs 48D–R).

19. Seventy-five percent of veteran elites and 60 percent of nonelite veterans versus 64 percent of civilian elites and 46 percent of the general-public respondents were concerned about the military becoming too involved in nonmilitary policies (Golby, Cohn, Feaver Crosstabs 41D).

20. Concern among the professional military of overstepping its bounds into civilian realms in the YouGov results is consistent with earlier findings by the TISS study.

21. Juvenal, Satire VI, lines 347–48.

22. See Hew Strachan, The Direction of War: Contemporary Strategy in Historical Perspective, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013, p. 97. Strachan argues that “we have tended to assume that the danger is a military coup d’état, when the real danger for western democracies today is the failure to develop coherent strategy.”

23. Lawrence Freedman illustrates that the divorce between politics and military force occurs during the Napoleonic era. He considers it strategic folly. See his Strategy: A History, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013, p. 103. Freedman also makes this argument in “Coping with Disorder: The Use and Limits of Military Force,” World Politics Review, October 27, 2015.

24. Colin S. Gray, The Future of Strategy, Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2015, p. 1.

25. Barack Obama, “Address to the Nation by the President,” December 6, 2015; see also “Obama At War,” Frontline, PBS, May 26, 2015.

26. For a thorough discussion of the issues, see Michael Howard, George J. Andreopoulos, and Mark R. Shulman, The Laws of War: Constraints on Warfare in the Western World, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997; Michael Gross, Moral Dilemmas of Modern War: Torture, Assassination, and Blackmail in an Age of Asymmetric Conflict, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009; Peter Berkowitz, Israel and the Struggle over the International Laws of War, Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 2012; and High Level Military Group, Our Military Forces’ Struggle against Lawless, Media Savvy Terrorist Adversaries: A Comparative Study, Friends of Israel Initiative, February 2016.

27. Dept. of Defense, Quadrennial Review of Military Compensation, 2014, http://www.defense.gov/Portals/1/features/defenseReviews/QDR/2014_Quadrennial_Defense_Review.pdf.

28. Raymond Odierno, quoted in Sydney Freedberg, “Pay Raise, Sequester Cut Will Eat Army Budget, GCV at Risk: Gen. Odierno,” Breaking Defense, July 29, 2103, http://breakingdefense.com/?s=Pay+Raise%2C+Sequester+Cut+Will+Eat+Army+Budget%2C+GCV+At+Risk%3A+Gen.+Odierno&submit=Search.

29. Tim Kane, “Military Retirement: Too Sweet a Deal?” War on the Rocks, March 2, 2015, http://warontherocks.com/2015/03/military-retirement-too-sweet-a-deal.

30. “Putting Military Pay on the Table,” New York Times, November 30, 2013.

31. Ken Harbaugh, “The Risk of Over-Thanking Our Veterans,” New York Times, June 1, 2015.

32. Quoted in John T. Bennett and Aaron Mehta, “House Armed Services Member Blasts ‘Arrogance’ of DoD,” Defense News, November 14, 2013.

33. Martin Dempsey, “The Military Needs to Reach Out to Civilians,” Washington Post, July 3, 2013.

34. Civilian elites and veteran nonelites form the center of attitudes.

35. Fifty-three percent of veteran elite and 47 percent of nonelite veteran ­respondents were unconcerned about the military diverging from society (Golby, Cohn, Feaver Crosstabs 41J).

36. Robert G. K. Thompson, “Regular Armies and Insurgency,” in Regular Armies and Insurgency, edited by Ronald Haycock, London: Routledge, 2015, pp. 9–20.

37. John F. Kelly, cited in Kristina Wong, “Marine General Predicts Lower Combat Standards for Women,” The Hill, January 8, 2016, http://thehill.com/policy/defense/265294-marine-general-predicts-combat-standards-will-be-lowered-for-women.

38. David Morris, “Surviving War Doesn’t Turn All Veterans into Victims, Sometimes It Helps Them Grow,” Daily Beast, May 18, 2014, http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/05/18/surviving-war-doesn-t-turn-all-veterans-into-victims-sometimes-it-helps-them-grow.html.

39. Brad Plumer, “The Unemployment Rate for Recent Veterans Is Incredibly High,” Washington Post, November 11, 2013.

40. Rebecca Shabad, “Post-9/11 War Vets: Bush over Obama,” The Hill, April 2, 2014, http://itk.thehill.com/policy/defense/202451-post-9-11-war-vets-prefer-bush-as-commander-in-chief.

41. “The World’s Biggest Military Bases,” army-technology.com, September 4, 2013, http://www.army-technology.com/features/feature-largest-military-bases-world-united-states.

42. Alan Zarembo, “With US Encouragement, VA Disability Claims Rise Sharply,” Virginian-Pilot/PilotOnline.com, July 18, 2014, http://pilotonline.com/news/military/with-us-encouragement-va-disability-claims-rise-sharply/article_14ce5c95-f0e2-5ef1-9480-af30b0f70f23.html.

43. Alan Zarembo, “As Disability Awards Grow, So Do Concerns with Veracity of PTSD Claims,” Los Angeles Times, August 3, 2014.

44. Ken Harbaugh, “The Risk of Over-Thanking Our Veterans,” New York Times, June 1, 2015.

45. Cynthia A. Leard-Mann et al., “Risk Factors Associated with Suicide in Current and Former U.S. Military Personnel,” Journal of the American Medical Association, 310.5, 2013, 496–506.

46. Yochi Dreazen, “Five Myths about Military Suicides,” Washington Post, November 7, 2014.

47. Benjamin Summers, “Hero Worship of the Military Is Getting in the Way of Good Policy,” Washington Post, June 20, 2014, http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/hero-worship-of-the-military-presents-an-obstacle-to-good-policy/2014/06/20/053d932a-f0ed-11e3-bf76-447a5df6411f_story.html.

48. See, for example, Phil Klay’s collection of short stories Redeployment, Eliot Ackerman’s novel Green on Blue, Kevin Powers’s novel The Yellow Birds and poetry collection Letter Composed During a Lull in the Fighting, Brian Turner’s poetry collections Here, Bullet and Phantom Noise and his memoir My Life as a Foreign Country, Benjamin Busch’s memoir Dust to Dust, Nathanial Fick’s memoir One Bullet Away, and the numerous books penned by and about Navy SEALs. The literary journal 0-Dark-Thirty, the Library of Congress, and the Veterans Writing Project also encourage and promote veterans’ literature. University writers’ programs such as Stanford University’s, which was founded by Wallace Stegner to encourage World War II veterans to write about their experiences as a means of transition back to civilian life, are also playing an important role. For an overview, see George Packer, “Home Fires,” New Yorker, April 7, 2014, and Dexter Filkins, “The Long Road Home,” New York Times, March 6, 2014.

49. The number of veterans in Congress had been declining since 1980 until 2012, when 189 veterans received their parties’ nominations. While the smaller size of our military means Congress is unlikely to again see 75 percent of its membership be veterans (as was the case in the 1950s and 1960s), organizations such as the Center for Second Service at George Washington University, Combat Veterans for Congress, Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, and the Veterans Campaign provide training for veterans seeking to run for political office. Joyce Tsai, “Veterans of Recent Wars Running for Office in Record Numbers,” Stars and Stripes, November 5, 2012; Jeremy Herb, “Veterans Vanishing from Congress,” Politico, July 8, 2014, http://www.politico.com/story/2014/07/veterans-congress-108687; Anna Mulrine, “More Iraq, Afghan Vets Going from Service Member to Member of Congress,” Christian Science Monitor, November 11, 2013.

50. Eric Greitens, Interview, Philanthropy, Summer 2015, available at PhilanthropyRoundtable, http://www.philanthropyroundtable.org/topic/excellence_in_philanthropy/interview_with_eric_greitens.

51. Bernard E. Trainor, “A Healing in Sharing War Experiences,” Washington Post, November 29, 2013.

52. Greitens, Interview.

53. Dave Philipps, “Iraq Veteran, Now a West Point Professor, Seeks to Rein In Disability Pay,” New York Times, January 7, 2015.

54. See http://www.independencefund.org.

55. Hussain Haqqani, Twitter post, December 30, 2013, 10:59 am, https://twitter.com/husainhaqqani/status/417731772781047808.

56. Thomas Jefferson, Letter to William C. Jarvis, September 28, 1820, Writings of Thomas Jefferson, edited by A. A. Lipscomb and A. E. Bergh, Washington: Thomas Jefferson Memorial Association, 1907, 15:278.

57. Theodore Roosevelt, quoted in Adam Quinn, U.S. Foreign Policy in Context: National Ideology from the Founders to the Bush Doctrine, London: Routledge, 2010, p. 68.