Kori Schake - Warriors and Citizens: American Views of Our Military

H O O V E R I N S T I T U T I O N P R E S S

STANFORD UNIVERSITY STANFORD, CALIFORNIA

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Hoover Institution Press Publication No. 667

Hoover Institution at Leland Stanford Junior University,
Stanford, California 94305-6003

Copyright 2016 by the Board of Trustees of the
Leland Stanford Junior University

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Schake, Kori N., editor. | Mattis, James N., 1950 editor.
Title: Warriors & citizens : American views of our military /
Kori Schake and Jim Mattis, editors.
Other titles: Hoover Institution Press publication ; 667.
Description: Stanford, California : Hoover Institution Press, Stanford
University, 2016. | Series: Hoover Institution Press publication ; no. 667 |
Includes bibliographical references.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016024317 | ISBN 9780817919344 (cloth : alk. paper) |
ISBN 9780817919368 (epub) | ISBN 9780817919375 (mobi) |
ISBN 9780817919382 (PDF)
Subjects: LCSH: Civil-military relations United States. | United States
Armed Forces Public opinion. | Public opinion United States.
Classification: LCC JK330.W37 2016 | DDC 322/.50973 dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016024317

CONTENTS

Kori Schake and Jim Mattis

Rosa Brooks

Mackubin Thomas Owens

Jim Golby, Lindsay P. Cohn,
and Peter D. Feaver

Benjamin Wittes and Cody Poplin

Nadia Schadlow

Thomas Donnelly

Tod Lindberg

Matthew Colford and Alec J. Sugarman

Jim Hake

Kori Schake and Jim Mattis

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 Stanfords 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. Hoovers 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, Stanfords 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 patriots burden and committed all they have to protecting the country.

CHAPTER 1

A Great Divergence?

Kori Schake and Jim Mattis

We initiated this project out of curiosity about whether, after forty years of an all-volunteer force, a small force relative to our overall population, and twelve years of continuous warfare, the American public was losing connection to its military. Our concern was not loss of connection in the sense that preoccupies academic experts on civil-military relations in the United States a military insubordinate to civilian control. We saw scant evidence of that in either our policymaking or military experience. Rather, with less than one half of one percent of the American public currently serving in our military (see figure 1.1) and with the high pace of deployments for significant elements of our fighting forces, we were interested in the cumulative effect of having a military at war when the broad swathe of American society is largely unaffected. Whether or not the different experiences of our military and the broader society amount to a gap and whether such a gap is adequately defined seemed worthy areas to delve into.

FIGURE 1.1 United States Civil-Military Population Pyramid

Courtesy of Tim Kane. (Data from United States Census Bureau, Current Population Survey, 2012, http://www.census.gov/population/age/, http://www.census.gov/hhes/veterans/data/, and from Defense Manpower Data Center, 2014 Demographics: Profile of the Military Community, 2014, http://download.militaryonesource.mil/12038/MOS/Reports/2014-Demographics-Report.pdf, p. 35.)

Source: Tim Kane, The Hoover Institution, based on US Census, ACS, and DMDC (most recent data as of 2015.

The untethering of our military from our society could be damaging to both in many ways. Some thought that our civilian society would become perhaps more willing to engage in wars and certainly more hardened to the costs of warfare from which they have the luxury of being insulated. Anecdotes indicated that public inexperience with veterans could complicate their reintegration into society, even cause them to be perceived as a threat to the broader society. With little experience of warfare in the general population, the public may have scant appreciation for what is needed to win our wars or become contemptuous of the military virtues necessary for winning on the battlefield when those virtues are out of synch with the values of our civil society. Elected political leaders without military expertise may have trouble crafting strategies for the successful conduct of our wars. The military could even come to consider itself a society apart, different from, and more virtuous than, the people they commit themselves to protecting, like praetorian guards at the bacchanalia, as one soldier described it. Or our military could begin to feel that society owes them something, fostering entitlement attitudes that would chip away at the culture essential to retaining warriors in our military forces. We were concerned above all about suggestions that the rest of society has simply become apathetic to the issues that dominate the consciousness of those who have been putting their lives on the line for the rest of us in the wars our country is fighting.