 Welcome to the U.S. Naval War College, the Navy's home of thought. NWC Talks features our world-class experts examining national security matters. We hope you enjoy the conversation. For decades, commentators from both inside and outside the U.S. military community have been issuing stark warnings that there is a widening gap between the military and society, that society is relying on a small, isolated warrior caste, that there is a chicken hawk nation where the wealthy and powerful avoid service and are too ready to send other people's sons and daughters to fight in useless wars. If only we had a draft, if only people had to worry about being dragged into foreign adventures, they would pay more attention to foreign policy and demand better judgment from politicians. Because of a civil military gap, we are told, we are warned about all kinds of undesirable consequences, irresponsible foreign policy, inadequate recruiting and retention, possibly even the slow decay of a civil society that feels no obligation to serve or to give back to the nation. I'm Dr. Lindsay Kahn, and this is NWC Talks, Civil Military Relations. Today we're going to talk specifically about this notion of a civil military gap, what it could mean, whether it exists, and what its consequences might be. First, some background. Civil military relations is a huge interdisciplinary field that asks both normative and empirical questions about the relationships among the government, the military, and the broader society. Many of us are concerned about the types of normative problems indicated by all those headlines, the health of democratic society, the fairness of how the defense burden is distributed. We want to know not only what these relationships actually look like, but whether they are healthy, and if they're not healthy, how to make them healthier. Now, most states today have divided the labor up. They've designated a group of people who do the fighting. So most states have some sort of standing army, some also, of course, have a navy. That means that they will have to manage civil military relationships. And these relationships consist of three different sets, three different pairs of actors that have to deal with one another. The first set is the government and the military. This involves things like military advice to policymakers, resourcing strategy, guidance from the government to the military. It also involves civil control or obedience. Now this is often called civilian control, sometimes democratic control. But I prefer the term civil control because it emphasizes that the entity supposed to be in control of the military is whatever the political community has designated. It is not the fact that the president is a civilian that gives him authority over the military. It is the fact that he is in his position by virtue of a political process that has been agreed upon by the community. Now between the people and the military, this relationship consists of mutual perceptions, what they think about each other, of attitudes, how they view policy choices, and also about representativeness. The more open a society is, the more desirable it is that the military be generally representative of society as a whole, at least in certain ways. It's understandable that the military will be younger and healthier than the average. But it's desirable to have a military as representative as possible, so no social group is bearing an undue burden or benefiting in ways from which others are systematically excluded. Between the people and the government, the relationship consists of things like the public's interest in and oversight of government activities with respect to foreign and defense policy. In a democracy, it is the citizens who must judge whether the government is making good policy, whether they are making good choices, whether they are using tax dollars appropriately. The government, in its turn, owes the public transparency, otherwise they cannot make these judgments. So there are lots of places where there might be gaps, where the two parties to a relationship might be too far apart for their relationship to be healthy. In general, most people worry the most about gaps in the military-people relationship. Those gaps are thought to lead to problems in the other relationships, such as the policy-making relationship between politicians and top military advisers, or problems in recruiting, and democratic participation, oversight, governance, where the people are not doing their jobs as citizens. There are a lot of theories out there about how specific gaps might cause specific problems. Here, I have divided things up into the gaps believed to cause problems. Those are on your left. On the right are some of the specific problems people think are caused by these gaps. So this seems like a lot to worry about, but do any of these gaps actually exist? If they do, are they getting worse? And most importantly, are any of them actually likely to cause these undesirable outcomes? First, I'll go through what we know about some of these gaps. The one thing people have often worried about is this thing called an attitude gap. Perhaps military people, especially those who have made a career out of it, just think differently about foreign policy and possibly domestic policy than everyone else does. Maybe military people are more prone to use military force because of their familiarity and comfort with it as a tool. On the other hand, maybe military people are more reluctant ever to use military force because they are so much more sensitive to the costs and difficulties and limitations of force as a tool. And on domestic policy, what if military people are, as Samuel Huntington claimed, natural Berkean conservatives whose social views stay locked in the 1950s while the rest of society diverges from them and grows ever more liberal? It is true that conservatives and Republicans are overrepresented in the military, particularly in the officer corps, but the views of military people, qua military people, are very similar to the views of everyone else. On foreign policy, for example, there is little evidence that military people in general think differently than Americans as a whole. In other words, there is a lot of disagreement among them. There is some evidence that those with military experience and especially with combat experience are less cavalier about the initiation of the use of force than those without. But there are hawks and doves in both groups. James Goldby has found evidence that partisanship explains more of the apparent civil military attitude gap than the fact of military service. In other words, Republicans in the military look exactly like Republicans not in the military. Democrats in the military look exactly like Democrats not in the military. And the only reason the military might look different in terms of attitudes is because there are more Republicans in it proportionally than in the general public. And this appears to be due mainly to what we call a selection mechanism, which is that people who are conservative and Republican are simply a little bit more likely than those who are not to join the military. But they're only somewhat more likely. And there are plenty of non-conservative non-Republicans who also join the military. There is very little evidence that serving in the military causes people to become more conservative, what would be called a socialization mechanism. In terms of domestic policy attitudes, we see approximately the same thing. Military personnel and those with military experience are more conservative than the general public, but their overall attitudes still shift in the same direction as those of the general public. For example, while military personnel do tend to be less supportive of gay marriage than the general public, they are still significantly more likely to support it now than they were 20 years ago. In other words, as society's views have shifted on that issue, so have the views of those in the military. It is not the case that the military is stuck here while society moves away from it. So in terms of actual differences in attitudes, there's not much evidence of a gap, certainly not much evidence of a growing gap. But perceptions matter too. So what do these groups think about one another? There are a lot of dimensions we could look at. I will look at just one, how partisanship affects perceptions. Dr. David Burbach has done an excellent NWC talk on the fact that the U.S. public has expressed increasing trust in the military since the 1980s, while trust in other public institutions and many private institutions and professions has decreased since the 1970s. And he makes a point about the role that partisanship plays. The U.S. public's confidence in the military has a partisan character. Republican confidence is consistently higher than Democratic confidence and has a steeper upward curve, though both trend upwards over the last several decades. Republican confidence in the military drops significantly when the president is a Democrat, while Democrats' confidence appears to be less affected by the party of the president. This important role of partisanship in confidence is consistent with many of the other issues where we see partisanship come into the civil-military relationship. Michael Robinson, for example, has found evidence that Republican members of the public tend to view the military as co-partisans, as members of their in-group, so to speak, while Democrats do not. Again, while the proportion of Republicans in the military, especially amongst officers, is significantly higher than in the population at large, most military personnel still believe in a norm of nonpartisan public service. However, it is possible that should this popular perception become more widespread and entrenched, serious civil-military problems could arise, whether the perception is accurate or not. Furthermore, there is evidence that the norm of military members remaining nonpartisan is eroding, both within the military and from the perspective of the public. The vast majority of concerns about gaps, though, have not to do with attitudes and perceptions which we just talked about, but with representativeness or familiarity. With representativeness, the relevant question is whether certain salient social or demographic groups are significantly over or underrepresented in the military, and if so, whether the trends are good or bad. Overall, the force is pretty representative, and most of the trends are either flat or positive. Most importantly, this is by far the most representative military the U.S. has ever had, including when we had a draft. But what about the charge that while the military may be representative in terms of attributes, it is isolated from society and growing more so? Let's talk about the idea that military service is becoming a family business and that an ever smaller group of Americans is bearing the burden. It is absolutely true that having a parent or other close relative in the military is a strong predictor for someone joining the military, just as it is true that having a lawyer or a farmer or a mechanic as a parent is a strong indicator for someone to enter that career. Family propensity is higher for the military than for many, but by no means all other professions. Also, this phenomenon has been steady over time. It has been true for hundreds of years that military service tends to run in families. There is no evidence at all that this is an intensifying phenomenon or that the U.S. military is in danger of becoming a caste. You may have heard concerns that fewer and fewer Americans know someone who has been in the military. And the implication is that if you don't know someone who was in the military, you are less likely to understand military people's concerns or less likely to care about foreign and defense policy. Again, to a certain extent, true. Family connection and personal experience shape what is salient and important to all of us. Having a smaller military than we did during World War II and the Cold War means that the surface area available for interface is smaller. So unless the military is made much larger or the rate of personnel turnover is significantly increased, the number of Americans with direct social contact to people with military experience will continue to decline and then level out. But let me give you two reasons to worry less about this. First, it only feels like a dangerous decline because most of us are using World War II as a frame of reference when the military was huge and salient and everyone felt directly affected by the war. But World War II was the biggest war the world has ever seen. Not only are its civil military effects not normal, it is dangerous to think of them as the ideal. Second, there is strong evidence that Americans will not care about foreign policy no matter how many relatives they have in the military. I'm only sort of joking. Survey data indicates that approximately equal proportions of those with and those without close family members in the military say that the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq matter to them or affected them in some way. And public figures from George Washington to Elihu Root have complained that Americans don't pay attention to foreign policy. And both of these men were speaking at times of major international wars, which is the time when you would most expect people to be paying attention. Had we not had World War II, the US military might still be less than one tenth of one percent of the population and confined to isolated barracks in remote areas. We did have World War II, though, and that did change people's experience of the military as an institution. In fact, the US military is now one of the most salient institutions in American society. Its budget share is large and the one thing Congress has to address every year is the National Defense Authorization Act. Its presence in popular culture is large, though often inaccurate or misleading. And its presence in the news is large compared to many other things that Americans care about or perhaps ought to care about. So the overall message is most of the gaps people worry about either don't exist, like the Attitude Gap, or are getting better, like the Representativeness Gap, or are sort of returning to a historical norm from a period of historical abnormality, like the Familiarity Gap. Some gaps and trends are cause for concern. We should work to maintain or revive a norm of nonpartisan behavior for military personnel, though how feasible that is in a polarized environment is not clear. We should work to maintain and improve representation, including recruiting from regions and demographics that don't traditionally send high numbers of people to the military. This will also require leadership efforts within the military to make the organization more welcoming to people who are different from the traditional image of the uniformed service member. And we should certainly look for ways to increase Americans' understanding of an interest in their government. We should look for ways to increase Americans' feeling of buy-in to their system. Many people think that a draft would accomplish this, but there are many reasons to doubt that it would, and certainly reasons to doubt that it would be the best, most cost-effective solution. I don't have time to talk about a draft today, but I will simply point out that drafts are always political creations. They are not magic bullets that make politicians or the public behave better. The problem of the American politicians and public not being good at governance is a problem to be addressed through education, to be addressed through political reform, to be addressed through the creation of a polity that people feel includes them and serves them. In the end, many of the issues Americans identify as problems of civil-military relations turn out to be problems of larger social and political institutions. Healthy civil-military relations depend on a healthy political community, not the other way around. So thank you for watching. I'm Lindsay Kahn, and this has been NWC Talks, Civil-Military Relations.