 I'm Dave Pallatti, very excited to serve as your moderator and host this evening. I see some new faces in uniform in the audience from the Naval Academy Prep School, welcome. And for lots of the familiar faces that are here, it's great to have you. This is our fourth lecture in the Issues in National Security Lecture Series. We're delighted you could join us. This will run till 5.45. Both Dr. Kahn and Dr. Blankshane said they have plenty of time for questions at the end of their lecture. So if you could save your questions, we'll have at least 20, if not 30 minutes for you to talk back and forth with them. Tonight's topic is incredibly timely, which is why I think we have such a great turnout, is we are living arguably in one of the most interesting times in modern history in the United States from a perspective of civil military relations. And we are incredibly fortunate to have two leading voices in this field for you to talk with. Just to cover quickly, this is a four-attribution lecture. It's actually being recorded, just so everyone's aware. Therefore, feel free to share any of the discussions with everybody in your network. Encourage them to go to the Naval War College website and check this out if they didn't get to make it. And I will also say for both of our doctors, keep in mind that the views that they expressed this evening are their views, their personal views, and do not necessarily reflect those of the college, the Navy, or the Department of Defense. Now onto our speakers. It's my great pleasure to introduce Professor Lindsey Kahn and Jessica Blankshain, who are both from our National Security Affairs Department. As I said earlier, both are recognized scholars in this field who have a very interesting take on current state of affairs as well as historical. Lindsey came to the War College from the Council on Foreign Relations, where she worked as an International Affairs Fellow and an advisor to the Office of the Secretary of Defense. She specifically focused on issues pertaining to special operations and combating terrorism. Prior to that, she taught at the University of Northern Iowa in international relations, international security, U.S. foreign policy, and terrorism. She earned her Ph.D. from Duke University and political science. Jessica joined the War College from Harvard University, where she also earned her Ph.D. in political economy and government. Her research interests include civil military relations, bureaucratic politics, and organizational economics. As you will quickly see, they're both very popular with our students here, because they teach leading edge practice and theory in this field. And they both teach a couple of very interesting electives. Ladies and gentlemen, Dr. Kahn and Blankshain. Thank you, Dave, and thank you, everyone, for being here. We're excited to be here with you tonight for this fourth lecture. And as Dave said, so I'm Jess, that's Lindsey. People haven't heard time telling us apart, even when we don't accidentally dress alike, so we apologize for that. But we're both in the National Security Affairs Department, which for those of you who are trying to keep track of what the students are up to is the TSDM and NSDM courses that you may have heard about. And we also teach the civil military relations elective that just wrapped up last week. And we, again, as Dave sort of suggested, came to this subject from slightly different trajectories and backgrounds. And as you'll see, we focus on slightly different issues in our research, but really fundamentally are both interested in this question of how states organize and try to control violent force for political policy purposes. And what we wanted to do today is try to do a quick overview of this. And we are going to do our best to stop talking by 5.15 so that we leave enough time for you all to ask questions, which can be about anything that we've brought up during the talk or anything that we have not brought up during the talk, but that you're curious about. So if you've heard the term civil military relations before, it may be in the context of something like one of the issues suggested in these headlines. In the US, frequently we'll talk about civil military relations when we talk about the size or scope of the defense budget. When we're talking about sort of policy issues and military input into those policy issues, whether the presidents are listening to their generals, those sorts of questions, questions about the personal relationships between elected officials and military officers or those officials own military backgrounds or lack thereof. And of course, in an international context, we talk about all of these same issues and additionally have some others come up sometimes, things like coup attempts, successful or not. And the military's sort of ability to be a power player in politics and help hand control of the government to one party or faction or another. So what we are hoping to do today is clarify a bit what we mean by this idea of civil military relations as an academic discipline that we study. And focus on a couple issues in particular, one being how governments try to control their militaries. Another being a question of in the United States context, this question of a familiarity gap is the military too distant from the population and if so, should we be concerned about it? And then finally concluding with some discussion of this idea of trust in the military, which is another thing you may have heard about. The high levels of trust in the US military and what sort of national security and military policy consequences that might have. So we're going to try to do all of that by 5.15. So I will hand it over to Lindy to kick us off. Great, great that you could come, thanks for being here. So as Jess said, the first thing we're going to talk about is just a little clarity on what we mean by civil military relations. Because I think a lot of people either have never encountered this term or if they have, they tend to think that we're talking about how the military interacts with NGOs, for example. That's not what we're talking about. When we say civil military relations, what we're really talking about is this triangle of relationships amongst three groups in a society. And just as a little bit of sort of philosophical background, the problems of civil military relations arise when you have a society that has differentiated its labor to different groups. So if you have, say, a hunter-gatherer society where everybody does the work of the society when there is peace and when there is war, everybody drops their farming or hunting and gathering and picks up a spear and goes, you don't have civil military relations, because there is identity between those groups. By the same token, if you have a society that is ruled by, say, a warrior caste, like a shogunate or something like that, again, you do not have civil military relations because there is identity between the government and the military. But in most societies, even dictatorships in many cases, even non-democracies, but especially in democracies, you will have these three different groups. There is the population, the society in general, and they delegate the work of governments to a group of people who form the government, who are supposed to be... So in a democracy, it's delegated from the people, right? In non-democracies, they're just separate groups. But in either case, the government is supposed to do the running, right? And then there is this other delegated group, the people who fight, right? And as Jess pointed out, the thing that the question that motivates both of us is how do different societies think about and decide to organize and regulate and legitimize the use of violence for political ends, usually externally focused, but not always? So when you have a society that has this division of labor, then you get the problems that we are interested in, the problems of civil military relations. And what we have up here is just some examples of the kinds of things that each side would expect and demand from the other. So in this relationship, well, the most common relationship, the one that you would see in any society, regardless of what type of government it is, is this one between the government and the military, this control relationship. But that's not a one-way relationship. It's not just that the military has to obey. The government also has responsibilities in this relationship. And we've written them up here as responsible foreign policy, having a strategy, budgeting, right? The government has to do those things or else the military can't function. In return, the military owes the government professionalism, a sense of duty, their advice on policy matters, et cetera. Down at the bottom, you have the relationship between the population and the military. Now, the military is always going to be drawn from the population in some way, but it might be drawn from the population in terms of large-scale conscription, or it might be drawn from the population by a volunteer force. There are many different ways to do that, right? And so that relationship might differ depending on how the society has organized itself. But in all cases, you're going to hope that the population gives the military some respect, some support, but also exercises some oversight, doesn't just let them get away with whatever they want. And at the same time that the military gives the society some respect and some professionalism that the military does not look down, for example, on civilians who are not serving in uniform. And then finally, over on the other side, you have the relationship between the population and the government. And this one tends to get left out of these discussions, but we both think it's very important in that in a democracy, by the way, that side of the triangle drops out when you're talking about non-democracies, because there is no popular accountability in non-democracies. But in democracies, the population's job is to determine whether the government is using the military appropriately, right? Are they giving them the appropriate budget? Are they making good foreign policy, right? And if the population thinks the government is not doing these things, they are supposed to vote them out. And one of the really important implications of this is that it's the population's job to judge the government, not the military's job, right? And that's one of the norms of civil military relations that we might talk about. Okay, what I wanted to do first is just in a sort of overview, a comparative overview of that one relationship that happens in every country that government military side of things. What are the different ways that governments try to exercise controls over their military? And when we talk about government control of the military, what we're really saying is how does a group of people who are supposed to govern the society delegate all of the effective control of deadly force to a different group of people and then expect that group of people just to do what they tell them, right? You see what the problem might be, right? Is that if the group of people with a sort of monopoly on deadly force decide that they don't like what they're being told to do, they could just not do it. They could resist. They could coo. They could do any number of things that would not constitute government control of the military. So how do governments solve this problem? Every government uses a combination of these things, but many governments rely more heavily on one than another or on a couple. So I'm just going to give you some examples. One way of doing this is to make sure that the government and military officers have the same identity in some way, right? That they either come from the same class, right? You see Prince Charles in his military uniform, indicating an identity between the ruling class of the United Kingdom and the military officers. Over here you have Hafez and Bashar al-Assad, right? Ethnicity or religion, they are both Alawite Shiite. What they have done is stacked the Syrian military officer corps with Alawite Shiites. In other words, making sure that the interests of that group of people are close to their own interests so that they have very little reason to disagree with each other. More examples, parallel military structures, right? Like a palace guard. This is designed to deter one group from trying to resist because they're afraid that another group might then resist them with armed force as well. In other words, if there are two groups of armed people running around, it is less likely that either one of them would rebel. And I've got a couple of examples for you up here. Good old Saddam Hussein with his Republican guard at the top, right? An elite group of people who got much better budget share than the rest of the Iraqi army, who got much better equipment, right? So the Iraqi army was much bigger, but they were made up mostly of conscripts, made up, they had very, very poor equipment. And if they had wanted to coup, they would have had to face the elite Republican guard, right? And down here you have Iran and the Revolutionary Guard, right? The same kind of thing. An elite unit that could easily resist a large-scale uprising by the less privileged but larger group of soldiers. Another one that you will see in many cases is professionalism, right? The idea here is that if you inculcate officers with a sense of duty, with a sense of self-restraint, that it is morally right or normatively right for them to obey the government, then they will not rebel against the government, right? Here is Shinzo Abe doing a review of his offices. Japan is a very good example of a culture of self-restraint among officers. Another one is pervasive security or surveillance. You might be familiar with the idea of political officers or commissars in, say, the Soviet Red Army or in the Chinese Army. This is when you have a state secret police or intelligence service that keeps tabs on everyone such that everyone in the military is too afraid to express different opinions or to talk about rebellion or motivate any kind of anti-government activity. It's very effective, but it's also very detrimental to the sort of morale and effectiveness of your troops. And then finally, I don't have a picture up here for this one, because it's hard to get a good picture of this. Monetary incentives, right? You pay your military. There is a reason that any time a state is having a debt crisis, the military still get paid, right, because those are the last people you want angry about missing paychecks because they have the tanks, right? But also, there are many countries where the military, so think of countries like Pakistan where the tax base is perhaps not so good, where taxation does not provide enough to support the kind of military that the state thinks it needs. So what do they do? They allow the military to make their own money by participating in business, by owning business, by running businesses. China was also an example of this for quite some time until the Chinese Communist Party decided that it led to too much corruption and they tried to crack down on it. Okay, so hopefully you can think of your own countries or think of countries that you know about and you recognize some of these things. As I said, most countries use many of these. Some of you might be thinking here of the Federalist Papers from the United States history, right? Having the National Guard or the militia and the Federal Forces, if and when we had Federal Forces and the idea was that the power wouldn't be concentrated in any one place. So why does this matter? Why does it matter how a state does this? Well, some of these produce militaries that are not very good at doing what we all think of as military things, right? I'll bring the Iraqi army back up, right? The Iraqi army was very unlikely to coup for all kinds of the reasons that you saw up there. They were also not a very good army because they had been coup-proofed to the point where they were ineffective at just about everything, right? Another problem that you can get is that some modes are not appropriate for democratic societies. In other words, if you insist that all of your offices have to come from the same ethnic or religious or ideological background as your ruling class, that doesn't seem like a very democratic way of choosing offices, does it? It's also not meritocratic. It means that you are choosing offices on some basis other than them being good at their jobs, which is also a problem for the first reason. So this was an overview of sort of that one side of the triangle that every single country has to deal with. And it has implications for all kinds of other things as well. But we do wanna talk about the other sides of the triangle. So I'm gonna give this back to Jess and she's going to take up the US case and talk about the problem of the familiarity gap. Thank you. So yes, as Lindsay said, we also don't want to neglect the other sides of the triangle. So one thing that's interesting to look at in the US case and that you may hear in the media on occasion in a number of different articles, is anybody familiar with James Fallow's tragedy of the American military from the Atlantic in 2015 is one of a number of articles sort of in this vein making this argument about this familiarity gap. Which is the idea that going back to our triangle, that the distance between the population and the military has gotten too big. Particularly this is often made in the context of the sort of post Vietnam and of the draft era all volunteer military. The idea that the American military is now a separate, sometimes called warrior cast that is separate from society, that these two points of the triangle are very distant from each other and that this has implications not just for that side of the triangle, the relationship between those two, but also for the public's ability to hold the government accountable or its interest in holding the government accountable. Either that the public isn't informed enough about what the military is doing and how it works to be able to hold the government accountable for military policy or simply that they don't care. Because it doesn't matter to them. So to look into this question, we need to answer a couple sort of sub questions, right? The first being, is there this familiarity gap that people talk about? Is the military in the United States really that distant from society? Sort of in absolute terms, in historical terms, these kinds of questions. If it is, then does that matter for how people think about the military and military policy? Do people who have familiarity and connection to the military, either because they were in it themselves or because they know people who are or were in it, think differently about use of the military and some of these national security policy questions than people who don't have that familiarity? And then finally, is there anything we can do about it if the answer to those two are yes? Are there things that the government can do to change the level of familiarity that the citizens have with the military or not? So we'll start at the beginning. Usually this argument gets made in terms of the idea of the other 1%, as it's sometimes called. The idea that only 1% of the United States is bearing this responsibility of providing national defense. And one thing that's important to remember is to try to put this in historical context. Usually when people cite the statistic, they compare it to here. To essentially the World War II era when you can see on our little graph here that nearly 10% of the adult population was participating in military service, right? Majority of able-bodied males were serving. So we see this big spike in the military population. And when you make this comparison of today, which you can see we had to put two graphs together here, so I apologize, but today we have, we do in fact have a small percentage of society serving. And if you compare that to World War II, it looks very, very small. But it's important to keep in mind the broader context that if you look at this whole graph, World War II is the oddity, right? This is the sort of strange point in American history when we had this mass mobilization that saw such a huge part of the population in service. It's actually quite common in American history to have 1%, 2%, 3% of the population in military service even during times of significant conflict. And certainly, there are discussions to be had about what it means to have a military this size doing a lot more around the world. But historically speaking, it's not odd for only 1% of the United States population to be in the military. And it's also important to remember if we're concerned just about that number, the percent, right, we think it's too small potentially, assuming that we are not planning to do anything to decrease the size of the overall population, then our option to change that number is to either make the military bigger, right, which requires money, or to increase turnover in the military in some ways that the military is effectively producing veterans more quickly, right? So those are just important contexts to keep in mind when we're looking at this picture. Now, of course, the other question is it's possible that we have sort of a normal percentage of the population serving in the military, but that this percentage is somehow more isolated than they used to be. They used to be sort of more distributed through society, and now it's still 1%, but it's sort of segregated and only a small number of people actually know someone in the military. It's not easy to get data on this. We don't have a lot of it, but we have a little bit. So this is from a study done by the Pew Research Center, which is a quite reputable polling public opinion institution where this was from 2011, I believe, is this data, where they asked a representative sample of Americans whether they had new people in the military in various contexts. And we put this slide up because it's very surprising to a lot of people. These numbers are a lot higher than many people expect them to be, particularly this one. So they asked, do you have a close friend or family member who has served in Iraq or Afghanistan? And more than half of their sample said yes. The numbers not surprisingly go up a bit when you go to veteran from any era, right? And then when you go from immediate family member to the less restrictive any family member, which would include things like grandparents and its uncles, it goes up even further. So this suggests that the military might not be as isolated as some arguments suggest. Now, there is some evidence that this is, that this picture may change over time, right? So here we see the question about, do you have an immediate family member who has ever served broken out by age group? And you do see, which is probably fits most people's intuition, that among older Americans, they're much more likely to say they have an immediate family member who has served. Now, part of that is because they just logistically have more immediate family members who are of age that they could have served in the military. Your 18 to 29 year olds are unlikely to have children old enough to be able to serve in the military. But also, this is what we would expect, given this picture, right, that there was a time when there were just a lot more veterans. And you do also see, this is the other argument that you see a lot in the military becoming a family business. You do see that especially among younger people, those who have served in the military are more likely to have veteran family members than those who have not served in the military, right? We do see that in our data here. Again, this is probably not surprising. We see this in a number of different professions and occupations that they tend to sort of run in families in particular ways. The question is, do we find it particularly concerning when it comes to the military? Which is something we can have a discussion about in Q and A. So, okay, that's all fine and good. We get this picture that there is potentially some separation between the military and society, maybe not as big or drastic as some pictures suggest. Does it matter? Do the people who know someone in the military or were in the military have different attitudes about national security policy than people who don't or weren't? Again, this is from the same Pew study. They effectively find that, so, light green is people who don't have an immediate family member who served. Dark green is they do have an immediate family member who served. And you see some differences here on this side in some of these questions about sort of patriotism, questions about military service. Would you advise someone to join the military? They do find some differences. They don't, however, find differences over here in attitudes about Iraq and Afghanistan. And this one in particular is interesting because people love to cite this number that half of Americans who don't have a family member who served feel that the wars that didn't affect them as evidence of this gap, but they failed to note the other one that people who do have an immediate family member who served say the same thing. We do have some evidence both from this survey, so great, so this is friends and family, this is its veterans themselves post 9-11 veterans. We have some evidence from this and other academic studies which we can talk about later that veterans in some circumstances have slightly different attitudes about things like use of force and other military policy. Not that they are more hawkish. We don't have evidence that veterans, those with significant military experience are significantly more likely to want to go to war. We do have some evidence that if the government is going to go to war, they note that veterans are more likely to want to use overwhelming force to do so. And here you see some evidence that in this survey, at least, veterans were more likely to say that Iraq and Afghanistan were worth it than were non-veterans, which potentially gets into all sorts of complicated, psychological reasons having to do with motivated reasoning and wanting to feel like if you participated in something that was potentially costly to you that it was worth it. So this leads to this final question, getting back to the triangle and accountability of can the government do anything to change this familiarity level, right? Again, sometimes people point to the end of the draft, the introduction of the all-volunteer force as sort of the point of the separation, which implies that if we changed our policies, for example, went back to conscription, that we would see more familiarity or potentially the people sort of doing more to oversee the government in its use of force. There are a number of academic studies that look into this, which again, we can go into in detail in the Q&A if anybody's interested, but they look at questions like, is the public more or less likely to support conflict when there is conscription than when there is not conscription? If more people feel that they will be personally affected by a conflict, are they less likely to support it? If people think that conflict is likely to be costly in aggregate, right? Either financially or in terms of casualties, are they less supportive of that conflict? The answer is generally yes, but subject to the benefits of the conflict, so people are to some extent rational about this. And also, there's some evidence that people are less likely to support conflicts when they think that the system that the government is using to recruit manpower is unfair, which again, we can talk about later what unfair means in that context. Lindsay and I did a little bit of research on this to try to dig into this question, looking at the question of, basically we were motivated by this idea that during Vietnam, the draft was used, but mobilizing the garden reserves was seen as too costly to be used. It would involve too many people, make too many people sensitive to the cost of this conflict, particularly because of the types of people it was involving, so the garden reserve were not sent overseas for the most part, where today we see the reverse. The garden reserves have been used nearly constantly, while a draft is only brought up as this sort of political third rail. And so we wanted to know what would happen if we told people, essentially, that either there would be a draft, the garden reserve would be mobilized, only the active duty troops would be mobilized, how this affected their views about a hypothetical military engagement. And essentially what we found is that when we tell people there's going to be a draft, they're less supportive of this hypothetical conflict, when we tell them the garden reserves are gonna be mobilized, it doesn't really affect their willingness to support this conflict relative to a baseline of just the active duty force. And in particular, we find that this is perceived as costly by the public, both in terms of aggregate casualties and the likelihood that they will be personally affected, but this is not. People don't perceive this as being costly. And even more surprisingly, we find that we don't find a lot of evidence for this idea that people who feel that they will be personally affected by a conflict are less likely to support it. So that's what this is showing here, is that if the dot is over here, it means that perceiving that you're gonna pay a cost makes you less supportive. So in terms of overall casualties, if people think casualties are going to be high, they're less supportive of the conflict. This fits with a lot of the literature. But in terms of perceiving that they will pay a personal cost, that did not make people decrease their support for the conflict, which is confusing and interesting and something that we can come back to. The bottom line essentially from all of this is that this relationship between people's familiarity with the military, their policy preferences about use of the military, and the way that the military is drawn from society is significantly more complicated than we often think it is. So one final thing here on the US is this question of, we talked about a familiarity gap, but one of the other things that come out of this is this question of not just does the public know anyone in the military, but what do they think about the military in general? How much do they trust the military? Relative to other institutions in society and what does that mean for policy, not just in terms of use of force, but all sorts of policies about defense budgets and other national security and military policy? Right, so now we're getting to that third side of the triangle, the relationship between the public and the government with respect to the military. And as Jess said, one of the issues that in the United States has become really salient recently is this issue of how much the public trusts the military relative to other social institutions. What does that trust actually mean? What does it consist of? What does it mean to say I trust the military or I support the military? And what implications does that have for how well the public exercises oversight over the government? And so we've put up here, this is just a snapshot. We can tell you that trust in almost all institutions in almost all Western societies has been declining generally since the 1970s. So that's a broad trend, but in the United States as you can see trust in the military has actually trended up. There are only a few other professions and other institutions that have that trend. So for example, I think veterinarians, people trust veterinarians. They trust firefighters, but they do not trust, as you can see the church, they don't trust big business, they don't trust Congress, they don't trust policemen, they don't trust the Supreme Court anymore. So this is an issue that we frequently see in terms, couched in civil military relations terms, but we can also think of this as a real problem for just democratic governance in general, right? This decline in trust in institutions. And where the military aspect of this comes in is what happens when you have a society that doesn't trust anyone except the people who use force? We don't know what the answer to that is. We're a little worried that we're gonna find out at some point soon. This is just a bit more granularity like Lindsay was saying with some other professions and occupations. Right, yeah, so you can look at this while I'm talking. So one of the things that we have also begun to find, and this is a more recent trend, you are probably all aware of the growing partisan polarization of US American society. One of the things that we are finding is that that trust in the military statistic also differs by partisanship. So Democrats trust in the military tends to stay fairly steady. It's got a slight upward trend, but it's not a steep upward trend, but it stays fairly steady over time. Republicans trust in the military has a steep upward trend, but it tanks when the president is a Democrat. So this is an interesting and potentially troubling issue if you've got a significant divergence between parties in how much they trust the military, but considering that we still don't know what it means to trust the military, we're not super worried as yet. So what are some of the policy implications? The defense budget, this is one of the things Jess mentioned, right? Is the public able, is the public willing to exercise oversight over their members of Congress in terms of military budgeting? Does the public have any idea what kind of budget the military needs, how much is enough, et cetera, et cetera? We can talk a little bit about the national emergency, the declaration of national emergency and border wall funding. I think the salient civil military relations issue there is how interesting it is that the DOD is probably the only place that has enough money just sloshing around that the president can say, you know what, I think I'll take a bunch of that and use it for something else. And then finally, the government shutdowns. This most recent time, the Department of Defense was not directly affected because they had already had a funding bill passed, which is of course interesting. The one thing that Congress can manage to agree on is let's give the military money. And we're not implying that there's anything wrong with that. We're just implying that it's interesting that that's the only thing they can all agree on. In previous shutdowns however, that was not the case. There was not necessarily a DOD funding bill already in place. But then if you paid attention to the congressional debates, they frequently centered on we need to fix the shutdown because we have to make sure that the troops are taken care of. And again, neither of us is implying that the troops shouldn't be taken care of. What we do question is this assumption that only the troops matter and that nobody else should be taken care of, which is the implication when that's the only thing that the congressional debates focus on. So in a sense, we worry about the military being used as a sort of political prop, essentially, that it is a way to avoid debate on more difficult issues that they don't agree on. That if you just trot out the need to help the military, you can kind of paper over all of the things that they disagree on, which is a problem because in a democratic society, the way you're supposed to reach policy is by talking about what the policy should be and making hard choices and compromising and things like that. And we see this on a range of other issues too. I mean, everything from food stamps, right, when there are discussions about sort of food assistance, often we'll come back to how does it affect the troops, similarly even with some of back during, if you remember, some of Michelle Obama's efforts towards obesity or fighting childhood obesity, right? Again, this often- Against obesity, not towards it. Yes, not for obesity, but that this gets framed in terms of what about military readiness, right? That we should care about this because it means that children aren't able to join the military, right? That this whole range of policies that ostensibly have nothing to do with the military get funneled back to what does it mean for the troops? Right. Or even ones that do have something to do with the military but they also matter for other people and the debate always comes back to how does this matter for the military? And that's kind of where all the concern is put. So we just wanted to put up a couple more examples of how this trust issue might affect policy. So we said outward facing the troops in Syria. If you've seen General Votel was just quoted in what a CNN interview, which is a question in and of itself, like why did General Votel agree to do a CNN interview? That just doesn't seem like a really good idea. It's gone so well in the past for other commanders. Yeah. But he did, he agreed to do this interview and in the interview he said, I was not asked what my advice was on the Syria thing. I would not have given the president the advice to do what he's doing and I think it's a really bad idea. How is this gonna play in the public? You've got a fairly respected general who has no partisan past, certainly doesn't seem like a partisan and he's out there criticizing the president's policy saying that he wasn't consulted. This is one of those things where we wonder how that will affect both public opinion and trust in the military and feelings about the military. And then you've got internally facing policies like the integration of women into formerly closed combat specialties, whether or not transgender people can serve, but also a lot of other things like just BRAC, the base realignment and enclosure, which is still a thing after all of these years, the issue of whether we can close down missile silos in rural Midwestern states because we don't actually need them or anything but those members of Congress don't want those to leave their states because that means a lot of influence lost for them, right? So there are all kinds of ways in which the status of the military and the policy preferences of the military interact even if the military were really a completely non-political, completely non-partisan body of people who were fully professional and focused only on doing their jobs. Even if that were the case, it would still interact with domestic politics in ways that we think are interesting and important to look at. And so unless you have anything else to add, we will stop there. Actually on time for one. So we know we've thrown a lot at you on a range of different topics and we are happy to take any of your questions about these issues or any others that come to mind. Doctors, I have a question on making sure the military gets paid. Is this because Congress wants to be sure that we're safe and secure? Or is it because Congress wants to protect themselves from actually not doing a job that they're paid to do from the top on down? So it's more of a self-preservation of their political beliefs, more than interest in the country. Because right now, honestly, if I had a B-52 with 30 megatons, I would drop it on DC. That's how mad I am. Anyway, do you have a book on this? I'd love to read it. There are lots of books that we can recommend. I mean, I think the first answer is yes, they care about both, right? That we have reason to believe both that they legitimately, there are reasons, as Lindsay said at the beginning, in the control section to want to pay your military. That's generally a good idea, both for maintaining control of the military and for making sure that the military has the resources to do what it needs to protect you. At the same time, it seems very likely that elected officials are also concerned about the politics and the optics of what happens if you are seen to not support the troops and also understand that this is a leverage point, particularly across parties, right? To Lindsay's point, this is sort of the one thing that the parties can agree on, is that the troops should be paid, and therefore that's sort of an easy place to go to try to solve this problem instead of actually digging into some of the more actually divisive issues. Yeah, and just to, I agree with all of that, just to get at your sort of specific dig about are they trying to avoid doing their jobs? I mean, I think most public servants do want to do their jobs, but they have a whole list of things they want, and doing their jobs is just one of those things, and sometimes it gets eclipsed by the other things that they want. And in this particular case, I think a lot of the members of Congress, if they can manage to agree on a DOD funding and just do continuing resolutions for everything else, then they are to a certain extent avoiding doing what they need to do, which is making the hard choices that we talked about. But I think Jess is right. I think the funding the DOD is low-hanging fruit. It's the easiest thing for them all to agree on. It makes them look good. It pushes off problems to another day. And it means that the military has, at least the budget that it needs to do its things. Can you hear me? Yeah. At what point do you think our military might decide to take matters into their own hands where you kick your military off and they decide they want to be the government? Absolutely. And to me, again, from my ignorant viewpoint is that they're not getting the leadership from the president or Congress they need. This has got to be a real sore point with them. At what point does a commander, a theater commander say to the president, go away, let me do my job? This is a question that we talk about in U.S. civil military relations. And I think that that phrasing of it is more the one that we tend to focus on when we're looking at U.S. civil military relations. Generally speaking, we don't spend a lot of time concerned about an outright coup in the United States. If anybody reads The Onion, they did a piece a couple years ago about Marty Dempsey talking about how easy it would be for him to conduct a coup and in the United States, it's funny and it's in The Onion and it's satire because no one is really concerned that this is gonna happen. Where we do focus is on the ways that the military can influence policy short of something like a coup either through their sort of attempts to extract resources in the form of the budget, saying things like, well, we can't possibly follow the sequestration guidelines because that would just be inadvisable and unsafe and we can't do it so you have to give us more money whether it's pushing back on the president's policies either in the form of giving a public interview or leaking documents to the press that might let the public know what the internal deliberations were. Those sorts of more nuanced ways of influencing policy are usually what we are sort of looking for more in the US case. Yeah, we have other examples of that so most recently we have at least reporting and I don't know the truth of this or not but we have certainly reporting that Secretary Mattis was on the phone with the president and the president was saying we should just bomb a whole bunch of people in Syria and Secretary Mattis sort of nodded and said, aha, aha, and then hung up the phone and turned to an aide and said, we're not doing any of that. So, you know, we definitely, right? And this is a particularly interesting case, right? We didn't go into the whole because most of them are not there anymore issue of active and retired officers serving in senior administration positions but this is one where Mattis is really interesting because the way we would think about a purely civilian Secretary of Defense doing exactly that, basically ignoring the president's guidance, I think a lot of people would think about that differently than they think about someone that the president still called General Mattis doing the same thing and it all goes back to the slides Lizzie was showing about how the public's confidence in the military is so much higher than their trust in other parts of the government. So, I think just to wrap up, you point out the lack of leadership, the lack of trust from the military to the government. I think that's a really significant problem. I think governments, as in that triangle slide, the government has a responsibility to provide leadership. The government has a responsibility to make good policy. But as we also said, it's not the military's job to make that judgment. It's the people's job to make that judgment. And so, while I'm not an absolutist, I do think that there are exceptions. There are extreme circumstances under which you cannot expect moral agents to go ahead and do what they're being told if it's really, really horrible. But in general, I think we would hope that the military's response to poor leadership would be to try to help lead from below, right? And I don't mean lead from below by going and doing what they want, but to try to help the leadership develop better policy. And I mean, you can only do so much of that. It depends on how much they're willing to absorb in terms of advice. But I think we're already seeing some of the milder forms of what you're worried about, and that's not surprising. Other questions? Dave? Drs, thank you very much. Lieutenant Colonel Jackson Dome, Marine Corps, senior class. The question I had was, you had on the triangulation public government and the military. And certainly it can be argued that there is a mutual respect between the civilian, the public side, and the military side, because we're a voluntary force and we come from the public. So there's a level of trust there inherent to that origination of where the military derives from. But I can see there that there's transparency, there's oversight coming from both sides, primarily what you said was the population oversight on the government, on the extension of the military and how they use the military through policy. But with the lack of overt transparency coming from the government, I would think that that would be the decrease in trust from the population to the government. But what would you forecast as seeing that continual decrease in overt transparency from the government, then bleeding over to the trust going to the military directly because of the link from us to the government? That's a really good question. I would point out what we've got up here is the ideal, right? So our study is both descriptive in the sense that we want to know what these relationships actually look like, but also normative in that we want to think about how they should look. And so this is how they should look. This doesn't necessarily describe how they actually look right now. But to get to your point, so if the transparency from the government goes down, will that affect the population's support for and trust in the military? I think that to use the most quintessential academic answer there is, that depends. But I think that, I think you're kind of seeing why that depends. So my example of General Votel, right? In the United States, we currently have a military that feels quite comfortable talking to the press, which I think in many ways is a good thing, right? But it can have its downsides. But one of the things that that might do is maintain the trust relationship between the public and the military even while the government's transparency is going down. Because if the public has a direct link to the military through the press, then you still have that relationship. I think if what you see is both a lowering of government transparency and a government retraction of the military away from the press, for example, like if the government started putting restrictions on that, that might be good in some ways, right? Like I don't think either of us thinks General Votel made a good decision in talking to CNN about that stuff. But it might have the effect that you're worried about that that would reduce the sort of feeling of mutual understanding, mutual trust between the troops and the population. And I think the press plays a really interesting role here that is often neglected. One of the arguments that you'll hear frequently is this idea that sort of military officers have an obligation to go to the public to provide transparency when the government isn't doing it, where a number of civ mill scholars would argue that's not their job. It's not their job to hold the government accountable. It's the public's job to hold the government accountable. The question then, of course, is how does the public do that if they don't know what's going on? And in the idealistic answer is that in the US system, the Constitution has enshrined the role of the press as the actor that is supposed to ensure that the public can do that, right? That that's the press's role. Now, of course, frequently the press gets their information from leaks inside the government. But we also, back to this trust question, potentially have a significant problem in that respect. If you see the news media is down there, that the news media is trusted significantly less to act in the public interest than, say, the military. And so this gets back to the idea of trust in these various aspects of our democratic institutions potentially being out of whack in ways that create issues for these oversight relationships. And that also, as you might guess, has a partisan dimension to it, right? And that, again, there's nothing wrong with having parties. Most democratic societies have parties, and they serve a really important function. But when you start getting to the point where parties are so far apart that they cannot talk to each other, that they cannot sort of come to any mutual agreement or common ground, then you start having problems. And so as you see a partisan divide on trust in the military, trust in the news media, you might start having disconnects that are really hard to fix. Thank you. I saw that you had a lot of information about the familiarity gap between the public and the military, and I was wondering if there was anything similar between the military and the government. Ah, well. There happens to be a book. There is a book. We should make a slide with all the books. We should. There was a big study done on this back in the late 1990s, a big survey study done from which we have a fair amount of data. And then there was more recently a follow-up survey done in, I think the survey was done in 2014, and the book was published in 2016. Edited by Jim Mattis and Corey Shachie, called Warriors and Citizens or something like that, yeah. So there is survey data on this, and it turns out that, so one of the criticisms that you'll frequently hear is that, well, Congress doesn't do right by the military in whatever form, because none of their children have to serve. None of their children have to be in harm's way. It turns out that data-wise, members of the political elite are actually more likely to have a family member who has served, a close family member, a direct family member who has served in the military than not. The percentage of veterans in Congress is still significantly higher than the percentage of, oh, hey, look at that. I got you back. The percentage of veterans in Congress is still significantly higher than the percentage of veterans in the general population. It's disproportionately high. And as you might expect, also one thing that we really haven't talked about is the difference between the officer core and the enlisted core, right? Officers in this country tend to look an awful lot like the political elite, right? They tend to, well, they all have bachelor's degrees for one thing, so they tend to be among the sort of 33-ish percent of the US population, adult population, with a bachelor's degree. They are more likely to be white. They are more likely to be middle class or upper middle class, right? The enlisted ranks tend to be much more diverse, both politically and socioeconomically and all of that. But in terms of familiarity gap between sort of the military and the political leadership, it's actually smaller than the familiarity gap between the military and the general public. And just to that, there's one more point too that I glossed over in talking about the familiarity gap to begin with that's relevant both to the public military gap and a potential military government gap is that when we're looking at any of these gaps, there's a tendency to sort of assume that there's a causal relationship there, right? That the gap exists because something about being in the military or familiar with the military makes people different. The alternative, of course, is what we would call a selection argument, which is basically the idea that these people were already different, which is what led some of them to join the military and others to not join the military. And those would sort of manifest the same in data, right? You would see the same gaps, but would be caused by fundamentally different processes which might make us care about them for very different reasons. And unfortunately, because they look the same and a lot of the data, it's really hard to tell them apart. But we're starting to be able to do that and what we're finding is that on a lot of these dimensions, particularly some of the things we showed around things like patriotism and views about the military, the gap seems to be less of a civil military one than it is based on party and a few other demographic items that basically Republicans in the military on a number of these issues have the same views as Republicans outside the military. It's just that particularly within the officer corps, the balance has shifted more towards Republicans. So if you survey the officer corps as a whole, they look more like Republicans than like Democrats, even though individually, it doesn't seem like the military service is what's driving those views. Yeah, just to add to that a little bit, there is a good amount of evidence at this point that most of what we see manifesting as civil military differences are from selection effects, not socialization effects, right? Not change once you're in the military or change from familiarity with the military. So that's actually really important and has important implications for if we're worried about any of these gaps. That implies that what you really need to do is start being way less efficient with your recruiting. You need to start recruiting people who are more expensive and harder to recruit because they're different, right? If you worry about this gap. Now, we haven't necessarily established that any of these gaps are really that big of a deal, especially because a lot of them are not in fact civil military gaps, as Jess pointed out. A lot of these gaps don't come from the fact that if you're in the military, you start to think like this. A lot of these gaps come from other issues in society that are just manifesting because certain people are more likely to join the military than others. How do you feel the military offering large benefits like enlistment bonuses and free healthcare affect the public trust in the military? Ooh, I was not expecting that twist at the end of that question. You may have stumped our benefits expert momentarily. So this is what I study. I think that I honestly have never thought about the question of whether the fact that the military gets these benefits affects public trust in the military. I do think that we have a fair amount of that, so I'm gonna answer the question I wanted you to ask. I do think we have a fair amount of evidence, though, that the public is very satisfied with the idea that the military gets these benefits. The public thinks that it's absolutely right and appropriate for the military to get these benefits, which is the thing that would matter for trust. If the public thought that it would, there are two possibilities. Either one, the public didn't know. The public thought that you all got exactly the same things they got, and if they found out that you got better stuff, then they'd be really upset. I don't think there's any evidence that that's happening. The other possibility is if they did know and they really resented it, that would decrease public trust, I think, because they would feel like, hey, why are these people getting all of these things? I don't get any of these things. We don't see any evidence of that. What we do see is a public that thinks that the military ought to get healthcare. They ought to get retirement, right? They ought to get paid vacation. They ought to get all of these things because the job that they do is very difficult, very demanding, very risky in some cases, right? So in a roundabout way, I think what you see is that the public believes that these are merited benefits and bonuses and therefore they don't really have a problem and it doesn't affect the way they feel about the military. Do you wanna ask it again? What? What you didn't wanna ask. Good evening, Lieutenant Commander Garcia. I'm in the War College here with some of my classmates. My question is, to the extent that we likely agree that the military should be a microcosm of the greater society, how, you know, if we can agree to that, does that affect trust at all? You showed some good stats up there on the demographics of the trust in the military, but it didn't in my mind necessarily speak to, you know, why people, why those individual demographics, whether it be age specifically or any others that you have up there, why the military? Is it because of the job? It's not because we wear some uniform. What is it that, and if there's any research that you've done or anybody else has done, why is it that the military is higher? So are you asking, I'm sorry, are you asking what causes the public's high trust in the military? Yes, yeah. I probably could have done that in a way fewer words, but. But you also threw out like three different interesting questions that I also wanna answer, so. But the, I mean, the short answer to that, I think, is we wish we knew, and there are a number of people who are working on studies right now to try to figure that out. One particular question that's being asked is sort of what is the connection between confidence and perceptions of competence? Anybody who's in sort of like the management leadership type literature probably knows this idea, right, that if you trust someone, it's usually because you believe that they're competent and that they have good intentions, right? So those are kind of the two dimensions that you can look at. So one that we can look at is competence, which brings up sort of an interesting question of at a time when most of the conflicts that the military has been involved in have not been ones that are sort of clear decisive winds of a World War II or even Desert Storm style, right? You could predict that that would decrease confidence because the perceived competence is not there, right, to go get the job done. We don't see that happening, right? If you go back to this, this ends in 2011, right? But you see that it still stays pretty high even once we're, even on an upward trend since 2003, which is great. So there are some people who are looking at that. Again, here the question is, do you trust them to act in the public interest, which seems to be getting more of the intent question, right? Of do you believe that these individuals have kind of the public's best interest at heart? So it appears that the public does believe that. We don't really know why, and we particularly don't know why the public believes that of the military compared to a lot of other occupations that effectively serve the public in other ways. Yeah, I would, we don't know. We have lots of theories. One theory is that the public narrative about the military since Desert Storm, there was a concerted effort to change the narrative away from what it had been post Vietnam, right? So there was a concerted effort to change that narrative into, regardless of what the government's policy is, we're gonna support the troops, they don't have a choice, they signed up to serve the public and that's what they're doing and they're sacrificing a lot to do that. So this narrative of sacrifice, of public service, of heroics, of sort of nobility, I think that that has a lot to do with it, but we don't have evidence that that's what's driving it. And just quickly to the point about representation, we do, we have a million more slides that I could go through that I will not, because we don't have time, about the sort of, is the military representative? Because one of the other strains of this familiarity gap argument is the idea that since the draft, the military has become less representative of society in terms of what it looks like, and that's just not true. That is completely, flatly not true. If you compare the all volunteer force to the draft era military, in most respects, it is more representative of society. But there's an interesting question there, right, that the sort of, can we agree that that's what we want? And based on some of the things we've talked about already, you can sort of think of three reasons you could argue that as what we want. One goes back to Lindsay's control argument, right, which is the idea that if you have a military that looks like the society it represents, it should have the same interests as the society it represents, and therefore you don't have to worry about them going off and trying to do things that you don't want them to do. This is kind of some of the citizen soldier argument, right, that if the warriors are just like everyone else, then they won't have separate interests of their own. Another would be an effectiveness argument, right, which is the idea that if you are systematically excluding groups of people from the military, you are missing out on talent that exists in those groups, right, that could be a part of the military. And so those are both sort of instrumental arguments, right, of we want the military to look like society because it helps us achieve these other benefits. There's a third, which is more sort of a normative democratic argument, which is that we want the military to look like society because it just should, right, that that's something we value as a democratic society, that we're providing these opportunities to people that the military looks like society, it just is in itself good. Yeah, and the good news is that it does. The All Volunteer Force is surprisingly representative in all of the ways that you think that it's not, right, so one of the things that you'll frequently hear is that the South is overrepresented. This is true, but it's only by about 3%, which is not a big deal, and nobody should really care. And it's been that way for a very long time. And it's been that way for a long time. This is the other thing, is that a lot of the things that people argue now, they make it sound like this is a new, scary thing when actually it's just been like that all along and it's never changed. Another one that people worry about is socioeconomic status. Oh, geography, go back, we can do. Yep. Yeah, the map one. Yeah, there we go. This is a nice one. So if you think the South is overrepresented, it might be because of this type of map, so this is 2002, but it hasn't changed much. That's the thing, this doesn't change over time very much. This is absolute numbers of recruits, right? So if you think, oh, I know the South is represented, every fourth officer I've ever met is from Georgia, right? That's because of this, it's because of absolute numbers. But in terms of proportion of the youth population, in terms of proportionality, it's actually pretty good. In fact, the highest proportions of people are coming from these very rural, scarcely populated Midwestern states in many cases. The socioeconomic status one is also really interesting. Do we have that slide? Is that this one? Yes. So this is splitting the population into five equal groups, right? So 20% of the population. And you can see the richest quintile is a little bit underrepresented. And this is looking at enlisted specifically. Yeah, so this is enlisted, because as we said, the officers are going to be upper middle class. The poorest quintile, so if they were perfectly representative, they'd each be at 20%, right? And you see that they are not each at 20%, but it's really not that bad, right? So when we worry about, and the one that's most underrepresented, as you can see, is the poorest quintile. And this gets back to one of the things just mentioned, which is obesity and other health issues, but also education issues. But the poorest quintile of this country's population has a lot of health issues. And many times they cannot pass the test required to get into the military. Next? Yeah, go for it. So when it comes to why the military is trusted more than the government, how much that is because you think that when the military messes up, the government's blamed. And then how much of it all can also be because of the fact that if the people can't trust the government, they have to feel like they have to trust something. So they're afraid to not trust anything besides the military, so. Both good theories, thank you. We'll use those. We'll look into that. Yes, I mean the question of who gets blamed is a really interesting one too, that goes to sort of a lot of questions around expertise. The students who have been in some of our classes around intelligence, right, are probably familiar with the phrase, what, there are only policy successes and intelligence failures. So that's one where we see the opposite dynamic, right, that if something goes wrong, the intelligence, it gets blamed. If it goes well, then it was a good policy. So it's an interesting question, right, of why in the case of military policy, it often seems to go the other way, right? And if it goes well, it's because our great military had a great success, where if it goes poorly, for example, Vietnam, then it's because those civilians interfered and ruined things, right? So it's, yeah, it's a very good theory and we. Except that we blamed the civilians in Vietnam and the military still had a bad reputation. So, not quite sure. I like the idea, though. I think we should definitely look into this, who gets blamed for what thing. But it goes back to what Jess was saying about the competence argument. And frankly, we just don't see a lot of evidence that competence, that a belief in competence is why people trust the military. They certainly believe the military is competent, but it doesn't seem to have any connection to actual performance. And just really interestingly, one of the more recent ones of these that came out that I didn't have time to get into a slide was looking at confidence in things and with partisan dimensions. And the one that could compete with the military and was particularly trusted among Democrats was Amazon. So, yeah, Amazon. So, I mean, there are these questions of sort of, if people don't trust the government, who or what do they trust and why? And that's a particularly kind of interesting and weird one because it seems to be one where competence is a big part of it. I can ask them for anything and they'll give it to me right away. And that people have a lot of interaction with where sometimes the familiarity gap argument is people trust the military because they don't know anything about it. If they actually knew how the military worked, they wouldn't trust it so much. But it's sort of off there on a pedestal so they trust it. So, yeah, there are a lot of really interesting dynamics who untangle and sort of buried in some of these graphs about who is trusted by whom and why. So, we just want you to worry about it. We don't actually have any answers. So, please join me in thanking Drs. Blankshane and Khan. I'd also like to thank Anne from the Fleet and Family Support Center. And as you leave the auditorium this evening, if you'd like to come out this way and grab some of their fantastic materials and say hi to her, that would be great. They're our co-sponsor. Can't do this without them. Thank you, Anne. And thanks everybody for coming tonight. Safe travels home.