 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. Americans are known to love their military. You've probably heard it said that the U.S. military is the most respected, the most trusted institution in the country. And in fact, public opinion polls show that that's true. For more than 20 years, the U.S. military has been the number one institution in terms of the confidence and trust that it generates in the American public. President Obama, in fact, even said in his farewell address to the military that keeping that up that esteem had been one of his greatest accomplishments as president, and he charged the military with what he called the great responsibility of maintaining that into the future. Well, the military certainly appreciates having that respect. An interesting question is, why does it receive it? Why exactly does the public find the military so much more trustworthy, so much more deserving of respect than other major institutions, and especially given that the public thinks that the recent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have gone fairly poorly, why do they think the military deserves more confidence than ever if we've lost the recent wars that we've been in? I'm David Burbach, and this is NWC Talks, Trust in the U.S. Military. Today we'll be talking about some of the reasons why the public expresses so much trust in the military and reasons why there might be concern for that confidence eroding in the future. Before we talk about today and the future, though, it's worth stepping back for a few minutes and looking at trust in the U.S. military in a historical perspective. Public opinion pollsters have been asking about confidence in major institutions since the mid-1960s, and back then the U.S. military certainly had a lot of respect from the U.S., but so did other major institutions. The military scored in the same ballpark as the medical establishment, major corporations, higher educational institutions. There wasn't anything terribly special. From the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s, things were pretty tumultuous in America. We had the loss in Vietnam, the Watergate scandal that forced a president to resign, all sorts of civil unrest, and in those years confidence fell in most major institutions, and the military fell especially far. So that by 1975, the military was actually less trusted than journalists, which may seem surprising from today's perspective. But after the 1970s, the military climbed back up. By 2010, the military stood head and shoulders above any other institution. Universities are respected about the same now as they were in the 1970s. The public has continued to lose faith in business, in politics. Congress is now the lowest ranked major institution in the country, while the military has climbed higher than ever. Now, why is that? I'm going to suggest that there are four main reasons why that's true. Performance, in the sense of, is the military winning the battles? Is it accomplishing the missions that it sets out to do on behalf of the country? Professionalism, does the military display discipline and order and efficiency, what we expect of a professional military force? An expression of patriotism? Citizens rallying around the military, especially in an era when so few people are willing to serve. And unfortunately, also political partisanship. Politics is part of almost everything in America today, and the public's relationship with the military is no exception. Now, the conventional explanation for why the military has gained in trust over the last few decades is, as Duke University professor Peter Fever put it, that it has been successful at what it does. It's a pretty simple story. The military lost in Vietnam and that hurt confidence in it. It then won a bunch of wars in the 1980s, 1990s, and that's what established public trust. You can certainly see that from the 1960s to the 1980s, as the war in Vietnam went badly, eventually in the difficult fall of Saigon and the evacuation of American troops, the American public's trust went down considerably. But in the 1980s and 1990s, there was a series of successful, rapid, low-casuality interventions. You might think about the Grenada intervention in 1983, Panama in 1989. The 1991 Gulf War was really a watershed. President Bush said that we kicked the Vietnam syndrome in that war, and I think he was right. The American public saw that it actually was possible to win wars, win them fast, win them at low cost, and that seemed to make a real difference in bringing up those confidence numbers once again. And then you can imagine that culminating in the fall of Baghdad in 2003, Saddam Hussein's statue being pulled down after just a few weeks needed to invade and occupy the country. But then after that, things haven't gone so well. The occupation of Iraq, the occupation of Afghanistan, the fight against terrorism around the world, there's been a lot of disappointment. The American public, in fact, within just a couple of years after the fall of Baghdad, said that they believed that the invasion had been a mistake, that they would prefer the U.S. withdrawal, and a majority of the public said that they thought the war was going badly. Certainly worse than they expected it to go ahead of time. Now, given that, you might expect, if the U.S. military's winning streak had come to an end, public confidence might drop. But instead, as you can see with the data that you've got on front of you right now, that public opinion actually showed even more confidence in the military in the post-Iraq period than it did in the 1980s and 1990s. So the notion that confidence has to do with a win-loss record, if you will, that it's performance in battle, that just seems hard to square with the disappointment that Americans have felt in the actual outcomes of those wars. Well, I think part of what's going on is that, even though we may not have achieved the strategic aims that we sought to achieve in those countries, the military has still looked very professional, maintained discipline, maintained efficiency. It has looked like a solid fighting force, even if we haven't got all the outcomes that we had hoped to achieve. That's a big contrast to the 1970s. If you look back at the end of the Vietnam War, it wasn't just that America was losing the war. It looked like the U.S. military was falling apart. It was an era of many troops had problems with drug abuse. There were stories from Vietnam of troops killing their own officers, fragging, it was called. Race riots not only in Vietnam, but it bases in the U.S. or in Europe. There was a mutiny on the carrier Kitty Hawk, essentially, incidents of sabotage on other Navy ships. Things got so bad that in 1971, President Richard Nixon at the West Point graduation told the cadets that discipline, integrity, patriotism are no longer things you can take for granted in the U.S. Army. Now, that's pretty astonishing from our perspective that a president would tell the West Point cadets, you can't count on discipline or patriotism. You might face drug abuse and insubordination, but that's where we stood. Well, since then, things got much better in the U.S. military. Throughout the 1980s, we put a lot of focus on rooting out drug abuse, on building morale, on creating an all-volunteer military that was proud to serve with discipline and effectiveness, very high-skilled. And despite the disappointments in Iraq and Afghanistan, that's largely held up. There have been very few problems with drug abuse, with, you know, mutinies are an unheard of thing. So even though there has been stress on the force, and certainly I don't mean to minimize problems with post-traumatic stress or suicides or anything else, compared to what the military looked like in the 1970s after Vietnam, we've really held together as a fighting force today. And I think the public recognizes that. Well, another difference between today and the 1970s is that the draft, the military draft, is long past. We have four generations now, had an all-volunteer force. And I think that matters in the sense that people recognize that very few Americans serve. Most people and many people, in fact, report they don't even know anyone who has served in the military. But when confronted within a survey that asks, do you feel confident in the military, it's very easy to say, yes, I do. I appreciate their service. I'm glad that they're doing that for me. And in the same way that people will say, thank you for your service in an almost automatic way, there's evidence that people respond to survey questions in a socially accepted way. Try and imagine telling a large group of people, I do not support the troops. It would be like announcing, I hate puppies. I mean, you just wouldn't do it. So the survey numbers that find so much trust and confidence may also be from due to what sociologist Charles Moscoe is called patriotism light. That in an era of in a time of war without a draft, people feel some gratitude, they feel some guilt. And so they do easy things, non-costly things to express support. And as evidence of that, the other professions that also show similar levels of respect to military officers include nurses, firefighters, even veterinarians, people who are seen as doing tremendously important social tasks that are very difficult for not a whole lot of reward with a lot of self sacrifice and that sense of gratitude, you know, for service, I think is part of why we see those numbers so high, as opposed to the draft era where people could feel if anything angry that they were forced to serve in a war that in many cases they didn't think was necessary. So the military with those confidence numbers, you know, the military needs just because the public trusts the military doesn't mean they always agree with the military. Even though the public says they trust the military leadership, the public has been pretty willing to disagree on issues such as allowing women into combat jobs, allowing gays and lesbians to serve openly. The number of American youth who are interested in serving in the military has actually declined steadily since the 1980s. Confidence is up, but the number of youth who want to serve and the number of their parents who would encourage them to serve has all been trending down. So the public trusts the military more than ever. So long as somebody else is serving in it. Well, the final aspect to think about is politics, partisanship, as I would call it. And we have seen over the years that if you go back to the 1960s and 70s, there actually wasn't much difference between Democrats, Republicans, independence, and how they thought about the military. Republicans have historically shown higher levels of confidence and trust than Democrats. But until recently that gap was pretty small, but two things have become apparent in recent decades. First, the gap between Republicans and Democrats has increased and Republicans increasingly seem to identify with the military in a very deep way. And the military itself has become more Republican in terms of the composition of the beliefs of the people in the force. There's also been an effect where confidence in the military is partly confidence in the commander in chief, the president. We see both parties showing evidence that when the president is of their own party, people who are of that political affiliation trust the military more. For example, during the during the Iraq era, from 2008 to 2009, the transition from George W. Bush to Barack Obama in just one year, confidence in the military among Democrats went up 10 points. And among Republicans went down several points that transition. When President Obama went out of office and Donald Trump came in, Republican confidence skyrocketed. And Republicans today express more confidence than they ever have in the U.S. military, while Democrats showed no real change. They were not particularly impressed by Donald Trump coming into office. So to some extent, confidence tells us not just do you feel good about the military, but do you do you approve of the military's boss of the president? That's that can be considered unfortunate in a way because we would like to think that the relationship between the public and the military is driven by objective factors. Is the military successful, professional? Are they serving the national interest? But politics does seem to matter increasingly. And that's true for so many other things in society. People now will rate their how the economy is doing on the basis of political considerations. When the when the party in the White House changes, people's estimation of economic growth will change. Republicans suddenly thought the economy was terrific after Donald Trump's election. Or as a military example, with the fight against ISIS, all through 2016, Republicans were incredibly pessimistic and thought that the campaign against ISIS was going terribly, whereas Democrats were about 50 50 between on whether it was going well. Within just a few months of the 26 after the 2016 election, when Donald Trump took office, Republicans were suddenly incredibly confident and Democrats actually lost some faith. Now it's hard to them. It's almost like they weren't watching the same war. How could two different groups watch exactly the same military outcomes in Syria and Iraq and come to very different conclusions? Well, that's the political reality in which we live today. So what do we what do we take from this back in 2001? General Martin Dempsey went on to become chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said he wished he had a better sense of why the public had so much confidence in the US military, because if he knew, maybe he could avoid screwing it up. Well, now that we have a somewhat better sense, I think there are a couple of takeaways that we could offer the Dempsey successors about how they can think about that confidence and how they could avoid screwing it up. And the first point that I would suggest is winning isn't everything. And that's a good thing. There I know personally, many national security professionals who worried at the start of the Iraq war, that if we found ourselves in a protracted war with many casualties, the public might lose faith that after having gotten used to those very quick successful low casualty interventions in the 1980s and 1990s, maybe the public confidence was pretty ephemeral and would go away quickly if the military faced some real difficulties. And what we've seen is that as long as the military can internally keep itself together, look like a disciplined, efficient, high skilled fighting force, the public will stay with them. At the same time, I would suggest to today's military leaders, be careful how much you read into those confidence numbers. The public says that they trust the military tremendously, but when you get to specific questions of would you join the military? Do you want your tax dollars devoted to the military? Do you trust the military to handle specific problems like sexual assault? Or do you agree with the generals on letting women serve in combat jobs, serviced by gay and lesbians? We see the public often is willing to disagree. So the public may say that when you ask in general, the public will say they have a tremendous amount of trust, but one should not assume that that means that they will simply defer to whatever the military wants. The military has got to make its case and continue to earn that trust. My main concern, though, would be that the military is pulled further into politics. As we saw a moment ago, people consider their political orientation when deciding do they trust the military? Do they trust the commander in chief? And there's going to be increasing pressure for the military to become more of a political actor. We've already seen more endorsements from retired generals and admirals for political candidates. President Trump has called upon an unusual number of recently retired four-star generals to serve in his administration, including in roles that would be thought of as political, not just as military advisors, but, for example, General John Kelly is chief of staff where he was inherently doing political tasks on behalf of the president, as well as offering military advice. And we know that when the public begins to see an institution as political, confidence drops. The Supreme Court has lost a lot of trust over the last few decades. And as far as political scientists can tell, a big part of that is the perception that justices are increasingly making rulings not on legal analysis, but on their political preferences for their own political partisan interests. If the public sees the military that way, too, they're likely to become less trustful. And in fact, we have some recent survey data that shows that when the public sees a retired general endorse a political candidate, they actually then look back at the active duty force and see the active duty force as more political, even though retired generals or retired admirals are certainly, certainly legally and ethically, it's fine for them to endorse candidates, but it contributes to the image of the military as becoming more political. So while certainly, you know, military and retired military are, you know, ought to exercise their legal rights to be involved in American politics, I would suggest a note of caution for the military that probably the fastest way that they can lose their image as, you know, such a trustworthy protector of national interests would be to be seen as just another political actor. So what have we learned today? We know that the U.S. military inspires a tremendous amount of confidence and trust from the public out of a mix of professionalism, performance, patriotism and political partisanship. And as long as the force maintains its belief in in ethics and non partisanship, they hopefully they'll be able to maintain that relationship with the U.S. public. Thanks for watching today. I'm David Burbach, and this has been NWC talks, trust in the U.S. military.