Warriors and Citizens: American Views of Our Military

by Jim Mattis

After two extensive polls and cross-disciplinary exploration, we are greatly relieved to say that the concern about the American public losing connection to its military was not substantiated by research conducted for this project.

Strong majorities of both the public and elites consider the American military one of the few remaining reliable means of economic advancement, especially for minorities and the poor.

support for the military is an easy social convention because it demands little from the broader populace.

The relationship is interactive: the less informed the public, the greater latitude governmental elites have to avoid electoral consequences for the material and human cost of strategic failure and the more likely public support is to be erratic and quickly eroded.

military leaders often try to leach the politics out of political decision making in order to better analyze problems and develop strategy; this can lead to “perfect” solutions impractical for consideration by elected officials whose portfolios are broader than the military mandate alone.

Does the public appreciate that values and practices in the military considered old-fashioned and even out of step with the broader society are considered by many in the military to be integral to their fighting functions in defense of that society?

diminishing loyalty to civilian leaders. We see little evidence of this in today’s American military, but serious people worry about commitment on the part of the military to upholding the principle that elected leaders have a “right to be wrong”

Civil-military relations in modern America are characterized more by paradox than by consistency: ordinary Americans support the military more than ever but know less about it than ever.

it is growing ever more difficult to clearly define the US military’s role and mission.

More than 75 percent of Americans over sixty have had a member of their immediate family serve in the military, compared to 40 percent of Americans under forty, and only 33 percent of Americans under thirty.[5]

only 19 percent of Americans said they had served themselves or had an immediate relative who served in the military after 1991, and only 15.6 percent had served or had an immediate relative serve after September 11, 2001

Half of all active-duty military personnel are now stationed in only five states: California, Texas, Virginia, North Carolina, and Georgia.[7] Partly as a consequence of these policies, over the last few decades the military has become more southern, less urban, and more politically conservative than American society as a whole.

Military families too must make substantial sacrifices: they are constantly uprooted, with consequent costs to friendships, children’s performance in school, and the ability of military spouses to build their own careers. War or no war, life in the military is full of difficulties and disruptions of a type born by few civilians with comparable education and income levels.

The Declaration of Independence tells us that all men have the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, but those who volunteer for military service effectively give up those rights. Once in the military, their lives belong to the nation.

rates of sexual assault and harassment do not appear to be higher in the military than in comparable civilian settings such as universities.[30]

Of the roughly 1.2 million active-duty service members stationed in the United States, 49 percent are stationed in only five states: California, Texas, Virginia, North Carolina, and Georgia.[40]

Arguably, this particular manifestation of a civilian-military gap is more a matter of perception than reality: though many civilians and military personnel perceive themselves as belonging to distinct and profoundly different communities, they are in fact more interconnected and less different than many might assume.[42]

“veterans are more reluctant about the use of force but favor fewer restrictions on its employment, whereas nonveterans are supportive of more wide-ranging use, but favor greater restrictions.”

they frequently talk past each other, using the same words to mean quite different things.

The mistrust and mutual ignorance that often characterizes relations between high-level civilian and military decision makers is another story: here, misunderstandings and mistrust lead to arbitrary decisions and can do genuine harm both to the military and to US interests.

As budget cuts cripple civilian agencies and programs, they lose their ability to perform as they once did, so we look to the military to pick up the slack, further expanding its role in both foreign and domestic activities. This requires still higher military budgets, which continues the devastating cycle.

Here’s the deep problem: we are no longer sure what a military is for. We do not know what we want our military to do and oscillate between asking it to do everything and demanding tighter but often quite arbitrary limits on its use.

In the wars of the coming decades, predicted the two Chinese officers, the “soldiers” will increasingly be computer hackers, financiers, terrorists, drug smugglers, and agents of private corporations, as well as members of organized state militaries. Their “weapons” will range from “airplanes, cannons, poison gas, bombs, [and] biochemical agents” to “computer viruses, net browsers, and financial derivative tools.” Warfare, wrote Qiao and Wang, will soon “transcend all boundaries and limits. . . . [T]he battlefield will be everywhere . . . [and] all the boundaries lying between the two worlds of war and non-war, of military and non-military, will be totally destroyed.”

when you wage war against a nameless, stateless, formless enemy—an enemy with goals as protean as its methods—how can that war ever end? The US government has also made it clear that it views cyber threats primarily through the lens of “war.”

Here’s the final paradox: the US military is today more professionalized and better educated than ever before—certainly far more healthy than most other US government institutions—but at the same time, it is increasingly hamstrung by its own organizational rigidities.

Today’s military urgently needs to experiment with similar flexible programs, both to bring in outside talent and to permit talented military personnel to gain new skills in the civilian world and then return without career penalties. Similarly, the nature of military evaluations and promotions boards makes officers only as good as their last evaluation report; a zero-defect culture discourages risk taking and pushes out many talented officers.

When rigid bureaucracy drives out many talented people, you are left mainly with people who are not bothered by rigid bureaucracy—but these may not be the right people to lead the military through uncharted waters.

This raises an interesting paradox: the leaders recognized and selected by the Army to serve at strategic levels—where uncertainty and complexity are the greatest—tend to have lower levels of one of the attributes most related to success at strategic level.”[67]

dissent is not the same as disobedience.

Officers are obligated to offer this advice forcefully, but this does not mean they have the right to insist that their advice be followed. History shows that the military is not always right, even regarding strictly military affairs. Moreover, officers are not elected, whereas political leaders who are have legitimacy in making trade-offs for society. Nonetheless, dissent is not disobedience: there must be a “calculus of dissent.”[27]

a profession must provide a set of alternatives beyond either “loyalty” or “exit.”

There is no danger of anything approaching a military coup in the United States, and many of the concerns that commentators raised beginning in the 1990s were not so much indications of a crisis in civil-military relations as they were manifestations of the reality that the civil-military bargain in America is frequently renegotiated.

Despite the fact that Congress itself strengthened the hand of the executive by passing the Goldwater-Nichols Act, the military has the right to make its case to the legislative branch and it no doubt will, very strongly.

Examples of healthy US civil-military relations include Lincoln and Grant during the Civil War, Franklin Roosevelt and George Marshall during World War II, and the tenure of Robert Gates during the last part of the George W. Bush administration.

On the one hand, the military must have a voice in strategy making, while realizing that politics permeates the conduct of war and that civilians have the final say, not only concerning the goals of the war but also how it is conducted. On the other hand, civilians must understand that to implement effective policy and strategy requires the proper military instrument and therefore must insist that soldiers present their views frankly and forcefully throughout the strategy-making and implementation process.

His argument was that, if Americans were unhappy about half of their wealth belonging to only one percent, should they not also feel that it is unfair for the entire defense burden to rest on only one percent of the people?

because of the levels of public trust in the military, both parties have an incentive to use military officers as policy salesmen, further undermining the norm of an apolitical military.

First, institutions of professional military education (PME) need to place renewed emphasis on professional norms of civil-military relations and, in particular, to reestablish the norm that military officers ought not to act as, or even appear to be, partisan figures.

Second, scholars, journalists, and the public must call out both politicians who hide behind military officers and retired officers who use the public’s respect of those in uniform to weigh in on partisan debates.

Third, it is important not to exacerbate the otherwise natural tendency for the military to draw heavily from certain regions and demographics.

there is very little evidence in the scholarly literature to indicate that having any form of conscription makes a country less likely to use its military forces.

the expense of such a solution—even were it deemed constitutional—would be astronomical. The US military currently accesses a little over 250,000 people per year (including all active, reserve, and National Guard components); the cohort in the United States reaching age 18 every year is more than 4 million.[36] Even assuming that large numbers would be disqualified on grounds of conscience or disability, that is still millions of people who would have to be clothed, fed, housed, trained, and paid some kind of stipend every year.

there is a causal relationship between people’s worry about terrorism and their support for strong measures against it; that is, the pessimism people feel about policy outcomes is causing the support for strong action.

mixed feelings are often a sign of good thinking.

The Snowden revelations came long after the fear associated with 9/11 had faded, so people looked at aggressive government surveillance programs and saw them as a threat. By contrast, after ISIS reared its head, people’s sense of the threat from government receded as they looked to the military to conduct operations against a force of particular barbarity.

the public is ill positioned to develop solid, stable, or even internally consistent views of how the military and the intelligence community might reasonably be used in a complex conflict that integrates elements of traditional warfare with elements we traditionally associate more with law enforcement and justice.

When asked whether the military is isolated from American society, respondents are split, with 33 percent answering yes, and a plurality of 46 percent saying no (21 percent were unsure) (CM2T 23). When asked whether a “military that is isolated from American society [is] a good thing or a bad thing,” 60 percent say that it is bad (CM2T 24).

the estrangement is an alienation of civilians from military life—one that creates an asymmetric mutual understanding

The combination of ignorance and admiration sustains a public willingness to rush into conflicts and then pressure politicians to end them quickly.

The making of strategy in wartime requires of leaders clear thinking, detailed and historical knowledge of the situation, clear objectives, and a willingness to commit and sustain the military, political, and economic resources required to overcome enemies and achieve successful outcomes.