BY RONALD R. KREBS, ROBERT RALSTON, AARON RAPPORT
U.S. citizens show deference to the armed forces regardless of their political persuasion. Their willingness to let the generals decide is a threat to the democratic tradition of civilian oversight.
In a Nov. 18 interview with Fox News, U.S. President Donald Trump rekindled his periodic feud with retired Adm. William McRaven, who designed the successful raid that killed Osama bin Laden in 2011 and who has been a prominent Trump critic. But this time, Trump went further than just accusing his longtime nemesis of partisanship—“a Hillary Clinton backer and an Obama backer.” Trump now seemed determined to undermine the highly decorated Navy SEAL’s professionalism by questioning his signature accomplishment: “Wouldn’t it have been nice if we got Osama bin Laden a lot sooner than that?” he said.
The renewed row is just another sign that Trump’s love affair with “the generals” may be coming to an end. In mid-October, in a 60 Minutes interview, he signaled that the secretary of defense, retired Gen. James Mattis, may be on his way out. Rumors continue to swirl of the imminent departure of White House chief of staff John Kelly, another retired general. But no one should be distracted by Trump’s ups and downs with the military’s top brass. This administration’s militarism runs much deeper and is far more dangerous. It has launched an assault on democratic norms of civil-military relations.
One could be forgiven for not having noticed. While some scholars, civilian defense officials, and military officers have wrung their hands and gnashed their teeth, the general reaction has been deafening silence. At one level, this is hardly surprising: The public is typically oblivious of the details of governance. But our research has discovered that, even if the public were aware, they would not share the anxieties of these elites, because deference to the military is widespread among all Americans.
The classic model of civil-military relations insists that civilians define the nation’s interests and goals, set the strategy, and decide when force will be used. Ultimately, it is civilians who have the right to be wrong. In exchange, civilians leave to military officers the matters over which they have expertise: fine-grained operational and tactical decisions.
This division of labor has been regarded as the ideal since Samuel Huntington wrote The Soldier and the State over six decades ago, and it has been drummed into generations of military officers ever since. When there is criticism of the traditional model, it calls not for less intervention by civilian officials but for more. Eliot Cohen—one of the nation’s most distinguished scholars of civil-military relations and, as a former George W. Bush administration official, no lefty—has made the case for civilian control even at the tactical level.
The Trump administration has not just loosened Obama administration fetters on military force; it has refashioned civil-military relations and undermined civilian oversight. Last year, Trump empowered Mattis to set troop levels in Afghanistan and elsewhere, and he gave commanders in war zones more freedom to launch raids and airstrikes without prior authorization. His then-chief strategist Steve Bannon justified these moves as “let[ting] the warfighters fight the war,” but critics warned that doing so could divorce the military’s battlefield operations from civilian-determined strategy. This past summer, Trump freed the military to launch cyberattacks without higher-level approval or interagency discussions.
The Trump administration’s willingness to dilute its own authority is puzzling—especially for a White House that has generally sought to vastly expand its authority relative to other power centers in the government. One explanation lies in its populist instincts and inclinations. We have long known that Americans hold very favorable views of the military and trust it more than they do other institutions. Past surveys have not established whether, and to what extent, Americans also believe that civilian leaders should defer to the judgment of their counterparts in uniform. Our research shows that deference to the military is so common among Americans as to be virtually a consensus position.
Between September 12 and 21, nearly 2,500 Americans completed a survey we disseminated via the Lucid platform. This sample was largely representative of the nation with respect to gender, age, education, race, income, Hispanic origin, state, and region.
We asked two related questions. The first sought to gauge respondents’ deference on strategic matters by asking them how strongly they agree or disagree with the following statement: “When considering the use of military force abroad, we should first and foremost trust the judgment of U.S. military leaders regarding whether to deploy U.S. forces.” The second emphasized more tactical decisions: “When considering the use of military force abroad, we should first and foremost trust the judgment of U.S. military leaders regarding how to use U.S. forces on the battlefield.” As we expected, respondents were more likely to disagree with the first statement than the second. But we were surprised by how small these differences were and by how high the overall rates of agreement were with both questions.
We found that nearly 70 percent of Americans agreed to some extent that the country should defer to the military on whether to use force (strategy), and just 17 percent disagreed to some extent (the rest were in the middle). Around 75 percent agreed to some extent that the country should defer to the military on how to use force (tactics), and just 11 percent disagreed to some extent. Overall, respondents who were deferential on questions of tactics were very likely to be deferential on questions of strategy: Respondents’ views were in agreement 71 percent of the time. These sky-high levels of deference suggest why the Trump administration’s military moves have met with little public outcry and why their critics have been greeted with silence. If the public knew about the administration’s approach, it would probably think the administration was righting a wrong.
Trump’s position seems designed to resonate with his base. According to our statistical analysis, with respect to both strategy and tactics, conservatives were more deferential to the military than liberals, older respondents were more deferential than younger ones, hawks were more deferential than doves, and men were more deferential than women. Wealthier respondents were also more deferential, as were veterans of the U.S. armed forces. In short, the respondents most likely to endorse deference to the military shared traits in common with the most likely Trump voter: male, more conservative, more Republican, older, not poor, military veteran.
Support for deference to the military was strikingly broad across all demographic and ideological groups. While 71 percent of self-identified Republicans (and Republican-leaning independents) endorsed strategic deference, so did 64 percent of self-identified Democrats (and Democratic-leaning independents). Merely 15 percent of Republicans rejected strategic deference, and only 18 percent of Democrats did. Some 70 percent of men endorsed strategic deference, but so did 65 percent of women. Around 75 percent of respondents over 60 supported strategic deference, but so did 60 percent of those under 30.
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