Assessing Differences in Civilian-Military National Security Beliefs

• In Event: Civil-Military Relations and US Foreign Policy

Abstract

Polling research on civilian-military relations suggests that the US public increasingly trusts the US military, over politicians, to make consequential foreign policy decisions. In turn, political leaders often exploit the public’s trust in the military by appointing ex-military officials to prominent public positions. Scholarly treatments of US civilian-military relations tend to focus on the political tensions between military commanders and civilian authorities that derive from different fundamental beliefs, including those about security policies and priorities. To date, however, there are no data-driven analyses of potential differences in how military officials and the civilian population view conflict. To explore this issue, we conducted a unique survey by drawing on a sample of approximately 500 active-duty US military commanders and a representative sample of the American public. The survey assessed beliefs about the likely nature of US national security in the next 10 years as well as the likelihood, cause, and nature of military conflict across multiple conflict domains (including nuclear, conventional, and cyber).

Our results reveal important differences between military leadership and the American public that stand to have significant implications for both the content and democratic nature of the ‘national interest’ driving US national security policy. First, there is a fundamental schism between civilian and military views on US national security over the next 10 years, with a majority of the public believing it will improve and a majority of military respondents believing that it either will not improve or will decline. Second, the US public and military officers tend to disagree on the scale and scope of the risk posed by nuclear weapons. While the public tends to believe nuclear conflict will result in high death and destruction from high yield weapons striking both population centers and military targets, military officials tend to assume that nuclear conflict will be a discrete exchange of low yield weapons on only military targets. Finally, relative to the public’s beliefs on cyberwar, military officials are more likely to believe that a major cyber attack on the US will be the result of deliberate, rational calculations by an adversary, rather than the result of inadvertent escalation or miscalculation. In concert, these results reflect differences in values and subjective judgment that stand in contrast to rising public trust in military institutions.

Authors

• Jeffrey D. Berejikian, University of Georgia

• Zachary Zwald, University of Houston