FALL 2022
Specific Sources of Trust in Generals: Individual-Level Trust in the U.S. Military
AUTHORS Max Margulies and Jessica Blankshain
In the 1970s, the combination of Vietnam and Watergate led to a crisis of confidence in U.S. governmental institutions, including the military. Within a few decades, the military had successfully regained public trust while other governmental institutions, by and large, had not. Will the fallout from the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan, and the prolonged conflicts of the post-9/11 era more broadly, similarly reduce public confidence in the military? There is some evidence that confidence is already eroding. Most often cited is a November 2021 survey conducted on behalf of the Ronald Reagan Institute that finds Americans’ confidence in many institutions, but especially the military, has fallen since 2018. Other surveys, like Gallup polls and the General Social Survey, also show a decline, though not as starkly.3
To understand where public confidence in the military is likely to head in the future, we need to understand what drives it. Who has trust in the military, and why? Answering these questions will also help us understand whether and why trust in the military matters. If trust in the military is consistently much higher in some segments of the population than in others, there is the risk of not only increasing polarization between these communities, but also that some will have a harder time making their voices heard in the policy-making process. This is particularly worrisome if trust is also associated with policy preferences. To that end, we must also examine the extent to which trust is related to specific military policies or democratic accountability. Do people with high trust in the military show more support for policies preferred by the military? And does their high trust translate to greater confidence in the use of military force abroad?
Scholarly investigations of Americans’ high trust in the military in the post–Cold War era identify five interrelated Ps as possible drivers of public trust in the military: performance, professionalism, persuasion, personal connection, and partisanship.4
The first two determinants—performance and professionalism—reflect rationalist explanations for public trust. In essence, the military earns public trust by demonstrating competence and character, and can lose trust through operational and ethical failures. Accordingly, we would expect to see public trust in the military vary in response to major events, such as battlefield victory or defeat, and highly publicized acts of heroism or scandal. Polling data from the Vietnam War era through the first Gulf War lend some support to this theory.5 Through the 1980s and 1990s, in particular, public trust was highly correlated with military performance, with a notable boost from the 1991 Gulf War.6 And yet, high trust remains despite two decades of U.S. military occupation in Afghanistan and Iraq that was “bloodier, slower, and less decisive than the American public had come to expect.”7
https://www.amacad.org/publication/specific-sources-trust-generals-individual-level-trust-us-military
