Brittle and Brutal: An Avoidable 2024 Civil Military Relations Forecast

The historically high public confidence of the American public in the U.S. military has steadily dropped over the past few decades, trending toward the all-time lows of the 1970s and early 1980s. To help explain the dynamics of this trend, in his 2023 book, Thanks for Your Service, Dr. Peter Feaver provides a central finding that the military’s historically high approval numbers are brittle.

High public opinion of the military is propped up, influenced by feckless political partisanship and a flimsy social desirability bias, meaning approval for the military is currently the socially acceptable attitude to hold.