Confidence in U.S. Military Lowest in over Two Decades | Hacker News Reader

Confidence in U.S. Military Lowest in over Two Decades

news.gallup.com

A pretty vague question.

What does having a "great deal of confidence" in the U.S. military even mean.

I suspect most people were using their answer as a proxy for expressing the sentiment that they don't generally support state sanctioned violence. Which is the answer we want people to give, isn't it...?

It's also interesting to note that the current value is still higher than many previous years, yet the tone implies it's somehow unprecedented. Two decades is a comically short time period. Come back in two centuries, THEN we got an interesting trend!

The question is indeed vague.

It could very well be interpreted as the public's confidence in the ability of the government, through the use of the military, to safeguard America's interests both domestically (ie. Puerto Rico) and globally.

And how many respondants really are making the statement that the modern US military isnt the same as it was when they were part of it? Most who join the US military only do so for a few years. Cange happens. They then percieve the current state as untrustworthy as it no longer mirrors memories formed during their brief exposure years ago.

Basically is like feeling lack of respect but still agreeing to some extent when you get told USA was defeated by Talebans. Or arguing that it was "just" a draw down and retreat when half way into argument you realize that USA took 20 years and spent about 10T USD to replace Talebans with Talebans and the conversation switch to vs Russia. At that point you know Russians shovels will easily mangle even the best Seal Team 6 today...and you just no longer want to talk about USA military prowess. That is what it means "great deal of confidence". In some military circles in many countries I am privy to participate informally their social gathering, many jokes about USA military quite badly and offensively (alphabet, drag queen, Patriots on ground stopping incoming missiles, tiktoking soldiers, skin flakes off F35, Abrahms taken out by "nonfreedom fighters", dementia+pedophilic+bribery Commander-in-Chief, etc). It wasn't like that 20-30 years ago. Even during the fall of Saigon, I've not experienced the kind of lowdown disrespect of American forces compared today.

There are two parts of "confidence" one of which matters and one does not.

Am I confident that I can leave my brother-in-law with my bag of diamonds / daughters life / keys to my ferrari ?

Hell yes.

Am I confident I can get my brother in law to organise a pissup in a brewery. Not so much. But that is a teachable skill.

And the same goes for armies. Am I confident that I can trust the Marine corps / Swedish tank corps / British Navy with the military equivalent of my daughters life.

Hell yes. Because this is about something called honour, duty or service. It's hard to nail down, it takes generations to build and maintain.

Can I trust that the Russian army will not rape the citizens of Bakhmut ? unfortunately not. And the difference there is not about number of rounds fired or guns used. It's the twisted politics of a whole nation that is exposed at the point of battle.

The important metric is not want your army is capable of, it's what it will never do.

The other unfortunate metric is how confident you are that it will be “successful” when tasked with nation building or a successful transfer of power, both tasks which are inherently sociopolitical and are ill suited to a highly organized and disciplined organization specifically trained and equipped to kill people and break things.

Someday, politicians will understand that the army isn’t for creating peaceful societies. If we (the USA) is going to continue to count military adventurism among its tools, we need to develop a distinct, expeditionary organization whose primary tools are social and political in nature. Sort of a practical adjunct to diplomacy, but capable of functioning in conditions of extreme adversity. Idk how that even looks.

Or Maybe we should consider more carefully the end-state of military action. Or ???

I’m not one to say just let the tyrants have a monopoly on military adventurism, we see what that looks like in Ukraine and other places… but there may be situations that out involvement is either unnecessary or even counterproductive, and we need to get better at seeing those situations for what they will become.

It sounds like you’re proposing something akin to a hybrid of the Peace Corps with maybe the Foreign Service and perhaps a dash of the Public Health Service Corps.

Yeah, something like that. Basically a nation building corps of some kind. I mean if you’re going to be empire building you may as well get serious about it.

Or maybe just don’t.

Yes. And this is very similar to the (saner parts of) defund the police activism.

We need a body of law enforcement that can react to immediate violent threats of course. But much more of our societal ills are around badly managed mental health, where ability to defuse situations, find hospital beds and so on are necessary. The police in most western societies do this, to lesser and greater success in the same way that most firefighters today don't spend their time putting out fires but cutting bodies out of cars.

In my limited understanding, the financial and moral corruption of tyranny also corrupts their armies, day by day. Who is officially in charge, and their moral corruption, seeing what is needed for success will wear down even the best.

So we must make sure that what it takes to succeed in our armies or police is both moral and aligned to the goals of the organisation.

If you are not catching thieves but suppressing black workers you are not really a police force and it will show for generations. If you are an army that "extra judicial executes" mid level street thugs in Afghanistan you might start to think differently.

What we ask our services to do in our name must match what we see as moral - not because of some view of morality, but because the corrosive power of the dissonance can infect the whole organisation.

There is a scene in "Death of Stalin" where Marshal Zukhov smuggles some guns into the Kremlin to start the coup, and the glee with which the "real" soldiers hunt down the KGB / Internal Security soldiers is ... telling.

Agree 100% but I'd go a bit further. This, BTW is Thomas Barnett's idea of a "Sysadmin force" modeled on the British foreign service. It's totally unreasonable to expect a bunch of 20 year olds with guns who serve a one year tour and don't even speak the local language to entirely transform the culture of another country.

It's not at all clear to me that this is even doable in the expected timeframe with some other force. The problem is that the U.S. may go somewhere with one objective "Stop Al-Queda from planning terrorist attacks", but then after the invasion there are all of these other default goals that we just expect to be true when we leave, like "there should be centralized democratic power" and "girls should go to school", and "women should have equal rights", and "boys should not be used as sex slaves for local warlords."

Making these sorts of transformations of another society is extremely difficult and impossible when your people don't even speak the language, much less understand all of the nuances of the local culture, and even if we did, it would take decades.

The main thing that needs to change in U.S. foreign policy is to have explicit, achievable victory conditions that are better than the current situation. We cannot just say "we have to depose the evil dictator", go in, smash some stuff, and then just wing it from there. If we cannot even describe how we're going to get from the current situation to our desired, stable outcome, we should not get involved, or come up with a more limited goal.

We saw the very same things happen in Syria and Libya, except without a U.S. occupation force. In Syria, we didn't like Assad, but the problem was that all of the alternatives were either too weak to hold power (FSA), or even worse than Assad (ISIS, Al Nusra). In Libya, we didn't like Gaddafi, but there was no identifiable alternative, so after he was killed, the country basically just descended into chaos.

Confidence to protect US mainland from invasion? Confidence to protect American interests in the Middle East? Confidence to deter Russian and Chinese aggression? Confidence to protect international shipping routes? Confidence not to start a coup? Confidence to start a coup if it's necessary for moral reasons? Confidence to employ lots of Americans? Confidence to practice inclusivity and not have any major scandals about mistreatment of recruits? Confidence to spend budget wisely?

WTF is confidence in the US Military supposed to mean, and how is it a useful metric?

Everyone here's pretending like they don't understand that for a while the US military was a source of genuinely impressive technological innovations (RADAR, internet, etc).

Whereas nowadays, I'm mostly aware of military contractors selling planes to the military that don't fly... For prices that make me wonder how those companies didn't get sued to oblivion.

Do I have confidence that the military itself could defend the US? It's kind of a moot/meaningless point, but I think they probably would. Do I have confidence in the decisions they make or that those decisions are good for the US? No way José.

From a data perspective it's interesting that confidence reduces when a military isn't in an active war zone. But then again if you think about it, it makes perfect sense. I wouldn't know about an accidental breakage system or be confident in one unless I saw it being used in a scenario successfully. So it's more of a psychology thing rather than whether the military is actually reliable. Cause if anything the US military is still the best one in the world and will continue to be. But one can only be confident about this statement as long as it's in an active war zone. Sounds like Shrodingers thought experiment with a default as negative in this case.

it definitely screws with incentives. the success of a military or superpower is ultimately in deterrence, but lack of direct conflict makes people think less of or think the military is useless. its like people thinking their door locks are useless because they haven't observed someone trying to break in. or thinking a fire extinguisher is useless because they've never been in a fire and had to use it.

when social media, and media as a whole, fuels "america bad" rhetoric and with russian propaganda of "american imperialism" combined with no active conflicts where the US is threatened, its no surprise.

but I don't think its about people not supporting state-sanctioned violence, because many support US assistance to ukraine and other allies and understand the defensive nature of it.

likely it was just the incompetance of afghanistan and iraq occupation that messed people up. the gulf war was a massive success, at home and for kuwait (sans gulf war syndrome due to iraqi chemical weapons). when we are pushed into another conflict, OPTEMPO increases, we are united against a common enemy, confidence will increase.

You are overthinking it.

You put your self at risk when there is a major war for being anti-war since unbalanced people will label you as an enemy.

You know the "support our troops" mantra that kept the worthless wars in Iraq and Afghanistan going long after they had been lost.

"Support our Troops with Achievable goals, limited mission, quick homecoming"

the "support our troops" mantra was the Right's "bring them home now."

Ye sorry mixed them up.

There doesn't seem to be much pattern here, except that confidence shot up in the 9-11 response, another Spike happened in 2009 (Obama?) and is coming down to pre-9-11 levels right now; following a downwards trend that was present over the last two decades outside of those two spikes.

Maybe the headline should read "confidence in US military returns to normal levels"?

Part of a larger trend https://news.gallup.com/poll/508169/historically-low-faith-i...

This can be solved easily: give them a task they excel at, such ah going up against a conventional foe.

Take on Russia and force them out of Ukraine. Show the world just how competent the US military really is.

My confidence in the US military already increased a lot in the past few months, with a lot of US equipment seemingly performing quite well in conventional warfare, even some of the systems people previously had less faith in.

most useless article.

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