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!