CivmilBlog

As we mentioned in an earlier post, the press has an increasing interest in the military vote. It seems reporters are discovering that the supposed powerful Republican voting bloc is not in fact so powerful. Today, Diane Tucker, writer for the Huffington Post called after reading the article by Patrick Donohue in the Beaufort Gazette.  She had apparently just returned from a visit to a Marine Corps base and was struck that there were more Democrats than she had imagined.  I gave her a few quotes and pointed her to this blog as well as CivMilResearch.  We just want good data and good research out in the public.  Make of it what you will.

As data continues to come in from our new survey of American enlisted personnel, we are finding that they have the same attitude as the general American population with respect to whether the country is on the right track or not.  Some 80 percent of the American population believes the country is going in the wrong direction.  In our survey, about 84 percent of American military personnel believe it is moving in the wrong direction.  Given the size of the survey thus far, that is about the same as the general population.

So, the American military fights on despite believing we are in going in the wrong direction.  Pretty interesting in and of itself.

We are going to go out on a limb and predict that the military will vote Democrat over Republican this year by a ratio of about 1.2 to 1.  This prediction is based on demographics, historical military voter turnout, and the evident excitement about Barak Obama among black Americans.  If military blacks turnout to vote at rates seen in the past, at least 75% or so, then because they are over-represented within the military enlisted ranks as compared to the American general population, the military population is going to have a Democratic bias this year.

We have suspected for some time that the military vote was not as strongly Republican as generally assumed, but this election year will bring out the black and Hispanic military democratic vote like never before.  The demographics, combined with the suggestion by early data that there is a general shift by at least a third of the military leftward (less Republican, more Independent) will give the military a definite Democratic party identification, perhaps for the first time since the Vietnam War.

There appears to be growing interest among the press about the political behavior (read, how do they vote) of our American military personnel, particularly the enlisted ranks.  We have known for some time that officers, particularly senior officers, tend to be overwhelmingly conservative in attitude and identify with the Republican party.  The problem is that assumptions have been made that the enlisted (and even junior officers) are much the same.

Military Times Newspapers (Army Times, Navy Times, etc.) have shown an increasing interest in finding out just what our enlisted people and junior officers think.  Now, it appears that the Beaufort (SC) Gazette, newspaper for an area that boasts two Marine Corps bases and a Naval hospital, is trying to find out how the military vote may be perceived in the coming Presidential election.  Reporters for both Military Times and the Beaufort Gazette confirmed a general assumption that enlisted personnel are predominately conservative and Republican.  It just may not be true.

First, look at the demographics.  Blacks are over-represented as compared to the general American population, and whites are under-represented.  The population of racial/ethnic groups in the military that traditionally identify with the Democratic party is of a greater percentage of the military than in the general population.  Indeed, demographics would predict that the military would actually have a democratic bias in their voting behavior.

We will see, as data is just now coming in.  The preliminary data supports this thesis, but we will need to analyze the random sample to be sure.

Stay tuned…

We are beginning to get a better picture of the politics of the American enlisted person.  Conventional wisdom would appear to paint them as more conservative and more likely to vote Republican than the average American citizen.  Such may not be true.  Early evidence from data beginning to come in seems to indicate that our enlisted personnel are more middle of the road or liberal than conservative.  They are certainly more likely to identify with the Democratic Party than the officer corps.

Our data are not complete and it is way too early to get a conclusive sense of where they are, but these early trends are surprising considering the strong belief that our military personnel will vote for the Republican candidate.  It may indeed be true (as other research suggests) that more military personnel voted for Gore in 2000 than voted for Bush.

Stay tuned.  We will see.

A sign that our Congress may be starting to retake its constitutionally mandated role of watching over the military is a particularly hard-hitting op-ed piece in the Washington Times by Republican Senator Richard Shelby.  In it he described the Air Force acquisition program as full of politics with parochial interests taking priority over national defense.  He charged that the Air Force had a de-facto policy of "Boeing aircraft or nothing." 

It is indeed time for Congress to take over it long-missing roll of control over the military by insisting that the money it appropriates is spent wisely and on the items that are in the best interests of the country and in support of national defense.  Appearances of favoritism will not do the military any favors nor will congressional ignorance of what is happening do anything to bring that institution’s unfavorable ratings up. 

Now, Congress needs to do more than just write op-ed pieces and actually conduct detailed (and perhaps painful) oversight hearings and requests (demands) for information from the Department of Defense.

Two months from Election Day, politics seem to be everywhere we turn. However, one place we should not see politics is in our Department of Defense (DoD) acquisition process. The process to select the new Air Force tanker fleet has become so politicized that DoD allowed parochial and business interests to keep the Air Force’s top acquisition priority from the pilots who need it. The long fight over the tanker contract proves that the acquisition process is fundamentally and significantly flawed.

This was a blatant, politically motivated decision, driven by the political and emotional hysteria generated by members of Congress who wanted Boeing to win no matter what. They were more concerned with jobs in their states than U.S. war fighters’ needs.

After a grueling but fair, open and transparent competition, the Air Force in February awarded the contract for its new fleet of air refueling tankers to the Northrop Grumman/EADS team, beating the overwhelming favorite, Boeing. From the outset of the competition, political furor was sure to ensue if the Northrop/EADS team won the contract. It did, and the intended result was achieved: On Sept. 10, 2008, DoD canceled the entire program. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates’ decision to cancel the Air Force’s number one acquisition priority outright, however, clearly placed politics and business interests above the interests of the war fighter. While Mr. Gates may characterize it as a "cooling off" period because of all of the political rhetoric, the exact opposite is true. Politics just canceled a competitively awarded contract, solely because Boeing was not the winner. Defense acquisition policy has been stated: If it is not a Boeing plane, DoD is not going to buy it.

Recall that a 2003 lease for 100 Boeing airplanes was rescinded after the discovery that the procurement process was rife with corruption - costing taxpayers more to lease the planes than to buy them. This lease scandal sent Boeing and Air Force officials to prison for rigging the contract.

When this latest competition began in 2007, there was no uproar over a full and open competition for any company that could build a tanker. No politician complained or wailed that the Europeans might win the contract or that the process was unfair to Boeing. No one grabbed a podium or scheduled a press conference to declare that the tanker contract should be a sole source to Boeing. Why? Because everyone believed that Boeing would win, no doubt about it.

The moment the Northrop Grumman/EADS team was awarded the contract, however, the political mania began. If the Air Force and members of Congress wanted the tanker to be nothing more than a job-creation program for Boeing, they should have forgone a competition and sole-sourced the contract in the first place. Now, they just may have gotten their wish.

It is unacceptable that DoD is abdicating its responsibility to ensure our war fighters have the best equipment possible. The objective was to acquire the best new tanker for the Air Force.

In a lengthy, full and open competition, it was determined that the Northrop Grumman/EADS aircraft is the best tanker to meet the Air Force’s needs. And it was determined by those who will fly it. The focus of the competition was on what is the best plane, not where it is built. Boeing supporters should not lie to the American people about what they did and why. It had nothing to do with concern about exporting jobs and technology to Europe.

This time, it was blatantly politics and home-state business. It is now clear that acquiring the best tanker for the war fighter was less important than saving Boeing jobs.

Boeing supporters and the secretary of defense have clearly lost sight of the fact that this country is at war. The issue remains that our armed forces need a new tanker, and they have needed it for a long time.

We are now jeopardizing the safety and security of our nation and those who fight for it simply because politics trumped logic, fairness and concern for the troops.

Terminating the tanker competition sent a clear message - that competition is fine, as long as Boeing wins. The secretary of defense made the wrong decision, and he made it for the wrong reason.

We must now move past politics. We need to put business interests aside and acquire the best plane for our armed forces. Our war fighters deserve nothing less.

Sen. Richard Shelby, Alabama Republican, is a member of the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense.

The Navy’s recent decision to drop the DDG-1000 program and restart the DDG-51 program harkens back to something we talked about on these pages last year. We recommended the Navy do exactly that, as the DDG-1000 is not the vessel required for the future…too expensive, too hard to make in numbers, too many unproven technologies…not the right system for the world that was foreseen. The DDG-1000 program is a scaled back DD-21 program after that program also proved too expensive.

With both Obama and McCain working in the background developing plans to rework the military acquisition system, this is just one more sign that such changes are critical. In particular, the Navy has been on a road attempting to buy systems that are just too expensive to build in the numbers required.

As we said a year ago :

Stop production of large aircraft carriers. Maintain the current carrier force for the near and mid-term, but as they age and retire, do not replace them. Eventually, they will be phased out. Stop production of the DD21. Continue production of the DDG-51 as the near and mid-term solution. Develop and produce a new Low Observable High Speed (LOHS) amphibious assault ship/craft, that can operate in or near littoral areas, supporting the Marine OMFTS concept. Develop the Streetfighter concept or a follow-on concept that permits low observable craft to operate in a dangerous littoral environment, while able to provide precision fires. Decommission the SSBN fleet and convert them to SSGN (strike arsenal ships). These vessels will be used in the near and mid-term, but as they age and are retired, they will be replaced by a submersible, high speed, arsenal ship armed with precision guided munitions. Maintain the SSN force and continue development, as these ships are most useful in providing access to contested littoral areas. Maintain development of the F/A-18E/F, stop development of the JSF(Navy), and concentrate on the JSF(STOVL) or next generation beyond that. Combine all sealift under the Military Sealift Command and produce more RORO type ships capable of lifting Army or Marine Corps forces and operating offshore.

Simply put, if we keep building our weapons bigger and more expensively, we will not be able to afford them in sufficient numbers to be effective. The Germans had the best equipment in the world during World War II, but that did not stop the Russians and the Americans from rolling over them with larger numbers. As the Russians have said in the past, “Quantity is a quality all its own.”

Robert Gates, Secretary of Defense, is strengthening civilian control of the military in a far more effective method than did Donald Rumsfeld. Instead of running rampant over the Generals or belittling them publicly, as did Rumsfeld, Gates discovered wrong-doing or inefficient behavior, investigates, and then disciplines. This will send a stronger signal to the military about what is expected of them than is a war of wills.

See the article below by Colin Clark:

Five Generals To Be Disciplined Over Nukes
By Colin Clark Wednesday, September 17th, 2008 1:21 pm
Posted in Air, Intelligence, Policy, Space

Defense Secretary Robert Gates will announce a range of punishments for at least five general officers and possibly several colonels for lapses connected with the nation’s nuclear weapons.

Several senior Air Force generals declined to comment about the disciplinary actions this afternoon at the Air Force Association’s annual conference. All the officers are reported to be from the Air Force. A congressional aide confirmed the Defense Department told lawmakers yesterday about the impending disciplinary actions. The aide did not know the names of those to be punished. Sources declined to identify them until the punishments were officially announced.

A report by Navy Adm. Kirkland H. Donald, director of naval nuclear propulsion, into the nuclear enterprise detailed a loss of oversight from senior Air Force leaders and lowered performance related to the nuclear mission.

Gates had to intervene personally and ordered Donald’s review after sensitive nuclear parts were sent mistakenly to Taiwan and a B-52 bomber flew across the country carrying six armed nuclear cruise missiles.

Last week, a panel of august experts led by former Defense Secretary James Schlesinger said they had been surprised by the erosion of controls over nuclear weapons since the end of the Cold War and recommended that Air Force Space Command be folded into a new Air Force Strategic Command and urged a range of other measures to ensure airmen dealing with nukes “feel they are part of an important mission.”

Bringing back something like Strategic Air Command is the biggest organizational and functional change recommended by the Task Force on DoD Nuclear Weapons management, which was created by Defense Secretary Gates after several high profile cock-ups involving nuclear weapons or their components. The creation of Space Command has meant that space had attracted “some of the glamour” and left missileers feeling like second tier players. Schlesinger noted that most officers, if they wanted promotions and a decent career path, had to become space qualified and stay in that slot. “Some of the glamour will now move back to the nuclear mission,” he said.

The panel also recommended adding about 2,000 people to the ranks of those Air Force personnel who deal with nuclear matters, Schlesinger told reporters. They also want a single bomber numbered air force created that is responsible for the traditional service responsibilities of organizing, training and equipping. It would be assigned to the new Air Force Strategic Command.

One of the panel’s main goals, aside from the primary goal of restoring a special sense of mission to those in the Air Force who deal with nuclear matters, is to restore confidence among America’s allies that the US nuclear deterrence means something and is reliable. Schlesinger said he thought restoring this confidence would take six months to a year.

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Theoretical thought about "deterrence" falls into the same line as "grand strategy."  We essentially have not had any grand strategy in the United States since the fall of the Soviet Union.  Perhaps this will help stimulate some theoretical talk and writing on what we ought to be doing in the future.  As noted by Dr. Leder in his comment on this piece, Admiral Mullen’s third point has its problems, but the question is clearly one that needs to be discussed and answers found quickly.  There are parts of the world, and the Middle East is one of them, where General Vessey’s quotation actually makes a great deal of sense.

By ADM Michael G. Mullen, U.S. Navy, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Joint Forces Quarterly, Fourth Quarter 2008

“Our strategy is one of preventing war by making it self-evident to our enemies that they’re going to get their clocks cleaned if they start one.”
General John W. Vessey, Jr,
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff,
1982-1985

It is way past time to reexamine our strategic thinking about deterrence. Vessey’s belief in “cleaning clocks,” characteristically blunt though it was, summed up nicely the urgency and the intent of our Cold War mentality. Unfortunately, that’s just about where we left it — back in the Cold War, strewn amongst the rubble of the Berlin Wall.
Deterrence today is tougher and more complex; more than one nation can now reach out and touch us with nuclear missiles. Americans are potential targets of terrorism wherever they travel, and regional instability in several places around the globe could easily erupt into large-scale conflict. Even before Russia’s move against Georgia over South Ossetia and Abkhazia in August, U.S. allies were revisiting longstanding assumptions about America’s protective security umbrella.

The United States may not face a nation-state enemy right now, but as many writers in this issue of Joint Force Quarterly point out, the threats we do face are just as treacherous, just as deadly, and even more difficult to discern.

Yet we have done precious little spadework to advance the theory of deterrence. Many, if not most, of the individuals who worked deterrence in the 1970s and 1980s – the real experts at this discipline – are not doing it anymore. And we have not even tried to find their replacements. It is as if we all breathed a collective sigh of relief when the Soviet Union collapsed and said to ourselves, “Well, I guess we don’t need to worry about that anymore.”
But worry we must. And act quickly we should. Terrorists are trying to obtain weapons of mass destruction. Some states, against international pressure, are trying to build and/or improve their own nuclear weapons. The specter of state-on-state conflict, though diminished, has not disappeared.

We need a new model for deterrence theory, and we need it now. Time is not on our side.
This model must possess at least three particular attributes.

First, it should espouse the highest standards of nuclear preparedness. The bulk of our strategic deterrence still relies upon the effectiveness of our nuclear arsenal. U.S. nuclear forces contribute uniquely and fundamentally to deterrence through their ability to impose costs and deny benefits to an adversary in an exceedingly rapid and devastating manner. They cast a lengthy shadow.

Regrettably, a lengthy shadow has also been cast over our own competence in handling this arsenal. We must turn this around.

We must revitalize our nuclear support infrastructure. We must hold ourselves accountable to unimpeachably high standards of training, leadership, and management. And we must recruit and then retain the scientific expertise to preserve and extend our technological edge in nuclear weaponry. Barring these improvements, a legacy force structure supported by a neglected infrastructure only invites adversary misbehavior and miscalculation. Deterrence then becomes anything but.

Secondly, the model must be credible. The enemy, or potential enemy, must be convinced that taking a specific action will bring them more harm than benefit. General Vessey would certainly agree with that, would he not? But credibility today requires flexibility.

Flexibility in our deterrence construct hedges against the possibility that adversaries might incorrectly perceive their actions as “below the threshold” of U.S. resolve and response. We must manage that threshold by looking at ways to limit the pain an adversary can cause through advanced defensive measures. Adversaries must know that they have a limited ability to hurt us.

We must also be able to act proportionally and across the whole of government, escalating and deescalating tension, predicting as best we can when a deterrence strategy is about to fail and shifting as required. These on-ramps and off-ramps provide a vital measure of control in conflict and give both sides a chance to solve problems more carefully.

A big part of credibility, of course, lies in our conventional capability. The capability to project U.S. military power globally and conduct effective theater-level operations across the domains of land, sea, air, space, cyberspace, and information – including the capability to win decisively – remains essential to deterrence effectiveness.

We must therefore address our conventional force structure and its readiness as a deterrent factor, especially after 7 years at war. We must enhance our capability to rapidly locate and destroy targets. We must conduct sufficient contingency planning that considers all facets of escalation and deescalation in crisis management. And we must improve conventional global strike capability, further develop global missile defense systems, and modernize our strategic weapons systems and infrastructure.

Nor can we forget the conventional capabilities of our partners and friends. We must strengthen their capacity to deter their enemies, and we must stay engaged globally. Coalition military cooperation and integration can and do have a tremendous impact on an adversary’s perception of the political will of the United States and its allies.

Lastly, any modern model of deterrence needs to address the challenges posed by extremists and ideologues. How do we account for the fact that traditional concepts of deterrence do not work against a terrorist whose avowed tactics are wanton destruction and the targeting of innocents? How do we deter an idea or a movement?

There are no easy answers. The deterrence of state sponsors is a start, but so, too, must we find ways to delegitimize the idea itself and to subvert the movement. That notion has been at the heart of the counterinsurgency strategy that we have employed successfully in Iraq: replace the fear that terrorists hope to engender with the very hope they fear to encounter.
Give people something positive to hold on to instead of something negative to avoid. Give parents a chance to raise their children to a better standard of living than the one they themselves enjoyed. Do that and we deter not the tactics of terrorists – they will still try to kill – but rather the ends that they seek to achieve. And that is deterrence of a truly strategic nature.

Of course, this improved stability cannot be achieved by military means alone. Again, Iraq illuminates the point. Security on the ground has been quite n
ecessary there, but it was never sufficient. Political reconciliation, economic development, social and cultural accommodation, and a higher sense of Iraqi nationhood and ownership have all proven vital to the progress we have witnessed. And all of it was the result of a truly international and interagency effort.
More than 40 years ago, Henry Kissinger warned that deterrence is “above all a psychological problem. The assessment of risks on which it depends becomes less and less precise in the face of weapons of unprecedented novelty and destructiveness. A bluff taken seriously is more useful than a serious threat interpreted as a bluff.”

Today, I would agree that deterrence is still fundamentally a psychological problem. But the time for bluffing is over. We need to be ready – actually and completely – to deter a wide range of new threats. It is not just about cleaning someone else’s clock anymore.
We need a new model of deterrence that helps us bring our own clock up to speed with the pace and the scope of the challenges of this new century. Time check … now.

You are invited to participate in a survey, entitled “Survey of American Military Enlisted Personnel Political Attitudes and Behavior.” The study is being conducted by Donald S. Inbody at The University of Texas at Austin. While we are primarily interested in active duty enlisted personnel, we will accept survey responses from officers and those who have left active service in the past few years.

The purpose of this study is to conduct research into the attitudes and thinking of American military personnel. Your participation in the survey will contribute to a better understanding of American military enlisted personnel. I estimate that it will take about ten minutes of your time to complete the questionnaire.

There will be no costs for participating, nor will you benefit from participating. All publications will exclude any information that will make it possible to identify you as a subject.

If you have any questions or would like us to email another person from your organization or update your email address, please call Donald Inbody at (512) 923-0704 or send an email to inbody@austin.utexas.edu. You may request a hard copy of the survey.

This study has been reviewed and approved by The University of Texas at Austin Institutional Review Board (IRB Number: 2007-06-0012). If you have questions about your rights as a study participant, or are dissatisfied at any time with any aspect of this study, you may contact - anonymously, if you wish - the Institutional Review Board by phone at (512) 471-8871 or email at orsc@uts.cc.utexas.edu. 

Click here to take survey or paste the following link into a web browser:

(http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=0VC4yshoLGMk2auqqhxhRQ_3d_3d)

Thank you.