New Military Index Finds Likely Success in Iraq

Foreign Policy's debuted its new "U.S. Military Index," a survey of 3,400 active duty, reserve, and retired service personnel from the miliary's four service branches.

Here's the introduction:

Today, the U.S. military is engaged in a campaign that is more demanding and intense than anything it has witnessed in a generation. Ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, now entering their fifth and seventh years respectively, have lasted longer than any U.S. military engagements of the past century, with the exception of Vietnam. More than 25,000 American servicemen and women have been wounded and over 4,000 killed. Additional deployments in the Balkans, on the Korean Peninsula, and elsewhere are putting further pressure on the military’s finite resources. And, at any time, U.S. forces could be called into action in one of the world’s many simmering hot spots—from Iran or Syria, to North Korea or the Taiwan Strait. Yet, even as the U.S. military is being asked to sustain an unprecedented pace of operations across the globe, many Americans continue to know shockingly little about the forces responsible for protecting them. Nearly 70 percent of Americans report that they have a high level of confidence in the military, yet fewer than 1 in 10 has ever served. Politicians often speak favorably about people in uniform, but less than one quarter of the U.S. Congress has donned a uniform. It is not clear whether the speeches and sound bites we hear from politicians and experts actually reflect the concerns of those who protect our nation.

What is the actual state of America’s military? How healthy are the armed forces? How prepared are they for future conflicts? And what impact are the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan really having on them? To find out, Foreign Policy and the Center for a New American Security teamed up to conduct a groundbreaking survey of current and former military officers. Recognizing that the military is far from a monolith, our goal was to find out what America’s highest-ranking military people—the very officers who have run the military during the past half century—collectively think about the state of the force, the health of the military, the course of the war in Iraq, and the challenges that lie ahead. It is one of the few comprehensive surveys of the U.S. military community to be conducted in the past 50 years.

The survey offers a sobering - and frankly realistic - assessment of the state of our armed forces. Sixty-percent of the respondents, for example, agreed that the U.S. military is weaker today than it was five years ago, and 88 percent said that the war in Iraq has stretched the military "dangerously thin."

Yet, on Iraq, the findings indicate a significant sense of having turned things around after initial disasters in strategic planning. The data provide some scientific evidence to the administration's claim that the surge is working and success in Iraq is likely:

Five years into the war in Iraq, the index’s officers have an overwhelmingly negative view of many of the most important early decisions that have shaped the war’s course. They believe more troops were needed on the ground at the start of the fighting. They believe disbanding the Iraqi military was a mistake....

The officers do not, however, necessarily believe that victory is beyond reach. Nearly 9 in 10, for instance, say that the counterinsurgency strategy and surge of additional troops into Baghdad pursued by Gen. David Petraeus, the chief U.S. commander in Iraq, is raising the U.S. military’s chance for success there.

Ninety-percent is an unusually high statistic for a polling response, and this finding is one of the most important results of the survey. For while the personnel who responded here are highly critical of the Bush administration's civilian planning on the invasion and postwar stabilization, there's no sense of fatalism that the mission has failed irreparably.

Success in Iraq, as Anthony Cordesman pionted out recently, will depend on domestic political circumstances, and especially on the nature of presidential leadership come 2009.

Be sure to check Foreign Policy's findings on the military's perception of the elected leadership. The article suggests:

Nearly 9 in 10 officers agree that, all other things being equal, the military will respect a president of the United States who has served in the military more than one who has not. The people we trust most are often the ones who remind us of ourselves.

I wonder if that respect extends to a certain Republican Senator from Arizona who's campaigning to run the Iraq war and the war on terror even more vigorously than President Bush?