US Might Accept 30,000 US
Military Deaths in Iraq
Nathaniel Heard
October 12, 2002
If the reader wishes to consider US policy-makers' Iraq-related
decision-making inputs, along with potential mass public opinion, the
included questions and sourced material may be worth carefully and fully
reading.
Please note that upon request, the below sourced/excerpted New Yorker
and
fully included Washington Post essays are available as MS Word
attachments.
* How many US military deaths would the US mass public accept in a
military
mission when the stated mission purpose is prevent Iraq from acquiring
non-conventional weapons?
* How many US military deaths would US policy makers accept in a
military
mission when the stated mission purpose is prevent Iraq from acquiring
non-conventional weapons?
* How many US military deaths do US policy makers think the mass public
will
accept in a military mission when the stated mission purpose is prevent
Iraq
from acquiring non-conventional weapons?
The New Yorker's Nicholas Lemann reported on 1 April 2002 that he "had
lunch...with a senior Administration foreign-policy official". "The
senior
official approvingly mentioned a 1999 study of casualty aversion by the
Triangle Institute for Security Studies, which argued that the 'mass
public'
is much less casualty-averse than the military or the civilian élite
believes; for example, the study showed that the public would tolerate
thirty thousand deaths in a military operation to prevent Iraq from
acquiring weapons of mass destruction. (The American death total in the
Vietnam War was about fifty-eight thousand.) September 11th presumably
reduced casualty aversion even further."
The Triangle Institute survey itself asked (in a related article two
survey
authors note that "The numbers cited on this page are averages, of
course,
and it is important that they be interpreted in general terms. For
instance,
we would not predict that most Americans would stop supporting democracy
in
Congo the day the death toll reached 6,182. And certainly there is a
difference between asking people to guess how they would feel about
casualties and the reality of seeing actual body bags. But the sheer
numbers, and the dramatic differences between our sample groups, are
surely
significant."):
[begin]
When American troops are sent overseas, there are almost always
casualties.
For instance, 43 Americans were killed in Somalia, 383 in the Gulf War,
roughly 54,000 in Korea, roughly 58,000 in Vietnam and roughly 400,000
in
World War II. Imagine for a moment that a President decided to send
military
troops on one of the following missions. In your opinion, what would be
the
highest number of American military deaths that would be acceptable to
achieve this goal?
A) To stabilize a democratic government in Congo__________.*
B) To prevent Iraq from obtaining weapons of mass destruction__________.
C) To defend Taiwan against invasion by China__________.
Military Mission: Congo
Military Elite: 284
Civilian Elite: 484
Mass Public: 6,861
Military Mission: Iraq
Military Elite: 6,016
Civilian Elite: 19,045
Mass Public: 29,853
Military Mission: Taiwan
Military Elite: 17,425
Civilian Elite: 17,554
Mass Public: 20,172
* The survey did not specify the Democratic Republic of Congo (formerly
Zaire) or the Republic of Congo
[end]
Below find:
* The complete New Yorker excerpt and url.
* Triangle Institute for Security Studies, Project on the Gap between
the
Military and Civilian Society urls
- Includes study methodology and project products/publications
* Select, related survey material bibliography.
* Two study authors' extensive/lengthy 1999 Washington Post essay on the
study.
*****************
Source: Nicholas Lemann, "The Next World Order", New Yorker, 1 April
2002,
http://www.newyorker.com/printable/?fact/020401fa_FACT1
*****************
Triangle Institute for Security Studies Main Url:
http://www.duke.edu/web/tiss/
Project on the Gap Between the Military and Civilian Society Url:
http://www.poli.duke.edu/civmil/
Methodology: http://www.poli.duke.edu/civmil/survey.html
Related Materials:
Peter D. Feaver and Richard H. Kohn (eds.), "Soldiers and Civilians: The
Civil-Military Gap and American National Security", (Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 2001)
Chapters: http://www.poli.duke.edu/civmil/findings_publications.html
"Media and Education in the U.S. Civil-Military Gap", special edition of
Armed Forces and Society, Vol. 27, No. 2 (Winter 2001)
Peter D. Feaver and Christopher Gelpi, "American Civil-Military
Relations
and the Use of Force", (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University, forthcoming
2003)
*****************
Source: Peter D. Feaver and Christopher Gelpi, “How Many Deaths Are
Acceptable?”, Washington Post, 7 November 1999
[begin]
The good news is that we drove Serbian troops out of Kosovo without
suffering any U.S. combat fatalities, a testament to American military
professionalism and prowess.
The bad news is that the foreign policy community, both inside and
outside
the U.S. government, generally believes that Americans demand a
casualty-free victory as the price of supporting any military
intervention
abroad.
These influential elites are wrong. They have bought into a powerful
myth,
born during the Vietnam War and cemented during the ill-fated Somalia
action
of October 1993, that Americans are casualty-shy.
Though the belief has become conventional wisdom, it is not well
supported
by public opinion polls. A careful analysis of surveys that we conducted
last fall and winter shows convincingly that the general public is far
more
willing to tolerate combat losses than civilian policymakers--or senior
military officers. The casualty-aversion myth has no doubt been
exacerbated
by President Clinton's awkward relations with the military and thus
constitutes part of his troubled legacy in foreign policy. But our
research
suggests the issue will outlast this president. Coming to terms with it
will
be a major challenge for the next administration.
Defenders of the "we can't take it anymore" school of thought offer no
concrete evidence for their position. Instead, they retreat to anecdotes
about the Somalia debacle and the "CNN effect." They say televised
images of
starving Somalis moved Americans to demand the United States intervene
in
that country's civil war in December 1992, and images of a dead U.S.
soldier
being dragged through the streets of Somalia's capital just as rapidly
moved
them to demand a retreat 10 months later.
That is not what happened.
There was a CNN effect in Somalia, but it did not involve the American
public; it involved government officials.
In a recent speech, former president George Bush described how the
decision
to commit U.S. troops to Somalia came after he and his wife, watching
TV,
saw "those starving kids . . . in quest of a little pitiful cup of
rice." He
said he phoned his national security team and said, "Please come over to
the
White House. I--we--can't watch this anymore. You've got to do
something."
Different leaders but a similar dynamic precipitated America's
humiliating
withdrawal. As news of the disastrous Ranger raid--which left 18
American
troops dead--came over the airwaves, members of Congress rushed to the
floor
to demand that the mission be aborted. The White House, moved by the
same
images, began to shut down the operation.
When asked by an interviewer about the gruesome TV footage, Clinton took
pains to draw a parallel with Bush's reasoning. "I just think it's
irresistible to show vivid images. . . . The same television power is
what
got the country and the world community into it in the first place."
One of us--Feaver--was on the National Security Council staff during
this
period. Though not privy to Oval Office counsels, the staff realized
within
24 hours of the first ugly TV reports that the administration had lost
its
stomach for the Somalia mission.
Outside the Beltway, however, a majority of Americans were less queasy.
Studies by foreign policy experts Eric Larson, James Burk, Steven Kull
and
I.M. Destler, re-analyzing polls taken during the crisis, demonstrate
that
even after the television reports, there was a reservoir of public
support
for the operation. If the sight of dead American soldiers somewhat
undermined it, it was because the Clinton administration made no effort
to
frame the casualties as anything other than a disaster in a mission that
had
drifted dreadfully off course.
Had the administration chosen instead to galvanize public opposition to
Somali warlord Mohamed Farah Aideed, our research suggests that
Americans
would have tolerated an expanded effort to catch and punish him.
We and two dozen fellow scholars have just completed an extensive
analysis
of the views of some 4,900 Americans, drawn from three groups: senior or
rising military officers, influential civilians and the general public.
It
was part of a major investigation of American civil-military relations
conducted by the Triangle Institute for Security Studies (TISS), a
faculty
consortium based at Duke University, the University of North Carolina at
Chapel Hill and North Carolina State University. The study was prompted
by
concerns, expressed in 1997 by Secretary of Defense William Cohen and
echoed
elsewhere, about the possibility of a growing gap between the U.S. armed
forces and American society as a whole--one that could harm military
effectiveness and civil-military cooperation.
Our study confirmed that the myth of casualty aversion is entrenched at
the
upper levels of society. Overwhelmingly, both civilian and military
leaders
agreed with the statement, "The American public will rarely tolerate
large
numbers of U.S. casualties in military operations."
But a very different picture emerges from the citizens themselves. We
asked
respondents to consider how many American deaths would be acceptable to
complete three plausible missions successfully: defending Taiwan against
China; preventing Iraq from acquiring weapons of mass destruction; and
defending democracy in Congo. We compared the answers from the general
public with those from two groups of influential civilians and members
of
the military.
Regarding America's long-standing commitment to defend Taiwan against
China,
we found broad consensus: All three groups agree that this mission would
be
worth the sacrifice of a substantial number of American lives.
No such consensus exists, however, with regard to typical post-Cold War
missions in Iraq and Congo.
First, the general public indicates that it is willing to accept not
just
hundreds but thousands of casualties to accomplish these missions.
On average, our sample of the public allowed even higher numbers of
casualties to curb Iraqi weapons than to defend Taiwan. This may reflect
lingering traces of successful Bush-Clinton efforts to demonize Saddam
Hussein combined with Clinton's attempts to pursue a conciliatory policy
toward China.
The public's estimates for the mission to restore democracy in Congo
were
much lower, but were nonetheless substantial. In fact, they were many
times
higher than the actual casualties suffered by the U.S. military in all
post-Cold War military actions combined.
The numbers cited on this page are averages, of course, and it is
important
that they be interpreted in general terms. For instance, we would not
predict that most Americans would stop supporting democracy in Congo the
day
the death toll reached 6,182. And certainly there is a difference
between
asking people to guess how they would feel about casualties and the
reality
of seeing actual body bags. But the sheer numbers, and the dramatic
differences between our sample groups, are surely significant.
Collectively, these results suggest that a majority of the American
people
will accept combat deaths--so long as the mission has the potential to
be
successful. The public can distinguish between suffering defeat and
suffering casualties.
By far the lowest acceptable casualty figures in our study came from the
military. Regarding the "non-traditional" military missions, elite
military
officers responded with estimates that were one-fourth to one-half those
of
elite civilians. Of course, this aversion to casualties is, in part, a
function of what might be called rational calculations. That is, one
reason
military officers give lower casualty estimates for non-traditional
missions
is that they do not believe those missions are vital to the national
interest. It stands to reason, therefore, that they would not consider
them
worth extensive loss of American lives.
Likewise, respondents who have a friend or relative in the military are
slightly more averse to casualties, although the effect appears to be
marginal. (Data on this point are not broken down here, but like many
other
factors we studied, they are reported and analyzed in more complex ways
in
our complete report. More information can be found at our Web site:
www.poli.duke.edu/civmil.)
Even after accounting for these "rational effects," however, the gap
between
the military and the other samples remains significant. Moreover, it
exists
despite the relatively low number of women and the lower average age in
the
military. (As a group, women and older people are substantially more
averse
to casualties.)
Significantly, the evidence indicates that casualty aversion is not
simply a
function of self-preservation. If that were the case, we would expect
sensitivity to be highest among officers whose roles are combat-related.
However, our data show virtually no difference in casualty aversion
among
the combat, combat support and other sub-samples of elite military
officers.
Even more telling, younger officers, who are more likely to see combat
duty,
are more tolerant of casualties.
Instead, we think several factors are at work. For one, officers
certainly
feel a special responsibility for their troops' welfare. Second, senior
officers may lack confidence in the reliability of civilian leaders;
thus
they fear that the government will abandon the military if casualties
mount.
Finally, casualty aversion may be an aspect of a growing zero-defect
mentality among senior officers, in which casualties are not only
deaths--they are an immediate indication that an operation is a failure.
If
a zero-defect mentality is on the rise, then civilian leaders must share
culpability for this problem.
There are at least three reasons to be concerned about our leaders'
attitudes regarding casualty aversion. First, their planning could be
hamstrung by the erroneous belief that the public will demand that they
cut
and run at the first American combat deaths.
Of course, it is important to prevent or limit American casualties as
much
as possible. But it would be a grave mistake to believe that we can
wield
influence around the world and use our military to defend national
interests
without risking casualties. It is also a mistake to believe that the
American public is unwilling to take risks when its leaders say that
risks
are appropriate.
Casualty aversion creates a second and more subtle threat to national
security: It is corrosive to the professional military ethic. As retired
Army colonel and West Point professor Donald M. Snider has argued, our
military is built on the principles of self-sacrifice and mission
accomplishment. Troops are supposed to be willing to die so that
civilians
do not have to.
In the Bosnian peacekeeping operation, casualty aversion reached an
unprecedented level. "Force protection," meaning the prevention of U.S.
casualties, became an explicit mission goal, on par with, if not
superseding, the primary mission of restoring peace to Bosnia. As a
result,
war criminals were not aggressively pursued and arrested,
community-building
activities were curtailed, and every stray movement of a U.S.
peacekeeper
was a mission-threatening event.
Finally, if American casualties are politically impossible, then
citizens of
other countries will be at greater risk. While NATO was arguably
victorious
in Kosovo without losing a pilot in combat, that was achieved by
forgoing a
ground invasion, using high-altitude bombing and otherwise shifting the
costs of the conflict onto the people of Kosovo and Serbia. By our own
actions, we turned the famous question on its head: How many Yugoslavs
are
worth the life of a single American?
Our study cannot say whether America ought to be intervening in
conflicts
around the world, or whether we ought to be willing to suffer casualties
in
order to do so. But we can recommend that policymakers start listening
more
carefully to the expressed--not mythical--views of the American people.
A
myth is hardly sound footing for American foreign policy in the 21st
century.
Peter Feaver is an associate professor of political science at Duke
University, and co-principal investigator of the TISS Project on the Gap
Between the Military and Civilian Society. Christopher Gelpi is an
assistant
professor of political science at Duke.
What They Said
The question about casualty aversion was one of several in the survey
done
by the Triangle Institute for Security Studies (TISS) Project on the Gap
Between the Military and Civilian Society:
WHO WAS POLLED
The military elite, 623 officers whose promise for advancement has been
recognized by assignment to attend the professional military education
course appropriate for their rank; the civilian elite, 683 non-veterans
selected from Who's Who in America and other directories of leading
Americans, foreign policy opinion leaders, and civilians studying at
professional military education institutions; the mass public, 1001
adults
selected as a representative national sample by Princeton Research
Associates.
WHEN THE SURVEY WAS DONE
TISS collected data between September 1998 and June 1999.
THE QUESTION
When American troops are sent overseas, there are almost always
casualties.
For instance, 43 Americans were killed in Somalia, 383 in the Gulf War,
roughly 54,000 in Korea, roughly 58,000 in Vietnam and roughly 400,000
in
World War II. Imagine for a moment that a President decided to send
military
troops on one of the following missions. In your opinion, what would be
the
highest number of American military deaths that would be acceptable to
achieve this goal?
A) To stabilize a democratic government in Congo__________.*
B) To prevent Iraq from obtaining weapons of mass destruction__________.
C) To defend Taiwan against invasion by China__________.
Military Mission: Congo
Military Elite: 284
Civilian Elite: 484
Mass Public: 6,861
Military Mission: Iraq
Military Elite: 6,016
Civilian Elite: 19,045
Mass Public: 29,853
Military Mission: Taiwan
Military Elite: 17,425
Civilian Elite: 17,554
Mass Public: 20,172
* The survey did not specify the Democratic Republic of Congo (formerly
Zaire) or the Republic of Congo
[end]
Nathaniel Hurd
90 7th Ave.
Apt. #6
Brooklyn, NY 11217
Tel. (M): 917-407-3389
Tel. (H): 718-857-7639
