CONNECTED TO SOCIETY: THE POLITICAL BELIEFS OF U.S. ARMY GENERALS.

 
   You know, we've always voted but we've never been aggressively following a 
   competition to determine the who's and the why's. We've just kind of said, 
   hey, you know, whoever the Americans say is Commander-in-Chief, that will 
   be our boss (Interview #34). 

In response to a question following her presentation on 26 October 1997 at a conference in Baltimore sponsored by Harvard University's Institute for Strategic Studies, Sara Lister--who was then serving as the Army's Assistant Secretary for Manpower and Reserve Affairs--drew an invidious comparison between the Army and the Marine Corps that produced an uproar of sufficient magnitude to necessitate her early retirement. What caused this problem for Lister was her statement about the Army being "much more connected to society than the Marines are." In her view,

 
   ... Marines are extremists. Whenever you have extremists, you've got some 
   risks of total disconnection with society. And that's a little 
   dangerous.(1) 

The reaction from the Commandant of the Marine Corps to Secretary Lister's remarks was quick and predictably outraged. Politicians hostile to the Clinton administration, led by then-House Speaker Newt Gingrich, also rose to defend the Marines, demanding both a full apology and Lister's dismissal.(2)

Lister's speech is but one in a series of analyses and incidents in the 1990s that assert the existence of a widening breach between senior military officials and the rest of society. Although no one claims that American military leadership is itself a danger or threat to the social order, there exists the belief among a number of thoughtful observers that the values and sentiments associated with civilian institutions are not as deeply anchored within the divisions, wings, and carrier groups of the nation's military.(3) The most pessimistic version of this theory of military disengagement from civil society contends that the insularity of military organizations from the wider society discourages young people from even considering military service as a possible career and leads inevitably to an inbred and ever more militaristic culture within the U.S. armed forces. Civilian control of the military, in this radical scenario, becomes weaker and less assured.

This article examines the issue of the connectedness of military leaders from civil society through an analysis of the political beliefs and identification of a sample of U.S. Army general officers. As part of a larger study of the military profession, a sample of 62 army generals was asked about their political views, party affiliation, and other issues that would indicate their more general political worldview. Unlike previous studies, which have relied primarily upon questionnaires that, by design, are intended to constrain discussion and discourage attempts by the respondent to elaborate upon what are essentially very complex questions, this study followed a more qualitative approach, using a semistructured interviewing technique that is more conversational in tone and allows both the questioner and the respondent to probe more deeply into the issues raised by the research. Based upon this elaboration of their political viewpoints, any argument concerning the disconnectedness of U.S. Army general officers from mainstream American society must be rejected. This article concludes with a far more sanguine view of the future of civil-military relations in the U.S. than the one that has emerged recently in either journalistic reports or the professional literature.

Methods and Data