Military partisanship: Its origins and consequences from Vietnam to Iraq

In the period between the Vietnam war and the Iraq war, the U.S. military community became highly partisan and disproportionately Republican, with substantial effects on the politics of national security issues in the United States. Recent evidence, however, suggests that partisanship in this group has moderated appreciably since 2004. I examine, therefore, two questions of both empirical and theoretical importance: How do partisan attitudes in the military community respond to the shock of protracted and politically galvanizing wars? And how does military partisanship affect civil-military relations, electoral politics, and national security policy?;I argue that war shapes military partisanship largely through the expressive and material effects of the policies civilian leaders choose to direct it. War is a crucible, and members of the professional military community respond especially strongly to the stimuli generated by the tenor and substance of civilian management during times of armed conflict. I show first for Vietnam, and later for Iraq, that both wars caused professional servicemembers to rethink their political attachments and that these changes drew structure from contemporaneous changes in the alignments and symbolic images of the two parties on national security issues.;With respect to the effect of military partisanship on the broader politics of national security, I argue that the strong association of the military community with one political party significantly limits the practical scope of civilian control under presidents of the disfavored party. Further, military personnel enjoy outsized influence over policy debates and electoral outcomes through mechanisms of opinion leadership in local communities and their collective ability to shape the reputations of the two parties for competence and strength in national security affairs. I build on current civil-military relations theory by incorporating insights from literature on issue ownership and symbolic politics to provide a framework in which to understand these effects, and I use the example of Bill Clinton's presidency to demonstrate their impact. The moderation in military politics emerging from the Iraq war, therefore, suggests the emergence of new patterns of civil-military relations, partisan electoral competition, and policy outcomes in the national security realm.