Americans’ faith in the U.S. military has declined to its lowest level in more than 20 years, according to a recently released poll.
Conducted by Gallup from June 1-22, the survey found that over the past five years, an increasing percentage of Americans are now “less likely” to voice “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in the U.S. military. According to the poll, 74 percent of Americans expressed such sentiments as recently as 2018. That number has since declined to 60 percent, marking the lowest level since 1997.
As noted by Gallup, overall confidence in the U.S. military steadily improved during Ronald Reagan’s presidency and continued to “surge” following the Gulf War and 9/11 terrorist attacks. While Americans’ faith in the armed forces would go on to hover “above 70% for the next two decades,” these numbers declined to 69 percent in 2021 and have “declin[ed] further since then, following the poorly executed exit from Afghanistan.”
Most notable in the survey’s findings, however, is the alarming drop in confidence among self-described Republicans and independents. While Republicans remain the group “most likely” to express faith in the military, these sentiments have plummeted in the past three years, falling from 91 to 68 percent since 2020. Meanwhile, independents’ confidence “has dropped nearly as much — by 13 points, from 68% to 55%” over the same period, to the point that they now “have less confidence than Democrats do.”
After experiencing a slight uptick upon President Joe
