Surveying The Military

SURVEYING THE MILITARY....Foreign Policy features a survey this month of "3,400 officers holding the rank of major or lieutenant commander and above from across the services, active duty and retired, general officers and field-grade officers." It's hard to be encouraged by the findings, though. Here's a small sample.

On torture: 53% say it's never acceptable. It's nice that this view got at least majority support, but the 44% who disagreed is a discouragingly high number.

On Iraq: 56% say the war hasn't broken the military. That's another very thin majority. Not only do 42% think the war has broken the military, but an overwhelming 88% think it has "stretched the U.S. military dangerously thin."

And then we have the results on the right. Given various ways to increase enlistment, only 22% of the senior officer corps was receptive to the idea of allowing gays and lesbians to serve openly. Compare that to the 38% who supported reinstating the draft (!) and the 58% who thought it was OK to lower educational standards. You'd think these guys could have made just a wee bit more progress than this over the past couple of decades.