According to a recent opinion survey, public trust in the US military has been steadily eroding over the past five years and is now at its lowest point in two decades.
The survey, which Gallup carried out and the results of which were released on Monday, was conducted between June 1 and 22.
According to the study, only 60% of Americans currently express “a great deal” confidence in the nation’s military, the lowest percentage recorded in the previous 20 years.
Kahl estimates that since the start of the conflict, Washington has given Kyiv close to $40 billion in military support.
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The US military’s level of capability was rated as “weak” by an American think tank last year, which claimed it was incapable of winning even one war against China and Russia, let alone two at once. This year’s confidence index showed a four percentage point decline from last year’s reading.
After the 9/11 attacks and for the following two decades, according to the Gallup report, confidence in the US military “generally held above 70 percent.” However, it dropped to 69 percent after America’s haphazard withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021, 64 percent in 2022, and 60 percent in 2023.
The percentage “hasn’t been lower since 1988, when 58 percent were confident,” according to the Gallup report, when it “was last this low in 1997.”
The article continued, “The declines this year were across the board, with Republicans continuing to be the most likely to express confidence and independents becoming the least likely.”.
While Gallup attributed the decline to Washington’s hastily planned withdrawals from Iraq and Afghanistan, many analysts have also linked the decline in trust to the United States’ substantial arms shipments to Ukraine, which has been at war with Russia since last February.
Last month, Colin Kahl, the Under-Secretary of Defense for Policy, acknowledged that the military assistance provided to Ukraine by the United States had put a strain on the nation’s arms industry.
The Marine Corps was the only service rated as “strong” in the report by the Washington-based Heritage Foundation, which gave the Army a “marginal” rating, the Space Force and Navy a “weak” rating, and the Air Force a “very weak” rating.”
