Casualties and Consensus: The Historical Role of Casualties in Domestic Support for U

Abstract : There has recently been a great deal of concern and speculation about the willingness of the American public to accept casualties in U.S. military operations. The fear is that the public has become less tolerant of casualties in military operations and has become unwilling to support operations unless they are concluded at very low cost. If true, such a conclusion would have broad implications for U.S. strategy, forces and doctrine, and for the U.S. ability to deter or coerce adversaries. The objective of this report is to summarize data that bear on this question and to place the role of casualties into a larger framework. The report is based upon a much larger body of work that examined the roles that casualties and other factors played in influencing support for a number of U.S. military interventions. A comparative case-study approach was used to better understand the determinants of support for a number of U.S. military interventions. Detailed data, including public opinion and additional quantitative and qualitative data on political, military, and media activity, were collected and analyzed for six different wars and military actions in which U.S. ground troops were employed: the Second World War; the Korean, Vietnam, and Gulf wars; Panama; and Somalia. A less-detailed analysis of several other cases was also done to assess the robustness of the findings.

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