“ An Army of deer led by a lion is more to be feared than an army of lions led by a deer.”- Chabrius
“If a hill is occupied by a company and you send a battalion to take it, you’ll take the hill, but with casualties. But if you send a division you’ll take the hill without a fight.” – Dwight D. Eisenhower
“We live in a time when the strong have grown weak because of their scruples and the weak have grown strong because of their audacity.” - Bismarck
What people are sensing is that our political leadership lacks the will to win a war. So we have the paradox of having a military that cannot be beaten yet cannot win a conflict. Besides our ground forces, the Army and the Marine Corps, are too small to do all the jobs our government claims it expects them to be able to do around the world. Our forces are still outnumbered by all our potential enemies combined. If we are able to overwhelm our enemies in both quantity and quality we will be able to win without much of a fight and therefore without taking many casualties (or even having to fight at all in many cases). Whereas the closer it is to being a “fair fight” the more likely our forces are to get bloodied up and take a lot of casualties. Regardless of our great strength we Americans are very sensitive to taking casualties , every American service member lost is somebody’s loved one to us, and all our potential enemies know this. The Islamic Jihadists certainly understand it. They believe if they can bloody our nose and inflict a lot of casualties on our forces we’ll give up and let them have their way. Our nuclear forces are largely irrelevant in nearly every possible conflict because our enemies know that we have way too many scruples to ever use them to win. So really in any likely conflict we are merely discussing the capabilities (or lack thereof ) of America's conventional and special operations forces, which aren’t big enough to do every job that has been laid out for them worldwide. So there is a threshold in American military strength that makes enemies more likely to take our military on around the world (including weak and irresolute political leadership at home) and a lot of Americans seem to realize we have crossed that threshold.
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By any metric — military spending, number of worldwide bases and alliances, quality of technology — America's military is by far the world's most powerful.
By any metric — military spending, number of worldwide bases and alliances, quality of technology — America's military is by far the world's most powerful. Yet the majority of Americans don't see it that way. In a Gallup poll released in February, only 49 percent of Americans said that the US had the strongest military in the world. That was the first timeever that a Gallup poll has found less than a majority saying America wasn't the world's strongest power.
Since 1993, Gallup has asked Americans whether "America is number one in the world, militarily" or whether "it is one of several leading powers." This year is the first when the two results were tied, though it's been close before:
This finding makes the Republican strategy on foreign policy make a whole lot more sense. For virtually the entire election cycle, Trump has been blaming Obama for torpedoing America's strategic position, hollowing out its military, and making the world a more dangerous place.
They're picking up on a real vulnerability. Two-thirds of Americans, according to Gallup, think America should be number one, and not just "among the leading powers." Many Americans who think their country is now just one great power among several aren't happy about it, and some blame Obama and the Democratic candidates who largely back his foreign policy.
There is, no doubt, a bit of a cycle here: The more Republican candidates talk about America's military weakness, the more Americans (especially Republican partisans) come to believe that US military strength has declined.
But the bigger question is why Americans' faith in the country's military strength appears to have weakened even beforethe 2016 campaign began.
The broader trend: US weaker under Democrats, stronger under George W. Bush
These changes don't reflect shifts in America's actual strategic position: Since the end of the Cold War, America has unquestionably been the world's strongest power, with no country even approaching peer status. Rather, public attitudes likely reflect the past three presidents' approach to the military, in terms of both rhetoric and actual policy.
There are basically two trends in the above chart. Bill Clinton and Barack Obama started out their presidencies with polls showing strong American belief in US military primacy, which then declined. Under George W. Bush, it was the opposite: Americans became more confident in US military dominance as his presidency continued.
Bush's foreign policy was practically centered on the idea that the US military, properly deployed, could transform the world — eliminate terrorism, topple rogue regimes, and turn Iraq's dictatorship into a democracy.
Clinton and Obama, by contrast, were both far more hesitant about starting major wars — and thus, rhetorically, less prone to playing up the ability of the US military to fundamentally change the world. Obama especially has emphasized the limits of American power to solve problems like ISIS, even in the face of widespread public fear about the group.
Americans pick up on this. They interpret "the US military can't solve all problems" as "America is losing its military edge," and thus start seeing America as just one great power among many.
Hence, American strength is perceived to be lower under Clinton and Obama than Bush, and even lower under Obama than Clinton. Americans are overreacting to what their presidents say and do, and ignoring the fundamental reality behind the headlines in the process.
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