http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2003/0311.wallace-wells.html...the consensus view seems to be that the military as a whole votes Republican by a margin of slightly less than 2-to-1, with enlisted men and women Republican by 3-to-2, and Republicans outnumbering Democrats among officers by 8-to-1. (Thankfully for Democratic partisans, there are 15 times as many enlisted men as officers)...
{me talking here - the enlisted men/women are only 3-to-2 - 3 Republican to 2 Democratic (not as Republican as I thought, and after this fiasco, the balance might tip to 50/50 - or better?):}
...Discontented enlisted men and women have a separate set of provocations...The war in Iraq is already brutal enough day-to-day: Soldiers spend their days in hundred-plus degree heat, being shot at, peering anxiously into the distance, trying to pick out anyone likely to drive through a barricade with a car stuffed with explosives or whip a rifle out from under his robes and start shooting. They are facing an enemy who is not easily identifiable; when they are too aggressive, they are criticized by the press, and when they are not aggressive enough, they are reprimanded by their superiors, if they don't end up dead... "They feel overused, and under-appreciated, particularly in the enlisted ranks," Wilson said. Christopher Parker, a former Army captain and a political scientist at the University of California-Santa Barbara, put it to me more bluntly: "What we're seeing now is almost unprecedented, this widespread sense among people in the military that they're being jacked around."..."There's a sense from everyone I talk to, even down at the unit level, that whoever planned this war simply had no idea what we were getting into," a retired Army captain told me...
Troops have been charged a dollar a minute to call home, newspapers have reported, and soldiers have to buy calling cards from Iraqi kiosks. Tens of thousands of troops have been sent to Iraq with flak jackets from the Vietnam era which, unlike the modern Kevlar, can't stop rounds from the Kalashnikov rifles typically fired by the Iraqi enemy. The Pentagon, looking to trim costs last spring, floated a plan to eliminate the pay benefits soldiers got for serving in so-called "hostile areas"; after a loud outcry from the ranks, they killed the plan. Some injured reservists were billed for food they were served while in the hospital. And veterans' groups are up in arms over the concurrent receipt issue, a military regulation which mandates that no retired soldier receiving his pension from the Department of Defense can also qualify for disability. As veterans' groups have pointed out, retired soldiers (who have more legitimate per capita disability claims than any other group of federal workers) are the only group of employees in the civil service who are barred from drawing simultaneous pensions and disability payments...
{me again - and the officers, who were the most Republican, are really ticked with Bush:}
...There was great skepticism among many officers that Iraq was the right "next target" in the war on terrorism, and an emerging doubt that Rumsfeld and his lieutenants really knew what they were doing... "What I've seen throughout the officer corps is a real pendulum swing over the last three or four months, from being pro-Bush to anti-Bush," Vandergriff said... Retired Gen. Anthony Zinni...last month called the administration's policy a "brain fart."...
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