Majority of Military not Republican Anymore

[ShineOn]

Weaning the military from the GOP

BURIED IN THE NEWS last week was one of the most potentially significant stories of recent years. The Military Times released its annual poll of active-duty service members, and the results showed something virtually unprecedented: a one-year decline of 10 percentage points in the number of military personnel identifying themselves as Republicans. In the 2004 poll, the percentage of military respondents who characterized themselves as Republicans stood at 60%. By the end of 2005, that had dropped to 56%. And by the end of 2006, the percentage of military Republicans plummeted to 46%.

The drop in Republican Party identification among active-duty personnel is a sharp reversal of a 30-year trend toward the "Republicanization" of the U.S. military, and it could mark a sea change in the nature of the military — and the nature of public debates about national security issues.

...

The poll shows that only 35% of military personnel approve of the president's handling of the war, and three-fourths of those polled say that the military is "stretched too thin to be effective." Anecdotal evidence suggests that many career officers also are skeptical of the administration's approach to combating terrorism and unhappy with its undermining of the norms of the Geneva Convention.

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la- ... ion-center

Why do the troops...er...hate the troops? Kidding. Kind of interesting.