Participants in the Military Times survey, for example, tended to be white, older, and more senior in rank--that is, they were hardly a representative sampling of the armed services. Another oft-cited study, conducted in 1998 by Feaver and Richard Kohn, found that 64 percent of military leaders identified themselves as ideologically conservative. While this was a groundbreaking study of senior officer attitudes, the data told us little about what the vast majority of military personnel--soldiers and non-commissioned officers--believe. After all, officers constitute only 14 percent of Army personnel; and only 6 percent hold the rank of major or higher.
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It is true that the upper echelons of the military tilt right. My own research confirmed that about two-thirds of majors and higher-ranking officers identify as conservative, as previous studies found. But that tilt becomes far less pronounced when you expand the pool of respondents. That is because only 32 percent of the Army's enlisted soldiers consider themselves conservative, while 23 percent identify as liberal and the remaining 45 percent are self-described moderates. These numbers closely mirror the ideological predilections of the civilian population. According to data collected in 2004 by the Annenberg Public Policy Center, 37 percent of the civilian, non-veteran population identified as conservative, 24 percent as liberal, and the remaining 39 percent as moderate or undecided.
