A Look at . . . Casualty Aversion

How Many Deaths Are Acceptable? A Surprising Answer

The good news is that we drove Serbian troops out of Kosovo without suffering any U.S. combat fatalities, a testament to American military professionalism and prowess.

The bad news is that the foreign policy community, both inside and outside the U.S. government, generally believes that Americans demand a casualty-free victory as the price of supporting any military intervention abroad.

These influential elites are wrong. They have bought into a powerful myth, born during the Vietnam War and cemented during the ill-fated Somalia action of October 1993, that Americans are casualty-shy.

Though the belief has become conventional wisdom, it is not well supported by public opinion polls. A careful analysis of surveys that we conducted last fall and winter shows convincingly that the general public is far more willing to tolerate combat losses than civilian policymakers--or senior military officers.

The casualty-aversion myth has no doubt been exacerbated by President Clinton's awkward relations with the military and thus constitutes part of his troubled legacy in foreign policy. But our research suggests the issue will outlast this president. Coming to terms with it will be a major challenge for the next administration.

Defenders of the "we can't take it anymore" school of thought offer no concrete evidence for their position. Instead, they retreat to anecdotes about the Somalia debacle and the "CNN effect." They say televised images of starving Somalis moved Americans to demand the United States intervene in that country's civil war in December 1992, and images of a dead U.S. soldier being dragged through the streets of Somalia's capital just as rapidly moved them to demand a retreat 10 months later.

That is not what happened.

There was a CNN effect in Somalia, but it did not involve the American public; it involved government officials.

In a recent speech, former president George Bush described how the decision to commit U.S. troops to Somalia came after he and his wife, watching TV, saw "those starving kids . . . in quest of a little pitiful cup of rice." He said he phoned his national security team and said, "Please come over to the White House. I--we--can't watch this anymore. You've got to do something."

Different leaders but a similar dynamic precipitated America's humiliating withdrawal. As news of the disastrous Ranger raid--which left 18 American troops dead--came over the airwaves, members of Congress rushed to the floor to demand that the mission be aborted. The White House, moved by the same images, began to shut down the operation.

When asked by an interviewer about the gruesome TV footage, Clinton took pains to draw a parallel with Bush's reasoning. "I just think it's irresistible to show vivid images. . . . The same television power is what got the country and the world community into it in the first place."

One of us--Feaver--was on the National Security Council staff during this period. Though not privy to Oval Office counsels, the staff realized within 24 hours of the first ugly TV reports that the administration had lost its stomach for the Somalia mission.