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Yet, when told of the exact text of the First Amendment, more than one in three high school students said it goes “too far” in the rights it guarantees. Only half of the students said newspapers should be allowed to publish freely without government approval of stories.
It would be interesting to see how the poll was actually conducted and exactly how the questions were phrased. I believe that the vast majority of Americans would answer as they did for one (or more) of these reasons.
1. They hate Bush, so do not want him in charge.
2. They are grossly ignorant of the system of checks and balances and the reasons we have for putting the President in charge of the military.
3. They gave a quick answer without too much thinking. (Put the generals in charge of the military? Sure, sounds sensible to me.) I think many otherwise intelligent people would answer like this if they were being pestered on the phone or in the shopping mall. Only later would they realize their mistake.
4. The question came at the end of a series of leading questions cleverly designed to elicit this answer.
Another point - a lot of these "dissenting generals" made general during the Clinton years. Many were the touch-feely, kumbaya types. Many got where they are not due to leadership ability and military ability, but due to suck-up ability.
That poll says more about lame, incompetent, criminally negligent educational systems than what people think about civilian control of the military, of which clearly they've never heard.
Another dissenting general is retired Army Major General John Batiste. Batiste says Rumsfeld is a disaster and has called him “contemptuous, dismissive and arrogant” toward career officers. But that’s not what he told his men when Rumsfeld visited them in Tikrit in 2004: “This is a man with the courage and the conviction to win the war on terrorism.” Sure, Batiste wouldn’t have criticized Rumsfeld in front of the troops, but why the flip-flop from courageous to contemptuous?
Here is how Batiste explains this in the WSJ:
"...Just weeks before his troops left Iraq, the general had an opportunity to confront Mr. Rumsfeld publicly. The secretary, who was making a 2004 Christmas tour through Iraq, came to meet with him and take questions from his troops.
Gen. Batiste introduced Mr. Rumsfeld to his soldiers as a "man with the courage and conviction to win the war on terrorism." The general says he was disillusioned with Mr. Rumsfeld's leadership at the time, but felt he needed to pump up his soldiers who were in the final days of a grueling, bloody deployment."
http://online.wsj.com/article_print/SB114748270803051995.html
I'd go for a benevolent dictator at this point.
True, but until 1947, many issues of command were fuzzy. The National Command Authority was created and from that no doubt existed that the chain of command went from the President to the Secretary of Defense. The Chairman of the Joints Chiefs is in that chain as a messenger. The Joint Chiefs are not. From the Chairman, orders go directly to the commanders of operational commands such as the Special Operations Command, Centcom, etc. Except for training, logistics and advice, the joint chiefs are left out, as are most post and base commanders. They are housekeepers, not operational commanders.
Can you say "red herring"? This was a dumb question, not just because it appears to exploit the lack of civics classes in our schools, but because the question depends on semantics ( OR as WJBC might say) on what the definition of "control" is. There are a dozen ways to "re-ask" the question (e.g. "Would you like to see the civilian Secretaries of Defense, Army, Navy and Air Force replaced by active duty military personnel, or do you think that is still important to guard against military takeovers of the government by maintaining civilian control?"). On the other hand, if you asked, "Who should be controlling the tactics, techniques and procedures of our military personnel, civilians who may never have served a day in the military, or Generals and Admirals?", in which case you'll probably get the same answer as the Fox poll.