Jason Reifler

Success Matters: Casualty Sensitivity and the War in Iraq

Since the Vietnam War, U.S. policymakers have worried that the American public will support military operations only if the human costs of the war, as measured in combat casualties, are minimal. Although the public is rightly averse to suffering casualties, the level of popular sensitivity to U.S. military casualties depends critically on the context in which those losses occur. The publics tolerance for the human costs of war is primarily shaped by the intersection of two crucial factors: beliefs about the rightness or wrongness of the war, and beliefs about the wars likely success. The impact of each belief depends upon the other. Ultimately, however, beliefs about the likelihood of success matter most in determining the publics willingness to tolerate U.S. military deaths in combat. A reanalysis of publicly available polls and a detailed analysis of a series of polls designed by the authors to tap into public attitudes on casualties support this conclusion.

Casualties, Polls, and the Iraq War

In their article “Success Matters: Casualty Sensitivity and the War in Iraq,” Christopher Gelpi, Peter Feaver, and Jason Reioer attempt to oush out the relationship between public opinion and the use of force as it pertains to the Iraq war.1 The authors promote the following proposition: “Our thesis is that expectations of future success are the key determinants of public casualty tolerance. That is, the U.S. public can accept that the war is not yet won and will involve continued and even mounting costs, provided that events thus far are not convincing it that eventual success is impossible” (p. 24). This statement actually contains two theses. First, public support for a military operation will not necessarily wane in the face of rising casualties.2 Second, the public’s tolerance for casualties is most affected by its expectation of victory (i.e., ultimate strategic success). These theses are consistent with Feaver and Gelpi’s argument in their earlier work: “Casualty phobia is not the dominant feature of the general public. On the contrary, policymakers can tap into a large reservoir of support for missions, even missions that entail a fairly high human price, provided those missions are successful. The public is defeat phobic, not casualty phobic.”3 Applying this argument to Iraq, Gelpi, Feaver, and Reioer assert that, as long as Americans expect victory, they will tolerate mounting casualties and thus support the war. Put another way, they claim that opposition to the Iraq war is driven not by casualties per se, but by the expectation of failure: “When the public believes that the mission will succeed, it continues to support the mission, even as costs mount. When the public thinks victory is unlikely, even small costs will cause support to plummet” (pp. 15–16).