Military Combat and Preferences for Escalation Among Contemporary American Veterans

While previous research has asked how combat experience affects the willingness of military veterans to support the use of force, there has been little work that focuses on support for escalation within the context of the contemporary American all-volunteer force (AVF). Extant work relies on small sample sizes and measures of foreign policy attitudes which do not directly assess support for heightened military pressure after force is used. This note uses a dataset of more than 1,400 American veterans to distinguish between service experiences and examine opinions about military escalation in Syria. We compare those with combat experience to civilians as well as veterans whose service did not involve military conflict. Our findings advance our understanding of the ways in which direct exposure to armed violence can affect an individual’s later attitudes about the role of military force in American foreign policy.