Disturbing Report about US Officer Corps Attitudes

David Wood at Huffington Post details some of the friction between the Obama team and the Pentagon regarding the scope of the military intervention in Libya.  Essentially, the White House wanted a plan for a limited operation that would secure US interests; the Pentagon said that no such plan was possible.  Obama went ahead.  We are where we are.

But buried in the middle of the piece is a report on a survey of 4000 officers conducted by a Georgetown PhD candidate:

the current generation of military officers, matured in a decade of combat, want a bigger voice in making policy. In a recent exhaustive study of 4,000 officers, Heidi Urben, an active-duty officer and doctoral candidate at Georgetown University, found that few of them are content with the traditional role of providing advice to civilian policymakers.

More than half of the officers in the random survey said the military should "insist" on clear political and military goals for any proposed operation; 46 percent said senior military leaders should "insist" on a clear exit strategy. And 37 percent of officers agreed with the statement that, to be respected as commander-in-chief, the president should have served in the military. [my emphases]

In the wake of the military fiasco in Iraq and the mess in Afghanistan, such results perhaps ought not surprise us.

But the potential danger to the Constitution ought to be obvious.