65% Say U.S. Has World's Most Powerful Military
Most U.S. voters believe America's military is the most powerful in the world.
A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 65% of Likely U.S. Voters think the U.S. military is more powerful than the military of any other nation, but 21% disagree. Fourteen percent (14%) are not sure. (To see survey question wording, click here.).
Among voters who have served in the military, 70% rate U.S. armed forces as the most powerful.
Despite this confidence, voters are fairly evenly divided as to whether the federal government spends too much or too little on national defense, although most appear to dramatically underestimate how much is actually spent.
This past Veterans’ Day, 81% of all Americans held a favorable view of the U.S. military. Eighty-three percent (83%) of voters currently rate the military’s performance in the War on Terror as good or excellent.
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The survey of 1,000 Likely U.S. Voters was conducted on January 27, 2011 by Rasmussen Reports. The margin of sampling error is +/- 3 percentage points with a 95% level of confidence. Field work for all Rasmussen Reports surveys is conducted by Pulse Opinion Research, LLC. See methodology.
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