Fighting to win: Wartime morale in the American public
Abstract The ingredients of wartime morale are the subject of lively debate, with casualties, prospect of victory, and elite cues representing the major points of view. This research covers the wars in Korea and Vietnam with expanded time series of public support and rare surveys that probed perceptions of victory during those military interventions. The prospect of victory affected wartime morale during both of those conflicts. It did so quite uniformly in the American public, cutting across elite cues such as partisanship. Casualties left only a weak, if any, imprint on popular support for the wars in Korea and Vietnam. Wartime morale suffered during those interventions not so much because of battlefield casualties or the breakdown of elite consensus, but because the prospect of victory collapsed.