Drudge is pushing poll results that show a surprising tilt in favor of Romney: a 46-44 advantage among women registered voters.

I am puzzled, however, by a different poll that shows something different but equally surprising: a tilt in favor of Obama, but this time among the "veteran vote." According to Reuters, "If the election were held today, Obama would win the veteran vote by as much as seven points over Romney, higher than his margin in the general population."

Part of the explanation is the way Reuters defines "veteran vote" to include not only the veteran but also "families." Adding in the families dilutes a demographic (male) that traditionally trends Republican with demographics (youth and women) that traditionally trend Democratic.  

If adding in the family explains the gap, then there is not much of a story here. But if the Obama advantage extends to veterans and the military, that would really be something.

In previous elections, military and veteran (narrowly defined) voters have tended to vote Republican by margins bigger than what is seen in the civilian population. Of course, Democrats have worked very hard to overcome that gap. In 2002, they hugged the more popular Republican commander-in-chief. In 2004, they nominated a Silver Star winner as their standard-bearer who traveled the country with some of his fellow Vietnam vets and made a "reporting for duty" salute as his grand entrance at the national convention. In 2006, they ran on a "support the troops, bring them home from the front" platform. And in 2008, facing a war-hero and POW survivor, they tried to out-bid Republicans on pay and benefits for the troops and their families.  

President Obama has assiduously courted the military along these same lines, and so I would not be surprised to see him outpoll his Democratic predecessors. But given other structural considerations between the two parties, I would be surprised to see him outpoll his Republican counterpart.

For one thing, in the same Reuters poll, Republicans have a 10 point advantage over Democrats among "veterans and their families" on the question: "In your opinion, which political party better serves the needs of veterans and their families." Republicans have a 5 point advantage over Democrats among the same group on "...which political party has a better plan, policy, or approach to the war on terror," a 6 point advantage on "...a better plan, policy or approach to Iran," and, for that matter, a 6 point advantage on "...the U.S. economy."  Moreover, the veterans and their families are quite hawkish -- strongly opposing cuts to defense spending, tilting slightly in favor of something approximating unilateralism, and remarkably supportive of the use of force option to keep Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons (57 percent agree strongly or somewhat and only 17 percent disagree strongly or somewhat). If Obama has the advantage, it seems to derive more from a personal appeal than any across-the-board support for his platform.

For another thing, previous surveys of active duty and former military consistently show that military personnel tend to be conservative and tend to be more Republican than comparable demographic cohorts in the civilian world. Likewise, the regular survey of the Military Times readership -- which is not a representative sample of all veterans or all military, but is a useful sample of career military -- consistently has shown deep skepticism about President Obama as a leader.

For all those reasons and more, I still expect that Romney will "win" the military and veteran vote this time around.  

Having said all that, however, I am not sure it is a good thing for civil-military relations that the campaigns vie for the military and veteran vote in this fashion. I understand why they do so -- it is a way of signaling that the party/candidate can be trusted on national security, and that is a legitimate thing to want to signal. But wooing the military/veteran vote can be corrosive of healthy civil-military relations. The military have a distinctive position in American society. They are trusted with exceptional coercive power and a privileged access to our country's resources, but in exchange they are expected to be entirely subordinate to civilian authority.  

We expect the military to salute and obey, even if they are not successfully wooed. President Obama is their legitimate commander-in-chief and has earned their respect and obedience by virtue of his success in persuading the entire electorate to support him, regardless of how he fared with the military themselves. Undue effort at wooing can contribute to a politicization of the military, making it that much more difficult for any commander-in-chief to exercise the constitutional role.

Yesterday's column by David Ignatius ostensibly detailing the Obama administration's reelection campaign's strengths on foreign policy is revealing, but probably not in the way the White House hopes. While some more critical analysis from Ignatius (usually one of the most perceptive of foreign policy columnists) would have been preferred, in this case he seems to be channeling what he's hearing from the White House, so the column serves the useful purpose of explaining the administration's mindset. No doubt Obama's experience and understanding of foreign policy has, um, evolved during his time in office. But given the administration's message in the article's closing line that Obama will be making the campaign case that he has "learned on the job," the specific examples of the administration's current thinking and future priorities cited in the article are puzzling and don't help their case.

For example, on Syria Ignatius says that Obama "worries that the protracted struggle" risks empowering extremists who would be worse than Assad. This is a serious concern, but it also risks becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy because it completely disregards the White House's own role in failing to support the non-extremist opposition elements in Syria who have for a year been crying out for American help.

On Russia, the hope is expressed that Obama can "do business" with the "transactional" Putin. One wonders if that is the most sophisticated assessment the White House can offer after investing so much diplomatic capital in Medvedev and the failed "re-set" policy, and after seeing Putin's conspiratorial and belligerent campaign directed at the U.S.?

On Iran, I hope the administration's optimism is warranted about the possibility of Tehran accepting a grand bargain on its nuclear program. But the real challenge comes if, as is more likely, Iran rejects the offer -- what is the administration's contingency plan? Especially since as Will Tobey lays out here, Vice President Biden's boasts and distortions notwithstanding, the Iranian regime has made substantial progress on its nuclear program during Obama's time in office.

The Israeli-Palestinian peace process? Again, may the administration's optimism be warranted, but making that a second-term focus needs to first account for the significant setbacks caused by the administration's own previous miscalculations, especially by alienating the Israeli leadership and adopting a position on settlements even firmer than the Palestinian position itself. "Managing" the Arab Spring? This seems to have disquieting echoes of "leading from behind," especially given the administration's current paralysis on Syria and apathy and missed opportunities, as Jackson Diehl has argued, towards democracy promotion in general.

Also curiously absent from the list of second-term priorities is Afghanistan or Asia -- the latter omission is especially puzzling given the administration's previous hype about its strategic pivot. The bottom line is that, as Peter Feaver and I among others have described, the administration's foreign policy successes have generally come when they have followed Bush administration strategic frameworks, and their greatest missteps have come when they tried to go in different directions. Such a pattern does not necessarily bode well for the administration's hoped-for second term policy priorities. Now the skeptics out there might respond that of course Shadow Government writers would say something like that. But I hope those skeptics remember one of Shadow Government's modest maxims: Just because a Republican says it, doesn't mean that it isn't true.

Responding to six months of DOD clamor that the Budget Control Act would decimate our national defense, this week the House of Representatives moved forward with a budget that would allow the Department of Defense to escape the strictures of sequestration, giving DOD a $519 billion baseline budget and $88.5 billion operations fund. Sequestration would have imposed a roughly 12 percent cut to Defense across ten years. The same House budget imposes a 12 percent reduction this year on the State Department budget requested by the White House. Yet where is the leadership of the Department -- and the Obama administration, who championed civilian power?

Where is the full-throated objection that we will cease to be a global power if our diplomacy is gutted? Where is the president's veto threat? Where is the detailed departmental projection of what essential functions will be impossible to perform? Where is the orchestrated White House strategy of business leaders and civil society groups and average Americans who stand to be negatively affected by the cuts? State has only rolled out assistant secretaries to defend specific programs (like the $700 million in aid for democratization); a threat of this magnitude requires a high-level full-court press. All this has been done by and for Defense.

I agree with Peter that, sadly, an even wider swath of civilian activity will be shifted into the military as national security spending is reduced. However, I think his contention that the State Department and other civilian agencies cannot perform these functions merits further examination. In particular, it is not necessarily true that organizations cannot perform additional functions without additional resources or without shedding other functions. They can rethink their business model to make it more cost-effective, and they can reinvent how they perform their functions. The State Department is long overdue for a serious assessment of how it performs the crucial work of American diplomacy. 

Why do we accept that money is always the answer in the State Department? It is an important input, certainly, but money is not determinative. The best funded militaries do not always win their wars. The best funded companies are not always market leaders, and they are rarely market innovators. When a sympathetic reporter suggested to Steve Jobs in the 1980s that it had lost the competition with Microsoft because Apple didn't have the resources, Jobs memorably said "innovation has nothing to do with how many R&D dollars you have. When Apple came up with the Mac, IBM was spending at least 100 times more on R&D. It's not about money. It's about the people you have, how you're led, and how much you get it." The American military will likely have to shoulder an even greater proportion of what needs doing, but not because of money. More civilian functions will move into the military realm because of the people they have, how they're led, and how much they get it.

State still has an institutional culture defined by reporting -- describing what is happening rather than affecting change. It has barely changed its practices despite an explosion of information sources in the past twenty years. It continues a professional development model that invests nothing in our diplomats, producing generalist foreign service officers in an age when detailed knowledge is at a premium. Almost the entirety of its training budget goes to language, yet it typically does not produce diplomats proficient enough to debate American policies in the language of the country they are stationed. It considers "public diplomacy" somehow separate from the fundamental tasks of diplomacy. Despite a renaissance of private philanthropy and emergence of remittances, USAID still has not answered the fundamental question of what functions in foreign assistance need to be undertaken by governments. These are problems of institutional culture, not problems of funding.

But if the problem is money, why isn't the State Department fighting for it? Why isn't the leadership contesting the spending levels and priorities in advance of the bill passing? The president has often said in the context of the wars that we can't care more about building democracy than they -- the country affected -- does. The same holds true for budgeting: The Obama administration shouldn't expect us to care more about building civilian capacity than they do.

Earlier this week, Vice President Joseph Biden misspoke. Normally, this would not be news. But unlike using obscene language, or confusing which Supreme Court Justice administered his oath of office, or talking about the president's "big stick," this time it matters.

The vice president said:

"When we took office, let me remind you, there was virtually no international pressure on Iran. We were the problem. We were diplomatically isolated in the world, in the region, in Europe."

Beyond the obvious point that "we" were not the problem, that Iran's longstanding and repeated violations of its IAEA Safeguards Agreement, multiple IAEA Board of Governors Resolutions, and multiple United Nations Security Council Resolutions were and are the problem, the vice president ignores history and distorts the present.

The United States was not isolated on Iran when the Obama administration took office. U.S. diplomacy had succeeded in passing, with Russian, Chinese, and European support, four United Nations Security Council Resolutions from 2006-2008, tightening the web of sanctions on Iran. Moreover, the Bush administration began innovative use of financial sanctions in cooperation with U.S. allies -- a policy the Obama administration has succeeded in continuing and expanding. Russia and China have always favored an incremental approach, so it is to be expected that over time, sanctions efforts would grow more forceful and the Obama administration has succeeded in making them so.

More disturbing is the isolation from reality implied by the vice president's remarks. Touting the success of the administration's Iran policy, he went on to say, "today it is starkly, starkly different." Well, yes, the situation is starkly different. In 2009, Iran had about 4,000 centrifuges enriching uranium; today, its production capacity is more than double that. Iran's declared stocks of low enriched uranium are five times what they they were in 2009. Two years ago, Iran began enriching to the much higher level of 20 percent, and can do so in a new, deep, underground facility near Qom.

Despite sanctions, Iran's nuclear program is expanding and accelerating. Iran is to blame for that, not the United States, but whatever can be said for the administration's policy on Iran, it is not halting the nuclear program.

A recent Cable item from the intrepid Josh Rogin tells me that one of the consequences of the era of declining defense budgets may well be a further shifting of civilian roles back on to defense shoulders.

That is not a typo.

For years pundits have complained about the "militarization" of foreign policy, referring to the way that foreign policy tasks get assigned to the military even if the tasks do not involve military expertise per se (i.e. blowing things up). For decades, the military has been deployed to do everything from disaster relief to rural development to local banking reform to post-conflict venture capital, and so on. High defense spending has bought remarkable capacity in our uniformed ranks, and that capacity has been utilized in the service of a broad range of foreign policy goals.

Critics have complained that these tasks are not inherently military and they could be, perhaps should be, done by civilians in the State Department and elsewhere. Letting civilians do civilian tasks would, the critics maintain, "demilitarize" American foreign policy. Hence, a big push to boost capacity outside of DoD.

That push enjoyed substantial rhetorical support from Secretary Rumsfeld, who despaired of the military being the bill-payer for tasks better assigned to State and elsewhere. It enjoyed even more substantial material and political support from Secretary Gates, who joined first with Secretary Rice and then with Secretary Clinton to beg Congress to boost the budget of the State Department so as to build civilian capacity.

I suspect that effort may have reached a turning point, however. The very same fiscal pressures that are forcing deep cuts in the defense budget will be operating on the budgets of the State Department and other departments and agencies that might otherwise be expected to prop up the civilian side of the civil-military balance. And in such a hostile fiscal environment, it is likely that the military will lose less than civilian agencies will. Or rather: Even if the military loses more in absolute terms (because their budget baseline is so high), in relative terms they can weather those losses better without losing minimum functioning capacity.

In short, the civil-military balance is likely to tip even further in the direction of the military.

This was the gist of a talk I gave last month to the Army War College's Annual Strategy Conference. I made several points, which the latest congressional action on the foreign operations and defense budgets have only reinforced:

• To make a lasting change in a civilian departmental or agency effectiveness, you have to increase resources relative to assigned tasks, specifically personnel resources. You must create float -- more than 100 percent staffing, so that a fraction of the workforce can always be improving its skill-set through professional training and education. If you can't increase resources, you have to decrease tasks. Neither is happening today.
• The problem of a balance tilted in favor of the military is a very old one. Ever since the United States became a global power, we have oscillated between two less-than-ideal coping mechanisms: (1) be unprepared or (2) ask the military to handle this as a lesser-included-task along with the primary mission of preparing to fight and win our wars. There are many complex reasons for this, but one pretty fundamental one is that it costs a great deal to build a military capable of fighting and winning our wars (and we often are unwilling in peacetime even to adequately fund that) and once you have paid for such a tool, it seems efficient to use it for other tasks, even ones it was not designed to do. Better a sub-optimal fit than a non-existent tool.
• If Gates+Rice and Gates+Clinton couldn't fix this problem, it won't get fixed in our professional lifetime. Those two Defense-State pairs may well have delivered the best levels of cooperation ever achieved between those two departments. And in the latter case, it happened while the administration enjoyed a dominant party advantage in Congress. It will only get more difficult from here on out. Adequately building up civilian capacity was going to be a hard slog when you had lesser politicians talking about how "it is time to focus on nation building here at home." Unfortunately for the more grandiose plans for building civilian capacity in national security affairs, the author of that line was President Obama when he announced in June 2011 that he was accelerating the end of his Afghan surge. That unfortunate applause line could prove quite effective in killing any momentum for rebalancing capabilities between DoD and State. What were those capacities needed for? Nation-building abroad. Well, it is time to stop doing that....

Therefore, while it is fine to remain rhetorically committed to Plan A (improving State capacity), the military should train and equip for Plan B (State and other civilian agencies  are no more and probably less capable than they were in 2008).

Once again Israel has caught the world off-guard, this time by announcing the creation of a new national unity government, which incorporates the leading opposition party and the centrist Kadima headed by its new leader, former Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz. Previous national unity governments were formed prior to the 1967 war and in 1984 in response to Israel's economic crisis. The new coalition indicates the depth of the multi-faceted crisis in which the Jewish state currently finds itself. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's government confronts difficult choices across a wide range of issues, ranging from decisions regarding an attack on Iran, middle class unrest regarding the country's increasingly unbalanced economy, social tensions over the power of the ultra-Orthodox Haredim, and the future of a peace process that seems ever more remote.

Netanyahu had dropped the broadest of hints that a new election was in the offing; most observers expected an announcement that the election would be held on September 4, before the Jewish high holidays, and, significantly, two months before the American elections. With Netanyahu widely expected to return as prime minister, it appeared that he would be in an even stronger position to threaten a strike on Iran if the international community appeared unable to prevent Tehran from moving ahead with its program to develop a nuclear weapon. By adding Kadima's 28 seats to those of his own coalition, giving him 92 seats out of 120 in the Knesset (parliament), Netanyahu was able to strengthen his hand domestically without having to go to the polls for another year.

Kadima's return to office -- Ehud Olmert, Netanyahu's predecessor, was Kadima's leader, as was Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, the party's founder -- will certainly affect any decision by Israel to attack Iran. Mofaz, who was born in Tehran, is known to be opposed to a unilateral strike; as a former chief of staff, his opinion will carry some weight in the government's security cabinet. On the other hand, should he become convinced that Israel has no other option but to strike the Iranian nuclear facilities, his support would solidify Netanyahu's decision, both internally and externally.

Mofaz and Kadima bring more to Netanyahu than possible support for an attack on Iran, however. Kadima has been far more forthcoming on making some progress in the peace process with the Palestinians. Significantly, Mahmoud Abbas welcomed the creation of the new government. Kadima's participation in the government allows Netanyahu to sidestep the more extreme elements of his own Likud party, and particularly those with close ties to the settler movement. The risk he runs, however, is that he could be abandoned by his party, as has been the case with Ehud Barak, or become a Ramsay MacDonald-type hostage to Kadima. Still, Netanyahu appears to be solidly in charge of Likud; the settlers may fuss and fume, but their clout may be less than meets the eye.

Kadima will certainly help Netanyahu in the economic and social realms. The "start-up nation" increasingly resembles a banana republic: The percentage of the population below the poverty line has increased in the past few years. Middle-class discontent over housing costs and the price of basic foods, could erupt once again, and the tent cities of a few months ago could result in a backlash against Likud. Kadima, on the other hand, is seen as sympathetic to middle-class needs, and likely will provide a vehicle for Netanyahu to be more accommodating to the middle class than might otherwise have been the case.

Finally, with the Israeli supreme court ruling that military exemptions for the Haredim are unconstitutional, the entry of the secular Kadima party into the government allows Netanyahu to outmaneuver the religious parties, who will no longer have a stranglehold on the government. The ultra-orthodox religious establishment, and the parties that represent it, will howl in protest at any attempt to remove the exemptions from military and national service that now apply to over 60,000 students in religious seminaries. On the other hand, popular opinion in Israel (and, for that matter, among its Jewish supporters overseas) overwhelmingly opposes more than a limited percentage of exemptions for the Haredim. Netanyahu and the unity government could now pursue a plan such as that which Defense Minister Ehud Barak has proposed: No more than roughly 3,000 places, or roughly five percent of the current population, would be reserved in the seminaries for the best and the brightest students. The remainder would either perform national service or serve in the military, after which they would enter the workforce, thereby injecting a real boost to the economy, while lowering the burden that subsidies for these students, and their often large families, force the government to bear.

Clearly, Netanyahu's latest move is a masterstroke, politically as well as in terms of the nation's security, its economy, and its social cohesion. In the past, national unity Governments have accomplished the mission for which they were established. If Netanyahu can do the same, particularly if Mofaz is able to restrain any Israeli impulse to attack Iran, this latest government will be able to take its place among its distinguished predecessors. 

The disruption of a new underwear bomber plot, once again attributable to al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) -- one of the most active branches of al Qaeda -- is a welcome and yet worrisome development. On the one hand, kudos to our counter-terrorism establishment which, through good intelligence and police work, stopped the bomber before he could carry out his attack. On the other hand, AQAP has shown that it -- and al Qaeda in general -- are alive and well, despite our best efforts to disrupt and destroy them. After years of deadly strikes against the group (see Bill Roggio's excellent work on this here), AQAP has been able to regenerate and continue to plot and plan destructive terrorist attacks against the homeland. 

Even more worrisome, however, is that AQAP managed to organize this attack while its fighting cadres are winning battle after battle against the Yemeni government, seizing territory and imposing al Qaeda's version of sharia on the populace. I'll have more to say on this issue soon, when the first part of my reaction to the recently released Osama bin Ladin documents will be posted. For this piece, I will just say that it is a false dichotomy to categorize al Qaeda's strategy as one that is meant solely to take territory OR solely to carry out attacks on the U.S. As the actions of AQAP make quite clear, the group desires both and, more importantly, has the capabilities to do both simultaneously.

The U.S. is on high alert to watch for any further bombs that might be on the loose; I wonder if we have a similarly well-thought out plan in place to deal with the deteriorating situation in the country that allowed these plots to be hatched.

President Obama is right to invite France's new president to the White House in the coming weeks for a series of exploratory talks. The Obama team will understandably put a positive spin on such a visit, but I bet the motivation is as much fear as opportunity. From the point of view of American foreign policy, I think Doyle McManus has it right: Obama is sure going to miss Sarkozy.

Sarkozy was the indispensable key figure in two of the more prominent policies that Obama officials tout as "successes." First, it was Sarkozy, not Obama, who led on Libya. Without Sarkozy (and British Prime Minister Cameron) pushing the agenda, it is likely that Obama's initial policy of refusing to intervene in Libya would have held. Obama joined the bandwagon somewhat belatedly, something that even White House spinners couldn't ignore, thus giving rise to the infamous "lead from behind" frame.

Likewise, it has been Sarkozy (and the U.S. Congress) more than the Obama administration out in front on using economic coercion to confront Iran's nuclear ambitions. Obama's innovative contribution to Iran policy was the unsuccessful attempt to hold unconditional talks with the Iranian leaders in 2009. However, with Sarkozy pushing hard from one end and the U.S. Congress pushing hard from the other end, eventually, after a year or so delay, the Obama administration did join in to impose tighter sanctions.

Thus, Sarkozy may well have been the indispensable figure in two of the more prominent talking points on Obama's brag sheet. If his French partner had been more of a spoiler in the mold of Sarkozy's predecessor, Jacques Chirac, is it plausible to think that President Obama would have intervened in Libya or secured new rounds of multilateral sanctions on Iran?  

Finding out what kind of partner President Hollande will be is a high priority for President Obama. And finding that out may also tell us some important things about President Obama. To borrow a sports analogy that the president would doubtless understand, we may learn that Obama is not as good a point guard when the other guys on his team can't or won't run the fast break.