Beginning with the Reagan era, public attitudes toward the military took a decided turn, with supermajorities of Americans telling pollsters that they had high confidence in the military. If this supposition is true — that some people say they support the military because they believe many or most others do — then we would expect to see that public opinion polls would actually overstate public confidence in the military. In the aggregate, our survey showed the public expressing the same high level of confidence in the military that other studies have shown: fully 75 percent of our respondents, when asked the straight Gallup poll question, responded that they had either “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in the military, higher than any other institution we asked them about.