I can offer three data points from the British army.

–Officers’ messes, as I recall, were pretty solidly socially conservative, although that did not mean the same thing in Britain circa 1970 as it means in the U.S. today. (It mainly meant holding “hard” opinions against obstreperous labor unions, seeing the USSR as a serious menace, and disliking third-world immigration.) I would estimate that in the 1979 election, Margaret Thatcher got at least 90 percent of the officers’-mess vote.

–Around 1980 I was sitting in a pub (The Queen Eleanor, just south of Northampton, England) with some squaddies (=enlisted men) from the nearby Simpson barracks. They had recently got back from a tour in Northern Ireland, and had some great stories. However, all my attempts to engage them on the politics of the situation fell completely flat. They weren’t interested at all. They waved me away with things like: “That’s for the higher-ups to decide. We just do our job. Oh, let me tell you about this time we were out on patrol near Armagh…”

–My brother, a career soldier (noncom) for 22 years, is slightly to the right of Darth Vader.