Doonesbury by Garry Trudeau for May 29, 2011

“A well-regulated militia, composed of the body of the people, trained to arms, is the proper, natural, and safe defense of a free state; that standing [ i.e. professional ] armies, in time of peace, should be avoided as dangerous to liberty; and that, in all cases, the military should be under strict subordination to, and be governed by, the civil power.” — Virginia Declaration of Rights, June 12, 1776. Once upon a time in America, we were supposed to have a citizen army, which did not mean a force of professionals who make their living in the military, but a trained and disciplined citizen body who could rise up to defend the country if attacked. From 1776 until 1890s, the Congress always tried to keep the army as small as practicable, a tiny force of poorly-paid soldiers, mostly foreign-born, led by a small cadre of officers who themselves could not hope live well, or ever retire, unless they had independent means. There were no pensions to speak of, no retirements, and officers served into their 70s and 80s. Nobody thought much of the “regulars” our there is isolated posts dealing with the Indians, so poorly equipped that they little resembled the blue-uniformed and smart “horse soldiers” living in stockaded forts that Hollywood has given us. They were never expected to be able to handle business outside our borders. A foreign war, whether with Mexico or Spain, called for the raising of masses of civilian volunteers who never expected to make the military their career. The Progressive era and Theodore Roosevelt (who witnessed the snafus of the Spanish War) gave us military build-up, and a larger navy. WWI still caught us terribly unprepared, thought we had 1914-1917 to get ready. We still saw the military severely cut back in the 1920s, and only under FDR did we begin to build up again, especially after 1938. Again, it was the (isolationist) conservatives who opposed this additional spending. We have been on a war footing ever since, with hardly a break between the “Cold War” and the “GWT”. And it was the liberal desire to eliminate the draft, as well as the military’s desire to get rid of independently-minded civilian draftees in the services, that produced, after Viet Nam, the present situation, so far from the conception of our Founding Fathers. Ron Paul actually gets this, and tells us that “you can have an empire or you can have a republic, but you can’t have both.” Notice that in the Declaration of Rights, quoted above, their is no mention of a right to bear arms. Not the point at all. The point is that the Founding Fathers envisioned a society in which there was little or no division between the civilian and the military, where wars would have to be necessary and popular, or they could not be fought: for the people at large were going to have to fight them. We can call our service people patriots and heroes if we like, and in many cases those terms are appropriate, but between purely mercenary private contractors and a military now largely professional, “we the people” are no longer fighting our own wars. We now pay others to do it for us, and are mainly concerned with what it will cost us in dollars rather than what it will cost them. The British officer corps in WWI were largely the sons of the upper classes who died in droves on the Western Front. University graduates joined in large numbers in this country in the Civil War, WWI, and WWII. There’s been a new study showing how much important leadership was provided by Harvard graduates in the Civil War. How many Ivy League graduates today volunteer after graduation? (Some may volunteer before, in order to get college money: not the same thing.) So the sons and daughters of America’s elite stay out of uniform, and the veterans working in our businesses and officers are invisible. And long and bloody wars can be fought without the country being too much disturbed or inconvenienced. We even do it all on borrowed money so we don’t have to see rationing or rising taxes at home. (Put our military spending on a par with China or Russia, and we would have no deficit.) Once upon a time in America, it was not so:

“A well-regulated militia, composed of the body of the people, trained to arms, is the proper, natural, and safe defense of a free state; that standing [ i.e. professional ] armies, in time of peace, should be avoided as dangerous to liberty; and that, in all cases, the military should be under strict subordination to, and be governed by, the civil power.”