Today, some officers warn that an army of nation-builders would lose its edge at conventional warfare. But in keeping with the founders’ belief that the soldier’s role was to build, not just to destroy, we need our own multipurpose military ”” an Army and Marine Corps with duties that extend far beyond winning tank battles or artillery duels against enemy states, or even fighting at all. And just as in Jefferson’s time, West Point in the 21st century should supply a nation-builder’s education, and we should encourage its efforts to emphasize in its curriculum the study of foreign languages and cultures.
The troops from America’s farming heartlands who are helping Afghans build greenhouses, grow cops and better feed cattle are not losing their identity as warriors ”” they’re following in the footsteps of our earliest soldiers.
“…in keeping with the founders’ belief that the soldier’s role was to build, not just to destroy…”
WHAT ARE THEY TALKING ABOUT?!? The Founders feared a standing Army. The Founders believed in a militia for the national defense (supplemented by a small cadre). The purpose of an army is to kill people and break things. The Founders knew this. Central banks and standing armies were both anathema to the Founders.
This is typical liberal hogwash. The military is a social experiment to them. They don’t like military values and they certainly don’t like military politics. They want all that destroyed. There is a direct correlation between the supposed inability to count militay absentee votes and the party politics of the people who want those votes excluded.
#1. Agree with your statements. In the run up to the 2003 invasion/liberation of Iraq it was then Secretary of State Colin Powell that was credited with establishing the “Potter Barn” doctrine: “You break it, you own it”. This was, of course, his way of illustrating International Occupation Law and to convey to NSC that once you invade another country and remove the recognized government (odious though it may be) the invading nation has legal obligations to provide governmental functions.
Since the US doesn’t have much governmental capacity within the Department of State and USAID the US Military provided most of the capacity to fulfill its LEGAL obligations. This was also the case after WWII in Germany and Japan.
Soldiers don’t want to do this type of work we are trained to kill the enemy and break things as you say. If national leaders order us afterward to take up nation building tasks then we do our “military best” to accomplish the mission despite being unqualified. If you look at it from the US Government point of view, when all you have is a hammer (military), every problem looks like a nail.
If standing armies and central banks were anathema to the founders, then it would seem silly to point out that the Constitution itself provides for a standing army and navy (Art. I, Sec. 8), and that the Charter of the first Bank of the United States sailed rather easily through the very first Congress, and signed into law by the very first President. If it was anathema to them, it wouldn’t have existed.
Palagious, your third paragraph is right on the money. Thomas Barnett has consistently argued for something along the lines of a ‘armed Peace Corp’ to do the necessary work of connecting countries to the global economy. You can’t ask the same 19 year old to kill on Monday and feed the same people they were shooting at on Tuesday.
4, then explain the strong militia clauses. 1 is absolutely correct. The Founders recognized that there had to be a standing Army to be a core around which the militia could be organized and formed at need. The modern military structure that we have is late. The National Guard did not come into existence until 1903 and the current large standing Army that we now have was not created until the 1950s.
You’re right insofar as the huge military structure we have is recent; a huge standing army is what you get when you tie international security to national defense, and separate them by how ever long it takes to get an ICBM from Omsk to Chicago. My understanding is that the army was intended to defend the homeland, while the Navy (together with the Marine Corps) existed to maintain ‘security’ of our trade (as it was used against the Barbary Pirates). I was reacting to the blanket statement of Sick’s, which was ‘feared a standing army’ which I understood to mean ‘no standing army [i]at all[/i].’ And, irregardless of what the Founders intended, I think the size of the Cold War military was a Good Thing, since the basic strategy of containment required it (and arguably, worked).
Fundamentally, the article above would require the return to the kind of split the constitution requires, rather than the blending of the two functions in the Dept. of Defense. Like I said, you can’t ask a 19 year old marine to kill on Monday and feed the same people on Tuesday. The two tasks require two different sets of people to do the task. You just need to shift the existing assets and change our doctrine.
All good Whigs (and the Founders mostly came out of the Whig tradition) feared and distrusted standing armies. They were seen as tools of central government to repress the people, the sort of thing one would find in France under Louis XIV, or in England under Cromwell. From the Declaration, one of the complaints against the King is that “he has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures.” Navies weren’t as bad, as they are harder to use against a citizen uprising, but the cost of them was a bitter pill. The anglophile Federalist party liked the Navy, but the Republicans under Jefferson cut it to the bone after they took control in 1800. Jefferson saw the expense of the Navy as an excuse to have a larger Federal government, in order to collect the taxes it needed to function.
I would be very interested in seeing quotes by any of the Founders in which they expressed a “belief that the soldier’s role was to build, not just to destroy…â€. I believe that the author made that up out of whole cloth. Further, that is the sort of muddled thinking that gets soldiers killed. If the Empire wants to play at nation building, they should not be using soldiers to do it. That is not the purpose, function, or training of a soldier.