How Much Military is Enough? Are "Standing Armies" Now Accepted in the United States of America?
It's confusing to me that a standing army was supposed to be a very bad thing according to the constitution, a threat to American liberty. But now I hear that those who are always complaining about politicians not following the constitution are the same people who have no problem with having our troops stationed all over the world, especially the middle east.
They seem to be the same people who have no trouble starting other senseless wars that will involve our military, and cause more of our troops to stand ground on foreign land. They also don't seem to have an issue with the militarization of our police force in America, and the overreach of Homeland Security. Haven't we had standing armies since before 9/11 even? If so, why aren't those who preach the constitution upset about that? Maybe they are, but I don't hear anything about it. Maybe I just don't understand what a standing army is or is not.
(from 2013) http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/01/28/the-force
"The U.S. once regarded a standing army as a form of tyranny. Now it spends more on defense than all other nations combined.
2001, military spending, as a function of the over-all American economy, was, at six per cent, the lowest it had been since the Second World War. Then, for a decade, it rose. In much the same way that the peace dividend expected with the Allied victory never came because of the Cold War (during most of which military spending made up roughly half the federal budget), a peace dividend expected after the end of the Warsaw Pact, in 1991, came but didn’t last.
Instead, after 9/11 the United States declared a “global war on terror,” a fight against fear itself. The Iraq War, 2003-11, went on longer than the American Revolution. The war in Afghanistan, begun in 2001, isn’t over yet, making it the second-longest war in American history. (Only Vietnam lasted longer.) Troops may be withdrawn in 2014; the fighting will rage on. During George W. Bush’s second term, the National Defense Strategy of the United States became “ending tyranny in our world.” But a war to end tyranny has no end; it’s not even a war.
The United States, separated from much of the world by two oceans and bordered by allies, is, by dint of geography, among the best-protected countries on earth. Nevertheless, six decades after V-J Day nearly three hundred thousand American troops are stationed overseas, including fifty-five thousand in Germany, thirty-five thousand in Japan, and ten thousand in Italy. Much of the money that the federal government spends on “defense” involves neither securing the nation’s borders nor protecting its citizens. Instead, the U.S. military enforces American foreign policy.
“We have hundreds of military bases all over the world,” Melvin A. Goodman observes in “National Insecurity: The Cost of American Militarism” (City Lights). “Few other countries have any.”
Goodman, a former Army cryptographer and a longtime C.I.A. analyst who taught at the National War College for eighteen years, is one of a growing number of critics of U.S. military spending, policy, and culture who are veterans of earlier wars. Younger veterans are critical, too. A 2011 Pew survey of veterans of Afghanistan and Iraq found that half thought the war in Afghanistan wasn’t worth fighting, and nearly sixty per cent thought the Iraq War wasn’t.
The most persuasive of these soldier-critics is Andrew J. Bacevich, a West Point graduate who fought in Vietnam in 1970 and 1971; served as a career Army officer, rising to the rank of colonel; and is now a professor of history and international relations at Boston University. A Catholic and a conservative, Bacevich is viscerally pained by Americans’ ”infatuation with military power.” Everything, in Bacevich’s account, comes back to Vietnam, the way it does for a great many of that war’s veterans, including Chuck Hagel, the President’s nominee for Secretary of Defense.
The United States, a nation founded on opposition to a standing army, is now a nation engaged in a standing war.
Bacevich locates the origins of America’s permanent war more than a decade before 9/11. “During the entire Cold War era, from 1945 through 1988, large-scale U.S. military actions abroad totalled a scant six,” he reports. “Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, however, they have become almost annual events.” Bacevich places much of the blame for this state of affairs on intellectuals, especially neoconservatives like Norman Podhoretz and Donald Rumsfeld, but also liberals, who, he points out, have eagerly supported the use of the military and of military force “not as an obstacle to social change but as a venue in which to promote it.” The resort to force is not a partisan position; it is a product of political failure.
And a failure, as well, of political culture. CNN loudmouths, neocon opinion-page columnists, retired generals who run for office, Hollywood action-film directors, Jerry Falwell, Wesley Clark, Tom Clancy, Bill Clinton—Bacevich has long since lost patience with all these people. He deplores their ego-driven mythmaking, their love of glory, their indifference to brutality.
War, by its nature, is barbarous, grievous, and untamable. There never has been a “smart war.” Still, some wars are worse than others. “Surely, the surprises, disappointments, painful losses, and woeful, even shameful failures of the Iraq War make clear the need to rethink the fundamentals of U.S. military policy,” Bacevich suggested in his 2005 book “The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced by War.” That scrutiny has not yet been given, not least because, as Bacevich has observed, “The citizens of the United States have essentially forfeited any capacity to ask first-order questions about the fundamentals of national security policy.” Don’t ask, don’t tell. But, especially, don’t ask.
“There are some in government who want to use the military to pay for the rest, to protect the sacred cow that is entitlement spending,” McKeon said, in his opening remarks, referring to Social Security and Medicare. “Not only should that be a non-starter from a national-security and economic perspective, but it should also be a non-starter from a moral perspective.” Cuts should be made, he said, not to “the protector of our prosperity” but to “the driver of the debt.”
“The driver of our debt is our military-complex machine!” someone shouted from the gallery.
The Capitol Hill Police stepped in and arrested several protesters, including Leah Bolger, the vice-president of Veterans for Peace.
“The war machine is killing this country!” she cried, as she was carried away.
The hearing resumed. McKeon introduced Panetta. But the moment Panetta began to speak a protester interrupted. He identified himself as an Iraq War veteran. “You are murdering people!” he shouted. “I saw what we did to people. I saw.” He was escorted out of the room.
The hearing lasted two more hours. Much time was spent defending defense spending. “I don’t believe that the D.O.D. should have to pay one penny more in discretionary budget cuts,” McKeon said. Much time was devoted to inventorying threats to national security, which, Panetta said, are only increasing in both danger and number. (His list included Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen, and North Africa.)
Hank Johnson, a Democrat from Georgia, attempted to draw an analogy between the Capitol Hill Police’s ability to arrest protesters in a hearing room in the Rayburn House Office Building and the deployment of U.S. forces in every corner of the globe. “From time to time, there are disturbances throughout the world, and these disturbances may interrupt some of our various interests around the world, and it is necessary for us to have some kind of force to maintain order,” he said. “It is like competition, like capitalism.”
Protesters are by no means uncommon at congressional hearings, but this particular protest had rattled people. “I know we started the day with protesters in the room, and sometimes they seem disruptive or their tactics are some we might argue with,” Chellie Pingree, a Democrat from Maine, said. “But, frankly, we are facing a time when there are protesters in almost every city where we reside or represent.”
This time—emboldened, maybe, by the protesters—a few committee members offered comments that were more pointed. Niki Tsongas, a Democrat from Massachusetts, told Dempsey, “I would hope you also take into account that not every risk can be dealt with through a military response.” And the questions were tougher. Walter B. Jones, a Republican* from North Carolina, asked Panetta, “Why are we still in Afghanistan?”
Panetta circled around an answer. “One thing we do not want,” he said, “is Afghanistan becoming a safe haven again for Al Qaeda.”
“Mr. Secretary,” Jones pressed, “we got bin Laden, and Al Qaeda has dispersed all around the world. Let’s bring them home.”
But by far the most adamant statement came from Dempsey. “I didn’t become the chairman of the Joint Chiefs to oversee the decline of the Armed Forces of the United States, and an end state that would have this nation and its military not be a global power,” he said. “That is not who we are as a nation.”
Either the United States rules the world or Americans are no longer Americans? Happily, that’s not the choice the 113th Congress faces. The decision at hand concerns limits, not some kind of national, existential apocalypse. Force requires bounds. Between militarism and pacifism lie diplomacy, accountability, and restraint. Dempsey’s won’t be the last word. ♦"
*A redistricting of California’s Twenty-fifth Congressional District went into effect in January, 2013. The district no longer includes a naval weapons station, Army fort, or a Marine mountain-warfare training center.
*Walter B. Jones is a Republican, not a Democrat, as originally stated.
*Executives from the Lockheed Corporation appeared at the hearings and before a Senate Committee. They were not from Lockheed Martin, as originally stated; the Lockheed Corporation became Lockheed Martin in 1995.
*The original article stated that Andrew Bacevich, Jr., served in the U.S. Army’s Third Battalion, but there are multiple Third Battalions in the U.S. Army.
It's confusing to me that a standing army was supposed to be a very bad thing according to the constitution, a threat to American liberty. But now I hear that those who are always complaining about politicians not following the constitution are the same people who have no problem with having our troops stationed all over the world, especially the middle east.
They seem to be the same people who have no trouble starting other senseless wars that will involve our military, and cause more of our troops to stand ground on foreign land. They also don't seem to have an issue with the militarization of our police force in America, and the overreach of Homeland Security. Haven't we had standing armies since before 9/11 even? If so, why aren't those who preach the constitution upset about that? Maybe they are, but I don't hear anything about it. Maybe I just don't understand what a standing army is or is not.
(from 2013) http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/01/28/the-force"The U.S. once regarded a standing army as a form of tyranny. Now it spends more on defense than all other nations combined.
2001, military spending, as a function of the over-all American economy, was, at six per cent, the lowest it had been since the Second World War. Then, for a decade, it rose. In much the same way that the peace dividend expected with the Allied victory never came because of the Cold War (during most of which military spending made up roughly half the federal budget), a peace dividend expected after the end of the Warsaw Pact, in 1991, came but didn’t last.
Instead, after 9/11 the United States declared a “global war on terror,” a fight against fear itself. The Iraq War, 2003-11, went on longer than the American Revolution. The war in Afghanistan, begun in 2001, isn’t over yet, making it the second-longest war in American history. (Only Vietnam lasted longer.) Troops may be withdrawn in 2014; the fighting will rage on. During George W. Bush’s second term, the National Defense Strategy of the United States became “ending tyranny in our world.” But a war to end tyranny has no end; it’s not even a war.
The United States, separated from much of the world by two oceans and bordered by allies, is, by dint of geography, among the best-protected countries on earth. Nevertheless, six decades after V-J Day nearly three hundred thousand American troops are stationed overseas, including fifty-five thousand in Germany, thirty-five thousand in Japan, and ten thousand in Italy. Much of the money that the federal government spends on “defense” involves neither securing the nation’s borders nor protecting its citizens. Instead, the U.S. military enforces American foreign policy.
“We have hundreds of military bases all over the world,” Melvin A. Goodman observes in “National Insecurity: The Cost of American Militarism” (City Lights). “Few other countries have any.”
Goodman, a former Army cryptographer and a longtime C.I.A. analyst who taught at the National War College for eighteen years, is one of a growing number of critics of U.S. military spending, policy, and culture who are veterans of earlier wars. Younger veterans are critical, too. A 2011 Pew survey of veterans of Afghanistan and Iraq found that half thought the war in Afghanistan wasn’t worth fighting, and nearly sixty per cent thought the Iraq War wasn’t.
The most persuasive of these soldier-critics is Andrew J. Bacevich, a West Point graduate who fought in Vietnam in 1970 and 1971; served as a career Army officer, rising to the rank of colonel; and is now a professor of history and international relations at Boston University. A Catholic and a conservative, Bacevich is viscerally pained by Americans’ ”infatuation with military power.” Everything, in Bacevich’s account, comes back to Vietnam, the way it does for a great many of that war’s veterans, including Chuck Hagel, the President’s nominee for Secretary of Defense.
Lately, Bacevich argues, Americans “have fallen prey to militarism, manifesting itself in a romanticized view of soldiers, a tendency to see military power as the truest measure of national greatness, and outsized expectations regarding the efficacy of force.
.
.
Bacevich locates the origins of America’s permanent war more than a decade before 9/11. “During the entire Cold War era, from 1945 through 1988, large-scale U.S. military actions abroad totalled a scant six,” he reports. “Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, however, they have become almost annual events.” Bacevich places much of the blame for this state of affairs on intellectuals, especially neoconservatives like Norman Podhoretz and Donald Rumsfeld, but also liberals, who, he points out, have eagerly supported the use of the military and of military force “not as an obstacle to social change but as a venue in which to promote it.” The resort to force is not a partisan position; it is a product of political failure.
And a failure, as well, of political culture. CNN loudmouths, neocon opinion-page columnists, retired generals who run for office, Hollywood action-film directors, Jerry Falwell, Wesley Clark, Tom Clancy, Bill Clinton—Bacevich has long since lost patience with all these people. He deplores their ego-driven mythmaking, their love of glory, their indifference to brutality.
War, by its nature, is barbarous, grievous, and untamable. There never has been a “smart war.” Still, some wars are worse than others. “Surely, the surprises, disappointments, painful losses, and woeful, even shameful failures of the Iraq War make clear the need to rethink the fundamentals of U.S. military policy,” Bacevich suggested in his 2005 book “The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced by War.” That scrutiny has not yet been given, not least because, as Bacevich has observed, “The citizens of the United States have essentially forfeited any capacity to ask first-order questions about the fundamentals of national security policy.” Don’t ask, don’t tell. But, especially, don’t ask.
“There are some in government who want to use the military to pay for the rest, to protect the sacred cow that is entitlement spending,” McKeon said, in his opening remarks, referring to Social Security and Medicare. “Not only should that be a non-starter from a national-security and economic perspective, but it should also be a non-starter from a moral perspective.” Cuts should be made, he said, not to “the protector of our prosperity” but to “the driver of the debt.”
The Capitol Hill Police stepped in and arrested several protesters, including Leah Bolger, the vice-president of Veterans for Peace.
“The war machine is killing this country!” she cried, as she was carried away.
The hearing resumed. McKeon introduced Panetta. But the moment Panetta began to speak a protester interrupted. He identified himself as an Iraq War veteran. “You are murdering people!” he shouted. “I saw what we did to people. I saw.” He was escorted out of the room.
The hearing lasted two more hours. Much time was spent defending defense spending. “I don’t believe that the D.O.D. should have to pay one penny more in discretionary budget cuts,” McKeon said. Much time was devoted to inventorying threats to national security, which, Panetta said, are only increasing in both danger and number. (His list included Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen, and North Africa.)
Hank Johnson, a Democrat from Georgia, attempted to draw an analogy between the Capitol Hill Police’s ability to arrest protesters in a hearing room in the Rayburn House Office Building and the deployment of U.S. forces in every corner of the globe. “From time to time, there are disturbances throughout the world, and these disturbances may interrupt some of our various interests around the world, and it is necessary for us to have some kind of force to maintain order,” he said. “It is like competition, like capitalism.”
Protesters are by no means uncommon at congressional hearings, but this particular protest had rattled people. “I know we started the day with protesters in the room, and sometimes they seem disruptive or their tactics are some we might argue with,” Chellie Pingree, a Democrat from Maine, said. “But, frankly, we are facing a time when there are protesters in almost every city where we reside or represent.”
This time—emboldened, maybe, by the protesters—a few committee members offered comments that were more pointed. Niki Tsongas, a Democrat from Massachusetts, told Dempsey, “I would hope you also take into account that not every risk can be dealt with through a military response.” And the questions were tougher. Walter B. Jones, a Republican* from North Carolina, asked Panetta, “Why are we still in Afghanistan?”
Panetta circled around an answer. “One thing we do not want,” he said, “is Afghanistan becoming a safe haven again for Al Qaeda.”
“Mr. Secretary,” Jones pressed, “we got bin Laden, and Al Qaeda has dispersed all around the world. Let’s bring them home.”
But by far the most adamant statement came from Dempsey. “I didn’t become the chairman of the Joint Chiefs to oversee the decline of the Armed Forces of the United States, and an end state that would have this nation and its military not be a global power,” he said. “That is not who we are as a nation.”
Either the United States rules the world or Americans are no longer Americans? Happily, that’s not the choice the 113th Congress faces. The decision at hand concerns limits, not some kind of national, existential apocalypse. Force requires bounds. Between militarism and pacifism lie diplomacy, accountability, and restraint. Dempsey’s won’t be the last word. ♦"
*A redistricting of California’s Twenty-fifth Congressional District went into effect in January, 2013. The district no longer includes a naval weapons station, Army fort, or a Marine mountain-warfare training center.
*Walter B. Jones is a Republican, not a Democrat, as originally stated.
*Executives from the Lockheed Corporation appeared at the hearings and before a Senate Committee. They were not from Lockheed Martin, as originally stated; the Lockheed Corporation became Lockheed Martin in 1995.
*The original article stated that Andrew Bacevich, Jr., served in the U.S. Army’s Third Battalion, but there are multiple Third Battalions in the U.S. Army.
