The Dangers Of A Standing Army: The Enormous Burden Of Sustaining The Vast Military Establishment
25 February 2013
By Jacob G. Hornberger
Consider why our American ancestors opposed a standing
army for our nation:
James Madison: "A standing military force, with an
overgrown Executive will not long be safe companions
to liberty. The means of defence agst. foreign danger,
have been always the instruments of tyranny at home.
Among the Romans it was a standing maxim to excite a
war, whenever a revolt was apprehended. Throughout all
Europe, the armies kept up under the pretext of
defending, have enslaved the people."
Patrick Henry: "A standing army we shall have, also,
to execute the execrable commands of tyranny; and how
are you to punish them? Will you order them to be
punished? Who shall obey these orders? Will your
mace-bearer be a match for a disciplined regiment?"
Henry St. George Tucker in Blackstone's 1768
Commentaries on the Laws of England: "Wherever
standing armies are kept up, and when the right of the
people to keep and bear arms is, under any color or
pretext whatsoever, prohibited, liberty, if not
already annihilated, is on the brink of destruction."
Commonwealth of Virginia in 1788: "… that standing
armies in time of peace are dangerous to liberty, and
therefore ought to be avoided, as far as the
circumstances and protection of the community will
admit; and that in all cases the military should be
under strict subordination to and governed by the
civil power."
Pennsylvania Convention: "… as standing armies in time
of peace are dangerous to liberty, they ought not to
be kept up; and that the military shall be kept under
strict subordination to and be governed by the civil
power."
U.S. State Department website: "Wrenching memories of
the Old World lingered in the 13 original English
colonies along the eastern seaboard of North America,
giving rise to deep opposition to the maintenance of a
standing army in time of peace. All too often the
standing armies of Europe were regarded as, at best, a
rationale for imposing high taxes, and, at worst, a
means to control the civilian population and extort
its wealth."
Now, consider the following statement by former U.S.
soldier Kayla Williams in an op-ed in last Friday's
Guardian:
A decade ago, I took part of the initial invasion of
Iraq…. I didn't support the war…. The reasons for
invading Iraq seemed disingenuous, at best. But as a
soldier, it was not my place to decide: our
democratically elected civilian government chooses how
to employ the military.
Williams' mindset reflects perfectly the military
mindset — the mindset of standing armies. The soldier
obeys orders. When the president orders his military
to attack a country that has never attacked the United
States, the troops will faithfully and obediently
comply. The soldier will do what the president orders
him to do.
The oath that the soldier takes to support and defend
the Constitution is actually a sham. As Williams'
statement points out, when the president issues an
order the soldier isn't going to reflect on whether
the order is constitutional or not. The soldier's job,
in his mind, is simply to obey the president and carry
out his orders.
Thus, as a practical matter the soldier's supreme
loyalty is to the president, his commander in chief,
not the Constitution. The soldier has convinced
himself that carrying out the president's orders is
equivalent to supporting and defending the
Constitution.
Keep in mind, after all, that the Constitution
requires the president to secure a declaration of war
from Congress as a prerequisite to waging war. No
declaration, no war. The president never secured a
congressional declaration of war against Iraq, and
every soldier, including Williams, knew that.
Nonetheless, no soldier refused the president's order
to invade Iraq. Every one of them faithfully carried
out the orders to invade, and many of them killed and
maimed Iraqi citizens who dared to resist the
aggression against their country.
Most everyone knows that the primary reason that our
American ancestors insisted on the passage of the
Second Amendment was to ensure against tyranny. The
right to keep and bear arms would enable Americans to
resist tyranny with force rather than meekly accept
the inevitable.
Americans didn't trust the federal government that
they were calling into existence with the
Constitution. That's why the Constitution limits the
federal government to a relative few enumerated
powers. It's also why the Bill of Rights expressly
prohibits the federal government from depriving people
of fundamental rights and why four different
amendments require long-established procedural
protections before federal officials can do bad things
to people.
But how many Americans give careful thought to what
tyranny actually means and how it is carried out? I'd
venture very few. That's because people don't want to
confront what is a very discomforting thought: that a
tyrannical regime uses its standing army to carry out
and enforce its tyranny. Yes, I'm referring to the
troops, the people that so many Americans have come to
idolize and praise almost as if they were a big
brother within their families.
Could a scenario ever arise whereby the president
would use the military to carry out orders against
Americans that would rise to the level of tyranny?
What we know is that U.S. presidents, the Pentagon,
and the CIA have long supported, defended, and trained
tyrannical regimes, in the name of protecting
"national security."
For example, there was the Pinochet military
dictatorship, which the U.S. national-security state
helped install into power. With the full support of
the Pentagon and the CIA, Pinochet used his troops,
which faithfully and obediently followed his orders,
to round up tens of thousands of people, torture them,
abuse them, and execute and assassinate thousands of
them.
There was the series of military dictatorships that
the CIA helped install into power in Guatemala, where
Guatemalan troops, many of whom had been trained by
the U.S. military, faithfully carried out the orders
of their superiors, torturing and massacring hundreds
of thousands of Guatemalans who were resisting the
tyranny.
There was the Shah of Iran, a brutal dictator who was
reinstalled into power by the CIA, and whose national
intelligence/police force was trained by the CIA in
the art of torture.
There are the decades of military and financial aid
provided the brutal military dictatorship in Egypt
under military strongman Hosni Mubarak, whose troops
and intelligence forces worked closely with both the
Pentagon and the CIA.
Thus, U.S. presidents, the Pentagon, and the CIA have
had no reservations about supporting, defending, and
training foreign tyrannical regimes. In fact, they
don't even consider them to be tyrannies. Instead, the
support and defense of such regimes has always been
considered to be part and parcel of "working with our
partners and allies in the defense of national
security." As Williams points out in her op-ed, the
soldier's job is to obey the orders of his president,
not determine the rightness of them or their
constitutionality.
The danger, of course, is some big crisis by which the
president feels the need to protect "national
security" by doing the types of things that those
U.S.-supported tyrannical regimes have done to their
citizenry. If that were to happen, make no mistake
about it: The troops will loyally and obediently obey
the president's orders, especially when he tells them
that "national security" is at stake. Few, if any, of
them is going to question the constitutionality of
such orders at the height of a major crisis any more
than they did the president's order to invade Iraq.
While Americans are rightfully concerned with
out-of-control federal spending, in large part owing
to the enormous burden of sustaining the vast military
establishment and all its activities, Americans would
be wise to reflect upon and reevaluate the fateful
decision to abandon the founding principles of our
nation with respect to standing armies. That's the
national debate that is needed most of all.
Jacob G. Hornberger is founder and president of The
Future of Freedom Foundation. He was born and raised
in Laredo, Texas, and received his B.A. in economics
from Virginia Military Institute and his law degree
from the University of Texas. He was a trial attorney
for twelve years in Texas. He also was an adjunct
professor at the University of Dallas, where he taught
law and economics. In 1987, Mr. Hornberger left the
practice of law to become director of programs at the
Foundation for Economic Education. He has advanced
freedom and free markets on talk-radio stations all
across the country as well as on Fox News' Neil Cavuto
and Greta van Susteren shows and he appeared as a
regular commentator on Judge Andrew Napolitano's show
Freedom Watch. View these interviews at
LewRockwell.com and from Full Context. Send him email.
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