Abolish the Army

The people who created the U.S. Army did not want it to last forever. George Washington, the first commander of the Continental Army, wrote that “a large standing Army in time of Peace hath ever been considered dangerous to the liberties of a Country,” though he supported a small frontier force. Other Founding Fathers struck similar notes.

“Standing armies are dangerous to liberty,” wrote Alexander Hamilton in Federalist No. 29. “A standing military force, with an overgrown Executive will not long be safe companions to liberty. The means of defense against foreign danger have been always the instruments of tyranny at home,” warned James Madison at the Constitutional Convention. “What, sir, is the use of a militia? It is to prevent the establishment of a standing army, the bane of liberty,” said Elbridge Gerry during the debates over the Bill of Rights.

No wonder, then, that they put an expiration date on any American army. Article 1, Section 8, Clause 12 of the U.S. Constitution states that Congress has the power “To raise and support Armies, but no Appropriation of Money to that Use shall be for a longer Term than two Years.” The next clause, authorizing the U.S. Navy, imposes no limits on spending. The message was clear: America needs a peacetime defense force at sea, not on land.

Before World War I, the U.S. Army didn’t even have permanent division–level units. But things have shaped up quite differently since then. The Army is now the largest branch of the military, with nearly half a million active duty troops, plus another 176,000 reservists.

The “militia” that was supposed to “prevent the establishment of a standing army” has now been absorbed into it. Since the early 20th century, all state-level National Guard units have been subordinate to the U.S. Army and the U.S. Air Force. Since 2001, more than a million guardsmen and guardswomen have been sent overseas, sometimes for multiple tours of duty, rather than defending their home states.

Fortunately, the Founding Fathers’ worst fears about “tyranny at home” were not realized. There has been no military coup d’etat in American history. But the standing army has still come at a cost—and not just a financial one. It has made it easier for the president to launch invasions of foreign countries without any declaration of war or real democratic debate, and it has helped police departments enforce tyranny on a local scale. And a large, permanent land army may be sucking up resources that America needs to prepare for real threats.

The United States launched an average of one military intervention abroad per year from 1776 through 1945, according to Monica Duffy Toft and Sidita Kushi’s book Dying by the Sword: The Militarization of US Foreign Policy. Since then, the number has grown to 4.6 interventions per year. “While in the past the United States often relied on diplomacy, economic tools, and threats or displays of force, its modern-day self has resorted to more direct militaristic tactics, rather than reserving force as the policy of last resort,” write Toft and Kushi.

Meanwhile, the standing army has been the handmaiden of a more heavy-handed, less accountable police force at home. In response to the unrest of the 1960s, the Army built training centers known as Riotsvilles, teaching law enforcement officers how to wage counterinsurgency on Americans. After 9/11, over $1.6 billion of surplus military equipment flooded into police departments through the 1033 program, according to a Brown University Costs of War Project study.

Given these drawbacks, what is the benefit of a standing army? Americans face fewer threats to their territory than they did when the Founding Fathers warned about standing armies. (Canada and Mexico, after all, are friendly now, and Native Americans are U.S. citizens.)

The U.S. has commitments to defend treaty allies in Europe and Asia, and an interest in making sure global trade routes are free for Americans to use. But responding to those challenges quickly requires naval and air power more than it requires a large ground army. The largest threat U.S. allies face today is China, and any future conflict with that country would likely be waged in the Pacific Ocean, with little role for ground forces. A 2020 paper by the Cato Institute, examining what a truly defensive posture for the U.S. military would look like, concluded that the Army is severely bloated, especially in comparison to the Navy and Air Force.

“Above all, the active-duty U.S. Army should be substantially smaller and postured mostly for hemispheric defense,” the paper states. “A grand strategy of restraint would eliminate most permanent garrisons on foreign soil and rely more heavily on reservists and National Guard personnel for missions closer to the U.S. homeland.”

That sounds a lot like the vision the Founding Fathers had: a navy and a militia, but no standing Army.

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