Before World War One the size of the Regular Army was 127,000 men, up from 100,000 in 1914. In 1939, before the start of World War Two, the Regular Army had 174,000 men.
It's time to go back to that.
Donald Trump this week:
Let's be clear.
We aren't being served well by a professional military class at all, and if most of the fighting strength of the nation was in the National Guard and Navy Reserve, we wouldn't be in a mess like Iran now. If we did that, having a fortress at the White House would be pointless.
And frankly, it's pointless anyhow...
The ballroom is completely pointless. There's another large Washington facility that can fit this purpose. In short, the next President needs to scrape this monstrosity and fill the bunker in with concrete.
But let's take a little deeper dive into this.
Trump's building a bunker.
Just like Hitler did.
By Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-V04744 / CC-BY-SA 3.0, CC BY-SA 3.0 de, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5437633
Am I saying Trump is Hitler? No, he's more like Idi Amin. Idi Amin was a nutjob who stood mostly for his fat self, and that sums up Donald Trump pretty well.
But building a bunker underneath the White House shows a mentality, and not just in Trump, but in the military, that it's 1964 and the Soviet Union is going to start a Third World War today.
Dwight Eisenhower's nightmare of the dangers of the military industrial complex have come true. And not only have them come true, our military sucks.
Not on the troops level. On the troop level, say E-1 through O-6, it's really good. But the problem is evident. We have a Cold War legacy military and its a danger to the country itself.
Prior to June 24, 1948 the United States had a completely different defense model, and it worked very well. It defended the nation and it never constituted a threat to the republic itself. It also didn't work great for assaulting other countries. It didn't, accordingly, do great in the offensive War of 1812, but it did suffice to keep the British counter invasion from succeeding, if only barely, and in part due to British morale and logistical problems. It won the war against Mexico and because of its structure it necessitated the US coming to terms with Mexico. It defeated the racist Southern rebellion of the 1860s, albeit at great costs as the South had the same military structure. It slowly won the long asymmetric war against the Native population. It beat Spain and then prevailed in the Philippine Insurrection. It performed brilliantly in World War One and World War Two.
Since then, with the new structure? M'eh.
We didn't lose in Korea, but we didn't win either. Interestingly, in that "conflict", the old model was still partially in place, and without it we couldn't have fought the war. We turned around with hte new model and lost completely in Vietnam. Since Vietnam we've fought Iraq twice, the first time, with limited objectives, we did okay, and the second time resulted in us getting bogged down for years. We also got bogged down in Afghanistan and ultimately surrendered to the Taliban. We're losing now and are going to lose to Iran.
So what's the structural problem here?
Before 1948 the US defense model was based on the following:
- Large professional Navy (which the Marine Corps was a tiny part of).
- Very small professional Army. As in very, very small.
- Large state controlled, in peacetime, reserves, which started being called the National Guard with the New York State Militia adopting that name in 1824.
- A small Coast Guard (originally the Revenue Cutter Service) that was in the control of the Treasury Department.
That was it.
There was no standing Army at all . The founders thought standing armies were likely to take over the country, sooner or later. A professional navy was different as it would always be busy sailing around the globe and therefore couldn't stage a coup.
The thought was that if the US was actually attacked, and the number of suspects who might attack it were quite small, the state militias could be called into active duty service to defend the huge country. A very small standing Army was formed in 1784 for frontier duty, and expanded after the US was badly beaten up in a frontier Indian war in 1786. It seemed to have been proven that if the country was going to engage in frontier Indian Wars, it needed some sort of Army. It was also frankly felt that sort of Army was not a danger to the Republic, as it was like the Navy. While the Navy was busy off of Gibraltar (no joke) or Chile (no joke), like everyone else's navy, the Army would be off in the wilderness were it would be on the edge of extinction and busy. If a real war came, the state's would muster their militia and the Federal Government call them into Federal service.
Really optimistic painting of the First American Rgt as party of a U.S. Army series. Painted in 1976, this depicts a 1976 view of this. In real life frontier soldiers wouldn't have been wearing white wigs, probably would have been semi shaven, and a lot of the enlisted men wouldn't be wearing uniforms Nobody can keep white trousers clean.
Frankly, some of this acknowledged that being a soldier requires training, but overall isn't that hard. It wasn't that hard then, and it isn't now. The Regular U.S. Army has always looked down on state militias, but the evidence doesn't support the disdain. In this period, likely the only branch of the Army that really required training were engineers and artillerymen, which the Army did provide, and which did require a professional service to sustain.
It was Canadian militia that basically won the War of 1812, and had the British Regular Army not performed up to expectations, Ohio would be a Canadian province today, as would most of the Rocky Mountain West.
The Mexican War was also fought largely with wartime volunteers and state militiamen. The Army branch that really shined with the artillery, which was made of troops in the Regular Army, again pointing out what I've noted above. Much of the early western soldiering was done by the Corps of Topographical Engineers, which again demonstrates it. For regular grunt fighting, volunteers and militiamen worked just fine.
This was all proven again during the Civil War. Almost all the troops on both sides were wartime servicemen. Lots of notable officer in the war came right out of peacetime civilian careers. And notably a really large and bloody war was fought for the long-haul by men who had only state service before the war.
The National Guard's contribution to World War One was so large that the US would not have been able to fight the war without it. For that matter, the Mexican Border War coming right before it completely relied on National Guardsmen defending the border when the Pershing's Regulars went into Mexico. And again, in World War Two, it was the Regular Army and the National Guard that really kept things going until mid 1943. A lot of early U.S. Army commitments relied on the Guard well into Operation Torch. Frankly, the Guard was sacrificed to some degree as they were available and trained. As late as the Korean War, and only two years into the new defense structure, the entire service relied upon Guardsmen and Reservists to a significant degree.
So that establishment has worked.
After 1948, and more particularly after 1950, the US started to assume that it needed to be on a wartime footing all the time, and that lead to the massive Cold War military. The Cold War was the reason for that. The assumption was that if war broke out with the Soviet Union there wouldn't be time to mobilize, so the US had to be ready to go from day one.
The Cold War has been over since 1990. The current size of the Army is 453,000, down from 700,000 during the colder parts of the Cold War, but way up from what it was prior to the Second World War. The British Army, in comparison, is 109,410. The French Army, which has commitments all over the globe, is 264,000 men in size.
And I'm not including the Air Force, which didn't exist until 1947. Prior to that it was part of the Army. It has another 321,848 active duty personnel. Into that you have to add the Space Farce, the comical absurdity that has 14,000 personnel.
The Navy, before World War Two, had 160,000 personnel serving 790 active ships. It has 344,600 serving 480 ships now. That size is about right.
The active duty Army's and Air Force's is not. It's entirely too large.
And the structure is wrong. The Joint Chiefs of Staff, formed in 1942, cover every service including sub services of the services. It currently has eight members for what ought to be two services. Having a large body like that risks turning it into a sort of German General Staff.
Complete with the incompetency such large bodies have. Note how well the German General Staff did in World War One and World War Two.
It's the kind of body that thinks it should build bunkers. And its the kind of body that has the problem noted here:
The Second World War, which is now over 80 years ago, is the last really successful war the US fought. You can't say we've lost ever war since, although I've seen that claim made, but like a large colonial power, which aren't, or aren't fully, our professional military gets involved in a lot of smaller wars with dubious results. A lot of those bad results is that, at the end of the day, we look back upon the Second World War in Europe. We've been preparing to restage it ever since 1948.
Now, there was some real reason to prepare for that war, really, and it darned near actually occurred. There's still reason to prepare for it, even though Donald Trump has a titanic crush on Putin and loves him dearly, making him the least reliable ally of all time, but we're preparing for it like it's 1941 and not 2026, which also makes us unprepared for anything else. It also puts us in the mindset of a country that feels it needs to have a gigantic bunker at the White House.
Now, the contrary thread of thought here has been in place since the Militia Act of 1903, which formally committed the various state militias into being the official reserve of the Army. The Army hated that at the time, but after World War Two, and during the Cold War, it brought the National Guard up to speed. By the 80s the Guard was every bit as combat capable as the Regular Army is, and that's still the case. Today, the US really can't fight a big war without the Guard, and truth be known it can't even make its overextended foreign commitments without it.
It's time to take that one step further.
And by that, I mean back to the future.
The current size of the Army National Guard is 328,084. That ought to be brought up to an even 500,000, and the strength of the Army down to 175,000 active personnel. The Air National Guard has 106,000 personnel. The Air Force should be scaled down to about that size, and the Air National Guard up to about 400,000. Following that, the Army National Guard, the Air Force, and the Air National Guard ought to be folded into the Army establishment so there's no longer a seperate Air Force (or Space Force). The Marine Corps should fully go back into the Navy and the Coast Guard back to the Department of the Treasury.
The Air Force Academy ought to be closed and so should West Point. College ROTC programs can take care of training officers, and in an environment that doesn't lead to a military class. I'd leave the Naval Academy, and the Coast Guard Academy, there, as sea related stuff is unique. Being a soldier, frankly, isn't all that unique. I've been one.
With this, the Joint Chiefs should be scaled down to three, one Chief from the Army, one Chief from the Navy, and one Chief from the National Guard. The Chairman ought to always be a Guardsman.
Why all this?
Well, it's a lot harder to launch illegal foreign wars with a defense posture that's designed for actual defense, and not offensive warfare. We aren't going to attack another country if we have to call up a bunch of Guardsmen to do it. And we have less of a chance of becoming an imperial nation if we don't have an imperial military structure.
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