Our National Defense: The Patriotism of Peace Part 5

Whatever we do for national defense should be done primarily to _prevent_ and _safeguard against_ the breaking out of war. Every plan for national defense should, like the plan proposed in this book, be formulated with that end in view. That should be its clearly defined objective. There should be no possibility of any mistake about that. It should be made so plain that there never could be any misunderstanding as to that being the primary purpose of the plan.

A national force should be organized primarily for civil duty in time of peace. It should be organized in such a way that it could at a moment's notice be converted into a military machine for national defense in case of war. But that conversion should be a secondary object. The necessity for such a conversion should be regarded as a remote possibility, to prevent which every human power would be exerted, but which might occur, notwithstanding all that could be done to prevent it.

An ill.u.s.tration of this situation might be drawn from the case of an aeroplane constructed for aerial service. It would be needed and built for work in the air. But if it were possible that it might be needed for use over water, then it might be so constructed that in the event of falling on the water it could still keep afloat and propel itself. Aerial navigation would be the primary purpose of its construction. Water navigation would be secondary, and not intended to be resorted to except in case of accident.

It would serve as a safeguard against death which might otherwise be caused by an event only remotely possible.

If the necessity for making our system for national defense primarily an instrument of peace is constantly borne in mind, it will make progress easier and more rapid and certain. It will eliminate many complications that would result if we should undertake to look to the military establishment to formulate plans for a system of national defense that would be operative for peace as well as for war. In the past the whole matter of national defense has been left to the Army and Navy. That is the reason why no satisfactory system has been evolved. Naturally the Army and the Navy can see nothing in any plan which does not involve simply a greater army and a greater navy.

If it is now left to the War Department to make plans for a military system that will be adequate for national defense, there are many reasons why a satisfactory system will never be devised. The idea would be incomprehensible to a Regular Army man that a national organization, available for civil duties in time of peace, could in time of war be automatically expanded into a military machine strong enough for the national defense.

Men educated and trained in the military profession do not comprehend conditions outside of the purely military environment in which they live.

They do not understand humanity or the temper of the people in civil life.

They have been trained in an atmosphere of social exclusiveness and educated to believe that they belong to a superior caste. They live in a world of their own, separate and apart from their fellowmen. This is every whit as true in America as it is in Germany. The only difference is in the relative size of the armies.

The Militarists have no real sympathy with any peace movement. They say that we always have had war and that we always will have war. They look forward with enthusiastic antic.i.p.ation to the next war as an opportunity for activity and promotion. War is their trade, their profession. They regard with patronizing pity all who have risen to the higher level that regards war as an anarchistic anachronism, and are willing to make any sacrifice to end it forever. They have never read the chapter ent.i.tled "The Iron in the Blood" in "The Coming People," by Charles F. Dole.

They are devoted to their duty, as they understand it, and are as brave and loyal _soldiers_ as ever existed on the earth. But really it is unreasonable to expect a soldier to be anything but a Militarist. He is bred if not born to war, trained to fight and to study the war game, the war maneuvers, to fortify, to attack, to repel, to figure out a masterly retreat if it becomes necessary. You cannot expect him to be a peace advocate or to work out plans which will prevent or abolish war. It is no part of his duty as he sees it to undertake to devise plans for peace that would render the professional soldier obsolete and relegate him and his brother soldiers to a place by the side of the chivalrous Knights of the Middle Ages, or the Crusaders who fought the Saracens to rescue the Holy Sepulcher from the infidels--picturesque and romantic but expensive and useless.

Moreover, Army officers are hampered in all planning for constructive work by their rigid adherence to precedent. They have a medieval contempt for everything non-military, and for all civil duties and affairs. All this results from the existence of a military caste in this country which is as supercilious, self-opinionated, and autocratic as the military aristocracy of the most military ridden nation of Europe.

They lack initiative and originality because their whole education has operated to drill it out of them, and to make men who are mere machines, doing what they are told to do, _and doing it well_, but doing nothing else. That is the exact opposite of the type of mind demanded in an emergency requiring initiative and the genius to originate and carry out new and better ways of doing things than those that have prevailed in the past.

Men with the military training appear to entirely lack the a.n.a.lytical mind that seeks for _causes_, and comprehends that by removing the _cause_, the evil itself may be safeguarded against, or may in that way be prevented from ever coming into existence.

_This fact is well ill.u.s.trated by the stupendous losses the country has suffered from floods because the Army Engineers have for years so stubbornly refused to consider plans for controlling floods at their sources._

Solid arrays of facts presented to them have contributed nothing to breaking down their stolid egotism.

They will not originate, or approve, any plan that does not center everything that is proposed to be done in the War Department and thereby enlarge its influence and prestige. They oppose every plan to coordinate the War Department with other departments, or to put the Army on the same plane with the others in working out plans for constructive cooperation.

The members of the military caste do not seem to be able to comprehend that the stamp of an inferior caste which they put upon enlisted men, and the menial services exacted from private soldiers by their officers, create conditions that are revolting to every instinct of a man with the right American spirit of self-respect. They are a relic of the barbaric period when the private soldier was an ignorant brute. Those conditions alone are sufficient to render impracticable any plan for a reserve composed of soldiers who have served out their term of enlistment.

In "On Board the Good Ship Earth," Herbert Quick says:

"All inst.i.tutions must sooner or later be transformed so as to accord with the principles of democracy--or they must be abolished. The great objection to standing armies is their conflict with democracy. They are essentially aristocratic in their traditions. The officers must always be 'Gentlemen' and the privates merely men. The social superiority of officer over man is something enormous. Every day's service tends to make the man in the ranks a servile creature, and the man with epaulettes a sn.o.b and a tyrant."

The standing army to-day represents an economic waste of labor of the entire body of enlisted men. Many soldiers are demoralized by the inactivity or idleness of the life of the camp or the barracks.

The whole conception of the military caste as to what the Army ought to be is medieval and monstrously wrong. The United States Army should be a training school for the very highest type of self-respecting, independent, and self-sustaining citizenship that this country can produce. It should be a great educational inst.i.tution, training every enlisted man to be an officer in the Reserve, or to be a Homecrofter after he returns to private life. Daily manual constructive labor should be a part of every soldier's duty. The relation between officer and enlisted men should be that of instructor and student. Such a relation is entirely consistent with the absolute authority that would be vested in the instructor.

The Army System should be such that an opportunity to serve a term as an enlisted man would be coveted as much as an appointment to West Point is now coveted. The Army should train men for civil life and citizenship, not ruin them for it as it now so often does.

The many wrong conditions above referred to result from the unfortunate att.i.tude of mind of those who compose the military caste. They would make it impracticable to ever successfully carry out any plan for useful constructive labor by enlisted men in the military service. If such a Reserve were made subject to the control of the War Department, it would be impossible to ever enlist as a Reserve a construction force composed of men who believe in the dignity of labor and refuse to recognize the superiority of any caste in American life or citizenship.

If this statement is not a fact, why is it that no useful, constructive work is accomplished by the fifty odd thousand able-bodied enlisted men of our Regular Army? The same men would accomplish superhuman manual labor in case of war. And the same conditions would obtain if our army was 100,000 or 200,000 or 500,000 strong.

This wasteful situation taken as a whole makes it impracticable to work out any plans which might otherwise be initiated or formulated by the War Department for creating a great reserve force that would be entirely under the control of the civil departments of the national government in time of peace. It is imperative that such civil control should prevail. Were it otherwise, the same danger of military domination in government affairs would arise that would result from the maintenance of a standing army in this country large enough to serve as a national defense in time of war with any first-cla.s.s power.

_And the establishment of a National Construction Service as a Reserve force, enlisted for work to be done under civil control in time of peace, but available for military service in time of war, const.i.tutes one of the most practicable plans for creating a Reserve from which an army for national defense could be instantly mobilized in time of war._

The plan proposed by the War Department, of a short term of service in the regular army, followed by liability to service in a reserve made up of men discharged after this short-service term, could never be worked out effectively.

The impracticability of that plan has been clearly shown by Representative James Hay, Chairman of the Committee on Military Affairs of the House of Representatives, in a recent magazine article in which he says:

"Military authorities, backed by the opinions of many persons high in civil life, insist that we should be provided with an adequate reserve of men, so that we may in any time of trouble have men who will be prepared to enter the army fully trained for war. In this I concur; but in a country where military service is not compulsory the method of providing a reserve is an extremely complex problem, one that has not yet been satisfactorily solved by anybody. It is proposed, among other things, to have short enlistments, and thus turn out each year a large number of men who will be trained soldiers. Let us examine this for a moment and see where it will lead, and whether any good will come out of it, either for the army or for the country.

"After giving this question of a reserve for the army the most careful thought, after having heard the opinion of many officers of our army,--and those too best qualified to give opinions on a matter of this sort,--I am convinced that, under our system of military enlistment, it is impracticable to acc.u.mulate, with either a long-term or a short-term enlistment period, a dependable reserve force of fairly well trained men. To use our army as a training school would destroy the army as such, and fail utterly to create any reserve that could be depended upon as a large body of troops.

"The proposal of the General Staff of the army has been that the men should enlist for two years and then spend five years in the reserve. The five years in the reserve is impossible in this country, because we have no compulsory military service and because it is intended by the authors of the plan not to pay the reserve men. And it is an open-and-shut proposition that men cannot be expected to enter the reserve voluntarily, without pay, when the regulations would require them to submit to such inconveniences as applying to the department for leave to go from one State to another or into a foreign country, and when they would be compelled to attend maneuvers, often at distant points, at least twice a year."

The Militarists, the professional military men, and those who draw their inspiration from that source, present no plan for enlarging our army in time of war except:

(1) The proposed Reserve system so clearly shown in the above quotation to be impracticable; (2) Reliance upon State Militia to reenforce the regular army--a plan rejected by all who are willing to learn by experience; and (3) The increase of the standing army, to bring it up to a point where it could at any time cope with the standing armies of other powers, and its maintenance there.

Another quotation from the same article by Representative Hay will give the facts that show the impracticability of the plan for increasing the standing army:

"But, in order to make more evident what Congress has given to the army and the consequent results that must have been obtained therefrom, let me call attention to the fact that during the last ten years the appropriations for the support of the military establishments of this country have amounted to the grand total of $1,007,410,270.48, almost as much as is required to pay all the other expenses of the government, all the salaries, all the executive machinery, all the judiciary, everything, for an entire year.

"Thus, during this period, the army appropriations have annually been from $70,000,000 to $101,000,000; the Military Academy appropriations, from $673,000 to $2,500,000 a year; for fortifications, from $4,000,000 to $9,300,000; for armories and a.r.s.enals, from $330,000 to $860,000; for military posts, from $320,000 to $4,380,000; by deficiency acts, military establishment, from $657,000 to $5,300,000; and for Pacific railroads transportation and the enlisted men's deposit fund, a total for the ten years of $11,999,271.

"The totals for the ten fiscal years 1905 to 1915 have been as follows:

Permanent appropriations (including Pacific railroads transportation and enlisted men's deposit fund) $11,999,271.00

Fortification acts, armories and a.r.s.enals, and military posts in sundry civil acts, and deficiencies for military establishments in deficiency acts 113,071,133.17

Army appropriation acts 868,536,993.31

Military Academy acts 13,802,873.00 ---------------- Total $1,007,410,270.48

"However, in spite of this showing of the great expense of maintaining a small army, the Militarists keep up their clamor--particularly at such a time as this, and again whenever a military appropriation bill is up for consideration in the House--that this country be saddled with a great standing army. There is not the slightest need of such an establishment. But, if there were some slight indication of trouble with a fully equipped great power, would the people of this country be ready to embark on a policy that would mean the permanent maintenance of a regular standing army of 500,000 men? It would cost this country, at a conservative estimate, $600,000,000 a year to go through with such an undertaking."

Now after fully weighing that situation in the mind, as set forth by Representative Hay, put beside it the following facts as given by Homer Lea, in "The Valor of Ignorance":

"European nations in time of peace maintain armies from three hundred and fifty thousand to five hundred thousand men and officers, together with reserves of regulars varying from two to five million, with a proportionate number of horses and guns, for the same money that the United States is obliged to expend to maintain _fifty thousand_ troops with _no reserve_ of regulars.

"_j.a.pan could support a standing peace army exceeding one million men for the same amount of money this Republic now spends on fifty thousand._

"This proportion, which exists in time of peace, becomes even more excessive in time of war; for whenever war involves a country there exists in all preparation an extravagance that is also proportionate to the wealth of the nation.

"_During the last few years of peace, from 1901 to 1907, the United States Government has expended on the army and navy over fourteen hundred million dollars: a sum exceeding the combined cost to j.a.pan of the Chinese War and the Russian War, as well as the entire maintenance of her forces during the intervening years of peace._"

And again, the same author says:

"A vast population and great numbers of civilian marksmen can be counted as a.s.sets in the combative potentiality of a nation as are coal and iron ore in the depths of its mountains, but they are, _per se_, worthless until put to effective use. This Republic, drunk only with the vanity of its resources, will not differentiate between them and actual power.

"_j.a.pan, with infinitely less resources, is militarily forty times more powerful._

"Germany, France, or j.a.pan can each mobilize in _one month_ more troops, scientifically trained by educated officers, than this Republic could gather together in _three years_. In the Franco-Prussian War, Germany mobilized in the field, ready for battle, over half a million soldiers, more than one hundred and fifty thousand horses and twelve hundred pieces of artillery in _five days_. The United States could not mobilize for active service a similar force in _three years_. A modern war will seldom endure longer than this.