Why should we have a military that is under federal command?
If the purpose of the military is to protect its citizens, Why is that left up to the federal government? Shouldn't that be a state concern? I believe that a single authority on any matter is a dangerous road to corruption. By leaving our military under the ultimate control of the federal government aren't we putting ourselves in the likely position of losing our freedoms? Shouldn't military power be divided?
Comments (22)
So no worries, only the most defenseless minorities are in the real shit when that happens.
Do you still think the military should be state-controlled?
Why should the military focus only on external threats? If we were to ever reach a point where we had to rise up against our national government, there isn't much we could do at this point. With the advancements of weapon technology, most people couldn't really afford to pay for anything that could fight off drones, missiles, tanks or any of the technology the government uses.
You're right in that the military can become a threat to the very citizens it was created to protect but I don't foresee such a problem in healthy democracies around the world. It's a problem, if history teaches anything, for totalitarian regimes.
You'd be jumping from the frying pan into the fire. State-run militaries are prone to the same problems as a federal army. I think the problem of the military (its potential to turn cancerous) is very deepseated, defying a solution (for me atleast).
Why would the state as the single authority be better than the federal government as the single authority? Why not an independent military for each county? Each city?
What keeps people from losing their freedom, is (to borrow a phrase) eternal vigilance. One must be on guard against control by brute force, mind control, fear mongering, propaganda, lies, drugs, media, and so on. Use your freedom or lose it.
:-} The military is also used for attack, conquest, or invasion, recall, which has little to do with protection. The US-led invasion of Iraq, for instance, served special interests far more than it protected citizens against alleged "weapons of mass destruction". The idea of protection was misused to mislead the citizens.
Quoting MonfortS26
A federal government is, by definition, a mixed or compound mode of government, and that's how power should be divided in a democracy.
A democracy without government merely amounts to "might makes right", in which case all citizens lose their freedoms because (like what Bitter Crank says about "eternal vigilance") they end up being on guard against each other all the time and everywhere.
Oddly enough, or not, it isn't clear who actually first wrote or spoke the phrase, "Eternal Vigilance is the price of liberty." Thomas Jefferson may or may not have said it, an abolitionist may or may not have said it, an Irish lawyer may or may not have said it. I definitely know that I didn't make it up, so somebody said it, sometime, somewhere, to someone.
Well I believe that the use of the military for unnecessary violence or monetary gain is immoral. Obviously the act of misleading citizens to satisfy special interests is wrong. Arguably depending on the special interests, but I don't enough about the war on Iraq to make claims about it. I certainly think the main focus of our military should be protection.
Quoting jkop
I agree, but I also think that we should have our guards up at all times. I'm incredibly concerned about the strengths of our freedoms. I see too much possibility for our government to lose power to a hidden corrupt elitist agenda, and I think that we should divide our military so that it isn't under complete control of one person because that could lead to some very bad situations. A democratic military with the capability of separating and fighting our government if need be.
Who would appoint your "democratic" military if not the citizens or their representatives, i.e. the federal government?
Moreover, without a shared commander of the military you'd have different independent commanders, and the mightiest of them would get to rule what is "right", like a puppet master of the government and the citizens. That's a dictatorship.
The state governments could elect a leader and whenever there is any international threat there would be a meeting to decide what to do about it. We shouldn't have a system in place where someone like Donald Trump can come in out of nowhere and have full power of our armed forces. When the country was founded it made sense to have a president because of the slow speed of communication. There needed to be someone to make a decision and fast. We don't need that anymore. With the advancements of technology, fast communication isn't an issue.
I don't think there needs to be a single commander of the military. There should be a board in command of the military. That seems like the best way to keep our country protected from the inside to me.
For better or worse, the Constitution specifically identifies the military as the responsibility of the federal government.
Because 50 state governments would have one hell of a problem coordinating their collective defense against foreign enemies. Imagine the 48 states trying to decide how to defend themselves from Germany and Japan in WWII: 48 governors, 48 legislatures, 48 treasuries, 48 military organizations... it makes one ill thinking how badly that would end.
The individual states all have the means (more or less) to defend themselves within their own borders. They have city police, county sheriffs, highway patrols, riot squads, and so forth. They all have "national guard" units.
War between states, like Florida attacks Alabama? Connecticut seizes Rhode Island? Minnesota annexes both Dakotas and then sells them to Canada? California secede? 49 states decide to erase Texas from the face of the earth?
That's why some central power needs to be on hand.
My thoughts exactly. Congress has the exclusive authority to make a declaration of war. Philosophically we can easily see the justification for it. The constitution can be viewed in one aspect as a treaty between the States of the Union.
Seems like the existence of a standing army itself is the biggest risk that OP sees in armed forces. Not that actually militaries are there to fight against other militaries or create a deterrence against other armies. In our very peaceful times where the only threat seems to be individual terrorists, this seems to be forgotten.
First of all, there's the basic rules of economics of scale: having a multitude of various organizations creates parallel organizations likely with incompatible equipment and basically a lot of confusion. Likely a state would prefer it's local arms producers to a producer from another state.
Then there is the issue of command: if the military is under state/district/municipal rule, who decides the force structure? The mission? When will it be used? How much money is put into it? An extremely naive answer (assuming the focus is US) is that there is a National Guard system on the state level in the US, so why could there just be the National Guard? The obvious answer is that there has to be a centralized command. And with that centralized command, it isn't just a thing for the state level anymore.
In fact, still in the 19th Century it was common for nations still be so weak that the mission of defence could be delegated to districts, cities and as the last resort, to rich people willing to put the money to the common effort. I recall during WW2 in my country various cities and individual factories bought Anti-Aircraft cannons by themselves... to defend themselves from enemy air attacks. But the truth is that even for Bill Gates it would extremely expensive to deploy an infantry battalion to Afghanistan. To understand just how expensive modern war is, here's an example: For the US to have one single company in Afghanistan for a year the same amount that the country of Estonia uses for defence spending in a year. And Estonia does actually spend the 2% of GDP in defence.
Above all, this question of how armies are organized isn't just a legal issue as war itself has defined how armies are. Warfighting itself has transformed a long time ago how militaries are organized. Under a centralized command of a sovereign state.
While some here have expressed fear on the matter of a centralized military overcoming the civilian populace, there is ample compensation provided in the case of the American Constitution in the Second Amendent, provided that the government has so long gone unchecked with the other precautionary checks and balances in the document. The Second Amendment provides the uninfringed right to bear firearms and other weapons, and for indiviual states to operate and maintain militias. Many times the use of the word "militia" triggers a negative response due to their aquaintance with rebelious civilians committing treason, but that is not what the document suggests. Instead, a militia at that time was more like what we now consider a national guard, but that all civilans were to be instructed in the art of guerrilla warfare, and able to defend themselves against not only foreign enemies, but also domestic. I have seen this also in Swiss military history. I am of the conviction that this was why in World War II they were able to prevent many invaders due to these strong tendencies of independence