 Welcome back to the war economy and state podcast. I'm Ryan McMacon. I'm a senior editor with the Mises Institute and Joining me for this podcast is Zachary Yoast and Zachary helped me out last month and he'll be our regular co-host on this where we discuss Issues related more to international affairs foreign policy issues related to the border Strategic issues that have to do with states dealing with other states But of course this does have a domestic policy dimension a lot of the time in terms of funding in terms of what is the relationship? between the taxpayer and The military itself which the taxpayers funding and is also subject to that military's coercive power in Many cases and so in some of these early episodes we want to set up some of the conceptual issues related to this As well as some of the historical American views toward military power and the funding of the military and This time we're going to talk a little bit about early American ideas as and of course how that's relevant today in terms of a standing army and this is this is a distinct and very specific type of military tool Institution and a separate as viewed from classical liberals of the 18th and 19th century separate from the Navy Or from other means of repelling foreign invasion And so we're just going to talk about that a little bit Specifically to how that relates then to the idea of militias in the United States the National Guard And what that has to do with defense military defense in the United States So Zach I wanted to just start us off with a quote here from a story named Richard Cohn and He's got a book called Eagle and Sword the Federalists and the creation of the military establishment in America 1783 to 1802 and so here's a quote from the book He says no principle of government was more widely understood or more completely accepted by the generation of Americans That established the United States than the danger of a standing army in peacetime Because the standing army represented the ultimate in uncontrolled and controllable power Any nation that maintained permanent forces surely risked the overthrow of legitimate government and the introduction of tyranny and Despotism so this I think is a good summary then of what many not all but what many and most certainly George Mason certainly the anti-federalist Viewed with trepidation the idea of establishing a large military establishment in the United States, especially a land-based one And so you can see then how this changed over time and the US moved away from the idea of Decentralized militias and military establishment toward a very centralized 20th century Pentagon focused military establishment that included the National Guard Which is essentially a federalized militia now and so it seems that we're in a much different situation from what the The old laissez-faire liberals of the 18th and 19th century would have actually approved of Robert Nisbitt has this short book called the present age where he just looks at He he tries to answer the question of what if the founders could speed up to the you know, roughly 200 200th anniversary of the Constitution what what would seem most out of place to them? And the first thing he says is the militarism that is rampant in our society and he points out that he has an amusing quote that Oftentimes the Continental Congress seemed much more worried that the Revolutionary War would end and there'd be a standing military Then they were of the British actually winning so I mean It I suspect they would Think things went very wrong if they could see How a bigger part of life militarism is in the United States today? Then core of which is the standing army Well, yeah, and it was in peacetime, right? They they certainly had a concept of the idea of calling forth a militia of raising an army in times of war that assumes some level of consensus among the the people who were taxing the population Because if you could not reach that consensus you wouldn't be able to raise an army at all But clearly if you read the anti-federalist papers And specifically some of the the speeches by Patrick Henry It's clear that the idea was that you had a very much decentralized military that was there just as much to repel the federal government as to repel foreign militaries and in one of his more entertaining speeches Henry gets all super sarcastic and He talks about how he laughs and mocks the idea that We can protect our liberties by assembling the people and having a vote on it to protect our liberties And he's like, yeah, right. Sure. When has that ever worked, right? He's the only he says the only way you can really Protect our liberties is by raising in our own local army loyal to us that can then shoot at the federal government To drive them out of our state and So looking at even when you talk to these Americans nowadays who think of themselves and often self-identify as their very anti federal government and very much in terms of Reducing federal power then they turn right around and praise the federal military establishment to the heights And they want more funding for it and they thank these people for their service Whereas that would have just been a bizarre state of affairs for an American in the 19th century Chandra base of itch has several books where he points out How it's not healthy basically for You know self-government to have like this class of people basically like the military class who are you know, oh You you were in the military. So you have special insight into how American foreign policy should be right Etc. Etc. You know, it's like creating this other class of citizen that is you know supposed to be Better in some sense. I mean, I think a lot of that is often times, you know Lip service to score political points and things like that, but it it's definitely not healthy well, there were many safeguards put in place in The US Constitution and certainly in the old articles of Confederation the better original Constitution in my view that were to keep the feds from having a Outsized amount of power compared to state military power. They were supposed to be some sort of balance there now that was in course involved in ensuring that Civilians maintained ultimate control over the military power You're supposed to have the president who was a civilian explicitly and he was only the commander-in-chief in times of war over the The army in the Navy is the specific phrase to use right decide people walking around mostly conservatives referring to the president of the He's my commander in These commander achieve at the civilian population or something Sparta or something right and so that's kind of odd But there was also this notion that each State governor was the commander-in-chief of the militia and the military forces within his own state And you could see this if you fall if you just watch movies, right say about the Civil War where back then they referred to each regiment as its state from the name of its state of origin, right and One particular movie a famous movie on this is say the movie glory. I think from 1989 Right and it's just notable because they refer to that regiment a million times in the movie Which is the 54th, Massachusetts regiment, right? Well, we don't do that anymore, right? Why don't they refer to these regiments as by their state of origin is because they they don't have a state of origin anymore Like they used to because the the method that had to work was if you had a war situation the president had to basically ask real nicely for the state governments to raise and issue troops and then send them to the federal government to then be under the command of the president but what and that usually worked fine because the US Governors would usually agree with the president in most of these situations So they could the Lincoln who was popular in the north would come out and say hey I need all these troops for the war because these rebels They're doing a horrible thing and so send me your military units So most states signed up on that But not all states did you find in the war of 1812 that in Connecticut for example The governor just simply straight up refused to allow his troops to be used for the purposes that Madison wanted This happened in Kentucky also during the Civil War where in the early years of the war There was a it was unclear who controlled the state if it was going to be Confederates or at least pro-confederate types or pro-union types And so the governor just simply refused to let his troops be used by Lincoln He he didn't want to secede either but also didn't want to participate in putting down the secession movement and it was not really It was not questioned that the state governors could could refuse to send to their troops Now they political pressure was applied. Don't you love America aren't you gonna send your troops to defend us? That was true in both 1812 and in the American Civil War but it was quite well established that State governors could basically veto the calling forth of the militia by the president This was a very important check Then on federal power and so you simply didn't have access to those troops if the governor of the state Didn't want you to do that and that unfortunately then changed throughout the late 19th and into the early 20th century early on they found that you could Work your way around that by by funding partially the state militias yourself and then later They just straight up changed the law to to limit that ability And we can look at that a little bit later in this episode But the but the idea here goes way back really to like so many things that are in the US Bill of Rights because the second amendment makes it clear, right? Although people usually fixate on the second amendment is guaranteeing private gun ownership That's part of it But a big part of it was to ensure that the federal government could not Intervene to prevent state militias from existing from states having their own military powers And that went back then to the English Civil War where under Well, first of all, I mean the Puritans certainly had some in some cases in some situations Opposition then to the royal power in terms of the military and then under the stewards who fancied themselves as absolute monarchs and Failed in that but really really really really wanted to be absolute monarchs James the second especially right you hated Parliament Hated the restraints they put on them. You just wanted easy access to military power at all times So we could just do whatever wars he wanted But there was all this pushback this idea that you should have this middle class locally based gun owning militia of sorts That then would be responsible for maintaining civil order within the country to prevent Uprisings and rebellions and that sort of thing But that those military could not be used by the king for whatever was he wanted to do And that would then limit the king's power So this then was very much in the minds of the Americans in the 18th century who wanted to ensure some sort of Decentralized local control as well. And then you see that carried forth into the 19th century where he had Richard Cobden and The French liberals as well It was all just generally accepted that having a standing army in peacetime was a terrible idea and the American classical liberals Generally accepted that idea as well. It is largely an Anglo-Saxon idea at least in practice of Keeping these armies out of the hands of the king But it's not from what I've been learning from you talking to you a little bit about that It's not strictly an Anglo-Saxon thing Right, and I would say it's not even for the founders. It wasn't only the Anglo-Saxon heritage They're also hugely influenced by their classical education. So they look back to Greece and Rome and whatnot and Until the Roman Republic fell. I mean they also had this sort of I mean you couldn't bring the Legion into Rome you know it there was these kinds of Things and while I don't think the founders were necessarily Explicitly influenced by him. I consider him a good source for interpreting Classical things and I also think he's great in a lot of other ways That's for another episode, but Machiavelli in the prince has several chapters on the military And you might think if you know you haven't read much Machiavelli. Oh, he must you know Strong military to crush everyone and whatnot Machiavelli in chapter 12 Explicitly argues against states employing mercenaries and things like that and argues in favor of basically citizen armies And he goes on for this at length about you know all these historical examples of where you know leaders Relyed on mercenaries who they could oppress their own people with Which is hard to do when your people are your military And he has this great quote Which is that Rome and Sparta for many centuries stood armed and free The Swiss are well armed and completely free Which sort of served as a segue to talk about the Swiss model Which is you know people might answer you know all these points you just brought up and say well that was the past the world So different now we can't you know have We have to have a standing army given the nature of modern warfare yada yada yada yada But I would posit that Switzerland in World War two is the perfect example of how Not having a standing army one It succeeded and two how it has a much better sort of incentive structure for everyone involved the Swiss succeeded in World War two in that they successfully deterred invasion by the Axis powers and The Axis powers drew up plans to invade it was called Operation Tannenbaum and of course there was also the Nazi ideology was in play You know Portion of the Swiss are German. They need to be part of the great German Reich You know, it's it's an aberration that they're not part of us and The Swiss as lots of listeners probably know are already a pretty especially back then decentralized form of government the cantons have a lot of power and The central government does not have tons of power and And this is a sticky issue we can get into later perhaps but the Swiss had conscription And especially as it became clear that World War two was coming down the pike There was a great deal of emphasis within Swiss society at all levels both civil society and the government to Emphasize basically that it is Everyone's job to defend the country Whereas I mean you have you can look at other places in Europe That had standing armies and it was just the armies here to defend the country, you know, what what what should I be bothered with? well, then The army was defeated in a week and the country surrendered Switzerland Because of its decentralized nature, I would argue helped to deter invasion The really great book to read on this is called Target Switzerland by Richard Hallbrook. I'm now a Stephen Hallbrook Who's written lots of books on gun control gun control on the third right gun control in Nazi-occupied France and he's written two books about Switzerland during World War two and a point He emphasizes over and over and over again is that no one Within Swiss society had the authority to surrender The nation of Switzerland the cantons could raise their own military forces and Just before World War two even broke out The Swiss government basically declared no one has the authority to surrender if you hear Switzerland surrendered, you know that's enemy propaganda and it's everyone's job to fight to the death and The it sort of is amusing almost to the degree to which the Swiss were sort of psychotic about their national defense and I think that's a trade-off that People have to think about some when it comes to having a standing army versus people defending themselves If you have a standing army, it's it's someone else's problem to do all this Whereas the Swiss it was hugely inconvenient to at one point about a quarter of the population was officially mobilized, I mean, can you imagine how disrupted life would be if you know One out of every four people on the street was officially in the military, but even beyond that the Swiss Made provisions for everyone to fight If you're familiar with you know, the Geneva Convention and this is an issue in Ukraine right now People if people are not uniform then they can just they don't they're not protected by the Geneva Convention So from the beginning of the war the Swiss instituted they basically issued armbands to the entire population Literally even women and children. So they had these armbands on they could legally fight it was very costly to Defend the country like this, but in the end it worked basically so and we could I think there's a lot of lessons that could be drawn from Their experience to numerous other examples both in World War two and after well, and of course in the United States You're not in that situation, right? It's a perilous Position to be Switzerland when you're next to the Reich Or next to just large states, right the French state one of the largest states in European history very powerful They have you know, the Italians have not historically been a big problem for neighbors But the Germans and the French have Is at least going back to Napoleon but boy go back to the 30 years war, right? I mean Switzerland didn't really exist in the way it does now, but big problem being right there in the middle of things and You could say same thing about of course the low countries I suppose but they never really developed those institutions the way the Swiss did and yeah The Swiss have been more successful at repelling invasion because of that and partly because of geography, right if you're a flat Right. I'll jump Poland would have difficulty pulling off the Swiss strategy But but they would have to have a similar level of as you say psychosis in Right. Yes. I mean literally multiple times the sort of the general which was like this position that was created His name was a Henry Gleason. I don't know if that's pronounced right He was French speaking Swiss Issued standing orders basically that everyone was to fight to the last man like Where I mean he criticized basically like the collapse of the the French army At the beginning of the war and all that because he's basically like if they'd fought, you know They might have won and even it's on we know from Documents that the Germans military did not believe it could have conquered Czechoslovakia But they had the president of either I can't remember exactly their structure of government It was odd, but they basically had the president of the Czech part of Czechoslovakia in Germany And we're basically like we're taking this to Dayton land and you better phone home and tell him it's happening You know, there's no person in Switzerland that could be you know Coerced at gunpoint to surrendering anything So it it's sort of I think it would the Swiss are a good example of The idea which I'd say the founders believed for America certainly that you know people were only free if they Maintained their freedom themselves and we have sort of farmed that out to our standing army, which as I think you were leading to the United States is perfectly situated to not have a standing army in that our strategic position, you know Mexico or Canada or Brazil are not going to ever invade us and You'd have to cross the Atlantic or Pacific oceans to get here Our standing army is really for intervening around the world, right? That's an important Note to make right is the standing army for North America for the United States does not serve a defensive purpose Normally when someone brings up how you need a standing army to quote-unquote defend America They're usually talking in some fantasy land stuff about how the Chinese are gonna send a flotilla Across the many thousands of miles of Pacific Ocean To invade California and the best they can come up with is oh the Japanese Occupied some of the Aleutian Islands Yeah, boy, and I really struck at the heart of the American mainland those Aleutian Islands, which were inhabited by like a weather team Meteorologist and the reality of course right is as we've discussed on the last episode right just that 90 mile trek across the Taiwan Strait for invasion purposes would be an unprecedented logistical feat So the idea of sending China to invade North America is just so far beyond the realities And so what does that mean then it means the standing army isn't key to defense what it means is the Navy Probably a very important factor It means the nuclear arsenal is a very important factor, but that's not what we're talking about when we're stuck talking about the standing army The standing army also as the as the classical liberals the old anti-fetalists understood is it's unlike the Navy Or any sort of like small force that you might have had right because there always was like a small standing army of About 1,500 Soldiers and officers that the US has you ever want to read something funny read the account of how Washington was so obsessed with ending polygamy in Utah that they sent an army out to Salt Lake City to teach those polygamous lesson and President Buchanan sent like basically the whole US military which was like 1,500 guys and And of course there were then some local skirmishes and so but nowhere near sufficient to occupy Utah as they I guess they were trying to do or at least scare the bejesus out of the the Mormons out there But that was the idea is that it would be too weak to send someone there So notwithstanding crazy people like Eric Swalwell who made some comment about I will enforce gun control in America because we have nuclear arms Sane people know that using nuclear arms to put down local insurgencies is crazy It doesn't accomplish any of your strategic goals, right? So if you have suicidal crazy people in charge of your government, then yeah, those nukes might be used for local counterinsurgency But the in reality, however, it doesn't serve the purpose that a standing army does where you can actually occupy US cities Institute martial law send in the troops to ensure people follow the rules That's what a federal standing army can accomplish and that's why the old liberals really hated the idea and why they wanted something That would be locally controlled by Some sort of local team whether it be the local governor or some sort of local council and so we're not talking about Just that could be for another episode. We're gonna talk about maybe you could abolish most of your all your military capability But we're taking our super conservative position here of just saying no standing army That's not saying anything about the existence of of a Navy, which by the way has its own huge massive Air force of its own so you wouldn't even need a separate air force the Navy in the air for and had sewn air force go together That's its own thing so you can do power Projection through that and and just to go back to what you were saying about you know, the central government can use the standing military it's sort of an issue of trust like not having a standing army is an issue of sort of trust in that you know Like you had me on radio Rothbard to talk about my like policy work related to Taiwan You know Taiwan would is well situated to adopt the Swiss strategy But a huge crucial difference is that Taiwan basically doesn't allow like any civilian gun ownership the Swiss strategy works for the Swiss because Shooting was like the national pastime like that the nap basically like the national gun club Was like one of the like leading institutions during World War two in terms of like, you know keeping morale up and basically like urging, you know You know school children to target practice so they could shoot paratroopers if if the Germans attacked it's just sort of Yeah, I mean we can even look at Ukraine After they were invaded they're like civilians can own firearms Well, okay, you know, that's Not very helpful at that point, you know, it's sort of a cultural It's sort of like the argument that freedom requires some cultural Ingredients one of those is the willingness to maintain that freedom if people are too lazy I mean is what it might boil down to then it's Not gonna be around so I think lots of cultural components as well which We could talk about it in other issues how militarism has under undermined all of American society the family morals everything you could could make the argument stems from Deciding to keep a standing army basically after World War one Well, and let's talk a little bit how we got to that point then Before we go just mentioning that the people run Ukraine also got rid of their nuclear arsenal Which is probably their number one defense against any sort of Russian occupation and so these are the same geniuses who prevented private gun ownership for 25 years after independence Actually more like 30 years really but yeah looking looking at the United States That really started to come to an end in 1903 Because I do know that there's a lot of vague information out there about how well the the National Guard is the militia, right? When when the second member refers to a militia they mean the National Guard But they very much do not mean that when when they're talking about these institutions because you can see in the writings of Some of these these early Americans that they did have a concept of the National Guard and there's there's a nice article by David Yasky in the Michigan Law Journal and He talks about he well here's a quote from him He says the founders did have a concept that approximates today's National Guard, but it was a concept. They disapproved This is the select militia quote unquote Especially trained part of the citizenry to the founders a select militia was a little better than an army The Philadelphia Convention explicitly rejected a proposal to create a select militia for the federal government as did the third Congress The Constitution's proponents moreover repeatedly denied anti-fetalist charges that Congress's power to provide for training the militia Would lead to creation of a select militia. So there was a great fear even that if you had this nominally Controlled group this the state nominally controlled by the states that They were still beholden too much and were professional agents of the central government And so they they they opposed the idea of the National Guard, which was invented with the militia act in 1903 so as lay it even after the Civil War when there was a whole lot of centralization going on At the federal level you still had very much the concept of the unorganized militia and The the official militia which might be called forth and in one of my articles here on this topic I look at I actually do a survey of state Constitutions over the years that had the explicit language in it that the militia that is people whose Private gun ownership could not be denied was basically the entire male population about age 18 to 40 or so and that was common through a lot of state Constitutions and it was assumed then that those people would be then brought under the state government to maintain civil order But that would be totally independent then of the federal government unless The state government approved the nationalization of that unit and it would all it was also assumed then because of these fears of federally controlled select militia that the training would take place under the auspices of the state government as well But what happened over time is the federal government more and more began to emphasize that the state Governments supposedly were not did not have a sufficient level of readiness Always of course defined by the federal government itself as to are you sufficiently ready for military needs? What what this was was never quite clear as if the Mexicans were going to invade or something like that Which was never really plausible and it was in the in the the Spanish American war that you started to get then movements toward using these These national or the state level groups For these wars of imperialism essentially and then by 1903 with the militia act they decided okay Well, we are gonna start funding These state units ourselves, we're gonna ensure that you meet certain standards And basically we're gonna create the National Guard and then over the 20s and 30s and 40s Did this started to become more and more really a subdivision of the federal government and Then this started to chip away also with the idea that state governments could veto Federal mobilization orders and then that finally came to an head then during the Vietnam War Where if you know more clever people they were joining the state National Guard in order to avoid being shipped off to Vietnam and because the law at the time was that State National Guards could not be used for foreign mobilizations that that was something specific to the federal professional military and A lot of state governors were just straight up or refusing to send their own troops And then through some court battles that was overturned and through the Montgomery amendment, which was an anti communist paranoia thing that occurred During the 80s where we don't want any of these state governments Many of whom are too much commie sympathizers to be able to veto Mobilization to Central America was really what a lot of the fight was they wanted to send these state guard people to Central America to train local terrorists kill squads and Central America and So they ended that so now essentially state governments have almost no ability whatsoever to keep their troops From federal deployments and you hear now about how you've got people in the in the National Guard are like well I'm I'm shipping out. I'm being deployed to where oh to Afghanistan to Indonesia for training They just ship them all over the globe in places that obviously have nothing to do with actual defense of United States territory and that's just now There were members of the Florida National Guard in Ukraine Training the Ukrainian military until like a few weeks before the invasion happened and it just kind of It's like I see ads for the National Guard all the time, you know on TV and whatnot I mean here in Pittsburgh at actually like at the Pittsburgh Airport are two wings of the Pennsylvania Air National Guard so I see that stuff all the time and you know all the all the Advertisements and everything are like help your community when there's a disaster, you know, you know So, you know, it's it's sort of very local centric At least in my impression and then it's like actually we're sending you to Iraq You know, which has nothing to do with your town in the middle of Pennsylvania Yeah, they very much appeal to the idea of local patriotism and then but really what it's about is you're basically a Reserve force for the professional military to fill gaps in their needs for conquering foreign countries and That's always been a very important role of a standing military is its offensive abilities, right? Is that you would have never had troops to occupy Iraq? Or if if get at Afghanistan if you didn't have these National Guard units that you could call up if they if the US only had a Navy and a small specific force In as imagined in the 19th century There would have been no problem with defense ever But it would have been way more difficult than to just start wars and send men off to actually occupy Foreign countries, but you're right. They try to recruit you so you can pay for college and then they send you off to occupy foreign countries And it I think we can look back if I'm remembering correctly during the war of 1812 It was a huge issue where the federal government tried to invade Canada and all the you know Militias from like upstate New York and New England would not would not go across the border Basically, that's right, you know Yeah, some states refused to send troops outside of their own state and then some State militias refused to cross any national borders because they viewed themselves as defensive force So boy how different things have become and now you've seen the so has just kind of wrap up with attempts to really sort of recapture some of that idea From an earlier age as you do now see these defend the guard bits of legislation at the state level Where Pat McGee and I think kind of set that off in West Virginia when he is I believe an Air Force veteran The idea of look you can't use National Guard troops unless you formally declare war and I would have liked to see something even stronger was you can't send these people Outside the United States at all which has been tried in the past and has unfortunately failed But that of course would be something much more in line with 19th century ideas of a militia and a National Guard But when when McGee and tried that and you hear this and this was also tried in the 80s where there was some resistance to Nationalizing the National Guard for stuff that had nothing to do with the state's business Boy, the pushback from the Pentagon was just enormous They immediately show up and start threatening you with like we're gonna pull all of our bases out of your state And there's gonna spike your unemployment rate and we're gonna just trash you in the national media and why do you hate America and We're gonna tank your economy we're gonna do everything we can to ruin you If you don't take orders from the Pentagon, even though this is supposedly ostensibly a state defense force and That's certainly according to McGee and he received all those threats That was used in Ohio in when they last tried to do that and a lot of it now stems From and boy were they anti-federalists were right It stems from the federal funding that comes down and is used to train These troops so it's with so much else that that where the federal government bribes you whether it's on drunk driving laws and then federal speed limits Education policy they can use all this stuff and they use it very much with military policy then to bribe the state governments that then just take orders from the Pentagon because then You'll have to use your own state budgets to fund your own state militia Which of course they they don't even really want you to do of course because then you wouldn't You wouldn't fit there arbitrarily set definitions of readiness and such readiness which in their minds is readiness Where you need to be able to invade foreign countries. It's not really related to our actual local defense And I would say this is an opportunity for sort of classical liberal slash libertarian minded you know scholars, you know if you're like in grad school or thinking about grad school like like We're talking at a very sort of abstract level here And I'm certainly not expecting the standing army to be abolished Anytime soon, but it it definitely won't be abolished unless people have done some work laying out How that could work like specifically beyond just the abstract so, you know What comes to my mind is the federal government's terrible Financial state, you know, maybe in a few decades. Who knows there'll be some willingness to maybe we should you know reduce The federal defense budget and you know farm this out to the states I mean that's sort of wishful thinking, but it's definitely wishful thinking unless that proposal things like that are out there in some sort of Fleshed out form that you know the policy people who work for the senators and whatnot can be aware of I'd say so I just encourage people, you know, this is an area that You know, not many people write about so, you know, you could own the niche and it would be quite good Hopefully down the road But it could at least potentially bear some fruit Well, we better wrap up with that then for this episode of war economy and state Thank you for joining us. We'll be back next month with another episode and we'll see you next time