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Accustomed as we are to seeing ourselves as a peaceloving people—“we Americans,” said Franklin Roosevelt, “are not destroyers, we are builders”—it is always sobering to confront our historic infatuation with war. To a greater degree than we are perhaps aware, ours is also a martial history, and tokens of that military past are everywhere around us—not simply remembered in the soldiers’ and sailors’ monuments that stand in every city and town. Our national symbols are almost all connected with war: from the Spirit of 76 and Washington crossing the Delaware to the raising of the flag on Iwo Jima. So, too, is much of our art (Remington, say, or the early Winslow Homer), our music (“The Star-Spangled Banner,” the camp songs of the Civil War, or Sousa’s marches), our literature (The Red Badge of Courage, The Naked and the Dead), and our holidays (Memorial Day, the Fourth of July, and Veterans Day). Our heroes also—though they have often been chosen for qualities going beyond the soldierly—Washington, for example, or Lee, Pershing, and Eisenhower. If nothing else, the precision marching of our high-school and university bands reminds us that the military tradition has been central to our growth as a nation.

That this should be the case is remarkable, for the Founding Fathers developed a profound distaste for war and military ways, and among the many lessons they took from their reading of the past was the assurance that a standing army and a free people were incompatible. As Benjamin Franklin warned in 1784, “an Army is a devouring monster.…It seems to me that if statesmen had a little more arithmetic, or were more accustomed to calculation, wars would be much less frequent.”

Franklin wrote at a time when the United States had a government barely worthy of the name, no foreign connections to speak of, and except for eighty guards no army at all. Some months earlier the last of the Continental units from the Revolution had been disbanded, and like others among his contemporaries Franklin hoped they would never be called to arms again.

But within a year of his writing, his hopes were dashed. Indian troubles along the frontier required the formation of the First American Regiment—three companies of infantry, totalling seven hundred men. They were drawn as volunteers from four states, and although nominally under state control they were nonetheless a federal army raised and financed by Congress.

At no time since have we been without a formal military organization. The results are striking:

• •In the two hundred years since 1775 we have spent a total of thirty-five years fighting major wars—that is, roughly one year of war for every 5.7 years of our existence as a nation.
• •In addition we have fought more than a hundred limited campaigns, including the quasi-naval war with France in 1797-99, the Barbary Wars, the Indian wars of the nineteenth century, the Philippine Insurrection after 1899, and various Latin-American expeditions through 1965.
• •In the last thirty years we have been involved in twenty-five major international crises, not counting Korea or Vietnam, in which American forces were placed on standby alert (as in the Middle East last year) or in which we supplied arms, matériel, and military advisers (as in the Greek civil war of 1946-49) or intervened directly (as in Lebanon in 1958).
• •The cost of these military activities over two hundred years is conservatively estimated at two trillion twentytwo billion dollars through fiscal 1974. This represents roughly 56 per cent of all federal outlays since 1789.
• •In the last twenty-eight years, beginning in 1946, we have spent in excess of $1.3 trillion on national security alone; this compares to $1.6 trillion spent by the federal government for all nonmilitary goods and services since 1789.

Beginning with the Declaration of Independence, in which George in was condemned in four separate clauses for misusing military power, and continuing through the drafting of the Constitution, the Founding Fathers displayed a deep-seated distrust of a standing army and all it represented. “Soldiers are apt to consider themselves as a body distinct from the rest of the citizens,” Samuel Adams warned in 1776. “They have their arms always in their hands. Their rules and their discipline is severe. They soon become attached to their officers and disposed to yield implicit obedience to their commands. Such a power should be watched with a jealous eye.” From the outset of the Revolution Congress placed the generals in a subordinate position, from which they have never escaped. As John Adams told Horatio Gates, “we don’t choose to trust you generals, with too much power, for too long [a] time.” Since then ultimate military authority has always rested in the civil arm: first with the President as Commander in Chief and next with the constitutional prohibition on army budgets for longer than two years.

Civilian control is the first great principle of American military policy and perhaps more than any other thing has been responsible for mitigating the otherwise oppressive effects that might have come from our preoccupation with war. Except for the abortive Newburgh Addresses in 1783, which threatened an officers’ mutiny—and which in fact merely prove the rule—we have never been even close to a military coup d’état, a condition among major powers in modern times that we share only with England.

So effectively was this principle embedded in the American system that to all intents and purposes the military was removed from the political sphere entirely, and whatever weight the generals carried in Congress came—and comes—from their acknowledged expertise as servants of the Republic rather than from any threat to use the forces they command to achieve their ends. And those who have succeeded to the Presidency are no exception. Indeed, the record suggests that the professional soldiers in the White House, like Washington and Eisenhower, were often tougher on military budgetary requests and more jealous custodians of civilian control than some of their colleagues who had followed a civilian route to the executive office.

Nineteen thirty-nine is the watershed year. Until then our active-duty forces had been kept to relatively modest levels—an average of 276,000 in the decade after 1930, a little more than one tenth our current strength. But as war clouds gathered in Europe the general staff persuaded a reluctant Congress to authorize a total of 335,000 men in the Army, Navy, and Marines. It was the second largest peacetime force in history (the force in 1921 was slightly larger); and if its size stirred some concern, the public took comfort in the knowledge that no soldiers were stationed on foreign soil, the nation had no military treaties of any kind anywhere in the world, and for the moment the threat of peacetime conscription was only talk.

In 1939 America was firmly wrapped in a blanket of isolation, a majority of the public confident that war in Europe was no concern of ours. For two centuries we had been sustained by the “two-ocean concept“—that the continent was protected from invasion by the vastness of the Atlantic and the Pacific—and were certain that should an enemy force appear, millions of American men would rush to arms.

By the end of World War II, however, our political and geographic isolation was at an end, changed forever by nuclear and rocket technology and altered by the profound shifts in the balance of power the war had produced. The martial legacy of the Revolution was, by itself, no longer enough to defend the nation from attack. For the first time in our history we continued military conscription in peacetime and maintained armed forces at levels upward of 1.4 million men and women a year. We abandoned the tradition of unpreparedness and took as our first principle the necessity to be ready for any eventuality. As our second principle we adopted the primary lessons of World War II: that modern wars were won by logistics and supply, that hardware as much as manpower carried the battlefield, and that research and development of ever more powerful weapons systems was the key to victory. In short, we resolved to apply the elements of American industrial and scientific technology to the conduct of war.

Not many people appreciate a military base closing. Like the shutting of a factory, it can devastate nearby towns, throwing thousands of people out of work. Merchants face losses and even bankruptcy as sales fall off. Home-owners put their houses on the market at distress prices and sometimes simply walk away from their mortgages. Even long-established military centers are not immune; the current round of closings includes the Mare Island Naval Base near San Francisco, which has operated since 1854.

Yet today’s base closings involve more than the end of the Cold War, more than the Pentagon’s present downsizing. They represent a turning point, as our military leaders work to redefine their missions and to establish new roles. Nor has this been the only such turning point. Time and again during the past two centuries our leaders have faced similar issues.

We mark our military history by remembering our wars. Yet the peacetime military has also seen its marks and milestones, many of which have had little to do with wartime events. At such times the military has taken on major new tasks, introduced novel ways of fighting, or grown greatly in significance in the nation’s life. With the Pentagon facing a new time of change, it is appropriate to recall the earlier moments when our armed forces grappled with similar peacetime challenges.

When George Washington was President, our Army faced the most basic of issues: What could it do? How could it serve the nation? The answers began to emerge very quickly, and those answers would shape the Army for more than a century. The place where they emerged was Ohio.

On paper the nascent government of the United States held title to the Northwest Territory, the present Midwest, following the Revolutionary War. But real power within this region still was in the hands of Indian tribes, egged on by the British. To oppose them, the territorial governor, Arthur St. Clair, had no more than a scratch force of soldiers “purchased from prisons, wheelbarrows and brothels at two dollars per month.”

In 1791 he put together an army of fourteen hundred such men, leavened with a modest number of regulars, and led them northward from what would become the city of Cincinnati. Early in November the Indians took him by surprise. Many of his troops fled in panic, leaving the wounded to the scalping knife. All the regimental officers died trying to stem the rout, along with twenty-seven women who had accompanied the regulars and fought beside them. St. Clair himself survived, but with eight bullet holes in his clothing.

In restructuring our forces to meet such challenges, our peacetime military today confronts a new prospect. For a generation we have faced the need to fight and win a global war. But the new challenges are regional, representing a vastly lessened threat. We may define our ground and air forces in the light of the nth-country problem, as we plan to fight a future Saddam Hussein—or two at once, as the Pentagon proposes to be ready to do. Similarly we may structure our Navy so as to support such a regional war, while maintaining the peace in a separate region such as the northwest Pacific.

With this we have reached a new milestone. As we face it, we can recall the developments that have marked our armed forces during the past two centuries. We can remember the events that led us to build a minimal navy and an army suited largely for fighting Indians. Then came West Point and the rise of professionalism; the younger Mahan and the modern Navy; air power and the advent of modern technology; NSC 68 and that historical anomaly the national-security state.

Today we are in the midst of a similar moment of sweeping change, as we shift from an era of global threat to one of regionalism. We will no longer arm ourselves against a Soviet enemy that now is no more. But there are words of Plato that Britain learned during its century of relative peace and that we may learn anew in the next: “Only the dead have seen the end of war.”

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