For those of you who can withstand a provocative, reasoned challenge to your
beliefs (whatever persuasion they may be) about War, Peace, and the Military
Arm of Foreign Policy, I invite your attention to the work of Paul Seabury,
Professor of Political Science, University of California, Berkeley and
Angelo Codevilla, Senior Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution,
Stanford, California: entitled "War - Ends & Means", 1989, ISBN
0-465-09067-2 (cloth); ISBN 0-465-09068-0 (paper) - (hardly hotbeds of right
wing, warmongering).
On the its first page of the "Foreword", you'll find this: "War is
essentially a clash of purposes; only incidentally does it become a clash of
arms."
----- Original Message -----
From: "Tom Magnuson" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Thursday, June 07, 2007 10:05 AM
Subject: Re: June 6, 1944
> Excellent discussion. Thank you all. I would, though, suggest that
> continuity rather than change distinguished US military manpower policy
> until the creation of the AVF. Selective Service, at the local level, was
> virtually identical to militia practices throughout American history. A
> board, usually comprised of community "leaders" of some sort selected for
> conscription the least essential members of the pool of local talent and
> exempted those deemed essential. It takes little imagination to conjure
> up what happened to this system when civil rights struggles made it clear
> that being wealthy and white were not tantamount to being essential.
>
> Selective Service was implemented after WWI as a means of rationalizing
> manpower distribution in a wartime regimen that integrated industrial
> capacity with war fighting. General Eisenhower was a member of the first
> faculty of the Army Industrial College which was created to provide just
> that sort of rational integration of the nation-state at war. That is
> what put him in a great position from which to make his warning about the
> evolving Military Industrial Complex that has now evolved our war fighting
> to the point where we are renting tens of thousands of multi-national
> combatants by the day.
> According to Machiavelli, 'mercenaries are expensive in peacetime and
> unreliable in war.....' Perhaps the liberal impulse to relinquish
> responsibility for citizen service to the professionals after Vietnam was
> not such a good idea. Vietnam ended not because some kids jumped up and
> down and got naked in the streets. It ended when the lottery replaced
> draft boards and body bags began arriving on the front stoops of suburban
> households wherein lived the check-writers who fund our political
> processes.
>
> The AVF has some good things to be said about it, but it also has come
> with a frightening price. Please, review the studies at TISS regarding
> divergences in values between the civilian sector and the military in
> America and then think about Bolivia. There may be no grounds for concern
> but the trend lines say otherwise.
> (http://www.pubpol.duke.edu/centers/tiss/research/cmr/civmilpublications.php)
>
> trm
>
> Debra Jackson/Harold Forsythe wrote:
>
>> Paul has received some rather unfair criticism about his understanding of
>> the US military in US history. Paul knows this history in detail but let
>> me "speak" for him for a minute.
>>
>> The US militia and "professional" military during the Revolution was a
>> rather thrown together force. They prevailed, but for reasons that seem
>> almost miraculous. It helped that Americans often fought asymmetrically
>> from Concord on out. It also helped that the field of battle was so
>> large that the British military, itself without a draft, didn't have
>> enough troops to completely occupy the 13 Colonies/united States.
>>
>> What posters are overlooking is what happened to the military AFTER the
>> Revolution. In the early republic, the military was an ambiguous and
>> somewhat dangerous institution. Think only of the treason trial of Aaron
>> Burr, where army general Wilkinson (Wilkerson?), who was also military
>> governor of New Orleans, gave crucial testimony against former Vice
>> President Burr. How did Wilkinson have so much information? He was in
>> secret coded communications with Burr. The grand jury for the circuit
>> court in Virginia came within a few votes of indicting Wilkinson for
>> treason, too, but the prosecutor pointed out that if Wilkinson were
>> indicted, he couldn't testify against Burr. It was later alleged that
>> Wilkinson was in the paid service of the Kingdom of Spain while serving
>> as a general officer in the US military. Sound like Bolivia? It should.
>>
>> The great antebellum reform that transformed the US military was the
>> establishment of West Point and Annapolis. The creation of the federal
>> military academies, open to all white male applicants with a full federal
>> scholarships changed, I think, everything. These academies were
>> dedicated not only to training US military officers, chiefly as
>> engineers, but also in training military officers to be true republicans,
>> subordinated to civilian command. Remember, even at the great divide in
>> 1860-1861, academy graduates decided whether to serve under civilian
>> command for the Union or for the CSA.
>>
>> This officer corps, by and large, shaped the institution that enlisted
>> men--volunteers in times of peace, draftees in time of war--entered.
>> Since the "Newburg Conspiracy" in the Revolutionary era, how many threats
>> of military action against civilian leadership (outside of literature and
>> film) have we experienced?
>>
>> Bracket Latin America and Africa: think of Thailand, a functioning
>> constitutional monarchy, which has recently experienced a military coup.
>> In France, 1960 when de Gaulle announced the withdrawal from Algeria
>> there was an attempted military coup. In Greece in 1968, the militarized
>> police overthrew the government and ruled by force. In Spain (1980s?)
>> military officers seized parliament and attempted a coup. Think also of
>> the militarized KGB in the USSR, arresting Mikail Gorbachev in the Crimea
>> in 1990, breaking the tradition of civilian Communist Party dominance
>> since 1917.
>>
>> One of the great challenging dilemmas for any republic is to have a
>> military strong enough to repel aggressors but be able to maintain
>> civilian rule. Somehow, the US has achieved that. When the mlitary
>> becomes fully politicized, as may always happen, the republic is lost.
>> This has in no ways happened yet.
>>
>> You do not have to have served in the military to realize this. Though I
>> must confess, I am one of those liberal, even leftist historians from the
>> 1960s, who had so many mentors from the Marine Corps, the Air Force, and
>> the Army, I cannot count them.
>>
>> Harold S. Forsythe
>> ----- Original Message ----- From: "Paul Finkelman" <[log in to unmask]>
>> To: <[log in to unmask]>
>> Sent: Wednesday, June 06, 2007 2:03 PM
>> Subject: Re: June 6, 1944
>>
>>
>>> Both postings remind us that for most of our history wars were fought by
>>> men who lived together before and after the war. Regiments were from
>>> counties and cities and even divisions were from states. Such shared
>>> combat made wars more real to the people at home as well as to the
>>> politicians who sent men off to battle. Thus, wars had to have a
>>> purpose and political support at home. Since WWII this has not been the
>>> case; soldiers are in a professional army, disconnected from the home
>>> front and from regular Americans; the military is a place for the poor
>>> and unfortunate who see it as "a way out" of where they are, but the
>>> soldiers are not part of units that come from where they do. THe mixing
>>> in the military was probably a plus in and after WWII -- people from all
>>> parts of the country met and learned about each other -- even if they
>>> were in "home town units" like the 116th. In our modern professional
>>> army people also meet others from all over, but there is no going home
>>> after the war because the army is their home. In the long run this is
>>> probably not good for our Republic; it underscores the Founders fear of
>>> a standing army. We cannot always "learn from history" but I think the
>>> larger memory of the 116th (and thousands of other units like it) is a
>>> lesson we should learn.
>>>
>>> Paul Finkelman
>>> President William McKinley Distinguished Professor of Law
>>> and Public Policy
>>> Albany Law School
>>> 80 New Scotland Avenue
>>> Albany, New York 12208-3494
>>>
>>> 518-445-3386
>>> [log in to unmask]
>>>
>>>>>> Randy Cabell <[log in to unmask]> 06/06/07 1:46 PM >>>
>>>>>
>>> Yes, we would do well to remember our heritage of the 116th Infantry.
>>> It
>>> has its roots in the 2nd VA Infantry, CSA which became known as "The
>>> Stonewall Brigade." The 116th (in its earlier unit designation I think)
>>>
>>> went to Mexico with Pershing just before the US entered WWI, and went to
>>>
>>> France in 1918. There is a classic photo somewhere of Will Ruebush
>>> leading
>>> the Band of the 116th Infantry down Broad Street in Richmond when they
>>> returned. Back about 1988, I walked the beaches of Normandy, saw the
>>> monument to the 29th Division, marveled that anybody could scale the
>>> rocks
>>> at Point-du-hoc, and got a lump in my throat when walking among the
>>> crosses
>>> at Coville-sur-mer which Richard Dixon calls out.
>>>
>>> Units of the 116th, including companies from Winchester have served in
>>> Afghanistan, the local unit losing two men to a roadside IED. I learned
>>> in
>>> the paper that the local unit has been mobilized once again, this time
>>> for
>>> service in Iraq, leaving at the end of this month. Whether you agree
>>> with
>>> out current policy in Iraq or not, you gotta applaud those men who are
>>> willing to up-root themselves, turn their lives upside down, and serve
>>> their
>>> country when called upon.
>>>
>>> I am guessing that for the past several years, more than 50% of the
>>> Virginia
>>> National Guard has been in Federal service at any given time, but I have
>>> no
>>> stats to back it up. It would be interesting to see what it is, and see
>>> how
>>> many units have been called up more than one time.
>>>
>>> Randy Cabell
>>>
>>>
>>> ----- Original Message ----- From: "Heritage Society"
>>> <[log in to unmask]>
>>> To: <[log in to unmask]>
>>> Sent: Wednesday, June 06, 2007 12:32 PM
>>> Subject: [VA-HIST] June 6, 1944
>>>
>>>
>>>> The crosses stand in perfect formation beneath the Normandie sky. It
>>>
>>> is
>>>
>>>> the graveyard at Colleville-sur-mer overlooking Omaha Beach where 9000
>>>
>>>
>>>> young Americans came to France on June 6, 1944 and now stay, forever
>>>> brave. On that morning, the first to reach the beach were men of
>>>
>>> Company A
>>>
>>>> of the 116th Regiment, 29th Infantry Division from Bedford County,
>>>> Virginia. Of its 36 men who went to war, 23 died in France, 19 on
>>>
>>> D-Day,
>>>
>>>> the highest percentage lost of any community in the United States.
>>>
>>> Today,
>>>
>>>> in Bedford, there is a memorial to the D-Day landings. To reach it you
>>>
>>>
>>>> will probably travel on a highway that bisects Virginia, known
>>>
>>> generally
>>>
>>>> as Route 29, but it's full name is the 29th Infantry Division Memorial
>>>
>>>
>>>> Highway, a daily reminder of the men who were heroes at Omaha.
>>>> Richard E. Dixon
>>>>
>>
>
> --
>
> T.R. Magnuson
>
> Trading Path Association
>
> PO Box 643
>
> Hillsborough, NC 27278
>
> 919-644-0600
>
> www.tradingpath.org
>
>
> --
> No virus found in this incoming message.
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>
>
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