Is a standing army constitutional?

[hwarang54]

It just kind of sucks that we ended up being the police force.... We are constantly involved in the affairs of other countries and I don't think our service men and women deserve to constantly be in harm's way.

 

[Ole Cowboy]

It just kind of sucks that we ended up being the police force.... We are constantly involved in the affairs of other countries and I don't think our service men and women deserve to constantly be in harm's way.

I cannot argue with that.

Now imagine that every Friday at 6 pm your local Sheriff and Chief of Police show up at your house and each hands you a check for $100 bucks then leaves and says thank you for allowing me to keep the looters, rapists, robbers from you house for the past week, see you next payday. What would you think, the guys are idiots, fools or just plain stupid and somebody must be giving them the money.

You would be right on all counts.

Well the worlds policeman has been doing that all over the world since WWII...Insane, you betcha. In a paper I wrote I said I beleive the reasons why Europe has become nothing but a socialist state, free healthcare etc etc is because WE, the US paid them to be there to protect them from the Ruskys and we have done that all over the world.

WHEN I am POTUS I will contact every single country we are in and tell them beginning today you pay for our military to be there and provide the space for our units at no cost. We will accept Gold or oil, if not we pull out and you can scream to high heaven when the bad guys show up and we won't answer the fone.

 

[Younggun]

Lol

We are not a "world police force". Hell, there's a ton of atrocities we hardly bat an eye at. If we are the World Police we are pretty selective in our enforcement.

When we do get involved the situation tends to be just as FUBAR when we leave as when we entered.


Can you imagine if Dallas PD started spreading across the state enforcing Dallas's ordinances and laws on other towns and cities? How bout Houston PD?

 

[atticus finch]

At a minimum you would need a standing militia or a small mix of standing army.

Things play out much quicker these days.

No doubt about that, with todays mechanization & the movement or logistical ability it presents armies of whatever sort move much faster than before.
I tend to think the idea of what we had originally would address this, the minuteman.
Locally organized and/or regulated via nationwide standards would be one way of dealing with this.
Local or anyone in the immediate vicinity could react to something a lot faster than anything halfway across the country.
Also local regulation and/or organization would address the major issue the Founders feared with a permanant standing army. That being the perversion of political control over the military and the tyrannical ability it presents. Local organization and/or regulation leaves the choice about use of force in the hands of the individual or at most at the local level. Even at the local level that decision is still in a position where it can be directly addressed by the individual, either they can stand there and say "This is wrong, I'm not doing this" Or tell whoever is attempting to wrongfully order them into violence under the pretext of use of force "stick it up your ass, it's wrong and we're not doing it"
Along with that, local organization leaves the arms immediately accessed by the individual, either at home as the 2nd specifies, or anything perhaps heavier than man-portable under local control.
In both cases & especially the second case, it avoids the dangers of the current status-quo which have been discussed more than once and are self-evident nowadays.
As for any national level land-oriented military, at some point you'll need to establish standards for training, logistics, armament, etc. Logistics alone would bring things to a standstill without any coordination amongst local efforts, the same for probably everything else. I could see a professional level of military towards these things yet leaving the organization and regulation or command at the local level. If it comes to a nationwide defense effort such as invasion, then the Founders original idea of only for two years under constitutionally declared war could apply and should as they specified.
CMP seemed to be a program oriented towards this originally, a minuteman corps rather than what it consists of nowadays. If we tried to implement a change back towards where we were originally and rightfully, perhaps this might be a guideline of sorts.
As for reverting back to a local type minuteman defense and it being an invite to invasion, I don't fully agree with that. It is true there is evil in the world however there's a couple things which I think argue against this.
We've all heard the quotes from yammamoto at the beginning of the pacific war "you cannot invade the US, there would be a rifle behind every blade of grass" In addition to that the conversation which supposedly happened on the USS America in the early sixties. However anecdotal Yammamoto's quote is, it's true he was here in the US before the war, naval attache or something. He knew this country and the armed citizenry it had and had an understanding of the culture in this country back then. I suspect his quote is likely true and back then what was legally available could put the average individual on a very near parity with the average soldier, it was less than a decade before Pearl Harbour when the average individual could legally purchase a thompson over the counter with no infringements or restrictions. I think Yammamoto was in the US around that time? If so I don't doubt he was aware of such things in this country, not to mention the CMP program existed back then & if he was here as an attache I don't doubt he knew about it.
Along with that, the article the soviet writer about the break-up of the US, that was written in the early or mid-80`s? Back then we were a far more culturally solid society than we are today.
look at the vote for Reagan in both elections, nationwide most everyone agreed with what he advocated.
Yet if you look at things today, especially the voting patterns starting in the late eighties and running through today, they are a real reflection of the culture war going on in this country and a very accurate reflection of the map that soviet drew as to what the country would break up into.
Take the map he drew, overlay the presidential vote from the last 4 or 5 elections and 2 things become very apparent, you'll see the vote slowly but surely define and/or delineate itself until they match on very scary degree of accuracy. And the last 2 or 3 elections match it almost exactly.
The point is this, it would have taken a very real understanding of the culture of this country and what it represented to draw that map that accurately especially forecasting into the future.
How does that apply to an armed citizenry and a deterrent to invasion? Those who would maybe envision invading this country understood what they might have to deal with in terms of the prevailing culture here and what it would do towards motivating the citizenry should the situation call for it.
As for Putin, if that map & so forth was done in the early 80's, this was during his day with the KGB & I don't doubt it was knowledge he would be aware of. Is he a nasty individual? I don't know he might be but he doesn't come off as a fool, nowhere near fool enough to contemplate poking that bear with a sharp stick. You'll recall the two largest importers of AK's either complete or parts sets as well as mountains of ammunition within the last 20+ years are China and Russia.
The political left in this country are arrogant fools there's no denying that, however I don't think the leaders of those two countries are near the same level of arrogant foolishness. I don't think the long-term implications of what the massive quantities they import into this country are lost on them as applied to that map & paper written 20 or more years ago & what the two combined represent.
To paraphrase Yammamoto they likely know they don't want to wake up a sleeping giant like that and fill him with a terrible resolve.