Reply #10: Professional army vs. citizen army.

[NYC]

Otherwise known as enlisted vs. drafted.

The Imperial Presidency Editer Répondre
Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.
Copyright 1973
Page 198

...The Commander in Chief clause gave every President nominal command of the Army and Navy. But it could not guarantee him, as Johnson and Nixon discovered in Vietnam, the loyalty of the soldiers in the field, nor the support of their families back home. When a citizen army had a war it believed in, like the Second World War, it fought with unsurpassed courage; but, thrown into a war it could not understand, it could become sullen and disaffected. Nixon now tried to solve the problem of the undependable army, and thereby elliminate one more check on presidential war, by replacing the army made up of civilans by an army made up of professional soldiers.

Had such an army existed in the 1960s, public criticism of the Indochina War would have been much slower to emerge. Even as it was, so long as the Americans killing and dying in Vietnam were sons of poor whites and poor blacks, the American middle class remained generally uninvolved. It was only when the contraction of educational deferments in 1967 and 1968 exposed their own sons to the draft that they (and, in many cases, their sons too) first began to wonder whether the American interest was after all worth the sacrifice of American lives. It was then that opinion began to change. Had conscription been on an egalitarian basis, the middle class would undoubtedly have swung against the war much earlier.

A citizen army is a projection of a whole nation and therefore has the capacity to find means of resisting a President who wants to fight wars in which the nation does not believe. A professional army is by definition a much more compliant and reliable instrument of presidential war. Its members are in the army by their own free choice. Because they believe in their career, they do not have to believe in a particular war. This would not matter if the United States needed only a very small army -- say, the 189,839 of the Army of 1939. But Nixon planned a very large professional army -- 2,233,000 men. The establishment of a vast professional army could only liberate Presidents for a wider range of foreign adventure.

READ THIS:
A vast professional army, in addition, could provide dangerous temptations to the imperial Presidency at home. Tocqueville had long since pointed out the different consequences a citizen army and a professional army had for a democracy. When men were conscripted into an army, a few might acquire a taste for military life, "but the majority, being enlisted against their will and ever ready to go back to their homes," found military service not a chosen vocation but a vexatious duty. "They do not therefore imbibe the spirit of the army, or rather they infuse the spirit of the community at large into the army and retain it there." But a professional army "forms a small nation by itself, where the mind is less enlarged and habits are more rude than in the nation at large." Its officers in particular "contract tastes and wants wholly distinct from those of the nation." In consequence, "military revolutions, which are scarcely ever to be apprehended in aristocracies, are always to be dreaded among democratic nations."

It was not unkown for professional officers in the citizen army to complain about a want of discipline and patriotism in the nation. Nor was it inconceivable that the existence of an army professional in all its ranks might suggest things to a President who regarded dissent as a form of subversion or anarchy and wished to restore law and order in the name of national security. Seven Days in May (an excellent movie*) might seem melodramatic fantasy, but President Kennedy, who knew the military, wanted it filmed as a warning to the nation. In any case, there seemed no advantage in compounding problems of an already volatile political society by introducing into it a "small nation by itself," united by professional prejudices, resentments and ambitions and possessing a monopoly of the weapons of war. Here, it would appear, was precisely the large and permanent military establishment which, as Hamilton had written in the Eighth Federalist, tended to destroy civil and political rights of the people and which, as Madison had said in 1812, was forbidden by the principles of our free government.

*It is I, NYC, who say it is an excellent movie, not Schlesinger.
Schlesinger also wrote about war against a non-nation.