So I read this in a book, but it was a long time ago and I don’t remember the name or author. The book was about US military policy post-Vietnam. Honestly, I never finished the book, but this was in an early chapter. You can take it for what it’s worth.
The author claimed the guard was not mobilized during Vietnam because the war was already unpopular, and mobilizing the guard would have created even more oppostion. It seems likely.
The interesting part was the author went on to claim that the generals were so unhappy with the way Vietnam turned out, which they attributed to fighting without support at home, that they reorganized the military so future wars would be impossible to fight without mobilizing the national guard. The theory being that during wars with popular support the government would be willing to mobilize the guard, and otherwise long deployments overseas would be impossible. They did this by moving some vital functions required for extended deployment (I don’t remember what) out of the regular army and into the national guard.
It’s an intersting theory, but I don’t know if it holds up.
Well, in fact this was done - but it wasn’t done by the military itself. Congress and the executive branch had their say - and they had an interest both in depoliticizing the Guard and keeping active duty strength as lean as possible.
That ensured that the Guard would be activated in any large-scale war.
Howdy, Bruce. Does this thread pertain to a Staff Report? If so, I couldn’t figure out which one. If not, let us know and we’ll move this thread to a more appropriate forum.
Note that the Guard, in its present form, was originally created because the West Pointers in the USA, after the troubles of the Civil War and the Spanish-American War, wanted to push the USV into an obscure corner where they’d be out of their hair.
I’d say that this thread presciently applies to What’s the national guard doing fighting overseas, anyway?. I’m less mystified by why the Guard is fighting in Iraq as I am by why the Guard was exempt from fighting in Vietnam. My guess would be that in the 1960s we had a peacetime draft that sent people directly into the regular Army, so the Guard wasn’t needed. (And Cecil pointed out that drafting people in the absence of a declaration of war is consitutionally rather iffy: Is the draft forbidden by the 13th Amendment?)
It’s confusing because the modern Guard is conceptually rather different from the original state Militias. Originally every able-bodied man was liable to be called to militia duty (and that’s still the legal justification for being able to draft civilians into the Army in time of war- US Constitution, Article 1 Section 8 Clause 15.) Furthermore the Militia was envisioned as the mobilization of civilians with their own privately held arms as a sort of posse, serving strictly in a limited short-term emergency capacity. I would take exception to one thing posted in the Staff Report:
During the Civil War, it was the militia that was liable to be drafted, but militia duty was by law short-term: nine months at the most. So during the Civil War the Union used what historian James McPherson called a “carrot and stick” policy to get men to sign up for a three-year tour of duty in the regular army. Get a bonus for voluntarily signing up for three years, or get drafted for nine months for nothing. (The Confederacy by contrast had a direct draft for the duration.)
Since colonial days there had been a distinction between the theoretical duty of every able-bodied man to be summoned to militia duty and the smaller core of people who regularly served actively in the militia. The Founders had rejected the idea of requiring everyone to be trained to a military standard like in the Swiss model (see Hamilton’s The Federalist no. 29 for details). When the Dick Act of 1903 reorganized the state militias into the modern National Guard (my emphasis), the active duty volunteers were referred to as the “organized militia”, with the rest of the mass of the populace referred to as the “unorganized militia”. Both by law and by practice the modern Guard is essentially a branch of the US Army Reserve, persons who have volunteered to be available for military duty on a call-up basis. So we now have a “militia” that can be summoned without a draft to military service. The Guard still theoretically has some state basis, but a Supreme Court decision (Perpich v. Department of Defense) ruled that the Defense Department can overrule a state governor’s objections to a unit being deployed overseas.
As a pro-gun ownership person, all of the above makes me snort when some people claim that the right to keep and bear arms is fullfilled by the modern Guard. IMHO, only by the same slippery-slope process that started with the twelve disciples of Jesus and ended up with Rodrigo Borgia as Pope Alexander VI.
Just wondering - why wasn’t “National Guard” capitalized in the article title, and throughout the article itself? I’ve never seen it consistently lower-cased like that.
According to the Associated Press Stylebook, U.S. branches of service, including the National Guard and Air National Guard, are properly capitalized. Foreign branches of service are lower-case. I’ve e-mailed Ed to ask him to confirm and change it. It’s a topic of great personal interest.
Mrs. Airman Doors, Pennsylvania Air National Guard
I was wondering about the use of “Mexican-American War.” Is this some sort of new PC term? Back in the day, I was taught about the “Mexican War.” Or was the writer simply maybe subconsciously following the “Spanish-American War” style? That one I have always heard like that.
The phrase “Mexican War” doesn’t describe very much. Typing the phrase in Wikipedia takes you to a disambiguation page that lists about six different uses, one of them being the Mexican-American War.
I don’t think it’s PC as much as it is an attempt at being descriptive. You may know what is meant, but it’s not as precise to someone else.
Thanks for the fix (although I see it’s still lower-cased in the text of the article itself), and for your husband’s service to our country.
Now, this also surprises me. I would always capitalize the British “Royal Navy” or the German “Luftwaffe” or the Chinese “People’s Liberation Army” or the French “Foreign Legion.”
The article went out of here with National Guard capitalized. FWIW, the Reader generally follows The Chicago Manual of Style, which also specifies initial capitals for names of military units and formations. I don’t know why it was changed.
“Mexican-American War” and “Mexican War” are both used in standard sources. See, for example, The Encyclopedia Britannica versus the Army’ s Institute of Heraldry. Although googlefight gives 159,000 results for “Mexican War” and 52,700 results for “Mexican American War”, I prefer the latter as more descriptive and particular. The former can refer to any one of at least 4 conflicts (War of Independence, Mexican-American War, Franco-Mexican War, or Mexican Civil War).
I believe there is a distinction. For the Mexican-American War and the Spanish-American War, there were two countries at war with each other. For the Korean War and the Vietnam War, technically America was not at war against those two countries. Rather, each of those countries was engaged in a civil war (north against south), with America providing training and resources including soldiers to one side of the conflict. Those resources may have included actually planning and executing the war, but the political veneer was certainly that it was a civil war and America was just a resource. Ergo, those wars are labeled differently.
This is the Associated Press, so your guess is as good as mine. I was always taught, however, to capitalize names of specific organizations, so your usage would be correct. In any event, it’s never wrong to call something or someone what they want to be called, and that extends to capitalization. See also: Mangrove, Throatwarbler.
It used to be that what the US Government could do was restricted by the powers granted it by the Constitution. The National Guard are considerd as being the state militias as referred to in that document. The Consitution grants the Federal Government the authority to call up the state militias (i.e., the National Guard) for certain purpoes: “to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions” – that’s it.
There is no breakdown of Federal law that the National Guard are enforcing in the US. There is no insurrection in the US (as there was in the Civil War). There was no invasion of the U.S. (as there was in the War of 1812 or as was claimed in the Mexican War) by Iraq.
Thus, there is no Constitutional basis for the National Guard to be called up to fight in Iraq (or Afghanistan). But the Bush Administration viewed the Constitution as an archaic document that didn’t restrict it from doing what it wanted to do. So the Guard was called up without any Constitutional authority.
Jack London, more famous for The Call of the Wild, wrote a book around 1900 called “The Iron Heel”, basically socialist paranoia about how the rich classes would use force to ensure the workers never unite… It’s been a long time since I read it, but iIRC there was a discussion about how the army could not be used on American soil, so the president used the state militias from one state to oppress dissent in another state.
The danger of the use of the armed forces against the population oddly enough was a major concern fo the founding fathers.