After the end of the American Civil War, the Republican Party
opposed maintaining an army of any appreciable strength. As soon as the
war ended, the GOP-controlled Congress reduced the U.S. Army to a bare shadow of
its wartime strength. They did this despite the fact that a very clear and
present danger existed at the country’s southern border. At that point in
history, the much larger French Army occupied Mexico. French dictator, Napoleon
III, openly harbored a desire to wrestle control of France’s former
Louisiana Territory back from the United States.
Nevertheless, Republicans repeatedly cut the army’s strength.
Throughout the late 1800s, during which the GOP held virtual one-party rule,
the American army’s strength dropped to 27,000 regular troops. What troops we
did have were poorly trained and poorly armed. While the rest of the world’s
armies were adopting modern magazine-fed repeating rifles, the U.S. Army was
still armed with archaic single-shot Springfield “Trapdoor” rifles, many of
them simply remanufactured from Civil War muzzle loading guns.
Out Gunned by the Spaniards
Many of our troops were still armed with Trapdoors during the
Spanish American War in 1898. Those who were issued modern Krag-Jorgensen
magazine-fed, bolt-action rifles complained that because of the lack of funds
for ammunition, the army had disabled the magazines, requiring soldiers
to reload the weapon after each shot. The rifles also still used black power,
which revealed the shooter’s position with a massive cloud of smoke.
The Spanish Army, on the other hand, was armed with
state-of-the-art Mauser repeating rifles and rapid firing Maxim machine guns,
both firing smokeless powder. The only rapid fire weapon our troops had were
Civil War-vintage Gatling Guns.
The American Navy didn’t fare much better under Republican rule.
In 1881 the London humor magazine Puck described the U.S. Navy
as a force of "three mud-scows supplemented by a superannuated
canal-boat." It wasn’t much of an exaggeration.
The GOP-controlled Congress funded a naval shipbuilding program
that began in 1890 and continued throughout the end of the century. But
the funding they provided for training ship crews was so meager, sailors were
rarely able to practice their gunnery. As a result, during the Spanish American
War, U.S. naval gunnery was pathetic. At the Battle of Manila Bay,
American ships fired a total of 4,959 shells of various sizes. They scored only
72 hits. At the Naval Battle of Santiago de Cuba, the U.S. Navy fired
1,300 shells; only 25 found their mark.
In his memoir of the Spanish American War, Teddy Roosevelt, a
Republican himself, condemned his own party’s failure to support the army and
navy with adequate funding. In the end, the U.S. won the Spanish American War
only by the courage of its soldiers and sailors, and the fact the Spanish
never wanted to fight a war over Cuba in the first place.
TR tried to improve American military power during his presidency,
but his policies were largely reversed by his own party after he left the
White House.
When a European war broke out in 1914, it was the isolationist
Republican Party that led the movement to keep America out of it. It would be
up to a peace-loving Democratic president, Woodrow Wilson, to see the dangers
posed to this country by a collapse of Britain and France and build up our
military in preparation to sending them “over there.” Still, America’s military
equipment was so limited that the bulk of U.S. troops in WWI were armed with
British Enfield rifles, French-made Chauchat machine guns, and French- and
British-built aircraft.
When Republicans again controlled the government in the interwar
years, U.S. military strength again shrank and stagnated. Important legislation
passed in 1920 established the framework for an improved, professional army.
However, because Republicans controlled both houses from 1920 to the early
1930s, lack of appropriate funding prevented the reforms from being fully
implemented. The U.S. Army so stagnated that some career officers remained
junior officers like lieutenants and captains for nearly their whole
careers.
Democratic President Franklin Roosevelt and his fellow Democrats
in Congress began the rebuilding of the American military in the early 1930s,
despite opposition from isolationist – and in many
cases, pro-fascist – Republican legislators.
Establishment of the Defense Industry
World War II was followed by years of decline in conventional
forces, as the atomic bomb was considered the weapon of the future.
Outbreak of the Korean War in 1950, however, brought with it the need for
a massive buildup of conventional American forces and equipment. When US
manufacturers balked at retooling for war, President Harry Truman made a
momentous decision that would impact the U.S. for the rest of history – with
passage of the Defense Production Act of 1950, he created the defense
industry.
Once the defense industry became a permanent form of
business in the United States, the Republican attitude to military
spending changed. From that point on, the pro-corporation Republican Party
would push as much money as possible to the defense contractors.
But spending on the defense industry doesn’t necessarily equate to
making America strong. Massive defense spending during the Reagan
administration did little more than triple our national debt and turn the U.S.
from a creditor nation to a debtor nation. With defense manufacturers
overcharging million of dollars for such follies as “crash-proof” coffee
makers and the so-called “Star Wars” missile defense system, there was
literally little money left for maintenance.
As a result, some older Navy ships were unable to leave port due
to mechanical breakdowns. Entire squadrons of aircraft reportedly were
cannibalized for spare parts. At the time, I served in a Navy reserve ground combat unit that, despite being part of the country’s Rapid Response Force, had
no weapons; Reagan had sent them to El Salvador and there was no money to
buy replacements.
Defense from Terrorists
In 1999, the Clinton administration received a single warning of a
pending Al Qaeda attack on the U.S. President Bill Clinton immediately placed
the country’s entire law enforcement apparatus on alert. As a result, the
so-called Millennium Plot was thwarted when the intended bomber was caught
trying to cross into the U.S. from Canada.
In 2001, the Bush administration received some 40 separate
warnings from American and foreign intelligence agencies that Al Qaeda was
planning an imminent attack. George Bush ignored all of them. On
September 11, more than 2,000 Americans paid the price for Bush’s national
security incompetence.
Less than two years later, in March of 2002, Bush told reporters
he was no longer concerned with finding the organizer of that attack, Osama Bin
Laden. Bush eventually closed down the CIA office dedicated to tracking and
capturing or killing Bin Laden. Two useless and unnecessary wars later, the Al
Qaeda mastermind was still at large when Bush left office in 2008.
It would be left to Bush’s Democratic successor, Barack Obama, to
reopen the search for Bin Laden and launch the covert operation that finally
made him pay for his treachery.
So much for Republican prowess on national security.
