War And Rumors Of War

I am reading Rachel Maddow's new book, Drift, The Unmooring of American Military Power.

I'm not finding it enjoyable - Ms. Maddow hits too many nails right on the head. In particular, the heart of her book reminds me why, after nearly three decades of service in the navy, I decided I could no longer serve the foreign policy and national security policy imperatives of a US administration - that of Ronald Reagan.

As Brutus observes in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, "the evil that men do lives after them..." The Reagan departure from our historical traditions and the policies of every US President in my lifetime, from FDR through Nixon and Carter, is captured in Maddow's book by an exchange between Senator Edward Kennedy and Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney in 1990:

Kennedy: "....do you agree that the president must obtain the approval of Congress in advance before the United States attacks Iraq?"

Cheney: "Senator, I do not believe the president requires any additional authorization from the Congress before committing US forces to achieve our objectives in the Gulf . . . There have been some two hundred times, in our history, when presidents have committed US forces, and on only five of those occasions was there a prior declaration of war. And so I am not one who would argue, in this instance, that the president's hands are tied or that he is unable, given his constitutional responsibilities as commander in chief, to carry out his responsibilities."

This was a pretty breathtaking repudiation of the Constitutional provision that only Congress has the power to declare war.

But what about those two hundred-odd instances of military action without declaring war? Actually, the figure Cheney cited is a bit inflated, because it includes some very minor actions that would not plausibly constitute war.

But the list also includes some very major military undertakings, including the three-year "quasi-war" with France, the two Barbary Wars, the Korean War, the Vietnam War and countless foreign interventions, including the Boxer Rebellion and the Philippine Insurrection.

On close examination, what is striking about the list is that vast majority of such military actions involved the navy and marine corps, not the army - to be more precise, not the War Department.

It seems too simplistic, but prior to 1947, there were two military departments of our government, the Navy Department and the War Department. If a military action involved only the Navy Department (which includes the marines), there never was a declaration of war. Only if the War Department was involved in a foreign action was there ever a declaration of war.

In one other interesting respect, the Constitution treats the Army and Navy differently. Article I, Section 8 lists the powers of Congress, including:
"To declare War, grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal, and make Rules concerning Capture on Land and Water;
To raise and support Armies, but no Appropriation of Money to that Use shall be for a longer Term than two Years;
To provide and maintain a Navy...."

For whatever reason, the Constitution does not include a two year limit on naval appropriations. One could conclude that our founding fathers were deeply suspicious of standing armies, but had no such suspicion of navies. The suspicion of standing armies was also memorably expressed in the Second Amendment to the Constitution.

What undid more than a century and a half of Constitutional practice and tradition concerning military affairs was the Unification of Armed Forces Act of 1947. Since that action, creating the Department of Defense, the Office of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and an independent Air Force, we have yet to sort these issues out satisfactorily.

Pentagon staff officers in my day often shared the observation that "before the Department of Defense, we never lost a war and since then, we have never won one."

Reviewing the history of our very successful operations during World War II, including significant joint Army-Navy undertakings, one can conclude that Unification of the Armed Forces was not the solution to a problem, but rather a solution in search of a problem. Or a solution that created a problem.