The continuing debate over military spending originated as a debate, at the time of the nation’s founding, over whether America should have a military at all. At the time even conservatives like John Adams and Alexander Hamilton, both partial to strong central government, had their doubts.

“The people of America may be said to have derived an hereditary impression of danger to liberty, from standing armies in time of peace,” Hamilton wrote in The Federalist, and this was after he had come around to the idea, pointing out that conditions in America, with its representative system that invested power in the elected members of the legislature, differed from those in England, with its long history, ended only in 1688, of almost “unlimited” authority exercised by the monarchy.

Implicit in the founders’ debate was the possibility, based on the colonial experience, that the army might be used at home — against dissident citizens. And in fact at times the military has been used in this way: during Reconstruction and during the great civil rights conflicts of the 1950s and ‘60s.

The issue resurfaced again when questions were raised about the Obama administration’s drone policy. Senator Rand Paul leapt to public prominence when he raised the possibility during his filibuster last March that drones might be used against noncombatant citizens and demanded assurances from the attorney general, Eric H. Holder Jr., that they would not be.