Max Boot surveys American history and concludes that the U.S. military should have been bigger at all times.

One of the strangest phenomena of our times is the weakness of the arguments constantly trotted out by hawkish "foreign-policy experts" who make their living writing about such matters but can't seem to put an argument together that withstands even cursory scrutiny from non-expert skeptics. The latest example is Max Boot's column, "Overspending the Peace Dividend," as superficial, misleading, and self-contradictory a piece of analysis as you'll ever encounter.

Seeking to prove that President Obama's proposed cuts to defense spending are a dangerous step toward unpreparedness and war, Boot looks back at history and says the following:

Some might argue that there is nothing wrong or damaging in this; that we always downsize our military after the conclusion of hostilities. But is it so wise to repeat history? Leave aside the fact that we are not really at peace -- troops are in combat every day in Afghanistan -- and simply consider the consequences of past draw-downs.



After the American Revolution, the military plummeted from 35,000 men in 1778 to 10,000 by 1800. As a result, the nascent republic had to scramble to put down the Whiskey Rebellion, fight a quasi-war with France, repress the Barbary pirates and, most spectacularly, defend the new national capital from British attack in the War of 1812. The burning of the White House stands as melancholy testimony to our military unpreparedness.



Where to begin? (1) Given the burdensome Revolutionary War debt owed to European allies, the fact that citizen militiamen were hardly going to just hang out in the army once the British were beat, and the general antagonism to standing armies in the Founding generation, it isn't as if trying to preserve Revolutionary War-era army levels was a better choice for the Americans of 1777. (2) The Whiskey Rebellion was a response to the taxes that Alexander Hamilton levied to pay down the national debt; it hardly would've improved the situation had the federal government demanded even more revenue to maintain a standing army. (3) It is misleading at best to say that Washington had to "scramble" to put down the Whiskey Rebellion -- in response to some rioting and attacks on federal tax collectors, he asked for and got a force of more than 10,000 men from the governors of several states, and never in fact had to use them in battle, because when he led them to confront the "rebels" they basically dispersed. (4) Does Boot seriously think that, had the United States for some reason maintained Gen. Washington's army after the revolution, it would've somehow dissuaded the Barbary pirates from demanding tribute on the other side of the globe? Does he suggest we should've built an imperial navy in 1777 in order to prevent that threat, which we dispatched in due time, from materializing? (5) Does Boot understand that after America declared war against Britain in 1812, it had two years to build up its army before the 1814 British counterattack that ended in Washington? (6) Is Boot blind to the fact that the course America actually took -- the post-Revolutionary War cutbacks in defense spending -- ultimately worked out well enough for America to grow in wealth, territory, and global influence?