With respect to the establishment of a military, our constitution provides that Congress has the authority to levy taxes to “provide for the common defense and general welfare of the United States” and
To declare war, grant letters of marque and reprisal, and make rules concerning captures 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;
To make rules for the government and regulation of the land and naval forces.
The president is imbued with the authority to implement military strategy in his role as commander-in-chief of the military by Article II, Section 1 of the constitution.
Clearly, the raising and equipping of a military force is authorized by the constitution. What the constitution does not say is how that military is to be used. In the debates that led to the adoption of our constitution, issues surrounding the raising of armies and navies were hotly contested. Generally the debating parties fell into one of two camps: the Federalists and the anti-Federalists.
The Federalist position on the military was mainly represented by Alexander Hamilton’s writings. In Federalist 23, Hamilton argued that the federal government should be imbued with an unlimited authority to raise armies and navies “for the common defence.” Nonetheless, it was clear from his writings that the military’s role was defensive, that the military should be powerful enough to address any contingency in order to deter aggression from other quarters. Hamilton saw the American people as essentially a commercial people rather than an imperial or martial people. In Federalist 34, he stated:
But if we mean to be a commercial people, it must form a part of our policy, to be able one day to defend that commerce. The support of a navy, and of naval wars must baffle all the efforts of political arithmetic admitting that we ought to try the novel and absurd experiment in politics, of tying up the hands of Government from offensive war, founded upon reasons of state: Yet, certainly we ought not to disable it from guarding the community against the ambition or enmity of other Nations.
Clearly, the idea of engaging in offensive wars was an absurd notion to Hamilton, who believed that the military’s role should be to protect our nation’s commerce from attack. Continue Reading »
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