Dominic Tierney: Jefferson’s Army of Nation Builders
[Dominic Tierney, an assistant professor of political science at Swarthmore College, is the author of “How We Fight: Crusades, Quagmires and the American Way of War.”]
THIS Veterans Day, a great debate is going on in the American military. On one side are the traditionalists who believe that our armed forces should continue to maintain as their core mission waging conventional state-on-state wars, like the first Persian Gulf war. On the other side are the reformers, like Gen. David Petraeus, who want to build on the lessons the Army and Marine Corps have learned in the irregular wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and broaden the military’s skill set to fashion a more effective counterinsurgency and nation-building force.
In this dispute, the reformers can take inspiration from a surprising quarter: the founders. From the start of the Republic, they aimed to create what the historian Michael Tate called a “multipurpose army,” designed for a wide variety of functions beyond combat. Despite the small size of the regular Army, which was capped at 6,000 men in 1821, and despite the miserly pay that led a foreign observer to wonder who would volunteer to be “shot at for one shilling a day,” the early military performed an essential role in forging the young America....
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THIS Veterans Day, a great debate is going on in the American military. On one side are the traditionalists who believe that our armed forces should continue to maintain as their core mission waging conventional state-on-state wars, like the first Persian Gulf war. On the other side are the reformers, like Gen. David Petraeus, who want to build on the lessons the Army and Marine Corps have learned in the irregular wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and broaden the military’s skill set to fashion a more effective counterinsurgency and nation-building force.
In this dispute, the reformers can take inspiration from a surprising quarter: the founders. From the start of the Republic, they aimed to create what the historian Michael Tate called a “multipurpose army,” designed for a wide variety of functions beyond combat. Despite the small size of the regular Army, which was capped at 6,000 men in 1821, and despite the miserly pay that led a foreign observer to wonder who would volunteer to be “shot at for one shilling a day,” the early military performed an essential role in forging the young America....