First You Need an Army

American Thinker ^ | 5-11-2006 | Christopher Chantrill

[AliVeritas]

One thing the situation in Iraq is demonstrating rather clearly. If you don’t have an army, you don’t have a country. Fortunately, the United States has always had an army, right from the start when George Washington first set siege to the British in Boston in 1775.

On Memorial Day that is something to be thankful about.

Not that the US Army was much good at first. The Revolutionary War was mostly spent in retreat. The Civil War was a bloody mess, the first instance of the modern lethal battlefield. In World War I the doughboys had too much money. In World War II the GIs were overpaid, over sexed, and over there. But in Iraq, a British general has said, the US Army is showing that it is the best in the world.

You need an army to found a nation. The modern French Army was born as the nation in arms defending the Revolution from the crowned heads of Europe. The British Army is descended from Cromwell’s New Model Army. The Soviet Union was founded upon a bloody civil war won by its Red Army. Chairman Mao, whether or not he spent the Long March reclining in a litter, founded modern China on the power of his Red Army. And the Germans achieved their unification on the back of the most popular institution in the North German Federation: The German Army.

[SE Mom]

EXCELLENT! Coming from a Brit general...that's high praise indeed:)

(Of course this..from a PROUD Army Mom)

[jazusamo]

Thanks for posting. Strong words and very appropriate on this Memorial Day. God bless all our military.

[Hugin]

Not that the US Army was much good at first. The Revolutionary War was mostly spent in retreat.

That's a non-sequiter. Good armies retreat when faced with overwhelming force. Bad armies stand and are annihilated. The US Army did a good job of retreating when it had to, and attacking when they could. They took Ticondaroga, then moved the guns hundreds of miles to use in forcing the Brits out of Boston. They beat British forces in Trenton and Princeton and captured a whole British army with militia at Saratoga. They fought the main British army to a standstill and Brandywine and Monmouth. They lost Charleston, but then fought a guerrilla war in the South, overrunning isolated British garrisons. When Cornwalis chased them they ran him ragged, defeated part of his force at Cowpens, then fought another inconclusive battle, and forced him to retreat to Yorktown, where they besieged him and forced him to surrender. Not bad for a bunch of amateurs up against the most powerful military in the world.

[Flash Bazbeaux]

"then moved the guns hundreds of miles to use in forcing the Brits out of Boston"

Which they put on a hill in Southie [Dorchester Heights], forcing the Brits to leave on St. Patrick's Day, no less.

BTW, it was no mean trick getting the guns up on top of the hill undetected, and then building protective works for them in a single night.

[LS]

I cover this---not battle by battle, but in terms of the Continental Army's makeup and maturity---in my new book, "America's Victories: Why the U.S. Wins Wars and Will Win the War on Terror." Well before Trenton, Washington said that he thought his officer corps was as good as the British; and after White Plains, already the British were impressed with how quickly we had assimilated the "lessons learned" in battle. In short, the British knew then if the war went too long, they were in trouble because despite the militia leaving on a regular basis, those who stayed were getting better and better.

[khnyny]

Thanks for posting, God bless the US military.

[sully777]

Not that the US Army was much good at first. The Revolutionary War was mostly spent in retreat.

---

The armed forces of the US adapt while other forces crumble in set rules of engagement. The US learned/employed strategies of the American Indian, or the pirate, or the German if it meant winning while saving one's hide doing it. That's the sum total of US warfare: Improvise, adapt, destroy, win, then go back home to home and hearth.

It wasn't always done properly. It wasn't always done in a precise manner. And it was damn near impossible to ever call pretty. But we won almost every battle and every war.

[Jacquerie]

The liberal war against the armed forces is part of their war against the nation state.

Well said. The rats made our 50 states little more than administrative units of the national gov't. Among their goals is to make the US an appendage of the UN.

[Dumb_Ox]

The liberal war against the armed forces is part of their war against the nation state. The thinking goes something like this. The nation state equals aggressive nationalism, aggressive nationalism equals Nazism, therefore the national army is the instrument of fascism.

Lefties love the nation-state. They practically invented its modern, centralized form, after all. They just have international loyalties too, which splits their focus and makes them alternate between the vague nation and the even vaguer "international community," depending on the situation.

On the contrary, far from being an atavism, the nation state is an advanced idea, the one political idea thus far that has persuaded ordinary people to loosen their loyalty to tribe and clan—that is, the instinctive tie to blood kin—and replace it with loyalty to a larger unity, to the abstract nation unified by the artificial and abstract idea of a national culture and a national language.

Hmm... nationalism most always has a rabid ethnic component. Pan-Germanism, pan-Slavism, pan-Arabism, etc. I'm not sure what this writer finds endearing about destroying local culture and loyalties in exchange for cookie-cutter patriotism. Once one accepts a national abstraction, the leap to international abstraction is a bit shorter. Shades of Jacobinism.