Everything-questioning by Kyle A. Lohmeier
As victims of generations of government indoctrination, most Americans take as a given that any country, and most especially the United States, needs a military, and a powerful one at that.
“Why, if we didn’t have a military, we’d just be taken over by someone else,” most anyone will tell you if you ask what would happen if the United States didn’t have a military. I got to thinking about this assumption.
I write novels that no one reads (much like this blog), I love fantasy fiction, I used to play tabletop roleplaying games with my friends – I have a very good imagination. Yet, I can’t quite picture just how the USA could be “taken over.” Honestly, it seems being “taken over” is likely a distinctly European problem – a whole bunch of small countries with modest populations all smashed together between a few seas, a mountain range and an ocean (Great Britain excluded, and it hasn’t been conquered since 1066 – geographic remoteness helps, even if it’s just 20.3 miles of ocean channel).
Here in the United States, we have a country that spans the breadth of a continent and contains less than half the population of continental Europe. We only have two neighbors, and they’re mostly friendly – the one could be even more so if we quit antagonizing it – with anemic militaries of their own. Oh, and roughly a third of Americans own rifles.
Given these factors, I have a hard time imagining what “taking over” America would look like.
Say a foreign invasion force lands on the Atlantic coast and eventually occupies Washington D.C. None of the distribution companies I rely on for work are based in D.C. and nothing I need is produced there as D.C. produces nothing of value ever. I fail to see what would change for most of us who don’t live in D.C. should it ever be occupied. Sure, the invaders could disrupt the electronic systems that keep track of our fiat money, but even that could be worked around. Hell, freeing us from the Federal Reserve system of automatic inflation would be doing us a favor. At any rate, just occupying the capital doesn’t amount to “taking over a country.”
In the Civilization series of PC strategy games, one must occupy all of a foreign power’s cities to conquer it – in some editions, you also have to destroy every last one of their military units. This seems a bit more apt a description of taking a nation over, but in real life would present a massive logistical nightmare for any invasion force. There are 80 urban areas – the greater metropolitan area around a city – with populations of more than 500,000 people spread across the United States. Even if Americans were unarmed serfs like most of the world’s population, occupying and quelling so many people in 80 different metro regions across a continent isn’t a task the military of even Russia, say, is up to. Given that one in three or four people likely have some sort of useful semi-auto rifle, the nightmare an occupier would face is nearly unimaginable. Beyond those urban areas are the vast rural regions of the U.S., where a lot of people live spread over a wide area and the concentration of firearms grows more intense. Good luck there.
Even if a foreign power occupied the capitol, what’s the likelihood they’d bring their own technocrats who know how to actually move the levers of government bureaucracy? Probably pretty slim. So then, what’s the point of even occupying Washington other than to disrupt the military’s command and control centers? Even if an occupation force could somehow eliminate the military’s ability to oust them from D.C., they still wouldn’t have any sort of effective control over the nation’s private companies and its economy. Any effort to blockade ports and strangle the private economy to death would require a massive navy to enforce; another logistical problem for an invading force to consider.
Clearly, it would be prohibitively expensive for any foreign power to invade and occupy the United States – even if several of the largest foreign militaries banded together to invade an America defended only by private gun owners. The amount of physical destruction of infrastructure and everything else required to quell the insurgency would render moot any point in invading to begin with – also why a series of massive nuclear strikes wouldn’t be helpful – why occupy a ruin? To what end?
So, does the United States need a military? No, not really at all. This isn’t actually that crazy or new of an opinion.
“A standing military force, with an overgrown Executive will not long be safe companions to liberty. The means of defence against foreign danger, have been always the instruments of tyranny at home. Among the Romans it was a standing maxim to excite a war, whenever a revolt was apprehended. Throughout all Europe, the armies kept up under the pretext of defending, have enslaved the people,” said James Madison, who also said. “No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.”
Fifteen years of continual warfare later, and it’s pretty obvious the man was correct.
Militaries are things governments have because governments are what goes to war. If we didn’t have a government, we wouldn’t have a military that we don’t need to begin with. As hard as conquering and occupying the United States would be for a foreign power, imagine how much more difficult it would be if they had to conquer and occupy tens of thousands of independent communities spread across a good swath of the North American continent?
Having a government amounts to having a giant head at the end of a big-ass snake at which a foreign power could strike. Seems to me that presenting any potential hostile foreign nation-state with a pit of vipers to contend with instead would actually make each of us safer individually.
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