Free The Sorrows of Empire by Chalmers Johnson Page A

waris, perhaps, the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes; and armies, and debts, and taxes are the known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few.” 11 The Declaration of Independence accused the English king of having “affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil Power,” and the First Continental Congress condemned the use of the army to enforce the collection of taxes. These attitudes lasted about a century. With the Spanish-American War, the government began to build a military machine—and to tolerate the accompanying militarism—that by the end of the twentieth century had come to seem invincible.
     
    During the summer of 1898, in Tampa, Florida, where American military forces had gathered for the assault on Santiago, Cuba, no single military or political authority had been in charge. Waste, confusion, and disease were rampant. Theodore Roosevelt had, in fact, exploited this disorganization to raise the Rough Riders. In 1899, President William McKinley appointed Elihu Root secretary of war, and Root, in 1903, made a signal contribution to American militarism by creating a “general staff” of senior military officers directly under him to plan and coordinate future wars. In testimony before Congress and in his annual reports as secretary of war, Root occasionally mentioned the confusion at Tampa in 1898 as evidence of the need for such an organization. But his real purpose was much broader. He argued that “the almost phenomenal success that has attended ... German (Prussian) arms during the last thirty years is due in large degree to the corps of highly trained general staff officers which the German army possesses.” He concluded: “The common experience of mankind is that the things which those general staffs do have to be done in every well-managed and well-directed army, and they have to be done by a body of men especially assigned to them. We should have such a body of men selected and organized in our own way and in accordance with our own system to do those essential things.” 12
     
    On February 14, 1903, following Root’s advice, Congress passed legislation that created the predecessor to today’s Joint Chiefs of Staff. Root could hardly have imagined that his modest contribution to military efficiency would result a century later in thousands of military officerstoiling away in the Pentagon on issues of weapons, strategic planning, force structure, and, in military jargon, C4ISR (command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance). Back in 1903, a week after setting up the general staff, Root established a complementary institution of militarism, the Army War College, first located in Washington, DC, and later moved to Carlisle, Pennsylvania. In his speech at the laying of the cornerstone for the original college, Root insisted, “It is not strange that on the shore of the beautiful Potomac, in a land devoted to peace, there should arise a structure devoted to increasing the efficiency of an army for wars. The world is growing more pacific; war is condemned more widely as the years go on.... Nevertheless, selfishness, greed, jealousy, a willingness to become great through injustice, have not disappeared, and only by slow steps is man making progress. So long as greed and jealousy exist among men, so long the nation must be prepared to defend its rights.” 13 In addition, as part of his modernization effort, Root brought federal standards and methods to the semi-independent state militias and renamed them the National Guard.
     
    Perhaps Root was right that, having achieved the industrial foundations of military might, the United States needed to pay attention to the global balance of power and modify its institutions accordingly. But there is no doubt about what we lost in doing so. Washington’s