Mind Experiment: The movie Red Dawn and the need for an army

"All the armies of Europe and Asia...could not by force take a drink from the Ohio River or make a track on the Blue Ridge in the trial of a thousand years." Abraham Lincoln




I just saw the movie Red Dawn (the re-make that is currently playing in theaters.) It is somewhat implausible. North Korea invading the portions of the West Coast with other unspecified countries invading the east coast. The rest of the movie tells the tale of the growth of a small piece of the insurgency against the invaders. It hard to imagine any country or combination of countries joining together on such an endeavor across the wide Atlantic or Pacific.

But what is not so implausible is the hard time such an endeavor would encounter were they ever to reach our shores. Even were we to have no military whatsoever, any invader would have their hands full once he were to reach our shores. The Iraq war was a testimony to that. The powerful American army had its hands full occupying and controlling a country the size of California. There is no power on earth that could subdue the length and breadth of the United States of America or as Lincoln put it "by force take a drink from the Ohio River." When Lincoln spoke those words, the size of the American army was in the order of 15,000.

Which begs the question: why have an army at all? Why have a navy? If it would be so difficult for an invader to subdue us, why do we need an army at all much less one so powerful that it can invade countries on the other side of globe?

I am not saying we should not have an army. I am simply asking the question why we need one.

We have become so accustomed to having a large military, we never ask such questions. For the great majority of our history our army was very small. We became a great nation and a world power with a very small military. National security is not always vested in a large military.

Question: Why did we down-size our military at the end of World War II? Why did we not keep it large?

Because it was ruiniously expensive!

For sure we needed to deal with the threats of Japan and Germany but once those threats were done with it would have foolishness to maintain the military so large. It would have broken us as a nation and in the long run would have made us less safe had we continued to run the large deficits necessary the military military at that high level. The people of that day realized that we were better of downsizing the military and increasing it only in time of need.

We became a great nation even while our military small. Throughout the late 1800s our excess capital was poured not into a large military but back into our growing industrial infrastructure which in turn made us more productive and prosperous. When war did come in 1917, we had a powerful industrial economy which was able to convert to a war-time footing which contributed to winning the war in Europe. This feat was repeated in World War II. I seriously doubt that today our economy could go to a total war footing. We are already too endebted. We would be more secure with a smaller military and no debt.

One of the reasons we need a large military, some would say, is so that we can project power. There are a lot of directions one could go with that: 1) Very few nations can project power in today's world and certainly none can do so on par with the United States; 2) With a very modest military we projected power and defeated Spain in the Spanish American War at the end of the 1800s; 3) one can look at historical examples of nations which had the ability to project power, The British Empire comes to mind; 4) even a relatively week power like the United States circa 1798 was able to project power and punish the Barbary States on the shores of North Africa and make them stop their piracy on our shipping.

The short story is that there are many models of projecting power besides our large military model and we should consider the fact that national security is not always vested in a larger military.