The Standing Army the US Should Never Have

The framers of the US Constitution didn’t want a standing army because the path to tyranny from there would be swift and sure; yet a standing army unfolded just the same.

August 23, 2022

By: Bobby Casey, Managing Director GWP

The US has sadly found a work-around for quite a bit of the fail-safes within its constitution. Congress was supposed to be in charge of coining money, but outsourced that to a central bank.

Congress was supposed to declare war, yet no formal declarations have been made since World War 2. That is made possible in part by simply not calling US military interventions “wars”. Just call it something else… like an “Overseas Contingency Operation” or “Humanitarian Relief”.

One thing the framers of the US constitution was afraid of was tyranny, so they ensured not only that individuals could be armed, but that the federal government would not have a way to keep a standing army:

[The Congress shall have Power . . . ] To raise and support Armies, but no Appropriation of Money to that Use shall be for a longer Term than two Years; . . .

This is part of Article 8, Section 12, Clause 2 of the US Constitution. Similar to how congress could declare war, but a president could withdraw, it was meant as a check against a tyrannical government.

The United States cannot have a standing army outside of wartime. While national defense is an important function of a central government, mobilization of a military was reserved for only that.

Yet, there is no denying the expansion of the US police state. The work around for a standing army is then to deputize every bureaucracy.

And that’s exactly what is being done. Rather than call them an “army” or even associate them with the military, they are simply militarizing the bureaucracies. If that isn’t the epitome of politics!

It’s quite unnerving, but not unexpected nor uncharacteristic of the government to pull something like this, but it is important that people not fall for the slight of hand.

Here’s what’s happening, according to the watchdog site OpenTheBooks.com:

1. One hundred three executive agencies outside of the Department of Defense spent $2.7 billion on guns, ammunition, and military-style equipment between fiscal years 2006 and 2019 (inflation adjusted). Nearly $1 billion ($944.9 million) was spent between fiscal years 2015 and 2019 alone.

2. Non-military federal spending on guns and gear averaged $192 million per year since 2006 (inflation adjusted). In the last two years, spending averaged $173 million, about ten-percent below the long-term average.

3. We estimate that there are now more federal officers with arrest and firearm authority (200,000+) than U.S. Marines (182,000).

4. Seventy-six administrative agencies spent $110.6 million on guns, ammunition, and military-style equipment between fiscal years 2015 and 2019.

Examples included:

5. Twenty-seven traditional law enforcement agencies spent $800 million on guns, ammunition, and military-style equipment during fiscal years 2015 and 2019.

Examples included:

6. Use-It-Or-Lose-It year-end spending spree: $1.5 million spent by non-military, non-traditional law enforcement agencies on guns, ammunition, and military-style equipment in the last month of fiscal year 2019. Spending by Veterans Affairs (VA) Included $650,964 worth of ammunition, handguns, and a “military police long gun program” with AR15-style weaponry.

7. The Internal Revenue Service, with its 2,159 “Special Agents,” spent $21.3 million on guns, ammunition and military-style equipment between fiscal years 2006 and 2019. The agency stockpiled 4,500 guns and five million rounds of ammunition.

8. The VA spent $25.5 million including 11 million rounds of ammunition since 2010. The VA has 3,957 law enforcement officers guarding medical centers.

9. Since 2006, federal agencies spent $355,775 on paintball equipment, $4.4 million on grenades/ launchers, $7.9 million on unmanned vehicles/aircraft, $8.75 million on projectiles, $11 million on buckshot, and $37.6 million on Tasers.

This is the new “standing army”. This is how much has gone into funding, and arming the various bureaucracies. According to an article from 2016 from the Wall Street Journal:

Over the last 20 years, the number of these federal officers with arrest-and-firearm authority has nearly tripled to over 200,000 today, from 74,500 in 1996.

This rate hasn’t slowed.

So while law-abiding Americans are struggling to get firearms, and the politicians continue to pile on the gun control, the non Defense Department officers are buying them up hand over fist, and for what? What on earth does the Smithsonian Institution , Social Security Administration , National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration , and Animal Health Inspection Service need with military grade firearms?

There is nothing ensuring that the government administrative bureaus should be armed by the taxpayers.

The US government is no longer even trying to obscure the violence that backs ever single law on the books… no matter how paltry and no matter how obscure the agency.

What does this mean for everyday Americans?  Nothing good.  The government turned citizens against one another under Wilson:

President Woodrow Wilson and Congress passed two laws, the Espionage Act of 1917 and the Sedition Act of 1918, that criminalized any “disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language” about the U.S. government or military, or any speech intended to “incite insubordination, disloyalty, mutiny, or refusal of duty.” 

World War 2 Germany also had citizens turning in other citizens.

Creating a dragnet of snitches out of citizens through propaganda, and creating a dragnet of enforcement officers in every government agency through militarization isn’t much different.

Time to find ways to navigate these choppy political waters.  Getting one foot out the door in some way, whether it’s a second passport or an offshore bank account, has reached a new level of urgency.

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