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Aughie and Nia introduce part A of two episodes regarding the 3rd of the Department Series, the Department of War/Defense.
This podcast uses government documents to illuminate the workings of the American government, and offer context around the effects of government agencies in your everyday life.
Announcer: Welcome to Civil Discourse. This podcast will use government documents to illuminate the workings of the American Government and offer contexts around the effects of government agencies in your everyday life. Now your hosts, Nia Rodgers, Public Affairs Librarian and Dr. John Aughenbaugh, Political Science Professor.
N. Rodgers: Hey Aughie.
J. Aughenbaugh: Morning, Nia. How are you?
N. Rodgers: I'm good. You sound a little foggy.
J. Aughenbaugh: We have been dealing with various and sundry physical maladies.
N. Rodgers: That's what comes from having children. I'm given to understand that children are germ factories. Before they reach a certain age.
J. Aughenbaugh: That is the case, and at the time when we were recording this episode, my daughter has been sick.
N. Rodgers: She generously gives to you?
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: She doesn't give you things because she gives you things all the time.
J. Aughenbaugh: She's still at a point to where she still wants to hug her daddy.
N. Rodgers: Hold onto that as long as you can. At some point you are going to be the worst person in the world.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah, the downside, of course, is whatever nastiness led to her having a cough has led to me having a cough.
N. Rodgers: Thank you for recording with me because I'm intrigued to keep going with our series.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: I know that this time we're doing a combination. Because we're doing the Department of War, which later became the Department of Defense, which I think is interesting just from a language point of view. Because one of those implies something very different than the other, war and versus defense. But I want to start by asking you a question.
J. Aughenbaugh: Okay.
N. Rodgers: In your notes, you talk about the Department of War tracing its origins back to 1775, which of course is, we all know is the revolution. Even if minimal school, we have learned that. But I'm intrigued because it wasn't a department, because there was no such thing as the United States. There's no president, there was no secretary. What do you mean by tracing it back to the war?
J. Aughenbaugh: Most historians of the Department of War argue that the idea of war has always been a significant bureaucratic or governing concern of what we refer to as the United States.
N. Rodgers: Wait, so we've been fighting all along?
J. Aughenbaugh: As number of historians have pointed out, for a nation that claims to be peace loving.
N. Rodgers: Were pretty feisty.
J. Aughenbaugh: I saw one historian who's calculated that well over 80 percent of our history, we've been fighting wars.
N. Rodgers: Can I just give you a visual I have on this with Americans. Have you seen film Midnight Cowboy? There's a scene where Jon Voight doesn't happen or walking across a street in New York and a cab pulls up into the crosswalk where they are walking. Hoffman slams his hand down on the hood of the car and he says, I'm walking here. It's a famous because Jon Voight from the country and he's never been to receive Hoffman faces down or car, which could easily run him and Voight over and kill them both. But he wins that confrontation and it's a memorable moment in cinema visually, and I picture that as the United States. Sometimes we just slammed the hood of something and yell, I'm walking here and we expect everybody to stop for us. That's not always a bad thing, but sometimes it is.
J. Aughenbaugh: You've got to put it in the context of when these committees were created in 1775.
N. Rodgers: That's separate from this. I'm thinking about older United States, but this is JB United States.
J. Aughenbaugh: But, it may be hardwired into our political culture Nia, that one of the ways you gain respect around the world is not putting up with other nation states. For lack of a better phrase, BS.
N. Rodgers: That's true. Because to Roosevelt speaks softly but carry a big stick.
J. Aughenbaugh: That's Teddy Roosevelt's infamous quote.
N. Rodgers: Okay.
J. Aughenbaugh: That both in World War I and World War II, access powers generally feared about the United States was not necessarily that we were great at fighting. It's just that we bring such resources, such size to the fight.
N. Rodgers: Relative unpredictability as the British to their misfortune discovered and read the revolution.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah.
N. Rodgers: We don't find in a straight line. You-all are silly to line up because that just makes you a bigger target. What are you doing?
J. Aughenbaugh: If you look at to convince these exactly, you had a committee to secure ammunition. You had a committee to raise funds for gunpowder, and then you had a committee to organize a national militia.
N. Rodgers: It's just really pretty clever without a national government.
J. Aughenbaugh: We have the national government infrastructure. For many historians, the origin of the secretary or the Department of War it predates the country. There was very little debate Nia, in the first United States Congress about ''creating a Department of War.'' Because the expectation was, at some point in time, great Britain was going to reclaim or want to reclaim the colonies. That France would wait until the Brits in this new country fought amongst themselves, tired themselves out, and then France could come in and claim huge parts of this Western Hemisphere.
N. Rodgers: This thing was already in Mexico and what is now Texas.
J. Aughenbaugh: But also Florida, right?
N. Rodgers: Right.
J. Aughenbaugh: This is a nation that was founded in many ways in a period where you had colonial superpowers that were very skeptical that the new nation would be able to survive. The colonial revolutionary experience taught the framers many immutable, if you will, lessons. You see it. We've already discussed many of them in regards to the United States Constitution and how it's structured, etc. But you also see this in regards to some of the first departments that were created; state, treasury, and war.
N. Rodgers: Was war 1789 as well?
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes, it was.
N. Rodgers: I know later in the 1900s you get defense.
J. Aughenbaugh: Post World War II.
N. Rodgers: We have the war department or the Department of War and I know it had been called both of those things. The reason I know it had been called both of those things is, if you listeners would like to look at government documents, one of the things that happens with government documents is that they are organized by the agency that produces them. If you have documents that were produced before 1950 or late 1940s, they will be under W because that's the war department. Then after that they are under D, which is the Department of Defense because they change agency names and they change agency production. You could argue that that's not a good way to organize things, but it is how government documents are organized. It's cool because you can see through time where agencies go, where they shift ownership because as Aughie we'll get into later, the Department of War/Defense was also in charge of Indian affairs for awhile until it became its own thing, well, first under the interior and then under its own thing. You have all these shifts in that. But I think that's a cool thing that you can actually trace in the documents that they created. By the by, all agencies have created documents since very early on. You have lists of things. You have people in certain offices. All that stuff had to be reported because transparency was a big deal from the very beginning of the country. Everybody was like, if we're going to have a federal government we want to know what it's doing all the time. We don't want it to sneak up on us and take away our rights because we've had kings and that's what they do. We want a lot of transparency. I will put a link to where you can see the the documents change over and that history because I find it interesting.
J. Aughenbaugh: But to your point, Nia. By the time we get to the turn of the 20th century, German sociologist Max Weber had created what he called the ideal type of bureaucracy. One of the characteristics of the ideal type of bureaucracy was the maintenance of extensive documentation of records. That's what governments do.
N. Rodgers: That's what government should do. It's not I think what governments always do. I think sometimes governments conveniently loose things or inconveniently loose things. President Washington who has been General Washington, because he's the commander-in-chief he was the commander in chief over these committees as well.
J. Aughenbaugh: He was the commander in chief of the Revolutionary Army. We fight the war. We eventually win.
N. Rodgers: In your face Britain.
J. Aughenbaugh: Washington's plan was to retire to his palatial estate in Mount Vernon. But when the Articles of Confederation began to fail you get the Constitutional Convention. You have the debate and eventual ratification and then you have the first presidential election. Washington is encouraged by both the federalists and the anti-federalists to run for president. What's really interesting to me, Nia and I don't know if you caught it in the notes is, Washington is elected president.
N. Rodgers: Wasn't that what would be traditionally called a complete landslide like, 96 percent of the vote or something like that went in.
J. Aughenbaugh: But the larger point here that I was trying to get at is his first secretary of War was also a retired general, Henry Knox and Washington picked him. But the expectation within the Washington administration, but also the United States Congress was that Washington would have direct daily control over the secretary of War. Unlike the State Department and the Treasury Department run respectively by Jefferson and Hamilton, George Washington had an extensive, if you will, control over the War secretary office, the War Department. It's very fascinating to me because even Knox who agreed to go ahead and be the first Secretary of War did so with the explicit promise that he would not be responsible for running the department.
N. Rodgers: He was thoroughly a secretary in the sense of what we think of as the modern word for secretary, meaning someone who keeps things running, but who is frequently not the boss.
J. Aughenbaugh: Because the assumption was the president in Article 2 of the Constitution is commander-in-chief. Almost early on in our country's history this idea that the president is in charge of our War Department takes root.
N. Rodgers: I mean, they would have had no examples of countries where that was not the case. Because kings were the leaders of their armies even if they hired really good generals and yadi yadi yada. They were still considered to be the leader of the army and they had to go out and at least pretend to fight even if they didn't fight. It would have been conceptually outside the realm of their possibility of having what we think of now is a civilian commander-in-chief. We've now had several commanders in chief that don't have military. No. Is that true they don't have military service?
J. Aughenbaugh: Well, I mean, if you think about it, Clinton did not, Bush 43 infamously did not, Obama did not.
N. Rodgers: Donald Trump did not.
J. Aughenbaugh: Did not. I don't believe Joe Biden did.
N. Rodgers: In the modern presidency we've really gotten away from that concept.
J. Aughenbaugh: I mean, but before that.
N. Rodgers: Is that the Henry Knox that Fort Knox is named for?
J. Aughenbaugh: I tried to find that. There are some books that say yes and other books that say no.
N. Rodgers: Okay. So disputed. Hard thing to know. But I would be willing to bet there's not just one Knox that served honorably in the military. You know what I mean?
J. Aughenbaugh: But what was I think most fascinating in this early period in addition to Washington having such hands on role as commander in chief, was the Department of War actually had a multitude of positions, many more than the State Department and the Treasury Department at least early on. You had two inspectors to oversee the troops and then Congress during this 1790s also added various ranks so major general, brigadier general, quarter master general, a chaplain, a paymaster general, a judge advocate, and inspector general, a physician general, a paymaster general, etc.
N. Rodgers: I like the apothecary general, which if you're wondering what an apothecary is it's a chemist. It's basically the CVS of the early nation.
J. Aughenbaugh: The other thing that they did almost within the first decade of the War Department is they created two institutions that are still with us today, Nia. They created the United States Military Academy at West Point and the Army Corps of Engineers, both of which were created in 1802.
N. Rodgers: West Point's important for a number of reasons. But the reason it leaps to my mind is that many of the generals who served in the Civil War had been to West Point. They knew each other from West Point and they were all trained in same way at West Point.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes, they were.
N. Rodgers: Which is why you see so many battles in the Civil War that aren't really won or lost. There is no clear winner in many of those battle because people were fighting each other who all knew the same tactics and who were all trained in the same way and who knew each other, which changes the tenor of the war.
J. Aughenbaugh: You move into the 19th century and almost immediately United States has a couple of skirmishes/wars highlighted by the war of 1812.
J. Aughenbaugh: And afterwards, okay.
N. Rodgers: Skirmish except wasn't that when the White House was burned down? Or partially burned down?
J. Aughenbaugh: I say skirmish is highlighted by the war of 1812.
N. Rodgers: Okay, thank you.
J. Aughenbaugh: But after that war, the Secretary of War was led by a well-known national politician, John C. Calhoun from South Carolina.
N. Rodgers: Why do I know the name?
J. Aughenbaugh: Because eventually, Calhoun argued for southern states being able to nullify federal government actions that the states did not like.
N. Rodgers: That's why I know the name. Because I was reading through your notes and going, that name is really familiar.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah, he became the most prominent politician, even more so than Andrew Jackson for developing and espousing the theory of nullification as it relates to state federal government relations. Calhoun did a couple of interesting things as Secretary of War and this becomes a running theme throughout the history of the Department of War. He tried to create a modern system of bureaus. To give you an example, you mentioned a few moments ago, the Bureau of Indian Affairs was created in 1824. This was supposed to be the main agency of the federal government to deal with issues regarding Native Americans and it was until 1849 and that's when Congress transferred it to the Interior Department. But Calhoun got a lot of resistance from uniformed military personnel because uniformed military personnel, by large, wanted to report to your basic rank system that you see in para or military organizations. This idea that there would be bureaus run by civilians, that military personnel would have to report to has been contested or was contested for most of the history of the Department of War. Now from a bureaucratic sense, it makes all kinds, there's an inherent logic, it's a democracy so you want civilians being in charge of even the Department of War, but for many military personnel is idea that they would have to report to a civilian who would be in-between them and the Secretary of War who then is between them and the commander-in-chief just didn't fly all that well.
N. Rodgers: I could see that point of view, I suppose. I come at it from the point of view of, I don't want you hearing often starting a war without my buy-in. By the same token, I've never served in the military, so I'm only observing it from the outside. I have a sibling and cousins who served in the military and it is extraordinarily hierarchical in the sense that you report up to the next guy who reports up to the next guy who reports it, you don't jump the chain of command unless there's an extremely drastic reason to do so.
J. Aughenbaugh: That's correct.
N. Rodgers: I can see where they would say, broken chain, where now you're trying to navigate a system that is political. The thing about hierarchy in the military is you take your generals orders because he's the general and you are not. There's no question about that. Whereas in the civilian system, we rarely take orders from other people. Your boss doesn't just order you to do something. They ask you in some semi polite way and you in some semi polite way say yes because that's how jobs work. I suppose they could order you, but it doesn't make the morale work very well in a workplace, but the military perceive it in the exact opposite. I don't want you to maybe patty around tell me what you want me to do and then let me go do it.
J. Aughenbaugh: That's particularly the case, Nia, when we move into the late 1800s, early 1900s and we go to a civil service system where you get your government jobs based on your knowledge, skills, and abilities and not necessarily who you knew. The idea that you're a boss appointed by a president or a governor or a mayor, could just come on in and tell a bunch of career bureaucrats with a whole bunch of subject matter expertise, well, you're going to do x. Many of those bureaucrats are going to be like-
N. Rodgers: Heck you say.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah, right, I am.
N. Rodgers: Or, I'm going to slow walk that until you're gone from here, because I'm here forever and you're going to be [inaudible] .
J. Aughenbaugh: I have something you don't have which is tenure.
N. Rodgers: Right.
J. Aughenbaugh: But back to the War Department. The War Department in many ways, in the 1820s and '30s and '40s, was defined by primarily the interaction of the federal government with Native Americans, but also the various westward expansion movements, Manifest Destiny, etc, but that all changes with what seminal event in American history that you mentioned previously.
N. Rodgers: It's got to be the Civil War.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes. Civil war.
N. Rodgers: Which makes sense that everything else goes to the wayside when you get to Civil War. Who cares about the West? Who cares about the Native Americans? Forgive me, I'm not me being piffy, but at that point, we have a really big fish to fry, which is this thing may completely unravel and come apart and we may not have a national government. If succession happens, we now have at least two countries in this section of the continent.
J. Aughenbaugh: To put this in context, during the apex of the Civil War, the Union side had to recruit, train, supply, provide medical care, transportation, and pay for two million soldiers.
N. Rodgers: Million.
J. Aughenbaugh: Two million.
N. Rodgers: That's a lot of people for a very small government.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: To look after.
J. Aughenbaugh: This was a major undertaking. Even after the war, the War Department, and this becomes as seem listeners as we discuss these various cabinet level department. As the war was winding down, the Department of War, ends up picking up some responsibilities that you may not necessarily think would be associated with "War Department."
N. Rodgers: But remembering that, at this point, we still don't have a whole bunch of other departments.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: Kitchens, remember listeners how we have already noted that the Department of State was a kitchen sink.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: The Department of Treasury was mildly a kitchen mild. It was a junk drawer in the kitchen. Whereas and then you get war, if you only have three departments, you're bound to end up with stuff that people go,
J. Aughenbaugh: Remember too, that throughout most of our country's history, one of the dominant features of American political culture was to be very skeptical about growing the federal government.
N. Rodgers: You don't just really nearly make departments because it seems like a good idea. That's not how this works.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah. We can stick a particular function in a pre-existing department. Because we know that department.
N. Rodgers: We're not theoretically growing the government that way.
J. Aughenbaugh: But what I'm talking about here, Nia, is after the war, the War Department took charge of refugees and freedmen, the freed slaves.
N. Rodgers: Through the name? You'd say the name of the bureau?
J. Aughenbaugh: Bureau of Refugees Freedmen and Abandoned Lands.
N. Rodgers: That's what amuses me is that last part, abandoned lands. Now I understand why we have to have somebody who's looking after for refugees and freedmen, because freed slaves and refugees from the south needed to be re-homed and integrated. They needed to be re-housed, not re-homed, they're not animals. They needed to have a job and a place to be able to make a living and raise family, and that thing. I understand why you would need that. I'm fascinated by the abandoned land's theory, because I don't if that very many people were abandoning their lands. I think that's interesting. I would love to know more about the work of that particular bureau, I might dig in on that at some point if listeners are interested, because I find that somewhat fascinating. I doubt that people really very much abandoned their lands so much as there was confiscation of land.
J. Aughenbaugh: Well, there are two things that were going on there. One was the Union Army would go ahead and take land. Because that's what armies do and more. But you also got to remember too, that both sides of the Civil War suffered huge casualties. It would not be unusual or an entire southern family to have pretty much all the men folk killed in the war. At that time, in pretty much every state in the country, Nia, could women actually take ownership of land?
N. Rodgers: Not generally.
J. Aughenbaugh: All of a sudden now legally the land had become effectively what?
N. Rodgers: Abandoned. Yes. This theory makes me angry. Anyway, things we know now that we didn't know then.
J. Aughenbaugh: But speaking of things that even to this day make people angry. The War Department had a huge role in the reconstruction after the Civil War. Because the War Department's usually had troops in the various southern states to ensure that the southern states did not resume their practices that they fought long and hard for during the Civil War. Slavery, indentured servitude, the mistreatment of, any number of groups.
N. Rodgers: Yeah. If you think that the United States has recovered from that attitude, you should ask Japan or Germany if that's true. Because we still had troops in both of those nations. It's become a friendlier thing than it was. But right after World War II, we stationed people there to make sure that those nations would stay in the losing column and not in the rebuilding column.
J. Aughenbaugh: Well, how do you go ahead and do both?
N. Rodgers: I'm sorry, rebuilding their armies.
J. Aughenbaugh: Okay.
N. Rodgers: Sorry, rebuilding of their armies. You want to rebuild the countries because you need them to be active traders in the world. You need them to be active economically in the world. That's a good thing, and you have to do that.
J. Aughenbaugh: Nia, you were born and raised in the south. You've probably even heard this growing up. A couple of generations were moved. You still have southerners who go ahead and say that the indignity of having War Department troops stationed in our states during reconstruction was a crossing of the line.
N. Rodgers: Well, it's part of the mythos of the War of Northern Aggression.
J. Aughenbaugh: Sure. Yes.
N. Rodgers: It's a day left invading troops here.
J. Aughenbaugh: They remained there until 1877 and shortly thereafter as been well chronicled, most southern states, went from being run by Republican Party governors and state legislatures to being run by Democratic Party governors and state legislatures.
N. Rodgers: Which remember folks means the opposite of what it means now.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: Always something I had to run myself, otherwise, you And Bill Newmann will fuss at me, is that the Republicans of 1877 were not the Republicans of now. There's a switch there.
J. Aughenbaugh: But otherwise, the War Department really shrink dramatically after reconstruction. I found this tidbit in my research. By 1890, the United States Army was the smallest and least powerful army of any major power in late 19th century.
N. Rodgers: How many men?
J. Aughenbaugh: The United States Army had 39,000 men. France, by contrast, had an army of over 540,000.
N. Rodgers: That is a huge difference, 39,000 is pretty much the campus of VCU plus about 5,000 people.
J. Aughenbaugh: We'll just think about the student population plus the employees.
N. Rodgers: There's no way, we don't even know if we could take Liechtenstein with that number of people. No wonder then that they were a little anxious about potential invasion. All along, if you're talking about armies that aren't very big comparatively. You said France had 542,000.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah.
N. Rodgers: I feel certain that Britain had at least that many.
J. Aughenbaugh: Well, in particular, Great Britain had a rather large naval force. Which again reflects the particular geography of that nation. But nevertheless, it really does reflect the American foreign policy well into World War I, which was isolationism.
N. Rodgers: We don't want to be messed with by anybody because we don't have enough firepower. We're relatively weak.
J. Aughenbaugh: Well, and because we're not going to get involved in other nations disputes, we don't need a large army.
N. Rodgers: We're all the way over here. By the time you get here, we'll have to figure something out.
J. Aughenbaugh: You had the Monroe Doctrine, which was uttered by President James Monroe, which basically said to the world powers in the early 1800s, leave the Western Hemisphere alone. Just leave it alone. If you leave it alone, we're not going to go ahead and get involved in what's going on in continental or Europe.
N. Rodgers: Trade-offs.
J. Aughenbaugh: Foreign policy definitely influenced the shape, size, and purpose of the War Department, well in to World War I. But even though we had a small army, this period of time between the Spanish-American War in 1898 in World War I, was according to many historians, extremely important in regards to the development of the War Department. Because again, there were internal bureaucratic battles Nia, about how to structure, how to organize the War Department. You had Secretary of War, I love this name, Elihu Root.
N. Rodgers: Elihu.
J. Aughenbaugh: He wanted to appoint a chief of staff who would be in charge of planning, make the War Department more business-like. But some of the generals in the War Department resisted this.
J. Aughenbaugh: It's during this period of time you get the creation of the United States Army War College and the general staff to give further training for the line officers in the military. They change the promotion procedures. Root insisted that staff officers be rotated to line positions and vice versa to make sure that they were familiar with how each part of the War Department actually worked.
N. Rodgers: To make them better leaders. That makes sense.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes. Now, his successor as Secretary of War was William Howard Taft. Listeners, you may be familiar with Taft, because Taft eventually became president in the United States. Then after a brief respite, the chief justice of the United States.
N. Rodgers: Taft is like me. We were going to hold all the jobs at some point.
J. Aughenbaugh: It's really fascinating. Taft loved being a bureaucrat. He loved being chief justice. He hated being president. Absolutely hated being president. But he loved being a bureaucrat and he loved running the Supreme Court.
N. Rodgers: Can we mention something positive about who Root that didn't get mentioned here, but that is in your notes and that I really like about him? He organized schools for the specialized branches of the services. Before that, everybody went to West Point. You learned all the same techniques regardless of what part of the military you were going to do. But there are specialized things that each part of the military does and they're really good at, I know this didn't exist then, but modernly, the Marines have a different skill set than the.
J. Aughenbaugh: The Army or the Navy.
N. Rodgers: There's a specialized Navy group.
J. Aughenbaugh: The SEALs?
N. Rodgers: The SEALs. They have a very specialized skill set and the Green Berets have a very specialized skill set. When you need a certain task done, you turn to these people who have trained deeply competent in this way to get this thing done. There's a different training that comes from artillery than comes from calvary. It is a wildly different thing to be able to hit a building from a great distance with armament from a tank, like that's a skill set and you need to go and you need to learn that specialized skill set. I like that he started that system. I'm assuming he gets lots of credit in the military, but I'll be honest, I did not know his name until today.
J. Aughenbaugh: Again, it was during his tenure as War Department secretary that because of the United States victory in the Spanish-American War, you had the War Department that was in charge of Cuba for a period of time, in charge of the Philippines, and also in charge of Puerto Rico.
N. Rodgers: He wrote the charter for the Philippines.
J. Aughenbaugh: That's right. He wrote the charter and then he had his successor, William Howard Taft who actually was the Commissioner General of the Philippines. That's how Taft gets on the radar of President Roosevelt.
N. Rodgers: That's just cool, because the secretary of war is out there doing things like, "Cuba, let's figure out how we're going to give this back to you in some organized way." I think if the department is stated as we parachute in and we make the document that makes peace. We stop the war. We come in and we say, "This is what we're going to do to negotiate the end of the war." But then there are these people who have to figure out the actual handing over of things they've taken because as you pointed out, the entire point of war is to take stuff from the other person. If I commit war on you, I'm going to break into your house and take all your stuff and then you're going to break into my house and take all my stuff and we're going to go back and forth that way until there's some detente worked out by the State Department. Then somebody has to figure out how to give back all the stuff in an organized way.
J. Aughenbaugh: You begin to see this with the Spanish-American War for them, or you could even say it occurred during Reconstruction. The war department is frequently tasked with post-war nation-building.
N. Rodgers: Right. We're still doing that in places.
J. Aughenbaugh: It's a somewhat controversial task. Take a look at the global war on terrorism.
N. Rodgers: That's where I was going to go with that. The unfortunate way that the United States pulled out of Afghanistan has been met with a great deal of anger because that's not how we generally have done this in the past. We don't just generally go, "Well, good luck with all that, bye." The way, it seemed we were doing in Afghanistan. When you look at the history of the war department, it really hasn't been done that way and then all of a sudden, poof. That's a big change in how we extricate ourselves from these situations previously.
J. Aughenbaugh: It reflects, as many scholars point out, the changing nature of war in the 21st century world. There was a lot of stuff going on that doesn't capture the attention in history books but there was changes of foot in the war department and I think we're going to go ahead and get to those changes in our next podcast episode, which will begin with World War I.
N. Rodgers: Which is as far as whenever I studied history in school, what we had was there was a revolution, there was a civil war, and then there was World War I as if there was nothing between those things. But as we see, there was a lot of change in the departments during those times in reaction to the previous events and then gearing up towards the next event.
J. Aughenbaugh: Then they also reflect changes going on in the country. Changes going on in the country, but also changes in regards to the United States place in the world. You see this very clearly when we begin our next podcast episode with World War I because there were some rather significant changes that would have to take place with the war department.
N. Rodgers: With our no longer isolationist? We all want to get involved in Europe.
J. Aughenbaugh: US foreign policy.
N. Rodgers: All tied in there together. Cool. Well, thank you, Aughie, so much. I find these people fascinating and I find the push-pull between civilian and military fascinating. This idea of who should be in charge but I like that it's a civilian that's in charge because I, again, worry about the army writing checks that the rest of us have to catch. Do you know what I mean? I wouldn't want military to just say, "Tomorrow we're going to invade Canada because it seems like a good idea," without us at least having a national discussion about it.
J. Aughenbaugh: That discussion ties into the foundation of most modern Western democracies, which is the social contract. If we're going to go ahead and incur bills that the public is going to have to pay, the public should be able to weigh in on whether or not they want to incur those debts. This is the ultimate debt here folks. Because war departments in post-World War II, Department of Defense, the debts they have the American people pay, are in the lives of our young, our best and our brightest and our loved ones.
N. Rodgers: As Lincoln, so beautifully put it, the last full measure of devotion.
J. Aughenbaugh: That's right.
N. Rodgers: That has to be honored.
J. Aughenbaugh: But we will really delve into that listeners with our next episode.
N. Rodgers: Thank you, Aughie.
J. Aughenbaugh: Thank you, Nia.
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