Providing for the Common Defense

Abstract

This is not the best of times for the American military. With the Soviet threat gone, the armed forces, so recently the favorites of the Reagan administration, now find themselves searching for missions and trying justify their existence politicians and voters more worried about bloated budget deficits than foreign adversaries. Easily forgotten in this era of funding cuts, base closings, and reductions in force is the fact that one of the central concerns of those who framed the United States Constitution-as they stated in the preamble-was to provide for the common defense. Eleven of the eighteen paragraphs in Article I, section 8 serve at least in part empower Congress meet that responsibility. The United States Military under the Constitution of the United States, 1789-1989 provides a timely reminder that, despite the present emphasis of politicians and the public on promoting the general welfare and ensuring domestic tranquility, ours is in many respects a National Security Constitution.' While designed provide for the common defense, however, America's fundamental charter also creates a system that constrains military power. The generation that produced the Constitution feared standing armies, and no Framer would have agreed with the world's first great military theorist, Sun Tzu, that generals should be free from interference by the sovereign. A central theme in the constitutional history of the American military is the preservation of popular sovereignty over the power of the sword. Besides highlighting that theme, this collection of essays probes a number of other important issues related the conduct of warfare under the Constitution and the position of the armed forces in the American system of government. What Kohn and his collaborators do not do, unfortunately, is provide anything approaching a complete picture of how war and the military have affected constitutional development in the United States. That shortcoming of an otherwise excellent book is probably inherent in the genre which it belongs. A joint venture ... by the two principal societies of professional