"Demilitarization... has led to catastrophe in the past"

From Eric Dondero:

Rudy Giuliani gave the Republican address over the weekend, stressing preparedness, and a tough approach to the threat of Islamic terrorism.

From TheHill:

A committed military presence in Iraq and Afghanistan has helped protect America from further terror attacks like the one experienced on Sept. 11 a decade ago, Giuliani said, and the nation should resist the urge to minimize the remaining threat to justify withdrawing from the Middle East.

"It's a re-emergence of a dangerous historical pattern that sometimes afflicts America -- a desire to demilitarize by minimizing the dangers we face and that’s led to catastrophes in the past," he said.

"American security requires a long-term military presence in the part of the world where people and organizations are plotting to kill us," he said. "We must not allow impatience to prevent our military from achieving its objective in Iraq and Afghanistan and the objective is the elimination of the threat to our nation."

He also noted that broad breakdowns in security are still possible, made evident by the failed bombing attempt of a jet landing in Detroit on Christmas Day in 2009. And poor decisions and the "irrational application of political correctness" enabled the shooting at Fort Hood.

Excerpt, from American Military History, Chapter 19 "Between the Wars":

War Department officials, especially in the early 1920's, repeatedly expressed alarm over the failure of Congress to appropriate enough money to carry out the terms of the National Defense Act. They believed that it was essential for minimum defense needs to have a Regular Army with an enlisted strength of 150,000 or (after the Air Corps Act of 1926) of 165,000. As Chief of Staff Douglas MacArthur pointed out in 1933, the United States ranked seventeenth among the nations in active Army strength...

For almost two decades ground units had to get along as best they could with weapons left over from World War I. The Army was well aware that these old weapons were becoming increasingly obsolete, and that new ones were needed. For example, General MacArthur in 1933 described the Army's tanks as completely useless for employment against any modern unit on the battlefield. Although handicapped by very small appropriations for research and development, Army arsenals and laboratories worked continuously during the 1920's and 1930's to devise new items of equipment and to improve old ones... not much new equipment was forthcoming for ground units in the field until Army appropriations began to rise in 1936.

For a number of years only about one fourth of the officers and one-half of the enlisted men of the Regular Army were available for assignment to tactical units in the continental United States. Many units existed only on paper; almost all had only skeletonized strength. Instead of nine infantry divisions, there were actually three. The continued dispersion of skeletonized divisions, brigades, and regiments among a large number of posts, many of them relics of the Indian wars, was a serious hindrance to the training of Regulars, although helpful in training the civilian components... in 1932 the 24 regiments available in the United States for field service were spread among 45 posts, with a battalion or less at 34. Most of the organic transportation of these units was of World War I vintage.

Editor's comment - And the non-interventionist foreign policy of left-libertarians differs from that of Neville Chamberlain and appeasement, just how exactly?

Photos - 1938 UK PM Neville Chamberlain, US Army on horseback circa 1930s.