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Carlo3b, it's good to hear from you. I hope this finds you well. Lots of changes, my FRiend, and none of us is exempt from the ravages of time.

A wonderful essay. I'll pick one topic among many but since the context within which we are treating the thing is the original Constitutional plan, it seems to stick out a bit. It is the issue you have captured under Internal Defense.

A curious thing, this. One of the principal objections to the advent of a standing army among even many of the Federalists was its potential for abuse in forging a supremacy of the federal government over those of the constituent states. Had I been alive at the time I'd have agreed - it would be madness to hope that the leaders of such a standing military could possibly remain immune from such a temptation.

I'd have been mistaken. And even with the advantage of 200 years' hindsight it still seems a nearly inexplicable thing - those exceptions that appear notable - Shays' Rebellion and the action against the Bonus Army - were directed at the veterans of that military and not at the citizens at large. In other countries there are modern examples of the standing military actually functioning as a formal bulwark against the oppression of central government: Egypt, for one, Turkey, for another.

But not here. The price we pay for the discipline of a military sworn to uphold the Constitution instead of a single figurehead - a Washington on the one hand, a Napoleon on the other, and an insignificant pismire such as 0bama at the most disgraceful pole of that continuum; the price we pay for a military deliberately aloof from political influence is that it cannot function as such a bulwark.

Nor can it function as a tool for oppression, at least so long as the discipline remains. And so other means are necessary for the state to extend its sway. Hitler found his in the brownshirts, the Sturmabteilung, a private army whose function was to facilitate his control of the legitimate military, and it did so very effectively (albeit in the end an act of suicide, deserved and unmourned).

There is another route for those intent on extending the sway of central power: a standing army that is not the army, a force immune from the strictures of posse comitatus, a functioning wing of a bloated federal government that has itself become a cancerous tumor. It is federal law enforcement militarized to a degree is simply insane in the eyes of a free people: a standing army that has already acted in contravention to the Second, the Fourth, and the Fifth Amendments and looks to be setting its sights on the First.

Much attention has been paid to the potential of the legitimate standing military making war upon its own people, generally under the assumption that an American Napoleon need only give the order for it to happen. And certainly the deliberate and systematic corruption of the military under 0bama may be seen as an attempt in that direction. But I think the real threat lies elsewhere. As you point out, "internal" defense is only the defense of authority against the people from whom that authority derives its only legitimate source. The fight will be there, I think.