Defending An Exceptional History

Campus Report ^ | May 20, 2009 | Malcolm A. Kline

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Defending an Exceptional History

by: Malcolm A. Kline, May 20, 2009

Truly, now more than ever, students cannot let their education end with college graduation, particularly when institutions of higher learning are increasingly sacrificing bodies of knowledge for reams of interpretation. For example, too few graduates get to learn about America’s uncanny knack for dismantling its defenses before being forced into world conflicts by enemy attacks and her remarkable resilience in overcoming same.

In an astounding bit of serendipity, the percentage of the federal budget that the federal government devotes to defense was similar before both the Pearl Harbor attack of 1941 and the attacks of September 11, 2001—17 percent. Coincidentally, this is the share of the budget that the Obama Administration wants to bring defense spending back down to.

“When the European war began in earnest on September 1, 1939, with the German invasion of Poland, the U.S. Army ranked seventeenth among armies of the world in size and combat power, just behind Romania,” Rick Atkinson, author of The Army at Dawn and The Day of Battle, said earlier this month.

Atkinson, who spoke at a conference organized by the Foreign Policy Research Institute (FPRI), is at work on the third volume of a trilogy he is writing on World War II. “At the time of Pearl Harbor, in December 1941, only one American division was on a full war footing,” Atkinson said at the FPRI event in Wheaton, Illinois. “Some American coastal defense guns had not been test-fired in 20 years, and the Army lacked enough antiaircraft guns to protect even a single American city.”...