[allmendream]

Many had problems with a standing Army. Less so with a paid professional Navy.

I didn’t ask what our founders view was - I asked what you had against a paid professional military.

Do you think America can and should do without one?

Do you think in modern warfare an amateur force would be sufficient to protect and defend these United States?

[bvw]

Every American should have serious reservations about any paid professional military, especially if -- as you yourself suggested by inference -- it becomes a family tradition. THAT is the what the Founders themselves would advise.

THAT is what our Nation's Founders had to fight both as part of and against. Some of greatest military officers of the Revolution had been part of the British military in the wars prior to the Revolution. So great was their fully understandable fear of a standing military, that the Articles of Confederation did not have the ability to raise one of any consequence.

Out of that post Revolutionary experience, under the Articles of Confederation, the founding generation learned that we needed a standing professional army and navy, but even then it was always kept small, lean and even at times impoverished. THAT is our heritage, and it is so for good reason.