[0.E.O]

A military should only exist in times of war.

Say, for the sake of argument, the U.S. had no standing army in 1941. What would have happened from December 8th onward?

[Olog-hai]

That’s what happens when people don’t read Madison correctly and omit Washington's thoughts. The type of army that Madison spoke of (controlled by an overgrown and unwieldy executive with too much power) was the very thing we fought in the War of Independence.

One of Washington’s most famous quotes is this one:

If we desire to avoid insult, we must be able to repel it; if we desire to secure peace, one of the most powerful instruments of our rising prosperity, it must be known that we are at all times ready for War.

No nation can survive without a standing military. No nation can be on a defensive footing without such.

As for your thought experiment, Japan’s forces would merely have sailed into Hawaii and enslaved all of the civilians; there would have been no military targets to bother with nor any kind of significant or organized civilian resistance. Next stop for them would have been Los Angeles.

[rarestia]

America had the army it did in 1941 because the progressives had already fired up the military industrial complex during WWI. Prior to WWI, America’s military was virtually nonexistent outside of those remnants of the civil war and the Spanish American war in the late 1800s.

The military was mustered from militias handed to the federal government during wartime. It was the responsibility of the governors of each state to ensure every able bodies man was prepared in the event of a wind up to war. Otherwise, standing armies did not exist. The army and navy in the early years of this nation were relegated to the frontiers and borders and the patrolling of our waterways, respectively.