The preamble has long been considered, by both Madison and most serious constitutional scholars over two centuries, to be a mere rhetorical statement of purpose, not an act of authorizing Congressional or any other power, which would have made Article I's details superfluous. (That hasn't stopped demagogues from appealing to "the general welfare" for any number of statist schemes.)
Beyond this, are you sure you want to go there, to make these powers to institute an army and navy into yet more infinitely elastic creations? As has been done for 125 years with the powers to regulate commerce between states and with foreign countries?
You know what monsters those have become. Now anything that ever once could conceivably have been carried in interstate commerce, whether it actually had been or not, is considered fair game. Such as with Roosevelt's original arguments for his National Recovery Act fascism, or the new proposals -- see Daschle's S. 22 -- for regulating firearm sales at gun shows.
Apart from this, the Congress has shown its contempt for any notion of limits by circumventing, with creative accounting, the Constitution's requirement that appropriations for a standing army be made for no longer than two years at a time. This was a check upon empire-builders in Congress, allowing those in the House to be voted out if the Army was used to impose domestic tyranny or create sources of graft.
Of course, they did the same thing to prepare for the 28th Amendment finally being ratified after 200-odd years, with how it disallowed Congressional pay-raise legislation without an election intervening ... they merely made the raise process permanent and automatic.
The Supreme Court has ruled in the past that conscription is a valid means of achieving these goals.
As I wrote, this has only reached them once (in 1918), and it took the form of the Court simply and ostentatiously refusing to second-guess Congress, clearly reading the political tea leaves. Which is not at all the same reasoning. It refused to explicitly endorse conscription as being constitutional, but it wouldn't stand in the way of such an action by Congress. (In much the same way as later cases stayed out of "political questions," such as, most recently, the revocation of treaties. I consider that to be judicial cowardice.)
And the rulings in those draft-law cases avoided any substantive discussion whatsoever, beyond that vague power of raising an army, of constitutional principles or text -- including, most notably, the 13th Amendment.
I should note that the Constitution does not authorize a Marine Corps or an Air Force. I suppose you would suggest we do away with them?
The Marine Corps predated the Constitution and has been the same, in essence, since 1775: a department of a larger Navy. The use of such seaborne troops was already fully understood to be within "providing a Navy" by the framers. It also had obvious restrictions -- most of all, the requirement for ship transport -- that made it less threatening to that generation than a permanent, land-based, national army.
The Air Force is a different matter, and genuine research and some constitutional controversy entered into the prospect of its becoming a separate service. That is, rather than its remaining part of the Army (the Air Corps), in analogy to the Marine Corps. This was finessed in two ways: The structure of command was made to follow the patterns and trappings of the Army, thus making it the equivalent of an "air army." And the question of funding was put aside by making the new Air Force part of a larger Department of Defense. (The two-years-at-a-time issue was worked around, once again, with unconstitutionally creative accounting.)
As for the movies touching on the 1863 draft riots: I meant "restoration" of a facet of history to the public consciousness, to spark inquiry and interest -- not taking fictional films as historical references. That last would be foolish, and has happened too often already, such as with Oliver Stone's "JFK."
The United States Marines were authorized 2 July, 1798.
Your whole argument is just a bit too slick and convenient.
Walt