“This vast difference between independent reporting and the DOD investigation raises concerns and undermines DOD credibility on civilian casualty reporting,” Warren and Jacobs stressed.
Civilian populations always take the most heat. what makes it worse is when the wrong countries are invaded. Iraq and Afghanistan for 9/11 to name two.
As U.S. military forces continue to kill and wound civilians in multiple countries during the ongoing 21-year War on Terror while chronically undercounting such casualties, a pair of Democratic lawmakers on Monday asked the Pentagon to explain discrepancies in noncombatant casualty reporting and detail steps being taken to address the issue.
In a letter to Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, Rep. Sara Jacobs (D-Calif.) and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) – who have both led calls to hold the military accountable for harming noncombatants – said they are “troubled” that the Pentagon’s annual civilian casualty report, which was released in September as required by an amendment Warren attached to the 2018 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), again undercounts noncombatants killed by US forces.
“In this year’s report, the department reported that approximately 12 civilians were killed and five were injured in Afghanistan and Somalia as a result of US military operations during 2021,” the lawmakers wrote. “However, the report did not admit to any civilian deaths in Syria, despite credible civilian casualty monitors documenting at least 15 civilian deaths and 17 civilian injuries in Syria in 2021.”
The U.K.-based monitor group Airwars counted between 12 and 25 civilians likely killed by US forces, sometimes operating with coalition allies, in Syria alone last year, with another two to four people killed in Somalia and one to four killed in Yemen.
Airwars does not track civilians killed or wounded in Afghanistan, where all of last year’s casualties acknowledged by the Department of Defense (DOD) occurred. These incidents include an errant August 29 drone strike that killed 10 people – most of them members of one family – including seven children.
“The report also appeared to undercount additional civilian casualties from Combined Joint Task Force-Operation Inherent Resolve (CJTF-OIR) that occurred prior to 2021,” the lawmakers’ letter continues, referring to the anti-Islamic State campaign launched during the Obama administration and ramped up under then-President Donald Trump – who infamously vowed to “bomb the shit out of” ISIS militants and “take out their families.”
“For example, the report… only disclosed four civilians killed and 15 civilians injured as a result of the March 18, 2019 strike in Baghuz, Syria,” the lawmakers noted. “But The New York Timesinvestigated this strike in 2021, finding evidence that the military concealed the extent of the civilian casualties, and according to Airwars, local sources alleged that the strike resulted in at least 160 civilian deaths, including up to 45 children.”
“This vast difference between independent reporting and the DOD investigation raises concerns and undermines DOD credibility on civilian casualty reporting,” Warren and Jacobs stressed.
When the NDAA amendment was first reported, a senior congressional aide told Defense News that the authority could also be used to prepare for war with China. “We can’t pussyfoot around with minimum-sustaining-rate buys of these munitions. It’s hard to think of something as high on everybody’s list as buying a ton of munitions for the next few years, for our operational plans against China and continuing to supply Ukraine,” the aide said.
Agitating for and preparing for peace…war. Casey and Kelly are all in. NDAA, their favorite bill.
Bill LaPlante, the Pentagon’s chief weapons buyer, said that he expects Congress to grant the authority to allow wartime purchasing power at a level not seen since the Cold War, Defense News reported on Monday.
To continue arming Ukraine, LaPlante has been calling for the Pentagon to be granted the authority to lock in multiyear contracts for weapons purchases, which are typically reserved for procuring naval vessels and warplanes. The idea is to get arms makers the incentive to ramp up production.
The Senate has added an amendment to its version of the 2023 National Defense Authorization Act to grant the authority. It would allow the Pentagon to make multiyear purchases through 2023 and 2024 of certain arms made by Lockheed Martin, BAE Systems, Kongsberg Defence & Aerospace, and Raytheon, the former employer of Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin.
The Senate is expected to vote on its version of the NDAA sometime this month, and it will then negotiate the final version of the spending bill with the House. LaPlante expects the wartime purchasing powers to make it into the finalized version that will reach President Biden’s desk.
“They are supportive of this. They’re going to give us multiyear authority, and they’re going to give us funding to really put into the industrial base ― and I’m talking billions of dollars into the industrial base ― to fund these production lines,” LaPlante said on Friday.
“That, I predict, is going to happen, and it’s happening now. And then people will have to say: ‘I guess they were serious about it.’ But we have not done that since the Cold War,” he added.
When the NDAA amendment was first reported, a senior congressional aide told Defense News that the authority could also be used to prepare for war with China. “We can’t pussyfoot around with minimum-sustaining-rate buys of these munitions. It’s hard to think of something as high on everybody’s list as buying a ton of munitions for the next few years, for our operational plans against China and continuing to supply Ukraine,” the aide said.
The Senate’s NDAA also includes $10 billion in military aid for Taiwan that will be disbursed over the next five years. While the number still needs to be finalized in negotiations with the House, there is strong bipartisan support for arming Taiwan, which will ensure tensions with China will continue to rise.
After Raytheon and L3Harris, the rest of the top ten defense companies donating campaign cash were Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, General Dynamics, BAE Systems, General Atomics, Huntington Ingalls Industries, Boeing, and Leidos. These companies lined members’ campaign coffers with millions of dollars in PAC funding.
As Congress considers two monumentally important pieces of legislative business — the annual defense policy bill and a historic reform to congressional ethics rules — it is worth taking some time to consider just how deep the potential for corruption goes in both these areas and how they intersect with one another. In other words, congressional corruption and ethical failings are inextricably linked to the military-industrial-congressional complex — the unhealthy intersection between Congress and the defense sector. This situation calls for serious reforms, and Congress is the only stakeholder that can make that happen.
A Cozy Relationship
There are few examples that better highlight the ethical dysfunction in Congress than the excessively cozy relationship between policymakers and the defense industry. Each year, including this one, members of the House and Senate armed services committees and the House and Senate appropriations committees craft the policy and allocate the hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars that fund the Pentagon. The National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) is the primary vehicle for defense policy. The accompanying appropriations bill allocates the money to operationalize the policy laid out in the NDAA. To put this in perspective, consider that the defense budget now clocks in at more than $800 billion and the Pentagon allocated $420 billion in contracts in fiscal year 2020 — over half the total defense budget and a contract dollar amount larger than every other federal agency combined.
In light of the scale and scope of defense spending, reasonable observers could be forgiven for assuming there might be some prudential rules in place to prevent corruption when it comes to Congress’s work regarding the defense industry. Unfortunately, there are virtually no such rules. In fact, the current framework around congressional conflicts of interest and campaign finance regarding industry relationships is so permissive as to all but guarantee the perversion of the policymaking process in this area.
There are few, if any, rules in place that restrict or prohibit members of Congress who sit on committees that oversee and legislate defense policy from holding direct personal financial stakes in defense companies, including through the ownership of stock. This means there is nothing stopping members of the House and Senate armed services committees (as well as each chamber’s respective defense subcommittee of the appropriations committee) from directly tying their own personal financial interests to the financial interests of defense contractors, all while passing laws that would steer billions of tax dollars to those very same companies. Again, these contracts total hundreds of billions of dollars each year.
The bill extends amendments that were in previous NDAA’s that block the White House from using funds to transfer or release Gitmo detainees into the US or other countries. The bill also blocks the use of funds to close the US naval base at Guantanamo Bay altogether.
After signing the bill, Biden released a statement denouncing the restrictions. “Unfortunately, section 1032 of the Act continues to bar the use of funds to transfer Guantánamo Bay detainees to the custody or effective control of certain foreign countries, and section 1033 of the Act bars the use of funds to transfer Guantánamo Bay detainees into the United States unless certain conditions are met,” the statement said.
Biden said the provisions “unduly impair the ability of the executive branch to determine when and where to prosecute Guantánamo Bay detainees and where to send them upon release.” Despite his objections, Biden still signed the massive $777.7 billion NDAA that authorized about $25 billion more than he requested from Congress.
Biden has pledged to close Gitmo, but the same promise was also made by President Obama. There are currently 39 detainees in the prison, and only 11 have been formally charged with crimes. Gitmo costs about $540 million to operate each year, meaning the US government spends over $13 million for each prisoner.
In July, Biden transferred former detainee Abdul Latif Nasser to his home country of Morrocco. Nasser was held since 2002 on no charges and was cleared for release five years ago. Like other Gitmo inmates, Nasser faced torture and other abuses during his time at the US military prison.
The US Senate has passed its National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) military spending bill for the fiscal year of 2022, setting the budget at an astronomical $778 billion by a vote of 89 to 10. The bill has already been passed by the House, now requiring only the president’s signature. An amendment to cease facilitating Saudi Arabia’s atrocities in Yemen was stripped from the bill.
“The most controversial parts of the 2,100-page military spending bill were negotiated behind closed doors and passed the House mere hours after it was made public, meaning members of Congress couldn’t possibly have read the whole thing before casting their votes,” reads a Politico article on the bill’s passage by Lindsay Koshgarian, William Barber II and Liz Theoharis.
The US military had a budget of $14 billion for its scaled-down Afghanistan operations in the fiscal year of 2021, down from $17 billion in 2020. If the US military budget behaved normally, you’d expect it to come down by at least $14 billion in 2022 following the withdrawal of US troops and official end of the war in Afghanistan. Instead, this new $778 billion total budget is a five percent increase from the previous year.
“Months after US President Joe Biden’s administration pulled the last American troops out of Afghanistan as part of his promise to end the country’s ‘forever wars’, the United States Congress approved a $777.7bn defence budget, a five percent increase from last year,” Al Jazeera reports.
Upon the removal of US troops from Afghanistan, President Biden said the following in August:
“After more than $2 trillion spent in Afghanistan — a cost that researchers at Brown University estimated would be over $300 million a day for 20 years in Afghanistan — for two decades — yes, the American people should hear this: $300 million a day for two decades. If you take the number of $1 trillion, as many say, that’s still $150 million a day for two decades. And what have we lost as a consequence in terms of opportunities? I refused to continue in a war that was no longer in the service of the vital national interest of our people.”
You would think a government so grieved over the loss of “opportunities” for the American people due to Afghanistan war spending would be eager to begin allocating that wealth toward providing opportunities to Americans at the end of that war. Instead, more wealth has been diverted to the US war machine.
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But the NDAA also often contains domestic innovations like this year’s inclusion of provisions “grant[ing] military courts the authority to strip servicemembers of their Second Amendment rights without due process and without the servicemember being present in court to defend themselves.”
After all, if women want to go help bomb children in Afghanistan—and join the Pentagon in losing wars across the globe—they are free to volunteer.
You can count on war party water carriers like Kelly, Toomey and Casey to jump on the NDAA bandwagon.
As in many previous years, this year’s National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) is chock-full of terrible legislation slyly inserted for the purposes of concealing matters from the public. Both parties have been long guilty of this, with both groups using the NDAA to pass police state legislation increasing federal spying and law enforcement powers.
All of the NDAA should be considered controversial, since so much of it is devoted to perpetuating the US’s aggressive, wasteful, and counterproductive efforts at global hegemony. But the NDAA also often contains domestic innovations like this year’s inclusion of provisions “grant[ing] military courts the authority to strip servicemembers of their Second Amendment rights without due process and without the servicemember being present in court to defend themselves.”
In other words, the legislation expands what is de facto conscription, since it sets up the US government to enact an active draft with ease and to track down all the young people who are to be forced into military service should the federal government decide to do so.
Any opposition to expansion of the draft is welcome. Yet the reasons for the opposition—mostly coming from conservatives—amount to little more than weak-tea arguments wrapped up in the usual promilitary pablum we’ve come to expect from the Right. These arguments ultimately boil down to saying, “Yes, it’s perfectly fine to enslave young men for a period of years in service of the state. Just don’t do it with women.”
With “opponents” granting such draconian state acts this level of deference and legitimacy, it’s no surprise the regime turns around and decides “the draft is for everybody” after all.
Of course expanding the draft to woman should be opposed, but meaningful opposition must come in the form of opposition to conscription overall. After all, the worst part of conscription is the fact the real-world effect of any draft is a massive expansion in government power over the lives of the population.
Conscription as a 100 Percent Tax
“Conscription is slavery,” Murray Rothbard wrote in 1973, and while temporary conscription is obviously much less bad—assuming one outlives the term of conscription—than many other forms of slavery, conscription is nevertheless a nearly 100 percent tax on the production of one’s mind and body. If one attempts to escape his confinement in his open-air military jail, he faces imprisonment or even execution in many cases.
States have long implicitly recognized the fundamental nature of conscription as a form of taxation. In Switzerland, for example, young men who are found unfit for military service are assessed an additional tax for a period of years in lieu of military service. In other places, such as the United States, where state and local conscription existed prior to the Civil War, those with means were able to avoid military service by paying an additional tax of various sorts or paying for “substitutes.”
Conscription remains popular among states because it is an easy way to directly extract resources from the population. Just as regular taxes partially extract the savings, productivity, and labor of the general population, conscription extracts virtually all of the labor and effort of the conscripts.
Conscription as a Weapon in the Culture War
If the debate over this issue continues, we’re likely to hear a lot about how “fairness” and egalitarianism require an expansion of the Selective Service System. It’s part of the Pentagon’s much-touted mission in expanding roles for “transgendered” people and other groups who have presumably been unjustly denied the opportunity to participate in the latest “regime change” scheme.
But those claims are all distractions from the central issue here, which is the state’s power over the citizen.
After all, if women want to go help bomb children in Afghanistan—and join the Pentagon in losing wars across the globe—they are free to volunteer. Whether or not women can be directly involved in military acts, however, is a completely separate issue from conscription and the Selective Service. There is a difference between opening up military jobs to women and forcing women into military service.
Besides, if fairness is a concern, there’s an easy way to achieve fairness on this issue: abolish the Selective Service for everybody. It’s as easy as that. It wouldn’t even cost a dime of taxpayer money. Simply shred the records, fire everyone who works for Selective Service, and lease out the office space to organizations that do something useful. Then, we won’t have to hear anything about “discrimination” or the alleged sexism implicit in a policy that outrageously neglects to force women to work for the government against their will.
But Isn’t This Just a Symbolic Gesture?
Some who want to expand Selective Service for egalitarian reasons are claiming that it’s all just symbolic anyway, because the draft “will never happen.”
It’s a mistake to think that the draft could never return because people supposedly would overwhelmingly oppose people being forced into combat. Even if that is the case, there is no reason at all why conscription could not be used to draft people for noncombat positions. After all, only a very small portion of the military ever sees combat. The vast majority of soldiers are involved in logistics, transportation, and desk jobs such as computer programming.
Only a small portion of military deaths occur in combat. Most deaths in the military are due to accidents.
Additionally, there is no reason that Selective Service could not be modified to be used to draft people for so-called national service positions in which conscripts would perform noncombat bureaucratic and manual labor jobs. Austria and Switzerland (which have conscription) allow this option for those morally opposed to combat. And historically—such as during World War II—“service” was imposed on conscientious objectors, who were forced to work on farms or perform other types of manual labor in special camps.
So no, the draft is not “hypothetical,” “symbolic,” or something that “will never happen.”
Numerous countries in Latin America, Europe, and Asia still employ conscription, and it is hardly some kind of never-used relic from the distant past.
Military service is one thing, the editors at National Reviewonce wrote, but forcing women into it is “barbarism,” they admit. They’re half right. It is indeed barbarism to force women to fight wars for the state. But the same is also true of conscription for men.
Conscription is abhorrent to a free society. As Senator Paul’s father—former congressman and Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul—has well said: “A government that is willing to enslave some of its people can never be trusted to protect the liberties of its own citizens.”
Earlier this year I asked the question: Will women have to register for the draft in 2021? That day may soon be coming.
Although the draft ended in 1973, the federal government continued to prosecute “draft dodgers” even after the Vietnam War ended. In 1975, President Gerald Ford eliminated the requirement that 18 to 25 year-old male citizens register with the Selective Service System.
During his campaign for president in 1976, Jimmy Carter promised to pardon those who evaded the draft. On January 21, 1977, President Carter made good on his promise and granted an unconditional pardon to hundreds of thousands of young men who dodged the draft during the Vietnam War. Yet, in 1980, Carter reinstated the requirement that men must register with the Selective Service System.
In its final report, issued in 2020, the National Commission on Military, National, and Public Service (NCMNPS) recommended that Congress amend the Military Selective Service Act to require that young women, like young men, register for the draft when they reach 18 years of age.
Back in July, the Senate Armed Services Committee, with 5 Republican no votes, approved an amendment to the fiscal year 2022 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) to require “all Americans” (not just men) to register with the Selective Service System. The final approval of the NDAA was by a vote of 23-3.
Now, the House Armed Services Committee, which contains 31 Democrats and 28 Republicans, has voted 35-24 on an amendment to the NDAA (5 Republicans voted with the Democrats: Jack Bergman, Liz Cheney, Pat Fallon, Scott Franklin, Mike Waltz) to include women as well. The NDAA then cleared the committee in a 57-2 vote.
Texas Republican Chip Roy blasted both parties for the recent committee vote, and tweeted that its supporters can “go straight to hell.” Roy said that he would rather see the draft abolished than see women forced to participate: “Abolish the draft if you want. But under no circumstances will you draft our wives and daughters. Total, complete, bullshit.”
Many other conservatives share his outrage. But conservative outrage over the possible drafting of women obscures the real issue.
There is one thing, and only one thing, that the draft is good for: giving governments a supply of cannon fodder to fight unjust wars.
Waging war in the actual defense of ones country, home, property, and family does not require conscription. If the United States were actually attacked; that is, if foreign soldiers actually landed on east or west coast beaches or crossed the northern or southern borders, the government wouldn’t have to conscript anyone. Americans would get their guns and flock to the coasts or borders and start shooting before the government or the military did anything.
Conscription is a form of slavery, regardless of what the Supreme Court says. No young man or woman should ever be drafted.
If young men and women want to enlist in the military, travel the world, meet interesting people, and then bomb, maim, and kill them for Uncle Sam, that is bad enough. But the government should never force any American to do so.
A heroic group of just 4 Democratic and Republican senators and representatives, including Senator Rand Paul (R-KY), has sent a letter to House Armed Services leaders calling for an end to the Selective Service System because it is “expensive, wasteful, outdated, punitive, and unnecessary.” The small group of lawmakers also recently introduced the Selective Service Repeal Act. That is 4 out of 525 members of Congress.
Conscription is abhorrent to a free society. As Senator Paul’s father—former congressman and Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul—has well said: “A government that is willing to enslave some of its people can never be trusted to protect the liberties of its own citizens.”
While Democrats and some Republicans celebrated the “historic” inclusion of women in the US military draft, Congressman Chip Roy (R-Texas) went on a rant against both parties for this – and other policies over the years.
The Selective Service system currently requires men aged 18-25 to register for the draft. An amendment that would extend this to women as well was adopted in a 35-24 vote by the House Armed Services Committee on Thursday, as part of the 2022 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), the bill funding the military.
🎙️ WATCH: Last night, I advanced my historic, bipartisan amendment to include women in the selective service.Grateful for Rep. @michaelgwaltz (R-FL) and all members of the House Armed Services Committee who helped pass this measure 35-24. #NDAApic.twitter.com/6Fr9o9O54N— Chrissy Houlahan (@RepHoulahan) September 2, 2021
The Committee has 31 Democrats and 28 Republicans, meaning four members of the opposition crossed the aisle and backed the “historic” amendment to the NDAA. The Senate already approved the proposal in July, also with some GOP members joining the Democrats.
Roy, a former Senate staffer who was first elected to the House in 2019, fired off a nine-tweet tirade telling both parties to “go straight to hell.”
“I do not trust you to do anything at all, much less say you will draft my daughter to ‘non combat’ roles,” he tweeted, before offering some examples.
Message to Republicans & Democrats – including @HouseGOP & @SenateGOP colleagues. I do not trust you to do anything at all, much less say you will draft my daughter to “non combat” roles. Why don’t I trust you? Let’s see – THREAD: (1/9) #DontDraftOurDaughters— Chip Roy (@chiproytx) September 2, 2021
Among his list of reprobates were people who amassed $30 trillion in national debt while giving lip service to balanced budgets, did nothing to secure the border except talk“in the false name of compassion,”politicized the coronavirus pandemic and the vaccines and treatments for it, and “destroyed our healthcare system” in the “false name of coverage.”
Roy also lashed out at people who had the US at war for 20 years only for “a gutless President to surrender and empower our enemies,” referring to the recent exit from Afghanistan. He also called out those who empowered “education bureaucrats” to teach children that America is evil and racist, and destroyed US energy independence “to appease institutional investors and the Acela corridor cocktail circuit.”
“Now you… want to draft my daughter and just ‘trust you’ not to put them into combat? All of DC – all of it – can go straight to hell,” he concluded.
Roy’s tirade came as the NDAA cleared the committee in a 57-2 vote, in a late-night session that stretched into Thursday morning. The House markup gives the Pentagon $23.9 billion more in funding than the White House budget request, even after President Joe Biden ended the war in Afghanistan – and the commitment to fund the Afghan government and military forces, which had surrendered to the Taliban in mid-August.
Both the amendment and Roy’s frustrated tweets went largely unnoticed by the major media outlets, which were focused on Thursday on the abortion restrictions that went into effect in Texas.
While the US abolished the military draft after the Vietnam War, the Selective Service registration requirement was only briefly lifted by President Gerald Ford in 1975. His successor Jimmy Carter reinstated it in 1980, citing the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan. When the Obama administration ordered the military to allow women to take part in combat roles in 2013, the National Coalition for Men sued to declare the registration requirement as unconstitutional on the basis of sex.
The case made it all the way to the US Supreme Court, which ruled in June that the law was indeed sexist as written, but that Congress was considering updating it – which is precisely what happened.
Ironically, the Democrats – and Republicans that joined them – have ended up enacting precisely what a meme campaign during the 2016 election accused Hillary Clinton of championing. Back then, sympathizers of Republican candidate Donald Trump argued Clinton would ‘Draft Our Daughters’ to fight Russia, and spread memes about it all over social media.
With America’s armed forces soon to fall under the control of a Congress that will, in all likelihood, do everything they can to keep our troops overseas, it’s time for the states to step up. This is why I will soon be filing the Defend the Guard Act in South Carolina, a bill that would allow the governor to withhold national guard troops from being brought under federal control.
While President Trump was negotiating yet another peace agreement this week — this time between Israel and Morocco — his enemies beat the drums of war in their ongoing effort to overthrow the America First foreign policy.
It’s sad that throughout the entirety of Mr. Trump’s presidency, the swamp has worked around the clock to dismantle his efforts toward peace. Even worse, with the passage of the disastrous, $740.5 billion 2021 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), it appears the neocons and pro-war left will soon regain the levers of federal power, plunging America into another four years of stupid, pointless, endless wars abroad.
With America’s armed forces soon to fall under the control of a Congress that will, in all likelihood, do everything they can to keep our troops overseas, it’s time for the states to step up. This is why I will soon be filing the Defend the Guard Act in South Carolina, a bill that would allow the governor to withhold national guard troops from being brought under federal control.
Sen. Rand Paul, Kentucky Republican, was one of the precious few voices of reason in the congressional vote on the NDAA. In his speech before the Senate, he said, “They believe that a president has the power to go to war anywhere anytime, but when a president tries to remove troops, they say ‘Oh no no. What we really want are 535 generals in Congress to tell him he can’t leave a war.’” Rep. Thomas Massie, Kentucky Republican, also took to Twitter to criticize the bill, writing, “This NDAA bill contains specific language to make it harder for the president to bring our troops home from Afghanistan.”
But heroes of liberty like Mr. Paul and Mr. Massie cannot fight this issue alone. Without reinforcements from elected officials across the board and a powerful grassroots movement to end America’s military expeditionalism, our efforts will never amount to anything beyond empty rhetoric.
In 1950, my grandfather was drafted into the Korean conflict. I grew up hearing stories of courage and sacrifice. The problem with American involvement in Korea was that it didn’t follow a declaration of war, but a U.N. decision to get the U.S. to intervene.
Undeclared war — something with which our country has become painfully familiar over the last half-century — plunges our country into foreign quagmires based on the whims of politicians, rather than American interests.
In Article I of the United States Constitution, Congress is given the authority to declare war; history shows that this check on war is critical to the survival of our republic. The Founders repeatedly warned of the dangers of excessive foreign intervention, having studied the fall of countless republics into entangled empires.
In Thomas Jefferson’s 1801 address to Congress, he said that the key to preserving our republic was “peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations — entangling alliances with none.” In 1795, James Madison said that “of all enemies to public liberty war, is perhaps, the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other.” Mr. Trump has tried to follow this advice and our country has seen the benefits of peace and commerce in recent years.
The pressure needed to apply to Washington if we are to see this objective through will not generate itself; it will have to emanate from leaders from across the country who are sick of seeing brave American service men and women shipped overseas with no objective, no plan, and no exit strategy. As I file the Defend the Guard Act in South Carolina, I call on state legislators elsewhere to do the same in their legislatures.
• Stewart Jones is a member of the South Carolina House of Representatives.
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