The Antimilitarist

In smearing General of the Army Douglas MacArthur, apologists for Harry Truman try hard to paint the MacArthur firing as a reassertion of civilian authority over the "military mind." This week, in a bylined article in the January American Legion Magazine, MacArthur himself fires a major broadside at the pretensions of some professional military men and urges a bigger role for the citizen soldier (as distinguished from the professional) in the U.S. Army.

"The tendency has existed--as it still exists--to regard [the citizen soldier] as an auxiliary rather than the main pillar supporting our national military strength," writes MacArthur. "Only in rare instances have his views been sought or considered in the shaping of high policy governing the conduct of war or plans to secure the peace." MacArthur finds civilian control of the military especially important in the light of the present enormous peacetime buildup of the armed forces.

"All this, while intended and designed to strengthen freedom's defense," he says, "carries within itself the very germs of freedom's destruction. For it etches the pattern to a military state which, historically under the control of professional military thinking, in constant search for means toward efficiency, has found in freedom possibly its greatest single impediment ... To avoid this historic pitfall it is essential that civilian control over the citizen army be extended and intensified. Particularly is this true in the administration of the program of Universal Military Training, if the youth of our land is to avoid being corrupted into a legion of subserviency to the so-called military mind . . .

"Extension of civilian control calls for ... a realistic appreciation of the potential in professional competence which the citizen soldier can bring ... It calls for the elimination of arbitrary restrictions upon the advance of the citizen soldier in the ranks of military leadership ... It calls for a much broadened opportunity for the professional preparation of the citizen soldier to permit his integration into the higher staff duties and planning designed to avert war if possible, to prosecute it to early victory if not . . .

"It is essential that the traditional role of the Army in these distressing times be carefully preserved--that it not be used as an instrument of tyranny or oppression --a form of pretorian guard--by those seeking to strengthen and entrench political power--but that it be used instead as a force of free men dedicated to its sworn purpose of 'defending the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.'"

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