“Royal Marines force U.S. troops to surrender just days into training exercise.” So read a provocative headline from the United Kingdom’s Daily Telegraph earlier this month. The accompanying article was replete with similarly bold descriptions, recounting how an elite British commando battalion had “eliminated almost the entire [U.S. Marine] unit” in a joint war game undertaken in Southern California’s Mojave Desert.
This all sounds quite bad for us Yanks, both for the potential that our Marines are being out-trained and outperformed by a foreign military force and, almost worse, that we’d let those tea-swilling Brits get one over on us in anything. But, much like the England national football team in international play, the article and its provocative claims don’t hold up under scrutiny. As thoroughly documented in Task and Purpose by Andrew Milburn, who was present at the war-fighting exercise, the Daily Telegraph story is tantamount to some jingoistic “fake news.”
His recounting of the events is worth reading for those interested, if far too long to explore in any detail here. Suffice it to say that, yes, the elite British 40 Commando battalion did participate in the biannual Marine exercise, but it did so as a subordinate unit under the 7th Marine Regiment, which was set against the 3rd Marine Regiment in the simulation, which does not use an objective measure of scoring. Additionally, he emphasized, “At no time did a unit surrender during the exercise, nor was any unit almost completely eliminated by 40 Commando,” rebutting further claims made in the Daily Telegraph.
Far from being a crushing defeat, the exercise provided necessary and presumably effective training for participants from each military. As one national security insider told me, “The Marines are a dynamic learning organization, and I’m glad they are testing themselves against other top-tier units like the Royal Marine Corps.”
It is hard to overstate the necessity of military preparedness for ours or any nation, and it has always been so. “Rome and Sparta stood for many ages armed and free,” Machiavelli wrote in The Prince. “The chief foundations of all states, new as well as old or composite, are good laws and good arms; and as there cannot be good laws where the state is not well armed, it follows that where they are well armed they have good laws.”
Machiavelli knew firsthand the consequences of an ill-trained or nonexistent military. As an Italian and a Florentine in the 16th century, he saw his country and city-state fall sway to the whims and dominance of foreign arms and foreign powers, principally those of France and Spain. He wrote of the need for a citizen military, subordinate to civic and popular will, and vehemently opposed reliance on mercenary forces or foreign auxiliary troops.
America has since its founding relied on a citizen military, but we have not always kept at the ready. Against the advice and recommendation of George Washington, Congress actually abolished the Continental Army in 1783 following the Revolutionary War, leaving only “twenty-five privates to guard the stores at Fort Pitt and fifty-five to guard the stores at West Point.” The sentiments against a standing army were most famously expressed by Elbridge Gerry, later a delegate to the Constitutional Convention, who argued, “Standing armies in time of peace are inconsistent with the principles of republican governments, dangerous to the liberties of a free people, and generally converted into destructive engines for establishing despotism.” Military security was such a subordinated concern in this period that, following the ratification of the Constitution in 1788, Washington himself had to remind Congress to establish the military. It wasn’t until the final day of the first session that the first Congress even got around to it.
Of course, as we learned in the War of 1812, when, among other military disasters, an ill-trained force of 6,500 militiamen fled their posts and allowed a paltry force of 1,500 British soldiers to burn the national capital and White House to the ground, not having an established standing army in peacetime can also be pretty detrimental to the liberties of a free people. If only they’d read their Machiavelli.
