14 e lusive v ictories
Greater Military Means, Fewer Restraints, and the Wrong
Kinds of Wars
Th e Constitution has remained a constant in presidential war-making,
but nothing else has stood still. One change involves the dramatic
increase in the military means at a president’s disposal. Although the
Polk example demonstrates that presidents have always exercised lat-
itude in deploying force at their own behest, only when the United
States became a superpower was presidential initiative matched by a
standing military capacity to support a worldwide military reach.
Superpower status also altered the popular mind-set about threats to
our national security. Th ese are now seen to arise in the most distant
corners of the globe. Meanwhile, the institutional and political
constraints on presidential use of force have weakened signifi cantly in
the period since the Second World War. On the other hand, the kinds
of full-scale wars in which the American military might be used eff ec-
tively to achieve national objectives have largely disappeared. Recent
confl icts have assumed a character that neutralizes American military
advantages, and presidents have discovered that the means at their dis-
posal often do not match the challenges they face.
Expanding the President’s Capacity to Wage War. Before the Second
World War, the United States maintained a small standing army in
peacetime. Th e nation had to start from scratch to create a suitable
military force for every signifi cant military confl ict. Substantial armies
were established either mere months before the shooting started (the
War of 1812, the Spanish-American War, World War I, and World War
II) or, in some cases, after the war had begun (the Mexican War and
the Civil War). After the Civil War, a number of political and military
leaders saw the need to alter this pattern. Th eir eff orts yielded oddly
mismatched outcomes. Advocates of army reform were thwarted in
their quest to establish an expandable army and extend national
control over state militia; yet proponents of a modern navy mounted a
brilliant public relations campaign in favor of battleship construction
in the early 1890s and made signifi cant headway. Th at was why Pres-
ident McKinley could call upon an updated fl eet in 1898 even as he
repeated the struggle of his predecessors to put a trained army in the
fi eld quickly.