The soldier doesn’t want a big army. He wants a safe army. He’s not after a large military nation. That would be contrary to American ideals and traditions. After all he’s simply an American citizen. He wants only a well-knit skeleton upon which flesh and blood can be laid in case of emergency. He wants the protection of a real defense man to pull through a possible conflict without unwarranted killings. He wants himself and every other man in his nation defended. He doesn’t want to see the waste of money and life that has characterized all our wars, because we were unskilled, unmanned, careless, neglectful. If he were after a large force, he’d ask for a million men under arms. That would be parallel to what other civilized countries are doing, but it wouldn’t be decent for us. He doesn’t want that. He wants the barest sufficiency to prevent habitual useless deaths. But he sees our woeful weakness now and shudders at the thought of what might happen were our country suddenly to become angry, as it has too often done in the past. He asks now for one hundred sixty-five thousand regulars, two hundred ten thousand National Guardsmen and one hundred twenty thousand reserve officers. He asks that thirty thousand reservists receive active duty training--every year. He asks that our supply of materials be brought up to standard. Such a force is less than sixty per cent of what we felt necessary in 1920. After General Staff study it is the bare minimum for our protection--very bare. The change would make us the sixteenth land power in the world instead of the seventeenth. But the soldier doesn’t care whether we’d be the sixteenth, the seventeenth, the second or the thirty-second. He wants enough to ensure our safety and keep us from being swept into eternity as the British regular army was in 1914. We have seen that an economy which cripples National Defense is extravagance past the point of folly. On the other hand, we see that too great a National Defense is also extravagance. If you ask the average citizen how many wars we’ve had he’ll answer offhand, “O, about six.” That reply illustrates our knowledge of our past. We’ve had actually one hundred and ten wars, great and small--an average of one oftener than every year and a half. We’ve fought all told eighty-six hundred battles. Compare this record with that of Germany, who from 1870 to 1914--44 years--had continuous peace while she was the most powerful military nation in the world. During that time we were one of the weakest nations and were almost constantly at war. A study of history proves that strength or weakness has nothing to do with the motives of war in a republic. It’s the temper and urge of the people as a whole when suddenly, unexpectedly they’re provoked. So we must be thinking about a possible catastrophe as we live under a volcano of human emotions.