Our National Defense: The Patriotism of Peace

by George Hebard Maxwell

It is a fact capable of absolute demonstration that a large portion of the damage resulting from those floods was due to the stubborn refusal of the Army engineers to approve or adopt any plan for flood control that would supplement the levee system by source stream control of the floods on the upper tributaries, and by controlled outlets and spillways and auxiliary flood water channels in the lower valley. It is very doubtful whether the people of the delta of the Mississippi River will ever succeed in getting protection against the recurrence of devastating floods until this baleful influence of the Army engineers can be eliminated.

There are several reasons why this military control of inland waterways is detrimental to the country. The military caste in the United States has developed remarkable capacity for turning to their own advantage the influence which their control over appropriations for river and harbor improvements has centered in them. The Army engineers are wedded to the present piecemeal system of appropriations, popularly known as the "Pork Barrel" System. The reason for this is that it practically vests in them the autocratic authority to determine whether the demands of the constituents of any Senator or Congressman for some local river or harbor improvement shall or shall not be granted. The representatives of the people, whether they be Congressmen or Senators, must humbly bow to a higher power and secure its gracious grant of consent or face the disappointment of their constituents. It ought not to be difficult for anyone with common sense, and with the most superficial knowledge of the manipulation of social and political influences in shaping legislation to understand the evils of this system, or the influence exerted through it by the military caste which is adverse to the best interest of the people at large.

The "Pork Barrel" System, with its piecemeal appropriations for local improvements, without any underlying comprehensive plan, as long as it prevails, will block the way to all efficient waterway development, or protection from periodical damage by devastating floods. And it will never be changed until popular indignation and protest breaks the stranglehold that the military caste now has upon this class of legislation in Congress.

Their attitude in this whole field of public development is in humiliating contrast with that of the Samurai of Japan when the whole system of government of that nation was reconstructed and reorganized. The Samurai, actuated by a patriotic and self-sacrificing desire to promote the general welfare, surrendered entirely the privileges and prerogatives that they held as a military class, and accepted a system which took from them all power and submerged them in the mass of the people.

The military caste of this country apparently think only of their own aggrandizement, and persistently oppose any modifications of an evil system which would in the slightest degree involve a surrender of their autocratic authority or official prestige and power for the general welfare.

In this stupendous field of national development, where immediate progress is so vital to the people of the entire country, the stubborn opposition of the military caste is the most serious obstacle in the way of a complete coördination of all the departments of the government in the solution of the whole problem of river regulation and flood control and the upbuilding of a great inland waterway system.

Aside from that, there is an additional reason why the present system can never be relied upon for a complete solution of the problem of river regulation. This further difficulty lies in the system under which the military caste is organized. The military system which prevails in all matters administered through the Army, strangles all individual initiative and opinion. It automatically subordinates every engineer in the military service to the mental and personal domination of the chief of the Army engineers, whoever he may be. All original and creative engineering genius is muzzled or chloroformed as soon as it is born. If by any Caesarian operation it chances to come into being it is promptly strangled.

Another incurable defect in the military system when applied to civil construction and internal development of the resources of the country, lies in the transfer of engineers from one assignment of duty to another after brief periods of service. This plan is no doubt advisable and possibly necessary in the military service. Its tendency is to bring all Army engineers up to a common general level of ability and experience. It destroys the peculiar originality and genius which can only result from long experience and training in one of the many special fields for which engineers must be developed in civil life.

This Army system might not work so badly if applied only to harbors and harbor improvement work, but it destroys efficiency when applied to such problems as those presented by a great river system like the Mississippi River and its tributaries. An army engineer in charge of the Lower Mississippi River district may have learned something of that problem, but by the time he has learned it he is transferred to some other part of the country and given a different problem to study. Another engineer is put in his place, and by the time he in his turn has partially familiarized himself with the problem he is likewise transferred. And so it goes on, ignorance succeeds ignorance as fast as knowledge can be obtained.

A martinet at the head of the Army Engineering corps can stifle and render useless to the country the most brilliant engineering genius if it blossoms forth with any new theory or original suggestion. The Army engineer corps is bound hand and foot by prejudice and pride of caste. The engineering corps is a unit, arbitrarily dominated, intellectually and professionally, by the chief of the corps. Nothing original can develop under such an atmosphere of mental repression. The best engineering talent in the world is suppressed and rendered valueless by that system of organization. It can never solve the intricate and novel hydraulic problems presented by the Mississippi River which, with all its tributaries, must be treated as a unit in order to control its floods.