Comment on Collections: Pre-Modern Armies for Worldbuilders, Part III: Paying For It by Basil Marte

In reply to Mark Magagna.

It also has an interesting place in American historical politics. Its late 18th century statesmen wanted their new polity to run on an entitlement-based self-equipping model, to the point they sold off the Navy and wrote laws (including the Bill of Rights) with this model in mind. They quickly learned why not having a navy is a bad idea. On land, it took some more wars (and more importantly, the industrial revolution) to successively move to armory-issued equipment (ACW), to central recruiting (WW1), to keeping a serious army in peacetime (WW2). By which point, rewriting the laws written with the militia model in mind came to be seen as too annoying to bother with, and so they were left in place.