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Comment by VikingCoder | Hacker News Reader

If I'm not mistaken, there was not supposed to be a standing army.

If you have a standing army, that creates a whole rats nest of problems.

And ps, I've talked to people who think we shouldn't have a standing army, and I frankly think they're insane.

Standing armies create structural problems. Many countries in Asia are constantly having civilian governments being overthrown by the army.

Not having standing armies also creates structural problems (mostly getting invaded). There are only 21 countries without a standing army, and they're almost all micronations with <200k population (mostly tiny islands). Iceland is the only one of them with a GDP per capita worth mentioning, but it's also part of Nato, the largest military alliance in the world.

Switzerland has no standing army and they have a respectable GDP.

You could pull off a “Switzerland but with defensive nuclear second strike capability” model in this era and it’d work fine.

Switzerland has a standing army with ~150k active personel, upon which they spend 1% GDP, and which includes a half year conscription https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_Armed_Forces.

Right, but it’s a citizen militia rather than a permanent professional army.

It's a permanent professional army, where are you getting this stuff? Switzerland has an air force and everything. They also have a large trained citizen militia but it's supported by a backbone of a professional standing army.

> They also have a large trained citizen militia but it's supported by a backbone of a professional standing army.

Less than 10% are full timers, the vast majority are conscripts and volunteers. Even officers generally aren't full timers[1].

All I'm saying is, there's a spectrum of 'Complete citizen militia, as envisioned by the framers of the US Constitution' all the way over to 'Standing army as it exists in the US today', and Switzerland is obviously much closer to the former than the latter.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_Armed_Forces#Personnel

This is why we originally instituted mandatory military service here in Sweden. To ensure that the army isn't representative of some special class, e.g. the nobility or the burghers etc.

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