Honoring the United States Army

The idea that something’s wrong with President Trump’s plan for a big parade in Washington to mark the 250th birthday of the U.S. Army is a mystery to us. We expressed a similar mystification in 2018, the last time that Mr. Trump mooted a parade showing off tanks and other weapons our military uses to defend us — and our allies. It seems, we noted at the time, to horrify the left. Joe Scarborough back then suggested it was “deeply un-American.”What in the world such critics are talking about is beyond us — and millions of others. We understand the wariness nursed by the Founding Fathers in respect of a standing army. The Constitution strikes a cautious note, blocking appropriations of more than two years. Yet the Army Americans will be celebrating this weekend is older than even the Constitution, and has never been other than a protector of our democratic government and country.Our Army prevailed in the Revolutionary War, gained a draw in the War of 1812, won the war with Mexico, the Civil War, and the war with Spain. It helped defeat the Central Powers in World War I, and the Axis in World War II. It fought to an armistice in Korea and stood with the fight in Vietnam until the Democrats in Congress lost their nerve. Same in Iraq and Afghanistan, the latter to the shock of Americans, when a Democratic president surrendered. If a 250th anniversary isn’t enough to celebrate an Army as venerable and valorous as ours, we don’t know what is. Yet a Times dispatch seems to begrudge that the plan “involves a tremendous scene in the center of Washington.” It lists 28 Abrams tanks and 28 Strykers. It lists a “World War II-era B-25 bomber; 6,700 soldiers; 50 helicopters; 34 horses; two mules; and a dog.” It quotes critics as reckoning that Mr. Trump has “politicized” the military.There’s been griping about the coincidence that Saturday will mark another birthday — that of the 47th president himself, who is never one to shy away from self-aggrandizement. Even so, why begrudge festivities in honor of the Army just because of an accident of the calendar? The Constitution, too, designates the president as the “Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States.” So he has his own standing on American bedrock.Critics may carp that the parade will be “a thinly veiled celebration of Trump himself rather than America’s fighting men and women,” as the New York Post reports in a dispatch today. All the more reason, in our view, to put the courageous troops — and their powerful weaponry — front and center at the nation’s capital. At a time when political division is rife, the Army’s example of service is one that is well worth extolling.The Army’s pending birthday, too, would be an apt moment for recognition of America’s fighting men and women for the Nobel Prize in Peace. These columns have long called for the prize to go to G.I. Joe to recognize our G.I.s’ contributions toward achieving a more peaceful world. What a moment the 250th anniversary of the founding of our Army would be for America to announce a nomination of G.I. Joe and G.I. Jane for the Nobel Prize in Peace.

Honoring the United States Army

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