I was thinking having the defense being highly centralized makes defense much tougher, but most people I've talked to say that what I believe is insane, although maybe I am.
How could having a strong centralized army headed by a civilian commander in chief be advantageous over militias and the Continental Army?
I also think that the CSA may have won had they based their government on the Articles of Confederation, because the military would've been decentralized under that and would've been better equiped to prevent Lincoln's army from waging total war.
A decentralized defense is vastly cheaper and just as effective in DEFENSE. The USA with its borders at the sea and giant size would be easily defended by a small inexpensive PRIVATE decentralized force. The current US military and the one during the Uncivil War of Northern Aggression against individual freedom are not defensive in their design. These are offensive organizations designed to attack the defensive organization of someone else.
As for not defending, Lincoln had his armies commit mayhem and destruction on a giant scale in the Confederate States. The most notorious of which was Sherman's March to the Sea and then left turn up to Charleston. Much of the industrialized Confederacy was destroyed by end of the war. Among the places that were beaten up were Richmond and Northern Virginia, Chattnooga, Vicksburg, Jackson MS, Mobile and a lot of Arkansas, Texas, Missouri, Kansas, etc.
The Confederate States decided to fight as organized armies instead of living in the population and fighting a guerilla war. Fortunately for the country the decided not do this as there was an end to the war that could have easily taken generations otherwise. But the saddest part was that it did not matter as in either method there ended up being entire armies running around the South committing acts of mayhem.
I don’t think any insurgency that ended up liberating some county in the last century and a half would have succeeded had it been organized in a centralized manner.
Guerilla warfare is vastly more effective than uniform warfare. Just consider this as food for thought. An M1A1 costs $6.2m. An RPG-29, which can easily penetrate any part of the M1A1, costs $1k (officially). Some ordinary guy can just have one stuck away in a closet and wait until an M1A1 drives by and poke it out the window.
This is why Vietnam/Afghanistan/Iraq are so baffling to the politicians. The proper resident armies get rolled in 5 seconds every time. It's the civilians that win it. In Vietnam every village was an ambush. The enemy was unknown. A grenade would just drop down your pants out of nowhere. Occupation was impossible. The only option against such tactics is to kill and destroy everything and everyone on sight, which nullifies the purpose of being there. Though that is always done to some extent, it only delays the inevitable.
You should read Rothbard's Generalissimo Washington: How He Crushed the Spirit of Liberty
Money Quote: "The first thing to do was end the occupation of Philadelphia, which at best had been a waste of time. Howe had thought of Philadelphia as equivalent to a European capital: the hub and nerve center of administrative, commercial, political, and military life. But in a decentralized people's war such as the Americans were waging, there was no fixed nerve center; indeed, there was scarcely any central government at all. All this gave the Americans a flexibility and an ability to absorb invading armies in a manner highly statified Europe could not understand."
Thanks guys:) I'm really quite PO'd that we have a standing centralized army when all of this high-tech superexpensive junk is countereffective towards defense. I sucks that tyrant G Washington wanted an offensive army.