Jack of Harts

In the founding years of the American military when the British were the oppressive enemy, the army was based around militia units recruiting young men from the surrounding territory. Many soldiers in the years and decades that followed would spend their entire service careers rarely more than a few day’s march from the home they grew up in, resulting in heavily divided loyalties between their State and America as a whole. And when their State seceded from America during the Civil War, they generally stayed true to their home. After that conflict ended, the American military began a long tradition of maintaining strong federal units that rotated individual troopers throughout their bases every few months to years. The intention was to keep local loyalties from overriding federal oaths in the future. But as Twenty First Century social experimentation led to spending cycles that drove the federal government further and further into deep debt, many politicians looked for ways to reduce military spending. They fought against “sending the troops on expensive world tours on the public dime” and called for them to “bring the boys home so they can work for a living.” They of course had far more important social engineering projects the military could “beat their swords into plowshares” to perform. And the expensive practice of rotating them between bases was simply not necessary to this new and improved mission. This would lead to unpleasant consequences during the Second Great Depression.