In January 1941, fresh from his electoral triumph, Roosevelt presented Congress with his budget request for 1942.

It included nearly $11 billion in defense spending and total government expenditures of $17 billion.

Later that month, he submitted legislation for what came to be known as the “Lend-Lease” program, authorizing the president to “sell, transfer title to, exchange, lease, lend, or otherwise dispose of “ weapons, food, or equipment to any country “whose defense the President deems vital to the defense of the United States.”

As historian David Kennedy wrote in Freedom from Fear, “substituting military production and technology for [American] manpower” was the “essence of the ‘arsenal of democracy’ or short-of-war strategy during the period of neutrality.”

Transferring weapons might avert U.S. intervention, and if the nation did enter the war, the better equipped its allies were, the more fighting they could do—with American forces suffering fewer casualties.

The proposal triggered a bitter congressional battle.

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CP Note: October 1940 found President Franklin Roosevelt campaigning for another term as president of the United States. 

At the time, battles in Europe were raging, the president had approved the lend-lease program for Britain (which they completed repayment on in 2006) and the Soviet Union, and the Selective Service Act of 1940 had been passed and the first person selected for service had been chosen. Just over a year later, the United States entered the war.

President Roosevelt's Campaign Speech in Boston, October 30, 1940:

I have said this before, but I shall say it again and again and again:

Your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars.

They are going into training to form a force so strong that, by its very existence, it will keep the threat of war far away from our shores.

The purpose of our defense is defense.

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In October 1956, war broke out between Israel and Egypt.

The countries were prodded into the war by France and Britain, which were enraged that Egypt’s president, Gamal Abdel Nasser, had nationalized the Suez Canal.

Although the war lasted only a few weeks before a cease-fire went into effect, those few weeks saw intense combat operations that centered on an Israeli drive into the Sinai. At the start of the war, the IAF, using thirty-year-old transport planes, dropped a force of crack paratroopers, led by future–prime minister Ariel Sharon, deep behind Egyptian lines.

Their job was to seize and hold a key strategic point known as the Mitla Pass, which served as the gateway to the central Sinai.

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October 27, 1858 marked the birthday of President Theodore Roosevelt. The editor of the book The Man in the Arena: Selected Writings of Theodore Roosevelt: A Reader wrote:

Look up "rugged individual" in the dictionary, and the grinning visage of Teddy is sure to jump out at you, and all contemporary mantle grabbers fade away. . . . and if being the first president of the twentieth century wasn't enough, he was also a gifted historian, a wild and wooly adventurer, and a man of letters.

Featured today is Roosevelt’s essay “Washington’s Forgotten Maxim,” within which, he argued for and/or against many of the issues the military still faces today:

On going to war with the military you have:

It has always been true, and in this age it is more than ever true, that it is too late to prepare for war when the time for peace has passed.

On the warriors and the weapons:

No matter how good they are, they will be useless unless the man in the conning tower and the man behind the guns are also the best of their kind.

On citizenship and material comfort:

Every man among us is more fit to meet the duties and responsibilities of citizenship because of the perils over which, in the past, the nation has triumphed; because of the blood and sweat and tears, the labor and the anguish, through which, in the days that have gone, our forefathers moved on to triumph. There are higher things in this life than the soft and easy enjoyment of material comfort.

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View images from the early 1940's--and today--of the Montford Marines.

October 25, 2011, the House of Representatives voted on H.R. 2447, which "authorizes the award of a single Congressional Gold Medal to collectively honor the Montford Point Marines, U.S. Marine Corps, in recognition of their dedicated service during World War II. (Camp Montford Point, North Carolina, was the site for the training of the first African-American Marines.)"

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CP Note: Yesterday, October 25, 2011, the House of Representatives voted on H.R. 2447, which "authorizes the award of a single Congressional Gold Medal to collectively honor the Montford Point Marines, U.S. Marine Corps, in recognition of their dedicated service during World War II. (Camp Montford Point, North Carolina, was the site for the training of the first African-American Marines.)" The article below was posted June 1, 2011 and is being featured again today to provide a slice of the Montford Point Marines' history.

Howard P. Perry was the first African-American to enlist in the U.S. Marine Corps, after the Corps changed its 100-plus years policy, June 1, 1942.

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Michael Ledeen, then a Pentagon consultant, said the failure to share intelligence "drove a change in the structure of the intelligence community, because what they found was that we should have seen it coming, we had enough information so that we should have seen it coming. We didn't because of the compartmentalization of the various pieces of the intelligence community. So the people who listen to things weren't talking to the people who looked at things who weren't talking to people who analyzed things and so on."

But that didn't mean that the people who had got it so wrong in Beirut were suddenly going to listen to the Activity.

Even within the special operations community, there were senior officers with little regard for Jerry King's unit, and that attitude was once again going to get US servicemen killed. Ever since coming to office, the Reagan administration had railed against the left-wing government of the small Caribbean island of Grenada, complaining that the prime minister Maurice Bishop was too closely aligned to the Soviet Union and Cuba.

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Advanced training separates civilian dog training from the specific skills that the military requires.

“Dogs who make it in the military working dogs are trained to overcome typical dog behavior,” said Joel Townsend. “For instance, when passing by the entry to a dark building, most dogs will tuck their tail and turn away. A military dog is trained to enter that building, as the handler’s eyes and ears, to recon and alert his partner to whatever is inside.”

The vast majority of military working dogs begin training at Lackland Air Force Base, which contains 90 training areas and laboratories spread across 400 acres, with 691 kennel spaces, averaging about 800 dogs in residence at any one time. Over 125 Army, Navy, Marine Corps, and Air Force personnel train both dogs and handlers for all branches of the military as well as for the other federal agencies.

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In a dogfight, expect anything. All bets are off.

Nobody drove that lesson home more pointedly than David McCampbell, a son of Bessemer, Alabama, who downed more enemy aircraft than any other naval aviator—ever. By the end of World War II, he’d destroyed thirty-four enemy planes.

On October 24, 1944, McCampbell had his greatest day. It began when he and his wingman ambushed a flight of some forty Japanese Zeke and Oscar fighters.

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Grenada was supposed to be a simple operation.

U.S. intelligence analysts had predicted little or no resistance from the Cubans working on the island and only token opposition from the PRA, the People's Revolutionary Army.

Plainly, the intelligence was wrong.

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"I know there are no words that can express our sorrow and grief over the loss of those splendid young men and the injury to so many others. I know there are no words, also, that can ease the burden of grief for the families of those young men.

"Likewise, there are no words to properly express our outrage and, I think, the outrage of all Americans at the despicable act, following as it does on the one perpetrated several months ago, in the spring, that took the lives of scores of people at our Embassy in that same city, in Beirut."

—President Ronald Reagan [More...]

The 1983 U.S. embassy attack was the first of a rapid-fire series of Iran coordinated attacks against Americans in Lebanon in the mid-1980s. Six months later, a truck bomb much like the one that struck the embassy blew up the U.S. Marine Corps headquarters in Beirut, killing 241 marines.

The U.S. district judge who ruled in 2003 that Iran was responsible for the attack and therefore owed damage payments to the victims’ families called the bombing “the most deadly state-sponsored terrorist attack made against United States citizens before September 11, 2001.”

The judge, Royce C. Lamberth, based his ruling on evidence gathered after the October 1983 attack that proved that Iran had approved and funded the Marine headquarters bombing. “Lamberth concluded that Hezbollah was formed under the auspices of the Iranian government, was completely reliant on Iran in 1983 and assisted Iranian Ministry of Intelligence and Security agents in carrying out the operation,” CNN reported.

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