General MacArthur, sitting before the Committee of Military Affairs in the House of Representatives, on April 26, 1933, spoke in firm tones…
If ever there were more prophetic words, they are not recorded in history…. “There is nothing more expensive than an insufficient army. To build an army to be defeated by some other fellow’s army is my idea of wasting money. There is no such thing in war any more as a ‘glorious defeat,’ and if you are defeated you will pay a billion dollars for every million you save on inadequate preparation….
“You will not only pay in money,” he warned Congress, “but you will be a slave in every other way. You will lose that nebulous thing—Liberty—which is the very essence of all for which we have stood ever since George Washington and his followers made us what we are. I repeat that if we had in the treasury of the United States only sufficient money to preserve our integrity against foreign aggression—that is the first use that should be made of it.”
Francis Trevelyan Miller, General Douglas MacArthur Rev. Ed. (Philadelphia: The John C. Winston Company, 1945), 122-4.
Short Stories on Honor, Chivalry, and the World of Nobility—no. 320
