• Cethin@lemmy.zip
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    6 months ago

    I wouldn’t say the were quite common. They weren’t unheard of, but only the major powers in the world could afford them. The US would be a nation of mostly farmers isolated from most of the developed world. There’s no reason they would have expected to become a world power. A militia, at the time, would seem to be the reasonable expectation for such a nation for the foreseeable future.