coming away from our victory, as a result of the perceived threat represented by the Soviets, we didn't demobilize our armed forces and in fact continued to keep troops stationed in places

Paul, we had a massive and chaotic demobilization of our armed forces after WWII. Headcount went from 12 million in June 1945 to 1.5 million in June 1947, and annual expenditures went from $90.9 billion in January 1945 to $10.3 billion in 1947.

By both choice and necessity, the Truman administration relied more on economic than military power to achieve its foreign policy aims. Strategic planning reflected this emphasis. The Joint Chiefs did not approve a statement of general military strategy until mid-1947, nor a war plan until 1948, for they accepted the State Department's assessment that the main danger facing the United States was political rather than military.

...

Although the pace and scale of demobilization dismayed the President and his advisers, almost everyone agreed that major cuts in defense spending were in order. Administration officials perceived no immediate threat to U.S. security and feared that the continuation of wartime expenditures and deficits, or anything approaching them, would bankrupt the country.

...

The cessation of hostilities would have prompted defense cutbacks in any case, but the fiscally conservative mood of the country, which Truman and his advisers shared, caused what in retrospect appears a precipitous dismantling of the American military machine.

...

No pervasive, national security "ideology" characterized U.S. military thinking in the early postwar period. The disorganization, misconceptions, and infighting that had disrupted the military services during the war continued well into the postwar period. This does not mean that the military services did not engage in contingency planning for wars of the future, against Russia among other hypothetical enemies. Military planning, however, was not the same thing as actual defense programs, for the Truman administration did not believe that the Soviet Union posed a direct military threat to the United States at the end of the war. Instead, the containment doctrine that evolved from early confrontation with the Soviet Union would prescribe primary reliance upon the greatest American asset of all, its unrivalled economic power.

From Robert A. Pollard, Economic Security and the Origins of the Cold War, 1945-1950 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), pp. 20-23

http://tinyurl.com/3vydxk

Note that aside from just a factual correction, this probably means the phenom you're looking at ... standing armies ... might be of even more recent vintage than you claim, which probably strengthens your point rather than weakens it.

The best response I've read to this, by a former interrogator, was that waterboarding is actual drowning, simulated death.

They used to perform this technique in training at SERE High-Risk C, a course designed to teach certain military assets at high risk of capture how to resist and endure torture (not how to conduct torture).

When I went through the course, they had suspended it under a safety review, so I didn't have the pleasure.

Sheesh ... a guy goes off to eat a nice little, pacifistic cruelty-free veg stir-fry and now look ...

My unavoidably simplistic response: As a positive (v. normative) statement, I'd say well-equipped, actively training, professional armies (short for 'militaries') aren't only preferable, but necessary to meet any number of threats we can imagine the US facing. Their composition would vary depending on how you see that threat (cue a subthread ... I'll keep said threat generic below), but they would have to have a sizeable professional, full-time element. Though the argument has been used cynically in the past, I still think it's logically true that capable standing armies are also a deterrent.

LWM mentions several of the reasons. Warfare is increasingly complex, the skills required take time to learn and (more important) master, team cohesion doesn't form overnight, adequate leadership takes time and intensive effort to build. Intensity of training is important, and almost impossible with part-time units. Physical conditioning is more than just hitting the gym a few times a week. And so forth. Google 'Task Force Smith' for an instructive read about this.

Also, some of the asset-specific human capital (if you will) is impossible to produce without a standing army, and unavailable on the open market. The backbone of any modern military is the NCO corps, which by definition takes time to cultivate and specific conditions to grow. Developing doctrine (unit level, geospecific, political) and leaders who can execute it also takes time, practice, repetition, revision, more practice ... in increasingly complex and realistic circumstances. All of that relies on domain-specific knowledge, which as we know isn't a filling-station operation. These are just the 'human factors', but they're probably less reducible than the industrial processes of fielding weapons systems (which the units would then have to learn) from templates.

Trying to create all this from scratch, or to meld state militias on the fly to respond to an external threat, isn't really feasible any more --- and not only because of the time it takes to raise units from scratch. Finally, it violates every principle we rely on (speed, mobility, unity of command, mass, etc) to fight those wars.

Now as to the normative aspect:

1. I think we can all agree that the current levels of spending are insane, and caveats about channeling the founders aside, not what they intended.

2. The counter-argument is that if you don't have a standing army with expeditionary capability, your leaders will be unable to abuse it by invading anyone. But this confuses the mechanisms of abuse, and evaluation of risk thereof, with the separate argument about what kind of capability the putative threat requires. It's better to build in safeguards to minimize the potential for abuse (which Abrams did after Vietnam, and which we've seen overridden by the Bushites) and continue to refine them.