From when America's armed forces entered World War I in 1917 until today, the United States military has repeatedly made the difference between civilization and barbarism.

It's no exaggeration to say that a militarily strong America is the one indispensable prerequisite for a peaceful and prosperous world.

The witness of history, as well as our own common sense, bears testament to the fact that when America's armed forces are powerful, focused and feared, the globe is a better place than when she is weak, unprepared and vacillating.

In the past century alone, there have been four great threats made to peace, democracy and freedom.

Each of them have come from enemies that hate and fear what the United States stands for, as laid down in her declaration of independence, constitution and bill of rights.

Three of these have come from differing mutations of fascism and one from its totalitarian twin, communism.

In each case, it has been the US military that has been a principle force protecting the free world from the tyranny these threats have sought to impose.

The First World War sprung from Germany's bid for her Germany over Europe and was powered by a Prussian military machine that was proto-fascist in its outlooks, ambitions and assumptions.

When the discovery of the infamous Zimmermann Telegram revealed that Germany wanted to extend the war even into the American heartland, the Wilson administration sent hundreds of thousands of young American recruits, nicknamed Doe Boys, onto the battlefields of Europe and tipped the balance to the world.

And tipped the balance in the Allies' favour.

25 years later, the American Armed Forces were again fighting against the second mutation of fascist ideology as espoused by Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan.

On battlefields as distant from America as tiny islands in the South Pacific, picturesque villages in Italy and desolate towns in North Africa, as well as on the sea in the Atlantic and in the skies over Germany,

the American Armed Forces made another invaluable contribution to victory. Yet the fight for freedom wasn't over.

Almost as soon as World War II ended, a new threat arose, the red fascist version of totalitarianism, Soviet communism.

It soon cast its shadow over Eastern Europe as well as parts of Africa, Asia and Latin America.

American military might, deployed intelligently and globally, played the key role in neutralizing and then ultimately bankrupting that terrible menace to the free world.

When victory in the Cold War in the late 1980s and early 1990s finally came under the Presidencies of Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush,

it was because the U.S. Armed Forces were kept strong enough to deal with the ceaseless probing and provocations of the Soviet Union over nearly half a century.

Since 911, the world has been faced with yet another mutation of fascism, fundamentalist, Islamist terrorism.

Taking on many of the features of earlier fascist movements, hatred of democracy and Christianity, a fanatical anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism and a desire for utter uniformity,

the Islamist terror movement has caused death and destruction wherever it has appeared.

The fascist bacillus has mutated yet again, but it is alive and well.

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