The above quotation reads more fully as: "Hence, likewise, they will avoid the necessity of those overgrown military establishments which, under any form of government, are inauspicious to liberty, and which are to be regarded as particularly hostile to republican liberty." This quote comes from an esteemed politician, and seemingly somewhat surprisingly, from a former President of the United States. Many people might presuppose that it must have come from President Eisenhower's Farewell Address, so done on January 17, 1961, in which the President rails against the "military-industrial complex," but these words are not Eisenhower's words. So then, one might logically think that this must therefore be words so spoken by a President that has no love for the military and during their Presidency, was considered to be a pacifist in principle, someone such as John Quincy Adams, or Jimmy Carter, but alas these are not their words, either. In fact, these words were spoken on September 19, 1796, as the Farewell Address, by the Father of our nation, the inestimable, irreplaceable, courageous George Washington, our country's first President.
This thus signifies that when someone that has been at the pinnacle of military power as well as military honor and therefore knows the intimacies of such, thereby recognizes the inherent danger of a military establishment grown too large, then surely these are the very words that any sensible American should subsequently take to heart. The fact that these words were spoken back when the military of these United States, was modest in size, and equally modest in scope, signifies the prescient of those words so spoken. The understanding of such therefore should not be prudently ignored, for as a sovereign nation of republican virtue, so governed and thereby divided into three separate powers, we find that none of those powers are specifically designated as a separate branch, exclusively for the military. Rather, this is supposed to be a nation that adheres to the highest law of its land, which is its Constitution, and of which, those three separate branches are known as the judicial, executive, and legislative.
Washington was correct in his sagacious concern, that none of those other branches have any real relevancy, if in fact, this country for all intents and purposes, is run by those unelected officials of the military establishment; for because they have the power of the mighty gun, are thereby in a position, should they not be effectively controlled or corralled, of essentially being that "shadow government" that thereby rules the roost, directly or indirectly, through that awesome military might or its threat, thereof. This is the probable reason in an age in which the United States has no country or series of countries that would even contemplate war upon our nation, that this nation maintains and even augments its insanely high military budget that thereby takes from its citizens, that which is of value, such as social services, healthcare, employment, infrastructure, education, and the like to feed the endless trough of military lust and desires, under the guise that our national security demands that very thing.
The very freedoms that this nation was founded upon, the unalienable rights that are ours, so gifted to us by our Creator, have in recent decades, taken the back seat to what that military-industrial-technology complex so desires, which has meant that never have so many domestic citizens been under the surveillance of its own nation's invasive security apparatus, and never have so many guns, been at the ready, so as to keep, if it must be, those citizens in their place, leaving our domestic tranquility, in a constant sea of tempestuous trouble, and our liberty at the mercy of that military establishment.