Leadership Quote by Frank B. Kellogg

"Adequate defense" is the kind of phrase that wins arguments before anyone has to make one. Kellogg is skewering it as a linguistic get-out-of-jail-free card: elastic enough to justify any buildup, any budget, any preemptive move, while sounding modest, prudent, even reluctant. The bite lands on "catchword" - not a principle, not a strategy, but a slogan. He implies militarism doesn’t always march in with sabers drawn; it often arrives in a well-tailored euphemism.

The subtext is a critique of how security talk laundered aggression into responsibility. "Adequate" has no ceiling. Once defense is framed as a technical requirement rather than a political choice, the militarist can keep raising the bar and declare each escalation merely catching up. The genius of the phrase is that it casts dissent as naive: who would argue for inadequate defense? Kellogg is pointing to that trap, where the vocabulary of protection becomes a moral cudgel.

Context matters because Kellogg wasn’t a campus pamphleteer; he was the U.S. secretary of state who helped broker the Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928, an attempt to outlaw war as national policy in the shadow of World War I. Read this way, the line is a warning from inside the machinery: the next war won’t be sold as conquest, but as necessity, packaged in careful words that make expansion sound like maintenance.