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I was going to make fun of that as spherical-cow thinking by a guy who had never seen naval service, but T-Paine actually had a slightly more complete plan.
It’s still kind of like paying truckers if they include at least one anti-tank weapon. America would have a heck of a time getting either to stand up against a serious military.
To be fair, Paine lived in a very different age. In his day, to compete in the Atlantic against the great colonial powers was not on the table for the US. If the Brits decided to invade again, a fleet to block them would not have been cost-effective. Instead, they would have been able to make uncontested landfall somewhere in North America. Of course, with a supply line spanning the Atlantic on sail ships, they would then have been at a disadvantage compared to the US in a land war.
Even today, I would argue that most of the naval forces of the US are not to keep the continental US safe from maritime invasion. Land based missile bases and a few spotter ships or planes would suffice for that.
The US navy is all about force projection. A airbase is superior to an aircraft carrier in every regard, except that you can not simply move your airbase to the South Pacific. Defending democracy on the other side of the world was probably not what Paine had in mind for the US.
To use civilian ships for warfare seems not entirely outlandish either, while purpose-designed warships will certainly offer superior performance, filling a merchant ship cannons is still a reasonable thing to do. What I am much more doubtful about is the use of turning over just some of the space on the ship to cannons. Traditionally, warships have dedicated most of their space to propulsion and armament, which is why they make very shitty merchant vessels. Smoothbore cannons do not exactly operate themselves, and the sailors will be quite busy navigating, so you need dedicated personnel to operate the guns (and the bilge pumps, for that matter). Unless you are also paying that merchant vessel to keep an extra crew of a few hundred to operate the guns, that 50 guns will be worthless.
Paying them to only carry a small fraction of the guns their ship could carry is even worse for warfare, because that means showing up to a rifle fight with a handgun. (It might still work out to scare of the occasional pirate, though.)
I think a better approach would have been to pay merchant vessels to have gunports so they can quickly be retrofitted with cannons (and the crews to man them) if the need arises.
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What could some jerks with trucks, consumer goods, and explosives do against, to pick a random example, a fleet of Tupolev bombers, right?
In theory I agree with you 100%, at least now that a serious military needs to have nuclear-tipped ICBMs.
In practice, Suez canal traffic was still down nearly 70% from 2023 Q1 to 2025 Q1, after third-world terrorist separatists took 10% of world trade hostage, because it took more than a year for a serious military to bomb them into agreeing to (not even a surrender!) a ceasefire. I do feel confused that the march of technology hasn't yet brought us to an era in which leading military superpowers can successfully pacify places like Afghanistan, with much less than a couple decades and a couple trillion dollars of effort, but here we are.
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laughs in Dari, Pashto, Vietnamese, Irish, etc
Yeah I'm sure a country full of small arms and handheld ATGMs will be a cakewalk to conquer. Good luck holding onto it though. It's just a bunch of peasants, what are they going to do against the best military in the world eh?
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It's not totally senseless, it's the equivalent of rich people and celebrities having private security and bodyguards today. "You're the guys likely to be robbed, have some defences on your ships or hire some private contractors". Something like ex-military or ex-cops setting up as private security nowadays? "Hello, you're a former privateer with a ship, a crew, and no war going on for you to plunder foreign navies. What do you do in peace time? Write to MERCHANTS-R-US for exciting new job opportunities in the field of civilian fleet protection!"
As you point out, though, in times of war this affair falls to pieces. That is when you need a professional navy with proper warships. Though maybe Paine wasn't anticipating that America would need to be going to war with anyone else after kicking out the Brits?
It also seems like in times of peace you would just get protection rackets rather than legititimate security.
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