According to nearly a dozen retired officers and current military lawyers, as well as scholars who teach at West Point and Annapolis, an intense if quiet debate is underway inside the U.S. military community about what orders it would be obliged to obey if President-elect Donald Trump decides to follow through on his previous warnings that he might deploy troops against what he deems domestic threats, including political enemies, dissenters and immigrants.
Archived at https://archive.is/He9O6
Hopefully the US military will honor and protect the US Constitution. If key officers drank the shitty Orang Kool-Aid, then the USA will have become FUBAR (Fucked-up Beyond All Repair).
There are definitely hawks in the upper echelons of military power, but I’ve never met one who didn’t hold the ideals of the United States as sacred.
I believe they will stand against tyranny. At first.
Then they will be replaced, made examples of, forced into retirement, and violently removed. If history is any indication.
I’m no military or historical expert, but I do believe if we’re counting on our military to save the country it is already lost.
I hope Trump is dumb enough to spend years hollowing the military out instead of doing the easy things. All he has to do in red states is convince the governors to use their National Guard. If they’re under state orders there’s no legal conflict. And in blue states he could start giving badges to the Proud Boys or whoever, (literally anyone willing to do his bidding) and set them loose as federal agents.
What the old officer corps is really afraid of here is the destruction of military norms and institutions.
Wasn’t that literally the last thing Julius Caesar did immediately before declaring himself emperor for life?
This is an important step in establishing a police state, which will be crucial for when trump doesn’t want to end his term peacefully.
I wonder how many people using social media today have gone back and actually watched the beating of Rodney King.
It is really horrifying. And VHS video recorders are the only reason the police were caught.
There are countess stories like this one that never ended in riot’s. One that comes to mind is Kelly Thomas a mentally I’ll man, schizophrenic if I remember correctly. I remember Thomas cried out for his mother as they beat him to death.
These atrocities sadly are commonplace here.
The constitution is your oath, not the president. Acknowledge that this administration is a domestic threat and deal with it.
The Praetorian Guard killed something like 13 emperors. Food for thought.
In their defense, they killed more terrible emperors than good ones.
Pertinax though… I’ll never forgive them for that. Who knows how the entire world would look now if he’d been emperor for a decade or more…
Please enlighten us, how was or in which sense was pertinente so terrible?
Didn’t you hear? Apparently if we vote for it, a domestic threat is allowed to just walk on in and do his thing.
eyup. surprisingly voting for hitler gets you hitler. I was surprised pikachu as anybody about it.
“There’s a reason you separate military and the police. One fights the enemies of the state. The other serves and protects the people. When the military becomes both, then the enemies of the state tend to become the people.”
-Commander Adama
Trump literally calls anyone who disagrees with him an “enemy of the state”, so yeah, we’re way past that.
The reason is that one is trained to (supposedly) keep the peace and prevent and investigate crimes. The other is trained to kill people. Military methods are incompatible with effective police work.
Ironically the American military is better at it than the police are. They usually only kill someone if they were being fired at first. It’s called rules of engagement. American police have zero concept of it.
Not exactly, read more US history, especially in situation when the military was called in to remove demonstrators. Look up the Bonus Army and no fucks were given even though the protestors were WW I veterans. Douglas MacArthur and George Patton were involved too. Disgusting piece of history.
You know that happened over 100 years ago right? Things have changed since then. If you wanted to make a good case, then you should have brought up Kent State because that one is very valid for criticism.
Largely because they’ve spent two decades trying to police Afghanistan.
Wait…which is which?
On the plus side, it would be the first time in several decades the military is deployed in a terrorist rogue state
But aimed at the wrong people.
Some things never change.
We got oil and unbombed children.
The country is fucked, isn’t it? We’re cooked?
End of the line yes. This is no longer something that is recoverable within a single generation. There’s some hope that our grandchildren or thereabouts can put things right, but I’m halfway through (40’s) and I fully expect every year after this to get objectively worse until I die.
Yes. The US’s peak has come and gone.
Deep fried, even
When military coup? Asking for a friend.
I seriously wonder whether this is the real reason they are putting so much effort into keeping the Classified Documents case report totally secret, without even disclosing it to Congress.
As absurd as the thought that the US military would rise up and depose a duly elected President is, ask yourself under what circumstances might it happen? Perhaps it would happen if it came out that there was incontrovertible proof that duly elected President sold that military’s secrets to foreign parties (or, worse yet, freely gave them away in exchange for compliments, and plauditudes.) And that two (possibly all three) branches of government refuse to do anything about it.
It’s not the most absurd conspiracy theory I’ve heard.
Not until after they purge the “woke” and “DEI” generals first and install their loyalists. Then the executive and military can operate as one.
