astronaut_sloth

My decade of experience working with the military says otherwise.

There is a small minority who joins to kill people, probably like 5%. It's way too high, but it's still in the vast minority. Most officers and NCOs, in fact, prefer thinking personnel so that war crimes aren't committed and laws are followed while still accomplishing a commander's intent. While I'll admit that there is a cavalier attitude toward collateral damage (which is a separate issue), war crimes, a la Eddie Gallagher, are generally not tolerated.

Of course, with a vet bro SecDef, war criminals will become more numerous and have a sense of impunity. It's why the vast majority of service members I work with have a disdain (some rather openly) for Hegseth.

“I learned all these skills in the army—smash and grabs, site exploitation—and never got to use them,” he said. “So I’m here to kind of do what I learned to do over there, but this time here, defending my country.”

Never getting to use those skills in real life is the ideal. Any sane person in the military learns a ton of skills that they hope only to use in training. Wanting to use these skills for real, and especially domestically should be grounds for psychologically screening these people out of not just the military but any sort of service position.

Using those skills can be fun in training or drills, actually. So, I get wanting to shoot, run, and do simulated combat. But why would anyone actually want to inflict that harm on someone else for real? They would have to be deeply disturbed.

Yep, but those who resign for moral reasons will be more likely to take actual actions to protest/stop what's happening. The military will have a hard time recruiting competent people in that environment, though, and the people taking the vacancies will likely have diminishing competence as time goes on.

To put it in perspective, if more officers retire at 20, they'll generally be O-5s (Lieutenant Colonels or Commanders), and so the next year's promotion cycle will need to promote more O-4s to cover the vacancies. This will then trickle down, and suddenly, you have officers who have been O-3s for just a couple of years being promoted to O-4 rather than waiting longer and gaining experience.

In that scenario, there will be less efficiency in planning and execution and far more incompetence, and if being used against civilians, more brutality. But incompetence is easier to defeat in the long run. Seeing the incompetence and brutality will deprive the military of the smartest recruits who staff the important IT, intelligence, cyber, etc. communities. So, while they may get true believers, a lower proportion will be competent.

No matter how it shakes out, it will get very bad.

Not wrong. At "best," we'll see a fracturing of the military...which could be much more trouble than it's worth. I'd expect a small wave of resignations/desertions (since resignation for an officer takes a long time). The remainder of good people will actively try to avoid and sea-lawyer their way out of doing any damage to civilians without violating orders. There will be a good chunk who will happily fire on US civilians, though.

It’s important to spread the message far and wide that they are not alone

This right here. Disobeying orders is hard, and upholding one's oath when being told from all sides is hard, especially when friends and colleagues are going along with it. You don't want to be the squeaky wheel who makes trouble for everyone. It can become easy to think that you're alone if surrounded by people "just following orders." It's made harder still when considering that a single morally courageous action can throw away a career and potentially land you in the brig.

Plus, actual veterans and service members think it's stupid. "Thank you for your service" is a punch line.

Sounds like it's going to be a violent summer. As soon as the first protestor gets injured or killed, this will start to spin out of control.

I'm not a lawyer, but I really don't see how this is legal, unless executed in a very particular way. I really only think this is legal if a state's governor allows their NG troops to work with ICE under Title 32 within that state alone. Once a state's Guard gets federalized, they are working under Title 10. The important difference is that Title 32 grants governors the ability to use their NG for law enforcement, but Title 10 means that they fall under DoD policy, and therefore subject to Posse Comitatus and unable to engage in law enforcement unless legislation is passed.

With that said, the only way I could see this being used is within states with friendly governors (so red states) who mobilize their NG and offer DHS their personnel as aid. But then those personnel could only be used in their state. So, if Indiana mobilized their Guard on Title 32 orders and aided ICE, then they could only operate within Indiana unless invited into another state. If ICE wants to do a raid with Guard personnel in Chicago, then they are SOL because then that would be an interstate invasion.

What this could do is allow ICE personnel to focus on Democratic states while Republicans use their NG to do the majority of ICE's dirty work. In other words, a bunch of ICE people will come to blue states to do the rounding up, while NG will do the rounding up in red states.

My take, too. They can comply with the court order and save face. The charges are not very solid, though. This can play into Trump's hands in that if he's acquitted, just silently brushing it under the rug with another outrage (the admin is seriously just an outrage/scandal ponzi scheme). If he's convicted, then they can parade him around like they were right the entire time.

It's important to note that these facilities are public; you can find them easily. Let's not let this just be isolated to Chicago.

I think that's a bit simplistic. I think Biden's position on Gaza hurt turnout, but at the very most, that would mean Trump would win the electoral vote only rather than both the electoral and popular votes. There were several other reasons, e.g. the economy, Biden not bowing out earlier, Harris not putting some separation between them, etc. that ultimately doomed them.

I'm right there with you. I actually preferred the time constraint of an in-class essay over a take-home essay. I think it also helped me think on my feet better and form a cogent argument off the cuff. When I took essays home, I would agonize over every word and re-write sentences a hundred times.

My unpopular opinion is that I have always preferred essay tests to multiple choice or true-false (especially true-false).