One thing that confuses me about the current situation in the US government, is why more more people in the various government agencies aren't pushing back against all these executive orders. Especially, those that are clearly illegal, or unconstitutional.
"I expect that you will eventually find somebody who is foolish enough or enough of a coward to file your motion, but it was never going to be me." - SDNY Prosecutor resigning after being asked to drop the Eric Adams corruption case. The people who would push back are resigning as their last resort. Soon anybody who has any sense of fidelity to the rule of law or the constitution will be removed from power.
Not everyone has the appetite for litigation. It can be expensive in cash, time, and relationships. Anyone supporting a family will need to consider the effect it will have on the family. We aren't all brave enough to fight against such a powerful adversary even if no one else would be negatively affected by doing it.
Of course population level passivity in the end allows the adversary to win but it's hard to be the first to stand on the front line.
Litigation is absolutely horrible. There is a reason they say "you can't fight city hall."
The gov will burn itself down to fight you in court. They generally don't like to settle because losing just means they may have to raise taxes or insurance premiums. No gov attorney is likely to actually lose their job because they fought too long or hard and lost.
Very common. This often stops the amount being put in the court records, but having settled one recently I think it is hard to hide these payouts from an informed, determined member of the public.
For instance, my settlement had to go through the financial committee of the county. Which means the lawsuit was scheduled as a line item in a televised public debate. Also, you could at least FOIA the bank records to a degree and reverse-engineer any payouts.
A properly scathing resignation letter catches media attention better than anything you say after being fired, which would be interpreted by many as whining.
They lead with firing a ton of the people in semi-independent executive branch offices that are suppose to raise red flags (in an advisory role, and formally putting the brakes on things if that's not enough) if the admin tries to do illegal stuff. Like, that was among their first actions.
They've been clearing out people who might resist before they get a chance to, and have made it clear that your life's gonna be messed up (your career's over, if nothing else, which is a pretty big deal for normal non-billionaires) if you rock the boat.
The only major, public resistance has been over dropping the prosecution of NY's mayor, and the first of the prosecutors to resign received a letter promising retaliation against other members of her office and that she'd have an investigation launched against her, which, even if it goes nowhere, is basically promising to make someone's life hell for the next year or so. They're looking to hurt people who don't play along, so others just shut up and do what they're told.
We haven't seen them going after political opponents (Democrats or Republicans who don't nod along to every single thing—and business leaders, this isn't limited to politicians) but nearly everyone in DC and in big business is a bit dirty and I wouldn't be surprised if we start seeing very selective investigations and prosecutions of things that everyone had kinda agreed to overlook up until now (and that may be far from the most-severe corruption going on), that they don't even pretend aren't aimed at getting everyone else to stay in line and go along with the agenda, legality be damned. They've got the access to do it and there are some indications DOGE and pals are starting to poke around in things like tax records.
Maybe there should be, but there’s no such thing as a semi-independent branch. Whoever told you so is either trying to mislead you or hasn’t read the constitution.
In the US, there are just 3 branches. Unless you work for congress or the courts, you work for the executive branch.
Also some not-quite-just-serving-at-the-president’s-pleasure folks (according to the law, anyway) directors & other positions, notably the director of OGE.
Hasn't risen to the point where the people perpetrating the crimes are credibly threatened with violence. People are still gambling on the nonviolent options.
Prosecution? Of the president who just last year got wide-ranging immunity from the Supreme Court? Or of his right-hand guy who allegedly does nothing without the president's OK?
Look, I agree with you on all points: politically, about rule of law being destroyed and also about Supreme Court being knowingly complicit. But, pushback is happening and is ignore. And it wont make change this year, not until actual catastrophe happens to America itself. Pushback can slow down descent, it can achieve improvements in the long term.
Lasting change for the better could happen only if it was possible to prosecute actual crimes that happen. As long as these are immune (which they are), things will only get worst.
And as long as half of Americans are determined to euphemism away and both side away and twist themselves into pretzels to enable and excuse, things wont get better. And then it will take massive amount of reforms to make things good again. And pretty much all the totally not pro-Trump people full off infinite benefit of the doubt towards him will suddenly loose it.
I'd be interested in hearing from former service members who have also worked in "tech" companies: Which is more authoritarian?
I'm guessing the answer is tech companies, esp. the modern version of such. Modern military officers tend to give a lot of leeway & empowerment to subordinates so that mission-building can be more opportunistic and adjustable. Tech companies tend to eviscerate anyone who dares contradict someone of higher rank.
In my experience, tech suffers from short term thinking and is not concerned about long term consequences.
In the military it is a privilege to be given responsibility over a group of men and women. At least for me, I was very aware of these issues. I was a believer in the “God” camp. There is a noticeable contingent of US military who wear their religious beliefs on their sleeves. It is complicated but at least for me, morality occupied my mind all the time.
I've seen plenty of bureaucratic stupidity and shenanigans in 20 years of active and reserve service. But in my personal experience, corporate America is even more hidebound, top-down, and unimaginative than everyone in it thinks the military is. Disclaimer: I don't work for a "tech" company; I work in tech for a non-"tech" company.
Even in peacetime, the Navy will launch 25 jets off an aircraft carrier off the coast of San Diego. They will be expected to go practice an opposed strike on a target in a range complex east of Reno, including multiple aerial refuelings and navigating the civilian airspace system. They will be expected to hit their target within seconds of the planned time. And they will be expected to come back and land on an aircraft carrier, at night, on the first pass.
And all the details of this kind of operation, from weapons planning to fuel planning to "who talks to whom on what radio net for what purposes" to flat-out "how do we simulate combat without anyone being killed in a midair collision" take place under the aegis of a bunch of twentysomething and thirtysomething junior officers led by a few thirtysomething (or maybe fortysomething) middle managers.
Plan-Brief-Execute-Debrief. Like a Scrum shop, except the iterations are 24 hours long and the penalty for sloppiness could potentially involve flames, wreckage, and death.
For an interesting book-length treatment of this topic, see When Soldiers Say No: Selective Conscientious Objection in the Modern Military, which examines both the philosophical arguments for and against and a selection of case studies from around the world.
The problem is, everyone says 'I won't follow an order if it is illegal', but it never starts out as big-evil™ 'illegal', it's something trivial, and you tell yourself that you'll do it rather than kick up a fuss, because they might just fire you if you push back on using torrented material as training material.
I don't really have great faith that there is a set of left leaning military officers in the U.S. though.
Anyway, interesting article. It always striking to me just how significant the military is in formulating policy. There is a strong tension there that is often not acknowledged. Good to see people wrestling with it.
If you read up-page in some of the other threads you'll find some right/libetarian people who are also against Trump because of how he's pushing us into authoritarianism.
Yes, right libertarians often oppose right authoritarianism, but that doesn't transform support or opposition to right authoritarianism to something that has no left/right valence.
Well yeah, in a consensus-based process you have to accept that not everyone is going to agree with you all the time. But you do have to try to push forward on things where there is consensus. There was a county committee that had a libertarian on it who would often advocate from a libertarian standpoint, whereas the people the committee affected were often more left/collectivist. However, he found himself briefly aligned with the rest of the group when a county official tried to do something that was against the law.
Dude, what is your point? We're pointing out a trend and you keep trying to counter by pointing out exceptions. It's the nature of real-life trends to have exceptions, so their existence doesn't even come close to invalidating the model.
"Left/right" is always at best an approximation, because the space of political ideology is multidimensional, and because differences in praxis (how to achieve the goals set by ideology) will often be as signficant in people's support for or opposition to concrete regimes as differences in ideology, but the Trump regime definitely is suppported much more on the right and opposed much more on the left.
We've had 2 military coups in Brazil that immediately implemented a constitutional government and called elections. (One was against an autocratic constitutional monarchy... go figure... but it was on the direction of more democracy so it counts.)
In a total of 5 military coups if I'm not forgetting any...
I have a theory, that the military are only interested enough on democracy after they come back from fighting against some dictatorship. Otherwise they are bad news.
What you say makes a lot of sense. The carnation revolution happened when officers in portugal had been to the colonies and started learning from the people they were colonizing.
The author of that has been at the sharp end and has been a senior commander.
There are two kinds of expected disobedience to orders in the US military. One is disobeying an illegal order, such as one to shoot prisoners. The other is doing what needs to be done to accomplish the mission despite conflicting orders. The second is why military orders have a "Commander's Intent" section. If the situation on the ground is not what was expected when the order was give, officers are expected to adapt to the new situation and overcome problems. Here's Army Chief of Staff Mark Milley writing about that back in 2017.[1] That was not about the moral issue, but the operational issues when command is messed up.
Milley faced the moral issue when he was Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
and Trump lost the election.
Here's the US officer's oath:
"I ___, do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter. So help me God."
German military oath, before Hitler:
"I swear by God this holy oath,
that I want to ever loyally and sincerely serve my people and fatherland
and be prepared as a brave and obedient soldier
to risk my life for this oath at any time."
After Hitler:
"I swear by God this holy oath
that I shall render unconditional obedience
to the Leader of the German Reich and people,
Adolf Hitler, supreme commander of the armed forces,
and that as a brave soldier I shall at all times be prepared
to give my life for this oath."
> "I, _____, do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; and that I will obey the orders of the President of the United States and the orders of the officers appointed over me, according to regulations and the Uniform Code of Military Justice. So help me God."
Note that the enlisted soldiers' oath includes "I will obey the orders of the President of the United States" which the officers' oath doesn't.
That is because commissioned officers are especially responsible for upholding the Constitution as opposed to swearing an oath to one person or a group of people.
As it was told to me, the part about swearing the oath to the constitution comes before the President, and it is understood by all service-members that said word order very much matters. In that, if the President gives an unconstitutional order, your honor demands that you follow the constitution.
Also, that '(or affirm)' bit is interesting too. It's there because some religions prohibit swearing, most notably in US history, the Quakers. In fact, a few Quaker presidents have refused to swear during inaugurations and have chosen to affirm instead, I think.
„Ich schwöre, der Bundesrepublik Deutschland treu zu dienen und das Recht und die Freiheit des deutschen Volkes tapfer zu verteidigen, so wahr mir Gott helfe.“
I swear to serve the Federal Republic of Germany faithfully and to bravely defend the rights and freedom of the German people, so help me God.”
No, that part is in the law about the armed forces. And I remember distinctly from my compulsory service that we got extensive lectures about the legality of orders and when to disregard them (and report further up the chain of command), with examples.
I shared a book in another comment[0] which contains an entire chapter[1] on the topic of (dis)obedience in the German Bundeswehr, which has a more permissive approach to individual objection than many comparable armies.
> I assume that the paragraph called «after hitler» is more appropriately called «during hitler» or similar.
What? Why would they change it? ;D
On a more serious note, swearing allegiance to someone who's not alive isn't really much of an issue; it's basically the same thing as the US oath to "the Constitution".
Well yes, clearly in terms of supporting and defending the Constitution, the military should have shown up to defend the capitol in far more timely manner.
But honestly, as a foreigner I was just glad the military didn't come down on the side of Trump. As I understand it the leaders of the military are appointed by the president, people in the military love guns and gun rights, and veterans are pro-Trump by a wide margin [1] even following Jan 6th.
> As I understand it the leaders of the military are appointed by the president, people in the military love guns and gun rights, and veterans are pro-Trump by a wide margin [1] even following Jan 6th.
This is a caricature that is as broad-brushed and offensive as claiming gay men all flounce around in assless chaps, and I say that with 20 years active and reserve service. Even in that poll (which I am curious about their methodology), 40% of veterans supported Harris, and my experience is that the military is a cross-section of society. I'm deeply skeptical that the modern military is as skewed towards one party as this poll would indicate. I highly suspect it is being skewed by either bad methodology or else by including a bunch of older veterans from WWII, Korea, Vietnam, and the Gulf War, who would skew Republican. The military I served in was a diverse cross-section of broadly middle-class American society.
And the leaders of the military are commissioned officers who are formally appointed by the President, but their oath is to the Constitution. And military leaders have served through bipartisan administrations . . . my own service was under W. Bush, Obama, Trump, and Biden, and today's senior leaders also would have served under Clinton and possibly H. W. Bush. There is no MAGA cabal in military senior leadership; the opposite if anything.
And just because someone "loves guns and gun rights" doesn't automatically put them in the MAGA column.
>and offensive as claiming gay men all flounce around in assless chaps
I agree they are painting with a broad and inaccurate brush but to compare it to the stereotypes queer people have to endure, especially in the current social/cultural moment playing out in the US, is honestly far more offensive IMO. Those two situations are not on the same playing field. People in the armed forces (who aren't LGBT) do not know what it's like at all to be judged like the queer community.
The point isn't to belittle or minimize discrimination against LGBT people. The point is to try to get someone who presumably supports LGBT rights to understand how it comes across to still make prejudiced remarks against other groups of people by comparing it to another well-worn and offensive stereotype.
It may not have been the point of your comment but it was the result regardless. It’s a really poor comparison that, intentionally or not, minimizes the LGBT experience.
The (yes incorrect) perception that the militarily is overwhelmingly conservative/republican doesn’t have some massively outsized (often negative) impact on your life akin to being queer in the US.
Some other surveys have produced some weird patterns, like [1] which said men in the military were Republican by roughly a 2:1 margin, while women in the military were Democrat by roughly a 2:1 margin - but there are a lot more men than women in the military.
And [2] says, in an analysis of voting precincts that map closely onto military bases, "On average, Mr Trump still won these precincts, though his margin shrank by nearly half. Patrick Air Force Base—located on Florida’s Atlantic coast and since renamed Patrick Space Force Base—supported Mr Trump by a 17-point margin in 2016. By 2020, his lead there shrank to 11 points."
So it may be more even among active duty military than among veterans, but an 11 point margin is still a win. Expecting that in a brawl they'd come out swinging on the Democrat side to me seemed naive, which is why them staying out of it seemed better than nothing.
Sure - the gun rights stuff is just me saying it makes sense why the military could skew Republican. The linked survey saying veterans are 61% pro-Trump vs 37% pro-Harris sounds plausible.
Loving the constitution is all very well, but Republican voters and senators seem to manage to square that with supporting Trump. Makes no sense to me, but apparently to 50% of the American population it does.
So IMHO the military could plausibly have backed a Trump coup, if the coup had been better planned. And I was glad when they didn't!
Trump intended to stay in power although he lost the election. As long as we agree on that, I don't see how you could not call it a coup. It only failed because there still were some people with a backbone around, among them Mike Pence. There are fewer of them this time.
Interesting. This goes some way to addressing an issue I had been wondering about recently. I am a UK citizen, not US, so have little familiarity with US military. With the recent news on Trump declaring that Greenland should belong to the US I was wondering what the US military would do if ordered to carry out an unprovoked attack on an allied nation. This does seem to suggest that there is a very real possibility that they could refuse.
> This does seem to suggest that there is a very real possibility that they could refuse.
Not at all, on a societal level the US has been increasingly constructed as a huge, intricate, Prisoner's Dilemma where everyone, allegedly, has all to lose and noone, allegedly, has a say in the matter, therefore everyone complies with whatever the system, or media, asks of them.
Everyone thinks they're the victim, everyone thinks civic duty is something the oppressor is responsible for, not them personally, therefore everyone is free to be an oppressor themselves.
This problem will be intensified whenever, as we've seen elsewhere, the military starts being transformed from within and sycophants are put in positions of power.
There is freedom of speech or freedom to disobey on paper. But most people cannot use these, because the system is set up so that they'll be fired, disgraced and probably barred from future jobs.
It is fine and encouraged to say "Trump is an idiot" or "Harris is an idiot", but better think twice before engaging with actual issues like whistleblowing or disobeying an unlawful order.
Just watch how topics of poor white MAGA voters who are being sold out are avoided and flagged on all sides. No one wants to hear about that. People like Bannon (a millionaire) can make some performative speeches, but nothing will happen.
I think you need to better define the order. It is unlikely to simply be to "attack" Greenland. If they were ordered to make landfall and establish a base of operations, that is very different from bombing military or civilian targets.
> No, congress would have to declare war first. Article I, Section 8.
Article I, Section 8 gives Congress the sole power to declare war, it does not, on its own, prohibit any other action than "declaring war" to any other actor.
The War Powers Act (or Resolution) attempts to put some additional rules around this (note that it is widely seen as being either an unconstitutional intrusion on Presidential authority or an unconstitutional delegation of Congressional authority, and courts have so far failed to resolve it, having found lack of standing in the few cases that have been brought under it.)
But even the War Powers Act doesn't purport to prohibit the President from using force in advance of Congressional authorization.
Only in the second gulf war did the US become an occupying force, and this action was permitted by congress. The others may have been “invasions” but certainly not occupations or annexations. I could be wrong, but I don’t see congress allowing Trump to destroy NATO.
It would still require congressional approval after 60 days, unless Al Qaida suddenly showed up in Greenland. Despite congress being majority R, I just don’t see them playing along with this.
Trump says these things to get a rise out of people. He’s fueled by reaction. You can’t tell if he’s ever being serious, and I doubt even he knows if he’s being serious most of the time. Getting enraged by his actions is his goal, and he’s very good at playing his opponents into blunders this way. Best to not play along.
> It would still require congressional approval after 60 days
"After 60 days" is very different from "first".
And, since the President can unilaterally extend the timeline by 30 days, its actually 90 days, even if the War Powers Act is valid (an unresolved Constitutional question.)
And, in practice, it doesn't even require that if you don't have active majorities in Congress opposing the action; see the NATO-Yugoslavia war and the failure of legal challenges by members of Congress against it predicated on the War Powers Act limitations, because of lack of standing.
If invading Greenland was an actual real goal, something like this would definitely "happen", to manufacture the necessary pretext. Way cheaper than the alternatives.
Trump thinks the same way. So far he has not disobeyed court orders, but if he does he will do so for the same reason you would disobey him: because he thinks he's doing right for the country.
That's the thing, everyone who disobeys thinks they're doing the right thing.
Nothing he is doing or will do is being done because it is "right for the country". He is purposely trying to destabilize America so that he can rule as a king over the ashes.
The article leans heavily on the word disobedience, but I think it would serve discussion more to emphasize the idea of a 'grey area' to distinguish it better from out-right disobedience. When the author was in tactical command of forces and made decisions to use resources or take actions contrary to stated orders there could have been an argument that the assumptions those orders were given under were found to be wrong and that adapting was crucial to achieving the stated commander's objectives. That would be different than disobeying the order to cover 'USS John S. McCain' when Trump was visiting. No matter how despicable that order was, it was clear that the commander's intent and objectives were being achieved by doing that and that it was a lawful order so to not carry it out would be outright disobedience and not a defensible grey area. Or to put it another way, I highly doubt the author would have lasted more than 1 second after they said 'no' had they been C7F or any of the CO's in the chain that got the order and passed it on when it came out.
Well yea, they teach you in officer’s schools that disobeying an illegal order probably won’t turn out well for you immediately, but it’s your duty. You will get punished sometimes, but if the order goes against the law and your morals, then you have to disobey it. Covering the McCain ship name probably isn’t worth disobeying, but firing on civilians is definitely worth any cost to yourself to disobey.
...Do you honestly think somebody's gonna get up on the floor of the United States Senate, and ask for billions of dollars for a couple of forgotten ghosts?
Trautman: Men, Goddamn it! Men... who fought for their country!
Murdock: That's enough! Trautman, I'm gonna forget this conversation ever took place.
Trautman: You bastard!
Murdock: And if I were you... I'd never make the mistake of bringing this subject up again.
Trautman: Oh you're the one who's making the mistake.
I learned recently that this and all the other MIA/POW focused media of the era was based on a conspiracy theory that traces back to a Nixon press conference that tried to reframe Vietnam into a rescue mission for imprisoned soldiers who probably didn't exist to improve support at home.
It’s disturbing how much of the current US political landscape—the fundamental social/perceived-historical identities of the two parties, which are one of two things that determine how people actually vote, the other being “does it seem like (seem like) bad things are happening right now?”, see Democracy for Realists—is based on straight-up fiction. A lot of it from the Nixon and Reagan administrations and associated propaganda efforts, but extending into the Clinton (lies about local work-requirement experiments for benefits being amplified and driving policy, on top of a bunch of 70s and 80s era lies about how those programs work that are to this day considered true by tons of people) and of course Bush II admins. It’s impossible to even start to talk about serious policy with a mixed and representative group of people in the US because you have to start with trying to de-program all the horse shit and wild misconceptions most of them have internalized, and that’s a tall order all on its own.
This is a good article and it's not just about the new administration threatening to use the US military against US citizens, it's also and perhaps more about all recent administrations putting personnel into unwinnable and dangerous situations because they won't resource it sufficiently. Why put lives on the line for political desires you know cannot be achieved by politicians who refuse to listen?
> Why put lives on the line for political desires you know cannot be achieved by politicians who refuse to listen?
If the US and Russia negotiate a treaty in Ukraine without Ukraine or the EUs agreement, we could end up in a situation with US troops squaring off against EU/Ukraine military in order to enforce the treaty. Feels like everyone loses except maybe Russia.
The current president has previously spoken of it multiple times [0, 1] and has already authorized domestic military deployments, albeit not against citizens [2].
The parent asked a question and I answered as neutrally as possible. I welcome suggestions on how I could have been even more colorlessly neutral, but I suspect that phrases like "radical left lunatics" would be counterproductive to that neutrality even in quotation.
I don't see how that changes anything. Especially since in practice "rioting" tends to mean "a protest that the police or those in power don't like".
All of those situations still have the problems associated with deploying the military against civilians: The military isn't trained to carry out appropriate law enforcement. It compromises trust in and support for the military. It tends to be used disproportionately against the left rather than the right. It is easily abused to suppress dissent. Etc.
> The moment protestors cross over to vandalism and violence, they're rioters and not mere protesters.
And this seem to be usually applied collectively (in obvious opposition to basic human rights) in practice. Often in cases where the violence wasn't done by the protesters and even in cases where the violence was against the protesters.
Also, police has a really shitty history of capturing and holding into account the actual violent people. They usually go free for turning the next protest violent too.
And both happen again and again, all over the world.
> Often in cases where the violence wasn't done by the protesters and even in cases where the violence was against the protesters.
Also very possible that the state actors are the ones beginning the violence which is well documented to have happened during the Troubles in Northern Ireland.
The point still stands that the choice of response should be appropriate, and there are several choices between inaction and deployment of the military.
So then 0 and 1 would indeed satisfy "using the US military against US citizens".
(When the National Guard is under the command of the federal government, rather than state governor, they are, obligation- and restriction-wise, the same as the US military.)
> 0 was talking about stopping Election Day interference from "radical left lunatics", and he suggested the national guard first
Oh good, no government has ever tried to justify authoritarian policies via scapegoating their political opponents as being "radical" and requiring force to suppress. Thanks for clearing that up!
According to Trumps longest serving chief of staff, John Kelly, he regularly needed to be talked down from using the military on citizens:
> Mr. Kelly said that Mr. Trump was repeatedly told dating back to his first year in office why he should not use the U.S. military against Americans and the limits on his authority to do so. Mr. Trump nevertheless continued while in office to push the issue and claim that he did have the authority to take such actions, Mr. Kelly said.
National guard members are subject to the restrictions imposed by Posse Comitatus when on Title 10 orders. National Guard members can only perform domestic law enforcement duties when under the command of a state's governor and TAG.
Putting active duty military members on Title 10 orders, such those of the 82nd Airborne Division which reporting indicates Trump also wanted to use in 2020, would also be an obvious violation of Posse Comitatus if those troops were used to arrest, surveil, or otherwise control protestors. Active duty troops may perform in a supporting function for domestic law enforcement, such as by providing engineering, logistics, or communications to law enforcement, which is what US troops do when they're on the border (or when they are supporting counter-smuggling operations).
If the Roman Senate's law says the army can't cross the Rubicon river, and anyone who does lead an army across will be executed - then that's the law.
But if an army actually crosses the Rubicon? Turns out that law doesn't count for much when the other guy has an army, and all the senators have to flee the country.
Then the guy with the army is in charge. He can retrospectively legalise his actions, grant himself a pardon, and fill recently-vacated positions of power with allies who'll sign it all off.
So while the exact details of "Title 10" and "Posse Comitatus" are very important to an army before they cross the Rubicon - if they do cross the Rubicon the law will suddenly turn out to be far more flexible than anyone expected, and it'll turn out their actions were legal after all.
You are making an important and fatal mistake: you are confusing law and power.
Caesar's civil war was illegal under the laws of the Roman Republic. Caesar successfully took power, so there was no one to enforce those laws, but he did break them, and ultimately, the Republic. As far as I know Caesar never even bothered legitimizing his war or self-pardoning - he didn't need to, he won and the Senate made him dictator for life.
> So while the exact details of "Title 10" and "Posse Comitatus" are very important to an army before they cross the Rubicon - if they do cross the Rubicon the law will suddenly turn out to be far more flexible than anyone expected, and it'll turn out their actions were legal after all.
This is very important: only if they win will their illegal actions go without punishment, and winning is not guaranteed.
There is a reason we generally prefer the rule of law to the rule of power.
The Insurrection Act[1] is still in force. The President can legally suspend Posse Comitatus with a simple proclamation and then he can use federalized Guard or regular troops to enforce law as he pleases.
Article II and Congress have invested absolutely vast powers in the Presidency. The main check on their exercise is not Congress, or the Judiciary, or even the Deep State, but rather just traditions. Unfortunately, both parties have been attenuating those traditions for many administrations.
I don't think we're going to see the US government morph, Roman style, into a new form of government that's only nominally a republic. I think it's already happened quite some time ago. And just like in ancient Rome, most people have no idea it happened, because it will continue to use the same legal structure, just applied in new and interesting ways.
What we're seeing now is the struggle between two factions of the elites over who controls this new system.
> National guard members are subject to the restrictions imposed by Posse Comitatus when on Title 10 orders.
True.
> National Guard members can only perform domestic law enforcement duties when under the command of a state's governor and TAG.
False. Posse Comitatus (18 USC Sec. 1385) does not prohibit the military (including the National Guard when called into federal service) from being used for domestic law enforcement, it prohibits that from being directed by those without specific authority in the Constituton or act of Congress to do so. The Insurrection Act provides authority to the President to do so, either at the request of state governments (10 USC Sec. 251) or on his own unilateral determination of necessity (10 USC Sec. 252, 253).
It's probably a common blindspot for people on HN to think in technical terms like this of what is and isn't permitted. But it comes down to people who are armed and emotional.
> you're saying military commanders and judge advocates knowing and understanding the bounds of their authorities are mere technicalities
Yes, I'm saying that given the right circumstances what is legal on paper does not matter in the real world.
> This "armed and emotional" bit gives off some real "I never served and don't understand the military as much as I think I do" vibes.
I have never served but I have read history books. This isn't a pure hypothetical: these things have happened before, there are examples going back as far as you would like. My sibling comment even expanded on one of these.
> I'm sorry
If you're sorry then I think it would have been possible to edit your comment not to have the tone of personal insult.
I think it took the tone of an insult partly because "armed and emotional" comes off as a huge insult to our military leadership. There's probably nothing more important to being a great military leader than the ability to keep a cool head in the midst of trying and even horrifying situations. I would guess there is a point of pride in doing that which was being assailed in your comment.
> "armed and emotional" comes off as a huge insult
Care to explain how having weapons or emotions is insulting? Everyone serving in the military is a human and humans have emotions. There's no shame in that and I think it requires quite a mean spirited mis-reading of what I said to take that from it.
> the ability to keep a cool head in the midst of trying and even horrifying situations
I think we're in agreement, you just have a different idea of what it means to be emotional. The desire to maintain a cool head in the face of horror is based in emotion. The effect of keeping a cool head might be exactly the reason why the technicalities of legality break down.
All that said we also have to remember that not everyone serving is a "great military leader" and that's also part of the point at hand.
> it comes down to people who are armed and emotional.
This implies that real people are making emotional decisions instead of guided by reason.
> technical terms like this of what is and isn't permitted
These technical terms that you are discounting are some of the real weapons that human beings use to give them options beyond simply following orders that they disagree with.
This is an incredibly nuanced topic, and to reduce it to people making "armed and emotional" decisions shows a lack of appreciation for what people try to do in difficult situations.
Again, your position is based on a disdain for emotion and a preference for "reason.' This is not a position I share, we are not Vulcans. I see no shame in recognising the emotional nature of our fellow actors.
I would point out the humour in an emotional reaction to my choice of words derailing the conversation but the realisation that there are people who believe their "great military leaders" are somehow "above" emotions and that this is a good thing is genuinely terrifying
Nobody is saying emotions don't exist. But I, like many others, believe that our ability to choose our reactions based on reason rather than emotion is what separates us from animals. We don't always succeed, but this is why your unevidenced claim implying that emotion is the primary driver of decision making has ruffled feathers.
People including myself have emotional reactions, but I choose to respond with a reasoned explanation, and I certainly wouldn't engage in violence with you over it, even if a portion of my lizard brain demanded that I should.
> unevidenced claim implying that emotion is the primary driver of decision making
You've added the words "primary driver" here yourself, I never made such a claim. But I hope you can see that not only that leap but also your desire to overcome your "animalistic" emotions are both rooted in emotion.
I won't waste my time looking for evidence for a claim I didn't make and I don't think it's up for debate that the majority of people in the armed forces are "armed and emotional." But in terms of the original claim that checks and balances only serve up to the point of human failure I could point to any number of examples and would repeat the fact that others have raised some in this thread.
It also would have been possible for you to not claim that military servicemembers are not in control of their emotions, and that this may make them present a danger to others by misusing their weapons.
But you did claim that, or at least imply it, so here we are.
Then it seems you are not sorry. Either way, it would have been absurd for me to ignore the humanity of the people I share the world with, especially given the ample amount of examples of military men being lost in their emotions.
Damage to public / private property is normal in a riot, that's where riot police comes in - who are, on paper, experts in nonviolent / nonlethal crowd control and de-escalation. Deploying the National Guard would have been an unnecessary escalation.
I do wish either riot police or the National Guard was deployed on Jan 6th though. But neither Trump nor anyone in the chain of command with that authority did, which only emphasizes how it was orchestrated and intentional.
For decades, a certain set of neoreactionaries have called me a radical leftist. Usually because I would note their ideas miss all kinds of unintended consequences.
Hilariously, I was early in the tea party stuff until it was clearly coopted by the Ted Cruz types.
I've consistently been a centrist libertarian for decades. If a person feels I am a radical leftist, I am confident they are working from a skewed worldview.
We have had a social contract since the 1930s to take care of each other through taxes. Like it or hate it, to change this requires the legislature. Current gutting is based on executive action, lawlessly, capturing rents, quashing regulatory enforcement for a certain Mr. Musk and buddies, and otherwise capturing the function of the state and government, to the benefit of cronies. This is antithetical to liberty and freedom.
> 1 was to stop the rioting around George Floyd where there was significant damange to public and private property, again the national guard was suggested
That's deploying military inside US against its citizens. You just argue it might be a good idea.
It's correct, but it doesn't support the point they're trying to make. The National Guard cannot be used for domestic law enforcement when under command of the US federal government. They can only do that when directed to do so by their state's governor.
So Trump wanting to deploy the National Guard to stop his imagined election day interference, or to deal with rioters, would fall under the same rules as if he were to try to deploy the US Army for those tasks.
> It's correct, but it doesn't support the point they're trying to make. The National Guard cannot be used for domestic law enforcement when under command of the US federal government. They can only do that when directed to do so by their state's governor.
But Trump provided zero details about how he might use the military. Zero.
He didn't say "i don't care about Posse Comitatus Act" or "I will personally deploy them as the Commander in Chief".
This is like someone saying "If I find out you stole my bike, I will come to your house and take it back" and people saying "oh my god, doesn't he know murder is illegal? you can't go into someone's house and kill them just because they stole from you!"
Assuming Trump will break the law when he nothing in his comments suggested he would AND he has legal channels with which to do it (send a formal request to a govenor), is not a reasonable nor logical thought process.
I don't recall the same hysteria when Obama said he was going to deploy troops to the Mexico border for law enforcement because of cartel violence.
He even said he will "continue to do what's necessary to secure our shared border." Whatever is necessary?!? Doesn't he know it's illegal for the President to deploy US troops inside the US?
Amazing how the media gives him a pass and is happy to explain how he'll do it all legally, but Trump makes a comment and the media (and HN) assume he's breaking law before he's even done anything.
That's why norms exist. Most previous presidents never would have had this problem in the first place because they would never suggest using US troops on citizens in the first place. If they needed to do something that even approached violating a norm, then they would go out of their way to affirm that they still supported the norm and to explain their actions. Obama was given more benefit of the doubt partially because he mostly followed norms.
By going out of his way to flout norms, Trump has brought this sort of mistrust and criticism on himself. Therefore, it's not really reasonable for his supporters to complain about it, it's exactly what they signed up for. Remember that Republicans style themselves as the party of personal responsibility.
The question: "Wait, who is threatening to use the US military against US citizens?"
The answer: Numerous examples of Trump threatening to use the US military against US citizens
The retort: He didn't explain exactly how he would do it, so it's not a threat.
> This is like someone saying "If I find out you stole my bike, I will come to your house and take it back" and people saying "oh my god, doesn't he know murder is illegal? you can't go into someone's house and kill them just because they stole from you!"
No, it's like someone saying I'm going to steal your bike, then you tell other people they said they're going to steal your bike, then someone else defends them arguing they didn't say how they were going to steal your bike so stop saying they said they're going to steal your bike.
Example? I was drunk for the entire administration. I don’t doubt he said some stupid shit, but I doubt he then doubled down and escalated consistently afterwards, with unquestioning support from his constituents.
> Trump makes a comment and the media (and HN) assume he's breaking law before he's even done anything.
Because he keeps breaking the law. Repeatedly. The better part of term in office this year has been spent violating the constitution, and lets not forget he's a convicted felon despite all the effort put towards making him immune from the law.
Hanlon's razor is reserved for people who don't demonstrate malice on a daily basis. They do not deserve the benefit of the doubt, they deserve the scourge of the certainty. I'm sure you can go back through your comments, find several instance where you've said something similar, and it later turned out the concerns were completely justified.
Edit: Didn't even have to go back a month:
"The Project 2025 that he disavowed? Do you want trying arguing with facts rather than some evil figment of your imagination?"
Of course, it was already ridiculous making that argument a month ago, and I'm sure you'll still say that's a figment of everyone's imaginations.
I think this is what people call the Mandela Effect. Below is an actual video in a presidential debate of Trump saying he had nothing to do with Project 2025, and yet you claim he never said that:
I did not claim he never said it. I’m claiming that it was an obvious lie. If words are the only thing that matters when judging a persons intentions, then that must apply to every person equally or else you’re objectively biased. But you already know that.
I don't see the comparison you are trying to make. Biden defined his entire political persona around centrism, bipartisanship, moderation, etc. He certainly made major mistakes (e.g. mismanaging the Afghan pullout, running for reelection); however, he didn't really display the cruelty or intolerance of different ways of life that is a core part of Trump's brand.
I mean, that might be how he defined his persona, but I don't think it's borne out by the facts. I think there was quite a lot of intolerance of anybody that didn't fit in with the left wing view of culture war issues espoused by his government.
He also oversaw numerous prosecutions of his political opponent, solely designed to stop him running.
> He also oversaw numerous prosecutions of his political opponent, solely designed to stop him running.
Odd conclusion. Why would you think solely? Are you familiar with the evidence in the documents case?
In the documents case, Trump clearly violated the law, based on evidence now in the public record. National security documents he was not entitled to were handled illegally, in ways that others have been prosecuted and convicted for. In really, really bad and scary ways, like nuclear-level secrets in an unlocked closet ways. With pictures. And videos. In the place he lets random foreign enemy political figures AND THEIR SECURITY STAFF run around.
The predominant reason someone like Biden or Bush doesn’t get prosecuted is because they don’t do this shit. Second, because of norms, they transparently cooperate when they make mistakes. Even still, Trump was handled with kid gloves. The documents prosecution took years and was ultimately a massive waste of time.
So if the sole reason was to disadvantage Trump, wasn’t it real dumb? Wouldn’t a more reasonable motivation be that the hundreds of elite law enforcement agents were doing their jobs / protect the country from a clear and present national security threat?
“this shit” was not a referent to mishandling classified material.
It was a referent to Trump having thousands of documents, including nuclear secrets and other SCIF material.
Please provide evidence of any of these other people doing it with nuclear secrets.
Please provide evidence of these other people risking national security by giving access to their sock drawers or email servers. Trump lets anyone into Mar A Lago. Anyone including known Chinese spies: https://www.npr.org/2019/09/11/759906611/chinese-woman-who-b...
The flagged subthread doing some whataboutery with drone strikes actually has a point that is relevant here; the War on Terror provided an erosion of rule of law, both in terms of normalized militarisation of society and in keeping places like Guantanamo Bay (US territory where US law basically doesn't apply) open.
The threatened immigration sweeps and the talk of removing birthright citizenship tie into this. If the troops are reluctant to be deployed against US citizens, simply make the people you want to deploy them against not US citizens any more.
Yeah this is my fear -- when we remove birthright citizenship, then suddenly you have to prove that your bloodline back to the Nth degree were citizens, or you have to prove yourself by some other way. So if someone or some group disagrees with what he is doing, he can simply add a requirement for citizenship that they can't meet and then they're not citizens.
The whole point of birthright citizenship is to create a clear, unambiguous means of testing if someone is a citizen so that people cannot be disenfranchised easily even by a hostile executive. If you can produce a birth certificate, you are a citizen end of discussion. As someone who disagrees with what is happening, my biggest fear is that myself, my son, or my family could be declared "not a citizen" and forcibly removed to some other country where we are also not citizens under a new system. This is not a good thing for the US.
HR22, the "SAVE act" is removing the birth certificate from viable documents for millions of people who have changed their names. If the person who changed their name does not get an updated birth certificate (most don't, like women after they marry and take their husbands last name), then they can no longer vote. This is many millions of regular naturally born citizens in the US.
He came damn close in his first term. I remember watching the Twitter video on June 1, 2020 - see the video: https://www.nbcnews.com/video/watch-helicopters-hover-low-ov... to see how low the helicopters were flying and the rotor wash was clearly intended to intimidate the protesters.
> In May 2020, protests emerged in the aftermath of the killing of George Floyd by a white police officer, as well as other incidents of police brutality against African Americans. In these protests there was in some cases significant property destruction and looting. In response, more than 20 states and the District of Columbia activated the National Guard to assist in stabilizing the situation.
> By June 1 Trump was reportedly ready to send 10,000 regular military troops to the streets — forces usually used in external conflict. He threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act, which would have allowed him to deploy the troops without the governors’ permission. Active-duty troops were brought to the Washington, D.C., area, including some from the immediate response force brigade of the Army’s 82nd Airborne Division. For a few days it looked like Trump might send in the troops, precipitating the retired officer commentary detailed below. Ultimately the president did not invoke the Insurrection Act and the troops were sent home.
Gotta love the current climate. Any time Trump says something terrible, you're guaranteed to find his supporters simultaneously arguing that he never said it and that it's a good thing that he said it.
Heh we had simultaneous protests by Trump supporters in 2020 to both “Stop the count!” and “Count the votes!” to either stop or continue counting mail-in ballots in different states. Among his ardent supporters, there is no truth except force.
https://projects.propublica.org/parler-capitol-videos/ - doesn't look like "walking through" the building to me. Source: I chaperoned a school group through the Capitol back in 2017 or so, and our tour did not look like this.
not to mention the brazen attempts to pressure states, specifically Georgia, to "find" enough votes to change the election outcome:
>>doesn't look like "walking through" the building to me.
Well we can certainly trust Pro Publica to pick the most peaceful examples, but we don't really need the videos of what happened outside. The White House finally, after being forced, released the internal camera footage. I don't think that shows any coup attempts.
There is also the "pipe bomb" that got memory-holed, and the role of FBI provocateurs that isn't fully explored yet.
They didn't pick any examples, they pulled all the footage that was available off of Parler. There are plenty of footage from inside the building in that link from the rioters themselves- not sure what you mean?
There were federal personnel among the rioters, but they weren't, to any evidence, either FBI or provocateurs (there were both active-duty military intelligence personnel and at least one DEI agent arrested and charged.)
"FBI provocateurs" seems to be one of the mutually contradictory stories adopted by the MAGA cult (alongside "it was a violent riot -- but by Antifa", "and it was MAGA, but it was peaceful, no different than tourism".)
Ok? Your point is? The fbi also allegedly paid infiltrators into the blm protests. https://www.yahoo.com/news/fbi-paid-informant-sow-discord-00.... The fbi has a long history of infiltrating what they consider to be “extreme” groups - going back decades.
It is unacceptable that there have been no arrests for the pipe bombs. Do I think that’s evidence of some sort of deep state cover up “false flag” operation? Nope.
How does that in any way answer the question of how Jan 6 was supposedly a coup?
Also there were massive problems with Georgia's election process in 2020, nobody denies that today so why should we keep using the least charitable interpetation possible of Trump's words?
What were the massive problems? The transcript clearly indicates Trump was only interested insofar as obtaining just enough votes to overturn the election. If he truly cared about election integrity, he wouldn't emphasize the exact number of votes he needed to win.
Yes, that was evil. If your point is that both Obama and Trump are criminals who deserve imprisonment rather than full throated defense and endorsement, I am in complete agreement.
Ironically, the military seems to foster a more liberal culture than the tech industry. I have been reprimanded for disobeying orders a few times, and seen colleagues put on PIPs and fired after a couple of months. Most "fast-growing" companies resemble an absolute monarchy.
"Fast growing" companies pretend to be the friendly, accepting, and understanding, but usually comes with a dark side where it's hard for them to point out small issues early and correct them. Because that's "negative" and doesn't jive "we're nice and friendly" image. So they keep sweeping issues under the rug until it's too late, and even then, they can't let someone go and need to pretend like they really want to keep them with PIP, while everyone knows it's bullshit to cover their ass, and person will be 100% out of there.
> Most "fast-growing" companies resemble an absolute monarchy.
Which explains why the tech bros are currently trying to install what's effectively a monarchy in the US federal government. Companies are inherently non democratic, so it's kind of bad that they're trying to install the same thing federally.
The founding fathers installed the monarchy. They simply thought that they could control it by making it non-heritable. The US president had more power than King George from the very beginning and certainly has more now.
Universally, articles that attempt to advance these views tend to be politically and morally chaotic.
Their recommendations are always vague and therefore open to political exploitation. Ignored or amplified when expedient and when someone with an actual stake has something on the line.
Cowardly.
Question: in a public bureaucracy that is always naturally intent on protecting itself but which also has rules and a judiciary, who is responsible for ignoring or amplifying intentionally vague external standards of morality? Political actors, perhaps?
The sum effects seem to be the desire to leave lower level ranks politically vulnerable and threatened by non-military political actors. And therefore perhaps to undermine the military hierarchy in general, with implied threats.
I agree that there are likely times to not follow orders, but the rules surrounding when that is to be the case cannot be vague whatsoever. Those times can not be subject to significant interpretation if we are to see such critiques as honest and not underhanded.
> I agree that there are likely times to not follow orders, but the rules surrounding when that is to be the case cannot be vague whatsoever. Those times can not be subject to significant interpretation if we are to see such critiques as honest and not underhanded.
You cannot capture all possible scenarios with full nuance in a rule-book. And even if you somehow could, you cannot expect people to memorize all of it. The world is just too complex.
By nature it has to be vague because reality is vague.
I don’t understand the point. We are all free to disobey and have to deal with the consequences. It can’t be otherwise. Nobody can pass as an automaton.
But at the same time, obedience, discipline and chain-of-command are ingrained in military culture (do correct me if I'm wrong, my main sources are movies and propaganda). But also trust, trust that e.g. your commanding officer knows what they're doing, considered the risks, and takes responsibility. They too in turn make decisions based on what they know / are told; if there's civilians in a target but intelligence doesn't say so, are you or your chain of command guilty of a war crime?
Not sure if you read Generation Kill or watched the miniseries, but that is one of the main points. In there, there were two platoon commanders, Lieutenant Fick and Captain America(The book never reveals its name, and I think the series does, but I don't recall at this moment). While Lieutenant Fick was a competent officer that tried to kept the welfare of his troops, he often butted heads with its direct superiors since the order given to him could endanger the lives of his subordinates while not accomplishing nothing of value. In contrast Captain America, was an incompetent officer who gave reckless orders, was ignored by his troops and could have been possibly be charged with war crimes. At the end of the series, when the journalist is interviewing the battalion commander about why Captain America was never disciplined for his actions, the battalion commander answers that the same leeway that he gave to Lieutenant Fick was given to Captain America. In other words if he were to punish Captain America, he should also be punishing Lieutenant Fick. In retrospective is understandable, but when you read or watch it, you wonder why no action is being taken to discipline Captain America and why no one listens to Lieutenant Fick
Having spent a bit of time working with the British army, I'd say there's a lot of pushback, either overt or covert. They even by doctrine have someone nominated in group decisions as the person who will play devil's advocate, to try and reduce groupthink, as groupthink is bad and they know it.
If you did not know civilians were present, it is very unlikely you will be charged under the UCMJ. Here is an article from Human Rights Watch about the lack of consequences https://www.hrw.org/news/2022/01/25/lost-innocents.
With regards to movies, remember prior to the modern era many soldiers and seaman were forced to serve against their will. Discipline was brutal. In the British American War of 1812, one of the reasons for war was the forced impressment of American sailors into the British Navy. British Admiral Horatio Nelson acknowledged the critical role of impressment in maintaining the British Navy’s manpower. In 1803, he reported that over 42,000 sailors had deserted since 1793, highlighting the challenges of crew retention. He stated, “Without a press, I have no idea how our Fleet can be manned.”
https://www.nps.gov/articles/impressment.htm
It was Prussia’s Moltke the Elder who recognized the complexity of modern war and the need for officers to think independently. “Subordinates would have to use initiative and independent judgment for the forces to be effective in battle. Campaign and battle plans should encourage and take advantage of the decentralization that would be necessary in any case. In this new concept, commanders of distant detachments were required to exercise initiative in their decision-making and Moltke emphasized the benefits of developing officers who could do this within the limits of the senior commander's intent.”. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helmuth_von_Moltke_the_Elder
With all that said, it all comes down to personal conscience. Of deciding what is right and wrong.
One thing that confuses me about the current situation in the US government, is why more more people in the various government agencies aren't pushing back against all these executive orders. Especially, those that are clearly illegal, or unconstitutional.
"I expect that you will eventually find somebody who is foolish enough or enough of a coward to file your motion, but it was never going to be me." - SDNY Prosecutor resigning after being asked to drop the Eric Adams corruption case. The people who would push back are resigning as their last resort. Soon anybody who has any sense of fidelity to the rule of law or the constitution will be removed from power.
Resigning or being fired, like the USAID inspector general: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/feb/11/trump-federa...
Resignation is quitting before the fight. Make them fire you and file suit for wrongful termination.
Not everyone has the appetite for litigation. It can be expensive in cash, time, and relationships. Anyone supporting a family will need to consider the effect it will have on the family. We aren't all brave enough to fight against such a powerful adversary even if no one else would be negatively affected by doing it.
Of course population level passivity in the end allows the adversary to win but it's hard to be the first to stand on the front line.
Litigation is absolutely horrible. There is a reason they say "you can't fight city hall."
The gov will burn itself down to fight you in court. They generally don't like to settle because losing just means they may have to raise taxes or insurance premiums. No gov attorney is likely to actually lose their job because they fought too long or hard and lost.
As I understand it, they like to settle with non-disclosure agreements.
Very common. This often stops the amount being put in the court records, but having settled one recently I think it is hard to hide these payouts from an informed, determined member of the public.
For instance, my settlement had to go through the financial committee of the county. Which means the lawsuit was scheduled as a line item in a televised public debate. Also, you could at least FOIA the bank records to a degree and reverse-engineer any payouts.
A properly scathing resignation letter catches media attention better than anything you say after being fired, which would be interpreted by many as whining.
They lead with firing a ton of the people in semi-independent executive branch offices that are suppose to raise red flags (in an advisory role, and formally putting the brakes on things if that's not enough) if the admin tries to do illegal stuff. Like, that was among their first actions.
They've been clearing out people who might resist before they get a chance to, and have made it clear that your life's gonna be messed up (your career's over, if nothing else, which is a pretty big deal for normal non-billionaires) if you rock the boat.
The only major, public resistance has been over dropping the prosecution of NY's mayor, and the first of the prosecutors to resign received a letter promising retaliation against other members of her office and that she'd have an investigation launched against her, which, even if it goes nowhere, is basically promising to make someone's life hell for the next year or so. They're looking to hurt people who don't play along, so others just shut up and do what they're told.
We haven't seen them going after political opponents (Democrats or Republicans who don't nod along to every single thing—and business leaders, this isn't limited to politicians) but nearly everyone in DC and in big business is a bit dirty and I wouldn't be surprised if we start seeing very selective investigations and prosecutions of things that everyone had kinda agreed to overlook up until now (and that may be far from the most-severe corruption going on), that they don't even pretend aren't aimed at getting everyone else to stay in line and go along with the agenda, legality be damned. They've got the access to do it and there are some indications DOGE and pals are starting to poke around in things like tax records.
Maybe there should be, but there’s no such thing as a semi-independent branch. Whoever told you so is either trying to mislead you or hasn’t read the constitution.
In the US, there are just 3 branches. Unless you work for congress or the courts, you work for the executive branch.
They said branch offices
Yep, especially inspectors general.
These folks:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inspector_General_Act_of_197...
Also some not-quite-just-serving-at-the-president’s-pleasure folks (according to the law, anyway) directors & other positions, notably the director of OGE.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Office_of_Gove...
Hasn't risen to the point where the people perpetrating the crimes are credibly threatened with violence. People are still gambling on the nonviolent options.
Don’t be so sure they’re all unconstitutional. Read A2S1. Read Humphrey’s Executor and try not to snicker.
What is A2S1?
They do. It wont matter unless there is prosecution.
Prosecution? Of the president who just last year got wide-ranging immunity from the Supreme Court? Or of his right-hand guy who allegedly does nothing without the president's OK?
Look, I agree with you on all points: politically, about rule of law being destroyed and also about Supreme Court being knowingly complicit. But, pushback is happening and is ignore. And it wont make change this year, not until actual catastrophe happens to America itself. Pushback can slow down descent, it can achieve improvements in the long term.
Lasting change for the better could happen only if it was possible to prosecute actual crimes that happen. As long as these are immune (which they are), things will only get worst.
And as long as half of Americans are determined to euphemism away and both side away and twist themselves into pretzels to enable and excuse, things wont get better. And then it will take massive amount of reforms to make things good again. And pretty much all the totally not pro-Trump people full off infinite benefit of the doubt towards him will suddenly loose it.
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I'd be interested in hearing from former service members who have also worked in "tech" companies: Which is more authoritarian?
I'm guessing the answer is tech companies, esp. the modern version of such. Modern military officers tend to give a lot of leeway & empowerment to subordinates so that mission-building can be more opportunistic and adjustable. Tech companies tend to eviscerate anyone who dares contradict someone of higher rank.
In my experience, tech suffers from short term thinking and is not concerned about long term consequences.
In the military it is a privilege to be given responsibility over a group of men and women. At least for me, I was very aware of these issues. I was a believer in the “God” camp. There is a noticeable contingent of US military who wear their religious beliefs on their sleeves. It is complicated but at least for me, morality occupied my mind all the time.
I've seen plenty of bureaucratic stupidity and shenanigans in 20 years of active and reserve service. But in my personal experience, corporate America is even more hidebound, top-down, and unimaginative than everyone in it thinks the military is. Disclaimer: I don't work for a "tech" company; I work in tech for a non-"tech" company.
Even in peacetime, the Navy will launch 25 jets off an aircraft carrier off the coast of San Diego. They will be expected to go practice an opposed strike on a target in a range complex east of Reno, including multiple aerial refuelings and navigating the civilian airspace system. They will be expected to hit their target within seconds of the planned time. And they will be expected to come back and land on an aircraft carrier, at night, on the first pass.
And all the details of this kind of operation, from weapons planning to fuel planning to "who talks to whom on what radio net for what purposes" to flat-out "how do we simulate combat without anyone being killed in a midair collision" take place under the aegis of a bunch of twentysomething and thirtysomething junior officers led by a few thirtysomething (or maybe fortysomething) middle managers.
Plan-Brief-Execute-Debrief. Like a Scrum shop, except the iterations are 24 hours long and the penalty for sloppiness could potentially involve flames, wreckage, and death.
For an interesting book-length treatment of this topic, see When Soldiers Say No: Selective Conscientious Objection in the Modern Military, which examines both the philosophical arguments for and against and a selection of case studies from around the world.
https://www.routledge.com/When-Soldiers-Say-No-Selective-Con...
The problem is, everyone says 'I won't follow an order if it is illegal', but it never starts out as big-evil™ 'illegal', it's something trivial, and you tell yourself that you'll do it rather than kick up a fuss, because they might just fire you if you push back on using torrented material as training material.
There's a possibility a free officers' movement would be good for the US, but I'm not banking on it.
The Carnation Revolution in Portugal overthrew the fascist government there and ushered in an improved though not perfect political system.
https://portuguesemuseum.org/?page_id=1808&exhibit=31&event=...
https://jacobin.com/2019/04/portugal-carnation-revolution-na...
I don't really have great faith that there is a set of left leaning military officers in the U.S. though.
Anyway, interesting article. It always striking to me just how significant the military is in formulating policy. There is a strong tension there that is often not acknowledged. Good to see people wrestling with it.
They don’t need to be left leaning.
Are you sure about that?
You can never be sure, but I don’t think support for Trump’s regime is a left/right issue.
It shouldn't be, but unfortunately it is, with only a few exceptions.
If you read up-page in some of the other threads you'll find some right/libetarian people who are also against Trump because of how he's pushing us into authoritarianism.
Good for them on actually paying attention to their principles. The overall alignment is still quite clear, though.
Yes, right libertarians often oppose right authoritarianism, but that doesn't transform support or opposition to right authoritarianism to something that has no left/right valence.
Well yeah, in a consensus-based process you have to accept that not everyone is going to agree with you all the time. But you do have to try to push forward on things where there is consensus. There was a county committee that had a libertarian on it who would often advocate from a libertarian standpoint, whereas the people the committee affected were often more left/collectivist. However, he found himself briefly aligned with the rest of the group when a county official tried to do something that was against the law.
Dude, what is your point? We're pointing out a trend and you keep trying to counter by pointing out exceptions. It's the nature of real-life trends to have exceptions, so their existence doesn't even come close to invalidating the model.
"Left/right" is always at best an approximation, because the space of political ideology is multidimensional, and because differences in praxis (how to achieve the goals set by ideology) will often be as signficant in people's support for or opposition to concrete regimes as differences in ideology, but the Trump regime definitely is suppported much more on the right and opposed much more on the left.
fwiw my comment was not solely about trump, the parties are both undemocratic and do not serve the people
Why?
I didn’t say it was balanced. But look at what happened at SDNY last week. Several conservative prosecutors went against the DOJ.
We've had 2 military coups in Brazil that immediately implemented a constitutional government and called elections. (One was against an autocratic constitutional monarchy... go figure... but it was on the direction of more democracy so it counts.)
In a total of 5 military coups if I'm not forgetting any...
I have a theory, that the military are only interested enough on democracy after they come back from fighting against some dictatorship. Otherwise they are bad news.
What you say makes a lot of sense. The carnation revolution happened when officers in portugal had been to the colonies and started learning from the people they were colonizing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasily_Arkhipov https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Petrov
The author of that has been at the sharp end and has been a senior commander.
There are two kinds of expected disobedience to orders in the US military. One is disobeying an illegal order, such as one to shoot prisoners. The other is doing what needs to be done to accomplish the mission despite conflicting orders. The second is why military orders have a "Commander's Intent" section. If the situation on the ground is not what was expected when the order was give, officers are expected to adapt to the new situation and overcome problems. Here's Army Chief of Staff Mark Milley writing about that back in 2017.[1] That was not about the moral issue, but the operational issues when command is messed up.
Milley faced the moral issue when he was Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Trump lost the election.
Here's the US officer's oath:
"I ___, do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter. So help me God."
German military oath, before Hitler:
"I swear by God this holy oath, that I want to ever loyally and sincerely serve my people and fatherland and be prepared as a brave and obedient soldier to risk my life for this oath at any time."
After Hitler:
"I swear by God this holy oath that I shall render unconditional obedience to the Leader of the German Reich and people, Adolf Hitler, supreme commander of the armed forces, and that as a brave soldier I shall at all times be prepared to give my life for this oath."
[1] https://www.army.mil/article/187293/future_warfare_requires_...
And here's the US Army oath of enlistment https://www.army.mil/values/oath.html
> "I, _____, do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; and that I will obey the orders of the President of the United States and the orders of the officers appointed over me, according to regulations and the Uniform Code of Military Justice. So help me God."
Note that the enlisted soldiers' oath includes "I will obey the orders of the President of the United States" which the officers' oath doesn't.
That is because commissioned officers are especially responsible for upholding the Constitution as opposed to swearing an oath to one person or a group of people.
As it was told to me, the part about swearing the oath to the constitution comes before the President, and it is understood by all service-members that said word order very much matters. In that, if the President gives an unconstitutional order, your honor demands that you follow the constitution.
Also, that '(or affirm)' bit is interesting too. It's there because some religions prohibit swearing, most notably in US history, the Quakers. In fact, a few Quaker presidents have refused to swear during inaugurations and have chosen to affirm instead, I think.
I assume that the paragraph called «after hitler» is more appropriately called «during hitler» or similar.
Do you know what the current path is on Germany? (I don’t, honest question!)
(Edited typo)
„Ich schwöre, der Bundesrepublik Deutschland treu zu dienen und das Recht und die Freiheit des deutschen Volkes tapfer zu verteidigen, so wahr mir Gott helfe.“
I swear to serve the Federal Republic of Germany faithfully and to bravely defend the rights and freedom of the German people, so help me God.”
No mention of 'obey' in the German one.
No, that part is in the law about the armed forces. And I remember distinctly from my compulsory service that we got extensive lectures about the legality of orders and when to disregard them (and report further up the chain of command), with examples.
I shared a book in another comment[0] which contains an entire chapter[1] on the topic of (dis)obedience in the German Bundeswehr, which has a more permissive approach to individual objection than many comparable armies.
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43087041
[1]: https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/97813155... (available on Google Scholar at https://scholar.googleusercontent.com/scholar?q=cache:H0ZxVD...)
> I assume that the paragraph called «after hitler» is more appropriately called «during hitler» or similar.
What? Why would they change it? ;D
On a more serious note, swearing allegiance to someone who's not alive isn't really much of an issue; it's basically the same thing as the US oath to "the Constitution".
>>Milley faced the moral issue when he was Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Trump lost the election
And sadly he failed the test.
> And sadly he failed the test.
Perhaps less than you think:
https://archive.is/https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/arch...
No, he 100% failed the test.
Well yes, clearly in terms of supporting and defending the Constitution, the military should have shown up to defend the capitol in far more timely manner.
But honestly, as a foreigner I was just glad the military didn't come down on the side of Trump. As I understand it the leaders of the military are appointed by the president, people in the military love guns and gun rights, and veterans are pro-Trump by a wide margin [1] even following Jan 6th.
[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/09/30/military-...
> As I understand it the leaders of the military are appointed by the president, people in the military love guns and gun rights, and veterans are pro-Trump by a wide margin [1] even following Jan 6th.
This is a caricature that is as broad-brushed and offensive as claiming gay men all flounce around in assless chaps, and I say that with 20 years active and reserve service. Even in that poll (which I am curious about their methodology), 40% of veterans supported Harris, and my experience is that the military is a cross-section of society. I'm deeply skeptical that the modern military is as skewed towards one party as this poll would indicate. I highly suspect it is being skewed by either bad methodology or else by including a bunch of older veterans from WWII, Korea, Vietnam, and the Gulf War, who would skew Republican. The military I served in was a diverse cross-section of broadly middle-class American society.
And the leaders of the military are commissioned officers who are formally appointed by the President, but their oath is to the Constitution. And military leaders have served through bipartisan administrations . . . my own service was under W. Bush, Obama, Trump, and Biden, and today's senior leaders also would have served under Clinton and possibly H. W. Bush. There is no MAGA cabal in military senior leadership; the opposite if anything.
And just because someone "loves guns and gun rights" doesn't automatically put them in the MAGA column.
>and offensive as claiming gay men all flounce around in assless chaps
I agree they are painting with a broad and inaccurate brush but to compare it to the stereotypes queer people have to endure, especially in the current social/cultural moment playing out in the US, is honestly far more offensive IMO. Those two situations are not on the same playing field. People in the armed forces (who aren't LGBT) do not know what it's like at all to be judged like the queer community.
The point isn't to belittle or minimize discrimination against LGBT people. The point is to try to get someone who presumably supports LGBT rights to understand how it comes across to still make prejudiced remarks against other groups of people by comparing it to another well-worn and offensive stereotype.
It may not have been the point of your comment but it was the result regardless. It’s a really poor comparison that, intentionally or not, minimizes the LGBT experience.
The (yes incorrect) perception that the militarily is overwhelmingly conservative/republican doesn’t have some massively outsized (often negative) impact on your life akin to being queer in the US.
Some other surveys have produced some weird patterns, like [1] which said men in the military were Republican by roughly a 2:1 margin, while women in the military were Democrat by roughly a 2:1 margin - but there are a lot more men than women in the military.
And [2] says, in an analysis of voting precincts that map closely onto military bases, "On average, Mr Trump still won these precincts, though his margin shrank by nearly half. Patrick Air Force Base—located on Florida’s Atlantic coast and since renamed Patrick Space Force Base—supported Mr Trump by a 17-point margin in 2016. By 2020, his lead there shrank to 11 points."
So it may be more even among active duty military than among veterans, but an 11 point margin is still a win. Expecting that in a brawl they'd come out swinging on the Democrat side to me seemed naive, which is why them staying out of it seemed better than nothing.
[1] https://www.militarytimes.com/news/pentagon-congress/2018/10... [2] https://archive.is/v6qOf#selection-1067.0-1069.342
The leaders of the American military love the constitution, and one relatively small thing on it is gun rights.
Sure - the gun rights stuff is just me saying it makes sense why the military could skew Republican. The linked survey saying veterans are 61% pro-Trump vs 37% pro-Harris sounds plausible.
Loving the constitution is all very well, but Republican voters and senators seem to manage to square that with supporting Trump. Makes no sense to me, but apparently to 50% of the American population it does.
So IMHO the military could plausibly have backed a Trump coup, if the coup had been better planned. And I was glad when they didn't!
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Trump intended to stay in power although he lost the election. As long as we agree on that, I don't see how you could not call it a coup. It only failed because there still were some people with a backbone around, among them Mike Pence. There are fewer of them this time.
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There's that love of the constitution squared with supporting Trump that I was mentioning.
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Anyone who doesn’t have “Trump Derangement Syndrome” at this point is either a fool or a deliberate fool.
Loyalty and obedience are excellent traits for a dog, not a human.
Interesting. This goes some way to addressing an issue I had been wondering about recently. I am a UK citizen, not US, so have little familiarity with US military. With the recent news on Trump declaring that Greenland should belong to the US I was wondering what the US military would do if ordered to carry out an unprovoked attack on an allied nation. This does seem to suggest that there is a very real possibility that they could refuse.
> This does seem to suggest that there is a very real possibility that they could refuse.
Not at all, on a societal level the US has been increasingly constructed as a huge, intricate, Prisoner's Dilemma where everyone, allegedly, has all to lose and noone, allegedly, has a say in the matter, therefore everyone complies with whatever the system, or media, asks of them.
Everyone thinks they're the victim, everyone thinks civic duty is something the oppressor is responsible for, not them personally, therefore everyone is free to be an oppressor themselves.
This problem will be intensified whenever, as we've seen elsewhere, the military starts being transformed from within and sycophants are put in positions of power.
This seems like a very interesting comment, if only I could make sense of it. Could you elaborate and/or give examples of what you're describing?
There is freedom of speech or freedom to disobey on paper. But most people cannot use these, because the system is set up so that they'll be fired, disgraced and probably barred from future jobs.
It is fine and encouraged to say "Trump is an idiot" or "Harris is an idiot", but better think twice before engaging with actual issues like whistleblowing or disobeying an unlawful order.
Just watch how topics of poor white MAGA voters who are being sold out are avoided and flagged on all sides. No one wants to hear about that. People like Bannon (a millionaire) can make some performative speeches, but nothing will happen.
> Just watch how topics of poor white MAGA voters who are being sold out are avoided and flagged on all sides. No one wants to hear about that.
What are you talking about here? Please share more about this.
I think you need to better define the order. It is unlikely to simply be to "attack" Greenland. If they were ordered to make landfall and establish a base of operations, that is very different from bombing military or civilian targets.
The U.S. already has a base of operations on Greenland, under agreement with Denmark:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pituffik_Space_Base
An unprovoked invasion of a foreign country is a legal order.
No, congress would have to declare war first. Article I, Section 8.
> No, congress would have to declare war first. Article I, Section 8.
Article I, Section 8 gives Congress the sole power to declare war, it does not, on its own, prohibit any other action than "declaring war" to any other actor.
The War Powers Act (or Resolution) attempts to put some additional rules around this (note that it is widely seen as being either an unconstitutional intrusion on Presidential authority or an unconstitutional delegation of Congressional authority, and courts have so far failed to resolve it, having found lack of standing in the few cases that have been brought under it.)
But even the War Powers Act doesn't purport to prohibit the President from using force in advance of Congressional authorization.
> it does not, on its own, prohibit any other action than "declaring war" to any other actor.
That's why it will be a "Special Military Operation in Greenland" or "SMO in Canada".
Recent history has shown this to be flexible. See Grenada, Nicaragua, Iraq I, Iraq II, and others
Only in the second gulf war did the US become an occupying force, and this action was permitted by congress. The others may have been “invasions” but certainly not occupations or annexations. I could be wrong, but I don’t see congress allowing Trump to destroy NATO.
take note of the last 20 years. special military operation.
It would still require congressional approval after 60 days, unless Al Qaida suddenly showed up in Greenland. Despite congress being majority R, I just don’t see them playing along with this.
Trump says these things to get a rise out of people. He’s fueled by reaction. You can’t tell if he’s ever being serious, and I doubt even he knows if he’s being serious most of the time. Getting enraged by his actions is his goal, and he’s very good at playing his opponents into blunders this way. Best to not play along.
> It would still require congressional approval after 60 days
"After 60 days" is very different from "first".
And, since the President can unilaterally extend the timeline by 30 days, its actually 90 days, even if the War Powers Act is valid (an unresolved Constitutional question.)
And, in practice, it doesn't even require that if you don't have active majorities in Congress opposing the action; see the NATO-Yugoslavia war and the failure of legal challenges by members of Congress against it predicated on the War Powers Act limitations, because of lack of standing.
> unless Al Qaida suddenly showed up in Greenland
If invading Greenland was an actual real goal, something like this would definitely "happen", to manufacture the necessary pretext. Way cheaper than the alternatives.
First time, huh?
This is one of many concerns. Any party loyalty should be trumped by loyalty to the country.
Mark Twain — 'Loyalty to country ALWAYS. Loyalty to government, when it deserves it.'
In democracy government is for the country/people and not the other way round.
Trump thinks the same way. So far he has not disobeyed court orders, but if he does he will do so for the same reason you would disobey him: because he thinks he's doing right for the country.
That's the thing, everyone who disobeys thinks they're doing the right thing.
Nothing he is doing or will do is being done because it is "right for the country". He is purposely trying to destabilize America so that he can rule as a king over the ashes.
“L'État, c'est moi” -- Louis XIV, King of France
Translation: "I am the state"
History is a fascinating subject, you should read up on how his reign played out.
> So far he has not disobeyed court orders,
Actually, yes he has. The courts have ordered funds released, he has not complied.
And he has publicly attacked the courts for trying to stop him.
You may believe that he is right to disobey the court, and I'd be much happier if his defenders were honest enough to actually look at facts
Here are some stories on Fox News showing that trump isn't complying. Note the source. Fox isn't known as a haven of liberals.
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/trump-administration-appeal... https://www.foxnews.com/politics/trump-100-disagrees-federal...
Trump has never done anything for anyone over doing what's right for himself.
The article leans heavily on the word disobedience, but I think it would serve discussion more to emphasize the idea of a 'grey area' to distinguish it better from out-right disobedience. When the author was in tactical command of forces and made decisions to use resources or take actions contrary to stated orders there could have been an argument that the assumptions those orders were given under were found to be wrong and that adapting was crucial to achieving the stated commander's objectives. That would be different than disobeying the order to cover 'USS John S. McCain' when Trump was visiting. No matter how despicable that order was, it was clear that the commander's intent and objectives were being achieved by doing that and that it was a lawful order so to not carry it out would be outright disobedience and not a defensible grey area. Or to put it another way, I highly doubt the author would have lasted more than 1 second after they said 'no' had they been C7F or any of the CO's in the chain that got the order and passed it on when it came out.
Well yea, they teach you in officer’s schools that disobeying an illegal order probably won’t turn out well for you immediately, but it’s your duty. You will get punished sometimes, but if the order goes against the law and your morals, then you have to disobey it. Covering the McCain ship name probably isn’t worth disobeying, but firing on civilians is definitely worth any cost to yourself to disobey.
...Do you honestly think somebody's gonna get up on the floor of the United States Senate, and ask for billions of dollars for a couple of forgotten ghosts?
Trautman: Men, Goddamn it! Men... who fought for their country!
Murdock: That's enough! Trautman, I'm gonna forget this conversation ever took place.
Trautman: You bastard!
Murdock: And if I were you... I'd never make the mistake of bringing this subject up again.
Trautman: Oh you're the one who's making the mistake.
Murdock: Yeah? What mistake?
Trautman: Rambo.
I learned recently that this and all the other MIA/POW focused media of the era was based on a conspiracy theory that traces back to a Nixon press conference that tried to reframe Vietnam into a rescue mission for imprisoned soldiers who probably didn't exist to improve support at home.
https://theoutline.com/post/7984/rambo-last-blood-vietnam-bo...
The other tiny detail I liked was the real life POW-rescuing Rambo-type figure was used as the basis of the Hannibal character in the A-team show.
It’s disturbing how much of the current US political landscape—the fundamental social/perceived-historical identities of the two parties, which are one of two things that determine how people actually vote, the other being “does it seem like (seem like) bad things are happening right now?”, see Democracy for Realists—is based on straight-up fiction. A lot of it from the Nixon and Reagan administrations and associated propaganda efforts, but extending into the Clinton (lies about local work-requirement experiments for benefits being amplified and driving policy, on top of a bunch of 70s and 80s era lies about how those programs work that are to this day considered true by tons of people) and of course Bush II admins. It’s impossible to even start to talk about serious policy with a mixed and representative group of people in the US because you have to start with trying to de-program all the horse shit and wild misconceptions most of them have internalized, and that’s a tall order all on its own.
This is a good article and it's not just about the new administration threatening to use the US military against US citizens, it's also and perhaps more about all recent administrations putting personnel into unwinnable and dangerous situations because they won't resource it sufficiently. Why put lives on the line for political desires you know cannot be achieved by politicians who refuse to listen?
> Why put lives on the line for political desires you know cannot be achieved by politicians who refuse to listen?
If the US and Russia negotiate a treaty in Ukraine without Ukraine or the EUs agreement, we could end up in a situation with US troops squaring off against EU/Ukraine military in order to enforce the treaty. Feels like everyone loses except maybe Russia.
I wonder how widely this question is asked.
Wait, who is threatening to use the US military against US citizens?
The current president has previously spoken of it multiple times [0, 1] and has already authorized domestic military deployments, albeit not against citizens [2].
[0] https://www.cnn.com/2024/10/13/politics/trump-military-enemy...
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/elections/2024/10/24/trump-mi...
[2] https://www.military.com/daily-news/2025/01/27/here-are-all-...
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The parent asked a question and I answered as neutrally as possible. I welcome suggestions on how I could have been even more colorlessly neutral, but I suspect that phrases like "radical left lunatics" would be counterproductive to that neutrality even in quotation.
I don't see how that changes anything. Especially since in practice "rioting" tends to mean "a protest that the police or those in power don't like".
All of those situations still have the problems associated with deploying the military against civilians: The military isn't trained to carry out appropriate law enforcement. It compromises trust in and support for the military. It tends to be used disproportionately against the left rather than the right. It is easily abused to suppress dissent. Etc.
> The military isn't trained to carry out appropriate law enforcement.
On the other hand, nor are the police.
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> Rioting is rioting and not protesting.
This doesn't seem to hold well in practice.
> The moment protestors cross over to vandalism and violence, they're rioters and not mere protesters.
And this seem to be usually applied collectively (in obvious opposition to basic human rights) in practice. Often in cases where the violence wasn't done by the protesters and even in cases where the violence was against the protesters.
Also, police has a really shitty history of capturing and holding into account the actual violent people. They usually go free for turning the next protest violent too.
And both happen again and again, all over the world.
> Often in cases where the violence wasn't done by the protesters and even in cases where the violence was against the protesters.
Also very possible that the state actors are the ones beginning the violence which is well documented to have happened during the Troubles in Northern Ireland.
The point still stands that the choice of response should be appropriate, and there are several choices between inaction and deployment of the military.
I agree that January 6 was a riot.
So then 0 and 1 would indeed satisfy "using the US military against US citizens".
(When the National Guard is under the command of the federal government, rather than state governor, they are, obligation- and restriction-wise, the same as the US military.)
> 0 was talking about stopping Election Day interference from "radical left lunatics", and he suggested the national guard first
Oh good, no government has ever tried to justify authoritarian policies via scapegoating their political opponents as being "radical" and requiring force to suppress. Thanks for clearing that up!
According to Trumps longest serving chief of staff, John Kelly, he regularly needed to be talked down from using the military on citizens:
> Mr. Kelly said that Mr. Trump was repeatedly told dating back to his first year in office why he should not use the U.S. military against Americans and the limits on his authority to do so. Mr. Trump nevertheless continued while in office to push the issue and claim that he did have the authority to take such actions, Mr. Kelly said.
From his Oct 2024 interview with NYT: https://web.archive.org/web/20250213113815/https://www.nytim...
I found it helpful to have that one line summary without following the link.
Upvoted because it provide more context, not because I agree these are good reason.
National guard members are subject to the restrictions imposed by Posse Comitatus when on Title 10 orders. National Guard members can only perform domestic law enforcement duties when under the command of a state's governor and TAG.
Putting active duty military members on Title 10 orders, such those of the 82nd Airborne Division which reporting indicates Trump also wanted to use in 2020, would also be an obvious violation of Posse Comitatus if those troops were used to arrest, surveil, or otherwise control protestors. Active duty troops may perform in a supporting function for domestic law enforcement, such as by providing engineering, logistics, or communications to law enforcement, which is what US troops do when they're on the border (or when they are supporting counter-smuggling operations).
If the Roman Senate's law says the army can't cross the Rubicon river, and anyone who does lead an army across will be executed - then that's the law.
But if an army actually crosses the Rubicon? Turns out that law doesn't count for much when the other guy has an army, and all the senators have to flee the country.
Then the guy with the army is in charge. He can retrospectively legalise his actions, grant himself a pardon, and fill recently-vacated positions of power with allies who'll sign it all off.
So while the exact details of "Title 10" and "Posse Comitatus" are very important to an army before they cross the Rubicon - if they do cross the Rubicon the law will suddenly turn out to be far more flexible than anyone expected, and it'll turn out their actions were legal after all.
You are making an important and fatal mistake: you are confusing law and power.
Caesar's civil war was illegal under the laws of the Roman Republic. Caesar successfully took power, so there was no one to enforce those laws, but he did break them, and ultimately, the Republic. As far as I know Caesar never even bothered legitimizing his war or self-pardoning - he didn't need to, he won and the Senate made him dictator for life.
> So while the exact details of "Title 10" and "Posse Comitatus" are very important to an army before they cross the Rubicon - if they do cross the Rubicon the law will suddenly turn out to be far more flexible than anyone expected, and it'll turn out their actions were legal after all.
This is very important: only if they win will their illegal actions go without punishment, and winning is not guaranteed.
There is a reason we generally prefer the rule of law to the rule of power.
I don't think michaelt was confused; I think he was making the exact point that you are.
The Insurrection Act[1] is still in force. The President can legally suspend Posse Comitatus with a simple proclamation and then he can use federalized Guard or regular troops to enforce law as he pleases.
Article II and Congress have invested absolutely vast powers in the Presidency. The main check on their exercise is not Congress, or the Judiciary, or even the Deep State, but rather just traditions. Unfortunately, both parties have been attenuating those traditions for many administrations.
I don't think we're going to see the US government morph, Roman style, into a new form of government that's only nominally a republic. I think it's already happened quite some time ago. And just like in ancient Rome, most people have no idea it happened, because it will continue to use the same legal structure, just applied in new and interesting ways.
What we're seeing now is the struggle between two factions of the elites over who controls this new system.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insurrection_Act_of_1807
> National guard members are subject to the restrictions imposed by Posse Comitatus when on Title 10 orders.
True.
> National Guard members can only perform domestic law enforcement duties when under the command of a state's governor and TAG.
False. Posse Comitatus (18 USC Sec. 1385) does not prohibit the military (including the National Guard when called into federal service) from being used for domestic law enforcement, it prohibits that from being directed by those without specific authority in the Constituton or act of Congress to do so. The Insurrection Act provides authority to the President to do so, either at the request of state governments (10 USC Sec. 251) or on his own unilateral determination of necessity (10 USC Sec. 252, 253).
It's probably a common blindspot for people on HN to think in technical terms like this of what is and isn't permitted. But it comes down to people who are armed and emotional.
I'm sorry, you're saying military commanders and judge advocates knowing and understanding the bounds of their authorities are mere technicalities?
This "armed and emotional" bit gives off some real "I never served and don't understand the military as much as I think I do" vibes.
> you're saying military commanders and judge advocates knowing and understanding the bounds of their authorities are mere technicalities
Yes, I'm saying that given the right circumstances what is legal on paper does not matter in the real world.
> This "armed and emotional" bit gives off some real "I never served and don't understand the military as much as I think I do" vibes.
I have never served but I have read history books. This isn't a pure hypothetical: these things have happened before, there are examples going back as far as you would like. My sibling comment even expanded on one of these.
> I'm sorry
If you're sorry then I think it would have been possible to edit your comment not to have the tone of personal insult.
I think it took the tone of an insult partly because "armed and emotional" comes off as a huge insult to our military leadership. There's probably nothing more important to being a great military leader than the ability to keep a cool head in the midst of trying and even horrifying situations. I would guess there is a point of pride in doing that which was being assailed in your comment.
> "armed and emotional" comes off as a huge insult
Care to explain how having weapons or emotions is insulting? Everyone serving in the military is a human and humans have emotions. There's no shame in that and I think it requires quite a mean spirited mis-reading of what I said to take that from it.
> the ability to keep a cool head in the midst of trying and even horrifying situations
I think we're in agreement, you just have a different idea of what it means to be emotional. The desire to maintain a cool head in the face of horror is based in emotion. The effect of keeping a cool head might be exactly the reason why the technicalities of legality break down.
All that said we also have to remember that not everyone serving is a "great military leader" and that's also part of the point at hand.
This is getting a bit silly, but I'll try again.
> it comes down to people who are armed and emotional.
This implies that real people are making emotional decisions instead of guided by reason.
> technical terms like this of what is and isn't permitted
These technical terms that you are discounting are some of the real weapons that human beings use to give them options beyond simply following orders that they disagree with.
This is an incredibly nuanced topic, and to reduce it to people making "armed and emotional" decisions shows a lack of appreciation for what people try to do in difficult situations.
Again, your position is based on a disdain for emotion and a preference for "reason.' This is not a position I share, we are not Vulcans. I see no shame in recognising the emotional nature of our fellow actors.
I would point out the humour in an emotional reaction to my choice of words derailing the conversation but the realisation that there are people who believe their "great military leaders" are somehow "above" emotions and that this is a good thing is genuinely terrifying
Nobody is saying emotions don't exist. But I, like many others, believe that our ability to choose our reactions based on reason rather than emotion is what separates us from animals. We don't always succeed, but this is why your unevidenced claim implying that emotion is the primary driver of decision making has ruffled feathers.
People including myself have emotional reactions, but I choose to respond with a reasoned explanation, and I certainly wouldn't engage in violence with you over it, even if a portion of my lizard brain demanded that I should.
> unevidenced claim implying that emotion is the primary driver of decision making
You've added the words "primary driver" here yourself, I never made such a claim. But I hope you can see that not only that leap but also your desire to overcome your "animalistic" emotions are both rooted in emotion.
I won't waste my time looking for evidence for a claim I didn't make and I don't think it's up for debate that the majority of people in the armed forces are "armed and emotional." But in terms of the original claim that checks and balances only serve up to the point of human failure I could point to any number of examples and would repeat the fact that others have raised some in this thread.
It also would have been possible for you to not claim that military servicemembers are not in control of their emotions, and that this may make them present a danger to others by misusing their weapons.
But you did claim that, or at least imply it, so here we are.
Then it seems you are not sorry. Either way, it would have been absurd for me to ignore the humanity of the people I share the world with, especially given the ample amount of examples of military men being lost in their emotions.
Damage to public / private property is normal in a riot, that's where riot police comes in - who are, on paper, experts in nonviolent / nonlethal crowd control and de-escalation. Deploying the National Guard would have been an unnecessary escalation.
I do wish either riot police or the National Guard was deployed on Jan 6th though. But neither Trump nor anyone in the chain of command with that authority did, which only emphasizes how it was orchestrated and intentional.
> radical left lunatics
Coming from a government who qualifies everybody they don't like as “radical left” it's not reassuring at all…
For decades, a certain set of neoreactionaries have called me a radical leftist. Usually because I would note their ideas miss all kinds of unintended consequences.
Hilariously, I was early in the tea party stuff until it was clearly coopted by the Ted Cruz types.
I've consistently been a centrist libertarian for decades. If a person feels I am a radical leftist, I am confident they are working from a skewed worldview.
We have had a social contract since the 1930s to take care of each other through taxes. Like it or hate it, to change this requires the legislature. Current gutting is based on executive action, lawlessly, capturing rents, quashing regulatory enforcement for a certain Mr. Musk and buddies, and otherwise capturing the function of the state and government, to the benefit of cronies. This is antithetical to liberty and freedom.
> 1 was to stop the rioting around George Floyd where there was significant damange to public and private property, again the national guard was suggested
That's deploying military inside US against its citizens. You just argue it might be a good idea.
It's worth noting that when Trump says "radical left lunatics" he means mainstream democrats like Kamala Harris.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/7/25/trump-blasts-harris...
Who, it should be noted, is not a leftist. Let alone a radical leftist.
Illegal and he can stuff "radical left lunatics" rhetorics cause it just makes it more plain he is about to abuse power.
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It gets downvoted because it tries to minimize or justify clear threats of using military force under exagerated pretense.
It's correct, but it doesn't support the point they're trying to make. The National Guard cannot be used for domestic law enforcement when under command of the US federal government. They can only do that when directed to do so by their state's governor.
So Trump wanting to deploy the National Guard to stop his imagined election day interference, or to deal with rioters, would fall under the same rules as if he were to try to deploy the US Army for those tasks.
> It's correct, but it doesn't support the point they're trying to make. The National Guard cannot be used for domestic law enforcement when under command of the US federal government. They can only do that when directed to do so by their state's governor.
But Trump provided zero details about how he might use the military. Zero.
He didn't say "i don't care about Posse Comitatus Act" or "I will personally deploy them as the Commander in Chief".
This is like someone saying "If I find out you stole my bike, I will come to your house and take it back" and people saying "oh my god, doesn't he know murder is illegal? you can't go into someone's house and kill them just because they stole from you!"
Assuming Trump will break the law when he nothing in his comments suggested he would AND he has legal channels with which to do it (send a formal request to a govenor), is not a reasonable nor logical thought process.
I don't recall the same hysteria when Obama said he was going to deploy troops to the Mexico border for law enforcement because of cartel violence.
https://www.army.mil/article/18189/obama_considers_deploying...
He even said he will "continue to do what's necessary to secure our shared border." Whatever is necessary?!? Doesn't he know it's illegal for the President to deploy US troops inside the US?
Amazing how the media gives him a pass and is happy to explain how he'll do it all legally, but Trump makes a comment and the media (and HN) assume he's breaking law before he's even done anything.
That's why norms exist. Most previous presidents never would have had this problem in the first place because they would never suggest using US troops on citizens in the first place. If they needed to do something that even approached violating a norm, then they would go out of their way to affirm that they still supported the norm and to explain their actions. Obama was given more benefit of the doubt partially because he mostly followed norms.
By going out of his way to flout norms, Trump has brought this sort of mistrust and criticism on himself. Therefore, it's not really reasonable for his supporters to complain about it, it's exactly what they signed up for. Remember that Republicans style themselves as the party of personal responsibility.
The question: "Wait, who is threatening to use the US military against US citizens?"
The answer: Numerous examples of Trump threatening to use the US military against US citizens
The retort: He didn't explain exactly how he would do it, so it's not a threat.
> This is like someone saying "If I find out you stole my bike, I will come to your house and take it back" and people saying "oh my god, doesn't he know murder is illegal? you can't go into someone's house and kill them just because they stole from you!"
No, it's like someone saying I'm going to steal your bike, then you tell other people they said they're going to steal your bike, then someone else defends them arguing they didn't say how they were going to steal your bike so stop saying they said they're going to steal your bike.
When Obama threatened the same, he was given the benefit of the doubt?
Example? I was drunk for the entire administration. I don’t doubt he said some stupid shit, but I doubt he then doubled down and escalated consistently afterwards, with unquestioning support from his constituents.
> Trump makes a comment and the media (and HN) assume he's breaking law before he's even done anything.
Because he keeps breaking the law. Repeatedly. The better part of term in office this year has been spent violating the constitution, and lets not forget he's a convicted felon despite all the effort put towards making him immune from the law.
You are failing the first law of HN, where you have to assume the worst possible form of any action when it refers to Trump.
Four years of this TDS is going to be exhausting.
Hanlon's razor is reserved for people who don't demonstrate malice on a daily basis. They do not deserve the benefit of the doubt, they deserve the scourge of the certainty. I'm sure you can go back through your comments, find several instance where you've said something similar, and it later turned out the concerns were completely justified.
Edit: Didn't even have to go back a month: "The Project 2025 that he disavowed? Do you want trying arguing with facts rather than some evil figment of your imagination?" Of course, it was already ridiculous making that argument a month ago, and I'm sure you'll still say that's a figment of everyone's imaginations.
I think this is what people call the Mandela Effect. Below is an actual video in a presidential debate of Trump saying he had nothing to do with Project 2025, and yet you claim he never said that:
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/watch-i-have-nothing-t...
Please try and find some facts to argue with.
I did not claim he never said it. I’m claiming that it was an obvious lie. If words are the only thing that matters when judging a persons intentions, then that must apply to every person equally or else you’re objectively biased. But you already know that.
> Please try and find some facts to argue with.
Why don’t you start first and show us all how it’s done?
We have years of experience with Trump already. At this point assuming that he will be cruel, irresponsible, corrupt, and vindictive is justified.
Indeed. And the world did not end and soldiers did not fire on US citizens. Americans experienced it and his support grew.
So was Biden. And with Alzheimers and unknown people actually running the government.
I don't see the comparison you are trying to make. Biden defined his entire political persona around centrism, bipartisanship, moderation, etc. He certainly made major mistakes (e.g. mismanaging the Afghan pullout, running for reelection); however, he didn't really display the cruelty or intolerance of different ways of life that is a core part of Trump's brand.
I mean, that might be how he defined his persona, but I don't think it's borne out by the facts. I think there was quite a lot of intolerance of anybody that didn't fit in with the left wing view of culture war issues espoused by his government.
He also oversaw numerous prosecutions of his political opponent, solely designed to stop him running.
Didn’t those “political persecutions” end up with actual criminal convictions for fraud by an independent jury?
"independent jury". It was in New York. What do you think would happen if Biden or Hillary were tried by a jury in Florida or Texas?
Did voir dire not apply?
> He also oversaw numerous prosecutions of his political opponent, solely designed to stop him running.
Odd conclusion. Why would you think solely? Are you familiar with the evidence in the documents case?
In the documents case, Trump clearly violated the law, based on evidence now in the public record. National security documents he was not entitled to were handled illegally, in ways that others have been prosecuted and convicted for. In really, really bad and scary ways, like nuclear-level secrets in an unlocked closet ways. With pictures. And videos. In the place he lets random foreign enemy political figures AND THEIR SECURITY STAFF run around.
The predominant reason someone like Biden or Bush doesn’t get prosecuted is because they don’t do this shit. Second, because of norms, they transparently cooperate when they make mistakes. Even still, Trump was handled with kid gloves. The documents prosecution took years and was ultimately a massive waste of time.
So if the sole reason was to disadvantage Trump, wasn’t it real dumb? Wouldn’t a more reasonable motivation be that the hundreds of elite law enforcement agents were doing their jobs / protect the country from a clear and present national security threat?
>>The predominant reason someone like Biden or Bush doesn’t get prosecuted is because they don’t do this shit.
Biden mishandled secret documents but escaped prosecution by being mentally unfit. He kept them in his garage, I believe.
Bill Clinton hid secret documents in his sock drawer.
Hillary had her secret email server with classified information on.
“this shit” was not a referent to mishandling classified material.
It was a referent to Trump having thousands of documents, including nuclear secrets and other SCIF material.
Please provide evidence of any of these other people doing it with nuclear secrets.
Please provide evidence of these other people risking national security by giving access to their sock drawers or email servers. Trump lets anyone into Mar A Lago. Anyone including known Chinese spies: https://www.npr.org/2019/09/11/759906611/chinese-woman-who-b...
Here’s a convenient wikipedia article summarizing sources and showing you pictures of what Trump did: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/FBI_search_of_Mar-a-Lago
You honestly think these behaviors are equivalent or comparable severity?
Trump is deranged.
The flagged subthread doing some whataboutery with drone strikes actually has a point that is relevant here; the War on Terror provided an erosion of rule of law, both in terms of normalized militarisation of society and in keeping places like Guantanamo Bay (US territory where US law basically doesn't apply) open.
The threatened immigration sweeps and the talk of removing birthright citizenship tie into this. If the troops are reluctant to be deployed against US citizens, simply make the people you want to deploy them against not US citizens any more.
Yeah this is my fear -- when we remove birthright citizenship, then suddenly you have to prove that your bloodline back to the Nth degree were citizens, or you have to prove yourself by some other way. So if someone or some group disagrees with what he is doing, he can simply add a requirement for citizenship that they can't meet and then they're not citizens.
The whole point of birthright citizenship is to create a clear, unambiguous means of testing if someone is a citizen so that people cannot be disenfranchised easily even by a hostile executive. If you can produce a birth certificate, you are a citizen end of discussion. As someone who disagrees with what is happening, my biggest fear is that myself, my son, or my family could be declared "not a citizen" and forcibly removed to some other country where we are also not citizens under a new system. This is not a good thing for the US.
HR22, the "SAVE act" is removing the birth certificate from viable documents for millions of people who have changed their names. If the person who changed their name does not get an updated birth certificate (most don't, like women after they marry and take their husbands last name), then they can no longer vote. This is many millions of regular naturally born citizens in the US.
https://www.congress.gov/119/bills/hr22/BILLS-119hr22ih.pdf
He came damn close in his first term. I remember watching the Twitter video on June 1, 2020 - see the video: https://www.nbcnews.com/video/watch-helicopters-hover-low-ov... to see how low the helicopters were flying and the rotor wash was clearly intended to intimidate the protesters.
https://warontherocks.com/2020/10/let-the-generals-speak-ret...
> In May 2020, protests emerged in the aftermath of the killing of George Floyd by a white police officer, as well as other incidents of police brutality against African Americans. In these protests there was in some cases significant property destruction and looting. In response, more than 20 states and the District of Columbia activated the National Guard to assist in stabilizing the situation.
> By June 1 Trump was reportedly ready to send 10,000 regular military troops to the streets — forces usually used in external conflict. He threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act, which would have allowed him to deploy the troops without the governors’ permission. Active-duty troops were brought to the Washington, D.C., area, including some from the immediate response force brigade of the Army’s 82nd Airborne Division. For a few days it looked like Trump might send in the troops, precipitating the retired officer commentary detailed below. Ultimately the president did not invoke the Insurrection Act and the troops were sent home.
It wasn't just Trump: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/03/opinion/tom-cotton-protes...
https://www.defenseone.com/policy/2020/10/helicopters-over-d...
https://media.defense.gov/2021/May/27/2002730396/-1/-1/1/DOD...
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/soldiers-disciplined-helicop...
https://web.archive.org/web/20230607212142/https://casebook....
https://www.usnews.com/news/national-news/articles/2020-06-0...
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Gotta love the current climate. Any time Trump says something terrible, you're guaranteed to find his supporters simultaneously arguing that he never said it and that it's a good thing that he said it.
Heh we had simultaneous protests by Trump supporters in 2020 to both “Stop the count!” and “Count the votes!” to either stop or continue counting mail-in ballots in different states. Among his ardent supporters, there is no truth except force.
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https://projects.propublica.org/parler-capitol-videos/ - doesn't look like "walking through" the building to me. Source: I chaperoned a school group through the Capitol back in 2017 or so, and our tour did not look like this.
not to mention the brazen attempts to pressure states, specifically Georgia, to "find" enough votes to change the election outcome:
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/03/us/politics/trump-raffens...
https://www.atlantanewsfirst.com/2023/02/15/read-full-transc...
>>doesn't look like "walking through" the building to me.
Well we can certainly trust Pro Publica to pick the most peaceful examples, but we don't really need the videos of what happened outside. The White House finally, after being forced, released the internal camera footage. I don't think that shows any coup attempts.
There is also the "pipe bomb" that got memory-holed, and the role of FBI provocateurs that isn't fully explored yet.
They didn't pick any examples, they pulled all the footage that was available off of Parler. There are plenty of footage from inside the building in that link from the rioters themselves- not sure what you mean?
I certainly remember the pipe bomb. No memory hole of that: https://www.fbi.gov/video-repository/january-5-pipe-bomb-inv...
FBI provocateurs? Citation?
> FBI provocateurs?
There were federal personnel among the rioters, but they weren't, to any evidence, either FBI or provocateurs (there were both active-duty military intelligence personnel and at least one DEI agent arrested and charged.)
"FBI provocateurs" seems to be one of the mutually contradictory stories adopted by the MAGA cult (alongside "it was a violent riot -- but by Antifa", "and it was MAGA, but it was peaceful, no different than tourism".)
> one DEI agent
This was supposed to be "DEA agent", but, you fingers do funny things sometimes.
I mean the internal Congress cctv footage that was supposed by the Jan 6th committee until forced to release it.
The FBI has admitted it had 26 informants at the protest.
Nobody has been caught for the pipe bomb and it was barely mentored for 4 years.
Ok? Your point is? The fbi also allegedly paid infiltrators into the blm protests. https://www.yahoo.com/news/fbi-paid-informant-sow-discord-00.... The fbi has a long history of infiltrating what they consider to be “extreme” groups - going back decades.
It is unacceptable that there have been no arrests for the pipe bombs. Do I think that’s evidence of some sort of deep state cover up “false flag” operation? Nope.
How does that in any way answer the question of how Jan 6 was supposedly a coup?
Also there were massive problems with Georgia's election process in 2020, nobody denies that today so why should we keep using the least charitable interpetation possible of Trump's words?
What were the massive problems? The transcript clearly indicates Trump was only interested insofar as obtaining just enough votes to overturn the election. If he truly cared about election integrity, he wouldn't emphasize the exact number of votes he needed to win.
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Yes, that was evil. If your point is that both Obama and Trump are criminals who deserve imprisonment rather than full throated defense and endorsement, I am in complete agreement.
I for one am in favor of arresting and trying US leaders committing (war) crimes.
And Clinton had emails server which makes her same as DOGE secrets wise. Or something.
Ironically, the military seems to foster a more liberal culture than the tech industry. I have been reprimanded for disobeying orders a few times, and seen colleagues put on PIPs and fired after a couple of months. Most "fast-growing" companies resemble an absolute monarchy.
"Fast growing" companies pretend to be the friendly, accepting, and understanding, but usually comes with a dark side where it's hard for them to point out small issues early and correct them. Because that's "negative" and doesn't jive "we're nice and friendly" image. So they keep sweeping issues under the rug until it's too late, and even then, they can't let someone go and need to pretend like they really want to keep them with PIP, while everyone knows it's bullshit to cover their ass, and person will be 100% out of there.
> Most "fast-growing" companies resemble an absolute monarchy.
Which explains why the tech bros are currently trying to install what's effectively a monarchy in the US federal government. Companies are inherently non democratic, so it's kind of bad that they're trying to install the same thing federally.
The founding fathers installed the monarchy. They simply thought that they could control it by making it non-heritable. The US president had more power than King George from the very beginning and certainly has more now.
Knowledge is knowing the rules. Wisdom is knowing when to bend or break them.
Courage is breaking them when you know you'll pay a price for doing the right thing.
Universally, articles that attempt to advance these views tend to be politically and morally chaotic.
Their recommendations are always vague and therefore open to political exploitation. Ignored or amplified when expedient and when someone with an actual stake has something on the line.
Cowardly.
Question: in a public bureaucracy that is always naturally intent on protecting itself but which also has rules and a judiciary, who is responsible for ignoring or amplifying intentionally vague external standards of morality? Political actors, perhaps?
The sum effects seem to be the desire to leave lower level ranks politically vulnerable and threatened by non-military political actors. And therefore perhaps to undermine the military hierarchy in general, with implied threats.
I agree that there are likely times to not follow orders, but the rules surrounding when that is to be the case cannot be vague whatsoever. Those times can not be subject to significant interpretation if we are to see such critiques as honest and not underhanded.
> I agree that there are likely times to not follow orders, but the rules surrounding when that is to be the case cannot be vague whatsoever. Those times can not be subject to significant interpretation if we are to see such critiques as honest and not underhanded.
You cannot capture all possible scenarios with full nuance in a rule-book. And even if you somehow could, you cannot expect people to memorize all of it. The world is just too complex.
By nature it has to be vague because reality is vague.
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Why would that be surprising? It’s not like you have control over what they’re going to do after you trained them.
Given the… situation there, I’d be more surprised if they didn’t.
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I don’t understand the point. We are all free to disobey and have to deal with the consequences. It can’t be otherwise. Nobody can pass as an automaton.
The point is that military officers have an obligation to disobey when the situation warrants it.
But at the same time, obedience, discipline and chain-of-command are ingrained in military culture (do correct me if I'm wrong, my main sources are movies and propaganda). But also trust, trust that e.g. your commanding officer knows what they're doing, considered the risks, and takes responsibility. They too in turn make decisions based on what they know / are told; if there's civilians in a target but intelligence doesn't say so, are you or your chain of command guilty of a war crime?
Not sure if you read Generation Kill or watched the miniseries, but that is one of the main points. In there, there were two platoon commanders, Lieutenant Fick and Captain America(The book never reveals its name, and I think the series does, but I don't recall at this moment). While Lieutenant Fick was a competent officer that tried to kept the welfare of his troops, he often butted heads with its direct superiors since the order given to him could endanger the lives of his subordinates while not accomplishing nothing of value. In contrast Captain America, was an incompetent officer who gave reckless orders, was ignored by his troops and could have been possibly be charged with war crimes. At the end of the series, when the journalist is interviewing the battalion commander about why Captain America was never disciplined for his actions, the battalion commander answers that the same leeway that he gave to Lieutenant Fick was given to Captain America. In other words if he were to punish Captain America, he should also be punishing Lieutenant Fick. In retrospective is understandable, but when you read or watch it, you wonder why no action is being taken to discipline Captain America and why no one listens to Lieutenant Fick
Having spent a bit of time working with the British army, I'd say there's a lot of pushback, either overt or covert. They even by doctrine have someone nominated in group decisions as the person who will play devil's advocate, to try and reduce groupthink, as groupthink is bad and they know it.
If you did not know civilians were present, it is very unlikely you will be charged under the UCMJ. Here is an article from Human Rights Watch about the lack of consequences https://www.hrw.org/news/2022/01/25/lost-innocents.
With regards to movies, remember prior to the modern era many soldiers and seaman were forced to serve against their will. Discipline was brutal. In the British American War of 1812, one of the reasons for war was the forced impressment of American sailors into the British Navy. British Admiral Horatio Nelson acknowledged the critical role of impressment in maintaining the British Navy’s manpower. In 1803, he reported that over 42,000 sailors had deserted since 1793, highlighting the challenges of crew retention. He stated, “Without a press, I have no idea how our Fleet can be manned.” https://www.nps.gov/articles/impressment.htm
It was Prussia’s Moltke the Elder who recognized the complexity of modern war and the need for officers to think independently. “Subordinates would have to use initiative and independent judgment for the forces to be effective in battle. Campaign and battle plans should encourage and take advantage of the decentralization that would be necessary in any case. In this new concept, commanders of distant detachments were required to exercise initiative in their decision-making and Moltke emphasized the benefits of developing officers who could do this within the limits of the senior commander's intent.”. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helmuth_von_Moltke_the_Elder
With all that said, it all comes down to personal conscience. Of deciding what is right and wrong.