McVeigh was another John Brown, with dozens more before and after.

I sometimes feel that the NCOs are worried that sooner or later orders won’t be obeyed. There is a lot of resentment over the lower ranks being prosecuted while the officers get off when something goes wrong [like Abu Ghraib]. When you add in the talk over changes in benefits, the grumbling gets louder.

We both know that a lot of the equipment doesn’t work the way it should and the logistics suck. It doesn’t help when the Air Force can roll out a functioning base with air conditioning in a week, while the Army and Marines are stuck in shelter covers for months. Rumsfeld went to war with ‘the Army he had’ and didn’t do much to fix it.

I’m waiting for the time when troops are demand to see written orders before coming to Attention, because they are tired of being scapegoats for officers. I’m not sure how violations of the Posse Comitatus Act will go down, but we were always told not to give orders that you don’t think will be obeyed.

Thing is, the unhappy NCO’s are exactly the sort of people who would have no problem at all receiving orders to “take out” some of these militia dimwits who think stocking up on AK-47’s and ammo will allow them to overthrow a “tyrannical government” (a.k.a. a government which doesn’t allow them to impose their religion upon others at gunpoint). And yes, there are some enlisted who would sympathize with the militia dimwits, but unless things have really gotten bad they’re still going to go along with their NCO’s. And there are still plenty of ambitious officers who are more in love with being perfumed princes than in love with their Bibles, they might grumble about their orders but the last militia dimwit who thought the police and military would join the cause ended up being executed for his crimes. (Timothy McVeigh, recall, believed that his actions would be the signal for the revolution that overthrew what he felt was a tyrannical government… instead it pretty much ended the militia movement for a decade because the government cracked down *hard*).

In other words, cynicism and fatalism rule at the low end of the totem pole, and ambition still outranks the Bible in the officer ranks of the Army. (Probably not in the Air Force, but the Air Force would not be used against militia types anyhow). If the types stockpiling AK-47’s really think this is going to let them overthrow a “tyrannical” government, they will be sadly disabused of that notion if ever attempting to do so.

You can’t avoid the ‘officer class’ down here, because this is one of the places where they retire. My Dad retired as an officer, but that was because he had a direct commission from World War II and had a medical retirement. I was on the list for E-6 when I got out. That said, I was part of the 4% of the Air Force on flying status, and had an intel specialty, so I was subjected to a lot of officers. The ‘plane drivers’ were OK, but you had to keep the others in line or they would think they knew something. The sad fact is that the intel courses for officers were a pale shadow of the courses for the ‘enlisted trash’.

I talk to the NCOs, and they are really unhappy with the way things are in the military. Religion and politics are forbidden topics under DoD directives and regulations, but the military has really become infected with both. It was creeping in after the military went all volunteer, but it exploded under the Shrubbery. Units aren’t unified, they way they were before, and it makes the NCOs nervous. Of course, the stress of multiple deployments is playing hell with effectiveness.

That last of course being the biggy. If the USA turns into the world’s largest failed state, as seems increasingly likely, and the paychecks stop flowing to cops and soldiers… well. All hell breaks loose then. I don’t even want to think about it, because it’ll make Somalia and Afghanistan look like paradise, because neither Somalia nor Afghanistan had modern professional militaries and police forces before they disintegrated. Body count would be high. Really high. Really really high. Ugh.

Badtux, I see them every day as I am surrounded by the largest Air Force Base in the US, and possibly the world. It is the home of the AF Special Operations Command, a Special Forces brigade, airborne weapons systems testing, F-35 training, the Ranger school, AF/Navy EOD school, etc. With a dozen axillary fields in addition to the main base, and a half million acre national forest, the military is still part of my life.

The fundies have done a good job of infecting the military with their brand of whacko religion, and the Tea Party has a large presence in the county.

Jerry Boykin wasn’t the only off the wall general in the Army, and John Catton wasn’t alone in the Air Force.

I wouldn’t put any serious money on what the military would or won’t do, nor would I bet on the police given the current decreases in their pay and benefits. Things are pretty dicey. Fox News is not exactly unknown at places where the military and cops hang out locally.

Referring to the number of “wives” that fellow had, I took to calling it the “Branch Chlamydian” compound…

Frankly, as long as the soldiers and cops are being paid by the government, with the current force composition of the military and police force, I can’t see that the small number of ideologues in their ranks would be able to turn the military or police forces against the government. The deep cynicism of a large majority in those positions pretty much says they’re going to continue working for whoever gives them a paycheck… which, in general, is *not* going to be some right-wing militia losers attempting to overthrow the government at gunpoint.

Which of course is why the right wing is attempting to attack the paychecks of the military and police forces… but that’s another story.

But if, in the fertile imaginations of these “patriots”, the U.S. Army was running around the USA with hobnailed boots, that strategy used by the Iraq and Afghan insurgency works about as well as Saddam’s Soviet strategy of “retreat and wait for winter” to match his Soviet weaponry. Uhm, the Army would *already* be home in that case, just as Iraq has no winter :).

Which isn’t to say that there have not been cases where an insurgency , unsupported by foreign powers, overthrew the established government and came to power. The October Revolution is of course a prime example of that happening. But if Kerensky had been supported by an Army that had the discipline, training, and weaponry of the U.S. Army, and a police force with the training, weaponry, and intelligence capabilities of a typical big-city U.S. police force, the Bolsheviks would have been slaughtered. But in the event Kerensky had of course already lost the support of the Russian Army and the Russian Army had never been a particularly well-trained or well-armed force in the first place, as well as most of it being at the Western Front. The same decidedly cannot be said to be true of the U.S. Army… it is well trained, well armed, and if told that a mob of armed revolutionaries is attempting to overthrow the government by force rather than by vote, would have absolutely no problem opening fire on said mob of revolutionaries and slaughtering them.