Thread by @Tinkzorg

Actually, let's talk about this alleged purge of the US military, and the business and best practices of purging in general. This claim about the US military being purged in preparation of tyranny is bandied about a lot, but the devil is often in the details.

https://twitter.com/DamarisTighe/status/1448466383713357827

Let's assume that you are an american tyrant and you want to use the armed forces to shore up your tyranny. There are then at least two things you need out of these forces: the numbers and capacity to suppress the population, and the *political reliability* to follow orders.

In terms of capacity and numbers, let's do the most general overview possible. The US has 1.346.400 active duty personnel across all the branches - army, marines, coast guard, navy, air force.

Out of these branches, the navy is pretty useless domestically, and the air force is likely to be actively counterproductive. You're better off parking those fancy drones, because every droned american wedding is a total disaster for legitimacy.

That really leaves you with the army and the marine corps. The USMC is fairly small, at less than 200.000 active duty personnel. The army is at half a million or so. This number includes everything from lawyers (Army JAGs) to cooks to mechanics to psychiatrists.

If we're being fantastically optimistic, we could just assume that maybe 10% of these 700.000 people are frontline soldiers. The real number is of course even less than that, but let's say 10% tooth to tail for the sake of argument here.

Here you should *immediately* see the glaring problem. 70.000 guys is not in fact a lot of guys in a country the size of a continent with a population north of 300 million. And in fact, this very problem - the lack of troops - has dogged the US army for the last 20 years!

The forever wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were very hard on the armed forces, necessitating some fairly scummy tactics such as sending national guardsmen to Iraq, and also sending people out on year-long tours when they had maybe a month left of their service.

So the US armed forces already have had problems finding enough people to do what they've been tasked to do. They've had to run the people they did have pretty roughshod at times to make up for it, but the overall picture is that recruitment is pretty hard.

Add to this that the US armed forces are fairly segregated in practice. Higher officers tend to come from certain social background, not necessarily shared by the grunts. Racial minorities and women are overrepresented in support roles and underrepresented in combat roles.

I'm not an expert on the demographics but the overall picture is that certain areas and demographics of the US pull double duty when it comes to supplying troops for the services. If I recall correctly, catholics are overrepresented in the military compared to the US as a whole.

Obviously, the specific demographics that are 1) overrepresented in the military in general, 2) then further overrepresented in the specific parts of the military machine that kick the doors in, are the same demographics that are supposedly being purged for ideological reasons.

These people cannot really be replaced, or at least not easily. Stuff like critical race theory and all that other ideological piffle is popular among coastal middle class people - the very people who as a rule will NOT sign up to lug a heavy rucksack around.

People have this fanciful idea that if you just "indoctrinate" people, you'll get a loyal military who will then proceed to implement tyranny on your behalf. But in reality, ideology follows class lines, and the people who go for this ideology do not become soldiers.

Historically, "purging the military" usually means replacing one *class* of people with another. The the french revolutionaries purged the military of almost all aristocratic officers, promoting people from the ranks who owed their fortunes (and thus loyalty) to the revolution.

This is not going on in the US armed forces. Insofar as people are being "replaced", it's that the people who kick down doors and lug mortar bombs around are not being retained, while the military is hiring more diversity consultants or what have you.

So the "purging" is in effect disrupting the first thing our american putative tyrant wants, which is capacity. In terms of the second objective, political reliability, the purging also accomplishes absolutely fuckall, if you'll excuse my french.

The political unreliability that people are worried about (angry white men!) has to do with their demographic profile. Unless you replace them in their jobs with people from other demographics (say, college educated women), you're not solving the problem.

This replacement is never going to happen. Kamala Harris isn't going to let her niece become a corporal in the marines. There are no equivalent to the french revolution's rankers to replace the angry white men who kick down doors.

In a situation like that, actually firing them or otherwise not retaining them inside the military is about the worst thing you can do. Aimless military veterans is an incredible security risk. The veterans of the Napoleonic war stewed on a low boil during the 1820s, until...

...until the revolution of the 1830s, where they could be found on top of the barricades acting as impromptu NCOs for the street fighters. People don't just despawn like NPCs in a video game once you fire them.

That alone makes this scary-sounding "purge" just a ridiculous mess and a clown show. These people are far better - even if you don't trust them - placed inside your tent, pissing out, rather than outside and potentially pissing into it.

Even if you don't trust these white men - owing to all the "white rage" in America the generals are apparently so concerned about - idle hands are the devil's playthings. Even if they're politically unreliable, them *not being on the other side* is worth paying their salary for.

I don't really know what the plan is behind these slow-rolling purges of the military, and in fact I very much doubt there is *one* plan, but just a bunch of blind institutional imperatives. But what is happening now is not what you would ever want to do as a successful tyrant.

During the pullout from Afghanistan, this piece was doing the rounds a lot:

im1776.com/2021/08/20/req…

It's a really good piece, moving, all that jazz. But it barely even puts a fig leaf over the whole "disgruntled soldier waiting for a chance to use his skills at home" subtext.

Just like the libs are just going "oh fi, we can just fire you CHUDS! We don't need you at our hospitals!" only to then basically discover that they've just collapsed their own healthcare system, there is no deeper plan here other than "oh fi, see if we need you GRUNTS!"

So when you talk about this purge, you should probably be pretty clear on the fact that it is about as menacing as Tom shooting himself in the foot with a shotgun in order to somehow spite Jerry.

In reality, far from having some sort of ominous tyrannical character, these purges of US low level military personnel represent a sort of *institutional cannibalism*, where societal institutions are repurposed to increasingly serve as jobs programs for the upper middle class.

That sort of military - the woke military - doesn't need angry white men who lug mortar bombs around or kick down doors. It needs college graduates who are paid to make powerpoints. And it neither knows nor cares what happens to the grunts once they're drummed out.

I occasionally see people going "oh my god! soon the woke blue haired trans lesbian womyn SEAL delta force tier one operators are going to kick down my door!!! the woke military is here!!" and it's like... man, think about these things for just a second. Please.

Please!

Tyranny isn't "free", as the kids say. You have to literally Do The Work. You have to think about these personnel issues, and you have to be very careful about using demographics correctly to shore up said tyranny. We have *thousands* of years of history here to guide us.

Trans lesbian genderqueer delta force operators shooting you for not saluting the pride flag does not, to put it mildly, figure prominently in the historical record. There might actually be a reason for that, but on second thought I shouldn't spoil it!