Thread by @Tinkzorg

The gracious comrade Stalin ( @Stal_Apu ) sent me this article and I have to say that it is a doozy. Given that he and I have been writing about these issues for a bit, I'll give my own (political side, not military side) view of what's written.

washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/…

First off, these people are not just random OpEd writers. These are retired flag rank officers (one brigadier general and two major generals). Second, what they write here is worth quite a few raised eyebrows. It's a pretty radical piece!

Put simply, the writers identify the lower ranks of the US armed services as being, not to beat around the bush here, *catastrophically* unreliable. They start by talking about the demographic makeup of the J6 protest, but that's not necessarily the biggest mic drop.

This is. Pointing out that "arms might not be secured" as a potential risk scenario is pretty amazing. These generals are saying that in the case of any sort of legitimacy crisis, the armed forces cannot be relied on to make sure that weapon systems don't end up "missing".

Other people are far more informed on the logistics of this than me, but I'll just say that there are a lot of man-portable weapon systems that could do truly horrible damage if they ended up in the wrong hands. MANPADS, hand-held AT, stuff like that.

A scenario of "weapons going missing" doesn't have to mean people stealing tanks or ships or whatever to be a really bad scenario. Missing grenades and plastic explosives is enough of a disaster on its own.

The real thing to keep in mind here is just what "arms might not be secured" actually means on a political level. This speaks to a real fear of near-total institutional failure on the part of the military in a crisis.

The authors point to the governor of Oklahoma firing the commander of the state national guard and putting his own man in place in order to defy Pentagon's covid mandates. They then say that "rogue units" "organizing among themselves" is a real possibility in crisis.

Let's put that in plain english. These generals are worried about *unit-level mutiny*. That is, entire military units (such as a company or a regiment) reaching internal consensus and deciding to support the other team in a potential political conflict.

That right there is basically the single worst disaster a political regime can suffer. Once unit-level mutinies are a thing, you are almost certainly headed for civil war. That there is an opinion piece written by flag officers in the WaPo warning of this is quite shocking.

What might be more important than this from a political perspective, however, is that the cupboard seems pretty darn bare in terms of actual, realistic solutions. These generals have some suggestions, but they shouldn't exactly inspire a lot of confidence.

The first suggestion is just to prosecute all the rabble rousers and politicians who inspired January 6th. This is not going to happen, and even if it did, it would likely just make polarization worse in the short and medium term. Moreover, who are you gonna prosecute?

Trump? Josh Hawley? Ted Cruz? People at American Greatness? Ron DeSantis? Whatever one thinks about J6, it didn't happen due to the actions of a few specific demagogues who can somehow be isolated. The polarization in America is general and severe, cutting the country in two.

As such, finding political scapegoats and "making them pay" is logistically and politically impossible. Either you don't go far enough, or you go far enough to where the "cure" for polarization becomes worse than the sickness itself.

The second solution is basically a form of political education for the troops, to really get them up to speed on just who their legal CiC is in a contested scenario. This is hilariously naive and will do more good than harm.

In a real legitimacy crisis, you are basically guaranteed to do a lot of things that are probably quite illegal just to keep a lid on things. In a situation where Biden can do things like pause rent (while acknowledging that doing this is literally illegal), this solves nothing.

In fact, if these lessons do anything, they're probably more likely to just make mutinous soldiers MORE confident - "what you're doing isn't actually allowed, so you no longer get to give us orders". These generals shouldn't wish for educated soldiers but LOYAL ones.

At the end of the day, however, these generals have no idea how to actually get those soldiers to be more loyal, and they tacitly admit as much. In the end, the hope for 2024 seems to rest on the FBI, NSA, and the alphabet agencies in general.

Sure, using your secret police and intelligence services to monitor your own troops is probably not a bad idea just in terms of practicality. But there's a huge tendency towards massively overstating what intelligence agencies actually do for you as a regime.

In practical terms, you can't use the NSA to make troops loyal, and you can't really use it to prevent unit-level mutiny. At best, you can use intelligence services to monitor the soldiery and write more or less accurate reports as to IF or WHEN such mutinies will occur.

Of course, constant surveillance has the negative externality of making troops less loyal and less accepting of the legitimacy of the ruling regime, so there's that. Like hooking a patient up to an EKG monitor, one shouldn't think of this as a permanent solution at all.

So in closing, the scenario laid out here is actually quite dire. Alarm bells are being rung about the structural unreliability of the US armed forces in the event of a legitimacy crisis, but if you read between the lines you see that the cavalry quite literally isn't coming.

Unreliability and lack of loyalty is presented as being quite bad today already, with potentially catastrophic (unsecured arms, unit-level mutiny) effects down the road. But nobody has any real idea how to fix the underlying issue. 2024 may be a fun ride!