Thanks for posting that. I appreciate what she’s saying and I would like to think that is what would happen, however, chaotic situations lead to very unpredictable outcomes. When you have chaos, an angry mob of people, and armed soldiers being told their job is to keep things under control, you’re putting a lot of faith in the individual good vs group think mentality that tends to be a sad aspect of human nature.

1. Especially given that you have corrupt governors pushing federal policy at the state level, there is a very good chance you will have the national guard called in to handle dissent. I’m watching my own governor abuse his power and grant some very questionable authority to the guard already. Kent State is a really good example of why this should be very scary. It’s not “fear mongering” to make sure people are aware of overlaps between fairly recent U.S. history and the current reality.

2. I do know there are soldiers who truly would refuse an illegal order, but I think it’s naive to rely on that when it comes to what we’re seeing now. Especially considering the goal of this administration is to deconstruct and tear down everything they dislike about the current U.S. system.

As someone pointed out, Hegseth is now in charge of the military and seems to be doing everything he can to root out opposition to the administration. He’s setting a tone for what is to be expected of anyone not following orders. Apparently ignoring the whole incident where he ended up texting war plans in a group chat on signal where a journalist somehow got added, the Pentagon has also started threatening department of defense employees with polygraphs in order to determine who is leaking information to the press. They actually sent this memo out threatening employees late on Friday night and news of Hegseth accidentally leaking sensitive information broke on Monday.

Soldiers get issued an RoE card. The card specifies the procedure for Escalation of Force. Usually it’s “Verbal Warning, Show of Force, Warning Shot, Lethal Force” with the option to skip steps in case of self-defence.

However, soldiers sometimes still do illegal and immoral thing time while deployed in other countries. Sometimes because they’ve been ordered to, and sometimes because they choose to. Is that representative of the entire U.S. or the military? No, but it definitely happens way too frequently.

3. There are a lot of comments from military members in the original post. A retired member of the army commented this. It’s in the 3rd screenshot of the pictures, and the original post is gone from the subreddit but still available to view here if you want to look over it:

by the time “effect martial law on [insert US city] and summarily execute anyone who does not comply” makes it’s way to the commander of a maneuver company, it is formatted in an operations order in a way that is devoid of any subjectivity. orders are distilled to a rigidly-formatted set of instructions that almost anyone in the formation are able to understand and carry out.

the reason for this is so the people who carry out the orders don’t hesitate and don’t contemplate the wider meaning. an infantry platoon’'s task won’t be to effect martial law; it will be “seize and hold objective [whatever] (could be a street intersection, train station, etc) by 1700 hrs”

Again, I believe at the individual level, most people would choose to do the right thing, but we’ve seen over and over again, that especially in times of panic and chaos, frontal lobes go offline, lizard brain takes over, and herd mentality kicks in as a defense mechanism.