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What will the Men with Guns do?
How would the US military react if ordered to suppress large-scale civil disobedience? With Washington D.C. still being patrolled by thousands of National Guard troops and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin ordering the military to observe a 60-day stand down to combat ‘extremism’ in the ranks, it’s a question that certainly deserves closer examination.
Another reason the issue important is the suspicion with which some people posting around the conservative media-sphere appear to view the American military. They seem genuinely afraid that the US Army and Marines are reincarnations of Caesar’s legions, the Waffen SS, the 300 Spartans, and possibly Genghis Khan and his Mongol hordes. Citizens frightened by their supposed protectors can only heighten the already high level of distrust many people already feel towards most American institutions.
I, therefore, decided to do a little digging to check out for myself the ability of the US military to carry out a campaign of repression against the very people they’ve sworn to defend. Now, since I’ve never been in the military what I’ve written below definitely puts me in the armchair general category, so please be gentle with your criticisms.
Numbers
The regular serving US Army and Marines aren’t all that big. For the fiscal year 2020, the US Army had 480,000 active duty personnel, while the USMC’s authorized strength was 186,200 troops. To back up the regular forces both organizations have substantial reserve components. The US Army reserve has189,500 personnel on call. The National Guard is much larger, with 336,000 people filling its ranks. The USMC has 38,500 reservists. Altogether, the combined strength of the US Army and Marines totals 1,230,200 troops.
That number sounds impressive, but you have to understand that a big chunk of that force isn’t geared for combat. For the regular US Army, the combat component is made up of 194, 934 troops divided into 31 brigade combat teams, while National Guard can provide 189,500 additional soldiers divided among 27 Brigade Combat teams for a combined force of 384,434 soldiers. The US Army, including the Guard, also has 19 combat aviation brigades available for duty, but in the event of a nationwide domestic crisis, most of the heavy lifting will likely be done by the Army’s ground forces. The rest of the force is organized into support units of various types.
Instead of brigade combat teams, the USMC is organized into infantry battalions, and 729 marines make up a standard USMC infantry battalion. Currently, the USMC has 24 regular and eight reserve infantry battalionsfor a total ground combat strength of 23,328 personnel. The remainder of the Corps is made up of air and support units.
After you combine all the USMC and Army ground combat units, they add up to 407,762 troops available for duty. That’s not a very big force when measured against the sheer physical size of the USA with its population of around 332,000,000 people, the world’s fourth-largest.
Willpower
But military success isn’t just based on numbers and weaponry. Willpower or morale can determine a war’s outcome just as much as any material component. In the unfortunate event that the US Army and US Marines are ever ordered into action against American civilians, troop morale could very well determine whether or not the Americans are able to retain their freedom.
This is where I disagree with the pessimists posting on the web who think that US soldiers from the highest commanders on down to the lowliest private will follow the orders of a repressive government and bloodily goose-step their way over the defenseless bodies of American citizens. Quite the contrary, I believe that there will be a marked reluctance on the part of many American soldiers to use force against the very people they have been charged to protect.
First of all, as anybody reading this piece already knows, many of those ‘defenseless’ civilians aren’t quite so defenseless. After all, there are supposed to be somewhere around 400 million or more privately owned guns in the USA. And since many of those guns are owned by veterans, a good number of who have combat experience, and by former police officers who may have become disgruntled by last summer’s riots and the attempts to defund and otherwise cripple the police, US Army, and USMC commanders will certainly tread lightly when it comes to using force against American citizens.
But having armed citizens squaring off against the US military should only be regarded as the most forlorn of last resort. Targeting the troops will only engage their fight or flight mode, and it’s not too hard to guess which choice they will take. No, it would be best to confront US military leaders with a series of uncomfortable choices through widespread peaceful action.
Protesting civilians attempting to stop a troop convoy? The peaceful way of dealing with the situation would be people using their own vehicles to block the road. Or, if that doesn’t work, think back to Tiananmen Square on June 4, 1989, when that incredibly brave but still unknown man blocked a column of Chinese tanks and the tank commander that refused to run him down. The same tactic should work against his American counterparts, who are probably (I hope) even less likely to run over their own people than that People’s Liberation Army trooper was so many years ago.
Another tactic for dealing with US troops ordered to move against their fellow Americans would be to simply barricade the entrances to ground force bases like Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, Fort Hood, Texas, or Fort Lewis, Washington. Again, as with the highway scenario, people would use their vehicles to prevent the troops from leaving their bases.
Again, it can’t be overemphasized that any opposition to the military by American civilians must remain as peaceful as possible. Otherwise, it will defeat the whole purpose of the resistance, which would be to force the US Army and USMC leadership to choose between two very clear choices: one, use violence to quell peaceful opposition by American civilians defending their rights or two, do nothing, or at least slow-walk their orders, which would be almost the same thing, and would amount to them ignoring the dictates of their civilian ‘superiors.’
Ideally, a campaign of peaceful protest would put the US military in the same position faced by the Egyptian Army during the 2011 Arab Spring. Called out by the Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak to defend his regime, Egyptian troops in Cairo found themselves sitting on the fringes of the city’s Tahir Square, where they were confronted by tens of thousands of peaceful protesters. Faced with this massive show of civil disobedience, Egyptian generals apparently ordered their troops to do nothing. What followed next was a flurry of photographs on social media showing protesters standing on Egyptian Army tanks while chatting happily with their crews. Mubarak fell from power a short time later.
Firing on US civilians without an airtight reason would push the American military into Rubicon territory. For decades, the armed forces have always been one of America’s most trusted institutions. Would US commanders allow that respect to be wiped out in a few bursts of gunfire? For if shattered, that trust would take a generation or more, if ever, to recover, and the shattering of the nation would likely follow.
Published in Politics
If they do start gunning down Americans it is over. They cannot rule a continent by force. Every government official and employee wll have to live in a green zone. Food will only move with armed convoys. Power substations will be destroyed. Dams will be shut down.
The nation will collapse as Americans with nothing to lose destroy their persecutors.
This is to say nothing of all the people settling scores.
About 10 years ago I visited a museum in Copenhagen about the Nazi occupation of Demark. I don’t recall the numbers exactly, approximately 15,000 Nazi soldiers managed to occupy a nation of 3.8 million people.
My first thought when I read that was, no way that could have happened in the USA. The guerrilla war they would have faced from the armed citizens would have destroyed them. This would be true even after, or maybe especially after, the government officially surrendered.
Keep in mind I was thinking about men and women in 1940. I’m not sure our population has what it takes today to resist. We are too used to being sheep.
Many moons ago, the NRA did a survey among our military. The question was, “If ordered to fire on US citizens, would you do so?” Or something like that. The results were interesting.
IIRC, most of the officers and senior enlisted said they would not. However, it was too close for comfort when it came to the junior enlisted. I still think the result was most would not, but the margin made me uncomfortable . . .
The military is not the only ones with guns by a long shot.
Give it a couple more years of politicization, indoctrination and selective promotion and retention and I think the results will be very different in a negative way.
Very good article.
I agree that the only realistic defense Americans have against the enemy deploying troops against us is massive civil disobedience.
I hope people on Ricochet who envision armed resistance are only strutting their stuff, and would not actually be foolish and brave enough to initiate armed conflict between (a) a gathering of middle-aged guys with shotguns and pistols with mostly empty magazines and (b) the most powerful infantry brigades in the world.
Against a protest of 50,000 unarmed civilians with SUVs, the Army and a kidnapped National Guard whose sympathies lie strongly with the sane majority of the people won’t stand a chance.
But salt that mass of peaceful patriots with half a dozen guys waving ARs, and one firecracker will start a bloodbath that will have the Democratic establishment screaming for more massacres and martial law.
There’s a flaw in this strategy—the progs using the tactics they did in the DC demonstration and subsequent propaganda blitz. (Not to say that the proggie incitement was significantly to blame for the violence—this is not something I know enough facts to judge). But it at least stands a chance and allows us to dictate their response.
Groupthink is powerful. Soldiers wouldn’t be told “Let’s go gun down your grandparents and nextdoor neighbors.” They would be told “Let’s go arrest these racist extremists who are endangering us all.”
It wouldn’t start with concentration camps. It would start with a mandatory “gun buyback program” of select weapons before proceeding to the next select type. It would start with roundups of “domestic terrorists” who were supposedly plotting something diabolical.
Oppression masks itself as law and order, as peace and self-defense. If a majority of soldiers think like Democrats, then they would trample our rights while believing we are the aggressors.
No civilian population ever suddenly rises up as a coordinated army. Individuals and local skirmishes are easy enough to put down.
I don’t know what to expect. But yes, overt totalitarian oppression is possible in America despite the guns. If America fails, I’d put the odds somewhere near even for stable oppression, civil war, and scattered anarchy. That’s even without China meddling when the US is too fractured to respond.
Am I missing something? In what universe is the US military going to attack the general public? I am shocked at how little faith you have in the men and women who volunteered to defend our nation.
The original post seems to think that we are on the verge of a mass scale mobilization and occupation of American cities. Nothing like that is going to happen. I remember getting briefings about extremism when I was in the Army. That’s not a big deal and it’s not necessarily some terrible precedent.
The whole post is, and I’m sorry to say this, paranoid fantasy. Our soldiers and Marines will not attack American citizens. The only scenario where that happens is if a military installation is attacked. Even then, it would be a limited response to defend the installation.
The American military is not our enemy. They are loyal to the Constitution and our laws, not a politician or political movement. Let’s step back and not give in to panic.
That won’t happen. Insurgents don’t win that way. Instead, they will target the infantry brigades homes, their families, their leader’s families and homes. The will be no safe zone. Once you have this sort of sectarian fighting it is over. Blood vengeance will be the rule. It will be the Middle East across a continent.
They cannot rule by force. They cannot protect their own homes, their food supply and their water supply and their power supplies. There is no super green zone to cower in with their families. If it comes to this, it all comes apart.
I once saw a former military sniper give a speech. He said if his commander had ordered him to shoot all of us in the audience, he would have done so without hesitation. Due to his training, he would not have considered anything else.
You have my blessings to say anything you want about the Army, but I’ll arm your supporting role Marines and take my chances any day of the week. My son is in a support reserve unit and every six months they have weapons in hand, either qualifying on the range or doing combat operation drills.
Every Marine is a rifleman and has been trained at combat school in addition to their MOS training.
Would it be easier to convince a member of the military to commit a drone strike from a far away office on an American target located in America than have a soldier firing his gun at an American at close range?
No one who has ever seen an armed insurrection would ever, EVER wish to be part of one from the other side. I’m not sure you are referring to when in the quote above when you say “People of Ricochet who envision armed resistance are only strutting their stuff…” but it if it comes to armed conflict, it won’t matter if it is initiated by “middle-aged guys with shotguns and pistols”. What will matter is if the US Army uses deadly force to suppress resistance. This is what happened at Lexington MA. The British troops there were the best “most powerful infantry brigades in the world”, and they got their a$$es handed to them at Concord the same day.
Do I hope and pray that we come through the coming darkness without resorting to violence? Absolutely. Am I confident that the current ruling elite in Washington DC and elsewhere will respect my desire to be left alone, and honor my constitutional rights without “an appeal to heaven”? No, I am not.
If you had posed this question ten years ago, perhaps five years ago, I might have agreed with you. But during the last decade of a 30-year career in the US Army (National Guard and Reserve), I saw more than enough evidence that much of the senior leadership of all the services will act in explicitly political ways to appeal to and appease civilian leaders.
Do I think we are on the verge of mass scale mobilization and occupation of American cities? No, but it has already happened once: Washington D.C. There 25,000 National Guard troops were deployed to quell a riot, and a relatively small one at that (compared to the mass civil violence committed last year). The riot was brought under control within hours, long before the vast majority of troops arrived. Even now, 5000 of those troops remain in Washington, serving in the role the Praetorian Guard to Congressional leadership. If the threat of domestic terrorism is so great that the Federal district requires armed occupation, why hasn’t this been made known to the US people? Where is the intelligence assessment that justifies keeping the equivalent of a brigade combat team on duty to protect Congress?
Do I hope that the senior leadership of the US military has the strength of character to resist the further politicization of the Armed Forces? Absolutely! Am I confident that the generals at the three- and four-star level are up to it, and will prevent the military becoming used to abridge the rights of the American people? Not so much.
I don’t follow you at all. Majority movements have often defeated despots using peaceful mass protests against armed forces. It seems that you may be disputing that.
Coordination requires leadership, otherwise it’s just an unruly mob.
I agree that some senior leadership is overly political, but that’s a long, long way from carrying out unlawful orders to attack American citizens. Remember our ROE from Iraq and Afghanistan. We managed an incredible amount of restraint against opening fire on civilians there. Is it really possible that we’d exhibit less restraint against our own fellow countrymen?
This is the type of paranoid thinking that plagued the Left under Trump about the military carrying out unlawful orders to effect a coup. It was crazy then, and it’s crazy now.
I am talking what happens if the solders start shooting.
The US Capitol has been barricaded and guarded by troops for over a month now.
Military leadership announced a “stand down” order and a purge of “racist” “extremists” — terms leftists politicians and media regularly use to describe Republican voters generally. It remains to be seen how reasonably or unreasonably targeted the action will be.
Leading Democrats and the President are openly discussing gun confiscation.
Leftists regularly refer to an “insurrection” which they explicitly associate with Trump and his supporters. Meanwhile, the FBI and HSA issue warnings of extremist movements without citing specific threats.
Normal process of law has been disrupted for a year by pandemic restrictions and claims to perpetual emergency powers. Citizens are commonly isolated.
Violent criminals have been cheered and protected by politicians, district attorneys throughout the past year’s rioting. Police departments are being gutted, even in Republican states.
Democrats still cite “climate change” as justification for emergency powers and extraordinary measures.
Government, corporations, and media are acting together (if not by coordination, by common ideology) to punish and silence opposition about a range of topics from COVID treatments and election fraud to crossdressing.
Many extraordinary circumstances have combined to raise concerns that America’s fundamental nature is threatened by revolutionaries both in and beyond government.
Oh yeah, easier. But probably not easy.
I suspect (hope) that something like this would be sufficiently shocking that all parties would step back and come to their senses.
But the ROE were ORDERS, right? So they were ORDERED to exercise restraint. What if the ORDERS were different?
Those “extremists” are those who swore to support the constitution and not to support the current regime.
You are of course correct. Unfortunately, just one or two witless or frightened people with guns can turn routine crowd-control into a horror show in a heartbeat: think Kent State. No, I don’t think something like that is likely, but it is not completely impossible.
I have always believed that what we are seeing with troops in DC is simply cynical political theater. But what if it is not? What if it is a “paranoid fantasy’ and Pelosi and others really believe their fears are justified?
Yes, based on the law of war and armed conflict, and on the UCMJ. It is not lawful to fire on unarmed or peaceful civilians. I am confident that soldiers and Marines would not obey unlawful orders. And that is the scenario that is envisioned, senior officers issuing unlawful orders.
Our military is not a collection of mindless automatons programmed to kill. This is the type of fevered paranoia that is all too common on the Left. I never thought I’d see it from the right.
Yes, times have changed, and the rule of law means nothing. History is being rewritten. And laws are being created by executives rather than legislatures. Corruption is endemic and probably incurable. And the US is, it seems, if only at the highest levels, giving up her sovereignty. (Look at how the Biden, and Boris, and other world leaders have adopted the very same slogan: Build Back Better.)
I don’t think the Left will blanche at anything.
They would also go after anyone who owns an arsenal – which they define as anyone with more than one gun . . .
I don’t believe they will. However, I hope the order to do so is never given in the first place because I don’t want to find out . . .
If that’s true, then I suppose we should all stock up, right? Because if that world exists, we’re pretty much over at this point. And if there is an armed conflict, it will be terrible because the very basic fabric of the nation will have torn apart. There is no turning back from that.
I hope that we all calm down. Biden is not going to order the military to occupy cities. He’s a senile old fool, but not evil. This is the crap the Left does, not us.