this post was submitted on 17 Jun 2026
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Difference is, I don't tend to hear stories about people becoming cops because their options in life sucked and then they regretted it after.
But I don't know if that's because of different conditions for military recruitment and cop recruitment, or difference in public narrative that gets passed around and the cop stories just aren't being told.
Either way, the meme has a valid point.
I feel like defending imperial vets because of poverty draft is just lazy idk. You could also defend israelis by that logic because its mandatory to serve in the iof, or you could also defend the nazis with that excuse. As for your other point about a lot of them after beeing in the military being agaisnt it, thats good but it shouldnt take someone to go assault another country and its innocent people to be against the us empire or war in general. I feel like most USians dont have a clue what war is like (the most horrific thing white americans ever witnessed was 9/11 while afghanistan or any other nation witnessed 9/11 × 10 every day when they where at war with the usa) and thats why theyre not bothered by foreign policy and dont pay any attention to it basically, since they attack countries that are oceans away they cant get hit back. Idk im just rambling at this point i feel like.
I guess it depends on what you mean by "defend". I can't speak for others, but for me, it's not about defending them morally, as in "they should be excused because they were pushed into it." It's more about the practicality of it and how much potential they have for change. If somebody was driven toward it cause of poverty and didn't understand what they were getting into until they're already deployed, that doesn't excuse things they do on behalf of the empire. It doesn't change the fact that people who did wrong need a mechanism for being held accountable, especially by the people who they wronged. What it does mean is that they're probably more capable of change and more apt to have guilt about what they directly or indirectly participated in.
On the other hand, if somebody is a rabid, bloodthirsty weapon of imperialism, they would surely be one of the last ones it'd ever occur to me to try to reach out to or change.
That said, I completely agree that Yankees are largely insulated from the wars themselves and it makes us varying shades of clueless (I say us cause I live there myself). I would venture to say, in fact, that what's going on with Iran is one of the few times they haven't been and it's still insulation from attack on actual "US" soil. This time, the oil stuff is impacting things and it's harder to ignore for that reason.
The poverty draft and not fully understanding what they're signing up for is real. I grew up in an area where the public school students were majority children of Mexican farmworkers. It was in late 2000 or so, but I'm still shook by my classmate who tried to get me to sign up for the army. "Man, all we do is hang out, drink beers, and get paid." Never knew what happened to him after that, since I moved away shortly after.
[2023-07-25] Adam Tooze's Chartbook – #229: America's unhappy militarism - the $886 billion bone of contention
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America is about to pass the biggest peacetime military budget of any nation in history. And yet, as the excellent Van Jackson (@WonkVJ) notes, American militarism is not in a happy place. “It is wild that the House is appropriating $886 billion for the defense budget … and NOBODY is happy with it.”
With good reason Van Jackson concentrates on the grand strategic issues. As he points out, in an increasingly multipolar world, the demand that the US should be able to beat anyone, anywhere, any time, is a recipe for frustration. As he puts it in another tweet “In a multipolarizing world, there is no real-world force that can close the gap … generated by a (global) primacy strategy.” The litany of gigantic, over-budget weapons projects (F35) and prestige military objects of dubious value (carrier groups) attests to this fact.
At the same time as the external demands are excessive, the domestic political foundation of US militarism are fraying as well. In recent years it was something of a cliché that the one thing that a divided US polity could agree on was more military spending. Now, not even that is true, at least not without “culture war” riders.
In Congress the GOP are holding the defense budget and senior appointments to ransom. Amongst the wider American public the image of the military has sharply declined. Meanwhile, the newest branch of the US armed forces.- the Space Force - launched in 2019 by President Trump, is quite literally a laughing-stock. At a moment of world historic confrontation the politics of American militarism are, all at the same time, a matter of deadly seriousness, blatant pork barrel vote-buying, supercharged culture wars and kitsch. You might say that it has ever been so. It is a myth to imagine a once-clean militarism. Actually existing militarism is always “messy” - a conflict zone of social, economic and political forces. But America’s current cocktail is both particularly potent and particularly toxic.
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The most conspicuous example of this fraying are the remarkable antics of Congressional Republicans. As the Washington Post commented:
On the same issues - above all abortion - Sen. Tommy Tuberville of Alabama has been holding up hundreds of Pentagon promotions for high-ranking officers. The result is to sabotage the circulation of military elites. As the New York Times reports: “More than half of the current Joint Chiefs are expected to step down from their posts during the next few months without a Senate-approved successor in place”.
No doubt a procedural work-around will be found to ensure that the US military has a command chain in place. But the attitude of the far-right to the US military leadership was well articulated back in the spring by Tuberville. When challenged on his blockade of senior appointments, Tuberville shot back: “Experts have known for more than a decade that the military is top heavy. We do not suffer from a lack of generals,"
For many on America’s right-wing the emblem of the “top heavy”, liberal minded, “political” leadership of the US military is Mark Milley, Chairman of Joint Chiefs of Staff. In 2020 Milley clashed with President Trump and felt forced to make contact with his Chinese counterparts to convey “reassurance in order to maintain strategic stability.” Since then Trump has accused Milley of “TREASON.” Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) wants him “immediately” fired and Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) wants him court-martialed.
It is worth pausing to consider the implications of this escalation between the US military top brass and the radical right-wing of the Republican party. If Trump were to take office again in January 2025, how would he act in relation to a military command chain with which he was so conspicuously at odds?
Milley went on to rub salt in the wound with his robust defense of a military curriculum at West Point that included works on Critical Race Theory. In response to criticism by the likes of Rep. Mike Waltz (R-Fla.) Milley replied: “I’ve read Mao Zedong. I’ve read Karl Marx. I’ve read Lenin. That doesn’t make me a communist … what is wrong with understanding … the country which we are here to defend?”
The question, of course, is precisely what country is Milley defending? The vision of the United States defended by Florida Republicans does not encourage the reading of Mao, Marx or Lenin. High-profile Florida Republican Matt Gaetz responded to Milley’s remarks by tweeting contemptuously: “With Generals like this it’s no wonder we’ve fought considerably more wars than we’ve won.”
***
Of course, Tuberville, Gaetz and Waltz are attention-seekers. But the fact that they court such controversy points to the fact that there is a groundswell of right-wing opinion, which see the US military leadership not simply as defenders of America, but as “political” and as complicit with a liberal agenda that is anathema to conservative Americans. This is revealed by striking polling figures compiled by the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Institute. These show that though the US military retain more trust than any other institution in American society, that trust has dwindled dramatically in recent years.
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From a high of 70 percent in 2018 the share of Americans expressing a great deal of trust for the US military plunged to 45 percent in 2021 before recovering to 45 percent in 2022. The singles biggest cause for this collapse is the perception on the part of conservative Americans that the military leadership has become “politicized” and complicit with the liberal agenda they identify with “woke”. These domestic political issues and in particular the suspicions of conservative Americans far outweigh any negative judgements about military competence or failure in Afghanistan.
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Strikingly, when you ask which security risks Americans are most afraid of, what, in other words, they need defending against, what came top in 2022 were not foreign threats, but “political divisions within the US leading to violence.” 85 percent of Americans are concerned about that scenario and this fear of domestic political violence was shared by both sides (88 Democrat v. 85 percent GOP). Unsurprisingly, Democrats were also more concerned about Russia’s war on Ukraine. Asked to prioritize Russia and China 56 % of Republicans ranked China first, against only 19 percent who put Russia top. 42 % of Democrats put Russia top v. only 32% prioritizing China. Really big gaps opened up, not over Taiwan (69 v. 75), but over the risk of actual war with China, which concerned 59 percent of Democrats v. 79 percent of Republicans. Likewise there was a giant gap on climate change which ranked top for Democrats (91%) v. only 41 % for Republicans.
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Since the American military is an all-volunteer force public opinion matters not just as political background. To be confident of being able to regularly refresh its ranks, the US military needs not just public affirmation, but also a general conformity between the lifestyles of young people and martial expectations. In this regard too, the disconnect is getting progressively wider.
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@amemorablename@lemmygrad.ml
The core of the post-Vietnam volunteer US military (well more complicated than that with contractors and shit moving on) is these generations of chuds pouring out of the deep south.
Even the PSL, which we were just discussing, is all buddy-buddy with organizations that treat US veterans as special good boys who need their treats. After all Brian Becker's BFF is Mike Prysner, who got on the map by doing the Medea Benjamin bit of screaming at GWB about how he shed precious soldier blood on filthy middle eastern soil (yes this is a bad faith characterization of the way he centered soldiers' lives over the colonized – my friends died because you lied – and he deserves it)
We've got an issue with coddling the US military to work out. Don't be deceived by the west's online spaces
I think there's a certain degree of desperation about it, when we're talking about what's being said and done about it in good faith by regular folks (as opposed to CIA meddling and the like). Whether with PSL or with the military.
To try to explain what I mean, imagine if the conclusion, upon careful investigation, is that the US military is mainly imperialist loyalists and that PSL is largely useless for getting anywhere. This would imply, based on my understanding of the current crop of parties in the US: 1) There isn't really anybody visibly leading the charge from within who is capable of meeting the moment and 2) The military is going to be a major obstacle from within, unless it breaks itself in imperialist wars.
If this is actually the case, better to know that than to believe in falsehoods. But it's also a grim outlook for those of us who were born in the US and would have a hard time going elsewhere.
I hope that makes sense.
Yes you're perfectly clear, thank you. It will be very difficult to convince these people to fight for the abolition of their own class. That shouldn't mean walking on eggshells around them just because they consider their popularity among liberals enough to make them an authority.
Also the soldiers people typically treat a little nicer are usually long past their service and regret what they did heavily while arguing against further imperialism. People are incredibly wary of the ones that loved their time in the military.
Meanwhile the cops are actively working their jobs or living off a fat taxpayer pension which was their reward for killing 10 black people or dogs.
To your point though, military recruitment is, by nature, open to all but a small number of people, while cops are ostensibly a boys club that will turn anyone they “don’t like” away. They keep the best pay and pensions for “their kind”; while the military pays pennies and makes people beg like dogs to get medical treatment. The difference is fairly grim.