It'd be a shame if people started checking potential hires, tenants, dates, and business transactions against this info, cutting off ICE from large segments of the economy and society. I bet they'd feel really dehumanized.
I.e they shouldn't be blamed if politicans force them to fight battles they think are unjust. If they are ordered to they don't have a choice its fight or go to miltary prison per UCMJ. Other jobs (law enforcement) are not like that. Generally speaking its quite unfair to double blame soldiers forcing them to fight unjust wars and than punish them for being forced into stupid wars. They can choose to not be soldiers but not everyone will be in a position economically to ignore the possible benefits. Miltary service is a strong path to escape poverty especially in the US.
Law enforcement is entirely different they are immune to judgement errors they make even if they kill someone. They have little accountablity, and often abuse of the law is just overlooked or covered up because they are the ones who enforce it. They don't even have to know how to do their job or law, if they mess up its someone elses problem due to qualifed immunity. Hence the craziness with the ICE they can violate rights with impunity and much of that has to due with the fact their oversight body is apparently just the president who says don't care about any law breaking.
Adding to this, if you're in the peacetime military and have a long contract, and congress or the executive orders the military to deploy somewhere, those soldiers won't even have much of a choice. As long as you're under contract, if the military says jump, most often all you can respond with is "how high?"
I also recognize that the US has perverted this concept countless times since with blatant imperialistic motives, it does however still not break the concept of a just responsive military force.
TL;DR: They're not selling their souls if they (mistakenly) trust elected officials to work for the will of the people and only deploy for just causes.
Fortunately the Nuremberg principles rescue us here. Following orders is no excuse for abdicating a moral responsibility.
I quite explicitly did the opposite of that.
> Who is really misguided into thinking the US army is defensive in nature?
Let me put it this way:
* Had Ukraine not had an army, it would not exist right now.
* Had Ukraine had a bigger army, it might not have been invaded at all.
* Had Ukraine had the biggest army in the world, it might or might not have abused it for nefarious reasons.
The argument I made is that the US (and any country) needs it for case 1 and 2 (can also be solved through defensive alliances, though Ukraine had assurances that were broken), but the US has gone the wrong way for case 3.
This however does not invalidate case 1 and 2.
> You have constructed a beautiful straw man.
I'm unsure how to respond to this other than state that it's ironic.
I highly recommend reading On War by carl von clausewitz. He gives a pragmetic opinion on War and being read for it. Along with being ready for general conflict both non-violent and violent
This is why derision is a valid philosophical debate strategy if a person refuses to engage in rational discussion. To label GP as an R-word is a social signal and warning to others not to behave similarly. Derision also promotes healthy skepticism of new arguments you hear, lest risk falling into the same trap and have oneself become a laughingstock.
You're not going to have a good conversation like this, and you aren't going to be "winning" anything for your troubles, either.
Peace from who? Mexico? Canada? Which country is going to invade you?
All the American military does is bomb Middle Eastern countries and leave a huge mess. I do not believe US security is helped by bombing weddings and schools. I would even argue that it worsens it, by creating a bunch of people that lost their loved ones to those acts and that then turn to terrorism as a means of revenge.
The countries of Western Europe used to be at a state of continuous war for literal centuries, horrible atrocities inflicted on one another.
They all had their fancy armies, and they were all tempted to use them. Gotta get your money's worth, y'know?
Then they founded the world's most successful peace project, the European Union.
No wars between members since.
This adolescent behavior of threatening gestures is counterproductive and only leads to more conflict.
More mature societies have figured that out already.
Again, the idea of "military protection" is overly primitive and simplistic. If we had integrated them in our system, we could've given them rule of law as we have done with many an applicant state (think other post-Soviet countries!) and nurtured peace through fostering mutual dependence.
We failed to spread the values of enlightenment and now we are paying the price.
The whole protection racket thing that's now exploding in our face would've been unnecessary and could've been avoided.
Violence is the language of the weak.
We've seen time and time again how ineffective it is, most recently when y'all tore up the deal the EU negotiated with Iran and instead went back to more primitive ways, with predictable results. Before that, in Afghanistan, where after countless dead the same group is in power again. When even is the last time your approach worked? WW2? Might be time to move with the times.
I'm explicitly not talking about all the Middle-Eastern misadventures here, I find those as baffling and unjust as you do. I'm only referring to defensive and deterrent effects of having a military, which as I said, is the true portion of the propaganda you pointed out. (Good propaganda is always partly true.) The assertion that it doesn't exist and that the US military is only for war crimes is demonstrably false, and to prove it you need only (as I said to someone else) try to fly an airplane into US airspace without announcing yourself.
Is it primitive and juvenile? Absolutely! It comports with those particular traits of homo sapiens, an ape species. Any country big enough, or rich enough, or strategic enough for some other reason, is a target for invasion by the immature and non-cooperative. Furthermore if all the countries of the world were to join in one big cooperative union (which they already do in the realm of trade and commerce to some degree), I sadly don't think it would take long for someone to betray it, the way Trump (Russian asset) is betraying it now.
Including Russia in EU would change EU from cooperative organization to its exact opposite.
Well, some of us at least.
It is telling you have not been able to engage with the point at all and choose to bury your head in ancient history instead of confronting the present day.
Please explain what would happen if the US had no military and Andorra decided to invade?
Nobody's gonna invade the US, what a preposterous idea. This is precisely the fear based propaganda I'm talking about.
And to be clear, the US has abused the army for half a century for unjust causes, and I'm not defending that, but the concept of an army can be moral in the context of rivalling aggressive nations.
There is no US military that's a defensive force. It is a war crimes machine.
You might think you are defending the idea of a peaceful defense force in the US but that's never existed and probably will never exist. So we all read your posts as if they were talking about the US military that exists.
I both acknowledged and specified the difference.
> You might think you are defending the idea of a peaceful defense force in the US but that's never existed and probably will never exist.
Let me ask you this instead: What do you see as an alternative? Abolishing the entirety of all military force, or electing officials that do not abuse the existing or reduced scale military force for unjust causes? Or some third option?
They are both zero percent likely to happen. So why hypothesize and carry water for either idea? Like, "the US military should have peace beans that rainbow blast everyone into loving each other" is as cromulent a position as "if the US military were defense only, they'd be really good actually".
> They are both zero percent likely to happen.
You didn't provide a third option.
> So why hypothesize and carry water for either idea?
If all possible ideas are completely unrealistic, why comment at all? What could they do better?
The problem is that it is defense + war crimes. And there is no credible just defense option.
The matter of fact is that war is messy especially guerrilla warfare which is the only war that basically exists today and in that context what's an acceptable ratio? 0 means surrendering or being stepped on ask Ukraine but is it 1/5, 1/10? Ideally you have zero but to have total disregard of the service members life doesn't cause there to be less war or civilian death. Just more onesided brutal wars. These are hard questions but to paint the people that fight in wars in democratic societies as just souless sellouts is reductive and its the type of thinking that leads to mass murder by political groups. Souless people don't feel PTSD for what they did they are souless. PTSD is incredibly common in the services because we don't want empathless murder machines. Because when it comes to wining wars (wining a political objective ultimately) generally speaking civilian deaths don't help political goals which is what the elected officals ask the miltary to do. But most importantly the elected bodies are the ones asking for invasion.
I think these are hard questions that good solutions from the miltary side of things don't exist but most importantly I really think we as a society need to have more serious talks and rational conceptions of how war and conflict works. I can't recommend On War by Clauswitz enough, but acoup also has a great primer on it [1]
[1]https://acoup.blog/2026/02/13/collections-against-the-state-...
Its difficult to name a war in which the American miltary has killed, even close to the number of civilians as its opposition. WW2 germany? Japan (remember china). the USSR? the PRC today. North Viet Government? North Korean? Afganhstan? (yeah the Tailban killed more civilians) All of these war/conflicts the US kills far less civilians. Is that ideal no civilian dies but the conduct of the opposition in this war maximizes civilian causulty often but no one says anything about those and people led with the Armed Service is just all murders.
You are simplifying the horror of War to some ideal where people don't have to die. It just doesn't exist and just comes across as Russian anti-liberal rhetoric. The structure of our miltary and its actions are not poor or unprofessional espeically when you look at literally any other peer nation.
Any nation that commits war crimes is evil. What is this nonsense like, some amount of war crimes is fine actually as long as we're not in the top 10 war crimes last?
Also, even still, I think the US would make that top ten list. Let's take some examples from your list.
North Korea -- a brutal dictatorship that has killed countless people in North Korea, and inflicted significant suffering on South Korea. Disgusting and reprehensible regime. Truly evil.
The United States -- imperialist nation that has caused incalculable damage to Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Guatemala, Indonesia, Cuba, Colombia, Dominican Republic, Congo, Chile, East Timor, Angola, El Salvador, Grenada, and Nicaragua.
Wait I'm not done.
Libya, Iran, Yugoslavia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Panama, Haiti, Somalia, Yemen, and Pakistan.
And you'd think that's it but let's keep going.
They've also hurt Ukraine, Palestine, Hawai'i, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Mexico.
Then, you know, there's The United States, where the indigenous people were killed. 95% of their population eradicated in the run up to the Declaration of Independence, and 50% of the remaining population in the 1800s.
Woof.
Need me to continue with more? These are all places where the US military ...
Oh shit, wait. I haven't even started on nuclear warfare and testing. Or testing on minority troops.
Ok. I think I got it out of my system. American Samoa. Sorry had one more. Whew.
Now you see why I don't play the moral relativism game, and simply say any war crimes is an unacceptable number of war crimes. Because if you hold up American military history against any single nation, the sheer quantities just don't stack up. Tens of millions of innocents dead, either through direct or indirect action. And it's continuing. North Korea is evil AND the US military has uncountable war crimes. Both are bad. Trying to compare two countries like this forces you to juxtapose a small but intense evil against a staggeringly large sustained but maybe less acute evil.
So no, you are probably right, I probably am over simplifying. I'm sure Pinochet's victims would love to hear how it was actually ok because the US soldiers who installed him were professional and had good structure.
Read more history. Understand the US place in the world. I'm sure there are many upstanding, kind, loving, wonderful soldiers in the US military. The institution, however... the institution has hundreds of years of imperialist violence.
Edit: I suppose I've stumbled on some kind of economic or game-theory angle here - Militaries exist to impose costs. They tip the balance of potential invaders' cost-benefit analyses. They also impose costs on their owners though. But I guess the idea is that the benefits (avoiding the costs of being invaded) are supposed to be greater than the costs of the defense force.
I'm not being condescending or rude or otherwise out of line here saying your position is genuinely stupid.
In the United States, citizens may decide to join the armed forces. Politicians decide whether and when they serve in a war.
The exception would be if a person volunteered directly in a foreign war, eg a US civilian volunteering to fight in Ukraine.