This is all presuming a refusal to deploy WMDs, right? The Armed forces technically could flatten any place into glass if it came to that. Granted, we have not done that since 1945.
What’s interesting is that the two factors that most determined the outcome last time were 1) demographics (relative population) and 2) industrial capacity. Not unlike WW2. So a spread of population of the seceding states will be a concern. Also geographic contiguity. New York and California have immense populations and wealth but are also a continent apart from each other… and the Midwest is no longer firmly on their side as it was 150 years ago.
But still, it’s hard to compare the standing Federal army of 1860, which did possess a scalable structure and embedded expertise, but tiny manpower, versus the one in 2019, which possesses permanent and extremely flexible force-projection capability with short turnaround time. I think that becomes a major, major factor in its own right.
I’m sure an AR-15 can drop the US power grid.
Right after it defeats a Bradley with one of these:
Also an insurgency like they plan wont work that well when your neighbors aren’t on your side and might even just take you out.
Are they using Academy Awards set decorations as targets?
Well their ‘claim’ is that the left doesn’t even own a fraction of the guns of the right. So they will be relying on the power of the loyal police and military for protection.
Sure, if it’s backwoods hunters vs. latte sipping liberals, backwoods hunters win. But what is the U.S. Army/Navy/Marines/Air Force doing while this is going on? (I admit I haven’t watched the video; apologies if they address that.)
Also, I know the military is supposed to skew Trumpy, but aren’t there a lot of minorities in the standing army? How does that play out?
One man owning 50 guns isn’t as effective as 10 men owning one gun each.
Not to mention one man picking them off or just reporting them to the military. All your AR-15s don’t mean much when a Hellfire hits your storm cellar from 20k feet.
An insurgency could be “effective” if it was diffuse and mostly picking soft political targets. But that effectiveness also requires a goal. If you’ve declared war on America, the Army will just take your territory and you aren’t going to live off the land in most states for long. Plus all your fancy camo doesn’t mean shit to FLIR. These people jerk off to gun cam footage from the Gulf, they should know this already.
Did anyone see that scene in Narcos (season 1, I think) where the Columbian Army conducts a raid on Escobar’s compound? Like, all these badass criminals, and a team of professional soldiers absolutely takes them apart. I think about that scene sometimes. (On the flip side, it’s not like that raid ‘solved’ the cartel problem.)
There are a lot of reserves and national guard members still. I think the rank-and-file would have some hard decisions to make and not all of them would choose to stick with the Federal government in an actual repeat of the Civil War. That said, I don’t actually think secession is likely.
Nuking American cities and towns would mostly be off the table, I think, but even if it happened, it wouldn’t necessarily end the war. It’s not like people rebelling against the US wouldn’t know that nukes were possible. Since I think any war is more likely to be cities vs towns than states vs states, I don’t see how nukes could be used to much actual effect. That said, I also don’t see how a war could really make much sense.
A far more likely scenario for a Civil War 2.0 is that you have a coalition of States, counties, and/or city governments that rejects the legitimacy of an election or of the electoral college. And then you are looking at President Biden and President Trump setting up their own governments and different elected authorities declaring allegiance to different presidents. If the Electoral College is never constituted, what does the government do? If half the Senators and Representatives are saying one thing and half another, do you ask the Supreme Court? When the swing votes are cast for Trump by Trump appointees, you end up with the same problem.
Basically, an actual constitutional crisis where the country cannot form a legitimate government is the scenario where some form of war ensues. But how do you fight a hot war between people sitting on their couches yelling into their Twitter? I expect mostly we’d see a bunch of rioting and police enforcement, a bunch of local governments stepping in to control things, and perhaps, eventually, another constitutional convention of some sort. The only way this happens, though, is if Trump loses the election or if the Dem nominee is wildly power-hungry (or bought - like maybe Gabbard’s or Bloomberg’s ego could support a rebellion centered on the idea that the popular vote should win or the election was rigged).
They did, to a degree. Its fanciful to some degree as well, but a lot sounds like its based on existing military wargaming projections. Basically the miltary will be less effective because they are dealing with Riots in major population centers, AND fragmenting along partisan lines. Which they claims that 60% (i think) support trump and his policies so more than 50% will form into a conservative patriotic military faction.
By the way, for all the vitriol and division in today’s politics, I’m somewhat amazed that the rash of assassinations we saw in the 60s hasn’t happened. Perhaps that’s because Trump is in power and it would change if he loses.
Yeah, '68 was still more violent and I think into the early 70s there was a lot of small-scale domestic terrorism. Though I don’t know how the body counts of all that compare to today’s mass shootings, which might be in some cases written off as apolitical but in other cases (synagogue, El Paso) surely should not be.
The logistics and particulars of this military fragmenting then become very important, I should think. Who holds which military bases? Who holds the carrier groups? What is the loyalty of the people who actually can fly the planes, drop the bombs, fuel the planes, operate the drones, and so forth? Does a lot of very fancy technology end up rusting on the airfield (or in the ocean) because there is no longer a unified group of people willing and able to operate/crew it?
Honestly, I expect this to change in 2020. Like regardless of what happens.
Also the prowess and mostly impartiality of the FBI and similar agencies isn’t to be discounted. In the 60’s the FBI was helping assassinate people after all.
John Mark is just another self-serving YouTube Rightnut and i wasn’t impressed with his previous videos. Like most of his kind he leans toward the graphic, dramatic and apocalyptic.
On the other hand i think the Conservative / GOP / Right’s obsession with guns and confrontation are a imaginary zombie apocalypse powder keg of misanthropic propaganda laced views, because most of the scenarios for Civil War 2.0 are them actually attacking liberals and not the other way around.
IOW and in reality, Civil War 2.0 is more likely going to look more like Germans rounding up Jews, or Serbians rounding up Bosnians, where the Germans and Serbs are conservatives and the Jews and Bosnians are liberals, than black helicopter Killary Democrats descending from the sky to assassinate Buck Bowman and his grizzled army of southern conservatives making their last stand in the foothills of the Ozarks.
People like John Mark think only in terms of the personal, as in the government has both collapsed and evaporated, and it’s just mano y mano. Even then, it’s more likely that Conservatives like him would advocate cleansing violence against Liberals than the other way around.
So let’s look at the reasonable scenarios that kick off CW2.
Hillary wins (yes, somehow) = Republican mass violence.
Trump loses, but refuses to concede = Republican mass violence against liberals, though perhaps on a low level. Democrat violence against GOP members is certainly possible at this point as well. It’s far more likely Republicans attack Democratic states than the reverse in this scenario, though i could be wrong.
Trump loses, but foreign interference has rigged the election to look like Democrats have rigged it = Republican mass violence
Trump wins, but foreign interference has clearly rigged the election = Democratic violence? According to John Mark, Democrats are weak pansies that aren’t going to fight back.
Trump wins, foreign interference, Democrats mass protest or secede = Republican violence against Democrats in their own territories. They may eagerly use the military under their control to attack and destroy the liberal states, depending on how it all plays out.
Civil War 2.0 = Who is defending against who? Would Republican be more likely to attack than defend? Is it more likely that Republicans like John Mark would eagerly preach mass violence against liberals as they moved to “liberate” the country from the misrule of Democrats, or the other way around?
In basically all reasonable near-term scenarios it would be Republicans attacking Liberals in rejection of Democratic political success, not the reverse. The fantasy that John Mark and his kind peddle about liberals is far less grounded in reality as is hatred of liberals - both the real and the imaginary - among conservatives.
It’s far more likely these so-called patriots would form death squads and hunt down liberals in their territories than the other way around, because in most of these scenarios these “patriots” are the bad guys. Just because they can’t tell they’d be the bad guys doesn’t mean they aren’t.
There are vanishingly few near-term scenarios where a clearly evil and despotic Democratic government takes power from a Conservative majority and begins to literally kill them, and far more very possible scenarios unfolding before our eyes where Conservatives / GOP refuse to believe anything but propaganda and declare Democrats to be their class enemy and in need of extirpation. This kind of slanderous propaganda in wide circulation among conservatives today is really far too similar to the kind that Nazis and Soviets and other despotic governments have always used against those they wish to destroy.
Loyalty to the US right now increases by rank. The officer corps hates Trump.
Most of the defectors to Trumpistan would be E1-E4’s.
I believe that he’s even underwater with the enlisted now.
NCOs are also enlisted. Junior Enlisted are more pro-Trump than NCOs.
Junior Enlisted loved Trump and Sanders in 2016. (Military Times polling)
But what did they think in 2018?
The more recent polls I saw from around that period showed that Trump had lost a ton of support from the military in his first 2 years of fucking stuff up.