Something else to think about, a thought exercise:

Suppose we went ahead and, at 6pm tonight, we gave the liberals absolutely EVERYTHING they want from us. Everything!

By 8 am tomorrow morning, they will have come up with a list of a thousand new demands. Every single new demand, critical! The denial of any one of them, a travesty of justice!

There is no end to it. They are congenitally incapable of stopping.

Every once in a while they actually have a point. (And every once in a while, five dice roll a Yahtzee, too. Every once in a while, you’re dealt a royal flush.) This usually occurs, slowly over time, as the country changes, and the majority of people come to have a view that matches a desired change.

Liberals are anti-God (unless God is an amorphous force of nature, ie, Mother Gaia, who perhaps does some quantum-mechanical thingie or Jungian Synchronicity-thingie that they praise as mystical. God not as an eternal and omniscient entity; rather this is God as a deaf, dumb, and blind force of nature that somehow, usually via a pseudo-scientific quantum Law of Love, manages to accomplish Good Things. Via Superstring Tremolo Good-Good-Good-Good-Vibrations, I guess.)

Due to this, they cannot accept that what happens after they die has any meaning, and therefore they *require* that all change must happen NOW, because it must occur within their lifetime. And so every change that they desire must be shoved down the throats of all Americans, want it or not, time for it or not.

Another excellent essay on the topic can be found at blackfive.net, under the title “I Only Hang With Sheepdogs,” in which the blogger reprints Dave Grossman’s famous “On Sheep, Sheepdogs, and Wolves.”

A sobering observation was made at a round table on the military-civilian divide that I attended last year, at which various veterans and active-duty military men and women discussed the sheepdog metaphor: All agreed that we have, today, a situation in which many Americans are not only sheep but sheep who fear and hate sheepdogs.

We have one part of society (for shorthand, the East- and-West coast elites who attend ivy-league colleges and have careers in academia, journalism and the “creative” arts) who do not volunteer to serve, who do not know anyone who serves, and who do not respect those who do.

Then we have another part of society (stereotyped as the Sarah Palin/NASCAR/Country Music rubes) who do serve and who are growing increasingly frustrated with and contemptuous of the coastal elites who look down on them, seeing them as cowardly and effete hypocrites who are willing to use them when convenient but who would never themselves dirty their hands with the messy business of national defense. (Why have we read so many stories of immigrants getting fast-tracked to citizenship through military service? Because too few native-born Americans are willing to volunteer. Why is ROTC so unwelcome on many campuses? Because your typical academic hates the military–at the same time that he or she eagerly embraces this week’s Hezbollah spokesman.)

As more than one round table participant pointed out, our society is splitting into those who serve and those who do not. This is not a healthy situation. A republic depends on a population in which everyone accepts all the burdens of citizenship. We can get along for awhile, but we run the risk of developing a permanent military class which is largely separate from the rest of society, and that is an extremely dangerous situation. If those who serve see themselves as separate, and the ruling class agrees, then our democracy is in danger of becoming unstable.

Drawing on the sheepdog metaphor, one of the panelists said that sheepdogs don’t ask for much, just a little respect. So what happens when the sheep abuse the sheepdogs? The sheepdogs can shrug it off for awhile, but sooner or later they may take one of three paths: First, they may see themselves as no longer fighting for America but only for their part of it. Second, they may give up. Or third, they may turn on the sheep.

None of those possibilities are good. Nobody wants to tear America apart–except for leftists, Useful Idiots, and other enemies. Call them the “God Damn America” crowd.

Something to think about.

Even if I don’t move to Utah, I still plan to take advantage of my Second Amendment right to protect myself—from my own government if need be.

http://www.oath-keepers.blogspot.com/

If you are out in Utah and there’s nothing around blocking your visibility, then rifles and .50 cal sniper rifles are the thing.

Stark’s War series by John G. Henry posits a rebellion by a sergeant after his chain of command orders suicidal attacks against entrenched positions that destroyed an entire division, until Stark cut the general officers out of the loop and took command, via future C3 systems, of the battle.

The point of all this is that if you read enough science and military fiction, such things are not a foreign or alien experience/situation as the one we are describing. But why that is relevant can be made clear in a few words.

The military, especially the commanders, mobilize through leadership and obedience to orders from their chain of command. In a situation where they doubt their leaders, they will turn to their NCOs or trusted commanders. But those NCOs and trusted commanders will be loyal to the United States and the concept of civilian rule or the validity of the chain of command. You see, an officer cannot counter-mand the orders of his superiors without his own people starting to rebel against the officer’s own orders. If the military stages a coup against the government, then any fractious elements inside the US will take that as a precedent and use it to mobilize more internal dissension, forcing a backlash in terms of martial law. Military general officers know this, and this is one of the reasons why they won’t take command of the United States Presidency, like a Praetorian Guard.

But, if the military commanders refuse to do this and they refuse to obey the orders of their lawful (but not Constitutional) superiors (Obama), then what is left? What is left is that the body of the Army and Marines will do nothing except stall, up until a military commander they trust gives the order to mobilize for operations against X target inside the United States.

A way they can do this and still remain in command by civilians is to escort and protect an American grassroots rebellion against the DC/state government. When Governors or Presidents call for their military branches to “suppress” dissidents and keep them from calling for such trite things as “fair elections”, the Marines and Army can self-mobilize to protect those civilians, the same way they mobilized to protect the Iraqi civilians in 2005.

But until a civilian leader that the military can trust and back arises, the military’s hands are tied. The mil’s best leaders, like Petraeus, recognize the dangers of overthrowing civilian rule so they will do everything they can short of doing just that. But if the President gives him an order, Petraeus has no choice but to accept it or resign. He may try his best to make sure that order is executed correctly and successfully, but that is only feasible within certain limitations: limitations that will be set by Obama, not Petraeus.

There are many different scenarios that can become existent here, depending on whether hot spots are centered around domestic locales or foreign locales.

John Ringo and Weber’s book “March to the Stars” describes how the military can be suborned so that such people are loyal to evil men because the evil men pay them their salaries.

As the economy tanks, military recruitment will go up. However, the pool of experienced military people will go down, because they won’t put their lives on the line under inept leadership and worse, retarded orders that tell them to maintain and create another Vietnam. This usually balances it out after awhile, with no critical change in the military’s combat ability. But Obama will break the Army and Marines, something they accused Bush of doing, via creating what is known as the “Peace Dividend”. Those in the military that saw cuts under Clinton and a Republican administration balancing the budget understand very well what a Peace Dividend leads to. The Dems cut funding to the South Vietnamese, partially because they wanted to see more foreigners die, partially because they hated the military, and partially because they hated Nixon and his VP, Ford, but primarily because the money spent on the South Vietnamese could be better spend on their “budgets”. That was worth the lives of a few million poor to the Dems. Heck, it was cheap as hell a deal for them. The fact that this cost others everything, well, since when did a Madoff or mass murderer care about that? That was their “Peace Dividend”, you see. They needed it to buy more votes and to stay in power. Just as they are doing now. But even the REpublicans will make cuts, although for different reasons, because every politician thinks the last war is always the final war, except for some very rare exceptions to the rule.

As the Peace Dividend goes into effect, what you will see is a concomitant lowering of standards in the military. Especially if Michelle Obama starts instituting “fairness” doctrines on military families and expenditures. Lower maintenance, lower training standards, lower everything. Combine this fact with the influx of new recruits coming from a crashed economy and what you will get is a very interesting result. Now this can be sustainable in peace time, but in active operations, it is a complete and unmitigated disaster. You cannot sustain operations while losing your best, having to train green recruits up to standard, and then having your budget slashed, your combat power politically limited by ROE and Executive Orders, and various other shenanigans that will occur under the Dems.

It cannot be sustained because too many people will die. It’s sustainable in peace time cause the rot is covered up by “Readiness Reports” and that jazz that looks good on paper but is really a paper tiger.

The finely oiled military machine President Bush left to America and to his successor is going down the toilet once Global Conflict starts anew and Obama starts “transforming” things. That is not going to be a pretty sight.

As for ammo, reloading is a nice hobby (but your wife might freak out even more vociferously than I did).

*chuckles*

In enforcement, the police will more and more simply enforce the status quo that keeps “the ruling political class” in power – and as a result, the police will become utterly despised by most of the people. (Have you had a home or car burglary in the last two decades? Exactly how helpful in containing or solving such crimes has YOUR police dept been? Here in Dallas, they’re worse than useless. Thieves have a completely free hand, as do their fences. The police do NOTHING.)

The breakdown of civilian authority will lead more and more “marginal people” to become predators on their communities. Communities that do not want to simply collapse into anarchic misery will organize for self-protection, which the police will HATE.

In economics, the black market will expand explosively. Attempts by the police to enforce the status quo will more and more, over time, be met with violent resistance.

In other words, there will be decades of rising misery as civilization devolves due to the breakdown of civilian authority. “What went wrong?” will be the complaint.

Socialists of course will have no answer.

The usual libertarian response, focused on individual freedom, with NO corresponding emphasis on individual responsibility, will have no answer.

The social conservatives, focusing on individual responsibility, with NO corresponding emphasis on individual freedom, will have no answer.

Unless we find a way to come together to head this whole mess off. The liberal left can’t do it, because their collectivism runs counter to all of human nature itself. We on the conservative side seem to be capable of promoting only part of the solution. I think the solution lies in the proper mix of individual freedom and individual responsibility… which is why I’ve been hollering that libertarians and social conservatives need to find a way to meet each other in the middle, in that area of what I’m calling the “proper mix” of individual freedom and individual responsibility.

If you abdicate on individual freedom, you still end up enslaved to your government. It might not be collectivist, but you will still exist solely to serve your government. If you abdicate on individual responsibility, your civilization collapses around you, in a descent into anarchy of one form or another.

Libertarians will have to accept that civilization is not inevitable; in fact it is fragile and requires its people to behave responsibly, and human nature requires therefore that laws enforce responsible behavior. For civilization to thrive, we require laws regulating social behavior and promoting civilization, supporting civilization. Social conservatives have always known this. They’ve known that human nature means we are not angels, that there are differences between men and women, that raising children to become responsible adults within that civilization is the most important responsibility of all adults. That freedom leads inevitably to anarchy unless responsibility is deliberately demanded.

Social conservatives will have to accept that a civilization without human freedom is not a civilization worth living in. Therefore the minimum amount of laws that regulate human behavior in accordance with human nature, while granting as much freedom as possible without harming the flowering of civilization, creates the best society and civilization. That change is inevitable over time, and resisting change itself is useless. Wisdom requires making the correct choices, allowing for change… and perhaps both sides may need to accept that there is a wise PACE of change as well, that human nature requires gradual change, not constant revolutionary change nor zero change.

In the long run, we’ll see.

I’m not military. I agree that in the military one must learn to obey authority. But as you rise within the command heirarchy, isn’t it true your own responsibilities increase as well, and you have command authority within your sphere… and you must also learn to exercise authority? Or is that only true for officers? In a top-to-bottom heirarchy, the vast majority of the military is likely low-level soldiers who have little to no responsibility for exercising authority. (Is that a true statement?)

I’m interested in what our military commenters would say.

Even in a scenario of collapse, I see violent resistance as being a long way away. What we’re more likely to see is a complete collapse of respect for civilian authority and civilian law.