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I don’t think the military rank and file would refuse to shoot if ordered simply because the US military has made training such that widespread insubordination is not going to happen. You might have a few stragglers, but I would expect them dealt with in a manner that would make the problem moot. Even among the officers, they are going to obey orders because that’s what they’re trained to do as much as the rank and file do.
I’ve just never understood the weird fantasy that the military or the police were going to en mess break with the leadership. That’s not how military or police think of themselves. They don’t make policy or decide whether or not an order is “legal” or “moral” or “good”. They follow orders without question because not doing so means a good possibility of worse things for their unit or the country as a whole. A cop who’s questioning whether or not a law he’s charged with enforcing is useless as a cop. He’s attempting to do the judge’s job. A soldier who won’t follow orders is a danger to his unit. He’s also attempting to do the job of the civilians who have decided he should be carrying out the mission he’s been given.
"Having an army willing to crack skulls domestically" is a solved problem and the USA has chosen not to do it, at least in some sort of generalized red tribe rebellion(localized flareups might be different because that's an easier problem to solve). American soldiers are probably willing to do war crimes under orders overseas, that doesn't mean they're willing to invade their own home towns.
I'm not claiming that 'American soldiers sympathize with the red tribe over the country', I'm saying that the US Army is not going to put down mass rebellions without substantial reorganization. Again, a repeat of the LA riots is different.
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You are correct 99% of the time. Most of the time, the duty of a soldier is not in doubt, it is obeying the (non-atrocious) orders of the leadership of his country.
Put simply, as long as the President, Congress and the SCOTUS are on the same side, the military will follow their orders, and any attempt at civil war by other parties will go extremely poorly.
However, you could also consider what happens in a constitutional crisis. For example, on J6, Trump was still the commander of the military, and he could have tried to deploy the marines to "stop the steal". If you then rely on the civilian leadership, things would get hairy, because the commander of the US military is the president. However, US soldiers do not swear simply to follow the orders of the US president. Instead, they swear:
In a constitutional crisis, the US military is sworn first and foremost to uphold the constitution, and famously, the constitution says what the SCOTUS says it says. (Within reason. If five SC justices decided to rule that one of them is in fact legally the president, and ordered the marines to occupy the White House, the military leadership might follow their own interpretation of the constitution instead.)
This "of course the military will follow the civilian leadership", which you take for granted, can be taken for granted in the US (after the civil war, anyhow), but historically seems to be the exception rather than the rule, as far as democratic states are concerned. In Weimar Germany, when the democratic leaders were asking the military to help with militants which attempted a coup in some cities, the reply was "Reichswehr schiesst nicht auf Reichswehr" -- we do not shoot our own. Spanish fascism started as a military coup, as did most military dictatorships in the Americas. "Military leadership decides they don't like election results" is a very common failure mode of having a military.
I’m not so sure the distinction is there. It’s something that the soldiers give an oath to do, and other than that, the emphasis is always on obedience, not making policy. And the ability to demonize whoever the outgroup is is pretty strong in most military and police departments. By the time you get to the point where American troops are being ordered to fire on American civilians, they will absolutely believe that they are threats to America itself. They’ll be terrorists, insurrectionists, militia members, whatever can be said about them. Those giving the orders are going to be brave defenders of the order. The other institutions countermanding the order will be compromised in some way.
It’s not going to be something that starts with the rank and file, certainly. It’s not structured to have people on the ground just decide on their own which orders are good or bad. It’s structured to have a unit take control over people and territory by doing a small part of the whole operation. Soldiers are taught to simply do their jobs. Even in things like nuclear silos, the people running them are explicitly selected for their ability to compartmentalize their part of the whole. Orders come in, flip these switches, turn these keys, and do so while insulated from the uncomfortable thought that you just trained to (or in hypothetical actually did) launch a weapon that will absolutely kill millions of people where it’s targeted. In other units it’s going to be drop this bomb by drone, or take out these militants, or protect these high value buildings. They aren’t going to think of it as “killing Americans” but doing a mission they’ll be told is defending American life.
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