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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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