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Notes -
On DEI-fication of the army :
I'm assuming you served through Bush Jr, Obama, Trump and Biden. When did DEI creep into the military ? Was it a Biden era phenomenon, or did you experience it during Trump 1 and Obama's terms as well ?
The post-Obama picture of America is pretty clear to me. It's the standard populism cascade. One side elects a habitual line stepper and the other party escalates in response. The escalation through Trump 1 --> Biden Autopen --> Trump 2 makes sense.
I see 'Obama --> Trump 1' as a separate phenomenon that's divorced from this escalation ladder. Is that also how Republicans see it ? Or do they see Trump 1 a response to a perceived populist line-stepping by Obama ?
I will preface this by saying my voting pattern went Obama, Obama, Biden, Trump. It’s been a real philosophical adventure.
DEI has been in the military from Day 1 of my career. There was a female servicemember who won the “Female Servicemember of the Quarter” award the same quarter she won the “Servicemember of the Quarter” award at my first duty station. Obviously, that’s one more award than I could have won each quarter, and awards matter in the military. I’m not saying I would have won, I didn’t know that gal and she might have been Queen of the Amazons. She just had more opportunity than I did.
In boot camp, women received the same degree of PT God recognition as the men did, despite the female standards being 20 fewer pushups and a minute slower run than I was already accomplishing, and I was just at the low end of the good male PTers, something like 10 pushups and 30 seconds off the top guys. But the women got praised and rewarded for being objectively worse, and I just carried on with life. It was the water in which I swam and I saw nothing wrong with it.
Obama just made it clear to the upper echelons in the military that they were going to stop saying things like “Women aren’t as strong as men,” and “Young women in a platoon of young men are going to cause order and discipline problems, and their chance to girlboss around is not worth the sacrifice.”
That was the point at which Skynet began learning at a geometric rate. He shuffled out the old guard and replaced them with people more aligned with him. From then on, the Pentagon just kept sending up more and more prog general promotion recommendations. At the time, this was of course a right-wing conspiracy theory, as I smugly told many people.
Since then, I would say that the military stopped being an inherently conservative (slow progressive) organization, and has switched to being progressive at the top echelons. It’s also much more prog at the lower echelons than it was when I came in. But we’ll see how Hegseth’s purges shake out and if people are willing to stay if a culture shift actually happens. Hegseth needs to get his own Pentagon Skynet learning at a hyperbolic rate if he wants to succeed.
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No, Obama is seen as continuously escalating leading to a backlash during his second term. Fast and furious, IRS targeting, his racial rhetoric, etc.
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I have met some older Red Tribe Republicans who see Obama as having crossed various lines with whatever scandals were prominent for the Tea Party, and some young online Republicans are now taking minor cracks at Obama revisionism. For the most part, the attitude I see in online and urban Republican circles towards Obama is that he was a bad president, but basically a figurehead for a bipartisan process of frog-boiling America that goes back well before him, which accelerated under him, but without major qualitative shifts or line-stepping during his presidency (partly because the architects of this process also draw all the lines).
I mean the big one that sticks out to me for Obama crossing lines is when he put out a hit list that included American citizens, and then actually killed said American citizen in a targeted strike (also killing said American citizen's teenage American citizen son). He was a terrorist shitbag who deserved to die, mind you, but the right way to do it would have been in a plausibly deniable way through one of our allies like the Brits, not straight up saying "We're going to assasinate this American citizen" and then actually following through.
Anwar al-Awlaki is the American citizen terrorist shitbag in question, by the way:
https://www.motherjones.com/criminal-justice/2010/08/aclu-anwar-al-awlaki/
The only significant leftwing criticism of this came from the ACLU, I don't recall any democrats in congress voicing opposition. Republicans were also generally supportive as well, for shitbag Muslim terrorist reasons.
This is one of those things that is a legal red line, but is obviously such a sensible thing to do (unlike, say, having Yemeni-American citizens who run off and become jihadists) that nobody really cared except leftists. There was quite a bit of leftist criticism at the time, I recall, although the antiwar left was already marginalized and so didn't make it into prestige institutions. Now that "line" mostly matters insofar as it points out liberal hypocrisy when they claim Trump crossing much lesser ones is completely unprecedented.
GWOT probably did more to completely normalize line-crossing as a matter of government procedure than anything else - but that's how it works, if it's a matter of government procedure, then by definition it isn't crossing a line.
The thing is, the legal line isn't where people think it is.
This goes into war powers, specifically the Congressional authorization of use of force against Al Qaeda, wherever it was, which included Yemen via AQAP, which is what those Yemeni-American Jihadists were a part of. Once the United States is in a legal state of armed conflict (colloquially 'war'), individuals start falling under various laws of wars and relevant precedents. The precedents applicable to American citizen joining, say, Al Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula, are the precedents established during WW2 with American citizens found serving in the Axis militaries. In Re Territo from WW2 is a relevant case.
The very short version of that is that the legal red line is 'Americans who take up arms against the United States on behalf of parties in conflict with the United States are considered belligerents of that other party, and do not get special exemptions from the normal rules governing conflict.' It is not a violation of constitutional rights to kill a belligerent fighting against the United States, even if that belligerent is an American citizen, any more than taking that belligerent prisoner and keeping them as a POW without an arrest.
The legal issue with hitting a Yemeni-American citizen in a drone strike in a conflict isn't the American citizenship, but the drone strike itself. The American citizenship is immaterial to whether the target is a belligerent- the issue is if you can take the drone strike against a belligerent in the first place.
Now, this doesn't mean that it was a good idea. I myself think it wasn't. But the issue is the awful, not the lawful.
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Obama did step over some lines that Nixon crossed, but were allegedly re-established.
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