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Your replying that us civilians have no chance vs the US army. He's questioning the legality of the US army being allowed to kill its own people.
No, I wasn't really speaking to that. Just to discipline, organization, and espirit de corps.
Caesar's legions had been with him in Gaul for years, responding to no authority and carrying little loyalty to anyone outside the legion. They were self-contained, having little contact with structures outside of the legion. Their pay came from the legion's paymaster, their food from the legion's quartermaster, they had lived more or less continuously together for years.
They were unified under Caesar's personal command, they identified their own selves and fortunes with Caesar in a way that I'm not sure is entirely comprehensible to us. Armies today don't have the kind of loyalty to their commanders and units that they had. Caesar made his men rich (relatively) as well as victorious. Even successful modern generals like Zhukov, Patton, McArthur, or Gyap might have succeeded in winning wars, but their soldiers material success was not tied to their military victories in the same way.
There is no equivalent structure in America, short of maybe something like the entire Marine Corps defecting at once. Military units interact with other aspects of the military hierarchy, are rotated in and out of combat zones in a matter of months rather than many years, draw their pay and sustenance from a large bureaucracy, draw their prospects for wealth and advancement from the existence of an even larger one. People talk about the Texas National Guard, or Texas more generally, as a potential site of rebellion: the Texas National Guard is not used to operating as an organized unit separately from the broader Federal armed forces, and has no concept that following Abbott is going to deliver them to wealth and status. Texas has many important oil and industrial concerns, but none of them function separately from the national economy, cutting off energy exports will destroy Exxon faster than it will destroy DC, the Exxon CEO will have no interest in doing so to glorify Red Tribe principles.
You need a disciplined unit that will respond to a leader, not a disorganized rabble however large. I'd take, say, the NYPD as a unit over 35% of NYC's population. Even if ~33% of the security forces revolt, they are less useful than a single determined division that is unified under a beloved leader.
That's the difference between Caesar and MAGA.
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