Contrast this with the morale of the U.S. military. From Vietnam onwards, Washington has been increasingly unsuccessful in its insurgency efforts, and with the rise of multipolarity, this has come to apply to its proxy wars. Despite assertions that Ukraine is winning, Russia has secured the entire Russian-Ukrainian border, destroyed Ukraine's air force and navy, and is slowly dismantling the rest of its military. Should Ukraine's fascist regime be subdued, it will compound the crisis U.S. hegemony has been in since last year's collapse of the Afghanistan neo-colonial regime. The reasons why the U.S. military would encounter a crisis of unity during a domestic revolt reflects why Washington is struggling in these areas abroad: everywhere, imperialism is divorced from the masses, and subject to the contradictions that come with existing purely to advance capital.
These issues are apparent within the U.S. military itself, which I recently gained special insight into when a military member offered to describe some details about the abusive and ill-equipped environment that the imperialists have cultivated for their cannon fodder. This person revealed a dynamic rife with maddening contradictions, where superiors obsessively bully people for trivial imperfections yet the most egregious problems imaginable are permitted:
Waking up soldiers at 0500 to have their sergeant or other high rank people basically nitpick their living space, write them up for infractions as minor as having a recently used tissue in the trash can or not wiping the sink after brushing teeth. This is in a conventional unit, not training. Sexual assaults galore. Sexual assault causes more military suicides and psychological damage than combat does. It particularly affects women, though men are in no way immune. The sexual assault rate for males in the army is much higher than the civilian population, because it's tied to hazing rituals. Diagnoses of alcoholism, substance abuse, and other 'coping mechanisms' are on the rise. When you factor in room inspections and physical training, the average work day of a junior enlisted on a line unit is something like 14-18 hours/day, sometimes as much as 7 days a week. As a supervisor, I get written up if my subordinate gets a DUI. that involves me usually coming in at like 4 in the morning on a Saturday to stand in front of the sergeant major getting yelled at for something I didn't even do.
Barracks commonly have faulty plumbing with undrinkable, exotically colored water. I've seen black mold. I've seen the Department of Public Works refuse to turn on air conditioners when it's ilke 90 degrees indoors on the 3rd floor of a barracks room. Work orders to repair these things go unfulfilled for months, and even then, the only reason they get attention is because the soldier happens to find one of maybe two senior leaders in an organization of 3,000+ who gives enough of a sh*t to fix it. Did i mention sexual assault? Soldiers rape soldiers. There were more people who died at the Fort Irwin National Training Center than there were deaths in combat. Soldiers will oftentimes be forced to drive incredibly dangerous training missions with broken and/or faulty equipment, such as driving around steep cliffs at night with no headlights and busted night vision goggles, all while they're running on maybe 2 hours of sleep the past 36 hours. One egregious incident I vividly recall was at fort hood, where the NCO in charge of the installation sexual assault prevention program ended up using his position of authority to manipulate vulnerable women into becoming prostitutes and pimping them out to senior leaders on post.
This is a military that's literally decaying, that's fundamentally unable to overcome its internal dysfunctionality despite the endless excesses of funds that the government throws at it. A guerrilla force, at least one that follows the parameters laid down by Che, doesn't have any of these defects. Its very nature as a tight-knit camping setup makes sexual assaults behind closed doors impossible, its members deal with issues like heat through stoicism without having to rely on air conditioning within the claustrophobia of being indoors in hot weather, and it's designed to manage sleep efficiently rather than haphazardly coercing people into working while severely sleep-deprived. In guerrilla warfare, even the discipline improves morale when done right, as opposed to serving no other purpose than petty torment.
Che describes how imposing punishments like ten-day deprivation of the opportunity to study or work, enforcing a severe boredom, ultimately lifts morale when applied in response to serious offenses: "This was the grade of revolutionary morale that our troop achieved through the continual exercise of armed struggle. It is not possible to achieve it at the outset, when there are still many who are frightened, and subjective currents serve to put a brake on the influence of the Revolution; but finally it is reached through work and through the force of continual example." This grade being one where everyone in the unit is motivated to follow their duties, and to correct their failures to follow their duties should they receive punishment. Because what's immeasurably worse than bruised egos for cocky individuals is a dynamic where not everyone is operating according to protocol.
Advantages like this could draw many U.S. soldiers to defect to the rebels, and could therefore gain the rebels territory. This is made more likely by that reality about how U.S. military strategists view the country's internal population not as victims of a capitalist humanitarian crisis who must be rescued, but as a threat to be subdued.
Treating the U.S. population like an enemy will make the U.S. population respond in kind
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