Didn’t North Korean military slap US military with their dick on their faces for years? Isn’t that the reason a North Korea exists at all?
No one will ever match North Korea’s marching game.
Lol they’re pro military just to make Trump’s joint celebration with the military look bad
I despised drill and ceremony. Standing in the heat and humidity, waiting to move and watching soldiers drop because of heat stroke. Never lock your damn knees.
Made more sense back in the day when you didnt have TV or anything to do for most of every day.
I did the last sentence and got punished when I was in school ☠️
Did they even know locking knees feel painful already?
“Defend our nation” by starting wars to keep rich people rich?
no sometimes they start wars to get rich people richer
but for reals its not the soldiers starting wars its the higher ups and the people who make weapons who start wars
It is soldiers who willingly join that organization, knowing the same or more as we know. So they are as morally bancrupt as their leadership
It’s crazy that the people involved for the most noble (to them) reasons are the ones most likely to be pulling triggers and/or getting killed, while the ones starting the war for evil reasons typically come out ahead as long as they are willing to ignore the mountain of bodies in their wake. (cue narrator)
Or as a wise man once said:
Why don’t presidents fight the war? Why do they always send the poor? Why don’t presidents fight the war? Why do they always send the poor? Why do they always send the poor? Why do they always send the poor?
the bottom line is money nobody gives a fuck
Unfortunately I think you are correct.
it is what Serj says in SOAD’s song Boom!
great music video for that btw
Eeehh, so yes, after basic i did not march anywhere really. And you do need to brush up on it to keep in the swing of things…. But honestly, you know your unit is going to march in a parade months in advance, and for better or worse are going to represent the armed forces, you schedule mandatory training time.
Is it wasteful? Arguably under normal circumstances, definitely under this circumstance.
So i can only conclude that either they did not care, or do care a lot, or someone who was supposed to plan this fucked up and they just grabbed people.
Whole existence of the military is questionable (not only in the US, but everywhere else) together with the governments, borders, permissions, involuntarily taxation (“legal” theft). People don’t create wars, governments do!!! Local conflicts are alright, but you don’t wale up and realize that you need to go and kill everyone in the neighboring town/village. Patriotism is a pile of horse shit, hopefully you didn’t allow your kids to be that heavily indoctrinated in schools.
People (not stupid NPCs) can live and peacefully coexist without that crap.
if by “defend our nation” he means “destabilizing foreign nations” then yeah, he is correct.
It’s very important for soldiers to focus on doing “important work to defend our nation” (murdering brown kids) and that they’re “productive at their jobs” (bombing hospitals)
This is a false dichotomy, as though you can either be productive or learn to march. Obviously you could do both.
No, you can NOT learn to march like they do in North Korea or China and have any time left in your day to do an actual job or even train to fight. That crap takes time.
Um… That is nothing like the pageantry they put on on North Korea and China.
I guess no, they cant learn to goose step, that quickly, because US troops dont goose step when marching.
That video is just some guys walking in sync (on my tax dollar). Have you seen an NK parade?
Broadly speaking, yeah. We send every member of the US Army through “Basic Training” even though 95% of them will never actually fire a gun or climb over a fence or jog ten miles in the rain for the rest of their careers.
Parade March is a thing we don’t bother to drill into units (except specifically tasked “Parade Units” that exist to do little circus acts for the high command’s amusement). But we could do it instead of the GI Joe training for the private class janitorial staff if we felt like it.
The bigger picture is that the US Military is a fountain of economic waste, social abuse, and pointless bloodshed in the name of machismo. Trump’s parade is just the cherry on a seven layer cake of squandered national wealth.
But it’s the thing liberals will fixate on, because we can’t ever actually say “The Pentagon sucks ass and makes the world an objectively worse place to live in”. It always has to be about this one Great Man Of History doing things wrong in a way his hypothetical liberal alternative would not.
I am surprised at how many people do not get it. In military you cannot not comply with the orders, especially whan there is clearly nothing criminal with it. The guys doing sloppy marching is pretty much the only agency they have and the only way to protest and boycot that ridiculous parade.
This. NATO has us troops stationed all over europe. They marched just fine during european parades.
“They did in protest” is the funniest cope I have heard, ever I think.
i don’t give a shit either way but it makes far more sense that it was in protest than that all of those soldiers are too incompetent to march properly. insisting it must be incompetence because you want to think bad things about the us military is the real cope.
Or its simply that drill and parade are not really practiced outside of bootcamp because marching in lockstep requires quite some practice.
D&C is used daily by the US Army, to move personnel from point A to point B. During running. During inspections. During pass and reviews.
15 years out, and “9 to the front and 6 to the rear” is still drilled into my head. Even my “about face” is still solid, while needing some practice.
This depends a lot on your branch and unit. Many many people never do a pass and review or any type of inspection other than counting inventory. I disagree that marching skills are used during running, that’s freeform.
Anyone who has served longer than 3 years has done a pass and review.
Anyone who has been to a perm duty station has had a class A inspection.
Anyone who has ever served has marched daily, in formation, from point A to point B.
Double time is a marching speed, aka running, and you have to run in step.
Ok. I guess your perspective is correct and there is just one military that is all the same.
I think the way they marched says more about trump than it does their ability to march. I very much doubt they forgot how to do it.
When has the US military defended the nation? I got the impression that they’re mostly used for invading foreign countries for financial gain, cf Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen, Yugoslavia, Sudan, Panama, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Cuba, Guatemala, Korea.
Yeah. That’s kind of America’s whole thing. Making money. Exploiting everything. Americans are the Ferengi.
Defending America = defending capitalism = doing whatever they can to make American, capitalist companies more profitable.
I don’t hate capitalism. Don’t get me wrong, but I generally don’t like capitalists.
Capitalists are what makes capitalism capitalism. How can you hate one without the other?
The same way I don’t hate Christianity but most Christians drive me up a wall.
The concepts can be good, valid and even the best option in some cases, but the way it’s weilded can be dramatically different based on the person wielding it.
You are comparing apples and oranges with your explanation.
Religion and belief are two separate things.
Christians drive you up a wall because of their beliefs not because of their religion.
This is not the same as hating capitalists but not capitalism.
These soldiers spend their days doing important work to defend our nation.
The U.S. military has done nothing to defend their “nation” for over 100 years. They ONLY defend the corporate oligarchs’ ability to steal resources and use slave labor in third world countries.
Lmao yet Ukraine still stands thanks to American intelligence and military apparatus.
I’m not even an American but this kindergarten sentiment on Lemmy is so exhausting.
Looking at the conflicts they have been explictly or covertly involved in, it does seem like they are attempting to create a hegemony. That’s not to say that some good doesn’t get done along the way but it is more of a byproduct than the intent.
But… Ukraine falling to Russia would strengthen the US’s military (and cultural) hegemony over the western world. If this truly was the rationale behind the US’s involvement in Ukraine, everything we’ve done thus far would make absolutely zero sense. Strengthening Ukraine and spurring investment into the home-grown EU defense industry only serves to weaken our position as the lynchpin of NATO. A better justification for US involvement in Ukraine is that this is a great opportunity to starve Russia’s economy by forcing them into conflicts they cannot economically support (which was much the same strategy that lead to the collapse of the soviet union).
It’s also a great opportunity for Russia to starve the US economy by getting them involved in conflicts it cannot economically support. And the US is far more overextended due to other conflicts.
You might have a point if the US were fighting in Ukraine, but… we’re not? We’re advising the Ukraine army, sharing intelligence we’d be gathering anyways and giving AFU a bunch of export weapon systems we found by rummaging around in the pentagon’s couch cushions. This has been a spectacular opportunity for the US because it costs us almost nothing, yet what used to be considered our biggest opponent is teetering on the brink of cultural and economic collapse. Seriously, even if Kiev were to fall tomorrow NATO would be no-contest the victor. Nobody cares about the bear any more.
You might have a point if the US were fighting in Ukraine, but… we’re not?
Yes, we’re just sacrificing their lives for the realpolitic of weakening Russia, which is also bad.
we found by rummaging around in the pentagon’s couch cushions… it costs us almost nothing
Lmao, y’all actually believe this shit.
The US spends nearly a trillion dollars a year on the military, more than the next nine countries in the world combined. Every government program designed to actually help people gets cut to feed more money into the war machine. It’s no wonder we have “military equipment between our couch cushions,” because military equipment is what virtually all our tax money goes towards, when it’s the reason we can’t have things like free healthcare or higher education. Notice how we never seem to find money between our couch cushions for those things?
what used to be considered our biggest opponent
Did it? Who considered the Russian Federation a bigger opponent than the PRC?
is teetering on the brink of cultural and economic collapse
Looked in a mirror lately? The US just elected Trump, in part because people think he represents an alternative to the disastrous establishment policies that pour endless money into pointless foreign wars, and to an economy that is working for fewer and fewer people. Seems like “on the brink of cultural collapse” describes the US to a T.
But moreover, the whole American Empire is falling apart around us. Every year, more and more countries that are just as significant as Ukraine are choosing to make deals with China, to start trading and cooperating with them instead of us. Because the US is trying to rule the world through force and intimidation, while China is manufacturing consumer goods and building hospitals and infrastructure for developing and middle-income countries - the things we won’t even build domestically. Who would want to side with us when you can look at our domestic situation and see that it’s declining and awful? If that’s the best we can provide our own citizens, then what could we offer to other countries?
If I were an “accelerationist,” like people sometimes baselessly accuse me of, I would 100% support spending more on the military and getting involved in these stupid unwinnable conflicts all over the world, dumping endless amounts of money towards any situation we can use bombs and not sparing a penny for actually making anyone’s life better, because those self-destructive policies will ensure the downfall of the US more than anything else could. The problem with that being, the US is likely to start WWIII in that scenario, the more clear it becomes that the military is literally the only tool that we could possibly use to maintain hegemony, since it’s the only thing we spend money on.
Oh boy. Only have time for a top three, so in no particular order:
Who considered the Russian Federation a bigger opponent than the PRC?
… Literally everyone. China was aligned as a ‘follower’ of the Russian Federation’s geopolitical lead prior to russia’s utter stomping in Ukraine. Was it incorrect? Well, obviously. But the image of the great russian bear was the specter keeping the western world up at night.
Looked in a mirror lately? The US just elected Trump
A blatant whatabboutism but just to address it: The US will be fine (diminished geopolitcally no doubt, but still in a powerful position) after this all gets sorted out internally. We survived the last trump admin, we’ll come through this one too. This just isn’t the fall of the roman empire like oh so many people are claiming, politically it just doesn’t even resemble it.
building hospitals and infrastructure for developing and middle-income countries - the things we won’t even build domestically.
I… what? We opened half a dozen hospitals in my state alone last year. Additionally, you know the US has been the world’s largest source of charity and investment in developing nations for decades, right? Look you’re repeating lines from some seriously anti-china propaganda here and it’s a little weird. You know about trump canceling USAID and why that’s bad, right?
There’s lots of things to criticize the US on (and it’s something I do all the time, lets be clear) but you clearly don’t know what you’re talking about.
(Okay, honorable mention because I just can't with this shit:)
when it’s the reason we can’t have things like free healthcare or higher education.
The reason we don’t have healthcare is fascism, not “military spending taking all the money”. We could 100% have free uni and healthcare without reducing a cent to the pentagon’s budget. In many states we even have (limited) free healthcare, entirely funded by state budgets. You’re just repeating bullshit right-wing talking points like they’re objective truth, but with a lefty spin on them.
