Where do you imagine these 500,000 soldiers will be housed? Where will they get gas for their vehicles? Where will they get their food? At peak US involvement in Vietnam, we had just over 500K troops in theater and it was a logistical dumpster fire bsky.app/profile/mmwr...
It's about 700k in the army and marines not including national guard, the latter of whom will be reluctant to fire on their neighbors. They couldn't subdue the whole country without reinstating the draft.
I can't think of a way to more thoroughly guarantee the whole thing goes south immediately than that.
Exactly
Also, I mean. To hold it from whom, and for how long? We already know how effective the US Army is at controlling local insurgent populations.
100%. Because every person you deploy to Los Angeles cannot be deployed somewhere else. bsky.app/profile/enri...
Last I checked, Hispanics are a very significant proportion of the Army.
LOS ANGELES, TRUMP WANTS TO ESCALATE HIS BULLY PULPIT AGAINST THE PROTESTERS BY CALLING IN THE MILITARY WHICH IS NOT NOT NECESSARY! DON'T FALL FOR IT! THIS IS HIS PLAN!!!!!!
Doesn't matter. Using military has the same baseline problems, coupled with even more logistical challenges, than using regular law enforcement. If anything it becomes even more of a losing proposition for the White House bsky.app/profile/socc...
i mean if we're ending liberal democracy there's substantial political risk in issuing unusual and unpleasant orders to your military as well
The Insurrection Act is not some "one weird trick!" to take over the country
Doubt you'd ever get that. Most gun owners aren't going to open fire b/c they're not killers Blockades? Molotovs? Throwing water bottles and rocks? Far more likely – and often enough bsky.app/profile/redl...
Don’t forget IEDs strapped to drones, which have not really been employed in urban warfare on this scale before but would make things very, very challenging for the occupying forces
I could still see a lot of LA people with guns showing up to oppose ICE. Not all of them, or even most, but probably a non-small number
I know exactly what the military does, which is why I know the logistics are more difficult in LA than in Afghanistan, not less bsky.app/profile/socc...
There's a reason guerilla warfare is A Problem™ and if it's happening in a large metro with plenty places for people to hide???
And strong personal gun rights.
Might want to listen to what he’s saying here, folks. A city with buildings and alleys, cars, barricades, all kinds of things in the way and all kinds of places to hide is potentially friendly to insurgents and difficult for occupiers.
Plus, Iraq would be a better comparison. Iraq was an insurgency nightmare, just like LA or any major city would be. A few months of constant attacks and soldiers would start deserting or turning their rifles on the officers that keep sending them out there to face more.
A key difference here is that the soldiers would not be trapped on the other side of the world, but would be able to simply leave and walk home at any time
Easy to tell who has never worked in a large bureaucracy
And infrastructure you want to preserve for your own use, so you can't just bomb it all bsky.app/profile/itst...
I've been told by people before that trump would just bomb any resistance, and uhhhh if a regime starts bombing its own cities, that means it is losing.
Maybe. The Kent State Massacre suggests otherwise though bsky.app/profile/your...
Kent State and also Jackson State
"your liberal friend" is definitely wrong, that would be an escalation, jfc i wish people would just say they *want* the fascism as opposed to saying nonsense
100% The erosion of state capacity from the government getting DOGE'd makes pacification harder, not easier bsky.app/profile/moch...
Totally agree. There are just apparently a *lot* of people on Bluesky who think supply chains materialize overnight 😂 bsky.app/profile/mada...
Also, where are these ICE guys from? All from the LA area? Prob not, but let's say they are. Is this the same squad that was in fashion district/DTLA yesterday? If they're from Corona or Victorville, is ICE paying for motels? I recall someone (Raskin?) was pressing Noem on going over budget.
The military could barely pacify Kabul, at tremendous cost in lives, money, and munitions That was only ~4M people, and much looser rules of engagement The military won't be able to pacify Los Angeles @unroll.skywriter.blue @unroll.bsky.social Unroll please
on a practical level, but also in the sense that there are a huge number of recently unemployed people who hate this administration
Kent state did not result in general protests. Mody sided w/LEO. Also, 4 students died. 5 cops on buildings with ARs could do significantly more damage to a large protest. I hope it doesn't come to that, but we are dealing with unhinged people in office.
Yeah it did and nixon even had to bring an airborne unit into DC because the riots were getting so nasty
If 100 people get mowed down we'll start to see how many people oppose this and own guns. They may try it, but I think it would be the beginning of the end.
If they kill 100 people in LA, it will result in a tidal wave of anti-state violence. The protests will turn into Angelenos dragging cops out of their cars and ripping them to pieces lol
The public blamed the protesters for Kent State, though.
If *the government* guns down 100 civilians I think it's more likely that officials even remotely connected with that event would be at risk of assassination, or having their homes firebombed. I doubt Americans would just go home and sit quietly. And we have a lot more guns than we did in 1970.
Oh but it’s already been “shut down” by the courts, so the danger is over. Great job, everyone!
This isn't MOVE in Philadelphia!
What's the remedy to agents provocateur like proud boys types infiltrating crowds & escalating? Like the boogaloo boys did in 2020. They killed cops, set the cop precinct on fire & everything got blamed on "antifa". The optics of "the resistance" are awfully fragile, susceptible to bad faith actors
I'm not sure they're bright enough to figure that out ahead of time.
Or been in the military.
General strike!!! Get the oligarchs to weigh in to stop this!
or has lived in Los Angeles
I can't criticize that, I've never lived in Los Angeles either 😆 But I know procurement!
General strike!!! Get the oligarchs to stop this!
logistics of getting around LA are complex enough at rush hour, can’t imagine all the ways this could become Difficult
Just have the protest at 4:30 on Friday afternoon in Santa Monica and let the tanks get stuck on the 405
Now I'm imagining a Los Angeles Commune with barricades made of cars instead of cobblestones and furniture.
Yuuuuuup. I kept thinking that, looking at all these replies.
Depending on how this goes I think one major question is "do grocery store owners refuse service to occupying forces"? Of course if occupying forces bring plain clothes I don't know if they can be practically distinguished from Angelinos.
It is worth asking "what is the government's objective here?" As far as I can tell: * Bullying for its own sake * Actually carrying out deportations with ICE to keep the numbers up for Steven Miller. The logistics of actually deporting people are challenging!
And blockades can be a lot more effective if you know what you’re doing. And if you *know* what you’re doing, you’d be using blockades and cutting off supply lines and using your small arms forces to secure/disrupt supply lines.
Portland 2020 is probably a good judge of about the maximum protester escalation.
I don't think it's about opening fire. It's about showing enough force to be able to hold the line without firing a single shot. That said, I don't think it'll happen before the feds start shooting folks because violating open-carry laws is a major escalation that puts everyone in serious danger.
When this started going down yesterday, it suddenly occurred to me the very large number of left-leaning and anti-Trump people I know in San Francisco who are packing
The new protest tool should be the vuvuzela 😆 Also, this point about people not being killers is well made. Loving this thread btw 👏
Last night, they threw plates lol
The thing I keep coming back to is using this as a pretext to suspend Habeas, which in Admin thinking lets them yank anyone they don't like off the streets w/o court oversight. They already tried and end-run around Habeas with Abrega. An 'insurrection' gives them another angle.
The prob with this admin is that he wants to be some kind of warrior-king (that doesn’t fight) but fighting in pre-Napoleonic fashion bc Napoleon realized the benefit of an administrative state to organize and coordinate resources effectively.
In one sense this admin will make the history books, but if it weren’t for how we ended up making people rich and powerful here via attention and corruption, this admin would not be worth mentioning—if it was its own country, it could never rise to greatness or be noteworthy on its own it’s so bad
I believe that if they try to invoke the military there will be internal chaos. Hegseth is not well liked by DoD/troops, and being deployed against citizens would not go over easily
Also, that's the sort of action places like Idaho might respond to.
You're also going to have a decent number of active duty military that are gonna refuse because they'll recognize it as an illegal order. I don't think people realize how much it is reinforced in the military that the military does not operate in the US against US civilians.
ICE and FBI officers can quit their job at any time and not go to jail, and they’re still dooming raids. Refusing an order of a superior officer sends you to prison and gives you a dishonorable discharge that fucks up your life for the rest of your life.
So the thing about disobeying in mass is you're the boots on the ground with guns in your hands and your superiors aren't.
And in fact your superiors are in a highly precarious position for having issued or passed on an illegal order: if the regime ever falls they're gone with it.
History being written by the victor also means that punishments and non-punishments are also handed out by them.
So all you're really saying here is you expect We The People to lose and MAGA installs a 100 year reich and buddy why don't you just go dig your own grave already and lie down in it
So you're implying thr military is too stupid or to incompetent to know what an illegal order is? Good to know what you think. I'll stick with the folks who have told me what I know.
No I’m saying if FBI and ICE folks who can quit their job without impunity are happy to do this shit, most military folks who would face serious consequences if they do something similar aren’t going to be taking a stand.
Sure. Plenty won't. But some will, and that means even fewer people available to try to enforce martial law.
No they won’t.
Well I'm sorry that the military people you seem to know are such cowards. We apparently know different ones.
"They'll just do a joint op between the military, Nat'l Guard, DHS, FBI, & local cops!" It's clear Miller et al. haven't read the Mythical Man-Month but has nobody on Bluesky read it either? en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Myt...
It's like these people don't understand how much of a losing proposition this is for the White House to even flirt with this. Idk if these people are making doom and gloom their personality for clout or what, but it's getting really old.
It’s more than that - they don’t seem to understand that they’re sowing the very division and doubt that these acts are meant to inspire. Friendly fire never helped anyone.
Exactly. We need to be pushing back against them, not giving them exactly what they want. If these people want to keep with the doom and gloom, they need to stay out of the way of our fighting back. Getting in the way just means they'll get hit by shrapnel.
I think people are just sort of being their amygdala with their whole chest-it's kind the same as the little voice in your head goes when it's stuck on overdrive, you know? ALARUM ALARUM ALARUM ALARUM ALARUM it's not well thought out because in that state, you're just not.
Which is a good reason to be nice about it (I try), I guess, but mostly: ignore. block if needed. It doesn't help.
And I totally understand being stressed about the situation at hand. Lord knows I definitely am right now. The thing is, doom and gloom is exactly what they want from us. They don't want us fighting back. We need to make their lives a living hell until they figure out that we aren't pushovers.
Totes. I mean I can at least understand it from a "be alert!" pov if that's all they're trying to do--thanks, we got it, but it's fairly harmless of itself I guess. Just blocked someone who literally wrote "Martial law is coming" and "there is little or nothing you can do." "You," who?
When they *actually* say "resistance is useless" I figure bad actor likelier, but not interested enough to explore more before the plonk.
Indeed. Resistance is a very viable weapon against these people. They're banking on no pushback, so when we pushback, they aren't prepared for it.
And members of the US military are more likely to walk away from the job.
IIRC, even the Feds in the Civil War—with a higher population—relatively quickly had to turn to volunteers for reserves, greater manpower
They don't need to be deployed somewhere else. How many LA-level protests are happening elsewhere right now? None? Maybe one other city?
Also a majority of the army isn't combat arms
Moving 500,000 troops to one point without months of planning cannot happen. That is also assuming you could find 500,000 people who are not in critical positions & that the logistics are already in place. Yes, the US can redeploy some troops quickly, but not 25% of their total.
Seems like a lot of people don't understand that any competent military is based on superior logistics and planning, not super powered soldiers. Solider performance counts in battle, but you have to get those soliders to the battlefield first.
To wit: Russia getting its ass kicked 10 ways from Monday by Ukraine.
Well, Russia’s soldiers, equipment, and doctrine suck, but at least they have very low morale.
When N Korea donated a bunch of soldiers to the cause and the very first result was they deserted in droves, that was a right larf!
These guys have never seen a war, except maybe a Marvel film.
It’s also extra interesting when the current SecDef is one of those idiots
The US has the capability to easily and quickly send in several thousand troops. These are groups prepared for deployment anyway. A couple thousand from the Army and a couple thousand from the USMC. That's it. Larger deployments require significant preparation time.
Didn't D-Day (to use an example) take months (at least) of planning and even weather forecasting to make sure it succeeded?
They were planning that a year in advance. Invading L.A. would be easier but still most of the military is not ready to pick up and go at any particular instant.
Wouldn't also a lot of military hardware be useless in an urban center like LA? Like, they probably don't want to destroy the city and want to keep its infrastructure, so tanks and jets are kind of off the table.
They wouldn't have even finished rail ops by this point.
You're aware there are military bases in CA, right? 125,000 of them are already here! CA is not Vietnam. It's a billion times more accessible. C'mon. Did you really try to compare the logistics of Vietnam to California?
yeah but everyone really liked Vietnam and generally agreed it was a good war so I'm sure doing Vietnam 2 closer to home will be fine
Vietnam was a lot of things but it wasn’t a *logistical* dumpster-fire (but I agree with the general thrust of your argument)
Wait. Is that Jim Amendments' music???
Whether this is tactically wise or not, or even strategically possible, it seems obvious that ICE is pursuing an accelerationist policy and that this policy will enable frump to invoke the insurrection act. Why not take it to the place most likely to encounter resistance?
also, I would wager most soldiers currently stationed in California aren't combat-arms, let alone readily deployable against protestors. Hell, the Army National Guard only has 45,000 combat arms *in total.* The Army has 70,000 combat arms, the Marines 120,000.
Unless they're sending the logistics kids and the signal corps guys out there with guns, you can't hold Los Angeles County with 235,000 soldiers, most of whom are currently stationed in Korea, Japan, Germany, Italy, Texas, and Georgia.
If we have to get a 3rd amendment SC case out of this, this will be the dumbest timeline.
"Where will they get gas for their vehicles?" The Trump campaign deserted rallygoers at least twice: once in dangerous cold, once in dangerous heat; by not providing adequate shuttle service from rally to parking area. The second time, the buses drained all area gas stations and ran out of gas.
And they're not going to send clerks, linguists, cooks, IT specialists, chemical NCO's, F-35 maintenance troops, sonar operators, bulldozer drivers, etc., etc., to stand around carrying M4's with empty magazines, radios on different frequencies, and reporting to unknown chains of command.
As far as I'm aware, Trump hasn't checked of violating the 3rd amendment yet from his list, so that is always an option.
I beg everyone who thinks this’ll be a government curb stomp to check our military’s record against decentralized urban forces and guerrilla insurgencies
That person is really determined to give in to fascism regardless of reality, huh?
And the moment an occupying army descends on LA, anyone with a rifle can interdict supply chain operations and tie it up in knots. At some point, people with nothing to lose realize they have nothing to lose.
"I know, we could quarter them in the houses of the locals!" Ask King George how popular that idea was.
well, we're sort of giving a wink and a nod to the constitution right now so the 3A might be just a suggestion at this point
Not /quite/ my point. More that if the government acts like those rights are suggestions, than the people are more likely to treat the government itself as a suggestion.
This Two million number is insane. They’re not calling in the navy reserve to pacify LA.
It's also a weird assumption to think that all of those soldiers would be okay with killing Americans, especially when a lot of those soldiers live here. Fox News viewers might think the cities are criminal wastelands, but the marines stationed at Pendleton know what Los Angeles really is like.
Not to mention the current Secretary of Defense doesn’t believe logistics is that important.
Also doing something like this is a great way to bring even more people onto the streets.
With this bunch in DC we might all find out why they stuck #3 into the bill of rights...
LA riots had 10k national guards sent out It was a logistical nightmare
bsky.app/profile/acyn...
Military will sleep in parks. This is not a concern for them. They’ll air lift or convoy gas in. Also not an issue for them.
The US military does not have the ability to air lift or convoy the necessary food or fuel for 500k without extensive preparation. You need large depots. Durimg OIF the US built more than 200 miles of bulk fuel pipelines in Iraq to fuel a force 1/5 the size being discussed here.
The military is built for kinetic operations not long term occupation and stability ops. The only way it was able to do this during GWOT was through relatively small force deployments and extensive use of contractors to fill in sustainment gaps.
It's like none of these people have ever looked at the force ratios considered necessary for operations in an urban environment to go door knocking.
Congratulations you've expanded the population of LA by 50% there's no water, the population now hates you because there's no water. You heard your base back home got looted the other day but on the upside the MREs have you so constipated that you don't have to worry about the line for the shitter.