{"id":741,"date":"2012-08-13T17:10:16","date_gmt":"2012-08-13T17:10:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/megalextoria.wordpress.com\/?p=741"},"modified":"2012-08-13T17:10:16","modified_gmt":"2012-08-13T17:10:16","slug":"u-s-military-officers-are-told-to-plan-to-fight-americans","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.megalextoria.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/2012\/08\/13\/u-s-military-officers-are-told-to-plan-to-fight-americans\/","title":{"rendered":"U.S. military officers are told to plan to fight Americans"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Imagine Tea Party extremists seizing control of a South Carolina town and the Army being sent in to crush the rebellion. This farcical vision is now part of the discussion in professional military circles.<\/p>\n

At issue is an article in the respected Small Wars Journal titled \u201cFull Spectrum Operations in the Homeland: A \u2018Vision\u2019 of the Future.\u201d It was written by retired Army Col. Kevin Benson of the Army\u2019s University of Foreign Military and Cultural Studies at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., and Jennifer Weber, a Civil War expert at the University of Kansas. It posits an \u201cextremist militia motivated by the goals of the \u2018tea party\u2019 movement\u201d seizing control of Darlington, S.C., in 2016, \u201coccupying City Hall, disbanding the city council and placing the mayor under house arrest.\u201d The rebels set up checkpoints on Interstate 95 and Interstate 20 looking for illegal aliens. It\u2019s a cartoonish and needlessly provocative scenario.<\/p>\n

The article is a choppy patchwork of doctrinal jargon and liberal nightmare. The authors make a quasi-legal case for military action and then apply the Army\u2019s Operating Concept 2016-2028 to the situation. They write bloodlessly that \u201conce it is put into play, Americans will expect the military to execute without pause and as professionally as if it were acting overseas.\u201d They claim that \u201cthe Army cannot disappoint the American people, especially in such a moment,\u201d not pausing to consider that using such efficient, deadly force against U.S. citizens would create a monumental political backlash and severely erode government legitimacy.<\/p>\n

The vision is hard to take seriously. As retired Army Brig. Gen. Russell D. Howard, a former professor at West Point, observed earlier in his career, \u201cI am a colonel, colonels write a lot of crazy stuff, but no one listens to colonels, so I don\u2019t see the problem.\u201d Twenty years ago, then-Air Force Lt. Col. Charles J. Dunlap Jr. created a stir with an article in Parameters titled \u201cThe Origins of the American Military Coup of 2012.\u201d It carried a disclaimer that the coup scenario was \u201cpurely a literary device intended to dramatize my concern over certain contemporary developments affecting the armed forces, and is emphatically not a prediction.\u201d<\/p>\n

The scenario presented in Small Wars Journal isn\u2019t a literary device but an operational lay-down intended to present the rationale and mechanisms for Americans to fight Americans. Col. Benson and Ms. Weber contend, \u201cArmy officers are professionally obligated to consider the conduct of operations on U.S. soil.\u201d This is a dark, pessimistic and wrongheaded view of what military leaders should spend their time studying.<\/p>\n

Full article: http:\/\/m.washingtont \u2026 e-civil-war-of-2016\/<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Imagine Tea Party extremists seizing control of a South Carolina town and the Army being sent in to crush the rebellion. This farcical vision is now part of the discussion in professional military circles. At issue is an article in the respected Small Wars Journal titled \u201cFull Spectrum Operations in the Homeland: A \u2018Vision\u2019 of the Future.\u201d It was written by retired Army Col. Kevin Benson of the Army\u2019s University of Foreign Military and Cultural Studies at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., and Jennifer Weber, a Civil War expert at the University of Kansas. It posits an \u201cextremist militia motivated by the goals of the \u2018tea party\u2019 movement\u201d seizing control of Darlington, S.C., in 2016, \u201coccupying City Hall, disbanding the city council and placing the mayor under house arrest.\u201d The rebels set up checkpoints on Interstate 95 and Interstate 20 looking for illegal aliens. It\u2019s a cartoonish and needlessly provocative scenario. The article is a choppy patchwork of doctrinal jargon and liberal nightmare. The authors make a quasi-legal case for military action and then apply the Army\u2019s Operating Concept 2016-2028 to the situation. They write bloodlessly that \u201conce it is put into play, Americans will expect the military to execute without pause […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-741","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news-and-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.megalextoria.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/741","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.megalextoria.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.megalextoria.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.megalextoria.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.megalextoria.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=741"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.megalextoria.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/741\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.megalextoria.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=741"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.megalextoria.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=741"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.megalextoria.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=741"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}