"Refuse illegal orders" is like the military version of "stop paying taxes and stop going to work" but at least a magnitude worse. It sounds good and virtuous but there are practical life-changing consequences for doing so.
UCMJ will chew you up and throw you to the side very quickly. Prison is almost a certainty. A dishonorable discharge hangs on you like a felony conviction. And that's assuming they won't use illegal force on you or your family.
Even on "safe" planets, the average person is basically a slave doing endless, arduous labor with no concern for their lives or well-being, all under the merciless thumb of Imperial dogma. It's just a bad place to end up.
Been wondering what the hell happened to that thing's design and requisition path.
I know it was supposed to replace the troublesome Stryker MGS that has been decommissioned for a while. Feels like we have problems making truly "light" vehicles now because everything has to save the crew from a direct IED detonation, and survive at least 14.5mm fire 360 degrees, and have modern fire suppression and spall protection, and have climate control, and have a full sensor and optics suite, and in this case carry a fuckoff 105mm gun, and and and...
...but it still has to be light enough to not fuck up roads and bridges and have a C17 be able to carry three of them. The design goals are at odds. In this case they ended up with a very heavy vehicle for its class. Crew survivability is an excellent thing, but you can't expect to make a light vehicle without compromise.
The only ways I could believe this isn't scripted nonsense:
Conservatives are just wrong - on basically everything. No amount of bothsidesing or hopium will fix that.
Border Patrol reportedly told them they were working from an anonymous tip tied to the previous owners of the home, who lived there two years ago.
Remember every single worm who informed on their neighbors.
Once again, it is not hyperbole to say that Republicans want to kill you.
Once again, if you are physically and mentally able, you should be arming yourself to the best of your ability for the day when they are emboldened to act out their violent delusions en masse. And that day may come sooner than you think, as it has with every fascist milestone thus far.
To normalize the military keeping the media at arms' length or further. Again, you don't need actual access to military affairs to spread propaganda.
I'm not saying my hypothesis is empirical truth. If it holds water I'd expect further sequestering of military affairs in the future under the guise of "national security."
Conservatives probably want to go back to the times where there was no genuine correspondence between the media and the military. Back then, everything about war that was released to the public was carefully curated to ensure the taxpayer never lost faith in our troops or lost the appetite for more war. They think allowing independent journalism into their business was a key mistake that helped lose them the war in Vietnam.
Fascists don't deal in journalism, they deal in propaganda. You don't need Pentagon access to get marching orders from the Ministry of Truth, and this is likely the start of that, and why de-facto state media like Newsmax and Fox aren't interested in keeping their connections.
Even if they aren't slaughtered on the spot, they would become a most-wanted fugitive and their normal life would be over. Kristi Noem would be proud to announce on Fox that the standing orders for the manhunt were to shoot them dead on sight. They would have to hide in the woods or some other concealed place and at least be familiar with SERE concepts if they wanted to survive another 72 hours.
It reads like any self-righteous copypasta, which it may be. I guess people are downvoting based on how seriously they're taking it.
Idiocracy was a mediocre stoner comedy that I think we've come to expect too much of as some sort of biting social commentary.
The people making these decisions are, for the most part, not stupid. Myopic, maybe. But mostly they're just psychopaths, which is a bigger problem than even stupidity.
They used to say "you can get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich" but these sleazeballs can't even do that. It's not just this case or this jurisdiction, too.