Not as a miniature bubble of autocracy, that’s for sure.
What sane democracy would centralize its most dangerous weaponry under the control of the citizens least in tune with its societal values?
Seriously: the United States’ military as currently constituted is just about the last organization that should be trusted with defending democracy.
It’s an authoritarian nightmare which values unity, conformity, and obedience over anything else.
And we gave it nukes?!
Just how insane are we?
Pretty damn insane, apparently.
A democratic State should have a democratic military.
That seems … obvious?
The entire officer corps should be a stucture of elected representatives, strategists and tacticians.
Start at the unit level, where each soldier would vote to elect the unit’s officer and continue with elections all the way up to generals and admirals.
(Each branch of the military uses its own terms for each scale of organization, so I’m not gonna get off into the minute details of the org charts.)
At the very top, of course, you run into the Joint Chiefs of Staff who are (and probably should be) appointed by the elected civilian government. There’s a good case to be made that the head of each branch should be forbidden from having been in the military at all, to preserve the civilian nature of the position.
If they’re “defending democracy” then they should be practicing democracy.
Instead, as it is now, they’re basically being trained to just do what they’re told.
And that’s prettty much the exact opposite of democracy.
(This follows on from prior posts: Just Sayin’: How A Democracy Would Go To War and Moar War: Well That Was Timely.)
