An Army of One

The gross malfeasance of the Biden maladministration has become so great that serious observers are beginning to whisper questions as to whether we might indeed be dealing with a situation of treason - because, if Joe Biden was intentionally trying to destroy the United States and kneecap worldwide American interests, what would he be doing differently?

We're not quite ready to go that far, though we can't help wondering what connection the hundreds of millions of dollars paid by Chinese companies to Hunter Biden might have to the trillions of dollars of Afghan mineral resources now suddenly available to Chinese possession.  But as far as tearing down any last remaining shreds of American credibility, yes, Joe Biden is doing this with more effective fervor than Hitler, Stalin, Castro, or King George III ever managed.

When a government commanding the world's most powerful army can be run out of a country by a pack of howling savages and at the same time claim that its "most lethal" threat is its very own citizens, is it even accurate to refer to it as a national "government" anymore, as opposed to an occupying power?

This sort of self-assault can't help but have consequences, because at the sharp edge of the knife are very real, human people with their own hopes, dreams, aspirations, beliefs, and sense of honor.  Just wearing a uniform and toting a heavy weapon doesn't turn you into a mindless clone stormtrooper - our military has long had an ethos of serving the American people, and most of its members believe that's what they're doing.

Being ordered to actively prevent U.S. citizens from escaping the Taliban can't help but knock a huge hole in the self-image of our serving Marines.  Having to watch while other countries rescue their own citizens doesn't help either.

Worst of all is when there is clearly no price paid by whoever is issuing these manifestly unAmerican, unlawful, illegitimate, and arguably treasonous orders - not Joe Biden, not Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, not Joint Chiefs Chairman Mark Milley, and not anybody else.

Something has to give - and, it is beginning to appear, that something is military morale.

One Marine lieutenant colonel decided his honor could stand no more, and he released a video demanding resignations by those who presided over the Afghan debacle.  As an immediate result, to date he is the only American military officer who's been relieved of command following the Afghanistan debacle - he didn't last even one day before he was frogmarched from his office.

To be fair, as LTC Scheller himself admitted, this was an entirely reasonable action on the part of the top brass, and he'd do the same if the positions were reversed.  An effective military must have absolute confidence that orders once given will be obeyed absolutely.  LTC Scheller's video made it plain that he no longer had confidence in his chain of command to give lawful orders, thus, it logically follows that they could no longer have complete confidence that he would obey them.

For a long time, conservatives have taken solace in the thought that the guys with the guns are mostly on our side, and to some extent that's true.  As we've seen on the streets of our cities, though, there's an awful lot of armed, uniformed officers who don't care to risk their pension to do what is right.  It now appears that, while there might be plenty of grunts who still have conscience and honor, that seems to have been driven out of the top brass at least as far down as, well, lieutenant colonel.  As LTC Scheller pointed out:

We have a secretary of defense who testified to Congress in May that the Afghan national security force could withstand the Taliban advance. We have a chairman of the Joint Chiefs - of whom the [Marine] commandant is a member - that is supposed to advise on military policy... All of these people are supposed to advise.

And I'm not saying we have got to be in Afghanistan forever. But I am saying, did any of you throw your rank on the table and say "Hey, it's a bad idea to evacuate Bagram Air Base before we evacuate everyone?" Did anyone do that? And when you didn't think to do that, did anyone raise their hand and say "we completely messed this up"?

What I'll say is, from my perspective, potentially all those people did die in vain if we don't have senior leaders that own up and say "we did not do this well in the end."

There's no way this ends well - not for America, not for our military, and not for anyone who loves serving their country.  The actions of LTC Scheller are probably the personally most-honorable, least-worst action that he could have taken: he made his views publicly known and resigned his commission.

But... what happens if others follow his lead?  By definition, those that would choose to remain in the military - those, that is, still in control of our vast array of powerful weapons - would be those who are generally OK with the actions of Joe Biden and his pack of traitors, liars, and fools.  Is that truly what we want?

Bad, and Worse, Paths

There are other alternatives, of course, and LTC Scheller's rank draws a glimmer of recognition from the historically aware. We're all familiar with military coups by generals in various unstable banana republics and similar tinpot dictatorships the world around.

But there's another type of coup, one performed by junior officers who profoundly disagree with the direction their country is headed.  Not high-ranked enough to force a policy change directly, but with sufficient clout and charisma to garner support from the men toting rifles, quite a few apparently more stable countries have seen coups led, not by generals, but by colonels, who locked up the generals along with the presidents, ministers, secretaries, and other grandees they viewed as more concerned with their own personal grandeur than the nation's well-being.

Perhaps the most notable such junior officer was Libya's Col. Muammar Gaddafi, often spelled Qaddafi or in other ways.  He was trained in the royal military schools of King Idris of Libya, unwisely as it turned out.

When the King went on vacation abroad, Col. Gaddafi was sufficiently well-connected and respected in the military, while not high enough to have been noticed, and was able to take control of the country.  He ruled for nearly a half-century, until Mr. Obama and Hillary Clinton arranged for him to be thrown out, killed, and replaced by... well, nothing in particular, so what once was a somewhat-functional second-world country is now an Islamic terrorist anarchy complete with sex-slave markets.  Well done!

Now, Col. Gaddafi was very far from being a good guy - he's generally considered to have been responsible for the terrorist bombing of Pan Am Flight 103, as well as various other atrocities.  But he wasn't notably more brutal to his people than the king he overthrew; he was arguably slightly more generous in sharing the national oil wealth; and there can be no doubt that life under his rule was vastly preferable to life in the failed state Libya has become.  And, for a long time, Libyans in general and their military in particular had a lot more national pride in their country.

Is LTC Scheller tuning up to overthrow our government?  He most certainly is not, except possibly at the ballot-box - he's made such a spectacle of himself that you know every intelligence agency in the land has dropped listening to Mohammed's phone calls, moved on from Tucker Carlson, and started eavesdropping on him.

But in expressing his earthshaking dismay and profound distress at what our much-vaunted military and beloved country has become, he clearly speaks for an awful lot of our soldiers, perhaps not all of whom are as honorable and transparent as he.

The best possible result of Joe Biden's perfidy is a military that will obey him only in a disgruntled, reluctant fashion, holding him as they do in contempt.

That particular result, no doubt undesirable to Mr. Biden and his "leaders," can be most easily avoided by expelling all the serving soldiers who agree with LTC Scheller.  This will be on the grounds of them being "white supremacists" i.e. Republicans.  The Biden team is already working on this.

The result will be - and, increasingly, already is - a considerably smaller military, but possibly a more-effective one with far less political diversity, unified around these views expressed by currently-serving Army Sergeant Cindy Bronson:

Understand that if active duty military actually get deployed within the United States, that weapon is not just going to be pointed at other people, other countries, it's pointed at you.

Sgt. Bronson appears to revel in this prospect; given that our Army was just run out of Afghanistan by illiterate thugs who, even now, are far less well-equipped than millions of private Second-Amendment-loving Americans, it's anybody's guess how that would turn out.  No traditional American army would be so positively gleeful at the prospect of blowing holes in American citizens that refuse to bend over and just do as they're told by their betters.

While this bloodbath can't help but be appealing to our increasingly tyrannical leaders who've made plain their intentions to enforce their diktats on their subjects without regard to any concerns of "the consent of the governed," there are risks for them that they may not realize.  If it came to that, are we truly confident that there wouldn't be some yet-unpurged colonel who blanches, declares "Enough is enough!", gets on the secure phone with a group of fellow colonels... and the government malfeasance and national disarray is brought to an abrupt end?

What is more - can we be sure, at this grim extremis, that this utterly unConstitutional but profoundly lifesaving action wouldn't be welcomed by, well, a great many Americans at the very least?

Of course, regardless of the uniform worn by that colonel or the flag flown by his troops, such an action would sound the death knell of America just as surely as anything Joe Biden's friends and paymasters the Red Chinese, or even the Taliban, can bring about.

It's sobering to think that a military government might actually be the least-bad likely result of Mr. Biden's wanton destruction of everything that once made America the shining city on the hill.