Is a Revolution Percolating in the U.S. Military?
Just before the US-Israeli war on Iran went kinetic, I shared my thoughts on literal “poop” deck of the USS Gerald Ford. “T-shirts and mop heads are finding their way into the pipes, and the proper explanation is sailors are attempting to declog these post-modern shit-suckers, but a bit of old fashioned rage and frustration may also play a part.
I was coy, but Colonel McGregor has not been. He assessed at the time it was sabotage “out of extreme dissatisfaction.” After 240 days at sea, the USS Ford was bound for Norfolk from the Caribbean for overdue repairs and crew changes. Most of the previous several months had been plagued with non-functioning and flooded toilets, and bad leadership. But Donald Trump decided he needed to send this battle group immediately to the Middle East, as part of a “war” buildup. Alfred Lord Tennyson spoke for these men and women: “Theirs not to make reply, Theirs not to reason why, Theirs but to do and die.”
Why? In Tennyson’s poem, “Someone had blundered” and the 1854 Battle of Balaclava remains instructive, in more ways than one. Our very model of a modern Major-Generalissimo read the headline, missed the lesson, and said “Hold my beer!”
The explosive February 28th attacks on political, religious and military targets on Tehran were meant to decapitate the regime, to induce Iran’s obedience to the US and Israel. While that objective was the first to be abandoned, removing previously obliterated nuclear material and playing ballistic missile whack-a-mole seem to remain. The first week of the war manufactured the “new” objective of restoring US allied traffic and trade through the Strait of Hormuz and within US allied GCC countries. Trump, as talented as he may be, is having trouble keeping it all straight.
As Marco Rubio blurted early on, it is a war for Israel, with US military commitment not requested, but demanded by Netanyahu. This is Israel’s war, one that Donald Trump and his Zionist team wanted to fight and Congress, like the American public, was left out, lied to, and leaned on to make it happen. As Joe Kent, Trump’s top Counter Terrorism Advisor, stated in his recent resignation letter, the war on Iran is based on an Israeli lie, “the same tactic the Israelis used to draw us into the disastrous Iraq war that cost our nation the lives of thousands of our best men and women.”
What Joe Kent believes, and what he does, is important. A combat hardened veteran and MAGA team player, he represents the thinking of many former and current military members, and their civilian counterparts, who have been around long enough to understand that civilian control of the military does not mean the President can do “anything he wants.”
The United States, as a collapsing and anti-constitutional empire, faces many problems. Some are obscure, like the coming economic and monetary collapse. Some are strategic, like the decades of wastage and corruption within the defense industrial complex that have eroded the dominance of the American war machine, while encouraging politicians to seek war continuously for fun and profit. Some are moral, as seen with the war lust of both political parties, and the corruption of the elite classes, merged seamlessly in the adopted moniker of the latest war, “Epstein Fury.” Some problems are political, like the current US parasitical infection by the Zionist horse-hair worm, which ingeniously hijacks the brain and movement of the host, culminating in the host’s suicide by drowning, water being necessary for the next stage of the worm’s life-cycle.
Unjust wars, deceitful monetary systems, elite arrogance and social disconnection are all part of late stage empire, fueling distrust among the people, and between the classes. The military is an institution where many of us have served, and many more take great pride in the service of ancestors children, family and friends. It has been a unifier of the working classes, and a link between our politicians and the people. Increasingly – in our frayed society – we see military men and women being elected to Congress, claiming in their campaigns the credibility and courage that we associate with service to country. A recent generation of military men and women, now Senators and Congressmen and among the top levels of the executive branch, have largely shown themselves to be easily compromised – no doubt MAGA classmates Tulsi Gabbard and JD Vance, and many pro-war voices in the House and Senate traded away earned credibility on war and peace, choosing to cower rather than stand up, proving themselves less patriotic and less courageous than we were led to believe.
Now we have Joe Kent, and we have the journalist son of a CIA officer, Tucker Carlson, and until recently, we had Charlie Kirk, an influential American philosopher-activist who had once been rejected for a military education at West Point. Our real leaders stand out, and become dangerous to the regime, when they assert their moral code and compass, usually that familiar code that simply forbids that we lie, steal, covet, cheat and murder.
A less well understood rebellion is rising as well. After defending Israel near Haifa, the USS Gerald Ford traveled to the Red Sea, a place the Navy knows well, especially after October 7th. However, an unfortunate fire in the laundry room changed the dynamic, and the Ford is rushing back through the Suez to Souda Bay, Crete, for repairs and an investigation on how those fires got started.
The word “mutiny” is bouncing around, in part because the fire was enormous, and because of Navy hasn’t explained it. When social media bans on that ship, and other military units in the region, become moot or unenforceable, we will get a more detailed picture of what went on.
The people serving in the US military resent the commission of war crimes in their name, and being ordered to behave like and fight beside the IDF, despite a lack of legal framework. They resent being told by their own officers that this war is not defense of the US, but rather a pseudo religious adventure meant to prepare the world for the second coming of Jesus. When the civilian and military leaders cannot lead due to incompetence, fraud, and poor moral character, they do not lead. Instead they use organizational discipline and fear of group punishment to lie, steal, covet, cheat and murder on a grand and massive scale.
Disobedience, often indirect and silent, is a destroyer of armies. Yet it is often the only functional tool soldiers, sailors and airmen have when they are betrayed and lied to by false and feckless leaders, in the conduct of false and feckless wars, about which Major General Smedley Butler wrote so eloquently a century ago.
Etienne de la Boetie was a young philosopher, five centuries years. Like Charlie Kirk, Shannon Kent, and many thousands more who at some point wondered about the state and its wars, Etienne died far too young, but left a mark. In “The Politics of Obedience: The Discourse of Voluntary Servitude” he writes
Resolve to serve no more, and you are at once freed. I do not ask that you place hands upon the tyrant to topple him over, but simply that you support him no longer; then you will behold him, like a great Colossus whose pedestal has been pulled away, fall of his own weight and break in pieces.
Etienne would nod approvingly at the increasing number of people – on ships at sea, in the pinnacles of state power, and everywhere in between – who have resolved to serve no more, and who have withdrawn their support of tyrants, wherever they are found.
https://karenkwiatkowski.substack.com/p/is-a-revolution-percolating-in-the