Trump terrorism czar says anyone

[mister_coffee]

The problem is that there are too many streets and not enough tanks. Or troops.

It is a well-established axiom of military science that to maintain control of a civilian population you need at least a 1 to 20 ratio between soldiers and civilians, and preferably 1 to 10.

Our military isn't even close to that.

If you made super-generous assumptions you might, given enough time, get to 1 million soldiers if you had the entire Army, Marine Corp, Army Reserve, and National Guard called up. Might. Note that a lot of those people have other jobs and most of them are not trained and have no real experience in any combat role. So that puts the ratio at about 1 to 160 for the whole country. Not likely to be very effective at all.

So in practice you might be able to assert control over one very large city or a handful of smaller ones. There's that word again.

And it would probably take at least three months to get all of the troops in place to make that happen. Three months while cities are supposedly burning to the ground.

The politics of this becomes ugly on several levels. State governors aren't going to give up their National Guard troops to go to some other state in such a situation. I also strongly suspect that the military will drag their feet on this and not really want to touch this any more than they have to.

What will inevitably happen is that somewhere, sometime, an understrength Army unit will be overwhelmed by civilians. Possibly with horrifically bloody consequences. There is too much stupid in the world to risk a situation like that.

On the bright side, an Army busy breaking liberal rioters heads in Seattle is an Army that isn't invading Canada or Greenland. And I doubt the people in charge are going to be smart enough to do any smart thing and will probably force the deployment of understrength units all over the place in sizes too small to be effective in any imaginable way.

[PAL]

They want protests to turn violent, so then here comes martial law. The key is for protesters, Trump voters and those of us that are pro Democracy or actually pro protecting our civil rights, to not be violent.
As I've said before document any incidents. Try to find out who is doing it.
Beware of provocatuers.

[mister_coffee]

Although doing that when their popularity is already pretty weak seems to me like a sure-fire way to trigger large-scale civil unrest.

A lot of people, including a lot of people who voted for Trump, have had their livelihoods threatened or destroyed by his trade policies. I doubt those people are going to sit quietly at home and wait for Homeland Security to come arrest them and haul them away to El Salvador.

[PAL]

We know what is coming possibly this Easter Sunday. The Insurrectionist Act. How very Christian. It is not necessary to do this at the border, as the border seems to be under good control already. It's an excuse to try to use US troops against US citizens. But, talking to former military personnel, the military will only go so far. Their main pledge is to the Constitution of the US.

[Rideback]

supporting due process for Garcia can be charged

https://www.yahoo.com/news/trump-counte ... 28821.html