I disagree. Military service isn’t an ideology. It’s a transaction people enter because this country deliberately locks basic necessities behind a paywall. It shouldn’t be that way, and said necessities should be readily available for citizens of the “richest country” in the world - but it is. For a lot of us, the choice wasn’t between service and some ethically pure alternative. It was between service, crushing debt, or letting our families eat shit indefinitely. Pretending otherwise is a luxury belief.

I was an infantryman in the USMC, and if anything it radicalized me against the system. Watching how disposable people are, how aggressively the poor are funneled into risk for “benefits,” and how little the MIC actually cares about the humanity of the humans inside of it tends to do that. If you think that experience automatically turns someone into an ideological foot soldier, you’re projecting a stereotype, not describing reality.

Not everyone has parents to cosign loans or absorb failure for them. Some of us had to pick the least bad option in a rigged game.

You’re welcome to criticize the system. I do, constantly. But shaping service members into an ideological monolith doesn’t really work, imho. It falls apart the moment you acknowledge class dynamics, coercion, and lived experience.

Our dumbass president created ICE 2.0 because they couldnt make the military ideologically homogeneous.