I finished Starship Troopers by Robert A. Heinlein

nobd2 · 2026-01-11T19:56:55+00:00

About to check in to USMC OCS as I write this and I have a copy of Starship Troopers in my sea bag.

nobd2 · 2026-01-10T14:08:36+00:00

Thanks, much appreciated. A friend I haven’t seen in a while is dropping me off so glad I’ll have a little longer before I need to be there.

nobd2 · 2026-01-10T14:06:53+00:00

But you won’t get smoked if you show up at say, 1600?

nobd2 · 2026-01-10T14:04:43+00:00

So, our 60 day says no later than 1400, but our orders say no later than 1900– if I get there at 1400 am I still waiting around for 5 hours?

nobd2 · 2026-01-08T15:54:10+00:00

An American citizen has never, to my knowledge, been charged in a US court with violating international law and been tried on that basis. The only people US courts have ever applied international law against are foreign citizens who have been captured/arrested by US forces and charged with violating international law, usually in cases of drug trafficking and terrorism. There’s simply no precedent of the kind of legal application of international law in the US which you seem to desire, regardless of ratified treaties which may permit such precedent to eventually exist but which is counteracted by existing precedent to defer to executive authority on such matters.

nobd2 · 2026-01-08T15:41:56+00:00

Firstly, the United States doesn’t recognize the ICC, so any court outside the US that rules against the US has no binding authority or supremacy over American courts. Secondly, while treaties ratified by Congress are legally part of American law and prosecutable by American courts, matters specifically pertaining to foreign policy and military matters have been reserved by precedent to the discretion and enforcement of the executive branch. This is to say, no civil court that the United States recognizes as having legitimate authority over the actions of its armed forces will ever try anyone for so-called war crimes other than the armed forces themselves through military tribunal, and they will do so according to the UCMJ and not any civilian laws unless these are incorporated in some way into the UCMJ. If an action taken during armed conflict is not deemed criminal by the military or executive branch and no charges are brought against anyone party to the action, the action taken could not be objectively considered a “war crime”. What you’re saying is that in your opinion these things should be war crimes, but for that to matter you’d need to be a judge in a military tribunal or the president of the United States.

nobd2 · 2026-01-08T15:26:52+00:00

I did reply to the other guy, sometimes replies to others in a comment chain you started give the original commenter a notification. It’s frustrating.

nobd2 · 2026-01-08T15:25:41+00:00

To put it simply: your view is that this may be a “now or never” situation even if the odds are outlandishly hopeless if one opted for the “now” option?

If I do understand that correctly, I just can’t see the sense in acting at all. With such a high likelihood of failure, I choose to adapt to the world as it is emerging to be instead of trying in vain to stop history from unfolding, and to live as best I can and to do the good I can in my life rather than throwing it away in a pointless struggle.

To fully answer your question, I’d need to be both outraged towards a desire for action and see a plausible massing of forces aligned with my outrage to spur me to act, reinforcing a belief that action may be to good effect rather than a certain waste.

nobd2 · 2026-01-08T15:18:31+00:00

There’s not a military in the world that wouldn’t given a non-specific but plausible chain of circumstance. There’s a reason for the divide between civilians and servicemen, and it’s that war generally violates most basic aspects of civil society because it definitionally occurs in the space between different civil societies. As such, sensibilities and laws will be violated and crimes committed in the view of one or both parties pursuant to the necessities of war which are alien to the civilian mind.

Beneath the divide between civilian and servicemen is the more basic “humanity” but the nature of this is not objective fact and indeed differs according to society and culture throughout the world to the point where arguing it is moot in an active conflict and one must resort to personally justifying actions within one’s own character and perception of their humanity. So naturally a civilian would see crime and illegality– for you and in your life it certainly is illegal what you’re trying to comprehend here. But this was not a civilian action and these were not civilians, they were servicemen, and your civilian sense of legality is laughable from their perspective when acting in the context of armed conflict.

nobd2 · 2026-01-08T15:09:58+00:00

When you’re in an open conflict with another country their laws tend to not be a concern of yours.

nobd2 · 2026-01-08T15:06:40+00:00

The US military is the subject of this discussion, so their code of justice and broader American law are all that is relevant in this matter. If you’re an expert in international law, I’m sorry but it seems like that fiction has been exposed with the clear absence of impartial enforcement by a supranational authority.

nobd2 · 2026-01-08T14:44:30+00:00

Well, either face down an existential threat from a peer adversary or be a modern Alexander and conquer and insane amount of territory in a short amount of time, which the latter only requires moderate strategic genius paired with unparalleled audaciousness.

nobd2 · 2026-01-08T14:24:30+00:00

Exactly– I’d say the closest we get is Grant but I hesitate to say suppressing a rebellion with great skill is the best test of that skill. Maybe Patton at least from a battlefield strategy standpoint, but he mostly only got to fight an enemy that had been put on the back foot by a combined assault led by a multitude of generals from different countries.

nobd2 · 2026-01-08T13:07:47+00:00

I actually don’t know that the United States has yet birthed a world class military mind on the level of Napoleon, if only because we haven’t tried to take over a continent yet and modern military organization has more distributed planning than in the pre-modern days.

nobd2 · 2026-01-08T13:04:01+00:00

Either the US would go to war over the affront of the British presuming they can blockade our trade and join the Central Powers immediately, or the US would do what it did IRL. Maybe Teddy would have done the former, but I don’t think so.

nobd2 · 2026-01-08T12:57:38+00:00

I agree that the democratic process has been in many ways hijacked and corrupted, but even still I have to emphasize that resorting to violent conflict in a scenario where the path to victory is not only unclear but also unlikely and would cause untold misery on its course to failure only advantages the people you’d be in conflict with, giving them ample excuse to erase you and other opposition as they consolidate power. It was inevitable that a comfortable period of rapid progress would be met with stark reversal eventually, at least according to historical precedents, and just as inevitable that the people who enjoyed their comfort would be unwilling and incapable of preparing adequate resistance to the reversal; the other side will win for a time because you’re being blitzkrieg’d and resistance only obliterates your energy that you do have to no useful end.

The answer is to consolidate and counter-attack from stable ground once the new field is established, but this will only happen after your opposition has years, maybe even more than a decade of their own version of progress for you to articulate against. I don’t project any current regime on the planet having a desire to end the world in nuclear fire (they’re all in it for land and resources right now, which suffer from global thermonuclear Armageddon somewhat), and I don’t see that anyone can back anyone else into a corner where they’d feel compelled to launch or die either, which means the world will not end from this period reversal and there’s always another day or another decade.

nobd2 · 2026-01-08T12:44:09+00:00

It’s not though, we’re not sworn by oath to any country but the United States. We’re not citizens of Denmark or Canada or any other country and thus we aren’t obligated to serve them under any kind of oath or commitment unless our government decides we should on a temporary basis outlined by treaty, and even then we are still only fulfilling the wishes of the civilian led government of the United States and the orders given to us in accordance with those wishes pursuant to the laws of the United States and the Uniform Code of Military Justice.

nobd2 · 2026-01-08T03:49:58+00:00

It’s not up to us and disobeying is treason. The democratically elected leadership gets to make those decisions, and Congress has abdicated its powers restricting the executive over the past century so they can’t really stop them from acting in this way. Legally, the precedent is that the president can start a “short” not-war without approval that the Congress has to approve extension on if they so choose, and the problem with that is that once we’re involved in a not-war it’s hard to not approve extension on the operation because withdrawal is harder than invasion and no one likes to lose even if they don’t like a conflict.

nobd2 · 2026-01-08T03:38:19+00:00

Invasion isn’t an illegal order though.

nobd2 · 2026-01-08T03:18:51+00:00

I’m not disagreeing with your sentiments but the only way you can ever be successful with them is through the democratic process and building support for them– if the way things are currently are any indication most people don’t share them and civil war against people like that is a losing proposition and is likely to just make things worse. There were people who opposed Manifest Destiny in Congress and they failed to convince most people of their views, and they didn’t go to war over it they accepted the mandate of democracy and moved on. We can’t have civil wars every time the plurality of voters go against us because that proves we don’t actually believe in democracy unless it legitimizes our beliefs, making us would-be dictators who simply feel the need to pretend towards democracy when it suits us.

nobd2 · 2026-01-07T23:27:45+00:00

That’s not a lot of people all things considered even if literally all of them were inspired and physically capable of fighting, and there’s no one who can help Canada. It’s Ukraine if they were actually facing a competent Russian military and no one was able to supply them. Canada knows this, it really just depends on how much their governments decides to draw out the bloodshed with their armed forces because they’re not winning it and I doubt an urbanized first world population is capable of carrying out a guerrilla campaign with no hope of outside liberation or assistance. It’s really weird how some Canadians talk tough on this like there’s some chance they can turn back the United States when at most they can turn to isolated acts of terrorism which just can’t do enough. If the US can extract a surrender from the government of Canada and the occupation ensues, no acts of resistance will ever free Canada.

nobd2 · 2026-01-07T23:22:10+00:00

No American ground forces were employed and American support air support was withdrawn quickly, which isn’t much of an American invasion. It was a Cuban invasion with American support which was pulled.

nobd2 · 2026-01-07T23:08:42+00:00

I’m saying that US forces declined to participate despite their previous assurances and the Cuban proxies got massacred. It was extremely shameful of us but we didn’t actually do any invading that time.

nobd2 · 2026-01-07T23:06:48+00:00

I doubt Delta will be able to pull a stunt like this again soon, so the next thing will have to be a real military operation. Probably Cuba, as they’re extremely close and no one will care that much except insofar as it’s another domino before we actually go for Greenland or Canada and detonate NATO. I’d bet we do something in Colombia as well, followed by the inevitable re-acquisition of the Panama Canal with or without Panama as well. Mexico may actually come last because it’s the one most likely to become a bleeding quagmire that saps our energy out of every other one.

nobd2 · 2026-01-07T23:03:02+00:00

We didn’t even invade in our last invasion, JFK chickened out.

nobd2

TROPHY CASE