Yes the American people CAN beat the US Military in open conflict. Those who argue otherwise tend to make the same mistake that the US Military makes: focusing on the tactical level, and failing to consider the effects of collateral damage. (1/25)

US Military officers often complained about the restrictive rules of engagement they were placed under in Iraq and Afghanistan: and today many veterans have pointed out they were under more restrictive use of force protocols than American police (but I digress.) (2/25)

This was because massive numbers of Iraqi civilian casualties would make the war less popular in the US, and drive recruitment of insurgents. Of course, civilian casualties still happened, and they rapidly degraded the perceived legitimacy of the occupation. (3/25)

This is despite the US military's efforts to claw back legitimacy in a variety of ways that would not be viable in CONUS (infrastructure projects, open payouts of large sums of money), and despite the US populace's unconscionable indifference to Iraqi civilian casualties. (4/25)

So we can infer two things from the US Military's conduct OCONUS.
1) The US Military would be under more restrictive use of force protocols because
2) Civilian casualties would matter a lot more - even a dozen dead American kids would massively influence propaganda. (5/25)

So if you're imagining the US Military would glass rebels with drone strikes, AC-130s, clusterbombs, and JDAMs, the fact is they almost certainly would not. Remember, we're on American soil in American cities. (6/25)

US Propaganda gives us the impression that technology has progressed such that the State is essentially all powerful. But at least initially, they would have to fight rebels with rifles and grenades, the same tactics available to them in 1918 or 1940. (7/25)

Perhaps in year two of a hypothetical civil war, restrictions would be lifted as. After a long drawn out fight in Portland or Seattle, one can imagine a beleaguered President green-lighting Mosul or Raqqa style destruction. (8/25)

But by this point it's too late, the US Government is never going to get that legitimacy back, the people know they can beat it. So maybe they take PDX and Seattle with a massive show of force, and Abrams tanks roll up Pike. But the Iraq insurgency didn't end w/ Fallujah. (9/25)

By this point, you no longer have a unified country. If a President orders JDAMs to be dropped on an American city, it's because he's banking on those citizens being pseudospeciated. They are the enemy now. (10/25)

Pseudospeciation is an essential part of war and nation-building. Humans are not predisposed to violence against other humans, so the State needs to systematically dehumanize those against whom it commits violence. (11/25)

That's why humanizing people subject to State violence can be such a radical act, albeit not a substitute for mutual aid or direct action, and again I digress. If psuedospeciation is happening with whole cities, your country has already fallen apart. (12/25)

Let's back up though. By the time the US Military is dropping bombs on American cities, they're also probably experiencing a crisis of desertion, both for ideological reasons, and because a civil war would probably impact its ability to reliably pay soldiers. (13/25)

It's hard to promise college and pay (the principle method of recruiting) while universities across the country are war zones. And how many marines are going to follow their boot LT into battle against their neighbors when the GI Bill is no longer a thing and pay is late? (14/25)

Here we'd have a military that can leverage a lot of technological superiority at the point of contact, but is wholly unsustainable in its current state at the operational and strategic level. (15/25)

Even for the GWoT, a war not fought on American soil against Americans, standards had to be lowered to meet recruitment goals and keep units at on-paper strength. This had disastrous effects at the tactical level. (16/25)

Officers tell stories of soldiers who couldn't leave the FOB because they had various medical reasons they could not fight.. For HoI4 players, this is what scraping the barrel actually looks like on the ground. It also looked like hiring bloodthirsty mercenaries. (17/25)

With rebel groups including veterans of the GWoT and recent deserters, all fighting for ideological reasons rather than pay or the GI Bill, it's really not difficult to imagine rebel groups being of higher quality than the military by Year 2 or 3. (18/25)

This is not deterministic. A lot of dominoes have to fall in a certain way. But it's also not a fever dream. Counterinsurgency isn't theoretically impossible, but it's pretty hard to actually find contemporary examples of it being effective. (19/25)

I also don't want to make it seem like I'm having delusions of grandeur about a general leftist uprising. Many of the most powerful rebel groups will likely be Christian fundamentalists and/or fascists. (20/25)

It's certainly possible to imagine a president glassing Portland, and being charismatic enough to justify it to a large enough portion of the rest of the US that the country eventually gets back to normal. Franco did eventually win the Spanish Civil War (21/25)

Frankly, that scenario, wherein the US Military deploys overwhelming force against American citizens and doesn't throw fire on or start a dozen insurgencies seems more far fetched than the US becoming a patchwork of rebel groups a la Syria. (22/25)

For reference to how complicated things might get in the US, here is how big Syria is compared to Washington. It'll be a county-by-county war. Washington alone will likely have fascists, anarchists, and Christian fundamentalists vying for power. (23/25)

There is more to go into here, but I'm out of tweets. Technology would benefit rebel groups as well. 3D printed equipment, drones, these all chip away at the Military's tactical tech edge. I recommend @HappenHerePod from @IwriteOK for more detail on this. (24/25)

I feel like the reason a lot of Leftists fall into electoralism and reformism is essentially military doomerism. We can't beat the State so we must grovel for scraps. But actual revolution will always be more viable than struggling within the system. (25/25)