-The troops aren’t getting paid enough to eat as it is. I have occasion to talk to one semi-regularly and he says there’s a high level of discontent in the ranks already, which would explode if they were made to wage a domestic counterinsurgency against the most heavily armed populace in the world. Military discipline collapsed in Vietnam, and the Vietnamese guerillas didn’t even have the ability to strike within America the way a US-based organization would. Similarly, US troops could hope to be rotated out of the country, while in this case they would have nowhere to run to. People can say that USians will never do what the Vietnamese did, but frankly I think this is an unjustified level of pessimism borne out of a lifetime of Nothing Ever Happens. While it’s true that we’re the most propagandized people on Earth, that by itself does not make a widespread popular insurgency impossible, especially when there’s a historical level of proletarian anger and desperation to be harnessed.

-An american White Terror would be ugly, messy, patchwork and unsustainable given the increasing level of polarization between the different regions of the country. It would be horrible of course, but it would also grease the skids of balkanization and put a shitload of disillusioned military defectors up for grabs

-The military resources they would have to draw from foreign occupations would take further pressure off anti-imperialists at a time when the US military’s combat readiness and logistical capacity is already abysmal. Not only are they already cannibalizing vehicles to maintain a still-unimpressive rate of battle readiness, but the whole “distribute your military production across various political districts” idea, while great for ensuring MIC profits and political control in good times, means that in practice logistical troubles and political dysfunction magnify military production dysfunction in bad times.

-Right wing paramilitary brainrot is a wild card. While most of those groups can be counted on to side with the fascist government most of the time, they infight over the stupidest shit and you never know when one will blow up a munitions plant because they thought the bombs were trans or something

Overall, I think that while it would be a hideous situation, it would not be a hopeless one, and in fact would open up new avenues for recruitment and movement-building. While we’re certainly in a period of crisis now, the move to a more acute phase would galvanize many scared and angry people to seek hard answers, which is something we have. But answers alone don’t earn people’s trust and loyalty or build parallel systems of survival and protection that would be needed-hell, that we needed years ago- so in my opinion as just some person, I think what we should do to best prepare for a martial law situation is to hoard knowledge and manuals for distribution (in anticipation of much tighter online information control), increase our efforts to build organizational and ideological connections between groups dealing with different faces of the empire (such as Palestine groups and anti-ICE groups) and personally cultivate and share skills required to achieve some minor level of resource sovereignty (such as repairs, mushroom cultivation -oyster mushrooms are high in protein and can live off nothing but cardboard- , machining, etc.) I’m not some prepper with fantasies of total resource independence, I just think that a resilient people’s movement needs to have some ability to maintain and fabricate things that can’t easily be acquired or replaced through simpler means, and to supplement what they already have. Unlike misanthropic woods-dwelling right wingers preparing for some biblical apocalypse, our message is a grounded and hopeful one with the potential to draw in great numbers of people with all kinds of skills, resources and social ties. I guess to be general, I just believe in the capacity for people to come together when things get terrible.

It would be long, brutal, stupid, terrible, and a shitload of people would die. But I don’t think the US empire would come out of it victorious, and possibly not even whole.

It’s a plan that requires 70% of the country backing them up, when in reality they only have 25% percent

I personally don’t think there’s enough cohesion among the domestic arms of the state to enact martial law. There’s only enough cohesion to terrorize people who are already deemed undesirable or invisible. Formal military control of everyday life would probably flop because it requires actually doing something and maintaining a disciplined state apparatus.

Our current state apparatus can’t even do a military parade. The only thing they know how to do domestically is perform brutish, cheap, and quick raids. It’s an administration of lazy idiots who all hate one another and are all trying to sabotage the other not because of political aspirations, but because they want to be on podcasts.

Maybe I could be wrong but we’ve already seen riots during a Trump admin, in 2020, and the best they were able to muster were some scattered and undisciplined BORTAC squads who only seemed to know how to chuck tear gas indiscriminately and shoot dogs. And I’m supposed to believe those same guys, with the same leadership structure and training, are supposed to become a permanent domestic occupation? Like what, doing checkpoints on roads or coordinated raids? Controlling the news media? I guess I can’t see it

What dispelled the 2020 riots weren’t civilian fears of inhaling tear gas or getting a shield to the face. What dispelled it was the promise of electoral liberalism, which is always what the American state tries to offer (note it does not offer this to the undesirable/invisible class).