You know, even in Vietnam the troops only had to do one six-month tour. That on its own was enough to fuck a lot of them up pretty badly.
Stop-loss means a lot of soldiers stay quite a bit longer than six months. Not surprisingly, the surge has led to an increase in soldiers detained in Iraq. Some of these guys are going to end up spending years in the middle of a warzone, and when they get back they're going to have trouble adjusting.
Well, there's always Blackwater, if civilian life just doesn't work out for them. Or organized crime (assuming there's any difference). Historically, the lineage of organized crime groups always has it's roots in the end of a large war. The longer the war, the worse the banditry afterwards (and let's not forget, the corporatocracy is promising us a hundred year war.)
And let's not forget, Caeser kept his legions in Gaul for 10 years ... and when he came back, he used them to conquer Rome.
Saturday, October 20, 2007
Stop-Loss and Regime Change
Tuesday, October 16, 2007
Drilling for Martial Law
From BBC Channel 4 News:
Three fictional "dirty bombs" are to be the trigger for the biggest terror drill in US history.
More than 15,000 people will take part in the 25 million dollar TopOff 4 exercise which will simulate a series of terror attacks across America.
The Department of Homeland Security said the aim was to "address policy and strategic issues that mobilise prevention and response systems".
PORTLAND, Ore. - It's the largest terror drill in U.S. history, and the nation will have its eyes on Portland.
This week, the city becomes ground zero as a fake dirty bomb goes off on a set resembling the Steel Bridge, covering the city in "make believe" radiation.
Beyond a terror attack, it's also a test for any catastrophic disaster - to prevent the fatal mistakes the nation witnessed in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
System-wide failures left thousands in jeopardy as emergency officials at all levels misjudged, mis-communicated and underestimated the storm.
In Portland, new communication plans, equipment and people will be put to the test.
"I'd rather much see if there are things we need to do to improve through this exercise than waiting till a real-life event came," Mayor Tom Potter said.
The mayor will be among 6,000 responders and volunteer victims working on the drill at Portland International Raceway and at local hospitals, where triage stations are ready to evaluate the wounded.
The drill scenario goes like this: terrorists who have been planning attacks in Oregon, Arizona and the U.S. Territory of Guam are able to bring radioactive material into the U.S. The first of three coordinated attacks occurs in Guam with the detonation of a dirty bomb and widespread contamination in a populous area near a power plant. Similar attacks then occur in Portland and Phoenix.
Despite the size of the drill, don't expect to see any real-life disruptions on the roads, highways, bridges or hospitals. Most of the action will be behind the fence at Portland International Raceway and out of sight. The only thing you might see is emergency vehicles racing around town.
If you notice anything unusual and wonder if it is a part of the training exercise, you can call 211. The phone number will be activated on Tuesday.
POWER: At half past nine this morning we were actually running an exercise for a company of over a thousand people in London based on simultaneous bombs going off precisely at the railway stations where it happened this morning, so I still have the hairs on the back of my neck standing up right now.
POWER: Precisely, and it was about half past nine this morning, we planned this for a company and for obvious reasons I don't want to reveal their name but they're listening and they'll know it. And we had a room full of crisis managers for the first time they'd met and so within five minutes we made a pretty rapid decision that this is the real one and so we went through the correct drills of activating crisis management procedures to jump from slow time to quick time thinking and so on.
This is what the enemy does. They carry out terrorist attacks themselves, in order to frighten the population and enact even stricter control. In order to cover the preparations for the strike massive exercises are staged, during which the terrorists, if discovered, can be explained away as part of the drill. Then, when the drill becomes real, the emergency services are already on their toes, ready to respond and limit the damage. Everyone involved promptly forgets that they were just drilling for the exact thing that happened, and fails to take a moment to examine the odds against that happening ... especially when it happens over and over again. If you have a couple of hours to kill, here, go watch Terrorstorm (after you finish reading this, of course.)
Will something very bad happen in Oregon, Phoenix, and Guam this week? Who knows? Not me. Just like most terrorist attacks are real, so are most drills. Then again, history is full of examples of nations using the excuse of military drills to launch an attack on their enemies. Or at the very least, intimidate them. The modern practice of concealing real terrorist attacks on one's own citizenry within fake-but-real drills is simply the latest and most perverse twist in the history of this venerable tactic.
There's a presidential election coming up. Whether the game plan is to
You know, that terror attack will be scheduled for right around the time that the US dollar inflates away to airy nothing, and it's economy with it. It might even be intended as the final nudge that pushes it over the abyss into national bankruptcy. People are going to be sitting in the middle of massive heaps of stuff, most of it owned by someone else, repossesed by the banks in the wake of an epidemic of unpayable credit-card debt (expect Congress, assuming it still operates, to rule all debt invalid, but only when everyone but the rich is utterly bankrupt) ... all that stuff, and unable to get together enough money for food.
I present to you my vision of a future America:
Some cities, contaminated by radiation or infection (or, hey, why not both?), get evacuated, and it's citizens put in refugee camps ... no doubt soon to become labor camps, as Halliburton comes along and offers to 'pay' them to rebuild, well, whatever it decides should be rebuilt. Even in cities (yet) unassaulted by terror, the security apparatus has everything locked up tight as a prison, and defending freedom from terror has become a sick joke. With the economy on the skids, jobs scarce, and wealth massively concentrated in the hands of a small elite, crime has spiked due to sheer desperation (in the sense of true crime, such as theft or violence, rather than violations of the myriad of inane regulations that the criminal code has become); those caught, and not simply killed, are charged with terrorism and added to the labor camps. At some point simple vagrancy might become an offense punishable by conscription. And expect lots of black people to fill the camps in the beginning. After all, they're already the poorest demographic, and the most prone to crime. So it'll look a lot like slavery, though everyone will be too polite to call it that. And hey, this time around it'll be slightly more colorblind: there will be whites in the camps, and latinos, and asians. Slavery might not manage to be morally correct, but politically correct? No problem.
Then there's the possibility of an already ongoing multi-front war in the Middle East having expanded to include against Iran, Turkey, and Pakistan, so that it's now requiring millions of soldiers in order to fight (hello, conscription!) instead of the mere hundreds of thousands it currently involves. The conflict might even proceed well for while, at least if the Chinese come in and throw their industrial weight (idle for lack of rich Americans to sell to) behind their manpower (playing America's role from the last two world wars during the current one: building stuff for the combatants for a while, letting them wear each other down, and then picking a side and going in for the kill.) America's toast if that happens. Then again, China might well continue to support America, as part of a mutual agreement to carve up the world. If that happens, the Empire might well totter on for decades after the final death of the Republic.
Sunday, October 14, 2007
You know, given that the best time to carry out false-flag operations is during exercises specifically resembling the situation that actually happens, I really and sincerely hope that Exercise Vigilant Shield '08 doesn't, you know, happen to coincide with anything ... real.
“North American Aerospace Defense Command and U.S. Northern Command along with U.S. Pacific Command, the Department of Homeland Security as well as local, state and other federal responders will exercise their response abilities against a variety of potential threats during Exercise Vigilant Shield ‘08, a Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff-designated, North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) and U.S. Northern Command (USNORTHCOM)-sponsored, and U.S. Joint Forces Command[JFCOM]-supported Department of Defense exercise for homeland defense and defense support of civil authorities missions.
Cooperation from NORAD on down to local authorities?
That's sounds a lot like martial law.
Bringing Democracy to the Corporatocracy
Watching John Perkins - author of Confessions of an Economic Hitman - giving a speech from about a year ago, he starts talking about changing corporations to make them open, transparent, and democratic. The reason for this is simple: modern governments around the world and especially in the United States are little more than puppets of large corporations, a form of government he calls the corporatocracy. This corporatocracy serves as the true government of the planet, and so long as corporations remain organizationally identical to, say, the Roman Army or feudal Europe, real freedom and democracy are impossible.
Democratic corporations. That's an interesting idea. I remember coming across it for the first time in Bruce Sterling's 1998 cybperpunk novel Islands in the Net, a volume I read many times as a teenager. The main character is a member of just such a democratic corporation, as are most people around the world - except for a few small rogue zones, the islands referred to in the title. Corporations in the novel did not specialize. Each was basically a massive economic cooperative, in which members assigned executive power during open elections, had rights as well as responsibilities, and the freedom to choose what kind of work they would do for the company rather than simply a set of assigned tasks. Of course, they weren't guaranteed to get what they asked for; a large part of the management's job was to review proposals made by those lower in the hierarchy, and decide whether or not to grant them. The longer and better one's record, the more resources one could muster for a given task. It wasn't a perfect deal, but it was a lot better for the people involved than what they'd had before.
The management class and their pet economists will claim that corporate democracy would be a business liability (which it will, to a degree: the rich will not be quite so rich). The reasons for why it's bad will vary. One claim might be that management talent will be lured away from any company that adopts the principles (then again, employees would probably be attracted to such companies, and employee talent can be far more important than management.) Some might claim that it would lead to bad decision making (but, why they should expect closed management hierarchies to be immune to the problems that plague closed societies?) My own feeling is that a truly democratic corporation would be a much leaner, much more efficient economic machine than anything built on the current model, generating far more wealth for far more people, and distributing that wealth with a much more even hand.
Initiatives like this are what give me hope for the future. A global revolution in favor of corporate democracy would be a wonderful thing.
Wednesday, October 3, 2007
The Red Pill's Bitter Aftertaste
Back in June, I flew for the first time, back to Canada. Made a transfer in Atlanta, where I was greeted, as soon as I got off the plane, with a giant banner saying 'Welcome to America, Land of Freedom!' or some shit like that, all in gold letters with a photo-quality American flag fluttering in the background. Later, while I was waiting to take off my shoes and have my bag pawed through by a surly, ill-educated trailer-park spawn, I couldn't help but think of this website (while, admittedly, listening to the album it's associated with, but then again, Year Zero was appropriate. Regarding the website, you might have to wait a bit for it to load. Once it does, just click and move your mouse around. You'll see.) At one point I made eye contact with a random traveller from the Middle East, inevitably getting far more thorough treatment than the petty humiliations of security theatre I and every other traveller was forced to endure. Nevertheless I felt an instant empathy with the plight of this man; a part of my brain that hadn't really sparked in years sputtered for life, however pathetically and briefly.
I think that was the moment, for me, when the shell that had been built up around my brain finally began to crack. It didn't spread very quickly, not at first. This was back in June, after all, and I can't honestly claim to have woken up any earlier than, well, last week. But then that is the way of crumbling dams: at first a small crack, which spreads, slowly ... until all at once, the flood.
Watch this. Over a million other people have. It was the cold shower that woke my ass up, and maybe it'll do the same for you.
Waking up is a funny thing. I was walking through Shinjuku station on my way to work, and all at once I felt tears in my eyes, because for the first time in years it really hit me that this time it was my people - the Anglo culture of which I am deeply proud, the culture that has given so much of freedom and science and technology and wealth to the world, that has taken civilization to the greatest heights it has yet achieved - this time, it was my people who housed the evil. That we were the bad guys, and that the Muslims, bless their bewildered, confused, hateful little hearts, were right to fight against us with every ounce of their strength.
I remember when 9/11 first happened (well, yeah, we all do.) At the time I'd never really considered that the government could be behind it, but still, a few days later, after the networks had been full of nothing but collapsing towers and broken five-sided geometry, I had enough savvy to tell my girlfriend at the time "Whatever happens, don't let me fall for the propaganda. Don't let me do anything stupid." Well, I didn't join the army or become a weapons scientist, so I have my ex to thank for that much at least (hell, if I hadn't dated her I'd've still been in the militia when the towers went down), but I still bought the propaganda, drinking deep of the kool-aid, letting the fever take over my brain. Then again, we broke up a couple of years after that, and it wasn't until later that I really started to buy into it, to really believe the lies and the halftruths and the misdirections and the perverted logic that's been shoveled so liberally into our mouths over the past several years. Hell, I remember getting into an argument with David Brin on his blog, where the guy tried his best to convince me with logical argument that the current pack of criminals was far worse than the muslims or the crazier elements of the left ... I couldn't defeat the logic, so I just left. Still, the propaganda kept it's hold on my brain.
It's not that I'm stupid. I am, if not a genius, certainly well above the herd. But intelligence can be as great a curse as stupidity when it comes to well-crafted webs of lies, because once the lies start to settle in and make themselves at home as part of one's self-image, an intelligent mind is much more adept at the doublethink required to keep it all in place.
I'll give this to the evil shits responsible for this nightmare: they are masters of memetic engineering, on a par with Mohammed and Marx. They know just how to get past all the mental defenses, how to manipulate human psychology with inter-related (and contradictory) complexes of memes. Hell, they've been setting memeplexes up against each other. 'Left' and 'Right' are just arbitrary camps full of manufactured ideas designed to be mutually antagonistic (thus keeping the politically motivated parts of the population at daggers drawn) while being supportive of the overall engenda (tax, control, and eventually, enslave.)
Basically, it works like this. The Left believes Bush and his court of grand viziers and sycophants are a bunch of evil fucks, and their war a complete sham. They think the real threat is environmental degradation generally, and global warming specifically. The Right, on the other hand, thinks global warming is a crock of steaming bullshit, and that terrorism generally, and the rise of an Islamic caliphate specifically, is the most dire threat facing Western civilization. Thus the Left is led to believe that those on the Right are criminals against the environment and duped supporters of an evil war, while those on the Right see the Left as either blind or traitorous when it comes to the war, along with being brainwashed victims of the new Gaianist religion with it's apocalyptic fairy tales of climate change.
Let me set you straight, in case you hadn't already figured it out. Terrorism is bullshit. So is global warming. Both are there to keep you scared (The terrorists might nuke us! The ice caps might melt!). Not only does this make it easier to control you - hysterical people instinctively look to authority figures - it also makes it easier to bleed you dry of resources. Carbon taxes limiting how big your house can be, how much electricity you can use, how big and fast a car you can have and how far you can go in it, how much you're allowed to fly ... all of these come directly out of global warming. It keeps you immobile, keeps you poor, and lets the government soak you like never before (income tax might be a tax on your label, but carbon tax? That's a tax on your existence. Because your very existence is a threat to the entire biosphere, awful, filthy human creature that you are.)
Terrorism keeps you scared of other people around the world, and keeps those people scared of you, which if you're trying to build a global empire is a very useful trick as it acts as a firewall against the formation of a global resistance. It justifies wars, and - more to the point - serves as an excuse for a steady ratcheting increase in 'security' regulations at home (security, not to protect us from terrorists, but to protect our would-be masters from us.)
For the last several years I came down on the right: global warming bullshit, Islamic terrorism dangerous! That's embarrassing, a little. But no more shameful than falling for the global warming line. Left and Right are more psychological predispositions than well-thought-out political positions, and the twin lies that have been endlessly repeated by the media are designed to appeal to one or the other (environmental catastrophe for the caring nurturer type, shadowy foreign threat for the watchful protector type.) Damn near everyone fell for one or the other and sometimes even both; few have been those who fell for neither, but then wisdom is precious because it is rare.
The wannabe emperors that are settling into power now, in this the time when the culmination of their scheme approaches, forgot to take one thing into account. Fear can be used to control us, yes, but only for a while. At first we look to our leaders; that is our instinct, as social animals evolved for life in a complex hierarchy. But alone among the social mammals, we have the ability to think; we look for leadership not just to our governments but to our thinkers, not just to the powerful but to the wise. And as time goes on, it is the wise that have the greatest influence, for even the most foolish of men - so long as he retains a soul - knows the truth when it is properly explained to him, and the finding and teaching of truth are the great strengths of the wise.
The nearer their plan comes to fruition, the more obvious it will be, and the more the truth will start to take hold. Those on the Right will realize that terrorism is a sick practical joke of awesome proportions, perpetrated by their own government against them; those on the Left will come to see that global warming is nothing more than a willful misrepresentation of science. They'll get to talking together, and together, they'll tear down the edifice of lies like the Berlin Wall.
Make no mistake, we are not out of the woods yet. Things are going to get much, much worse before they get better. I'm talking biowarfare (my guess: smallpox, say in Oregon.) Martial law. Maybe a nuclear exchange or two (not a planet-buster, just turning a country or two into wasteland.) Disappearances, concentration camps, secret police, conscription, the whole nine yards of the classic militarized fascist police state, updated for the 21st century, scarier than anything that's come before, like something out of the Book of Revelations. This particular generation of homo demonicus is playing for all the marbles this time, and as always they mean to win.
Hell, I'm not sure if I'm going to survive this. I'm not sure if you will. I'm deeply frightened for the future of my family, and my friends. I look at the faces of the children in my kids' classes, and I wonder.
One thing I am sure about. The people will wake up, and when they do there will be a revolution. Much blood will be spilled leading up to it, and rivers will flow by the end. But when the dust settles, it will be the heads of the would-be neo-aristocracy that are impaled on pikes and set on display as an eternal monument to the greatest depths of evil yet plumbed by the human soul, as an eternal reminder to any who might plot to follow their path into darkness, and seduce others into following them down it.
Sunday, September 30, 2007
My Dilemma
What is divided must unite; what is united, must divide
(I think)
Oh sure, you can quibble that I'm a Canadian if you want, and everyone knows it's really America that's getting buggered by history. But while Canada might be America's kinder, gentler and slightly dull kid brother, the sad fact is that we also follow the American lead in more or less all things. Legislation that gets tried out in the states is introduced in Canada within a decade. The sad fact is that the only reason Canada's been a free country throughout the 20th century, is that America has too. If America loses it's freedom, Canada will too. You can take that to the bank.
I'm not going to belabor the North American descent into tyranny. Naomi Wolfe does it much better here, in Fascist America in 10 Easy Steps, and Carolyn Baker does an excellent job as well in her article Speaking Truth to Power. Go there, read those articles, and if they - and the events of the last several years, which sadly I'm only just now really waking up to - don't scare your bowels empty you're not paying attention. Or you're working for the fascists, and the various incidents they detail make you all warm and tight down in your unmentionable areas (if you are, and you're reading this post, I'll just say this to you: you and the cockroaches you work with might just succeed in hollowing out the greatest nation on the planet. Good for you! But you know, eventually, we'll hang you from a lamp-post.)
I'm seriously conflicted. You see, right now I live in Japan, making my humble living teaching the fine people here how to speak my language. It's undemanding and reasonably well-compensated, one of the better compensations being that I get to live in Tokyo. But it's been a few years, and I'm getting the itch to return home, to rejoin my kith and kin, and start something approaching a real career.
But is that so wise? North America's on the brink of a precipice, and the only thing keeping the entire continent from a rapid fall into tyranny is just one more big terrorist attack ... and if 9/11 really was a false flag operation (I'm not %100 certain on that, but the doubt is there, and the doubt is enough), that terrorist attack could come at whatever time is convenient to the state. Like, say, shortly before a presidential election.
Going back right before that would be a really bad move. I'm a very loud person, with a tendency to sound off if someone's annoying me. At the very least, any career I started would be very short-lived; at the worst, I might be 'detained', or simply executed.
At the same time, this is my homeland these execrable fucks are ruining. Not fighting the bastards smacks of cowardice, but fighting them is basically suicide.
So that's the question I'm looking at. Stay in Japan - or at any rate Asia - and continue plying a trade I fell into more or less accidentally. Or return home, very likely jumping down the rabbit hole with the rest of my country, deep into Orwell's darkest nightmares, and hope to God it all blows over quickly.
Although I know it won't. If America loses itself, it'll be a century before it's people wake up and remember who they used to be. If I go back, I'm not just fucking myself ... I'm risking any kids I might have, too.
History's a bitch, isn't it?
Thursday, September 6, 2007
The Bomb and The Bug
Let's say for a second the false flag theory of 9/11 is true. I'm not going to discuss this in the article (or bother debating it in the comments, if anyone's so inclined), as there are much better places for that.
It would imply the reason there's been no terrorist attack on American soil in the past six years is nothing to do with better security and everything to do with the fact that the government sees no need for another. The anger/fear reaction elicited by 9/11 were sufficient to get the war they wanted, and if we're lucky they're happy with that.
If their ambitions go deeper, though....
9/11 worked once. There's no reason another, similar attack couldn't work just as well. Just knocking down a building with a plane or a bomb wouldn't be sufficient, though; there are security measures already in place against that (so maniacally and rigidly focused on preventing that kind of attack, so useless for preventing any other.) And besides, now that the war's going it'll probably keep going forever, or at least as long as it keep paying for itself (see this post by John Robb at Global Guerrillas, Unleashing the Dogs of War.)
Maybe the ultimate plan is to complete the short-circuiting of democracy in America. Of course, for that you'd need something much scarier than a plane flying into a building. If you want to get something like, say, nation-wide martial law you'd need a really serious emergency or a really massive shock. I see two ways to go about this: either a Bomb or a Bug. Lets take a closer look at these two scenarios.
1. The Bomb, or "Shit, what happened to Springfield?"
If Americans woke up one day to hear that a city had been nuked out of existence, that tens of thousands of people were dead, with hundreds of thousands more on the way due to the radiation, their first reaction would be that someone, somewhere would pay.
There's an easy way, I think, to tell if the nuke is planted by the government or by al Qaeda. If the latter, they'll pick a target like LA or New York, one that'll maximize the economic damage, and kill the largest number of people. If the former, a smaller city will be picked, one that the US will be able to live without, wounded and angry. Let's call the city Springfield, an everytown that can be plucked out of existence without the economy noticing.
Where did the nuke come from? Oh, that's simple enough. Iran, Pakistan, the Soviet Union. If it's one of the first two there will be nuclear retaliation, and everything east of Iraq and west of India will be radioactive waste. If the latter - a plausible source for the device, as their poor security and corrupt officialdom of the 90s (not that they're so much better now) means that any number of their nukes might have leaked out onto the market - then while terrorists will be blamed for detonating it their countries might possibly escape total culpability in the eyes of the American people, and thus be spared a nuclear revenge that would be history's greatest genocide.
They would not, however, be spared bloodshed. The conventional war would most likely escalate greatly (aided by a large expansion in the robotics industry), with the aim not so much of conquering the Middle East, but of militarizing US society as thoroughly as possible. A militarized society, after all - especially one still in shock - is more accepting of public regimentation, and of the steady erosion and eventually total loss of their freedom.
2. The Bug
The outbreak hits a major city somewhere, and is suppressed with only a few thousand people dying (conversely, it wipes out a Springfield). Almost as soon as it hits the entire city is put under quarantine: anyone not involved in medical or security services is advised to remain at home, until further notice. Quickly suppressed outbreaks occur in a few other cities, claiming several hundred more lives, and other outbreaks occur in a few other countries around the world (likely claiming many more.)
The Quarantine would have to last for a few weeks to be effective, and in that time martial law could be slipped into place. All manner of restrictions on travel could be justified afterwards, in order to prevent any further outbreaks from taking place.
I could see the Quarantine become something very extreme. Restrictions on travel could mean that most office jobs converted to telecommuting, just to avoid the hassle of checkpoints. The fear of getting sick would motivate people to spend a lot of time at home, and the technology industry would be thrilled to play the enabler. In the long run, people could buy robots so they didn't actually have to leave their houses to perform errands.
There's a great advantage to that kind of situation for a tyranny. If you always know where everyone is, it's much easier to keep very close track of what they're doing. They could have all the free speech they wanted and it wouldn't mean a damn, for they'd all be under voluntary house arrest.
Which method is used is largely irrelevant. Both could be accomplished with relatively small teams; both would make fear pervasive to a degree we can't imagine today; both would thus, in short order, lead to autocracy of one kind or another. The forms need not be changed. There would still be a President, a Congress, Supreme Courts and a Constitution that they all pretended to love while ignoring utterly. But their grip on power would be absolute, insulated utterly from the will of the people they purport to serve and in fact rule with an iron fist.
Another thing they have in common is the Springfield factor. A real attack, either nuclear or biological, would claim not tens but hundreds of thousands of lives. It would target a large, dense city, and the economic damage would bring America to it's knees, wiping it out as a dominant world power. I'm betting that any cabal that merely wants to solidify their power over America also wants to preserve America's power as much as possible, and will thus avoid anything that causes real structural harm.
But hey, I could be wrong about that, in which case we're really in shit.
Sunday, August 26, 2007
By Any Means Necessary
I gotta say, I'm not all that surprised that the person publicly advocating a military coups in the US is from the left side of the political spectrum. Counterintuitive - most people would expect it to be a rightwinger - but the left is the side that generally prefers to use the courts, rather than the voting booth, to get what they want.
It's saddening when people begin to lose faith in democracy, but, again, not surprising. If this view becomes widespread a coups is probably inevitable, given enough time.
Hat tip: Wretchard at the Belmont Club.
Thursday, July 19, 2007
A Military Coups in America: Revolution or Regime Change
Most people assume it couldn't happen in the States: troops in the streets, martial law, political executions on a massive scale. It's a subject that has been treated in the past. This essay, Origins of the American Military Coups of 2012 by Lieutenant Colonel Dunlap at the Army War College, is particularly worth reading. Still, it seems unlikely at first. The American military has been under the perfect control of the civilian government ever since the founding of the country. It's composed of patriotic American citizens sworn to defend their country, men drawn from every walk of life and every part of the nation, who would never take up arms en mass against the population. Coups d'etats are a problem faced by other countries, basket-cases with corrupt governments and restive populations split by a mix of mutually repulsive, vehement ideologies or simple ethnic division.
Actually, put that way it doesn't seem so foreign, does it...?
A coups in the US is a probably a certainty in the near-to-mid term. Probability theory alone suggests that, at least once in US history, there will be a military coups. After all, no state ever lasts forever, and military intervention is the most common type of sharply discontinuous political event that leads to the death of one state and the birth of another (climate change, historically, is a distant second.) Military intervention can either be external - successful invasion by another country - or internal, ie, a military coups. When you're talking about the towering giants of history, military revolts generally precede outside conquest.
Now, you could apply Copernican probability theory - the assumption that there is nothing inherently special about the place or time from which we observe - to the question of how long the current constitutional order will survive. It's been around since 1787, so there's a 5 percent chance that the union is in it's final 11 years of existence, and a 5 percent chance that it will last for another for and a half millenia. And, of course, a 90% chance that it's remaining span is somewhere in between the two.
Copernican theory is a clumsy tool, however, for use only when no other data points exist. Data about the US abounds.
If you're talking about a coups, politics is one of the areas that deserves close attention. Part of the agreement the military, in effect, has with the political class is that they trust the politicians to make the call when it comes to going, or not going, to war. This requires that the military believes the political class to have the best interests of the country at heart and, beyond that, to know the best way of realizing that interest. The contract has held for almost two and a half centuries, and has largely worked out for the best. But there's nothing to say it couldn't sour in the future (and in fact, there's plenty of evidence it's souring right now.) If the common perception amongst the population that politicians were nothing more than venal, corrupt criminals were to spread to the troops as well, the military might well decide at some point that enough is enough, and simply remove the government from office.
Here's one scenario: Washington in general, and Congress specifically, finally puts an end to the Iraq war. The US military is withdrawn as fast as it can, and the country collapses into bloodshed along sectarian, political, and ethnic lines. The consequences of that little collapse lead to a larger one; a discredited US finds itself increasingly pressed everywhere around the world. The economic fallout of that loss of credibility is grim: possibly a sharp drop in the value of the dollar, maybe even just a long-term period of slow growth while the rest of the world rockets ahead (one or two percent in the US, but a decade of twenty percent in China, India, and Brazil....) Precisely what the consequences would be is hard to tell, but one lesson of history is that no war has ever been lost without some sizable fraction of wealth being taken afterwards from the loser.
Meanwhile, the military seethes. They know they could have won the war, but were betrayed from the top, sold out for cheap and ephemeral political gain. It becomes a bitter narrative, endlessly muttered by by soldiers, by former soldiers, and by their supporters. Their numbers grow; as the economy struggles, more people are willing to believe the tale of betrayal and treason at the top, especially with corruption and scandal becoming more apparent by the day. Finally things boil over. Congress is dissolved (ie imprisoned or executed), the president is replaced with a five-star general, and the American people wake up the next day to find themselves living in a military dictatorship.
This is perhaps the uglier scenario, driven as it would be by vengeful bitterness. It could be made uglier still: the successful nuking of an American city, for instance, would in this scenario turn Americans against their government with even greater malice. Media and academia, too, insofar as they're seen as supporters of that government, would come in for rough treatment. This is the kind of scenario where the streets might run red with blood, where hundreds of thousands might 'disappear' in detention centers and secret executions.
The second scenario is not necessarily so grim. The premise is the opposite to that of the first: America doesn't lose Iraq. In fact it succeeds, and proceeds to perform regime change on a regular basis, once or twice per decade taking out an odious government and inviting in a massive global network of NGOs and corporations to rebuild the country afterwards, establishing the conditions for a democracy and then protecting whatever starts to grow. This is essentially Thomas Barnett's view, and it is a strategy that bears thinking about. Executed correctly, it would benefit the entire world, from the country being invaded (which in exchange for some short-term instability is presented with both freedom from repression and economic opportunity), to the global community (who would gain in both a newly opened economy, and a reduced security threat from a basket-case regime.)
The danger comes in the downstream risk to America's own political order. Once again, were the general perception that the civilian government is deeply corrupt, counter-productive or even injurious to the country's interests to deepen, what would there be to stop the military from executing regime change at home? Indeed nothing would be easier. There wouldn't even be a military to oppose them.
Rome's transition from republic to empire bears comparison. For centuries, Rome made a habit of sending its army out, conquering foreign lands, and establishing Roman governance. Practice made them good at it, until Caeser was able to roll up the whole of Gaul within just a decade ... after which he made the logical connection that if a city could be conquered and her lands taken away, well, Rome was just another city and the same principle applied.
Caeser, of course, sought personal gain, though he justified his actions by pointing to the corruption of the Senate, claiming that it acted not on the side of the people but for the wealthy minority. His stated intentions were not to win a throne but to restore the old republic; almost certainly, these statements were mere public relations. But would a modern general be so cynical? One can well imagine some Caeser ordering the dissolution of Congress, all the while stressing that his motivation was merely to clean the slate and go back to a better day ... and actually meaning it. As an example, the gerrymandering of congressional districts is widely seen as a gross perversion of the democratic system; the coups leader could declare that elections based on such a system fail the test of free and fair elections, and all leaders so elected thus utterly illegitimate. First he would occupy Washington, banishing Congress from the city. Next, he would plead for cooperation and patience from the American people; the military government would last only so long as it would take new elections to be held, and that - given the American peoples' boundless experience in conducting elections - would likely be a very short time, almost certainly less than a year. In fact, there's no reason not to let all or most of the sitting congress run for their seats; competing in a fair arena (ie, congressional districts modeled more like third-grade shapes and less like regions of the Mandelbrot set) most of those congressmen would likely lose anyways, and if they were allowed to run it would do a lot to increase the perception of fairness.
Of course, there's no reason the people would have to passively allow their government to be dismantled, but it's worth keeping in mind that general confidence in presidential and congressional competence (19% and 14% respectively) are dwarfed by confidence in the military (64%.) The scenario presented above requires only that this massive divide continue long enough for some old warrior to decide to use that political capital to affect change back home.
There's also no overwhelming reason that the coups leader would have to be true to his word. He could, like Caeser, use reform as merely a pretext to the seizure of power. Even if he didn't, the possibility of another military coups would be eternally at the back of everyone's mind. Nevertheless, this second scenario is quite a bit more user-friendly than than the first; America, rather than becoming a nightmare of repressive government, would in all likelihood remain a livable country, as the transition from old republic to new republic, or republic to whatever comes next, would be managed in a much less destructive fashion. If a military coups is indeed in the long run inevitable, I for one would prefer it to follow the second rather than the first scenario.