What do retired military liberals do? The Civil War of 2016 U.S. military officers are told to plan to fight Americans

Imagine Tea Party extremists seizing control of a South Carolina town and the Army being sent in to crush the rebellion. This farcical vision is now part of the discussion in professional military circles.

At
issue is an article in the respected Small Wars Journal titled “Full
Spectrum Operations in the Homeland: A ‘Vision’ of the Future.” It was
written by retired Army Col. Kevin Benson of the Army's University of Foreign Military and Cultural Studies at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., and Jennifer Weber,
a Civil War expert at the University of Kansas. It posits an “extremist
militia motivated by the goals of the ‘tea party’ movement” seizing
control of Darlington, S.C., in 2016, “occupying City Hall,
disbanding the city council and placing the mayor under house arrest.”
The rebels set up checkpoints on Interstate 95 and Interstate 20 looking
for illegal aliens. It’s a cartoonish and needlessly provocative
scenario.

The article is a choppy patchwork of doctrinal jargon
and liberal nightmare. The authors make a quasi-legal case for military
action and then apply the Army’s
Operating Concept 2016-2028 to the situation. They write bloodlessly
that “once it is put into play, Americans will expect the military to execute without pause and as professionally as if it were acting overseas.” They claim that “the Army
cannot disappoint the American people, especially in such a moment,”
not pausing to consider that using such efficient, deadly force against
U.S. citizens would create a monumental political backlash and severely
erode government legitimacy.

The vision is hard to take seriously. As retired ArmyBrig. Gen. Russell D. Howard, a former professor at West Point, observed earlier in his career, “I am a colonel, colonels write a lot of crazy stuff, but no one listens to colonels, so I don’t see the problem.” Twenty
years ago, then-Air Force Lt. Col. Charles J. Dunlap Jr. created a stir
with an article in Parameters titled “The Origins of the American
Military Coup of 2012.” It carried a disclaimer that the coup scenario
was “purely a literary device intended to dramatize my concern over
certain contemporary developments affecting the armed forces, and is
emphatically not a prediction.”

The scenario presented in Small
Wars Journal isn’t a literary device but an operational lay-down
intended to present the rationale and mechanisms for Americans to fight
Americans. Col. Benson and Ms. Weber contend, “Army
officers are professionally obligated to consider the conduct of
operations on U.S. soil.” This is a dark, pessimistic and wrongheaded
view of what military leaders should spend their time studying.

A
professor at the Joint Forces Staff College was relieved of duty in June
for uttering the heresy that the United States is at war with Islam.
The Obama administration contended the professor had to be relieved
because what he was teaching was not U.S. policy. Because there is no
disclaimer attached to the Small Wars piece, it is fair to ask, at least
in Col. Benson’s case, whether his views reflect official policy regarding the use of U.S. military force against American citizens.

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Farnsworth's take:

Well isn't this special? Is this guy insane OR did he just blurt out a state secret?