Eeehh, so yes, after basic i did not march anywhere really. And you do need to brush up on it to keep in the swing of things…. But honestly, you know your unit is going to march in a parade months in advance, and for better or worse are going to represent the armed forces, you schedule mandatory training time.
Is it wasteful? Arguably under normal circumstances, definitely under this circumstance.
So i can only conclude that either they did not care, or do care a lot, or someone who was supposed to plan this fucked up and they just grabbed people.
We’re there soldiers in WW2 cosplay? I’d be so embarrassed.
This is just not accurate.
Here’s an example proving it incorrect:
https://youtu.be/aeFltEjzR2Y?t=1212
That’s just a unit. Not a ceremonial one.
Hell, even our AIT D&C was crispy AF. Every fiber of our being was purely focused on immaculate execution. I do miss that. The intensity of
notthat natural motivation and not the manufactured stuff that gets you through daily morning formation.###“SOUND OFF”
😈👏 ooooh, Jodie you done did it now. I hope you like getting your tits blown off because you bout to get your tits blown off.
It is genuinely, such a hilariously piss-poor excuse.
My wife is in the Canadian Forces. She is ridiculously good at her job, and everyone in the CAF is trained to a ridiculously high standard. By the time she exited occupational training she was already qualified on more weapon systems than most US soldiers ever touch in their entire careers. Her unit shoots sub-MOA groupings for fun. They meet and often exceed the physical standards for Ranger school. And this is just reg-force infantry.
And despite all that, she is also so completely capable of keeping a tight march that she actually has to stop herself from automatically falling in perfect step next to me when we’re walking down the street. And no, the excuse of “Oh, you can’t march to Fortunate Son” doesn’t count for shit. My wife can mark perfect time with no music at all. Christ, one time in training her MCpl made her unit all put on their gas masks and mark time while singing Oh Canada, and they didn’t get to stop until it was perfect. And no, they did not have a fucking drum or backing music. She’s not on a drill team; Canada doesn’t have drill teams. This is just something they do because it’s part of the basic standard of being a soldier.
The key difference is you can actually march to that music. Fortunate son is slightly too fast for a proper pace which is why the front of the one group was wavy and people were out of step. Also if anyone was actually calling cadence, the people on the left side probably wouldn’t have been able to hear it over the music.
Marching can be done to no music.
Side ranks keep sideeye on the element leader to the side, everyone else keeps side eye to the person on their right.
There are also the marshall with the whips. If all else fails, you keep cadence to that.
In a silent march, you keep in step with the “Clomp clomp clomp”, which also, is quite easy to do, and is done often.
Yeah, you literally just keep the beat in your head. Anyone can do it.
True, but keeping time with the steps of those around you while music is playing at a completely different tempo is not something I would trust a non-musically trained soldier to do well.
My wife falls in step beside me without even realizing she’s doing it. You learn this day one of basic up here. By the time you get out of BMQ it’s instinct. And it doesn’t eat up any training time, because your practice is just walking in time with your unit every time you go anywhere.
Except, every soldier is quite capable of doing it, and does it routinely.
I don’t know much about the military, but I am very familiar with the marching arts. Discerning between two different tempos and keeping your feet in time with only one of them is a lot harder than it sounds. Unless there is time allotted to learning that skill specifically, I doubt any group of soldiers are going to do it flawlessly.
They may not fall apart, but its not going to look pretty. And apparently, it didn’t. If every soldier is capable of doing this, then why is there a whole post about how badly they did it?
I mean the honest truth is the military hates Trump just like the rest of us
It’s not hard to march
It’s what you learn on your very first day of basic training in Canada. You’re expected to march in time everywhere you go throughout your training. You only get to stop once you reach your unit. Even clerks have to do this, it’s just basic discipline.
Whole existence of the military is questionable (not only in the US, but everywhere else) together with the governments, borders, permissions, involuntarily taxation (“legal” theft).
People (not stupid NPCs) can live and peacefully coexist without that crap.
given that they lost in Afghanistan, after 2 decades, to one of the military of one of the poorest countries in the world. proves that the US military is nothing but a scam to funnel tax payer money to the pockets of MIL shareholders.
“Defend our nation” by starting wars to keep rich people rich?
Unironically yes. You don’t get to be the center of the universe without showing up on the periphery to kick someone else’s nuts in from time to time.
no sometimes they start wars to get rich people richer
but for reals its not the soldiers starting wars its the higher ups and the people who make weapons who start wars
This is a false dichotomy, as though you can either be productive or learn to march. Obviously you could do both.
You can. And they do.
Broadly speaking, yeah. We send every member of the US Army through “Basic Training” even though 95% of them will never actually fire a gun or climb over a fence or jog ten miles in the rain for the rest of their careers.
Parade March is a thing we don’t bother to drill into units (except specifically tasked “Parade Units” that exist to do little circus acts for the high command’s amusement). But we could do it instead of the GI Joe training for the private class janitorial staff if we felt like it.
The bigger picture is that the US Military is a fountain of economic waste, social abuse, and pointless bloodshed in the name of machismo. Trump’s parade is just the cherry on a seven layer cake of squandered national wealth.
But it’s the thing liberals will fixate on, because we can’t ever actually say “The Pentagon sucks ass and makes the world an objectively worse place to live in”. It always has to be about this one Great Man Of History doing things wrong in a way his hypothetical liberal alternative would not.
Parade March is a thing we don’t bother to drill into units (except specifically tasked “Parade Units” that exist to do little circus acts for the high command’s amusement).
That is not accurate.
https://youtu.be/aeFltEjzR2Y?t=1212
Soldiers utilize D&C every day, by and large. Even when running. Its how soldiers are moved, as a group, from point A to point B.
No, you can NOT learn to march like they do in North Korea or China and have any time left in your day to do an actual job or even train to fight. That crap takes time.
Um… That is nothing like the pageantry they put on on North Korea and China.
I guess no, they cant learn to goose step, that quickly, because US troops dont goose step when marching.
This is a false dichotomy, but also, maybe if all the others have been doing it for millennia there is a reason. For instance, having large groups that walk fast while not taking too much space, but also many other things : Marching into battle, study
It’s very important for soldiers to focus on doing “important work to defend our nation” (murdering brown kids) and that they’re “productive at their jobs” (bombing hospitals)
I came here for this but found people already pointing it out.
DeFeNdInG as seen by everyone else: going to places 5k km away and murdering every living thing there.
VeTeRaNs as seen by everyone else: steroid micro-penis assholes murdering women & children
The bravest and most honorable men in our nation are doing the hard, honest work of fucking all those military wives while their chud husbands are deployed abroad.
When has the US military defended the nation? I got the impression that they’re mostly used for invading foreign countries for financial gain, cf Iraq, Kuwait, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen, Yugoslavia, Sudan, Panama, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Cuba, Guatemala, Korea.
Not saying you’re wrong in general but we didn’t invade Kuwait.
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Yeah. That’s kind of America’s whole thing. Making money. Exploiting everything. Americans are the Ferengi.
Defending America = defending capitalism = doing whatever they can to make American, capitalist companies more profitable.
I don’t hate capitalism. Don’t get me wrong, but I generally don’t like capitalists.
Capitalists are what makes capitalism capitalism. How can you hate one without the other?
This is what Americans call “defending the nation”; making war in other countries than their own, believing themselves to be the world police.
I think America has only ever been attacked… Twice… In all of history (Pearl Harbour and 9/11), and both times the defense was pretty piss poor.
America was attacked hundreds of times. The native people lost.
I’m not sure either of these events can even be counted as an attack. Pearl Harbour is roughly 3800km from the mainland. It’s basically an overseas territory. An attack there is like saying the Falkland War was an attack on the UK.
And 9/11 was a terrorist attack, not a war. While it was a big attack, it was still only carried out by a handful of non-state-actors. That’s quite a different thing than an actual military attack by a country.
Afaik, the last war on US soil was the civil war.
Hawaii was not a state for almost 2 decades after pearl harbor, so yeah.
The original white house was burned to the ground by British/Canadian troops in 1814.
Not to mention about 100 different American Indian Wars, though some of those were more slaughter than war.
The original white house was burned to the ground by British/Canadian troops in 1814.
Yeah, ok, that counts as a war on US soil, but that’s still over 200 years ago.
Not to mention about 100 different American Indian Wars, though some of those were more slaughter than war.
Hard to really count them as wars for the reason you mentioned.
Invasion is the defense.
I think it was probably in protest. However they can, I guess.
“A serious problem in planning against American doctrine is that the Americans do not read their manuals, nor do they feel any obligation to follow their doctrine.”
– Soviet observation during the Cold WarThe band played “Fortunate Son”. They all knew exactly what they were doing.
If shit ever does hit the fan full send (I very much doubt it) he doesn’t have the army.
Imperial March would have been dope
Got a video link? Sounds amazing.
Beautiful.
From what I’m hearing from coordinators and people inside its not that they can’t march. It’s that nobody wanted to. They had to be there. So they phoned it in. Malicious compliance.
Like the squeaky tanks. That was a choice made in the motor pool. They could have greased them up and tested to make sure they were smooth. But they made a different call.
I’m not saying you’re wrong, but i do find it hard to believe. I think most people that take pride in their jobs won’t half ass it.
Lol, half assing it is the default setting. Most people in the military are 18-22 year olds doing one enlistment contract and mostly hate it and want to get out as soon as they can.
Soldiers don’t take pride in being used as political pawns.
Here is another event they hate doing, yet they seem to know how to march:
100%. I’m the most uncoordinated guy I know and even I learned (French army but the cadence/the mere act of marching is similar enough), like not even that far into basic either. Maybe not everything is lost for the common American!
Lmao I didn’t think about that. Probably didn’t think it would be quiet enough to hear it squeak either.
Same, considering its age that thing is in mint condition and barely made any noise, really highlighted how much crowd noise wasn’t there
These soldiers spend their days doing important work to defend our nation.
The U.S. military has done nothing to defend their “nation” for over 100 years. They ONLY defend the corporate oligarchs’ ability to steal resources and use slave labor in third world countries.
Lmao yet Ukraine still stands thanks to American intelligence and military apparatus.
I’m not even an American but this kindergarten sentiment on Lemmy is so exhausting.
Are you suggesting that kindergarten political thought is somehow less valid? You must hate children!
And then promptly fucked right out of peace negotiations immediately after signing the resources deal. Fits perfectly well with
They ONLY defend the corporate oligarchs’ ability to steal resources and use slave labor in third world countries.
Yeah you get a lot of these ‘moral purity absolutists’ with all the nuance of an edgy teen. Some of them, or course, are edgy teens, but 100 years is a super odd choice even so. You’d think by the time they were 13 they’d have heard of at least one war that came pretty close to defense against a malign hegemonic power with ambitions of global domination…
It really reminds me how I felt when I was an edgy 16-year old but luckily for me social media wasn’t really a thing yet so it didn’t bother anyone.
Lmao yet Ukraine still stands thanks to American intelligence and military apparatus.
Which they provide exactly as long as they profit exponentially from it. Dont pretend like the US would provide foreign aid out of generosity.
I am of the mindset that a good thing done for selfish reasons is still ultimately a good thing done.
Me too, but that still doesnt contradict the comment above drmoose’s
It’s possible that you’re overestimating the US contribution
Looking at the conflicts they have been explictly or covertly involved in, it does seem like they are attempting to create a hegemony. That’s not to say that some good doesn’t get done along the way but it is more of a byproduct than the intent.
But… Ukraine falling to Russia would strengthen the US’s military (and cultural) hegemony over the western world. If this truly was the rationale behind the US’s involvement in Ukraine, everything we’ve done thus far would make absolutely zero sense. Strengthening Ukraine and spurring investment into the home-grown EU defense industry only serves to weaken our position as the lynchpin of NATO. A better justification for US involvement in Ukraine is that this is a great opportunity to starve Russia’s economy by forcing them into conflicts they cannot economically support (which was much the same strategy that lead to the collapse of the soviet union).
It’s also a great opportunity for Russia to starve the US economy by getting them involved in conflicts it cannot economically support. And the US is far more overextended due to other conflicts.
You might have a point if the US were fighting in Ukraine, but… we’re not? We’re advising the Ukraine army, sharing intelligence we’d be gathering anyways and giving AFU a bunch of export weapon systems we found by rummaging around in the pentagon’s couch cushions. This has been a spectacular opportunity for the US because it costs us almost nothing, yet what used to be considered our biggest opponent is teetering on the brink of cultural and economic collapse. Seriously, even if Kiev were to fall tomorrow NATO would be no-contest the victor. Nobody cares about the bear any more.
Must have forgotten that Ukraine became a US state, these edgy kids
They didn’t want to attract the worm.
No need, trump was already there.
Trump physically resembles Baron Harkonen from the old film.
“The Spice must flow”
On a fucking Saturday too. They wanted to be with their loved one probably.
I woulda filed a chit for gastro or something.
