The Bush years are back. With the war drums now beating once more, America is stumbling, drunk on jingoistic fervour, to the bad old days of the early 2000s — from the platitudes about regime change, to the shock-and-awe campaigns, to the neocon hacks wheeled out from wherever they were cowering.
Unfortunately, many of the critics of this new war are also stuck in the past. We therefore hear plenty of arguments that Iran will be the new Iraq, the new Syria, the new Libya. Regime change won’t work; occupation will be too expensive; Iran might collapse into a civil war and cause a new refugee crisis in Europe. All these arguments are now being used by critics of a war with the Islamic Republic.
But, in 2025, these arguments seem more than a little presumptuous. Times change, and neither the US economy nor the vaunted US military is equal to what it was when the tanks rolled across the border into Iraq back in 2003. America now faces a far bigger problem than figuring out just how it’ll screw up the aftermath of a blitzkrieg campaign: unrest or even mutinies inside the US military. As the single most dangerous thing that can happen to an unpopular political system, mutinies helped topple the French monarchy and the Berlin Wall. Now, it may be America’s turn — with terrifying consequences for the Republic’s future.
To understand why mutiny is now a very serious threat, we must first examine the broader geopolitical context. In the Nineties and early 2000s, when America began those unfortunate wars of choice now glibly compared to Iran, the world looked very, very different. Prince Sultan Air Base — the big installation in Saudi Arabia now filling up with military hardware — is akin to the quip about the lightsaber in Star Wars: it is, in fact, a relic of a more civilised age. Prince Sultan, like pretty much every other US airbase, was built in a time when America’s enemies simply lacked the resources to shoot at it. In those days, bombing someone from the air required advanced jet planes; planes that are still so expensive that only a few countries can hope to own them in significant numbers.
Critics of US involvement in Iraq or Afghanistan would often wring their hands about the unfairness and inhumanity of the American way of fighting, given that the US effortlessly blew up its enemies from thousands of feet up in the sky without the victims ever being able to do much about it. These days, however, the ongoing mass adoption of ballistic missiles makes that sort of lament rather moot. The missiles raining down on Tel Aviv show, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that you no longer need jet fighters to do a “bombing campaign”. The citizens of Tel Aviv, for their part, are just as helpless in the face of an incoming missile as the goat herders of Afghanistan once were.
Yes, the Israelis have bunkers. But the IDF’s extremely expensive missile defence offers only threadbare protection: interceptors are rare, slow to manufacture, and are now at risk of running out. More advanced hypersonic missiles usually can’t be intercepted at all. Planes, for their part, have become older, harder to maintain, and tactically less flexible. In fact, given advances in anti-air technology, the primary weapon of most combat planes today is actually just a long-range ballistic missile, small enough to fit on an aircraft and fired from a safe distance. During the Vietnam War, America lost over 10,000 airplanes and helicopters. Today, planes and pilots have become so expensive that replacing them in large numbers isn’t actually feasible. Thirty years ago, Israel could blow up Iranians without the Iranians ever shooting back. Now, though, both sides can throw punches.
For the American military itself, this means that it now has to prepare itself for something it isn’t very good at: being bombed from the sky. This is a huge problem, and not just because American airfields lack hangars capable of withstanding missile strikes, or a doctrine adapted to enemy missile fire. Much more critically, the US Army is now so understrength that it relies on National Guard troops to man its various outposts and bases in the Middle East. These people are part-time soldiers who live and work as civilians until they are called up. This also means the military is extremely hard-pressed to deal with actual battlefield casualties; there simply aren’t that many troops available to serve as replacements.
Few people sign up for the Oklahoma National Guard because of a desire to travel halfway around the world in order to fight against Iran, but unless America goes back to the draft, this is what will happen. But the status of the National Guard might be about to change; flying mostly under the radar, a popular movement calling itself Defend the Guard is working on introducing legislation across dozens of states that would prohibit the deployment of National Guard troops to foreign conflicts without a formal declaration of war by congress. There are problems with this kind of legislation — including questions about how it would impact funding for Guard units — but the direction of travel is clear. Americans in and around the National Guard are increasingly tired of it being used as just another reserve pool of soldiers to commit to various foreign lands. The problem, however, is that America’s military posture would collapse overnight if it could no longer rely on the Guard.
Then there’s America’s political system — which, as everyone will tell you, is utterly incapable of dealing with significant military casualties. The American public simply doesn’t like seeing flag-draped coffins flown back home, especially when these coffins come from wars that nobody really wanted to begin with. That is why the discussion of war is so fixated on the concept of “boots on the ground”. This fixation is natural, but it is also completely out of step with the times. The way it used to work was that American soldiers had to be physically deployed to a hostile country for the enemy to shoot and kill them. But this is no longer the case, just as Iranians no longer need to be anywhere near Tel Aviv to destroy its homes and trap Israelis beneath the rubble. Of course, even without these proverbial boots, a war with Iran is already incredibly unpopular. The conflict is essentially being forced down the throats of Americans, shattering the political coalition that got Donald Trump elected in the first place.
Yet if all this is fairly well known, the morale of the soldiers themselves is almost never mentioned. For historical reasons, everyone in America, from Left to Right, simply assumes that their soldiers will stoically follow orders, no matter what happens, no matter what those orders are. Throughout history, however, an uncountable number of governments have collapsed because everyone assumed that the soldiers would always follow orders — until they didn’t. When the Cossacks sent in to beat up demonstrators refused to follow orders, the Russian monarchy collapsed. The Berlin Wall protests became a regime-ending crisis because the military and police were ordered to crack skulls and stop the protestors from tearing down the wall, but then refused to do so.
“An uncountable number of governments have collapsed because everyone assumed that their soldiers would always follow orders — until they didn’t.”
How likely is it, then, that Trump will give an order to his troops (who are required by law to obey him) only for them to refuse him, revealing another political system at the end of its rope? It’s probably far more likely than most people realise. For one thing, wars often don’t go as planned, and in this particular case the Iranians can actually shoot back in a very significant way. Nor can the US replace casualties without heavily relying on mobilising part-time soldiers and reservists. How eager will these people be to don their old uniform and fill the shoes of someone who was just killed by an Iranian missile?
This was the problem faced by King Ferdinand VII in 1820, when the Spanish king tried to send another batch of soldiers to the various South American colonies vying for independence. Ferdinand VII was already incredibly unpopular, and the trip to the jungles of New Spain was almost guaranteed to be a one-way affair. Once a large group of soldiers gathered at the port city of Cadiz learned that they were the next in line to be mobilised, they revolted. This soldier’s revolt quickly spread, sparking a massive political crisis that smashed the absolutist system. Trying to send teachers and mechanics from Wisconsin and Oregon to some desert killing field could yet spark something similar.
Trump himself has exacerbated these tensions. The various feuds he has pursued against Democratic governors and states — most notably in California — has already led the White House to mobilise the National Guard and the US Marine Corps to fight protestors rioting over his immigration policy. Judging by some of the reporting, morale is not exactly great among the Guardsmen and Marines being used in this way. Partly, the dissatisfaction comes from the shambolic way in which these troops were deployed to LA (the Department of Defense failed to complete the necessary paperwork in advance to actually pay the troops), but the bigger problem is that soldiers really aren’t supposed to involve themselves in the political process. It is probably a matter of when, not if, Trump’s war policy sparks protests and riots too. Unlike Trump’s harsh immigration measures, however, here he won’t have much in the way of support among any section of the public. And if the police are unwilling or unable to contain the protests, the National Guard may once again need to be mobilised. Once again, they are fully capable of either refusing the call to muster or simply joining the demonstrators. Anti-war protests are not the only vector for riots either: the US economy is in such a parlous state that ordinary Americans are now borrowing money to pay for groceries. Even without a looming war, the US is already unstable, and the political system is breaking down. It will not take much to push it, and its soldiers, over the edge.
You could make the argument that, in the end, America will be safe: its soldiers are just too disciplined. This might have been true at some point, but not today. Moreover, the current all-volunteer military was specifically created because the Vietnam War produced so many cases of ill-discipline, mutiny and even “fragging” — a slang term for soldiers murdering their own officers, where fragmentation grenades chucked into tents became a favourite method of execution.
Americans in uniform have historically been very capable of unruly or rebellious behaviour. Apart from the systematic murder of officers during Vietnam, the so-called 1932 “Bonus Army” — made up of dejected veterans from the First World War who gathered by the tens of thousand to demand early cash redemption for their service certificates — contributed massively to the electoral loss of Herbert Hoover that same year. Of course, both Vietnam and the First World War were fought using conscription, and the US today has a professional military that is supposed to be resistant to rebellious behaviour and breaches in discipline. But professional soldiers are not robots; they can and have historically engaged in mutiny and disobedience. Guardsmen, being part-time soldiers, also live in a world closer to that of reservists in non-US countries that do maintain conscription.
In recent years, due to various failures of the bureaucracy as well as the ballooning budget deficit with which the US is grappling, the payment of various bonuses to both Guardsmen and regular military have become increasingly erratic. Sometimes, enlistment bonuses aren’t paid out, other times it might be cost-of-living adjustment cheques fail to arrive on time. These problems with payment also contribute to flagging morale. In a real national crisis, the lack of regular or mandated pay could be another aggravating factor pushing Americans in uniform towards disobedience or mutiny.
More to the point, unrest is brewing inside the US military right now. In fact, the latest news is that the Joint Chiefs of Staff had to remove a colonel from his position because he was posting, semi-anonymously, extremely venomous remarks against Israel. These remarks included calling Israel a “death-cult” and saying that American soldiers were being made to serve “Netanyahu and his Judeo-supremacist cronies”.
The fact that attitudes like these now exist at the highest levels of the US military, before the fighting has even started, means that they will also be extremely common at lower levels. The US military will no doubt try to ferret out dissenters, but it only takes a few colonels, majors, or captains to listen to the discontent of their men, and then give it an outlet, for a chain reaction to spread. Once one unit refuses to deploy or follow orders, others are far more liable to do the same, and suddenly the state has lost control of the one thing it needs to survive: the monopoly on violence.
Moreover, one only has to look at Trump’s own military parade, held literally when Iran’s missiles were hitting Tel Aviv, to realise that the US military is now deeply unwell. Trump no doubt expected what most people his age expect: that a showing of America’s military would be an impressive, well-coordinated spectacle. But the soldiers that cloudy day in Washington didn’t even know how to march properly, and many of them clearly looked like they didn’t want to be there in the first place. The entire parade was sparsely attended; one got the distinct impression that nobody, either inside or outside the Army, cared about it enough to put in much effort. That’s unsurprising. Some of the soldiers in the parade were drawn from Fort Bragg, a base with a truly sinister reputation for suicides, drug use, and even gangland-style murders. Four years ago, one soldier stationed at Bragg went missing. His headless body washed up later, on Memorial Day, and he wasn’t even the only soldier to be murdered at the base that year.
It seems clear, then, that quite aside from the National Guard, the uniformed military these days is not very reliable either. Enlisted men are restless, suffering from low morale, low pay and an ongoing suicide epidemic. This crisis is in reality far worse than the already grim statistics would indicate; every soldier that takes his own life has a very significant impact on the rest of his unit. The officers, for their part, are jaded, used to dysfunction, and acutely aware of the many military weaknesses that civilian elites either don’t know or care about.
Up to and including Vietnam, most of America’s wars relied on the draft. This meant that politicians always needed to make sure battles didn’t fall too far out of public favour. After Vietnam, where the military nearly fell apart as a result of failing discipline and general political polarisation, the all-volunteer model was adopted instead. This has made various “forever wars” in obscure parts of the world politically possible for America’s leaders: civilians have simply detached themselves from the bloodshed. But the result of this is that it has allowed ordinary Americans to increasingly treat their own soldiers as faceless automata, as distant, obedient servants who will always jump to it, who will always give you the victory you asked for, regardless of how miserable the conditions become. But soldiers, too, have a breaking point.
To bewail the stupidity of regime change in Iran is one thing. But to call up teachers and bus drivers from Wisconsin and Oregon, and expect them to cheerfully march into what already looks like the most unpopular war in all of American history, is quite another. The US’s shrinking circle of regime change enthusiasts might be surprised at how close they are to getting what they ordered. Unfortunately for them, it’s in Washington DC, not Tehran, where the powers that be ought to fear America’s soldiers.
