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Comment by stale2002 | Hacker News Reader

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stale2002·

Well, those Texas/southern hillbillies are the ones running the US military.

Military workforce by state:

http://www.governing.com/gov-data/military-civilian-active-d...

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Yah, imagine everyone at Fort Hood being ordered to invade Dallas and half the tanks driving off in the night to go protect the neighborhood they grew up in.

Which is why if such orders were being issued it'd be more like blue state stationed divisions sent to quell uprisings in red state areas and vice versa. This is a huge part of why I think a growing political divide is such a problem - we can be easily persuaded to attack each other when the problem isn't each other but the ones issuing the orders.

Texas is split inside itself:

http://www.nytimes.com/elections/results/texas

(The map is even still a lie; there are large counties that voted Republican, but the majority of the red by area is tiny little county populations.)

I also don't think that people are particularly stationed by their home state.

And everyone at Ft. Hood will just sit there while Dallas is leveled.

First you'd need a political purge of the Army. Anything less would leave the door open to a split in the military. I think history supports this well.

A division stationed in a blue state isn't going to be made up of locals. It's going to have the same mix as the US military in general (read: Mostly southern states).

The National Guard will be more representative of their home base, but that is going to be smaller forces that complement active duty, not replace it.

I was meaning more of metaphorical constructs of blue and red rather than just the political jargon and probably should have used quotes. I'm an army brat and former DoD IC contractor and know very well how distributed personnel get.

Or Blackwater (Xe) mercenaries.

There just aren't enough.

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