A friend that does inspection work at factories, told me over beers once, that many executives are former military. West Point graduates and the sort. I took it as some sort government control of industry collusion. But who knows.
The chatter inside the military is mostly, "How stupid are those asshats that want a coup?"
However, I remember when the US early in the pandemic ran out of masks, since the masks were manufactured in China and was telling its people masks were not necessary, to preserve supplies for healthcare workers. Recently the chip shortages are causing car manufacturing to grind to a halt.
Is the US military anything without industry? Seems to me like almost under all scenarios, US military success, is heavily based on US industry's ability to supply its weapons and logistical needs. With politicians behind outsourcing so much to China, can the US even sustain any direct conflict. Seems to me, that diminishing industrial capability has to be a giant sore point for the military. Especially when there are money trails of some politicians accepting money from China.
The military would not have "stepped in" under its own accord. It may have been called in (probably in the form of the state national guards).
If so many former military officers are positioning themselves so well in industry to effect this coup, maybe they could also step in and restore a larger portion of US manufacturing and sidestep the issue of your last paragraph. It would certainly be easier than destroying a country.
“Total breeze” is probably an overstatement given the culture differences between the military and civilian worlds, but otherwise I agree.
You can hire a master artist to paint you a portrait, but if you only give them Jello and a steel 'canvas' to work with, your painting isn't going to be so great.
I have a few decades in private sector, 8yrs as a reserve officer, and I recently was publically berated by a junior engineer after simply asking him to explain his work (which was, incidentally, incorrect). He was forced to publically apologize in the face of losing his job, but this was an extreme example. An event like this would virtually never happen in the military, but I see it happen fairly routinely to other senior staff, albeit less extreme cases, with junior employees that do not have a military background.
There is a professional and orderly way to handle dissagrements with authority. The military helps teach you how to handle those situations in a more productive and stable manner.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Department_of_De...
Why?
The more mundane explanation is that the military teaches you how to tolerate command chain bullshit on a daily basis.
Large companies are more about navigating political waters than they are about getting stuff done.
Where we struggle is in what others have identified in this thread. As a military leader, you're used to having complete control of your subordinates. You can confine them and in some cases execute them for not following orders. It takes some getting used to being in a situation where your reports have personal liberties guaranteed by the Constitution and you have to follow labor laws and what not. I've seen a lot of former military officers struggle with this. My wife's ex boss (and part of the reason he is now an ex boss) reported a hospitalization incident all the way up his chain of command, seemingly unaware of the existence of HIPAA. Soldiers don't have privacy rights, but ordinary citizens do.