• null_dot@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    8 hours ago

    This is a false dichotomy, as though you can either be productive or learn to march. Obviously you could do both.

    • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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      5 hours ago

      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.

      • ubergeek@lemmy.today
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        4 hours ago

        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.

    • Olhonestjim@lemmy.world
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      5 hours ago

      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.

    • Sirius006@sh.itjust.works
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      5 hours ago

      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