>>5576>Which modern military personnel (from support staff to technicians to grunts) would have skills most useful to the socialist movement?All are useful, frontline personnel are of course the most valuable, but even the support staff are needed because "the tip of the spear don't fight for free."
>Are there any reasons military personnel would be inherently incompatible with the socialist movement? Are comrades right or wrong to ostracize them based on their job?Absolutely not, any comrade may hate them the imperial enforcer for what they've done and how they have contributed to upholding the empire, but on a pragmatic level, anyone who knows how to fight and is willing to do so MUST be allowed to, and must be allowed to teach and train. The Bolsheviks would never have won if substantial portions of the White officers had not gone over to them.
>How did movements like Nazism/Fascism recruit ex-military members so effectively? How about counter-examples like the 43 Group? Is this the same dynamic we see with US 'Patriot' militia movements today? What place do ex-military members currently hold among the socialist movement?The military as a institution and an occupation is inherently conservative and will almost always trend conservative for the simple reason of being so strictly hierarchial.
>How should military be considered differently to police and other state law enforcement agencies?To quote a certain Battlestar Admiral
<There's a reason you separate military and the police. One fights the enemies of the state, the other serves and protects the people. When the military becomes both, then the enemies of the state tend to become the people.>Do any particular state armies have a different dynamic? For example, do the PLA (China), KPA (North Korea) or PAVN (Vietnam) have a different relationship to Western armies?Military doctrine (how a military do the thing?) can be looked at as a sum of the country's historical experiences (with war especially), national culture, economic need and geopolitical position.
Take Germany for example, up until the second half of the 20th Century, Germany had always been a resource-poor, not very industrial, not THAT developed or educated place that could easily be starved into submission or attrition-ed to death in the wrong circumstances. Hence Germany (by extension, Prussia) has always sought to fight quick wars to collapse their opponents before the inevitable crunch of resources kills their campaigns, when the war doesn't become quick, that's when Germany gets into trouble.
Another example is NATO post-war and to modern day, very highly focused on air campaigns, heavy firepower and fire support for the ground forces, why? Because of their (very one-sided) experience having air supremacy over Germany from '44 onwards. Despite the fact that post-war analysis concluded that the bombing campaign was largely a failure that DID NOT achieve its stated aim of crushing Germany from the air. Air power has come to be the most generously endowed service in NATO militaries, largely thanks to propaganda from the air force, no matter how many times Uncle Sam and friends are shown that you can't win wars and conduct foreign policy from the air, its a hideously tempting tool to use because the Air Force is always promising the sky (hyper-accurate precision bombing) even when it fails to deliver.