Somehow I doubt that someone in a professional armed forces can’t fucking march. It’s just left, left, left right left
Anyone can march. Marching in perfect sync with 50 other soldiers in formation is another matter and takes quite a bit of practice and coordination like any other group dance routine.
You learn a lot about the speed of sound
I’ve been out of the military for almost 20 years and I can still march to a cadence.
Active duty? They could march if they felt like it. They did not.
Just gotta keep the bends outta those elbows, troop!
Military is absurd. Ceremonial is the least destructive thing they can do I think.
Seems like the kind of thing someone who’s been the president before would know. It’s like draft-dodging and believing everything you see on tv are qualities of a shitty president.
The entire thing screamed humiliation display more than anything else. And the anything else was like a half assed shitty commercial for military equipment. They had actual soldiers playing dress up for no fucking reason while wasting a fuck ton of money the VA could’ve used. Just despicable all around.
The way the marines, in particular, marched… no. That was sloppy and looked intentional.
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I mean, if they’d been ordered eyes right and present arms, they would’ve.
But they probably didn’t plan for him to salute so no one knew what to do and just walked on by.
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A real President, sponsorships notwithstanding.
Lol he did approach his problem with science and eventually was happy with the solution, but in the interim he also sentenced the person that proposed the scientific solution to death against gladiator and only changed his tune when someone illegally filmed the unexpected plant growth so 5/10
What we are seeing right now is how a society sleepwalks to that point.
Trump’s parade was sponsored by Coinbase.
That was my point. A president standing in front of logos with a world on the brink of collapse around him. The only difference in Idiocracy is that when everything got real shitty Dwayne was still willing to try “science” whereas I’m sure the fascists would rather drink brawndo until they died to “own the libs” than admit change was required so they could eat.
Well, it’s got electrolytes!
I’m the son of two Navy parents. One was a Command Master Chief. I was appalled, I haven’t spoken to him yet.
Saw a short video of an ex drill instructor saying your first week in boot besides getting oriented and shit was learning to march. You dont ever forget it. That if it starts getting sloppy, the seargent or whatever starts saying left, right, left to coordinate again. The guy said it was very intentional .
Yeah, I did basic training decades ago, and could probably do it right with maybe an hour-long refresher course. Even without that I’d probably be be fine just marching, it’s more the “eyes left”, “present arms”, handling turns, etc. that would need work.
That said, you tend to follow someone’s lead. From what I remember, they declare it like “by the left, quick march” and that means you’re marching at a standard “quick” pace and you’re lining up with whoever’s to your left, and the left column follows the person in front of them, so basically led by whoever’s in the front-left position of the formation. That means if people to your left, or people on the left-most column are out of step, it will have a cascading effect through the ranks.
But yeah, it’s pretty standard to call out the march, and they’d definitely do that if they cared.
What’s also funny is that at one point as the soldiers were marching past, they were playing “Fortunate Son” on the PA system. Now, that’s massively ironic given that the song is basically about Vietnam-era draft dodgers who used their family’s wealth to get out of Vietnam service like Trump.
But, making it worse is that the song has a slightly faster pace than your typical rock song at 135ish BPM. The US military generally marches at 120 BPM. It’s actually really hard to hear a song at 135 BPM and march at 120 BPM. That’s why generally marching music is at 120 BPM so you march to the beat. The result is that some soldiers kept marching at 120 BPM, others adjusted to match the song, and it all generally looked like shit.
I learned to march in basic in '96, I promise you it stays w you.
I am surprised at how many people do not get it. In military you cannot not comply with the orders, especially whan there is clearly nothing criminal with it. The guys doing sloppy marching is pretty much the only agency they have and the only way to protest and boycot that ridiculous parade.
In military you cannot not comply with the orders
What i find surprising is that even after making this claim you still believe these people are down to protest and boycot their superiors.
Malicious compliance
This. NATO has us troops stationed all over europe. They marched just fine during european parades.
“They did in protest” is the funniest cope I have heard, ever I think.
It’s the entire discourse online, mostly stemming from veterans on social media. Literally saying the same as comment above you.
Yeah seppo veterans are rarely blindly patriotic and regularly offer genuine feedback for their country and its “servicepeople” (by this they only mean their boots).
I am hardly blindly patriotic, and I critique the US when is should be (Which is often).
Yes, this was a case of malicious compliance.
If you want to see evidence, here’s some normal soldiers (Not ceremonial guards) marching:
i don’t give a shit either way but it makes far more sense that it was in protest than that all of those soldiers are too incompetent to march properly. insisting it must be incompetence because you want to think bad things about the us military is the real cope.
Tbf, if enough of them are bad at marching it doesn’t really matter how good the others are
Or its simply that drill and parade are not really practiced outside of bootcamp because marching in lockstep requires quite some practice.
D&C is used daily by the US Army, to move personnel from point A to point B. During running. During inspections. During pass and reviews.
15 years out, and “9 to the front and 6 to the rear” is still drilled into my head. Even my “about face” is still solid, while needing some practice.
This depends a lot on your branch and unit. Many many people never do a pass and review or any type of inspection other than counting inventory. I disagree that marching skills are used during running, that’s freeform.
Anyone who has served longer than 3 years has done a pass and review.
Anyone who has been to a perm duty station has had a class A inspection.
Anyone who has ever served has marched daily, in formation, from point A to point B.
Double time is a marching speed, aka running, and you have to run in step.
Ok. I guess your perspective is correct and there is just one military that is all the same.
There was a brass band that was resposabal for playing to state visits. if a foreign visitor came who was not popular they would play the national anthem out of tune and out of time. The visitor would have to stand or salute while seeing there song be murdered infront of them.
defend our nation
From what?
Story time, boys and girls.
When I joined the Army and went to basic training, one of the first things they did was show us how to stand at attention, at-ease, right face, left face, and about face. Then they turned the training unit and marched off.
And then stopped and screamed at us for marching like Nazis.
Turns out, you don’t see US soldiers marching like that because it’s stupid as hell, and you can’t do it for twenty miles with a rucksack. The US military for all their many, many faults, is real good at war, and marching like a toy soldier doesn’t help you do war.
So we learned how to march like Americans, which is much more casual. The only thing you’ve gotta do is make sure you match the stride length of the soldier in front of you, but even that is more of a suggestion than a hard rule. We got good, though, because we were assholes.
We would ease out behind someone who was walking somewhere and roughly the same height, and step slightly faster than the person in front of us, until we were close behind them. Then you perform a little skip at the last second to get back to the same stride and close the last few inches. The end result is that your chest is hovering about an inch from their back, your nose is an inch from the back of their head, and your hands are swinging right behind theirs. While walking at full speed.
You haven’t had a jump scare until you’ve march two blocks, turned your head, and glimpsed someone’s face an inch from your own.
The US military for all their many, many faults, is real good at war, and marching like a toy soldier doesn’t help you do war.
The point of a uniformed service is to show your enemy that you have control and command over people who will follow your orders. Demonstrating this lowers your enemy’s will to fight back. It gets soldiers on the other side to think “If these guys are so organized that they march in unison, we don’t stand a chance.”
These military parades are no longer valuable except to authoritarians. Normal functioning democracies don’t use national military forces to project power. They do so using diplomacy and other political methods.
But Trump, Kim Jung Un, Modi, and Putin all use it to flex their authority to their base.
It will not surprise me if in the next year, a new division in the army is created for parade duty for the president’s birthday where next year their marching will be perfect.
All so that Trump can get his dick hard.
The USA absolutely uses military prowess to project power. It just happens to be that marching soldiers no longer does that anymore; that’s what Air Force flybys at college football games are for.
The point of a uniformed service is to show your enemy that you have control and command over people who will follow your orders. Demonstrating this lowers your enemy’s will to fight back. It gets soldiers on the other side to think “If these guys are so organized that they march in unison, we don’t stand a chance.”
Fair enough.
It will not surprise me if in the next year, a new division in the army is created for parade duty for the president’s birthday where next year their marching will be perfect.
That would just be the chefs kiss of silly bullshit on top of everything else.
It Follows…
…him through the train turnstile
Decades of Hollywood Military propaganda ruined in one single day.
So, the tweet isn’t entirely true; my experience in the army was that we very much did irregularly do marches together, even after basic training. Every few months or so the battallion or brigade leadership would get an idea about a ‘fun run’ or whatever, and the start of those is always a march together. It inevitably switched to running together, but there was definitely a quick refresher on walking in step together on a regular basis.
What the tweeter missed is that there’s tricks that every leadership command knows to do if they want a formation to look good.
If you wanted to put a military parade on that actually looked good you’d do a couple things prior to running it. You’d tell your various units to have a competition for who does it best, and you’d put up a basic-ass award for the winners and runners up. This ensures that any ladder climbers go out and find all the people who are actually good at this to put together a small super squad of people who actually know what they’re doing. You then have them compete, and you pick the units that did the best to lead your parade.
We actually did this in basic training; my drill sgts had a little demonstration where they put the people good at keeping time together and the people bad it together. It was damn impressive how much of a difference just doing that made. One or two bad marchers can ruin a whole formation with their lack of timing.
None of this was done; at best they practiced for pt for a couple weeks before the event, but even that is iffy. They likely didn’t bother to filter the parade members who can’t march out, and that’d be good enough to turn this into a herd instead of a formation.
This doesn’t rule out malicious compliance at all though; again, one or two bad marchees doing their best (or worst) job can completely throw off the timing of everybody behind and next to them. Same way as counting wrongly out loud can throw off someone trying to count up to 50.
put together a small super squad of people who actually know what they’re doing
From what I vaguely remember, you also want all the best marchers on the left most of the time, since you line up with the person on your left most of the time, and the very best at the front left. This was decades ago for me, but I know that there were tricks like that to make it look good.
Didn’t North Korean military slap US military with their dick on their faces for years? Isn’t that the reason a North Korea exists at all?
Lol they’re pro military just to make Trump’s joint celebration with the military look bad
Trump just needs to up his dictator game and threaten everyone involved, especially the leadership, with jail time or dishonorable discharge if they don’t shape up and goose-step properly.
No one will ever match North Korea’s marching game.
I personally enjoy their “Jumbotron” where everyone holds a pixel and they change in unison.
My volunteer fire department was able to march in sync in parades despite having enjoyed a few adult beverages beforehand. What the Army did had to be deliberate.
