People tweeting stuff. We allow tweets from anyone.
RULES:
These soldiers spend their days doing important work to defend our nation.
The U.S. military has done nothing to defend their "nation" for over 100 years. They ONLY defend the corporate oligarchs' ability to steal resources and use slave labor in third world countries.
Yeah! They need to do important stuff!
Like point guns at me while I'm going to the grocery store!
I think it was probably in protest. However they can, I guess.
They can dEfEnD oUr NaTiOn against brown peasants, but can't march in step because they apparent forget how to do so after basic training? Shit, it's been over 20 years since my military service and I'm 100% sure I could still manage to march in step
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.
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.
On a fucking Saturday too. They wanted to be with their loved one probably.
