I have no idea what it's like to be a uniformed member of today's military, or an ops or analysis employee of our intelligence organizations or a foreign service officer today. I have some contacts who might give me their impressions, but I can only guess there's a horrible feeling that the US has just entered an unprecedented danger zone.
With the President (POTUS) & VP aligned with the klepto-fascist leader of Russia and with the emerging dictator of Hungary (a pro-Putin leader of a NATO member) and with Moldova's rebellious pro-Putin Transnistria separatist leaders, NATO is in an existential crisis. The VP has already declared the US's nominally official support for Putin-backed AFD, insulting the leadership of Germany's conventional moderate left and moderate right political parties. Our Secretary of State has just disavowed his support for Ukraine's leader. And our National Intelligence leader has been suspected for years, with good cause, of being a pro-Putin Russian asset, and the confirmed chief of the FBi is a devout election denier, defender of Jan. 6 vandals and violent insurrectionists, and author of a public list of enemies to arrest that is ridiculously extensive and 100% sworn to "support and defend the Constitution of the US", and the confirmed SecDef having minimal organizational management experience and bearing a huge body tattoo of an anti-US extremist organization and having grownup and been educated in a white Christian nationalist sect. Which of those parts of America's National Security infracture is not screwed??
Add to those points the POTUS-authorized unconstitutional activities of man-child Elon Musk with a small army of non-cleared, non-appropriated executive branch (?) employees to hack into nearly every federal entity's databases and terminate the employment countless numbers of career civil servants, and to install who-knows what kinds of worms or key-logger bugs into the systems used by every one of these organizations.
If this isn't some Orwellian caricature of Stalin's government, it's then much worse than that.
Every Republican constitutional lawyer and Member of Congress who voted for Trump is now either too afraid to stand up to stop our emerging Trump dictatorship or trying to rationalize some way to legitimize it.
Already, an example has been made by Musk's illegal disestablishment of USAID. For American service members on duty in S. Korea or supporting USMC jet fighters in Kadena, Japan. They must wonder what this month's executive branch actions will lead to in their lives. And every intelligence operator must wonder if they need to turn against the allies they've been collaborating with or if their identities have already been compromised to Putin's security forces. Wtf!
And our months-ago international security allies must now wonder if any American national security agent can be trusted. Can US intelligence informations or tech be trusted? With America ostensibly allied with Putin and Russia, and with N. Korea, and right-wing Putin aligned political parties across Europe, how can our NATO allies work with their American "colleagues"?
