I would have to meet those men to make a judgement on the morals, principles and spines thing.

I think it is more of a loyalty and performance issue. I have seen some of the really good guys simply just get turned after someone really mindfucked them into thinking we are the bad guys, others bullied, some just plain bought out with more money power and privelage. Out problem right now is we can't even come close to competing in that realm and not just the enemy knows it, but our friends do to.

I was one of very few in my old shithead commie sellout unit who was actually taking a pay cut to enen go to drill let alone take a deployment so they all knew my price tag was higher to begin with compared to my rank. All that active duty power tripping "we control your life" shit did not hold much against me, but that was because I spent years cultivating backup sources of income, which one by one came under attack by those in government which demonstrated to me it was not my personal failures keeping me down but a full time staff of enemies working in the background as malefactors.

Prior to that, I was in a unit that was functionally militia in the truest sense. Sure we had some .gov funding, but if that did not happen, we came up with substantive training on our own, with our own "resources". We networked with other unit leaders and even had representatives make contact with the more underground civilian groups as we prepped to coordinate resistance to the gun grabber martial law scenarios. That is all a thing of the past now. I know because certain "key events" came and went with nothing being done about it.

Our eventual failure was in not having a sufficient economic loyalty base to guarantee positions and economic sustainability to good loyal people. A few high performing sell outs got in, had a lot of intel in the core guys and as they rose up, took control. It all was coming to an end about the time we had a command staff hand picked by a FEMA official.

The other big move that gutted our leadership in CA was when .gov came in with a combination of higher pay and lots of weapon exemptions and privelages for anyone even remotely associated with law enforcement. Prior to that, they were practically the leadership cadre for a lot of the resistance cells in the part time military. Then by the Bush era, Special Forces was just plain purchased by the high dollar corporate security contractor community.