Veteran here, served during the contentious 2000 election. The US military very strongly prides itself on being an apolitical entity.
There's an important distinction between the electorate having differing opinions about the role and size of the military and the scope of its missions, and the military itself being a political entity.
It seems to me that any country at a point where the combination of its flag together with an oath of office, oath of enlistment or commissioning oath is seen as political rather than patriotic cannot be in a good place. It is not too far from that to one where calling for fair and unbiased administration of elections is considered political rather than patriotic.
Thank you for assisting in the election, and thank you for your excellent software projects, but in this case I think that you were incorrect.
Unfortunately patriotism itself is highly political; the ultimate question of "my country, right or wrong" results in some people noticing that it is in fact wrong in some cases.
Do they not teach Clausewitz in the US military? "War is the continuation of politics by other means". Every shot fired in anger is a political act. Not the politics of the person firing it, but those directing the fire.
It is possible to try to be non-partisan, but an apolitical military is an oxymoron.
The US military is the guarantor of a host of political lines across the world; supporting South Korea or Taiwan or Israel or Germany or Bosnia is a political act.
You can't sign up and then disclaim responsibility for the political results of following orders "apolitically". The last people who tried that got shot at Nuremberg.
But that policy flows from the civilian political realm. Military leadership doesn't decide which missions to take on. Congress and the President do. The military won't decide the fate of this election, no matter how contentious it gets. The civilian bodies will.
Speech gets swamped by mass propaganda. I don't see how it's possible to look at say the run up to the Iraq war and think that antiwar had a meaningful voice. When it comes down to it, the warmongers are just better funded, better connected, and take advantage of basic human nature.
Since it seems impossible to prevent the military from being used for elective wars, or even to simply downsize it, discouraging general support for the military makes sense (when voice fails, try exit). I'm not asking you to agree with my arguments above, but you don't get to make a unilateral call that this isn't a political viewpoint.
