You are expecting them to do the job you think they singed up for.

\1) I am expecting them to continue blindly following a domestic enemy, as they have been. Like I said in my very first post here, if it were going to happen, it would have by now. 2) This isn't some pedantic word game - what they sign up at the most basic level is established very plainly in their oath, and similar oaths for taking office or commissioning. I'm not projecting some ideal onto it, it just outright says it. And 3), "they" are not a hive mind. We don't need the entire military to turn and do what's right in unison - it'd be fucking amazing, but there is zero chance of that happening. "They" are 1.3 million individuals with their own world views, opinions, and threshold of bullshit they're willing to tolerate before finally taking their oath seriously. Even if what I'm saying only resonates with 0.01% of them, that's 13,000 candidates who have the training and moral/sworn/contractual obligation to do the deed. We need a single one of them to do their job.

You keep making a dentist analogy. The problem with it is when you pay the dentist they work for you. When you pay your taxes the military works for the government.

I mean, generally you don't pay the dentist, you pay a clerk at the front desk, who forwards your payment to their organization, who then gives the order to the dentist to work on your teeth. That dentist is under obligation by whatever their employment agreement establishes. Not unlike how my my taxes are filed and processed by some finance employee working for the govt, gets added to their own pool of cash, and entitles me as a tax paying citizen to the services funded by those taxes. To include military protection from all enemies foreign and domestic.

As it stands, I'm paying that clerk at the front desk, but have been abandoned in the lobby with a festering tooth ache. Where the fuck is my dentist?

You are at odds with your government. Not a party.

Yeah no shit. Actors like Trump and Musk are symptoms, not the root. Our issues won't magically disappear when they do. But the symptoms of this disease are severe enough that they urgently need to be addressed. An infection can be harder to treat than the fever it causes, but the fever can still kill you - when that's getting dangerously high, you need to prioritize the fever. Get that under control and then go back to fighting the infection. Or better, both simultaneously, but either way, we've got a hell of a fever right now.

So assuming you are really calling for a physical overthrow of the current political order

Depends on what you mean by that. I definitely do NOT want the military to start a coup and seize power for themselves. Their action needs to be like a surgical excision - get in, chop that fucker out, then hands off. Even if that means power transitioning to some other villainous shit like Vance or Johnson, that person will then act with the understanding that a severe enough abuse of their power will be a mortal liability. ...and really, that needs to happen to some extent at all levels of government. Not by military intervention or anything, like look at Salem's approach recently to their city representatives bending the knee to data centers: a crowd showed up with an actual fucking guillotine... that turned out to be a nonfunctional prop, but still, when those in power feared for their lives, they stopped the oppressive shit and got the fuck out of there. I think the message was lost when it came out that it was a prop though... there needs to be tangible consequences. I digress.

my reason for not actively engaging in violence | So instead I do what many people suggested in response to your comment

Right... same... so what exactly are you criticizing? Am I somehow in the wrong for doing that and calling out servicemembers' hypocrisy? You don't see those as mutually exclusive, do you?

I don’t assume that some other group of people are going to magically come to my rescue because I pay taxes to a government that has been operating this way for its entire existence.

Congrats! You're not an idiot. If you're implying that my own assumption is said magical rescue, then I invite you to reread my first post here. Or any post here, being that I never expressed such an assumption. If that's what you're worked up about, then I think we're running circles around a miscommunication.

Edit - I think I see where the disconnect is. I'm going to highlight the distinction between contractual expectations and expectations established by pattern recognition.

With regards to the oath, the expectations are clear and established. We as a citizenry have a reasonable expectation that the oath will be fulfilled.

We can also see plainly that it is not being fulfilled, and as of now, have no reason to expect that will change.

Those are not mutually exclusive. Even after two hours in that dentist's waiting room, I may have abandoned any expectation of actually receiving care; but there's still a contractual expectation established by the transaction.

This is one of those weird instances of two different contexts of a word popping up in the same setting, so I can definitely understand why there's a disconnect here.