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US military is already admittedly understaffed. It's a particular problem in the Navy and Air Force. They haven't been meeting recruiting targets well at all and the article I read said they missed last year's target by 45,000. If these people are all just gun-toting boots then yeah it doesn't impact how things work. But if some amount of them are specialists it could cause severe strain and negligence in various parts like their ships not being repaired properly, their aircraft having problems, just all kinds of things that impact the machinery of the war machine itself that keep the more technical aspects above a bunch of people who handle M-16s and hang out in Japan or Germany.
I do not think the conditions yet exist for these people to be truly revolutionary. Remember they signed up for this. They weren't conscripts and comparing this to China's situation in their civil war is like comparing apples to horse-shoes. Those people in China's nationalist army were revolutionaries of a kind who wanted independence and self-determination for their country, many of them were misled into a certain kind of nationalism but upon discovering communism they were amenable to it given it fit their passions and goals and met them much more effectively because communism was a message of hope to these people given their history, that of their parents, etc. It allowed them to save and liberate their people, promised to rejuvenate their nation and has succeeded. What passions and goals does resisting the US government meet for people who joined up because they're willing to enable killing brown people for healthcare or college and other highly individually centered selfish goals? What's the similarity there?
They'll be upset yes and that's good. I'm glad there is tension there as should we all be glad that the empire isn't able to effectively do rainbow imperialism with people like Trump taking off the mask so much. But I don't think so upset they'll be revolutionary. Americans are incredibly atomized and 15,000 is frankly a drop in the bucket. Could some of them eventually become part of something? Sure but they don't represent any kind of collective force that's going to pop up in any meaningful numbers to defend the marginalized when Hitler-lite (D) takes office and tunes the repression machine higher. I mean right now we're in the middle of a genocide and the response is to crush college protests, to criminalize dissent against the zionist entity and classify it as racism and the response to that is liberals smugly blaming the left and saying we deserve it and collective feelings of despair and powerlessness.
Things are going to get much worse in the US before that revolutionary potential arrives and I don't think it will be these people frankly. I think they'll be in their 40s at least before that moment arrives and it will be some new group of people in or recently in the military when things hit the fan that will turn their guns around. I think between that moment arriving and now we will have a war with China and the way things are going maybe with Russia more directly too.
You have a very important point, war with China is much more proximal than revolutionary war. That changes the calculus. I think I stand by my belief that a fifth column is a required part of a successful leftist revolution against a militarized imperialist state; however it might be of greater utility for progressive forces outside the US for a large number of military specialists to be laid off without replacement. We'll see.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifth_column