I cannot disclose who said the following, but the arguments about the US and British armies today sound very interesting.

"The peasants [of the Russian army prior 1917] in uniform weren't mercenaries, but conscripts. The US and British soldiers [today] aren't conscripts, not the historical equivalent of the Russian imperial army, but the historical equivalent of Hessians or the Swiss guard. There's a huge difference between those two. Only a conscript is a worker in uniform - all the others are bourgeois cops with bigger or smaller guns.

Edit: I can't find any historical example where a revolution was won with the aid of professional soldiers - it was always won by defeating them, be they Hessians, the Swiss Guard or Cossacks...and some US soldiers are OK and have resisted imperialism - still doesn't change the US military's role as a whole...

I never said a soldier "can't act in favour of the masses because he wasn't conscripted" - I said they most often don't...I do think that an army which consists mostly of ppl who had to join it to escape a precarious situation with no affordable healthcare or education can have class consciousness - it DOES have class consciousness. Just not working class."

One should wonder what happened in the Egyptian, Tunisian and Syrian armies during and after the uprisings.