From combat to crowd control: How the US military took over policing

Over the past months, the world watched as US President Donald Trump sent in the National Guard and the Marines to crack down on protests in the streets of Los Angeles, arrest civilians, and provide backup for the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) operations. The Marines were also sent to support ICE in Florida.

This was followed by another deployment of the National Guard in Washington, and a presidential takeover of the local police, to combat “violent gangs and bloodthirsty criminals.”

Trump is also threatening similar deployments in another half a dozen metropolitan cities.

As shocking as those scenes and statements are, they are hardly an anomaly. Public debates around the world have tended to focus on police militarisation, while ignoring—or at least not paying enough attention to—a reverse process taking place for decades.

The changing role of militaries

The relationship between the military and the police is not a one-way road, where solely the first impacts the second. “The interplay between military and police has a much longer history,” note scholars of modern policing, David Correia and Tyler Wall: “Police have long adopted military technologies, and militaries have adopted police tactics and strategies.”

In other words, police militarisation has been developing hand in hand with military constabularisation.

Classically, constabularisation armies were thought of as an institution for external security, built of fighters who counter and destroy symmetrical armies. However, today being a member of the military could mean a wide variety of roles unrelated to combat. At present, on average, less than 20% of military personnel are “still engaged in combat functions” compared to more than 90% in the 19th century armies.

Following the end of WWII, the nature of militaries and of warfare itself has been going through a steady transformation. While conventional warfare—that involves two or more states engaged in armed hostilities that range from limited border skirmishes to full-scale invasions―still exists, the role of the militaries has been increasingly shifting towards counterinsurgency warfare. This includes “low intensity conflicts,” developing a model heavily based on constabularised special forces.

For example, the special forces account for 3% of the US military joint force, yet they were involved in operations in more than 90 countries in 2019. During the same year, in the Middle East alone, on “average, more than 4,000 Special Operations forces ... are deployed to the region each week, more than anywhere else in the world.”

Counterinsurgency at home and abroad

The roots of the transformation mentioned above could be traced back to the imperial competition that shaped the Cold War and the counterinsurgency campaigns against the national liberation movements in the Global South colonies.

The US, the new imperial hegamon, eyed with fear the left-leaning nationalist movements in the Global South and the spread of communism. The latter were reduced in US ruling class ideology to mere pawns of their Soviet and Chinese rivals.

As early as 1948, CIA analysts pointed out with concern that a power vacuum was in the making with the retreat of European colonial powers, and direct, explicit US military interventions to fill this vacuum would neither be sustainable economically nor accepted politically in the age of decolonisation.

It was in that context that the doctrines of counterinsurgency were developed.

Historian Stuart Schrader provided detailed account—in his seminal work, Badges without Borders: How Global Counterinsurgency Transformed American Policing—of the raging debates within the circles of the US state and its repressive apparatuses. One side advocated for the US special forces operating as guerrillas, in liaison with CIA-advised local auxiliary forces, to fight rural wars against perceived communist guerrillas or to topple a leftist regime.

The other side emphasised “civil policing and development programming must counter insurgency preemptively. It would occur largely in cities.” The proponents of the latter strongly campaigned for “a shift away from prioritizing the military to wage counterinsurgency, and the centralization of oversight of counterinsurgency into one council.”

After some quixotic adventures that ended with mostly the slaughter of CIA-trained guerrillas in North Vietnam and Cuba from 1958 and into the 1960s, the balance shifted increasingly to the urban policing model of counterinsurgency.

These debates were not confined solely to the US state circles. They were developing in parallel with, and mutually influenced by, similar discussions in their European counterparts, most notably France and Britain.

David Galula―one of the officers involved in the French colonial war in Algeria and whose writings were influential in shaping modern counterinsurgency—argued the emphasis should be on policing rather than military tactics. “While the insurgent does not hesitate to use terror, the counterinsurgent has to engage in police work,” Galula wrote. “The police work was not to my liking, but it was vital and therefore I accepted it.”

Policing the people

British counterinsurgency strategists drew similar conclusions. They favoured police operations to control the population, and the military special forces would mostly be used for small operations countering the insurgents in less densely populated areas.

As an imperial hegemon, the US managed to export and globalise its social control doctrines and modules, primarily through foreign assistance programs.

The reliance, however, on urban policing as the first line of defense against subversion did not necessarily mean the disposal of the model of military special forces advising and/or fighting with local guerrillas and allies. But the differences between them are increasingly narrowing, since the objective needs, modus operandi, and targets of counterinsurgencies inevitably push for the constabularisation of the military special forces.

From suppressing anti-colonial uprisings, to the declared “wars”―on communist subversion, crime, drug-trafficking, piracy, terrorism, and other constructed threats and irregular forces—the constabularised imperial armies are engaged in searches and gathering intelligence from the local population, like the police do in metropoles.

Even today’s conventional wars are bound to push for military constabularisation. In any full-scale invasion, once the regular foreign army destroys the local military and topples the local ruler, this will inevitably be followed by indefinite policing.

In post-2003 Baghdad, they replaced the Ba’athist regime’s Iraqi police with an American from Kentucky doing “stop-and-frisks.” The global War on Terror in effect transformed the mandate of the US military elite units, from targeted operations to “police work.”

The constabularisation process can also transform the military into literally a “riot control” policing force, both abroad and domestically. The traditional distinction in spheres of operations, of the military as a force for external security and police as a force of internal security, is also increasingly getting blurry, with the constabularised military deployed for internal operations, in the name of fighting the perceived threat, in the urban streets of dictatorships and liberal democracies alike.

The police militarization and military constabularisation are dialectically interconnected. But such dialectics of repression can gain exceptional momentum, fully embracing the language of militarism, during times of fear psychosis.

Whether it is crime, subversion, communism, drugs, illegal migration, sex-trafficking, pirates, poachers, terrorism, the perceived nature of the “enemy”―in these open-ended wars where victory is not clearly defined, if not impossible—means little differences in terms of the overall standardized strategy.

Once a “war” is declared, society is expected (as indoctrinated) to accept “collateral damage” and “sacrifices” such as the killing of innocents, restrictions on civil liberties, austerity, and a war economy that ensures production continues uninterrupted while suppressing worker unrest.

Hossam el-Hamalawy is an Egyptian scholar-activist in Germany, focusing on the military, policing, and labour.

Follow Hossam on X/Twitter: @3arabawy

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Opinions expressed in this article remain those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The New Arab.