Watch Obama give his speech about education.
Is there a more important topic for our nation?
http://www.evtv1.com/evtv1_newads.aspx?u=14799&c=393&a=100226
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THE PROGRESSIVE REVIEW - September 9, 2010
US Government Report Argues for Police Force for American
Interventions Overseas
by: Matthew Harwood
truthout
President Barack Obama's declaration Tuesday that the US
combat mission in Iraq is officially over may give some
Americans hope that US foreign policy may become less
invasive and adventurous, especially if American troops
begin to return home from Afghanistan by the end of 2011.
Yet, inside the defense establishment, some intellectuals
continue to examine the need for the United States to
build a paramilitary police force to deploy to fragile or
failing states to restore security and order.
In May 2009, the federally financed RAND Corporation
published a 183-page report, "A Stability Police Force for
the United States: Justification and Options for Creating
US Capabilities". The report, conducted for the US Army's
Peacekeeping and Stability Operations Institute (PKSOI) at
the Army War College, examined the need for a "stability
police force" (SPF), which it described as "a high-end
police force that engages in a range of tasks such as crowd
and riot control, special weapons and tactics (SWAT) and
investigations of organized criminal groups." Most soldiers
do not possess the specialized skills an SPF officer needs
to prevent violence, the report notes. "Most soldiers are
trained to apply overwhelming force to secure victory,
rather than minimal force to prevent escalation." The SPF
would also train indigenous police forces, much like what
occurs today in Iraq and Afghanistan.
According to the study led by Terrence K. Kelly, a senior
researcher at RAND, the United States clearly needs an SPF.
"Stability operations have become an inescapable reality
of US foreign policy," the report states. The RAND report
estimates that creating such a paramilitary police force
would cost about $637 million annually, require about 6,000
personnel and that it should be headquartered inside the
US Marshals Service (USMS), not the US Army.
"Of the options considered," the RAND report argues, "this
research indicates that the US Marshals Service would be
the most likely to successfully field an SPF, under the
assumptions that an [military police] option would not be
permitted to conduct policing missions in the United
States outside of military installations except under extra-
ordinary circumstances and that doing so is essential to
maintaining required skills." The idea here is that members
of an SPF would be a "hybrid force" and could be embedded
in police and sheriff departments nationwide to retain
their policing skills when not deployed overseas. When
needed, a battalion-sized SPF unit could be deployed in 30
days.
This recommendation did cause a small number of libert-
arians to take notice of the report after it was published
because of the Posse Comitatus Act, which forbids using the
military for domestic policing inside the United States.
Libertarian William Grigg blogged on LewRockwell.com that
he feared that an SPF could be used domestically. "If
'peacekeepers' end up patrolling American streets, they
probably won't be foreigners in blue berets, but homegrown
jackboots commanded by Washington," Grigg wrote. Chris
Calabrese, a legislative counsel for the American Civil
Liberties Union, was less fearful of an SPF, but he told
Truthout that the report's recommendation to headquarter
"a super police force that would be deployed both foreign
and domestically in the US Marshals Service" did violate
the spirit of the Posse Comitatus Act.
"In essence, you have this force that would in theory be a
civilian force that would be part of the US Marshal Service
but they would be deployed as part of the Army and the
military forces," Calabrese said. "That would be their
primary deployment purpose. Their civilian purpose would
be secondary. They describe it as a training purpose. So
who does this police force work for then?"
Talking to WorldNetDaily in January, Kelly did say an SPF
could be deployed in the United States, although that's
not what their primary purpose is.
"If there were a major disaster like Katrina it could be
deployed in the U.S. but that's not the purpose of the
research," he said. "It's important to point out that the
goal was to create a force that's deployable overseas.
If it's to be used in the United States it would be a
secondary thing and then only in an emergency."
The RAND Corporation would not make any of the report's
authors available for an interview. Emails to the USMS
asking for a comment on the report and its recommendations
also went unanswered.
Calabrese also said there are practical concerns behind
such a force outside of the Posse Comitatus Act. "It's
also somewhat strange," he said. Calabrese wonders what
would happen when SPF personnel get called up from wherever
they're embedded to deploy overseas. "What happens to all
the police work they're doing domestically?" he asked.
But the RAND report has more implications for the future
of US foreign policy than it does about the militarization
of police inside the United States. It signals that some
defense and peace intellectuals believe that the United
States will continue to intervene in fragile and failing
states. After listing the stability operations that the
United States has participated in since the end of the
cold war - Panama (1989), Somalia (1992), Haiti (1994),
Bosnia (1995), Kosovo (1999), Afghanistan (2001), Iraq
(2003) and Haiti again in 2004 - the RAND report notes
this trend will continue. "There are several countries
where the United States could become engaged in stability
operations over the next decade, such as Cuba and Sudan,"
according to the report.
While an SPF could be part of a multilateral response
directed by the United Nations, the RAND report also
imagines times when the United States will need an SPF
to restore security and order in another country because
it has acted unilaterally. "While there may be times in
which allies make important contributions, to do so would
be to limit US freedom of action on the international
stage."
Robert Perito, a senior program officer at the United
States Institute of Peace and the author of "Where Is
the Lone Ranger When We Need Him? America's Search for
a Post Conflict Security Force", believes a stability
police force is necessary, especially after the looting
and rioting that occurred in Baghdad after the US
invasion of 2003. If the United States was able to
prevent that disaster, the Iraq campaign could have
gone differently.
"We have a proven need for a capacity that would makes
things better if it existed," Perito said. "We refuse to
do it and we keep ending up with a negative result."
The United States, however, once did have some of the
capabilities of a SPF, said Perito until Congress scuttled
it in 1974. The US Agency for International Development
(USAID) once trained foreign police officers at the Inter-
national Police Academy in Washington, DC. In a recently
released paper from the PKSOI, retired US Army Col. Dennis
Keller explains why Congress eventually ended US assistance
to foreign police and closed the academy.
"Congress's growing opposition to USAID's police training
and assistance programs peaked in 1973, the concern being
that police trainers had allegedly approved, advocated,
or taught torture techniques to civilian police in some
countries, which in turn had damaged the image of the
United States," Keller writes. While other departments
like Homeland Security, Justice and State do train foreign
police, Keller notes there is no SPF capacity and that the
training is a bureaucratic maze, carried out by large
contract police trainers, like DynCorp and MPRI in Iraq
and Afghanistan.
He, like Perito, however, believes the United States needs
a centralized, government-led policing capacity to restore
order in a fragile and failing state before terrorist or
criminal organizations fill the power vacuum and then
transition to training police forces to carry out their
public safety duties.
Perito says four federal agencies entities have recently
put forth proposals to create stability police forces to
deploy overseas. He said two of those agencies were federal
law enforcement entities, but would not name them, although
he said one does have personnel in Iraq.
"These are serious federal agencies," he said. "I don't
have much of a fear that this is going to turn into a
rogue force that goes wandering around getting into
trouble."
Perito, however, is skeptical there is any real movement
to create an SPF from the upper echelons of the US govern-
ment. "I don't think this is on the president's agenda,"
he said.
"From my perspective, I really wish it was true, that this
was moving forward at a rapid clip," Perito said. "But I
don't think it's imminent."
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