U.S. Regime Moves Increasingly to the Police-State Model

Eric Zuesse (blogs at https://theduran.com/author/eric-zuesse/)

We’ll start with the U.S. Government’s plan to normalize the militarization of police departments throughout the country. The U.S. Government’s Defense Logistics Agency issued on 1 September 2022 a “Frequently Asked Questions relating to the 1033 Program”, which reports that

In the National Defense Authorization Act [NDAA] for fiscal years 1990 and 1991, Congress authorized the transfer of excess DoD [Department of Defense] property to federal, state and local law enforcement agencies. …

On January 16, 2015, President Obama issued Executive Order 13688, “Federal Support for Local Law Enforcement Equipment Acquisition” and established the Law Enforcement Equipment Working Group. The executive order applied to all federal government programs providing property to law enforcement, including the Departments of Homeland Security, Justice, Treasury and the General Services Administration, which provide support to law enforcement agencies through grants and property transfers. The working group provided recommendations to the president in the areas of prohibited and controlled equipment lists; policies, training and protocols for controlled equipment; acquisition process for controlled equipment; transfer, sale, return and disposal of controlled equipment and oversight, compliance and implementation.

The working group’s recommendations were accepted by the president and became effective on Oct. 1, 2015. The prohibited equipment list went into effect as soon as the president received the recommendations. [Obama’s Executive Order 13688 merely continued the 1990 NDAA program of supplying to domestic policing agencies excess military weapons, but banned from such donations bayonets and big weapons, and specified a “controlled equipment list” of weapons which the federal Government “urges L[aw] E[nforcement] A[gency]s to give careful consideration to the appropriateness of acquiring such equipment for their communities.”]

Equipment on the prohibited list included tracked armored vehicles; weaponized aircraft, vessels and vehicles; .50-caliber firearms and ammunition; bayonets; camouflage uniforms and grenade launchers. …

President Trump’s Revocation of Executive Order 1368

On August 28, 2017, the White House issued a “Presidential Executive Order on Restoring State, Tribal, and Local Law Enforcement’s Access to Life-Saving Equipment and Resources.” It revoked Executive Order 13688 and directed all executive departments and agencies “to cease implementing those recommendations and, if necessary, to take prompt action to rescind any rules, regulations, guidelines, or policies implementing them.” 

With the revocation of Executive Order 13688, excess tracked armored vehicles and bayonets are no longer prohibited for transfer from LESO/1033 program to law enforcement agencies. [Trump, who opposed all Democratic Party federal regulations, issued Executive Order 13809, which ordered the federal Government to return to the situation that had pertained during 1990-2015 — ignore E.O. 13688.] …

Regarding President Biden’s Executive Order (EO) 14074 [here] “Advancing Effective, Accountable Policing and Criminal Justice Practices to Enhance Public Trust and Public Safety,” DLA is working to implement the programmatic changes and additional certifications required from LESO program participants, specifically for controlled property cited in the EO.  All EO prohibited items are now included in DoD/DLA’s extensive prohibited property list. …

Using the initial acquisition value, the total amount transferred since the program’s inception in 1990 is $7.6 billion. 

On 22 April 2024, the U.S. Government’s National Guard site headlined “Virginia Guard CST, State Police Team Up for Training Exercise” and reported:

BLACKSTONE, Va. – Virginia National Guard Soldiers and Airmen assigned to the 34th Civil Support Team trained with Virginia State Police Bureau of Criminal Investigation bomb technicians March 19-21 at the Blackstone Readiness Center.

The 34th CST supports civil authorities in a domestic chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear or high-yield explosive incident. The evaluated tasks included deploying the team, establishing communications and medical support, conducting surveys, technical decontamination, analytical functions and interagency coordination.

CST and VSP elements worked together to identify possible explosive hazards while maintaining crime scene integrity.

“The focus of training this week was the integration of the 34th CST with the Virginia State Police BCI bomb technicians,“ said Lt. Col. Thomas Mecadon, commander of the 34th CST. “The ability of these two agencies to understand each other’s processes and procedures on approaching an incident is crucial for interoperability and support.”

While many of the CST’s training events are focused on chemical, biological or radiological hazards and threats, the team trains on explosive threats annually.

“Due to our mission, the possibility to encounter an explosive combined with a CBRN agent is likely,” said Mecadon. “The benefits of training with VSP bomb technicians and other bomb tech agencies allows us to better prepare for a response and learn how we complement each other.”

Participants conducted reconnaissance surveys on a suspected explosive threat. The teams also trained on a simulated “man down” scenario, giving the entire CST realistic training on procedures to evacuate and decontaminate a fallen colleague. The second full-scale exercise focused on a radiation threat.

“The integration of the two teams on Day 1 was flawless,” said Mecadon. “The downrange operation of the VSP technician with 34th CST members allowed both agencies to identify potential explosive hazards and precursors for production. Day 2 focused on radiation and a wide-scale search of an area with strong samples that masked each other and presented a challenge to our survey team. The survey team was able to fight through this, relying on previous lessons and techniques learned to pinpoint and identify the exact location and isotopes present.”

The 34th CST has six sections: command, operations, communications, administration/logistics, medical/analytical and survey. Members complete 500 to 900 hours of specialized training in their first year of assignment and continue advanced training with multiple agencies, including the Virginia Department of Emergency Management, the National Fire Academy, the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, the Department of Energy and the Environmental Protection Agency.

The team’s primary response area is a 300-mile radius from its home station at Fort Barfoot, from Pennsylvania to South Carolina. It can deploy an advance team within 90 minutes and the main body in three hours.

The anti-Zionist and anti-imperialist Mondoweiss site posted on 25 April 2024 a highly informative article about the creation by both the Israeli and the American regimes of a more unified military and police approach within both countries, and speading it throughout the U.S. empire so as to crush dissent and especially dissent against imperialism and against the U.S. and Israeli versions of supremacist imposed ‘democracy’. It said:

For over 75 years, the Palestinian people have been subjected to the illegal Zionist settler colonialism and white supremacy funded by Western Powers. The violence of the Israeli regime goes beyond denying Palestinian livelihood, making it its mission to sever Palestinians from their communities, land, and history. Halfway across the world, in the heart of Atlanta, a battle rages against the encroachment of Cop City, a sprawling police training facility slated to be erected in the Weelaunee Forest. This biodiverse site, designated as one of the “four lungs” of Atlanta, was stewarded by indigenous Muscogee and Cherokee peoples before it became a slave plantation and subsequently the Atlanta prison farm. Despite years of struggle to defend the forest and stop the Cop City project from moving forward, the relentless expansion of the prison industrial complex (PIC) under the guise of “public safety” ensues.

We are students across multiple Atlanta universities and community members organizing against Cop City and the genocide of Palestinians at the hands of U.S. imperialism. We are demanding total institutional divestment from Israeli apartheid and Cop City at all Atlanta colleges and universities. We are occupying Emory, not because it is the only institution that is complicit in genocide and police militarization, but because its ties are some of the strongest. Emory University, the Atlanta University Center Consortium, Georgia State University, and Georgia Tech have all intimidated and repressed students and employees who spoke out in support of Palestinians. These institutions have all refused to divest from Cop City and the Zionist occupation.

This local resistance is a vivid tableau of a global struggle for liberation. At its core, the fight against Cop City is interconnected with global movements against oppressive state practices, most notably the Palestinian struggle for liberation from illegal occupation, apartheid, and systemic violence. The parallels extend deeper into the mechanisms of oppression, where the tactics employed to suppress dissent in Atlanta echo those used globally, facilitated by significant international collaboration in policing and surveillance.

Image from the protest encampment at Emory University in Atlanta, where protesters are demanding an end to the genocide in Gaza and immediate divestment from Israel & “Cop City.” The Emory encampment joins a wave of other university encampments across the U.S., April 25, 2024. (Photo: Emory SCC)

The roots of Cop City can be traced to the Israeli Urban Warfare Training Center (UWTC), nicknamed “Mini Gaza,” funded with $45 million from the U.S. These training centers are more than mere facilities; they are live testing grounds for strategies deployed against marginalized peoples, whether in occupied Palestine or predominantly Black, working-class, and undocumented communities in Atlanta. The design of these centers reflects a brutal exchange of methodologies that exacerbate violence against oppressed populations to expand and maintain power and domination through any means necessary.

Georgia State University (GSU) plays a significant role in these exchanges through its Georgia International Law Enforcement Exchange (GILEE) program. For over three decades, GILEE has facilitated collaboration between U.S. and Israeli police forces, fostering the dissemination of tactics used to maintain control and suppress dissent. This program is not an isolated academic endeavor but a cog in a larger machine that reinforces global structures of oppression. The technologies and strategies exchanged have manifested devastatingly in the U.S., from the knee-on-neck tactic used in the murder of George Floyd to the militarized policing seen during the protests that followed.

Further implicating the role of domestic policy in global suppression, the United States funds and supports various forms of state violence beyond its borders, such as in Sudan, Artsakh, and Palestine. These actions are not merely foreign policy but are deeply embedded in the fabric of U.S. domestic governance. They represent a pervasive approach to international relations that prioritizes domination and control, extending the reach of the U.S. imperial and carceral state globally.

The involvement of local universities, non-profits, corporations, and government with Cop City through its support of the Atlanta Police Foundation and its integration into the city’s surveillance and security expansion paints a stark picture of institutional complicity in these structures of power.

As Atlanta students and community members, we echo the growing national calls for immediate divestment from Israel and, by extension, Cop City, which are death-dealing partnerships profiting off of genocide, occupation, and police terror. We stand in solidarity with all students and university employees who have risen up to challenge the oppressive status quo and disrupt genocide economies, from Columbia University to Vanderbilt University.

The solidarity between the Stop Cop City movement and Palestinian liberation movements is profound and instructive. It is a solidarity based not only on shared symbols but on a deep, systemic understanding of how local struggles are inextricably linked to global ones. The fight against Cop City and for Palestinian liberation are both frontiers in the same struggle against the mechanisms of state-sanctioned violence and repression.

The Modern War Institute at West Point had headlined on 30 August 2022, “Creating the School of Urban Warfare”, by Michael G. Anderson:

In 2016, then Chief of Staff of the Army General Mark Milley remarked, “The American Army is probably going to be fighting in urban areas. We need to man, organize, train and equip the force for operations in urban areas, highly dense urban areas, and that’s a different construct. We’re not organized like that right now.” Six years later, Russian failures in urban operations in Ukraine have added weight to Milley’s statement. Ukrainian resistance in Kyiv and Mariupol slowed Russian advances and helped continue the war. Milley’s prognosis and the implied tasks therein still have not been fully implemented by the US Army. To prepare for the future urban fight and to avoid Russian-type struggles, the Army needs to improve its urban warfare proficiency through the creation of a school of urban warfare, concurrent with the development of an urban combat training center. While the US Army has extensive recent experience in urban operations, most notably in Baghdad [that word is linked to an article about the 2003 invasion of Iraq and which shows a map titled “Expeditionary large-scale combat operations are likely to center on large cities,” which map highlights in red the “large cities” that are in “the four named potential adversaries in the U.S. National Security Strategy” but which U.S.-targeted nations aren’t named there: Russia, Iran, China, and North Korea], there needs to be continued emphasis and further development on the specific skills and training needed for the demanding and dynamic requirements of urban combat.

The complexity of urban terrain and the presence of civilians in an information- and media-dense environment pose significant complications for armies. Reconnaissance and surveillance technologies are hampered as communications systems face increased electromagnetic interference. Even a stronger opponent’s firepower advantages are largely negated as more rubble makes an attacker’s movement more difficult. Large-scale combined arms operations are extremely difficult in the canalized terrain, pushing large-scale operations down to the platoon and squad level. Whereas in the past, military doctrine largely recommended bypassing built-up urban areas, steadily increasing populations and population densities in megacities are quickly making this an impractical approach. In 2018, General Milley declared that the future of war was in the cities. “We have to adapt the American way of war to the unique reality of future combat in highly dense urban areas,” he said. Then, in April 2022, he testified before Congress, stating that “urban battle is going to dominate land combat in the future.” Others have also championed the idea of an urban warfare school and training center and even a specialized urban warfare unit. Yet, despite these voices nothing has happened.

The School of Urban Warfare

The Army has a plethora of tabs, badges, and additional skill identifier courses for nearly every type of fighting—except urban warfare. While there are small-unit tactics schools for leadership like Ranger School, skill schools like Sniper School, capability schools like Air Assault and Airborne Schools, and even courses for digital battlefield management like the Digital Master Gunner Course, there are no urban equivalents. In 2018, Master Sergeant Eric Linn made the case for a standardized training proficiency for urban warfare through an urban master training course. His proposed course would provide Army staffs with urban operations subject matter experts vetted through a standardized, accredited format, creating small-unit leaders institutionally proficient in developing, executing, and supervising training and implementation in an urban environment. Commanders would obtain a principal advisor on urban operations and tactical units would receive highly trained and competent small-unit leaders.

The California Army National Guard’s 40th Infantry Division has displayed critical initiative in filling another identified gap by creating a week-long Urban Planners Course with two iterations being run to date. This course’s expansion and adoption is needed to proliferate urban warfare expertise. The Army should adopt and expand the course to three weeks by creating a school of urban warfare, merging Linn’s proposal with the Urban Planners Course. Additionally, the Special Forces Advanced Urban Combat course, a three-week long course, has elements that should be adopted for the school of urban warfare.

The school ultimately would create individual soldiers who return to their units as experts in planning urban operations and certified to conduct effective urban training. The proposed course identifies and fills the gaps that exists between Army Techniques Publication (ATP) 3-06, Urban Operations, ATP 3-21.8, Infantry Platoon and Squad, and Training Circular 90-1, Training for Urban Operations and the practical implementation of training to these standards.

The school’s curriculum would start with a basic introduction to Army Design Methodology and red team techniques, along with deliberate planning through military decision-making process repetitions. Along with this focus on staff planning, the course would train students to plan and operate in a wide variety of dense urban terrain. Enlarging the curriculum and expanding the timeline allows for broader exposure to diverse dense urban terrain, to include subterranean terrain, and the intricacies of sprawling seaports and airports, as well as interactions with civilian authorities and nongovernmental organizations present in urban areas and skills in urban logistics, communications, and engineering.

In addition to the first two weeks of planning and practical application, a third week would certify leaders in a train-the-trainer model. This phase would qualify individuals on setting up the technical and tactical requirements for shoot-house operations, establishing unit training standards, and instructing close-quarters combat essentials, among other skills.

An Urban Training Center

While the 40th Infantry Division’s partnership with the nearby National Training Center (NTC) for its current Urban Planners Course is constructive, the characteristics of dense urban terrain with a significant subterranean aspect are not sufficiently available, in terms of both time and resources, at NTC. A world-class urban-specific training center needs more than NTC or its counterparts can offer. Creating an urban warfare training center also meets the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) 2020 directive to establish an urban warfare center.

While typical sites for training military operations in urban terrain at Army posts and CTCs are adequate for training small units, they simply do not possess the scope and scale of sprawling size, density, and complexity of modern urban environments. A larger site is needed that can host multiple battalions and brigades at once across a dense multidomain urban environment. The Israel Defense Forces’ National Urban Training Center in Baladia City, Israel is an example of the size and scope more appropriate to an urban training center.

Ultimately, the Army needs units, not individuals, to come through its urban training center and receive certification at company and battalion level for urban operations over a three-week rotation. At an Army urban training center, rotational training units should arrive with squad- and platoon-level urban proficiency and be led and staffed by graduates of the school of urban warfare. While urban warfare training requires extensive dedicated resourcing for ranges, ammunition, demolitions, lodging, opposing forces, and observer-controller staffing, there are viable options already available for the Army to use rather than starting from scratch.

Muscatatuck Urban Training Center (MUTC), an Indiana National Guard facility near Camp Atterbury, provides a combined urban and rural training environment, and is the Department of Defense’s largest urban training facility. Muscatatuck started as a real city and provides rotational training units with the full range of multidomain operations with purpose-built physical infrastructure and an integrated and closed cyber environment with electromagnetic effects system. The installation training site spans a mixed urban and rural environment of one thousand acres with nine miles of roads and more than 190 permanent structures. There are nearly two miles of tunnels throughout and a cave complex to support subterranean training. For multidomain considerations, the site includes a 185-acre reservoir, a cyber range, and managed airspace. In the past, MUTC has even supported units with customized role-players to fill the urban environment, adding the unpredictability and realism of the human element with densely populated civilian terrain. In 2019, the United States Marine Corps even used MUTC for a combined US-British urban exercise for Project Metropolis II.

While MUTC has the base for becoming the Army’s premier urban training center, expansion is necessary to support the additive throughput this would bring. Adjoining Camp Atterbury has existing life support sustainment facilities such as barracks space, dining facilities, and motor pools. Camp Atterbury, however, supports more than MUTC and will likely need infrastructure improvements and physical facility expansions. Additionally, an increase in staffing for MUTC is required. MUTC has a resident observer-controller/trainer (OC/T) element in Operations Group Wolf (OGW). OGW, however, is designed around support to the Army National Guard’s exportable combat training center concept, and therefore is focused on the squad and platoon levels. To provide for company-level and higher training, OGW needs additional personnel assigned to support those levels and staffs or further augmentation from outside support, such as the training unit’s higher headquarters. With requisite expansion, Camp Atterbury, MUTC, and OGW are an ideal existing foundation to assume the mantle of the Army’s premier dedicated urban training center for the total force.

It is not unprecedented for the Army to make an Army National Guard facility a primary training site for the total force. Previously, it did so with the US Army Mountain Warfare School at Camp Ethan Allen, in Jericho, Vermont. The school regularly instructs the total Army force structure in basic and advanced military mountaineering. Starting in 1994, the Vermont Army National Guard’s mountain warfare course was identified as the skill identifier–producing course. In 2003, the school was incorporated into the Army’s Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC). A similar process of accreditation and command support training relationship between TRADOC, the National Guard Bureau, and the state could be followed for MUTC, further opening MUTC to the total force. …

If civil war comes to the U.S. as a result of the nation’s increasing polarization, these Army National Guard Urban Warfare Schools will be training and arming police, so that the previous distinction between police being a civilian force against lawbreakers, and soldiers being a military force against a foreign government, will fade-out and end, and the American public will become like Palestinians are in Israel: subjects of U.S.-and-allied military occupation. It’s the future that the U.S. Government has been, and is, moving toward.

Historian Howard Zinn has written, about the event at Ohio’s Kent State University on 4 May 1970: “At Kent State University, the Ohio National Guard shot unarmed college students — some who were protesting the war and others who were passing by. The guards fired 67 rounds over a period of 13 seconds, killing four students (Allison Krause, Jeffrey Miller, Sandra Scheuer, and William Knox Schroeder) and wounding nine others.” Ever since that time, the American nation has been moving yet further down this same path. The American majority have continued to support this military-state/police-state Government throughout the entire period, though becoming increasingly polarized, Republicans versus Democrats, but always supporting the U.S. Government, the permanent Government, this Government, which hasn’t fundamentally changed ever since 25 July 1945. This Government’s bipartisan foreign policy has not changed at all ever since that date (it even has the same enemies it did then: Iran, Russia, China, and North Korea), and what we now are seeing increasingly is that this bipartisan foreign policy (and its Government-led propaganda against those official enemies) has come to dominate totally over domestic policy — subordinate domestic policy to what has been, since that date, the U.S. Government’s bipartisan supremacist foreign policy — popularly known as “neoconservatism”; and it claims to be for ‘democracy’, ‘freedom’, ‘human rights’, and ‘peace’, throughout the world, enforced by the U.S. Government, throughout the world, as-if this Government has the right (the exclusive right) to do that.

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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s latest book, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public.