Comment by DanielBMarkham | Hacker News Reader

Comment by DanielBMarkham | Hacker News Reader

Somewhat tangential: There has long been a tie-in between the military and the police. Former military members make an easier transition to the police, and a lot of policemen have a strong weekend-warrior, macho mentality and like big guns and things that go boom. Plus the rank system is similar, there's use of deadly force, and so on.

The U.S. has also seen major mission creep in the military. Instead of going in and bringing a devastating kinetic assault to an enemy in order to get them to surrender, now we're in the mission of Counter-Insurgency (COIN), nation-building, handing out candy to kids, and air-lifting supplies in to earthquake victims.

Because of all of that, I think we need a new branch of the armed forces specifically set aside for nation-building, humanitarian relief, and so forth. It's a completely different mission from the other branches, and deserves its own budget, training, and voice. Then, civilian police forces should only pull military members from that branch.

We need to separate the warrior mentality from the protect and serve, community-friendly mentality. Some organizational re-alignment may help.

Here's a TED talk discussing such a military realignment:

http://www.ted.com/talks/thomas_barnett_draws_a_new_map_for_...

>Because of all of that, I think we need a new branch of the armed forces specifically set aside for nation-building, humanitarian relief, and so forth.

Maybe we could call it something like The Peace Corps?

I wouldn't say the military has seen mission creep. Their job was always to stay until the fighting was over and the mission was accomplished. The difference is that we've found ourselves in conflicts where the fighting doesn't stop, and the mission might be "accomplished" now and then but it never stays that way. Judging by our recent conflicts, it's wishful thinking to try to separate the duties of fighting and interacting with civilians, and I think the new branch of the armed forces you're talking about is basically what the current U.S. Army is trying to be. Any nation-building and humanitarian relief force we create will have to deal with ambushes, mortar attacks, RPGs, and assaults on their bases, so it's not like they won't be fighters (and inevitably killers.)

Honestly, I think the army, along with a handful of progressive city police departments, will solve the problem of community policing long before most local U.S. law enforcement agencies. The army has greater ability to control and change its culture. It won't happen overnight, but we can hope that eventually U.S. cops will learn to respect their neighbors across town by the example of how U.S. soldiers treat people from the other side of the world. The army will also learn how to assess soldiers' fitness for interaction with civilians, which will have interesting implications for law enforcement.

The US military did do extensive nation-building in Europe and Japan after WWII. (I have it from my father, a 4-year-old German at war's end, that candy was most definitely involved.) I would argue that the difference is that, then, the military was expected and allowed to win the war first.

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