The US
military: A creeping civilian
mission By David Isenberg
It
seems that the United States military coup of 2012 has
arrived about 10 years early. Well, okay, not the
full-fledged classic coup, led by a general on
horseback. But, as they say, close enough for government
work.
First, more about that coup. In 1992, a
then little-known deputy staff judge advocate
lieutenant-colonel by the name of Charles J Dunlap Jr
published an article titled "The Origins of the American
Military Coup of 2012" (1) in the US Army War College's
military journal Parameters. In a plot that was a cross
between Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon and
the movie The Siege, he depicted an America in
which a military coup had taken place in the year 2012,
and General Thomas E T Brutus, commander-in-chief of the
Unified Armed Forces of the United States, occupies the
White House as permanent military plenipotentiary. A
senior retired officer of the military is one of those
arrested, having been convicted by court-martial for
opposing the coup. Prior to his execution, he discusses
the origins of the coup, arguing that it was the
outgrowth of trends visible as far back as 1992. These
trends were the massive diversion of military forces to
civilian use, the monolithic unification of the armed
forces, and the insularity of the military community.
While Dunlap, now a brigadier-general at the Air
Combat Command, has not weighed in on this recently, the
last two trends have been evident for many years. The
Goldwater-Nichols reforms passed by Congress in the
1980s greatly strengthened jointness among the
traditionally separate armed forces and the increasingly
conservative and republican nature of the armed forces,
which is well documented by journalists and academics.
But a report in the November 23 Los Angeles
Times by respected military affairs analyst William
Arkin provides the latest evidence that the supposedly
inviolate wall keeping the military out of traditional
civilian activities is eroding, due the diversion of the
military to civilian missions.
That wall is
embodied in the US by the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act,
enacted to preclude federal troops from doing the
bidding of local politicians in the occupied South
following the Civil War. It prohibits the military from
conducting domestic law enforcement operations. Congress
wanted to make it crystal clear, as Richard Nixon might
have said, that there is a great difference in a
democracy between protecting our nation from foreign
attack and policing our neighborhoods. But the law also
allows Congress and the president to make exceptions,
and over the years they have done so.
They did
so notably in the 1980s in the Ronald Reagan era when
the US military was dragged kicking and screaming into
counter-drug operations. Ironically, then defense
secretary Caspar Weinberger wrote in 1985, "Reliance on
military forces to accomplish civilian tasks is
detrimental to both military readiness and the
democratic process."
On May 20, 1997, a Marine
anti-drug squad stalked, shot and allowed to bleed to
death Ezequiel Hernandez, an 18-year-old high school
sophomore, while he was herding goats near his home in
Redford Texas, near the Rio Grande River, the site of
heavy military drug interdiction activity. Hernandez's
death was the first fatal shooting of a US civilian
since the military began anti-drug missions in the 1980s
and is the first American killed by soldiers on US soil
since the 1970 National Guard killings of four students
at Kent State during anti-Vietnam War demonstrations.
In fact, Congress already has passed several
laws relaxing the strictures of the act in order to deal
with potential attacks on American soil. In 1997,
Congress gave the Pentagon authority to cooperate with
the Justice Department in responding to biological or
chemical attacks. Another law gives the president
authority in an emergency to use the armed forces to
perform work "essential for the preservation of life and
property". Another allows military personnel to assist
the Justice Department in collecting intelligence or
conducting searches and seizures if "necessary for the
immediate protection of human life". Section 104 of the
USA Patriot Act passed last year further authorizes the
emergency use of the military in "case of attack with a
weapon of mass destruction".
Taken together, all
these measures give the president authority to use the
military in most conceivable emergency situations. But
after the September 11, 2001 attacks, the Pentagon
picked up extra responsibilities focused on preventing
future terrorist attacks on US soil. US Air Force pilots
were and are now authorized to shoot down commercial
airliners, if necessary. The Air National Guard flew
thousands of combat air patrols (Operation Noble Eagle)
over major American cities
Some US military
officials want to put unmanned aerial vehicles in the
skies above the continental US to conduct surveillance
and intelligence operations. The North American
Aerospace Defense Command wants to use a high-altitude
airship to detect cruise missiles and monitor vessels
and other potential threats approaching the continent.
Initially, the Pentagon expanded the role of the
US Joint Forces Command (JFCOM), giving it additional
authority to coordinate and deploy military forces to
fight terrorism in the continental US. The commander was
placed in charge of the land and maritime defense of the
continental US, as well as providing military assistance
to civil authorities. JFCOM already was responsible for
providing support to civilian authorities responding to
attacks or disasters, and for planning the land and
maritime defense of the continental US. Now, it would
also have the power to deploy military forces
domestically to fight terrorism and defend the homeland,
an authority previously left to the defense secretary.
But this was deemed unwieldy, and thus led to
the creation of the Northern Command, an organization
that consolidates all existing military homeland defense
and security operations. Concerns about possible
violations of the Posse Comitatus Act caused Congress,
in the 2002 Defense Authorization Act, to "conduct a
study on the appropriate role of the Department of
Defense with respect to homeland security".
Last
year, however, the Bush administration's Homeland
Security strategy document said: "The threat of
catastrophic terrorism requires a thorough review of the
laws permitting the military to act within the United
States in order to determine whether domestic
preparedness and response efforts would benefit from
greater involvement of military personnel and, if so,
how."
Since then the Defense Department also has
been inserted into two very visible new agencies. It
transferred about 50 new employees in the new Department
of Homeland Security to the White House's newly formed
Terrorist Threat Integration Center, which is designed
to make sure the Central Intelligence Agency, the
Pentagon, the Department of Homeland Security and the
Federal Bureau of Investigation share information.
At Homeland Security's United States Northern
Command (Northcom) headquarters at the Peterson Air
Force Base in Colorado Springs, more than 200 people
will be engaged in gathering domestic intelligence,
receiving information from local and state police as
well as US intelligence agencies.
But as Arkin's
article makes clear, Northcom is doing more than mere
coordinating. "Under the banner of 'homeland security',
the military and intelligence communities are
implementing far-reaching changes that blur the lines
between terrorism and other kinds of crises and will
break down long-established barriers to military action
and surveillance within the US."
According to
Arkin, Northcom has defined three levels of operations,
each of which triggers a larger set of authorized
activities. The levels are "extraordinary", "emergency"
and "temporary". During emergencies, the military can
provide similar support, mostly in response to specific
events such as the attacks on the World Trade Center. It
is only in the case of extraordinary domestic operations
that the unique capabilities of the Defense Department
are deployed. These include not just such things as air
patrols to shoot down hijacked planes or the defusing of
bombs and other explosives, but also bringing in
intelligence collectors, special operators and even full
combat troops.
Some say this is nothing new. In
a speech to the Council on Foreign Relations in January,
former US senator Gary Hart said American founders
"created such an army and called it the militia:
citizen-soldiers under the immediate command of the
various states that can be deployed in times of
emergency. Since the late 19th century these militias
have been known as the National Guard, and they were
created and given constitutional status as the first
responders and the first line of defense in the case of
an attack on our homeland".
Indeed, on December
2 Paul McHale, former Democratic congressman and now the
Defense Department's assistant secretary for homeland
defense, said at the Defense Manufacturing Conference in
Washington that military studies of potential domestic
terrorist attacks have determined that the National
Guard should not only protect the defense industrial
base but also critical infrastructure that has
previously been defended by civilian law enforcement
agencies.
In the future, the National Guard will
be the lead organization that coordinates military and
civilian responses to terrorist threats and attacks
against some critical infrastructure, such as nuclear
power plants, McHale said.
He also said the
Pentagon reviewed the Posse Comitatus Act and determined
that it would not be a violation to deploy the National
Guard to protect critical infrastructure in some
circumstances. He said he expects more presidential
directives in the future to expand the military's
homeland defense role.
But the same basic
concerns about military involvement still remain
relevant. From a civil liberties viewpoint, while
members of the armed forces take an oath to uphold and
defend the constitution, they are not trained, like the
police, to uphold Americans' rights to privacy and due
process. Civil libertarians' fears about due process
have been heightened since September 11 by the
indefinite detention of citizens and immigrants, and by
proposals to try them before secret military tribunals.
