RAND Corporation Blueprint for Militarized “Stability Police Force”

William Grigg
LRC Blog
December 11, 2009

RAND suggests a vanguard for a militarized internal security force.

The RAND Corporation, one of the most fecund research arms of the Military-Industrial-Homeland Security Complex, has released a study entitled A Stability Police Force for the United States: Justification and Creating U.S. Capabilities.

The SPFOR (to use the inevitable acronym) would be a “hybrid” military/law enforcement unit created within the U.S. Marshals Service (USMS) for use “in a range of tasks such as crowd and riot control, special weapons and tactics (SWAT), and investigations of organized criminal groups” — both abroad, in UN-directed multilateral military operations, and at home, as dictated by the needs of the Regime.

Initially as small as 2–6,000 personnel, the SPFOR’s size “could be increased by augmenting it with additional federal, state, or local police from the United States” as necessary.

The RAND study, which was conducted for the U.S. Army’s Peacekeeping and Stability Operations Institute, recommended using the Marshals Service rather than the US Army’s Military Police  as host for the SPFOR in order to avoid conflicts with the Posse Comitatus Act, which forbids (albeit in principle more than in practice) the domestic use of the military as a law enforcement body.

“The USMS hybrid option … provides an important nondeployed mission for the force: augmenting state and local agencies, many of which currently suffer from severe personnel shortages,” states the report without explaining how the SPFOR could at once “augment” those under-manned agencies while at the same time being “augmented” by them if necessary.

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This article was posted: Friday, December 11, 2009 at 6:49 am

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