Not knocking what you wrote...I agree with all of it.
But it seems like you took my one sentence and put it through a Verbosity Amplifier.
I believe that when the police are completely transformed into a “standing army”, and they will be - it has gone too far to reverse, they will also they have unwittingly created the largest force of anti government guerrillas in the world.
It’s not going to be the cake walk these Storm Trooper wannabes think. Armored vehicles, tanks, copters and so on are impressive looking and will keep people off the streets of urban areas. But they will be fairly ineffective against a large number of armed & motivated civilians. IMO, what all this firepower and armor is good for is cordoning off areas of a city or laying siege to specific limited areas. For all this hardware, when they push the general populace into a determined uprising, they are going to be seriously outnumbered. Which means they will have to hunker down into fortified enclaves. The end result will be “law enforcement” under siege.
How many professional soldiers with much greater amounts of equipment did it take to subdue the cities in Iraq? It takes a vastly overwhelming force to do that.
LA in 2013 had about 10,000 sworn police officers. How many of those 10k could actually be equipped with serious military gear? 500? 1000? I don’t know, but it can’t be a large number. The rest are basically going to be equipped only marginally better than the *American citizens* they are expecting to subdue. The defenders or insurgents or whatever we call them will have the tactical advantage in an urban environment, particularly one as large as LA. My opinion of course.
If/when police get in their (relatively few) armored vehicles and mow down a fair number of ordinary citizens, I think an unbelievable sh1tstorm will be loosed upon them. How many of those 10k cops in LA are going to be willing to walk the streets knowing a large portion of the population wants to get them? Not just a relatively small number of criminals. They are not prepared or trained to be combat soldiers. And they won’t get court marshaled for deserting. Be a lot different than hitting a half dozen criminals with 50 swat guys and a bunch of vehicles. Or a couple of druggies in a house. And their families will not be safely tucked away in another country.
If our government tries to morph our police forces into occupying armies, it will be much bloodier than their egghead strategists think. It will not play out the way their hardware inflated egos expect.
I sincerely hope things don’t degrade that far, but I have little faith that government bureaucrats heady with power will ever see that line before they cross it.
Not knocking what you wrote...I agree with all of it.
But it seems like you took my one sentence and put it through a Verbosity Amplifier.
Now, said equipment is no longer thousands of miles away and heavily guarded.
No, it is delivered and hand carried to a neighborhood near by, with boxes and boxes of attachments, and other bells and whistles.