ARTICLE: Arnold Schwarzenegger visits Iraq - and aims to transfer military tactics to California by Oliver August in Baghdad, November 16, 2009 (Via Times Online.)
The transfer of counter-insurgency tactics from the military to the police is being pioneered in the central Californian town of Salinas. Combat veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan are already advising the local authorities on how to conduct their own “surge,” as the US counter-insurgency campaign of President Bush is known.
Rather than hunting down gang leaders and arresting them, the police is told to build trust in the community that supports the gangs. Only by patiently “draining the swamp” can the leaders be eliminated.
The line between foreign and domestic security is likely to blur as the tactics and experience of personnel become transposable across that boundary. Like Thomas Barnett explains in his lectures, the network building force necessary in post-combat spaces will resemble more your 40-year old cop, along with all the experience and street-wise he or she possesses.
It might seem that the methodologies should be going from the domestic space to the foreign space, but in this case we are seeing the cyclical feedback of that approach; meaning once the methods borrowed from one domain are applied to another, the feedback from its application can be reapplied to the original context. Then the lessons learned from applying COIN methodology to counter gang operations can again be reapplied to the insurgency context, then back home to the streets, ad infinitum.
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