Armored Vehicles for DHS, Slingshots for You

By Daren Jonescu 

What does it portend that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security has purchased 2,700 armored vehicles? One may speculate all day long about what it might imply -- and such speculation, by the way, may be pursued by perfectly rational people without ever crossing the line into paranoia. However, I would like to offer one consideration that is not speculative at all, and relates to the very roots and legitimacy of government in a free society: when the disparity in strength between the state's domestic security apparatus and the collective civilian population becomes overwhelming, it undermines a fundamental principle of modern liberal government, namely the consent of the governed.

For the sake of establishing scale, the entire German army currently possesses 580 armored infantry fighting vehicles and 2,000 armored personnel carriers -- fewer armored vehicles than America's DHS has just acquired. A few people in the blogosphere are asking the obvious question that none of today's "professional" journalists (or members of Congress) will ask: "Why does a domestic security agency need 2,700 armored vehicles?"

"Don't worry," say the people who see nothing to fear in anything the Obama administration ever does, or ever will do. "After all," they scoff, "it's not as though Janet Napolitano is going to be in command of these vehicles; they're being purchased for the use of your local police. See, no problem."

Problem: A major thrust of DHS policy over the past few years has been a gradual effort to federalize police authority, under the rubric of "improved coordination." In other words, DHS seems to have every intention of ending local law enforcement in all but name. The phrase "local police" may soon mean nothing more "local" than that the men inside that armored vehicle are driving down your street, rather than someone else's -- much like "local schools" under the new Common Core standards.

A representative statement of this intention is the Aspen Institute's white paper, "Homeland Security and Intelligence: Next Steps in Evolving the Mission," presented to the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. From that document:

Partnerships and collaboration will be a determining factor in whether this refined mission succeeds. As threat grows more localized, the prospect that a state/local partner will generate the first lead to help understand a new threat, or even an emerging cell, will grow. And the federal government's need to train, and even staff, local agencies, such as major city police departments, will grow. (Emphasis added.)

So why does America's newly nationalized "local police force" need to be equipped like the German army? After all, doesn't the actual U.S. military have enough of that sort of, well, military-style equipment for any military-style emergency that might emerge on the home front?

Perhaps in every population there must inevitably be a percentage for whom the six o'clock news will always be trustworthy, Bill Ayers will always be a respected educator, and reality TV will always be unscripted. For everyone else, however, it is not only not crazy, but actually the only rational position, to ask, with a fair degree of concern, what legitimate purpose there could be for the executive branch's domestic security agency to have more armored vehicles than Germany.

How many armored vehicles is 2,700? America is a very big country -- perhaps 2,700 sounds bigger than it really is, given the size of the nation. Let us consider that possibility.

According to 2011 Census data, the U.S. has nine cities with populations over one million, and twenty-five more with populations over half a million, but under a million. Let us assign thirty armored vehicles to each of the megacities, and fifteen to each city between half a million and a million. That would be 645 vehicles. Now, for each of the next forty-one cities, down to a quarter million citizens, let us designate ten vehicles, i.e., 410 altogether. That makes 1,055. For the smaller cities, down to a bare one hundred thousand (Broken Arrow, Oklahoma), let's provide five each, or 1,050. That makes the total 2,105.

We have provided armored vehicles for all 285 cities in the United States, and we still have almost 600 left over for town and rural duty. And of course this is accounting for only the single order of vehicles that DHS is known to have made. No doubt further acquisitions are planned.

True, 2,700 is smaller than the number of tanks and armored vehicles the U.S. deployed during Desert Storm, and that was in a much smaller geographical area than mainland U.S.A. Here is the major difference: in Desert Storm those thousands of tanks and other vehicles were being deployed on foreign soil against a fully armed 500,000 man military with thousands of tanks of its own, not to mention a considerable air force. Within the borders of the U.S., there would, presumably, be no opposing force with comparable equipment, the only armed aerial vehicles would also be DHS assets (drones), and the vast majority of the population would likely be operating under the presumption that the presence of these armored vehicles was necessary for their security -- that the "local police" were protecting them against a violent threat.

And what would that threat be? What is it that DHS imagines might necessitate the use of armored vehicles designed and constructed not for police chases or investigations, but for ground warfare, or for maintaining impenetrable checkpoints?

It would be very nice to imagine a sensible, benign purpose for this investment. It would be nicer still if the executive branch thought it owed an explanation for the military arming of its non-military domestic security forces to the population it alleges to represent. If the head of your family came home with a rifle today, and you asked him why, would you feel comfortable if he refused to answer, or said, "You don't need to know"?

If the Obama administration comes home with that rifle, even while they are demanding that you relinquish or unload yours, must they not be held to at least the same level of scrutiny as your hypothetical family member? The notion that government -- no, the executive branch of government -- is seeking means to render itself immune to any possible civil unrest, by establishing conditions of complete domestic firepower superiority, should be disturbing not only to the paranoid. This is decidedly not a "tin foil hat" issue. For it is of the essence of civil government in the modern "free world" that the state never be so well armed against the people that the people are effectively without recourse in the face of potential government abuse.

This goes even beyond the Second Amendment argument about allowing men to defend themselves against tyrannical government overreach. Equipping and organizing domestic security in the manner of a national army, while taking radical steps to restrict private firearm ownership, fundamentally alters the nature of the relationship between the citizen and the state. If the citizen is disarmed, or at least severely limited in his ability to take up arms against the state, then acquiescence is his only realistic option in any and every circumstance. He cannot even contemplate the idea of resistance, whether alone or in conjunction with others. In other words, citizens no longer have the status of rights-bearing agents who have freely willed some of their power over to the state on the condition that political representatives shall serve their interests as rights-bearing individuals.

That is the condition on which modern political liberalism (in the classical sense) bases everything: the individual cedes some of his personal right of self-defense and retributive justice to the state -- but he does so voluntarily. And that voluntarism does not cease when a government is actually formed; it is, or was meant to be, the permanent underlying condition of a government's legitimacy. The government governs by the consent -- not the mere votes, but the literal, albeit usually tacit, permission -- of the governed.

This does not leave the government unstable. On the contrary, the possibility of meaningful consent is the moral guarantor of the state's existence, because it is the necessary condition of its legitimacy. If your consent as a private citizen is still meaningful and necessary, then you have no just grounds for revolt. Government becomes fundamentally unjust precisely when rational consent is no longer meaningful, such as when a situation is established in which there is nothing the citizens could do about any level of abuse from government, even if they wanted to.

This profoundly individualist condition, the consent of the governed -- the underlying voluntarism of the citizens' submission to the state's laws -- is the moral heart of modern political liberty, and hence, in a sense, of modernity itself. It cannot be abrogated without violating a core principle of a free society, namely that the government belongs to the people, and not vice versa. And yet that is the condition that the current American administration is seeking to abrogate by pursuing severe restrictions on private gun ownership while simultaneously arming its domestic law enforcement agencies as though they were the German army.

I do not pretend to know what DHS wants with all those armored vehicles -- enough equipment to subdue significant unrest or restrict population movement in many locations at once. I do not pretend to know exactly what they imagine might occasion the need for such a force. However, I also don't pretend that the world is a happy fairy land where nothing really bad ever happens, or ever could. Generations of carefully managed cultural Marxist indoctrination, deliberately spirit-shrinking compulsory education, irredeemable national debt, the creation of a near majority dependent class within the general population, and the legislated disarming of the law-abiding citizenry, cannot end well. The only question is how and when it will, in fact, end -- and whether the end will come as a series of hard jolts, or as a slow, hopeless decline into nothingness.

The Department of Homeland Security is apparently preparing itself for every contingency.

(Hat tip: Timothy Birdnow)

Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/03/armored_vehicles_for_dhs_slingshots_for_you.html#ixzz2Mw7RNhzx