A sniper sits atop an armored vehicle, gloved hand holding the pistol grip of his weapon, aiming at his target through his scope. He is in battle dress: his uniform is camouflage. On his shoulder he wears subdued IR patches: an American flag in shades of olive drab, and a unit insignia in the same muted colors.
At whom is he aiming? An ISIS jihadist? An Al-Qaeda terrorist? No. The man on the armored vehicle is aiming at a demonstrator in Ferguson, a small town in Missouri. The response from the Ferguson police to demonstrations about the killing of a black man by a police officer have been all out of proportion — and the sniper on the armored vehicle has come to represent the massive overreaction of an overwhelmingly white police force in a predominately black town.
Yet while the images from Ferguson remind us of the chasm between the vision of a post-racial America that some hoped Barack Obama’s election would bring and the grim reality of social and political division, the images of Ferguson also point to the staggering militarization of American police forces. (U.S. News and World Report has a nice brief summary here.) A Department of Defense program (the “Department of Defense Excess Property Program,” or “1033” for short) has given billions of dollars of surplus military weapons to police forces across the United States.
Although the 1033 program’s existence helps explain the presence of this equipment on the streets of America, it does not do much to help us understand why civilian police departments would want to have this kind of gear. It is, after all, war-making equipment, and police departments are generally not about making war; police officers are “peace officers,” not “war officers.”
And therein lies a clue — language. When we see the image of the police officer on the armored vehicle, we see a man engaged in an act of war, but he is not doing so in isolation. Politicians and journalists have long borrowed the language of war and applied it to other situations. In his powerful first inaugural address (March 4, 1933), Franklin D. Roosevelt famously tried to bolster the spirits of Americans suffering the ravages of the Great Depression:
So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself—nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.
The full text is here.
Even as Roosevelt provided a psychological analysis of an economic crisis, he also invoked the language of battle in the words “retreat” and “advance.” As he developed his theme, the language became less allusive, more direct, more bellicose:
Restoration calls, however, not for changes in ethics alone. This Nation asks for action, and action now. Our greatest primary task is to put people to work. This is no unsolvable problem if we face it wisely and courageously. It can be accomplished in part by direct recruiting by the Government itself, treating the task as we would treat the emergency of a war, but at the same time, through this employment, accomplishing greatly needed projects to stimulate and reorganize the use of our natural resources.
[Emphasis added.]
And, of course, having made the analogy to war, he made his claim perfectly clear: he wanted
… broad Executive power to wage a war against the emergency, as great as the power that would be given to me if we were in fact invaded by a foreign foe.
[Emphasis added.]
Roosevelt’s brilliant speech conjoined two very different ways of using the imagery of war. On the one hand, it suggested that a warlike state of mind would help overcome the psychological underpinnings of the Great Depression; on the other, he used the metaphor of war to justify a sweeping claim to greater power.
Whether or not one admires (as I do) the programs Roosevelt built, the invocation of war is striking. It suggests something that we probably know intuitively: that battle, war, struggle, combat, all of these things are powerful ways of mobilizing emotional and psychological energy. That, of course, is why politicians keep reaching for this metaphor. And reach for it they do: in March 1964, President Lyndon Johnson declared that the goal of the United States was “an America in which every citizen shares all the opportunities of his society, in which every man has a chance to advance his welfare to the limit of his capacities.” How would this dream be realized? By a war on poverty: “To finish that work I have called for a national war on poverty. Our objective: total victory.” Jimmy Carter, too, would in 1977 declare “the moral equivalent of war” on the energy crisis. Journalists, too, have played a role. When Nixon declared drugs “public enemy number one” in 1971, journalists used the phrase “war on drugs” as convenient shorthand. The phrase stuck.
In each case, the word “war” gave a new sense of urgency to the struggle. In each of these cases, the use of the word “war” transformed Clausewitz’s famous dictum. War was no longer “the continuation of politics by other means” — war was a tool to increase the potency of a political or ideological position. Yet if the objective or effect of the adoption of a metaphor of war served to heighten the sense of urgency, it must be noted that in each of these cases, the “war” was targeted, not at an enemy, but at an idea or a practice: fear, poverty, malaise, or consumption.
And, on September 20, 2001, George W. Bush famously pronounced that the United States was launching a “war on terror.” This time, there was a human, albeit shadowy, enemy: first Al-Qaeda, then the Taliban, then Saddam Hussein. And yet the war was directed not against a particular regime or person; it was directed against terrorists, and more generally against the idea of “terror.” Like the wars against fear, poverty, malaise, and drugs, the enemy was a concept, but like a “real” war, the war on terror would be fought with bullets and bombers.
George W. Bush’s war on terror revealed how dangerous the mobilization of the word “war” can be. War, after all, is invoked to permit the otherwise impermissible. The essence of war is to have an enemy; against that enemy, actions that would be impermissible if directed at a civilian are permissible. In peacetime, holding people who have neither been charged nor convicted of a crime is impermissible; in war, taking the enemy prisoner is legitimate. In peacetime, people have the right of habeas corpus; in wartime, the enemy has no such right. In peacetime, people have freedom of speech; in wartime, governments censor newspapers and read the mail to avoid giving succor or information to the enemy. In peacetime, killing people is a crime; in wartime, we kill those we suspect of being our enemy. To call something a war is to ask that we not be found by the rules.
Back to militarization and Missouri. In Ferguson, we see police officers who are not only armed for war by the Pentagon — but we also see police officers who have internalized the logic of war. Soldiers — combatants – train their weapons on the enemy. The essence of policing is to provide justice and security. These are fundamentally different things, but the language of war and the materiel of the military has so permeated our police forces that they have been rendered senseless. What kind of person takes aim at peaceful crowd? A person who is convinced that crowd is the enemy. What leads a police officer to think of the public as the enemy? The language and material of war.
Unmoored from the bloody reality of conflict, divorced from the horrors of the dead, the injured, the maimed, and the homeless, war — against fear, against poverty, against malaise, and even against terror — is a way to amplify our emotions, work us up, do things we ought perhaps not do. It is well to remember what people who understood real war have said. A century and a half ago, William Tecumseh Sherman, no stranger to war and no stranger to victory, wrote this:
I confess, without shame, that I am sick and tired of fighting — its glory is all moonshine; even success the most brilliant is over dead and mangled bodies, with the anguish and lamentations of distant families, appealing to me for sons, husbands, and fathers. You too, have seen these things, and I know you also are tired of the war, and are willing to let the civil tribunals resume their place.
Cited in B. H. Liddell Hart, Sherman: Soldier, Realist, American, 1929.
War with all of its horror cannot be the template for our actions. We are tired of war, and we must be eager to let civil tribunal and civil police retake their place in American public life.
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