Matt Yglesias has written a post proposing a new US military force that operates in foreign and domestic urban environments. It is truly a Foucauldian Boomerang: he proposes a police/security force to meet foreign adversaries in non-US cities that can then be transplanted to "high-crime jurisdictions" in the US for domestic "surges", then back to the colonies again.

The beginning of the framework is that we should reduce the scale of our economic commitment to the military, which over time means not just fiddling with procurement but actually doing less and having a smaller force structure. Less what? In particular, I think we should actually move away from the COIN/MOOTW paradigm and focus on the idea of deterring and defeating military attacks on the United States and sundry allies. It should be possible to do that without representing 50 percent of global defense expenditures, especially when the allies in question are generally the richest countries on earth. []

What we need, I think, is some form of American gendarmerie—a quasi-military federal organization specialized in police/security functions rather than finding and killing bad guys per se. Such a force would, unlike today’s military, have a valuable peacetime domestic role to play as a flexible auxiliary police force that could assist high-crime jurisdictions with the kind of temporary infusion of extra personnel that can help push crime rates down to a lower equilibrium. A “surge” if you will. But it would also be prepared to deploy abroad in the case of contingencies. The regular military would be big enough to beat an adversary (i.e., a lot smaller than the regular one) but it would need to call on the gendarmes (who naturally would need a less French name) to conduct an occupation. This means we wouldn’t be caught lacking capacity in a real emergency, but since the gendarmes would be performing a useful peacetime domestic service politicians would (appropriately) feel that initiating situations that require their mobilization is high cost situation that ought to be avoided if possible.

Any ideas that people had about free expression on the internet, about the value of a free press, about transparency and accountability, about unbiased educational standards, are all being called into question. Political figures who endorsed the value — and the necessity — of journalists pushing through government censorship are now calling for their government to censor journalists.

But this is what I mean. Five-hundred words in, and I still haven’t listed a day’s worth of facts, or addressed the content of the Wikileaks documents, or done much more than amass a collection of links. The only coherent picture I can make out of it all is exceedingly cynical about governments, media and corporate institutions, and overly idealistic about the people donating to Wikileaks, finding ways to circumvent the restrictions that the dominant power structures are imposing and becoming vocal about their dissatisfaction with a system that prizes largely pointless secrecy over truth and accountability.

In fact, the main reason I’m posting this is that the first time I thought about posting about it, I actually questioned whether doing so was in some way dangerous. And the fact that the atmosphere out there is such that it dissuades people from even entering a discussion — that the rhetoric from the government and politicians is having a legitimate chilling effect on the debate — is reason enough to get involved, even in a minor way.

This reaction by obscured or hidden power structures sees to be have been anticipated by Assange beforehand, described in essays from 2006.