Rob,

Good post as usual.

Much of our difficulty in understanding this is in our own culture--there is that word again--in that we as a military do not train, study, consider, much less talk about a paramilitary function of policing our populace. That drives us when we encounter a need to develop such a force, we turn to USAID as we did in Vietnam and the Congo. Ken can speak to the former; I studied the latter as part of what we did to control unrest in the Congo. In my look at it, the results were to say the least incongruous--a view echoed by MG (ret) DV Rattan when I interviewed him. He was in the Congo as a LTC logistics advisor. USAID literally hired former State Troopers and sent them to the Congo to train police. They went complete with Smokey the Bear Hats and "Where you From, Boy!?!" attitudes. It just did not work.

From where I sit we essentially did the same in Iraq--we hired Benard K out of NYC as a darling of Rudy G to advise us on how to rebuild (That word is inappropriate to say the least as Iraq's police were never built to do what Western police do) the Iraqi police.

I agree with Ken and Norfolk on the gendarmerie and national police model ala the Canadian Mounties. The problem we have is that we do not have a viable model inside the US military to draw on.

Going back to the Congo, by the time I joined Stan there in 1993, Zaire had multiple layers of police, paramilitary, military, and outright populace intimidation forces. Each had its own foreign sponsor and each acted somewhat in accordance with the tranferred values of the sponsor. For example, Egypt had long sponsored the Guarde Civile--modeled on Egypt's national gendarmeire. Israel had long sponsored the Division Speciale Du President as the guarantor of Mobutu's control. The GC and the DSP were in almost constant friction that could turn kinetic in a heartbeat. We even had a mini-war between cellular phone companies over who would control the Kinshasa market. The GC and DSP were on opposing sides and shot at each other as they attacked the competitor's base station.

In contrast, Rwanda had long had an army and a gendarmerie and when the rebels assumed control they fell in on that model and made it work--without outside advice.

Best

Tom