Gendarmerie / Paramilitary Policing (again)

[carl]

I am not sure that is true. In the past we have put together a military force out of the civilian population. They were there for as long as they needed to be, and then they were gone. They were not a "professional" military.

Today you have a different system in the US. A professional military trained to search and destroy. I don't think history is on their side. I think they have a different attitude than there predecessors in WWII or maybe even Korea and Vietnam where the draft was still bringing civilians in for a short stint and then they were gone.

In the Philippines it was largely a professional Army that did the occupying, as it was in the South. The Marine occupation forces in the old days were professionals, as were the soldiers who occupied the American frontier. The draft was an anomaly in American history. A professional force has been the norm. Those forces handled things well enough. The current Army may prefer to concentrate on the bang and boom stuff but given the history of what it has been called upon to do, professional competence would tend to ask that it at least acknowledge that and think about it some.