The military role in internal defense and security: some problems
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A key issue in the post-Cold War world is whether military forces should be deployed
in domestic law enforcement missions. Advocates of military involvement in domestic
law enforcement see it as a useful strategy for avoiding immediate force reductions. In
many new democracies this practice is not even questioned. Due to the traditional
involvement of the military in law enforcement missions, when violence breaks out
policy-makers and society-at-large assume that the military should be brought in.
This paper will analyze some of the difficulties that emerge when the military is
employed in domestic law enforcement. It discusses the American military's involvement
in riot control in Los Angeles in 1992, the British military's thirty-year experience of riot
control and counter-terrorism in Northern Ireland, and some lessons we derive from these
two cases. In Los Angeles and Britain, public officials deployed the military in law
enforcement missions as an act of desperation, without giving much thought to the impact
that these decisions might have on military organizations, democratic practices, and the
orderly functioning of civilian law enforcement agencies.
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