I asked about cops PHYSICALLY detaining and arresting a crowd of angry protesters. Thousands, in an inner city area, not a few dozen protesting a pipeline in the middle of nowhere. How would they do it?
SIri, how do force multiplication, maneuver warfare, rapid dominance, and anti-access/area denial weapon systems work?
Last year is the definitive case example of how this works.
Cops use combined arms -- role-designated infantry on the ground (phalanxes up front, riflemen at back, sharpshooters up top) supported by armored fighting vehicles, with aerial support in the form of heli and drone surveillance -- as a force multiplier. This combined arms force employs maneuver warfare to select for strategically-advantageous ground, and contains and corrals (AKA, kettling) crowds to those locations before engagement. This is also a form of psychological warfare, as kettling and surrounding crowds incites fear and panic in the crowd.
As a prelude to engagement, they deploy anti-access and area denial weapons to degrade opposition's organizational competence, will to engage, and capacity to resist while obfuscating the instigating forces' maneuvers and creating time, ground, and opportunities to launch offensives. That's where tear gas and smoke grenades come in. Once opposition's capacity to resist has been sufficiently degraded, then cops go on the offensive, striking as rapidly and decisively as possible to suppress and defeat opposition with minimal risk not to the opposition forces but rather themselves.
US militaries learned this shit getting their asses handed to them in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq (twice). US militaries came home, some formed private security contractors and consulting firms, and together they taught urban police forces whilst putting military gear in those police forces' hands. Hence, the evolution in counter-protest strategies -- and the escalation of counter-protest -- between the civil rights era and now.
Civil rights protest in the '60s was an ultra-violent clusterfuck because police forces hadn't yet learned how to counter large-scale protest; civil rights protest today is an ultra-violent clusterfuck because police forces
have. The
only difference in counter-insurgency strategy and counter-protest strategy, is insufficient political will to use live rounds and willy pete in the latter, so cops have to satiate their bloodlust with tear gas, rubber bullets, and pepperballs.
Those lessons
also apply to media presence and oversight. Public opinion turned against Vietnam -- and government response to the civil rights movement -- because the media had unfettered access and reported honestly on what was really going on. In the '90s and early '00s (the eras of Iraq, Afghanistan, and Iraq), the government learned and put to practice curating media presence and controlling media access, so the media was not only incapable of reporting inconvenient truths, but they were bought in or bought off to report government-approved narratives. With the rise of social media and citizen reporting, that curation is no longer possible and therefore anyone with a phone or camera in their hands is to be considered part of opposition forces; hence, why cops were prioritizing reporters as targets last year.
Make no mistake, that's exactly what this is. Protest groups aren't viewed as citizens with civil rights and liberties, exercising their Constitutionally-guaranteed rights to assemble and speak. They're viewed as an oppositional force engaged in hostilities in designated AO's, against which counter-insurgency tactics are to be employed to defeat that force, and that end justifies the means. That's
regardless of how violent a protest group may or may not be; that's the assumption by
default and precisely what justifies preemptive militarized "crowd control".
Civil disobedience justifies escalation, and even if protestors aren't engaged in civil disobedience cops are
entirely aware their own "crowd control" strategies incite panic...and that is
precisely why they do it.
Even if someone is skeptical of any word I've said previous, I'll end with this. It's
awfully strange how civil rights protest is never violent
until cops show up and start kettling, isn't it?
