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Blue armies, khaki police, and the cavalry on the new American frontier: the police--military distinction is in danger of collapsing as security becomes the sole source of political legitimacy.

Article Excerpt
Nine days after the 9/11 attacks on New York Washington, President Bush announced the 'war on terror'. The declaration of war and its pursuit through Afghanistan, Iraq and in the 'homeland' mark a decisive moment in the history of the world. The moment is momentous, not because it ushers in a new era, but because it represents the culmination, intensification and coming to light of major shifts in global politics that have been bubbling and brewing below the surface for the previous three decades. United States Vice President Dick Cheney let the cat out of the bag when he said that the discovery of a new 'great enemy' post 9/11 meant that his country's role in the world had finally become 'clear'. Ground Zero provided a firm base from which to launch a new but premeditated stage in the thrust for American power. Simultaneously governments around the world harvested the garden of terror in the fog of fear surrounding the collapse of the Twin Towers by implementing 'security' measures which, in less emotionally clouded times, would be rejected as too draconian. Although touted as responses to extraordinary events, these changes mark a new zenith in an ongoing power shift between state and subject in liberal democracies. The new openness brings novel opportunities to analyse and understand the changing contours of state and global power.

One major shift in the nature of state power and global politics that the 'war on terror' illuminated is the progressive erosion of the boundaries between military and police action. Hardt and Negri anticipated this in their influential book Empire:

Every imperial war is a civil war, a police action--from Los Angeles and Granada to Mogadishu and Sarajevo. In fact, the separation of tasks between the external and the internal arms of power (between the army and the police, the CIA and the FBI) is increasingly vague told indeterminate.

On the war's international front, military interventions take the form of peacekeeping police actions, while on the home front, the military are increasingly engaged or prepared for internal intervention, with policing taking a turn towards the paramilitary. The ramping up of police and military 'counter-terrorist' capacity post 9/11 and the hybrid of khaki police and blue armies this has created, is the endpoint or new beginning in a significant change in the state's coercive capacities.

Prior to the mid-1970s democracies of the Anglo-American tradition maintained a strict demarcation between the police and the military....