Photo By Randi Lynn Beach For The Washington Post Photo I recently stumbled across this article from the Washington Post on veterans teaching COIN techniques to police handling gang issues. The mayor is asking for 84 more officers but has yet to receive a response for funding. Sound familiar?
Since February, combat veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan have been advising Salinas police on counterinsurgency strategy, bringing lessons from the battlefield to the meanest streets in an American city.Law enforcement is moving to this population-centric military approach that was based on the best practices in...law enforcement. Apparently the military was not the only occupational field that forgot how to do a foot patrol.
"This is our surge," said Donohue, who solicited the assistance from the elite Naval Postgraduate School, 20 miles and a world away in Monterey. "When the public heard about this, they thought we were going to send the Navy SEALs into Salinas."
In fact, the cavalry arrived in civvies, carrying laptops rather than M-16s and software instead of mortars. In this case, the most valuable military asset turned out to be an idea: Change the dynamic in the community and victory can follow.
"It's a little laboratory," said retired Col. Hy Rothstein, the former Army career officer in Special Forces who heads the team of 15 faculty members and students, mostly naval officers taking time between deployments to pick up a master's degree. Their effort in Salinas counts as extracurricular and is necessarily voluntary, given the constitutional bar on the military operating within U.S. borders.
You can read the full article at the link below:
Iraq's lessons, on the home front
Volunteer veterans help California city use counterinsurgency strategy to stem gang violence
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