It only took the Allies about a year
Mass deportations are becoming the country’s next “forever war” warns Greg Sargent. Vast sums are pouring into contracts for supplying weapons and gear as well as for building and running concentration camps. (Conservatives who condemn political correctness will give them a politically correct name, and don’t you dare call the deportation effort “ethnic cleansing.”) Sargent warns the momentum behind this effort may be difficult to stop because war profiteers gonna profiteer.
Senator Adam Schiff’s office has got a little list of the handful of private companies making fistfuls of cash helping the Department of Homeland Security stockpile weapons for Donald Trump’s “heavily armed” praetorian guard and “an ever-expanding immigrant carceral state.” In short:
- Tens of millions of dollars to buy lethal weapons, including thousands of AR-style rifles, pistols, and large quantities of accessories, such as optical sights for firearms and suppressors;
- More than $30 million for ammunition; and
- More than $25 million to purchase significant quantities of so-called “less-lethal” weapons and crowd control devices, such as TASERs, pepper sprays, tear gas canisters, and canister launchers.
Sargent warns:
Meanwhile, just like the forever wars, this fiasco is also birthing its own captive constituencies and internal political momentum. This includes everyone from the private contractors supplying it to the large population of MAGA-adjacent young (and not so young) men signing up for ICE, which writer John Ganz describes as “an employment program for the Trumpenproletarian mob.”
Any entity this hypermaterialized—especially one simultaneously aimed at immigrants—will inevitably attract white nationalists and evolve into a political paramilitary force in thrall to ideologically aligned leaders, as Substacker Brian Beutler explains. This is borne out in ICE recruitment messaging, which explicitly seeks to get recruits invested in the mission of achieving national rejuvenation by employing cleansing ethno-nationalist violence.
Trump’s forever war — accomplishing the eradication of unwanted, “filthy, dirty, disgusting” (nonwhite) immigrants from American soil — will take three presidential terms at its current pace, Sargent projects. Longer than the Iraq War.
During that period I was consulting for a client in Charleston, S.C. On my way home each week, I monitored the progress of the Iraq War by counting the number of low boys heading east down I-26 carrying trios of Humvees to the 437th Airlift Wing at Joint Base Charleston on their way to Iraq and Afghanistan. Later it was up-armored humvees and, later still, MRAPs.
Rule 1033
Even when forever wars end, all that equipment does not go to scrap yards. We found that out the hard way with the 1033 program. Polygraph reviewed it last March:
Since then, the 1033 program regularly comes up whenever police respond to protests with a militarized show of force. And for good reason — according to the Pentagon’s Law Enforcement Support Office (which manages the program), more than 8,800 state and local law enforcement agencies have received equipment through the program.
What does any of this have to do with the Iraq War? The troop withdrawal created a ton of surplus armament, which the US military doesn’t like having (otherwise, it’s harder to justify the obscene budget requests it sends to Congress every year). The 1033 program allows it to quickly shed surplus gear.
The Pentagon’s procedure for disposing of “excess” property gives preferential treatment to state and local law enforcement agencies — outside of the military branches, police get first dibs on surplus weapons and equipment. As the chart below shows, as US military forces returned home, massive quantities of combat gear started going to state and local police.
If Congress ever defunds and demobilizes Trump’s domestic ethnic cleansing effort, the U.S. will have to dismantle its “archipelago of enormous new prison camps” and do something with the weapons stockpiles. Expect DHS to have its own 1033 program. Meaning for decades afterwards the country’s police forces will be using up all kinds of cop equipment they have hanging around their police officer stations. Including so-called “less-lethal” weapons and crowd control devices we’ve seen used against citizens with abandon in city after city. Any excuse to play with their big-boy toys.
I assembled a slide show about that 15 years ago during the Occupy movement.
Perhaps I was too optimistic to suggest that it only took the Allies only about a year to liberate the Nazis’ concentration camps.
When the U.S. had allies.