The Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 generally prohibits military forces from performing ordinary civilian law enforcement functions such as arrest, surveillance, interdiction, search and seizure. This long standing rule was changed by the Obama Administration in early 2013 and those changes are reflected in new Military Purpose Doctrine that is worth noting. The Military Purpose Doctrine provides that, "law enforcement actions that are performed primarily for a military purpose, even when incidentally assisting civil authorities, will not violate the PCA [Posse Comitatus Act]."
"Defense Support of Civil Authorities," Joint Publication 3-28, July 31, 2013:
The publication introduces a new addition to the DoD lexicon: "complex catastrophe." A complex catastrophe is anything that the federal government feels it to be. If you ever had a college accounting class, I'm sure you counted widgets with the rest of the students. A widget could be anything. A complex catastrophe is a widget.
A complex catastrophe (which may "magnify requirements for defense support of civil authorities") is defined as: "Any natural or man-made incident, including cyberspace attack, power grid failure, and terrorism, which results in cascading failures of multiple, interdependent, critical, life-sustaining infrastructure sectors and causes extraordinary levels of mass casualties, damage or disruption severely affecting the population, environment, economy, public health, national morale, response efforts, and/or government functions."
The big question is one of "what does this mean to me"? It means that the US military can now legally be employed on the streets of your town to combat anything that the USGOV feels is a 'complex catastrophe'. Between 1878 and 2013, it couldn't. In those intervening years, the various state national guard organizations handled 'complex catastrophes', managed by the respective US States. Today, its the Army and Marines.
Where once it was management from your state capitol, it is now management from the nation's capitol.
I have discussed this earlier on this blog in 2013 and (taking the tinfoil hat off for a moment) while it may be completely harmless, it is still a fundamental change in philosophy.
(replacing the tinfoil hat) Recent revelations about IRS and EPA targeting groups who were politically opposed to the President, domestic intelligence collection that would seem to violate the 4th Amendment are disturbing The amount (Senate filibuster) of effort it took for Congress to force the Attorney General to issue a statement that the USGOV had no present plans to undertake extrajudicial killings of US Citizens by drone aircraft, etc. gives one pause as to the intentions of the new law. -- the NEW NORMAL.
Where once it was management from your state capitol, it is now management from the nation's capitol.
I have discussed this earlier on this blog in 2013 and (taking the tinfoil hat off for a moment) while it may be completely harmless, it is still a fundamental change in philosophy.
(replacing the tinfoil hat) Recent revelations about IRS and EPA targeting groups who were politically opposed to the President, domestic intelligence collection that would seem to violate the 4th Amendment are disturbing The amount (Senate filibuster) of effort it took for Congress to force the Attorney General to issue a statement that the USGOV had no present plans to undertake extrajudicial killings of US Citizens by drone aircraft, etc. gives one pause as to the intentions of the new law. -- the NEW NORMAL.