Between 1944 and 1970, the US routinely discarded thousands of tonnes of functioning arms and munitions into the sea. Aside from those considered ‘surplus’—a weasel word meaning excess, obsolete or unprofitable—the dumping was undertaken to clear the stockpiles for newer weaponry, and to circumvent strict decommissioning protocols.
During Operation CHASE—acronym for cut holes and sink ’em—in 1964-70, the US scuttled entire decommissioned ships loaded with chemical and newly ‘obsolete’ weapons in the deep ocean. The ironically named Operation Davy Jones’ Locker in 1946-48 sank ships loaded with munitions in the North Sea. During the Million-Dollar Point operation in 1945 in the South Pacific, the US Army bulldozed vast amounts of wartime equipment—tanks, jeeps, rifles—into the sea off Espiritu Santo (now in Vanuatu).
Way had to be made for flashy new weaponry from the arms factories that continued to boom, war or no war. The public saw through this uncommon profligacy and forced the US Congress to prohibit weapons jettisoning through the Marine Protection, Research, and Sanctuaries Act—also known as the Ocean Dumping Act—of 1972.
But what about the unstoppable supply line of surplus arms and munitions after 1972? Much of it began filtering down to the police after the start of Richard Nixon’s war on drugs in 1971, and increased exponentially with Ronald Reagan’s escalation of that ‘war’ in 1982. That was when the US Congress first authorised the then department of defense to transfer surplus equipment—in any shape or form, handheld or driven—to law enforcement agencies. By 1997, the ‘1033 Program’ under the National Defense Authorization Act was actively pushing the latest armaments to the police—including in school districts—after marking them, new as they were, as military surplus. The US police are today, in general, considered heavily armed enough to fight wars abroad.
But since the US already has a globalised military, much of this police militarisation is turned against the citizenry, most often during civil rights protests and demonstrations that turn scofflaw—precisely because they are being suppressed. Military-style SWAT teams are today revered in everyday gamer folklore and TV programmes, and ‘killology’ is a neologism that is foundational in police training. The conduit from the military to law enforcement agencies is straightforward, although not kink-free: a portion of the deliveries drop off the backs of trucks, so to speak, and find their way to the very criminals in the drug trade whom the police were originally armed to combat.
Where policial behaviour is easy to track in America—because the media reports it—far less so is the parallel militaristic arming of police forces in the rest of the democratic world.
As Terrance Long, chair of The Hague-based International Dialogue on Underwater Munitions, said in 2016 about chemical weapons dumped on the seabed, “It’s a global problem. It’s not regional, and it’s not isolated.”
Aside from the US, the countries that have notably militarised police are also those that are often pinned by human rights organisations for infractions: Brazil, Colombia, France, Belgium, Israel, Germany, Indonesia, Burundi, Türkiye, Italy, the UK and Mexico, and those like India, Myanmar, Somalia, Sudan, fighting protracted wars on insurgencies.
Israel has its MAGAV or Border Police. The UK annually holds the ‘security and policing’ trade show, which the Campaign Against the Arms Trade described as “a secretive annual event organised by the Home Office and the arms industry trade body”. Türkiye has its Special Operation Teams. In South Africa, military rankings for the police were reintroduced in 2010, and the South African Police Service is trained by the over-armed French Police Nationale in strong-arming protests.
In India, the Union government has increasingly been heavily relying on the Central Armed Police Forces (CAPFs) for regular policing such as during the recent West Bengal election. The size and budget of these forces have grown enormously, aligning federative security with centripetal militarisation. According to the government, in 2024, the CAPFs numbered more than 10.5 lakh. Its budget increase rates have been much higher than the overall military’s: from 12 percent of the defence budget in 1999-2000 to nearly 18 percent in 2016-17 and 22 percent in 2026-27.
State police forces and the CAPFs are primarily supplied through the ordnance factories operating under the defence ministry and bodies like Advanced Weapons and Equipment India Limited. The Modernisation of State Police Forces scheme allows state governments to directly buy weapons like the Sig Sauer 716, Glock pistols and Kalashnikov variants using central funds. State units such as the UP Special Task Force also procure military-grade firearms—M72 5.56mm carbine, P-72 Rapid Engagement Combat Rifle, T-72 Battle Rifle and T-12 12-gauge antidrone semiautomatic shotgun—from domestic private manufacturers.
There can be no return to the maladroit, under-equipped ‘Pandu’, ‘Mama’, ‘Ponda’ or ‘Tholo’—as disparaging as Plod, Schlümpfe, Kiwara, Pały elsewhere. But the police seem to have become what citizens feared they might be: in the words of Tara Tabassi and Andrew Dey in ‘Police militarisation is global’, “a form of social control”.
Soon, the difference between cop and commando may fade.
Kajal Basu | Veteran journalist
(Views are personal)
(kajalrbasu@gmail.com)