A great mass of soldiers, estimated at over 150,000 men and women, marched towards Pennsylvania in late June of 1863. Almost half were were led by General Lee, who had made it abundantly clear since the start of hostilities that he planned to push conflict deep into Union territory.

In 1861 Lee had turned down the offer to be a Major General in Washington DC. He instead returned to his home state to command forces in secessionist Virginia. Within a year his plans were to return north with Lt. Gen. Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson; they intended to lead a Confederate Army into Pennsylvania. Resources could not be spared at that time but by 1863, following aggressive tactics and success in the Battle of Chancellorsville, Lee convinced Confederate leaders to let him push forward.

The massive Rebel army was assembled quickly; it had to be made from unseasoned and less confident men than Lee had relied upon in past, which brought challenges in communication. Stonewall Jackson, for example, no longer was part of the plan. He had been gravely wounded by his own soldiers at Chancellorsville. Lee nonetheless hesitated little because of risk that his superiors would change their mind about his strategy.

Many books and articles have been written about the contributing factors to Lee’s decision and his preparations. Whatever he really thought or said by July 1st many thousands of Rebels neared Gettysberg, Pennsylvania and Lee stirred up an urgency to defend the North. A first-person account by a school girl gives a colorful description of when the first ones arrived:

…a dark, dense mass, moving toward town…

“What a horrible sight! There they were, human beings! Clad almost in rags, covered with dust, riding wildly, pell-mell down the hill toward our home! Shouting, yelling most unearthly, cursing, brandishing their revolvers, and firing right and left.

“I was fully persuaded that the Rebels had actually come at last. What they would do with us was a fearful question to my young mind.

“Soon the town was filled with infantry, and then the searching and ransacking began in earnest.

“They wanted horses, clothing, anything and almost everything they could conveniently carry away.

“Nor were they particular about asking. Whatever suited them they took. They did, however, make a formal demand of the town authorities, for a large supply of flour, meat, groceries, shoes, hats and (doubtless, not least in their estimations), ten barrels of whisky; or, in lieu of this five thousand dollars.

The Rebels also were surprised to encounter nearly 10,000 Union men near there. The two sides had been estimating where they would battle when a decision suddenly was made. The importance of this small town elevated quickly and was not lost upon the commanders of the Union forces, as explained in a first-person account by a Union soldier.

Gettysburg was a point of strategic importance, a great many roads, some ten or twelve at least concentrating there, so the army could easily converge to, or, should a further march be necessary, diverge from this point. General Meade, therefore, resolved to try to seize Gettysburg, and accordingly gave the necessary orders for the concentration of his different columns there. Under the new auspices the army brightened, and moved on with a more elastic step towards the yet undefined field of conflict.

And so began escalations of historic proportions. Nearly 90,000 Union soldiers rushed ahead to hold the town against the 75,000 coming Rebels. Right from the start Lee’s charge over his newly formed army, rife with misunderstandings and delayed communication, found itself unable to push through the right and left Union flanks.

July 1st ended in standoff as the Rebels did not fully engage. July 2nd, Lee pushed harder and increased the total dead count to more than 30,000, yet his efforts failed to break the Union line.

He then infamously ordered a full attack on the center. His next in command, General Longstreet, later claimed registering a strong objection:

General, I have been a soldier all my life. I have been with soldiers engaged in fights by couples, by squads, companies, regiments, divisions, and armies, and should know, as well as any one, what soldiers can do. It is my opinion that no fifteen thousand men ever arrayed for battle can take that position.

Whether or not these words were said Lee did not back down from his aggressive plan for the third day and, believing two prior days of flank attacks had weakened the center, gave the order to attack. The plan failed miserably.

Artillery first was unleashed in the early afternoon to weaken the Union line. Ammunition was quickly spent.

About 150 guns opened up at once–the biggest artillery barrage in the history of the North American continent–and thundered with bone-jarring ferocity for nearly two hours.

“…Ammunition nearly out.” Pickett read the note, then took it to Longstreet. “General, shall I advance?” he asked. Longstreet, with no confidence in the attack, could not speak, but merely nodded.

A Union cease-fire during the barrage, meant to conserve ammunition, also may have persuaded the Rebels to move forward. Brigades and regiments then were decimated as they advanced into heavy Union artillery and musket fire.

Within only one hour 7,000 new casualties lay on the battlefield. Lee was forced to withdraw.

When Lee asked [Pickett] to reform his division to repulse a possible counterattack, [Pickett] replied, “I have no division now.”

A series of tactical battles and aggressive maneuvering in the South had brought him success yet Lee’s strategy to bring pressure to the North failed on July 3rd 1863 at Gettysburg.

On July 5th, after a two day train ride from New York, a newspaper reporter arrived in Gettysburg to search for the body of his friend. He wrote home a description of the calamity:

The city is filled with wounded officers, all of whom agree that our loss was at least 30,000, and many estimate it as high as 50,000. I saw a Brigadier General for a few moments, who was wounded in the arm, and who says that his brigade lost 1,200 out of 1,600 men

I mentioned in my Dr. Stuxlove presentation early in 2011, and in later blog posts, it was American policy-makers who were behind the move for Iran to get nuclear capability.

The Washington Post probably said it best in 2005:

Ford’s team endorsed Iranian plans to build a massive nuclear energy industry, but also worked hard to complete a multibillion-dollar deal that would have given Tehran control of large quantities of plutonium and enriched uranium — the two pathways to a nuclear bomb.

[…]

After balking initially, President Gerald R. Ford signed a directive in 1976 offering Tehran the chance to buy and operate a U.S.-built reprocessing facility for extracting plutonium from nuclear reactor fuel. The deal was for a complete “nuclear fuel cycle” — reactors powered by and regenerating fissile materials on a self-sustaining basis.

That is precisely the ability the current administration is trying to prevent Iran from acquiring today.

The story is that Rumsfeld, Cheney and Wolfowitz came back in the Bush administration and sang a completely different tune compared to their work under Ford. The WashPo offers a possible explanation why.

Gary Sick, who handled nonproliferation issues under presidents Ford, Carter and Reagan, said the entire deal was based on trust. “That’s the bottom line.”

“The shah made a big convincing case that Iran was going to run out of gas and oil and they had a growing population and a rapidly increasing demand for energy,” Sick said. “The mullahs make the same argument today, but we don’t trust them.”

That doesn’t really get to the heart of weapons risk. Never mind the energy issue. There are other energy solutions. Why was Iran trusted in nuclear non-proliferation? Or for that matter, why was Pakistan trusted? As Gorbachev used to often tell President Reagan, trust but verify.

Analysis this month by famous political scientist Kenneth N. Waltz might better explain what President Ford’s crew was thinking. Competition between states, in Waltz’s self-described structural realist view, keeps them in check. He writes in “Why Iran Should Get the Bomb” that proliferation would bring stability.

Most U.S., European, and Israeli commentators and policymakers warn that a nuclear-armed Iran would be the worst possible outcome of the current standoff. In fact, it would probably be the best possible result: the one most likely to restore stability to the Middle East.

Perhaps Rumsfeld et al in the 1970s believed this and also held the view that competition would only ever be between Iran and Iraq — at the very most a limited regional affair. After all, Iran was an ally of Israel, sending oil supplies and collaborating on weapons development until the 1980s.

Ironically, the shah teamed with Israel to develop a short-range system after Washington denied his request for Lance missiles. Known as Project Flower, Iran provided the funds and Israel the technology. The monarchy also pursued nuclear technologies, suggesting an interest in a delivery system for nuclear weapons.

A joint Iran-Israel nuclear ballistic missile collaboration? It seems impossible now. But that’s the issue with nuclear proliferation. A long-term irreversible threat to the region let alone America must have occurred to Rumsfeld, Kissinger and anyone even vaguely familiar with Iranian history. We can say the world changed a lot but to work hard for Iran to get the bomb, and then try hard to stop Iran from getting the bomb…Rumsfeld never explained his reversal on an irreversible issue. It certainly puts Stuxnet in a different light when you look at the historic role America and Israel have had with regard to technology in Iran. Wonder if Waltz thinks malware is also good for stability.

Wired did a blistering expose of the transfer of federal military equipment to local law enforcement. There are many elements of the story that make sense in terms of a military-industrial-congressional complex predicted by President Eisenhower. Apparently the lobbyists figured out that a good way to expand federal government spending on military equipment is to setup domestic distribution channels.

On the one hand we should expect to hear arguments along the lines of “if this saves just one life, it’s justified”. That’s a hard point to argue against if a life will actually be saved but it’s mostly speculation. Speculation aside, a good counter-argument is that the move from civilian to military tactics tends to create an imbalance that will seriously damage relations with citizens. If we agree that the police become less effective as they lose respect then the question should be how military equipment affects respect.

I suspect police will have a harder time maintaining respect (aside from respect that comes through intimidation and fear) when they show a need to rely on military-grade technology to solve problems; it will make them appear tactically weak. After all, they are not funded to have the time and resources to maintain a military training program. Without the federal funding to acquire the equipment it would not be possible, but then comes the real costs of ownership. The simple act of acquiring a tank is very different from the complexity of securely storing, maintaining and training with a tank to use it effectively.

So while police departments across the nation may see the military supplies windfall like kids in a candy store, their local citizens undoubtedly will grouse about a much darker or even sinister downside. Wired says some police understand this effect and have warned about it already.

“There’s been an unmistakable trend toward more and more militarization of American law enforcement,” Norm Stamper, former Chief of the Seattle Police Department and author of Breaking Rank: A Top Cop’s Exposé of the Dark Side of American Policing, told Danger Room. During his tenure in Seattle, he clamped down on the WTO protests in 1999, the infamous “Battle in Seattle.” It’s a response he now calls “disastrous.”

According to Stamper, having small local police departments go around with tanks and military gear has “a chilling effect on any effort to strengthen the relationship” between the community and the cops. And that’s not the only danger. “There’s no justification for them having that kind of equipment, for one obvious reason, and that is if they have it, they will find a way to use it. And if they use it they will misuse it altogether too many times,” said Stamper. What happened a year ago in Arizona, when army veteran Jose Guerena was shot down during a drug raid that found no drugs in his house, could very well be an example of that misuse.

If people want to make the argument that the equipment could save a life, they also must confront the growing number of examples where the equipment has caused unnecessary loss of life and property. Wired points out that the equipment is more often used in vain and causes more damage than good.

Wired also gives a long list of cities that already have been buying large amounts and types of military supplies. In a surprise move the Berkeley campus police just applied to get on the military-industrial-congressional complex program; it can now be added to that list.

The University of California – Berkeley Police Department (UCPD) has acquired a $200,000 grant from the Department of Homeland Security to purchase an “Armored Response Counter Attack Truck,” a police department spokesman told Campus Reform on Friday.
The eight-ton vehicle, commonly referred to as a “Bearcat,” is used by U.S. troops on the battlefield and is often equipped with a rotating roof hatch, powered turrets, gun ports, a battering ram, and a weapon system used to remotely engage a target with lethal force.

[…]

Tejada said that although he does know of any incident in the university’s 144-year history in which such a vehicle would have saved a life, the police department would have have liked to deploy it in an incident last year when they mistakenly believed a man had an AK-47 assault rifle.

Clearly the military equipment makes some police feel more prepared to face their worst fears. The issue will soon become whether these police also have calculated how much less safe citizens will feel and what militarization means for an overall objective of keeping the peace. Who really benefits from this trend, aside from the manufacturers? Furthermore, as the police completely change risk calculations have they properly calculated the costs to manage insider threats and to prevent the equipment from being stolen, abused or misused? Consider the recent armored car robbery…it’s a bigger gamble than they might realize and they could soon wish they had never been “given” military tools.