Is this tied to the militarization of police? Yes.

Is it tied in the way you think? No.

Here’s the problem. The program the army uses to sell military gear to the cops exists for several reasons, but one of the biggest is congressional earmarks. That is, virtually every dollar in the DoD budget is earmarked – by congress – to fund a SPECIFIC program. For example, that 600 billion dollars we’re spending on the F-35 that not a single general or admiral will say they even want? Earmarked. The armed services are disallowed, by congress, to spend that money the way they – the armed servies, who you’d think would be the experts on the subject – want to. Instead, they’re forced to direct the money to specific projects, and most often, to specific defense contractors.

How is this relevant? Because the program used by the armed services to sell this gear – at bargain basement prices, but still, it’s sold, not gifted – to the police goes into a slush fund that the military can then spend however they want, free of congressional earmarks. Thus, the military depends on these sales of arms to the cops to fund projects that congress doesn’t want to pay for.

Keep in mind, this isn’t the DoD’s preferred solution to any of this. The armed services all have their own logistics divisions who are veritable experts at moving vast quantities of guns, tanks, and anything else an army needs anywhere in record time. They’re better than UPS by most accounts. The DoD certainly doesn’t want to be fighting potential hostiles (anyone remember anything that happened in the 60’s and 70’s when the National Guard was sent in AGAINST the local cops???) who are using the DoD’s own gear. But when they need to direct more money to armor Humvees and aren’t allowed to use the money wasted on the F-35 or the 3,000 surplus Abrams tanks they don’t want, then hey, the money has to come from somewhere.

And guess how else the DoD makes extra pocket change that isn’t earmarked? Yep, Military Surplus Stores. All that gear just lying there for any civilian to walk in and buy it? The armed services sell that gear to the stores, and the money goes into another slush fund.

So here’s the thing. There aren’t a million different kinds of “body armor.” Guns? Thousands. Bullets? Tens of thousands. Body Armor? You can probably count those between your hands and feet, anyway. By far the most prevalent (not counting things like Flak Vests, which really aren’t body armor) is the US’s Interceptor armor. And it is told, by the military itself, to private surplus stores all across the country, to the tune of 2000 or 3000 vests a year. This is because it uses a system of ceramic plates. Once a given plate takes a single round, that plate is useless, and won’t stop anything. The DoD did some number crunching after Desert Storm and figured out it’s actually cheaper for them to sell an entire vest, plates and all, than to replace the single broken plate. So some soldier in Iraq cracks a plate in combat, and boom, it gets sold to a civilian who now has 95% as-good-as-new body armor.

This law intends to do a few things, but it’s motivated by just one thing. It is trying to ensure that the military can still put down a civilian uprising if needed. It is trying to ensure that the army doesn’t have to outfit every soldier with AP rounds to counter the body armor. But mostly, it’s motivated by the same greed that causes the DoD to sell thus stuff in the first place.

Many people have noted – for over a DECADE now – that Dragonskin is a superior kind of body armor over the Interceptor armor in use today. The guy who designed Interceptor, himself a vietnam war vet who still holds a patent and gets regular royalty payments on Interceptor armor sales to the Army, Marines, and (I think) Navy, himself has said, on camera, that he agrees that Dragonskin is a superior product. And it’s cheaper. Yes, the better product is ALSO cheaper.

But the guy who intended it and the company that mass produces it for the DoD are not the same people. The company that makes Interceptor has spent no small amount of coin to ensure that, every time a new DoD budget passes through congress, the funds for body armor are earmarked for Interceptor armor ONLY, not Dragonskin. And so, our troops come home as paraplegics (if at all) because of the inferior body armor that congress stupidly earmarks, as if to imply that senators and congressmen know more about body armor THAN THE ARMY!

That’s the root of this problem. These sales of arms – to civilians who lack the training to know what they hell they’re doing anyway – and to the police are all the symptoms of the root cause, congressional earmarks.

Remove the earmarks, and the DoD can operate on half its current budget while still being better equipped than they are right now, and ill-advised, short sighted programs like these will no longer be needed.