Local government officials are training active duty military soldiers to run communities, re-igniting fears that troops will be used to deal with civil unrest in the event of a total economic collapse or other national emergency in a newly militarized America.

“The 3rd Brigade Combat Team, 10th Mountain Division met with City Manager Mary Corriveau, Mayor Jeff Graham and other City officials gaining insight about city infrastructure,” reports ABC 50.

“Government 101 is a new program that Fort Drum has established to learn from local officials about what it takes to run a community efficiently.”

The 10th Mountain Division is a light infantry division of the United States Army based at Fort Drum, New York that specializes in fighting under harsh terrain and weather conditions. The unit was deployed to Afghanistan in 2006 for one year and then to Iraq in April 2008.

The troops are being prepared for “A sitution where in essence they will become the local government,” said Corriveau.

The program is ostensibly aimed at preparing troops to govern occupied areas of Afghanistan, but as we highlighted over the last two years, the real purpose behind the training could hit a lot closer to home.

A similar program that was announced back in September 2008 involving the 3rd Infantry Division’s 1st Brigade Combat Team was geared around training troops who had recently returned from Afghanistan to conduct “homeland patrols” which began on October 1st of that year.

According to an Army Times report, part of the troops’ mission was to deal with “civil unrest and crowd control” by using non-lethal weapons against the American people. After the announcement caused controversy, the Army Times was forced to issue a clarification, claiming that the non-lethal weapons training was intended for use overseas, but the part about “civil unrest and crowd control,” a complete violation of the Posse Comitatus Act, was not retracted.

In November 2008, Northcom announced that over the course of the following three years, an additional 4,700 troops would be assigned for domestic homeland security missions.

The very next month, the Armed Forces Press Service initiated a propaganda campaign designed to convince the American people that deploying the 3rd Infantry Division in the United States in violation of the Posse Comitatus Act was a good thing, as fully uniformed soldiers were photographed helping to save car wreck victims, in another effort at incrementally conditioning Americans to accept troops on the streets as normal, despite the fact that it is the hallmark of corrupt dictatorships and empires in terminal decline like the former Soviet Union