Ralph Mroz reviews “American Thinking” by Frank Borelli
Frank Borelli is a former soldier and military policeman, and has been a cop and law enforcement trainer and writer for roughly two decades now. He is probably most widely known as the equipment reviewer for the Blackwater Weekly e-zine, and his reviews and articles are read by 500,000 warriors every week.
Frank is one of the new generation of writers and trainers — one of the new generation of real influencers in our field — to have their world view largely informed by the realities of the fourth World War, a.k.a. the war on terrorism.
Born in 1964, Frank is too young to be a member of the baby boom generation of trainers and pundits that are now retiring ... and that too often don’t “get” the nature of the threat that we now face. He is just young enough to qualify as a senior member of “Generation X,” giving him the perfect combination of decades of experience and relative youth. This fact, combined with his far-reaching audience and its concomitant impact, make him a man to watch.
“American Thinking” is a collection of Frank’s writings ranging from the nature of being an American and the service-orientated nature of patriotism, to the training necessary to so serve, to the kinds of threats that we will need to address as patriots and police officers, to the equipment (including mental equipment) we need, to an in depth discussion of the threat that will most define cops of GenX and GenY: terrorism on our soil.
If there’s one theme that defines Frank’s outlook and runs through this book, it is that terrorism will be the standard reality here in the U.S. in a very short time, and that we as a nation, individually as citizens, and each of us as cops, will have to change to deal with it. And it’s not a pretty picture.
Life here will get more violent; the traditional social-work/liability-ruled approach to police work—and to use-of-force in particular—will have to adapt; police officers will have to become genuine warriors. In other words, many of the trends that have defined the careers of baby boomer cops will have to either be reversed or changed.
Short of this, we will become another Europe: appeasing, cowardly, statist, and basically controlled by any world-stage despot or philosophy (such as Whahabbi-style Islam) that has even a tiny number of followers and the armory of any violent gang of today.
Frank is emerging as one of the leading writers on the consequences of this coming reality for law enforcement. He writes to the individual cop — not to the academicians, not to the social critics, but to you and me. His chapters in this book on the meaning of service, on being a cop, on facing up to the task at hand, and on training and preparation for it are critical reading. American Thinking will be one of the seminal publications that define what we are and what we do in this new world.