You're assuming the police and the military attract the same sort of people, keep them under the same sort of discipline (or lack thereof for the police), etc.

You're assuming the police and the military attract the same sort of people, keep them under the same sort of discipline (or lack thereof for the police), etc. That's not my impression at all. In fact, there tend to be two different types of militaries, the expeditionary type, which is ours, and the internally focused type, which our increasingly paramilitarized police seem to be becoming. The latter suck when they're asked to fight a "real war", and one advantage we in the US have right now is that their numbers are quite small compared to the size of the nation or our formal military, something less than a million total.