Herschel Smith has some good questions about what the proposed "Civilian National Security Force" might look like and do:

1. How will this Civilian National Security Force (hereafter CNSF) be just as powerful as men with guns, artillery, ordnance, war ships and aircraft?
2. What will make the CNSF "just as strong" as the U.S. Marine Corps?
3. How will this CNSF implement national security policy?
4. Since the 2009 budget includes just over half a trillion dollars for defense spending (The Captain's Journal supports this, and calls for even more), and since it is judged that this CNSF be "just as well funded" as the military, where will this half a trillion dollars come from?
5. Finally, if he didn't really mean that this CNSF would be the beneficiary of half a trillion dollars (to do with we don't know what), then why did he say so?

The first two points are probably just Obama using hyperbole. There is simply no way that Obama could build a parallel organization that is literally as powerful as the military, since the military has a few million men and women in uniform between active duty service, reserves and the National Guard. Furthermore, it would cost trillions of dollars to build parallel infrastructure and buy parallel armaments, so that is obviously just exaggeration on Obama's part.

Now, as to what the organization might look like, it would probably be something that along the lines of the American Protective League (APL), only run entirely by the federal government. It would be a paramilitary organization--all volunteer--that would essentially act as a combination of a police force and a domestic intelligence agency in the mold of Britain's MI5. Imagine everything you dislike about federal law enforcement, coupled with everything you would be afraid of happening if an intelligence agency were told to specifically target domestic operations. As a melding of law enforcement and intelligence, it would be uniquely suited to dealing with both worlds from a legal point of view.

Finally, to answer points four and five, it's more likely that Obama will dramatically cut defense spending by following Barney Frank's lead. If the defense budget is reduced to $350B from $500B, then that would allow how to spend $350B on a civilian agency for a total of $700B instead of $1T. Now, I think that the matched spending is another area in which Obama has greatly exaggerated on this subject, but it's more realistic when one considers the distinct probability that the Department of Defense will see deep budget cuts under a Democrat-dominated government.

I know many will have a hard time accepting the notion of the Civilian National Security Force being a resurrection of the APL and effectively a secret police force, but there are good reasons for assuming that outcome. If implemented, this new agency will have as its raison d'etre as a task that is likely to give it few legitimate targets large enough to justify itself. It will invariably find itself outclassed by existing intelligence and military agencies who will handle the serious external security threats, and our nation's elite law enforcement agencies will likewise beat it to the aspects of national security work that law enforcement excels at such as investigating funding of terrorism. The only way that it will be able to justify its existence will be to classify new activities as threats to national security.

One way to put it is imagine TSA, with a good chunk of the NSA's surveillance authority, responsible for keeping the public safe from "violent extremism" on the domestic front.