St. Louis County tactical police officers fire tear gas along West Florissant Road near St. Louis, Missouri, to disperse protesters two days after a St. Louis County police officer shot and killed unarmed 18-year-old Michael Brown in Ferguson. Robert Cohen / St. Louis Post-Dispatch/ EPA

Canisters of tear gas thrown indiscriminately into crowds, armored vehicles rolling through city streets and men in camouflage wielding machine guns — it seems like a scene from Fallujah or Kabul or perhaps from the dark days of the U.S. civil rights movement.

But as the world knows, this is Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014.

Even as the community struggles to come to grips with the tragic shooting death of yet another unarmed young African-American man, the events unfolding in Ferguson have thrown a spotlight on a second alarming trend: the increasing militarization of local police departments.

In response to protesters expressing outrage over the killing of 18-year-old Mike Brown, the St. Louis County and Ferguson police departments have turned the streets of this majority-African-American suburb into a veritable war zone, firing rubber bullets, menacing demonstrators with dogs and in general displaying excessive force for the purposes of security and crowd control.

“This militarization that we are witnessing — police officers dressed as soldiers, using military vehicles and military weapons to engage largely unarmed protesters — is outrageous,” said Tom Nolan, chairman of the department of criminal justice at the State University of New York at Plattsburgh, who served for 27 years in the Boston Police Department. “It’s a disgrace.”

But as jarring as the images coming from Ferguson are, experts say the tinderbox situation on the ground was also inevitable, given how the federal government has readily handed over military-grade weapons, armor and equipment to local law enforcement with scant oversight or training.