[BlueTrain]

One of the times the military (not the National Guard) was used was to run the bonus marchers out of town. Ironically, they were WWI veterans and it happened in Washington, D.C. They even used tanks. The commander was MacArthur. This was before my time but one who was living here at the time said that MacArthur overstepped his authority, meaning he went farther than his orders said to, which in this case actually meant crossing the Anacostia River. Truman remembered that when MacArthur wanted to do the same thing in Korea.

The D.C. National Guard was used to help restore order in 1968, too, but I don't know if you want to count that or not.

Regarding the militia, colonial American style, and also the Swiss military system, you should understand that neither was voluntary and were not necessarily popular. In the case of the Swiss, it did not follow that the Swiss generally had a lot of confidence in their own ability to resist the Germans but apparently the leadership of the country at the time (1940) managed to rally the Swiss enough to adopt an active defensive posture. Naturally all this is arguable. The militia was certainly very active on the early American frontier, chiefly against the Indians but also the French. However, there were regular troops, if you can call them that, manning frontier forts all up and down the Alleghenies, chiefly. This period of history was actually quite short, roughly from 1750 to around 1800 (fifty years, not really so short a period) after which the threat to the states had pretty much been eliminated east of the Mississippi, except in the south. The regular troops I mention would have been state troops and existed, as far as I know, only in very limited numbers but the total population was still small.

I don't recall much mention of a militia in the west (beyond the Mississippi) except perhaps for Texas, which of course also had a regularly organized army, even if it was not uniformed. Federal troops carried most of the burden of surpressing the Indians in the west.

In countries like Germany under Hitler and others, it was still the police who carried out anything resembling policing and other bodies apart from the regular armed forces, namely the SS, who mainly did the dirty work of the state. While both Germany and the USSR may have been police states, they were not really military dictatorships. Dictatorships to be sure but generals didn't run the country.