Winning Irregular War

Conflict Geography
ii

Ft. Leavenworth, Kansas

Foreign Military Studies Office (FMSO), 2 March 2018

ISBN: TBD

Winning Irregular War: Conflict Geography builds upon the earlier Winning Insurgent War: Back to Basics, sharing format and about 50% of content.

Although this is a work of the United States Government in accordance 

with Title 17, United States Code, Sections 101 and 105, the opinions, observations and advice in this document are the author’s alone. They are not 

the opinions, observations, advice or practice of the United States Army or 

any other part of the United States Government and do not represent or reflect US Government policy, opinion or practice.

About the Cover Illustration:

Irregular armed conflicts have chartable, controllable natures, and their 

outcomes are subject to long-standing principles. To best comprehend these 

conflicts we need to look closely at the interrelationships of people with their 

surroundings. Just because they are not simple does not mean these contests 

are intractably amorphous affairs. Many constants in their dynamics can be 

rendered in vivid color and detail, much like a 19th Century landscape.

In this panoramic view, Justice and Liberty are held hostage by sinister 

actors. A contest for power has defaulted to those opponents able to orchestrate their iniquity or perhap orchestrate a righteous response to that 

iniquity. Included as backdrop are mundane elements -- parachutists, pickup trucks and pumpkins -- along with non-corporeal influences -- devils, 

dragons and death worms. A key investigative challenge in preparing for 

effective action (for winning) in such landscapes is to illuminate hidden 

identities, interests and whereabouts of shadowy, but nevertheless exposable transgressors, violators, perpetrators, trespassers.

What had been the image of a Sherlock Holmes on the cover of Winning 

Insurgent War has now transformed into an Oliver Wendell Holmestype. It is 

a fitting adjustment of allusions, the earlier one tied to investigative prowess

and the latter to the movement of matters toward the institutions of justice. Evidence of crimesisto be discovered in a conflictive landscape; indictments can 

also be found, but most must be willed. Sherlock might have said, ‘the game is 

afoot’, and Oliver, ‘when we study law, we are not studying a mystery’.

On the cover, ominous threats hang dangerously like the sword of Damocles or aggressively advance -- sometimes punctuating the countryside as 

surprising, limb-wrenching detonations. Always accompanied by human error 

and carelessness, and by illicit commerce, irregular wars endanger the innocent. Perhaps not always bad, and not inevitable, they can be lost -- or won.
iii

DEDICATION

To Chuck’s arm, which he nobly left on the other side of the world.
iv
v

QUICK START: HOW TO READ THIS BOOK

Best would be to take a traditional approach, reading the sections in numerical sequence; but you can also read the first seven-to-fifteen sections, then 

the last several, then the middle (say 68-76), then skip around. Going backward

from 144 to 1 will work, or you can peruse the Contents and go to whatever 

sections interest you, hopefully all of them. After the last section there is a onepage restatement and a three-page synthesis.

Some of the sections have expansive titles like Legitimacy or Human 

Rights. They aren’t intended to encapsulate those subjects, but just tie those 

themes to the book’s central assertions. Other titles, like Dogs and Mules, 

or Forts and Walls, or Poop are less abstract, but relate to the same assertions. Those assertions, or propositions, include:

• An impunity-based definition of success and victory;

• Attention to anonymity as a competitive emphasis;

• Inventorying as an indispensable knowledge activity;

• The route of escape as a key geographic concept for strategy;

• The result of the pursuit as the measure of operational success;

• Deception as a compulsory element of strategic thinking;

• Geography as the academic discipline of choice;

• Property analysis as a tool for exposing the distribution of power;

• Risk distance as a key variable in the measurement of relative power;

• Civil engineering and construction as noble activities;

• Fusion of classic strategy to forensics, art and rectitude;

• Formal property regimes as a basis of peaceful social compacts.

‘Winning’ means dominating your enemies, hopefully without creating too many more of them. It may on rare occasion mean changing, 

building or re-building places so as to not create or empower enemies.

Building such places requires that ideology, political philosophy, epistemology, engineering, shooting and art all get along, so the book assumes 

these things cannot be distanced one from another. At the bottom of each

section are jokes, sayings or pieces of poetry enclosed in scrollwork (). 

They are interrelated in a way similar to the text, and with the text. They are 

like the fins on a `60 Cadillac. They might not make the car go faster; but 

they’ll make it seem like it’s going faster. They say Cadillac a little louder,

and over time they can preserve the value of a car more than its engine can.
vi



“Remember, we are talking about revolution, not revelation. You can 

shoot too high as well as too low. First, there are no rules for revolution 

any more than there are rules for love or rules for happiness, but there 

are rules for radicals who want to change the world; there are certain 

central concepts of action in human politics that operate regardless of 

the scene or the time.”0F

1

Saul Alinsky

Rules for Radicals

--------------

“The whole experience has left me with not less but more belief in the 

decency of human beings. I hope the account I have given is not too 

misleading. I believe that on such an issue as this no one is or can be 

completely truthful. It is difficult to be certain about anything except 

what you have seen with your own eyes, and consciously or unconsciously everyone writes as a partisan.”1F

2

George Orwell,

Homage to Catalonia

--------------

“Satan is not a fictional character or a figment of the imagination. He 

is a real spiritual being who has a specific agenda: to destroy people’s 

lives and send them to hell.”

Creflo Dollar (attributed)


vii

FOREWORD

This book offers a smorgasbord of topics, presenting a menu and vocabulary both varied and intriguing. It is divided into 144 sections 

encompassing 674 pages, with titles that could interest almost anyone. They 

include, for example, “The Denver Broncos,” “Songs of Chu,” “Mens Rea,” 

“Your Staff Work Sucks,” “Impunity,” “Hohfeldian Grievance Analysis,” 

“The Doomsday Book,” “Magical Realism,” and “Sex.” They provide arrows 

not found in the quiver of most (perhaps any) other strategist or irregular warfare specialist. While the many sections are individually titled and most have 

an independent integrity, they together form larger arguments which are themselves parts of a unified whole.

The book’s contextual canvas transmits readers’ thoughts into some 

areas and conclusions that they probably have never considered. As but one 

example, the following formula for “winning irregular war” was developed 

by a person who read a draft of the book: 

Winning irregular war (WIrW) is equal to imposing early culminating points (IECP) on an opponent (stop his initiatives), 

often by exposing him (EH, eliminating anonymity through the 

use of property and identification methods, perhaps via an effective social compact based on people’s will), then cutting off 

his line of retreat (COLOR, his essence of survival), thus denying him impunity (DHI), and doing so before time expires 

(BTE). The equation offers leaders a template to keep in mind:

WIrW = IECP+ EH + COLOR + DHI + BTE.

The book entertains. A popular culture buff myself, I find what must 

be hundreds of movies, books, cartoons and internet productions referenced 

for their insights or humor, but also their applicability to irregular war. Although a few are purely fanciful, the majority underscore one or more of the 

book’s more serious points. Many of them are curiously related to one another in a way that can cause the reader to enter into a parallel search for 

interconnections among these seemingly random flourishes. Do you like 

personalities? Then you will be introduced to R.V Jones, T. R. Fehrenbach, 

Errico Malatesta, Mary Roach, Margaret Elizabeth Kerr, and Ricardo Asturias, as well as the more familiar Led Zepplin, Joe Namath, and Chuck 

Norris. Looking for a bottom line? The section “Why Are Irregular Wars 

Lost?” provides one answer, as does “Seven Strategy Strains,” as well as

“The Operational Equation.”
Foreword

viii

Dr. Demarest is a lawyer, retired military foreign area officer, strategist 

and Latin America expert. He has doctorates in geography and international 

relations and speaks Spanish fluently. It follows that his perspective would be 

different from those military writers who have been heralded in recent years 

(perhaps, for instance, David Kilcullen, John Nagl, David Petraeus, Stanley 

McChrystal, etcetera). The majority of these authors offered a discussion 

within the context of our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and within a range of 

preferred thinking as to how those wars were to be prosecuted. Dr. Demarest, 

under the umbrella of irregular war, herein outlines an understanding (of what 

to do with power) that is markedly unlike those writings, but without being 

disdainful toward them.

I have repeatedly asked Dr. Demarest who the book’s audience is, but 

he dodges. The number one hundred forty-four can be divided multiple 

ways such that the book’s organization lends itself to course preparation --

to divvy up readings -- so perhaps it is aimed at instructors. The section 

subjects provide a richer and more comprehensive taxonomy (for the filing 

and cross-reference of observations) than, say, PMESII, so perhaps intelligence collectors and academic researchers are a part. As the book seems to 

give almost as much credit to screenwriters as it does to historic military 

figures (for pronounced wisdoms), it seems he intends a wider audience. He 

suggests in his preface that the title ought to be enough: If you want to win 

a war, the book is for you. However, many who would in no way see themselves as competitors in or practitioners of any warfare will find the book an 

enlightening intellectual experience. 

This work expands awareness of irregular war and of warfare, national strategy, and even decision-making generally. It does not channel the 

imagination into any particular scale of activity. It begs the reader to mix

theology, ideology, politics, policy, strategy, operations -- all levels of human thought and endeavor -- in the context of mortal competitions. The 

book admits what the Chinese might call ‘all forms of power’ and how all 

forms of power might be applied to create shi, or strategic advantage. Here, 

however, we have a distinctly American approach for beating wily opponents, whether we would call them insurgents, counter-insurgents, 

separatists, or something else entirely.

 Timothy L. Thomas
ix

AUTHOR’S PREFACE

In the preface to Winning Insurgent War: Back to Basics I stated that 

‘insurgency’ was a place-holder for and center of mass of a broader set of 

conflict types, but that the umbrella category might be named ‘irregular’.

While admitting doubts about the term ‘irregular’, it is the best of the more 

inclusive alternatives. The ‘Terms’ section of a 1960 US Army field manual 

titled Operations Against Irregular Forces states,

Irregular, used in combinations such as irregular forces, irregular activities, and counter-irregular operations, is used in the broad sense to refer to 

all types of nonconventional forces and operations. It includes guerrilla, 

partisans, insurgent, subversive, resistance, terrorist, revolutionary, and 

similar personnel, organizations and methods.

Onto that list we can throw

Anarchy, cocktail war, contingency, counterdrug, counter-latrunculi, genocide, grand felony, gray zone, humanitarian intervention, hybrid, insurrection, 

lawfare, light-intensity or low-intensity conflict, manhunts, new war, occupation, transnational crime, peoples’ war, piracy, postmodern war, privateering, 

punitive expeditions, raids, rebellion, sedition, separatism, small wars, stability 

operations, unconventional, sub-conventional, unrestricted warfare, war 

amongst the people, and combination of the forms of struggle.

You name it. I confess to occasional indiscipline regarding what may be appropriate distinctions between types of irregular conflict; I spent little text parsing 

definitions of the various types, preferring instead to address what to do. Still, 

leaving most of the sub-categories behind, it is useful to emphasize the greater 

degree to which five phenomena are present to influence outcomes in irregular 

as opposed to regular war. They are: the number of civilians or non-fighters

with whom the contenders must deal in-place; psychological factors, especially 

as these influence the non-fighting population; challenges of anonymity; legalities, juridical systems, and lawfare as these influence military outcomes; and the 

variation in types, compositions, and modus operandi of competing armed organizations. I often revert to use of the word insurgency, as autochthonous 

leadership is often at the heart of the matter, even if it doesn’t do justice to a

whole range of organized violence. Still, too many contests would have ended 

early but for the security of lines of finance, supply, evacuation and escape going 

to and from other countries whose governments have taken sides.

The set of features that distinguishes irregular war carries with it an 

invitation for military preparations generally. Success in irregular war calls for
Author’s Preface

x

doctrine, organization, training, materiel, education, personnel and facilitiesspecific to it. Universal experience has shown repeatedly that regular forces are not 

suited for irregular war -- not just that they are not optimally suited to it, but that 

they are unsuited to it. Special operations forces in their various guises, the operational portions of intelligence organizations, police, military police or

paramilitary organizations are all better suited. Given that the word regular will 

not aptly describe most of the warfare they envision for the present century, it 

makes sense that so many countries have shifted their designs, resources and 

preparations toward irregular warfare types of forces.

‘Doubling down’ as they say, I made this text even more pretentious 

than the last. Not only do I stick by the claim of showing how to win irregular 

wars, this volume presents the skeleton for a whole new academic sub-discipline, which I call Conflict Geography. You might find parts of this work

disagreeable (putting yourself in good company). Some readers found the epigrams at the ends of the sections in Winning Insurgent War to be distractive, 

irrelevant, frivolous, and even juvenile. For those folk, I added about 300 additional gems. I’m reminded of advice attributed to John Steinbeck regarding 

the reception of one of his books: “Unless a reviewer has the courage to give 

you unqualified praise, I say ignore the bastard.”2 F

3

Control of impunity occupies the center of this book’s definition of 

winning. Impunity is protection from punishment. Building the definition 

of victory around impunity makes good sense, given that if a society does 

not develop some kind of delimitation over organized impunity (that is, if an 

errant entity can defiantly grant impunity to its members), a formula for violent conflict exists, which may be the elemental condition for organized 

violent competition. Impunity has a synonym, immunity, but this latter word 

is usually applied to a wider range of statuses and is less likely to connote a 

wrongdoing. I sense a dynamic as one becomes the other, that is, as immunity becomes impunity and vice versa.

I outline basic elements of victory and defeat in irregular war, but please 

do not infer that I think a State is inherently worth defending or strengthening. I 

lean in the other direction; but the ingredients of State failure and success don’t 

care what I think, and remain the same regardless. If an insurgent wins, his organized impunity might become legalized immunity. Likewise, governments 

often slump toward granting protection from punishment for the corruptions of

a select group. Such behavior invites subversion, sedition, rebellion, insurgency.... So this book starts and ends with impunity, control of which the 

contenders try to achieve. Impunity implies specific geography, which we can 

call sanctuary, which in turn allows us to depict military objectives on a two-
Author’s Preface

xi

dimensional map. Controlling those cartographed objectives (physical spaces) 

might well constitute victory. Generally, victory in a violent political contest 

relates to a balance of human domination and submission. We will seek to 

change or to maintain such a balance, as will our enemies. Our warriors will 

know victory if a balance established by their efforts is recocognized by and 

acceptable to our people.

The second and third sections of this book are about the control of

anonymity, which may be the single most useful vocational theme in the book. 

Some amount of anonymity supports freedom, but anonymity can enable impunity, and so the book highlights efforts that can appropriately sway what I call 

the ‘balance of anonymities’. Like impunity, anonymity is a word we don’t 

see in books on military strategy, so it too needs some defining. It is an 

outlaw imperative (especially in the early stages of forming a defiant group)

to maintain a culture of silence in order to keep oneself and one’s comrades 

or lieutenants from being punished by the authorities. For a defiant leader 

to grant impunity it is necessary that he hide identities and whereabouts.

The next ten or so sections are in one way or another about the line 

of retreat, a geographic concept related to the physical survival of outlaw 

leaders. Impunity is the first semantic guidepost for setting logical objectives, 

and control of anonymity is the first prescription. It is rarely enough, however. 

To stop the defiant leaders from granting impunity, authorities must still 

close with and neutralize them, often meaning capture or kill them. Therefore, the book asserts continuing applicability of classic military operational 

art. In this regard, special emphasis goes to control of lines of communication, 

which include lines of retreat.

If asked to declare a third vocational theme, I would be highlighting

the question ‘where?’ in the set of questions we might use to treat a given 

war. We obsess over why insurgents or criminals act – a valuable question, 

certainly. Of more urgent operational consequence is exactly where and how 

far away. Knowing your enemy’s motives may not matter. If we can’t find 

him, he’ll sneak up on us. Geography as an academic discipline focuses on

where, and also on distance, and distance is intimately related to questions 

of power. Unfortunately, Geography, like most of the social sciences, is 

being weakened by a politically-painted ideological fashion that tears at

things like positivism, empiricism and even optimism. Fortunately, Geography is also the home of Geographic Information Science (GIS), which is 

busily restoring those things.

If imposed upon to highlight a fourth item, that item would be the 

book’s promotion of durable property ownership systems, which we can also 
Author’s Preface

xii

call social compacts. Much of the text is about closing with and destroying 

the enemy, but more of it is about not creating other enemies in the process. 

Property is an axial term for that endeavor.

The book is pro-American. It doesn’t hide my disdain for Anti-Americanism, including its cousins, including: deconstructionism, neo-marxism, anticolonialism, anti-capitalism, post-structuralism and a reigning favorite, progressivism. These isms, and especially the latter, tend to reject maps, GIS, reason, 

engineering, human nature, American football and other good and useful things. 

The whole set is annoying. Post-structuralism and its street version, progressivism, make no bones about not seeking or telling objective truth. They feed on 

patent anti-Americanism and a covert pseudo-epistemology that directly or indirectly but purposefully preferences anti-Americanism. This book takes a dim 

view of that philosophical-ideological surliness. Americans can reach into a rich 

inheritance of their own isms, some of which are appreciated directly in the sections and others by allusion in the epigrams.I’m especially fond of the simplicity 

and exceptionalism of the founding fathers’ framing of the strategic-ideological 

challenge -- that concentration of political power and despotism are correlates. 

It fascinates me that the founders of the republic did not have to suffer the mental 

paradigm of left-and-right. One can hardly imagine today’s political scientist 

being able to function without it, and yet in its total absence, our fraternity of 

American revolutionaries beat the world’s greatest power and founded another. 

It is in awe of this fact of intellectual history that I underline the importance of 

controlling vocabulary and semantics as a first act of strategy-making, especially 

in irregular war.

Although I posit impunity as the central prompt for efficiently stating 

one’s objective in an irregular war, there is no stand-alone prime message in 

this book. The Quick Start mentions twelve key themes, the Restatement 

seven, and I discussed four just above in this Author’s Preface. Counting is 

hard work; there is no utility in an integer of principles that might guide you 

to winning your war. The format of this book is itself intended as a reminder 

that words enslave and categories deceive. The ideas make a soup, not a 

ladder. That said, after each section, I invite you to read eight other sections 

because I’m told ‘ba’ and ‘fa’ sound alike in Chinese -- one word meaning 

‘eight’ and one word meaning ‘luck’ -- and that makes eight a lucky number.

Maybe the book’s attitude will suffice as a center-pole -- that the best 

objective in war is to win, not ‘seek a solution’, ‘prepare conditions for negotiation’, or ‘find a favorable outcome’. Those lesser results might be

acceptable, might be the best you can do, but this book is about how to win. 
Author’s Preface

xiii

Winning means defeating your enemies without creating too many more of 

them. Geometric, geologic, topologic, palpable, pragmatic, empirical, physical aspects of winning are favored herein. Nevertheless, they cannot be 

honestly addressed unless they are mixed with less tangible, bigger things. 

If you insist on a nub-of-nubs summary, however, look at the last three 

words of the book on page 642, at the end of the last column of the index.

As for whom the book was written, the title seeks its audience. The 

text touches on a broad range of subjects. In a Memorial Day speech, Oliver 

Wendell Holmes, Jr., relating why his generation fought in the Civil War, 

suggested that we should share the passion and action of our time. Some 

folk may want to share that passion and action competently. I doubt, however, I can successfully argue why anyone should read the material in this 

book. If one were to ask...

“Why should I seek to know the secrets of philosophy? Why seek to decipher 

the hidden laws of creation that are graven upon the tablets of the rocks, or to 

unravel the history of civilization that is woven in the tissue of our jurisprudence, or to do any great work, either of speculation or of practical affairs? I 

cannot answer him; or at least my answer is as little worth making for any effect 

it will have upon his wishes if he asked why I should eat this, or drink that.”3F

4

“Books are good enough in their own way....”4F

5

 I would like to think 

these pages will be useful to some man or woman who does not wish to be 

one of those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.5F

6

Geoff Demarest



John L. Sullivan: I want this picture to be a commentary on modern 

conditions. Stark realism. The problems that confront the average man.

LeBrand: But with a little sex in it.

John L. Sullivan: A little, but I don't want to stress it. I want this picture to be a document. I want to hold a mirror up to life. I want this to 

be a picture of dignity. A true canvas of the suffering of humanity.

LeBrand: But with a little sex in it. 

John L. Sullivan: With a little sex in it.

from the movie,

Sullivan’s Travels (1941)6F

7


xiv

--Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.--

Photo by Harris and Ewing. Appreciation to old-pic.com.
xv

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

This being a disparate work, the reader will appreciate that many reviewers

and counselors were abused in its making. I apologize to those who deserve personal mention here but who I forget. Several individuals were 

especially generous with their time, and I in turn especially thievish with

their ideas. They are, in no reasoned order: Kathleen Demarest, Kevin 

Benson, Scott Henderson, Tim Thomas, Ivan Welch, Jan Horvath, Les 

Grau, Robert Feldman, Alice Mink, Greg Fontenot, Linda Pride, Karl 

Prinslow, Merle Miyasato, Joel Anderson, Cindy Hurst, Brenda Fiegel, 

Karen Kaya, Tyson Demarest, Kayla Harford, Vince Demarest, Lauren 

Demarest, Chuck Bartles, Matt Stein, Patrick Reanier, Nathan Toronto, 

Stephany Trofino, Jason Warner, Lucas Winter, Dennis Giangreco, 

Charles Martinson, Tom Wilhelm, Ralph Erwin, Randy Love, Rob Kurz, 

Andy Pollock, Kevin Freese, Brian Williams, Steve Gerecke, David Spencer, James Green, James Riely, Rob Arp, Kent Baumann, Aaron Perez, 

Gary Philips, Ernesto Villamizar, Matt Reynolds, Anthony Scheidel, 

Myrna Myers, Eduardo Castillo, David Bailey, Brian Kaiser, Monroe Bonfoey, Cullen Demarest, Paul Kent Baumann, Mathew Kent Baumann,

Mark Monroe, Hommy Rosado, Robert Cassella, Paul Darling, Robert 

Manley and David Hunterchester. Some of you will recognize that many 

of the names come from the Foreign Military Studies Office. A few of 

them, even, are Marines.



“Great job team. Head back to base for debriefing and cocktails.”

Spottswoode in the movie,

Team America: World Police (2004)7F

8


xvi

--Luther Martin--

Etching by Albert Rosenthal, appreciation to Wikimedia Commons 

and Harvard Law School
xvii

CONTENTS

DEDICATION ......................................................................... p. iii

QUICK START......................................................................... p. v

FOREWORD........................................................................... p. vii

AUTHORS PREFACE............................................................. p. ix

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT....................................................... p. xv

CONTENTS .......................................................................... p. xvii

LIST OF MAPS, ILLUSTRATIONS AND PORTRAITS ... p. xxiii

GLOSSARY...........................................................................p. xxv

RESTATEMENT ...................................................................p. 567

SYNTHESIS ..........................................................................p. 569

APPENDIX: MISCELLANEOUS LISTS..............................p. 573

BIBLIOGRAPHY ..................................................................p. 591

ENDNOTES...........................................................................p. 607

INDEX ...................................................................................p. 635

ABOUT THE AUTHOR ........................................................p. 646

SECTIONS 1-144:

1, Impunity...executive strategy..........................................................p. 1 

2, Anonymity...operational art............................................................p. 4 

3, The Domesday Book...executive strategy........................................p. 6 

4, Defining Enemy...executive strategy ............................................p. 11 

5, Vocabulary of Classic Strategy...knowledge process.....................p. 14 

6, The Operational Equation...operational art..................................p. 19 

7, Sanctuary...operational art ............................................................p. 22 

8, Linearity and the Line of Retreat...operational art.......................p. 28 

9, White Bird...historical vignette, Chief Joseph’s failed retreat...........p. 31 

10, Decisive Battle...operational art ..................................................p. 36 

11, Protraction and Diligence...executive strategy ...........................p. 40 

12, Commitment of the Reserve...operational art ............................p. 44 

13, Puthukkudiyirippu...historical vignette, Sri Lankan War..............p. 46 

14, Legitimacy...executive strategy ...................................................p. 52 
Contents

xviii

15, NGOs, IOs, and Unions...environment.......................................p. 56 

16, Presence...operational art ......................................................... p. 62 

17, Keeping Secrets...operational art.................................................p. 65 

18, Best of the Best of the Best...executive strategy..........................p. 69 

19, Mercatus...environment..............................................................p. 73 

20, Rule-of-Law...synthesis .............................................................p. 79 

21, Iximché...historical vignette, warfare in Guatemala circa 1982 ......p. 83 

22, Badassoftheweek.com...environment ........................................p. 93 

23, Mens Rea...environment............................................................p. 96 

24, Ruthlessness and Resolve...environment....................................p. 99 

25, Why Humans Don’t Fight...environment ................................p. 101 

26, The Chaco War...environment .................................................p. 105 

27, ‘Nonviolent’ Action...operational art.........................................p.110 

28, Takeovers and Sieges...operational art......................................p. 116 

29, Heavy Machines...executive strategy........................................p. 119 

30, Control Technology...executive strategy ..................................p. 121 

31, Holes in the Ground...operational art.......................................p. 124 

32, Land-use Planning...knowledge process...................................p. 126 

33, Engineers and Built Environment...environment ....................p. 130 

34, Urban or Rural...environment ..................................................p. 133 

35, Comuna 13...historical vignette, a troubled borough in Medellín ..p. 137 

36, The Denver Broncos...environment .........................................p. 147 

37, School Lunches...operational art...............................................p. 151 

38, Cultural Study for What?...knowledge process.........................p. 153 

39, Socioeconomic Causation...knowledge process ........................p. 155 

40, Popular Support...knowledge process.......................................p. 159 

41, Dear Westy...historical vignette, a letter to Gen. Westmoreland ...p. 163 
Contents

xix

42, Brigands...environment.............................................................p. 170 

43, Sam Spade’s Whereabouts...knowledge process........................p. 174 

44, Political/Military/Administrative...executive strategy .............p. 177 

45, Police or Military...executive strategy ......................................p. 180 

46, Taxation and Debt...environment.............................................p. 186 

47, Why the County...knowledge process ......................................p. 189 

48, Grading the Social Compact...knowledge process ....................p. 192 

49, Territorial Scrutiny...knowledge process..................................p. 195 

50, U.S. Persons...environment.......................................................p. 200 

51, Get Willy...historical vignette, manhunt in part of Colombia ........p. 204 

52, Sovereignty...knowledge process...............................................p. 210 

53, Hohfeldian Grievance Analysis...knowledge process ...............p. 215 

54, Extortion...executive strategy....................................................p. 220 

55, Kidnapping...environment ........................................................p. 223 

56, Militias and Gun Control...executive strategy ..........................p. 225 

57, Dogs and Mules...executive strategy .........................................p. 231 

58, Condottieri...executive strategy.................................................p. 233 

59, Spontaneity...environment........................................................p. 235 

60, War Nouveau...historical vignette, the world circa 1900..............p. 239 

61, The Geography of Dope...environment ....................................p. 248 

62, Bank Robbery...environment....................................................p. 255 

63, Roadblocks and Checkpoints...operational art..........................p. 258 

64, Measuring Distance and Comparing Power ...knlg process ... p. 262 

65, Smuggling...environment..........................................................p. 268

66, GIS...knowledge process............................................................p. 271 

67, Points, Lines, Spaces...knowledge process ................................p. 275 
Contents

xx

68, Scale...knowledge process ............................................................ p. 277 

69, Measuring Effects of Actions on Enemies...knowledge process... p. 281 

70, Measuring Effects of Actions on Structure...knowledge process. p. 288 

71, Jerusalem...historical vignette, the Zionists create a nation state....... p. 293 

72, Land Strategy and Property Strategy...executive strategy ........... p. 300 

73, The Catatumbo...geographical vignette, the bolivarians take .......... p. 306 

74, Refugees and Displaced Persons...environment .......................... p. 313 

75, The Price of Real Estate, and Tourism...knowledge process ....... p. 316 

76, Gender...environment.................................................................. p. 319 

77, Sex...environment ........................................................................ p. 322 

78, Identity... knowledge process ...................................................... p. 326 

79, Suicide... moral compass ............................................................. p. 330 

80, Why You Should Like Geography...knowledge process ............ p. 333 

81, What a Clergy Wants...environment........................................... p. 336 

82, Conflict Thresholds...knowledge process..................................... p. 339 

83, Why Are Irregular Wars Lost?...synthesis ................................. p. 343 

84, Cultures of Violence...environment ............................................ p. 345 

85, Paul Emil von Lettow-Vorbeck...historical vignette, WWI.......... p. 348 

86, Shifting Covet-geographies....environment................................. p. 354 

87, Water Wars...environment.......................................................... p. 356 

88, Escape Geography...operational art ............................................. p. 359 

89, The Dot Game and Go...operational art....................................... p. 362 

90, Prisons and Prisoners....operational art ....................................... p. 364 

91, Forts and Walls....operational art................................................ p. 366 

92, Graves Registration...environment .............................................. p. 371 

93, Diseases and Disasters...environment .......................................... p. 375 
Contents

xxi

94, Poop...environment...................................................................... p. 379 

95, Childhood...moral compass ......................................................... p. 381 

96, Combatant Status...executive strategy.......................................... p. 384 

97, Oviedo...historical vignette, start of the Spanish Civil War .............. p. 386 

98, Jorge Verstrynge and Pio Moa...ideology................................... p. 395 

99, Seven Metropolitan Lines of Effort...operational art, synthesis ... p. 399 

100, What the Foucault?...ideology.................................................. p. 404 

101, Magical Realism...knowledge process ........................................ p. 408 

102, Negotiations...executive strategy................................................ p. 412 

103, Amnesty and Restitution...executive strategy............................ p. 415 

104, Lawfare...executive strategy ....................................................... p. 419 

105, Genocide Geography...knowledge process................................. p. 422 

106, Massacres...historical vignette, repugnancy.................................. p. 428 

107, Guerre d'Algérie...historical vignette, Algerian War.................... p. 434 

108, Common Knowledge...knowledge process ................................ p. 443 

109, Your Staff Work Sucks...knowledge process.............................. p. 446 

110, Knowledge Gaps...knowledge process........................................ p. 450 

111, Knowledge Cultures...knowledge process.................................. p. 454 

112, DIME and PMESII...knowledge process .................................... p. 460 

113, Unrestricted Chi Whiz...executive strategy............................... p. 465 

114, R.V. Jones...knowledge process.................................................. p. 467 

115, Physics of Strategy ...knowledge process .................................. p. 469 

116, Songs of Chu...operational art .................................................... p. 471 

117, Strategic Communication...executive strategy........................... p. 473 

118, Democracy...ideology ............................................................... p. 475 

119, America’s Revolutionary Strategy...ideology and strategy......... p. 479 
Contents

xxii

120, Competition Social Media...environment.................................. p. 481 

121, Dignity and Honor...moral compass.......................................... p. 484 

122, Ulm and Austerlitz...historical vignette, Napoleon...................... p. 487 

123, Sea and Aerospace Power...executive strategy........................... p. 491 

124, Slavery and Underclass...moral compass................................... p. 495 

125, Human Rights...moral compass................................................. p. 498 

126, Particularization of Power...environment................................. p. 502 

127, Between Liberty and Lawrence...historical vignette ................. p. 504 

128, Global Insurgency and Global Trespass...ideology .................. p. 509 

129, Nerd Globe...executive strategy ................................................. p. 512 

130, Globalization...environment ...................................................... p. 516 

131, Is It an Insurgency?...knowledge process................................... p. 521 

132, Turducken and Hybrid...knowledge process ............................. p. 525 

133, Snipers and Assassins...executive strategy.................................. p. 529 

134, Luigi Galleani...historical vignette, violent anarchy...................... p. 531 

135, Borders and Anarchism...executive strategy.............................. p. 534 

136, Weapons...environment............................................................. p. 537 

137, Foreign Support and Foreign Perspective...executive strategy.. p. 541 

138, Raids...historical vignettes, raids, executive strategy...................... p. 545 

139, Strategy of Aggregate Tactics...executive strategy..................... p. 549 

140, Risk Distance and the Pursuit...operational art ......................... p. 552 

141, Thirty-six Stratagems...operational art ...................................... p. 555 

142, Conflict Geography...knowledge process................................... p. 557 

143, Seven Strategy Strains...executive strategy ................................ p. 562 

144, What the Pirate Said to Alexander...moral compass........................p. 564 
xxiii

LIST OF MAPS, ILLUSTRATIONS AND PORTRAITS

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. .................................................p. xiv

Luther Martin.......................................................................p. xvi

Paul Emil von Lettow-Vorbeck.........................................p. xxiv

Montana circa 1878...............................................................p. 35

Sri Lanka circa 2006 .............................................................p. 51

Bolivia, La Paz and El Alto ..................................................p. 61

Guatemalan Highlands circa 1982.......................................p. 92

Chaco War Theater of Operations ....................................p. 109

Comuna 13, Medellín, Colombia circa 2002 .....................p. 146

Southeast Asia Vietnam War Era......................................p. 169

Hell with Limbo (Purgatory?) circa 1300 .........................p. 188

Yoknapatawpha circa 1936 ................................................p. 191

South-central Colombia circa 2012....................................p. 209

World Map circa 1900 ........................................................p. 247

Palestine circa 1920 .............................................................p. 299

The Colombian Catatumbo ................................................p. 312

East Africa circa 1914-1918................................................p. 353

The Revolution of ’34 in Asturias......................................p. 394

Colombia, various locations ...............................................p. 433

French Algeria circa 1954-1962 .........................................p. 442

Europe circa 1805................................................................p. 490

Kansas-Missouri Border circa 1858...................................p. 508

Hedy Lamarr .......................................................................p. 566

John Brown..........................................................................p. 572

Saul Alinsky .........................................................................p. 580

Joseph Bazalgette ................................................................p. 586

Raphael Lemkin ..................................................................p. 590

Miguel de Cervantes............................................................p. 604
xxiv

--Paul Emil von Lettow-Vorbeck--

Appreciation to commons.wikimedia.org
xxv

GLOSSARY 

60974 -- The serial number of Simo Häyhä’s Mosin-Nagant sniper rifle.

Adui tayari -- Swahili meaning ‘the enemy is ready’, that is, battle is nigh.

Amat victoria curam -- Latin meaning if you want to win, prepare. More 

literally perhaps, ‘winning loves preparation.’

Amplius prodest locus saepe quam virtus -- Ground is often more important than valor.

ALN -- The Army of National Liberation, armed force of the FLN in Algeria.

ARVN -- Army of the Republic of Vietnam

Askari -- In much of East Africa, a soldier or policeman.

Anonymity -- condition in which some set of observers lacks sufficient 

knowledge to distinguish the relevant identity of persons or their whereabouts.

AUC – Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia. United Self Defense Forces of Colombia ˗˗ Colombian guerrilla group (anti-leftist, probably rightist) formed in 

the late 1990s, now defunct.

Autochthonous -- Home-grown, indigenous, aboriginal, native, local.

AYBABTU -- Abbreviation of “All Your Base Are Belong To Us,” an internet meme derived from the victory cry made by martyred Taliban leader 

Al-Adquiri-Feinman as Russian General Boris Gromov withdrew across the 

Amu Darya River from Forward Base Khairatan, Afghanistan in February, 

1989; or it is from a Japanese video game called Zero Wing.

Bolivarians or Bolivarian movement -- An identity encompassing shared ideology, agenda and strategic coordination featuring the Cuban and Venezuelan 

governments, several other national governments in the Western Hemisphere 

to a lesser degree, and several armed groups (most notably the FARC and 

ELN). The Bolivarian movement is hard-leftist and Anti-American. Bad.

Built environment -- Man-made surroundings or terrain features. More than 

infrastructure and more than urban, built environment encompasses all features we could not agree were part of the ‘natural’ environment.

Cadastre -- A land or real estate record system, usually concerned with taxes.

Castrametation -- The creation and maintenance of survivable encampments.

CCTV -- Closed-Circuit Television (monitoring cameras).

CEDA -- Confederación de Derechas Autónomas (Confederation of the 

Autonomous Right). Right-of-center political party or movement in Spain 

around the time of the Spanish Civil War in the early 1930s.

CIDG -- Civilian Irregular Defense Group. Vietnam.
Glossary

xxvi

Convoke – Get people together at the same place and time.

Cost Distance -- Distance, but measured in costs. Also known as friction 

distance.

Coup d`oeil -- Ability to quickly discern the competitive significance of a 

place, including the consequences and difficulties of taking, keeping or 

losing possession of it.

Culminating Point -- An imagined point in time and space beyond which it 

seems to the leader imprudent (too costly or too risky to the mission, personnel or resources) to continuing doing something or staying in a place.

DDR -- Demobilization, Disarmament and Reintegration.

Dilatoriness – Tardiness. In this context, a relative tardiness in which the 

enemy’s loop for conceiving, preparing and executing actions is much 

shorter than your own. For instance, he decides to mortar your base, moves 

to his attack position, fires and goes home for lunch; you spend two weeks 

making PowerPoint slides about going after him.

الجزائریة الثورة -- Arabic for French-Algerian War. Big insurgent win.

EGP -- Guerrilla Army of the Poor. Guatemalan armed insurgent group 

(leftist), active 1972 to 1997, now defunct.

Ejido -- A form of communal land tenancy, especially in Mexico.

ELDORADO 5-9970 -- Can you remember that? Also, Eldorado 9-2632.

ELN – Ejército de Liberación Nacional. National Liberation Army ˗˗ Colombian 

guerilla group (leftist) organized in the mid-1960s and active today with perhaps 

1,500 active members.

Enthrall -- To make a slave of; enslave; to put or hold under strong influence; captivate; enchant; fascinate.

Epistemology -- Meta-knowledge, that is, knowledge about knowledge. It 

is the study of the validity, relevance, value, collection, organization and 

testing of knowledge. It is what might separate mere opinion from a wellfounded opinion of consequence. The best intelligence chiefs are dedicated epistemologists.

EPL – Ejército Popular de Liberación. Popular Liberation Army -- Colombian 

guerilla group (leftist) organized in the late 1960s. Mostly demobilized in 1991, a 

small remnant remains active as a narcoguerrilla in northern Colombia.

Exclusive Agency -- Materially valuable condition of being the only authorized representative of a person, group or category of people.

Eyjafjallajökull -- Volcano in Iceland, which erupted in 2010 causing 

flight disruptions across Europe. In Icelandic the word means island 
Glossary

xxvii

mountain glacier. The volcano is covered by an ice cap. It has absolutely 

nothing to do with Puthukkudiyirippu, other than being on a large island.

Etymology -- The study of the origin and development of a word or phrase. 

Neologism, the creation of new words or new meanings for established 

words, is closely related. Neologism connotes jargon (buzz words), but together, etymology and neologism are consequential because the 

terminology with which we describe the environment is such a basic element of strategy-making.

FARC -- Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia. Revolutionary 

Armed Forces of Colombia ˗˗ Colombian guerrilla group (leftist) formed

in the mid-1960s and active today with perhaps 8,000 active members.

Forum of Sao Paulo -- Originally an umbrella-coordinator of remnant Cold 

War marxist-leninist political parties and guerrilla groups. Highly successful 

as a consortium identity, many Forum member parties have taken the reins of 

national governments. The Forum greatly overlaps the Bolivarian movement 

in terms of adherents, agenda and leader personalities. Anti-American. Bad.

Foucault -- Michel Foucault, a heavily-cited leftist French philosopher of the 

mid-20th century highly regarded by sociologists. As a verb: to try to bewilder 

or overawe by way of circular semantic flight, as in, “Major Thomas tried to 

foucault the commander by talking about design.” 

FLN -- National Liberation Front ˗˗ Algerian Insurgent Organization (leftist) active in the 1950s and 1960s, now a legal political party.

FMLN -- Frente Farabundo Martí de (para la) Liberación Nacional, Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front ˗˗ El Salvadoran guerrilla consortium 

(leftist) active in the 1970s and 1980s, now a legal political party.

FMSO -- Foreign Military Studies Office at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas; 

center of the military-intellectual universe, if there is such a thing.

GIS -- Geographic Information Systems or Geographic Information Science.

GPS -- Global Positioning System.

Guerrilla (or guerilla) Warfare -- a type of warfare (perhaps a tactic or a 

strategy, and perhaps a phase within a war) in which at least one of the 

opponents strikes blows, but does not attempt to hold and keep terrain. 

‘Guerrilla’ supposes hit-and-run, as opposed to hit-and-stay.

IGPGEECTMT --Introduction, Geography, People and Society, Government, 

Economy, Energy, Communications, Transportation, Military, Transnational 

Issues. These are the categories used in the CIA’s The World Factbook. It is 

The World Factbook’s way of spelling PMESII.

Imbricate -- overlap in a pattern, like roof tiles or fish scales.

Immunity -- exemption from punishment or cost, probably as a matter of law.
Glossary

xxviii

Impunity -- getting away with wrong-doing.

Incorporeal -- without material body or substance, but existing nevertheless.

In flagrante delictu -- caught in flaming perpetration of an illegality or impropriety; caught ‘red-handed’; with hand ‘in the cookie jar’; outside a bank with 

the bag of stolen money; or with your car in someone else’s garage.

INTERPOL -- International Criminal Police Organization.

IPB -- Intelligence Preparation of the Battlefield.

IO -- International Organization, such as the United Nations, International 

Postal Union, etc. These are not generally classed as NGOs, but they are 

not governments, per se.

IPKF -- Indian Peacekeeping Force.

Irregular War -- A war featuring a relatively greater amount (than regular war) 

of the following five phenomena: civilians or non-fighters with whom the armed 

contenders must deal in-place; psychological factors, especially as these influence the non-fighting population; challenges of anonymity; legalities, juridical 

systems, and lawfare as these influence military outcomes; and the variation in 

types, compositions, and modus operandi of competing armed organizations.

Iximché -- Archeological site in Guatemala at 14°44′8.88′′N 

90°59′46.32′′W. Capital of the Kaqchikuel tribe from about 1470-1524. Iximché was a military geographic center of gravity at several disparate 

moments in history.

Legitimacy -- Alluring abstraction with a beautiful voice, generally depicted 

naked on a rocky cliff, assiduous attention to which can be ruinous.

LTTE --Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, a defeated Sri Lankan insurgent group.

MACV -- The US Military Assistance Command, Vietnam.

Makak pa janm kwe petit-li led -- Haitian saying. A monkey never thinks 

her baby’s ugly. 

MDMP -- Military Decision Making Process. At times these days countered by, compared to, or complemented with ‘design.’ 

M-19 -- 19th of April Movement ˗˗ Colombian guerrilla group (leftist) active 

in the 1970s and 1980s, became a legal political party, now defunct.

Mens Rea -- Latin for criminal intent, herein used in reference to the human 

locus of initiative for wicked acts the impunity for which we cannot abide.

-- Mongolian Death Worms. From what little we know 

of these creatures, the specimen on the right is the female. Lovely.

Money -- Units of exchange and increments of material value and convertible 

wealth or power. Frito says, “I like money.”
Glossary

xxix

Moschi -- Also Moshi, near New Moschi, a place in Tanzania, southeast of Mt. 

Kilimanjaro. For a moment in time, a military geographic center of gravity.

NGO -- Non-Governmental Organization.

ORPA -- Revolutionary Organization of the People in Arms. Guatemalan 

armed insurgent group (leftist), active 1972 to 1997, now defunct.

Paisa -- Person from a region in Colombia that includes the Department of 

Antioquia as well as much of the central coffee-growing region.

Peace -- Rare condition during which no group is applying lethal physical 

coercion to change or maintain a balance of domination and submission.

PMESII -- Political, Military, Economic, Social, Information, Infrastructure.

Post-structuralism -- Late 20thcentury/early 21st century suite of ideas honored 

by some writers as a distinguishable philosophy. Anti-American. Bad.

Postmodern -- Beyond just the technically modern aspects of warfare. A 

fluid mixture of components and conflict types in varying measure. Sometimes used to refer to left-progressive thinking or to post-structural thinking.

Propaedeutic -- A basic-level text, having the nature of an introductory or 

elementary instruction, usually on a broad subject. As in, “This here is a 

propaedeutic.” The ‘deu’ is pronounced like poo.

PSOE -- Partido Socialista Obrero Español (Spanish Workers Socialist 

Party). Led by Largo Caballero and others, the PSOE sparked the Spanish 

Civil War in 1934.

Puthukkudiyirippu -- Last battle place for the Tamil Tigers, where the Sri 

Lankan government killed the Tamil Tigers’ leadership and where the war 

against them ended. It has absolutely nothing to do with Eyjafjallajökull, 

other than being on a large island.

Quiet-title -- Quiet-title is a formal legal euphemism used for a legal process in civil court that decides definitively the ownership of land. The 

court ‘quiets’ the title. Of course, it is not the title that is being quieted.

Risk Distance -- Distance to the ‘culminating point’. The distance to the 

point in time and space when to keep going would be imprudent or too risky.

Radix malorum est cupiditas -- Latin for: Greed is the root of evil.

ම��ද රාජප�ෂ -- Sri Lankan reference to Percy Mahendra ‘Mahinda’ 

Rajapaksa, President of Sri Lanka from 19 November 2005 to 9 January 2015.

Sanctuary -- a safehaven, perhaps from persecution, or, as used in most 

instances in this book, a place where one enjoys impunity.

Schutztruppe -- German colonial protective forces, especially in Germany’s 

African colonies prior to WWI.
Glossary

xxx

Shi -- Strategic advantage.

SLA -- Sri Lankan Army.

SLM/A -- Sudan Liberation Movement/Army.

SLMM -- Sri Lanka Monitoring Mission.

Strategy -- The composite of a leader’s competitive decisions. A plan to 

change or maintain some balance of human domination and submission.

Statute of Frauds -- Legal requirement that important agreements be written.

Surrogates -- Proxies, substitutes, stand-ins, etc. Might be a country’s 

army to the extent it fights on behalf of another country. Might connote 

officers imported from another country or refer to a composition of foreign 

soldiers. It might now even connote persons inspired or impelled by a 

foreign organization via electronic social media to perform some act.

Terrorism -- The unlawful use of violence to intimidate or coerce, ostensibly 

(at least) to favor an organization, ideology, or religious precept.

Tessellated -- tightly seamed in a pattern like the squares of a chessboard.

Toponomy -- The study of place names. 

孟母三迁 -- Chinese title, The Three Moves or Mother Meng’s Three 

Moves, a Chinese parable about a mother who loved her son, Mencius.

UFMCS -- University of Foreign Military and Cultural Studies at Ft. Leavenworth, Kansas.

URNG -- Unidad Revolucionaria Nacional Guatemalteca, Guatemalan 

National Revolutionary Unity. Guatemalan armed insurgent umbrella 

group (leftist), active from 1981 or early 1982. The URNG coordinated 

the EGP and the ORPA. The URNG is now a legal political party. 

War -- Organized human endeavor featuring lethal physical coercion to 

change or maintain a balance of domination and submission or to deny 

impunity; when the US Congress so declares; when lethal crew-served and 

indirect weapons are used in organized fights; meh.

Win -- To achieve satisfaction in an organized armed contest of domination and submission (or to deny impunity) between or among delimited 

human identities, and within delimited territories.

WWF -- World Wide Wrestling Federation (From 1963 to 1979, when it 

became the World Wrestling Federation, until 2002 when it became World 

Wrestling Entertainment, WWE.)

ZANLA -- Zimbabwe African National Liberation Army. Rhodesian-Zimbabwean armed insurgent group (leftist), formed in 1965. Robert Mugabe, a leader 

of ZANLA, is dictator of Zimbabwe. Eh, retired at 93 in November, 2017.
1 Impunity 

1

A State fails that cannot monopolize the granting of impunity

Section 1, Impunity

In most, if not all, irregular wars, somebody organizes to defy a 

State, the State being or acting through a government. By defy I mean 

they don’t pay their taxes, refuse to serve in the military, extort, bribe,

murder, steal, trespass, bomb, rape, give away State secrets, give aid to an 

enemy of the State, or otherwise offend in the eyes of the relevant agents

of the State. When safe in their defiance, we say the defiers enjoy impunity, which means they are somehow resistant to State punishment. The 

word carries a negative connotation distinct from its nicer cousin, immunity. Immunity is gained or conveyed for many reasons and purposes, 

usually within an established system of laws. When a person gets away 

with something they’re not supposed to get away with, they enjoy impunity. When impunity is provided to the ‘they’ by a defiant leader (who 

might be a mobster, clergyman, union leader, insurgent, separatist, spymaster, or something else), a fundamental challenge to the State is put in 

motion. When the State responds (attempting to discipline the transgressors and stop the impunity), and the transgressorsresist violently, we might 

have the beginning of an irregular war.

Maybe the transgressors want to adhere to some other State, or form 

a new one entirely. They may want to destroy the government, or become 

it. The State’s goal in response will not be just to inhibit individuals from 

enjoying impunity, but to prevent another structure of human leadership

from providing or conveying impunity. That defiant grant of impunity is 

the fundamental threat to the power of a State. Therefore...

A durable State controls the power to grant impunity.

Exemption or protection from punishment can be granted in advance. 

The protection from punishment granted to a country’s artillerymen, for instance, probably existed before they pull a lanyard, probably before they were

born. Countries in the international system generally claim a thing called sovereign immunity, considered an admissible expression of State power. If a 

country can grant immunity for future acts of warfare that might be committed 

in other lands, we might say that country has strategic power to that extent. 

However, if some organization can grant premeditated impunity for illegal acts 

to be committed inside the territory of that same country, we might say that 
1 Impunity

2

State is not completely healthy or fully sovereign. Although strategically powerful, it might be failing as a State, at least to the extent of the impunity.

Governments regularly abuse sovereign immunity. If a government 

agent were to perpetrate a corruption, or commit any act that most of us 

would consider immoral, excessive, or normally punishable, and yet is exempted or protected from punishment, we might agree that the operative 

word should be impunity, not immunity. Thus, how we label the protection 

from punishment may depend on whose side we’re on. Still, an impunitybased definition of State success and failure need not imply judgment about 

whether or not a government or a defiant organization is good or bad, moral 

or immoral. Evidence may suggest that impunity is rampant in some territory. That evidence may include an excess of unsolved violent crimes, failed 

prosecutions, and prison escapes. Lack of transparency in government records also hints to a high level of government impunity; likewise the absence 

of free speech. The government in such a place may or may not be failing. 

The impunity we observe may have been granted by the government itself. 

While it may be an unattractive place, with an irresponsible, tyrannical government, even an evil immoral State, it is durable if nobody can effectively 

defy it, or perhaps not even trying to do so. It is not going away soon if no 

other entity can successfully challenge its monopoly over the granting of 

impunity. Other indices of State failure -- based on normative standards 

such as the number of violent crimes, economic wellbeing, breadth of the 

political franchise and so on -- might influence State survival. Impunity is a 

good mental starting place for winning irregular war. It goes to the point.

Impunity has an associated geography. That geography includes the 

places where the offenses occur, where the offenders go to be safe, and the 

routes they take to get there. The most competitively valuable places may 

be the locations of leaders who are able to grant or convey impunity. If 

spaces exist inside a territory where perpetrators are protected from a constituted government, the government fails in those spaces to the extent of 

those offenses. In response, the State can take actions to make the offensive

acts harder to achieve, to otherwise deter the perpetrators, to neutralize them, 

or simply to punish them. The most effective actions are probably those 

directed against those leaders able to grant the impunity.

To win your armed conflict, you will neutralize any capability to 

grant impunity other than by those institutions and mechanisms accredited 

or tolerated by you, your people, system, or society. You will secure the 
1 Impunity 

3

capacity to grant immunity to your agents from the punishments of others, 

even in advance of your agents’ actions, knowing you have the power to 

absolve those you send out to express your dominating will. To progress

in this matter, you will concentrate on the management of anonymity, provide it to your people and their informants, and take it away from your 

enemies. When your enemies are exposed, you will take their wealth, pursue them physically, shut off their routes of escape, close their sanctuaries, 

corner and maybe kill them.

Please see sections: 142, Conflict Geography; 81, What a Clergy Wants; 24, 

Ruthlessness and Resolve; 16, Presence; 72, Land Strategy and Property Strategy; 83 Why Are Irregular Wars Lost?; 54, Extortion; and 23, Mens Rea.



“The right of revolution is an inherent one. When people are 

oppressed by their government, it is a natural right they enjoy to 

relieve themselves of the oppression, if they are strong enough, 

either by withdrawal from it, or by overthrowing it and substituting a government more acceptable.” 8F

9

Ulysses S. Grant

Memoirs (1885)

--------------

“I think somebody fell off the roof. He thought he'd sing to the 

Crime Commission. He won't.”

Truck in the movie,

On the Waterfront (1954)9F

10

--------------

“And have thee’en ta’en, Kinmont Willy,

Withouten either dread or fear?

And forgotten that the bauld Buccleuch

Can back a steed, or shake a spear?”10F

11

from the ballad,

Ballad of Kinmont Willie


2 Anonymity

4

Anonymity -- hinge quality in irregular warfare

Section 2, Anonymity

Anonymity is that obscure quality of going unnoticed or unidentified which helps an insurgent or outlaw act and move without being 

caught. Speed is good, too, but if there were a keyword or ‘nub’ to either 

the survival or demise of insurgency, separatist movement, rebellion, revolution, mafia and other related insults to the State, that word would be 

anonymity. With anonymity rides facility of movement, the possibility of 

surprise, security in escape, sanctuary, and the potential to enjoy illicit 

profits. Whether one is a starship trooper, Che Guevara, an embezzler, a 

whistleblower, or the police chief, calculated attention to the question of 

anonymity may be the difference between success and being shot to death 

in a Bolivian village. There are other variables, other dimensions, other 

preoccupations bearing on violent conflict; this book has a hundred and 

forty-three other sections. Failure to address anonymity, however, is a severely punished negligence.

Perhaps the most consequential operational difference between regular (conventional?) warfare and the more common violent competitions 

considered by this book is anonymity, and how the contenders care for it. 

Your objective will probably not be to eliminate anonymity, but rather to 

change the balance of anonymities in your favor. For a government, this 

may mean the development of ways by which individual members of the

public at-large can anonymously inform about illegal activities -- like an 

anonymous hotline. For the outlaw it can mean creating an environment 

of certain retribution for such ‘ratting’.

For governments, public records are the traditional and proven tool 

for establishing a social environment in which anonymity is difficult to 

achieve and, consequently, for making anti-State behavior dangerous to 

attempt. Because an insurgent leader has to balance the secrecy of his 

whereabouts with a useful degree of public notoriety and political identity, 

he may be concerned more with geographic anonymity than with hiding 

his personal identity as an insurgent leader. Likewise, the same insurgent 

wants to hide the locations of his wealth while maintaining its liquidity. 

Hence, systems that tie specific physical locations to individual identities 

are especially relevant. These systems -- that relate physical geography to 

personal identity and wealth -- are called property systems.
2 Anonymity

5

Careful record-keeping helps make personal anonymity hard to 

maintain, allowing a State to control a population with less physical coercion. Peacefully controlling Big Brother’s excesses, on the other hand, can 

be partly accomplished by making those records publicly transparent. 

Transparent public records are the hallmark of a liberal State, making corruption and tyranny at least a little more difficult. Anonymity might be 

the most significant, even the defining environmental phenomenon in an irregular war -- or it might not be. Instead, the single defining operational 

characteristic might be legal constraint. Nevertheless, when respect for the 

‘rule-of-law’ is an operational preoccupation, then actions that mark or manifest respect for the rule-of-law (like the serving of a warrant, or observance 

of habeas corpus) require control of anonymity. Anonymity and privacy are 

siblings, and, although transparency would seem their nemesis, transparency 

(of government files) can also serve to protect privacy. To push family a 

little further -- if anonymity and privacy are somehow brother-and-sister, 

then anonymity and impunity are at least first cousins.

Please see sections: 43, Sam Spade’s Whereabouts; 30, Control Technology; 38, Cultural Study for What?; 110, Knowledge Gaps;

7, Sanctuary; 35, Comuna 13; 17, Keeping Secrets; and 16, Presence.



“Señor Bond, you got big cojones. You come here, to my 

place, without references, carrying a piece, throwing around 

a lot of money...but you should know something: nobody 

saw you come in, so nobody has to see you go out.”

Franz Sanchez in the movie,

License to Kill (1989)11F

12

--------------

“From now on you'll have no identifying marks of any kind. You'll not 

stand out in any way. Your entire image is crafted to leave no lasting 

memory with anyone you encounter. You're a rumor, recognizable only 

as deja vu and dismissed just as quickly. You don't exist; you were never 

even born. Anonymity is your name. Silence your native tongue.”

Zed in the movie,

Men in Black (1997)12F

13


3 The Domesday Book

6

Hastings is not called the ‘Domesday Battle’

Section 3, The Domesday Book

Historically, few things spell Big Brother better for the English than 

Domesday. William the Conqueror won the battle of Hastings in 1066, 

but it was the census he ordered two decades later that subdued the English. That inventory, which included everything worth anything -- land, 

cattle, gravestones, everything, was put in a big registry, which became 

known as the Domesday Book.

If working for the Government, you can help defeat anti-Government actors and settle mattersif you do an inventory soon and well. 

In any case, without a good inventory, the chances of creating a peaceful 

society are slim to none. If you are a smart insurgent, you will not only 

want to confound the government’s inventories, you will build your own.

If you are in charge, don’t let whatever crew that considers itself 

the ‘action people’ wait for the ‘knowledge people’ to complete an inventory. Don’t let any shiftlessness seep in under the guise of a debate about 

whether or not security comes before or after public administration, census-taking and cadastre-building. (A cadastre is a land registry.) If there 

is to be territorial control by anyone, it will be accomplished in the long 

run on the basis of knowledge about exactly what and who are located 

where within the territory. If your entity (government or other) wants or 

occupies space, count everything in it. If you’re not sure you control territory 24/7, count everything anyway. And, of course, put it all in a 

georeferenced relational database because where stuff is is as significant

as what it is. Everything belongs to someone and everyone has some kind 

of connection with someplace, something, or someone else. Try not being 

anywhere! If you think a person doesn’t belong in a place, you will want 

to talk to him about it, or you might learn the nature of his strangeness the 

wrong way. In short, any debate about whether or not intelligence runs 

operations or operations runs intelligence is just that and no more -- a debate. If you have time to ponder whether induction comes before 

deduction, work on that for a while. Otherwise, proceed with the inventory 

with all available strength. If there is nothing else to do, take inventory.
3 The Domesday Book

7

If it is at all possible, give everybody an ID card. Biometrics can’t be 

allowed to mean just careful physical identification of perpetrators or of someone from whom we want to deny access. Biometrics has to be applied to 

everyone for Big Brother to work as well as it might.

Inventories are the essential Big Brother tool, maybe basically unAmerican, but they can be helpful for the preservation of a liberal social 

compact when constrained by individual liberties and transparency. A transparent, high-quality system of public records can be an aid for checking 

government corruption and controlling Big Brother itself. This book offers 

few items of advice more practical and achievable for countering an armed 

insurgency than the creation of complete inventories within any territories at 

issue. Nevertheless, it is equally true that peaceful, liberal social compacts 

depend on formalized public records of ownership. There exists a singularly 

significant overlap of what for some would appear to be two competing concepts: The public knowledge that underpins a peaceful society and the Big 

Brother intelligence that allows the State to repress resistance and opposition. The quality of records, and rules regarding accessibility to those

records, are central factors for reaching culturally appropriate political balances. If you are not involved in this activity (determination of the types, 

qualities, and management of public records) or, worse, you are oblivious to 

it, you may have absented yourself from the most critical events associated 

with creating a durable, peaceful social compact.

The creation of viable public records is an expensive proposition. 

Your immediate organization will probably not find the number of disposable work hours it would take to do a sufficient inventory -- much less 

create functioning public records. To be successful, you will want to involve as much of the population as possible in the creation of records. For 

this reason you will focus publicly on information members of the public

will themselves own and which empowers their control over their own 

wellbeing as they perceive it. When the knowledge you seek is knowledge

everyone needs and wants, the costs of data collection and input go down 

precipitously. In other words, if you design an inventory that is clearly 

advantageous to the flourishing of peoples’ lives as they see it, the inventory will be much more realizable. Some obvious examples are inventories 

of water and water pollution sources, home titles and appraisals, and insect 

infestation or communicable disease data. Entertainment, tourism and recreational data, or broader market information, are others. The phone book 

with its ‘yellow pages’ is an example, and likewise social Internet sites.
3 The Domesday Book

8

One of the decisions that will most bear on the acceptability of a human 

geographic inventory regardsscale. If the people involved believe information 

will be public at a controllable scale, they are far more likely to participate in 

the inventory. The county (not country) may or may not be the right scale of 

formal territory, but as a beginning assumption the county is a better territorial 

scale for understanding, planning, and prosecuting military, police, or economic development operations than is the country.

Taking the kind of inventory suggested in this section requires technical and social training. New tools are available that can make the work faster 

and more accurate than it was in 1066. Two of the best known are the GPS 

devices available from firms like Garmin and Trimble, or the ID-card making 

and biometrics suites that have come on the market in the last decade. The 

taking of human geographic data, however, must be contemplated and implemented in consonance with the systems of data maintenance and retrieval. 

Gathering human geographic data in a piecemeal or one-off manner in order 

to inform a local commander or leader may be immediately, tactically useful, 

but it might not change the balance of anonymities for any consequential 

length of time. It is good that we might squarely identify Jihadi John with 

voice and face recognition technology. Better if we had that coded to his 

friends’ addresses and their gym memberships.

The business of creating a useful inventory is an easy thing to inspect. Any leader at any level, when questioning the condition of an 

insurgency, for instance, will do well to ask questions about territorial inventories -- about precision, comprehensiveness, transparency, and 

availability. Look to see if you have a record of everyone in your territory

and that any of your foot soldiers can quickly use it to cross-check the ID 

of anyone. If your territory has a weak records or ID-card system, that is 

not a good sign. Don’t know where Mrs. Castro is buried? Not good. 

Can’t quickly tell who is married to whom? Don’t know the relative worth 

of a piece of real estate or who gets the rents from it? A cop can’t quickly 

tell where a motorcycle was bought or where it should be parked at night?

Can’t say where all the licensed doctors live? These are all signs that you 

are at a disadvantage in terms of anonymity control.

Early in 2002, the Colombian government decided to complete a titling 

and property formalization project for hundreds of peasant families in an area 

known as Puerto Leguízamo that was partly under the control of the insurgent 
3 The Domesday Book

9

Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). To proceed, the government functionaries had to present a letter of introduction from the office of 

President Andrés Pastrana to the local FARC commander. The FARC commander knew the value of having precise public records, especially when paid 

for by the government.

In a way, the construction of a regime of regulations that causes a 

population to inventory itself (thereby constraining anonymity) is the pinnacle of intelligence management. Creating a system in which the 

population exposes itself to scrupulous investigation is nothing new. In 

1677, the English Parliament passed the Statute of Frauds. It wasn’t conceived as a domestic spying mechanism. It was a moment of recognition 

that physical technologies, and persons who could put them to use, were 

available in sufficient quantity that they could be applied to thwart human 

dishonesty. From that point on, any important agreement in the realm 

(everything dealing with land was considered important) would have to be 

in writing to be recognized and enforced by the State. Later, agreements 

would have to be signed, then witnessed, then notarized, then copied, photocopied, distributed and even put on the Internet. All of the requirements 

go to the same end -- to make evidence more reliable and court decisions 

more effective. The simple rejection of oral evidence became a competitive advantage of Western civilization. The West systematically prepared 

the legal environment for peaceful conflict resolution. This one cultural 

inheritance has been overlooked or taken for granted, but it is a key to 

peace. The requirement that the evidence of human agreements be precise, 

comprehensive and transparent is much of what makes life in your county 

peaceable. It is what keeps so many of today’s practical geographers at

work in the county courthouse or office of the city manager. There they 

maintain ownership maps, land-use plans and the like. If not for such records, their maintenance, and the courts and markets that apply them, we 

would live in a world of possession by force -- a continual physical struggle. Almost all of the records exist because of some regulation that says

an owner of a boat has to get it tagged before he can put it in the lake, or 

an inspector has to certify that a house is termite-free before it can be sold. 

The records almost grow themselves.

If you are an insurgent leader or a crime boss, it is harder to protect

your followers (for violent acts they perpetrate) in a land that has excellent 

records of who has what, and who is supposed to be where. In a wellinventoried land, you cannot assure the secrecy of your rebels’ identities 
3 The Domesday Book

10

and the locations of their hideouts, cashes, and accounts. You cannot effectively grant them impunity.

Centralized control and manipulation of public records is dangerous to liberty. If you’re an inveterate counterinsurgent, GIS everybody 

and everything. For a social compact that is both durable and liberal, and 

resists Big Brother metastasis, keep records local, maybe at the countylevel, and do not allow public filing of much more than real estate rights, 

professional licenses, motor vehicles, and perhaps the locations of the perpetrators of a few particularly incendiary behaviors, such as pedophilia. 

Greater control of anonymity may be necessary to maintain a monopoly 

over the granting of impunity. Security, justice, and freedom depend on 

and are tied to the control of impunity. If a government is allowed to monopolize access to public records, however, it can grant impunity to a 

privileged few. It becomes the brigand. We then have reason to revolt, 

and will want to grant protection to our rebel followers who defy the State.

Please see sections: 30, Control Technology; 47, Why the County; 72,

Land Strategy and Property Strategy; 92, Graves Registration; 78, Identity; 66, GIS; 108, Common Knowledge; and 49, Territorial Scrutiny.



“This is our land. A land of peace and of plenty. A land of harmony 

and hope. This is our land. Oceania. These are our people. The 

workers, the strivers, the builders. These are our people. The builders of our world, struggling, fighting, bleeding, dying. On the streets 

of our cities and on the far-flung battlefields. Fighting against the 

mutilation of our hopes and dreams.”

Big Brother in the movie,

Nineteen Eighty-Four (1984)13F

14

--------------

KGB officer: Do you want to see me?

Cuban Colonel: Yes... yes. Go to the sporting goods store. From 

the files obtain forms 4473. These will contain descriptions of 

weapons, and lists of private ownership.

from the movie,

Red Dawn (1984)14F

15


11

He will hurt you if you act gently

Section 4, Defining ‘Enemy’

There may be nothing morally inadequate about turning the other 

cheek and not responding to violence or the threat of violence with more 

violence -- even if your own demise, honor, and family are at risk. Peaceful submission is one answer to violent affront. This book is just not about 

that answer. It is about winning, not being dominated, and it supposes 

winning and not submitting may entail violent effort, or at least a sincere 

willingness to use violence. The healthy path is to be careful in designating anyone as enemy, and to be clearheaded regarding the values held at 

risk by the use of violence.

Work to have as specific an identification of the ‘enemy’ as possible -- written on paper as well as in mind. Make sure your denomination 

of enemy concords with that of your boss. The Table of Organization and

Equipment (TO&E) of a tank battalion typically starts out with a mission 

statement something like: ‘To close with and destroy the enemy by firepower, shock action and maneuver’. Such a statement could hardly be 

clearer, subject to agreement regarding who the enemy is. There are, in 

other words, plenty of excellent, inspiring mission statements out there that 

are nevertheless inchoate, that is, not yet fully formed, not yet actionable. 

To aim the tank battalion, or a special operations team or a policeman, we 

need to provide a place and name. Abstractions and the inanimate -- ‘terrorism’, ‘communism’, ‘globalization’ ‘neoliberalism’, or even ‘narcotics’

can all be useful shorthand for expressing solidarity, motivating adherents,

or to create alliances. They might be good for the narrative, but they do 

not help much to solve the operational equation.

In irregular war, given over as it generally is to legal constraints, you 

will want to obtain, as best you can, something like a warrant -- an objectively 

reviewed document that states specifically the persons whose property, life or 

liberty you aim to deprive, where they are to be found, and the nature of their

transgression. It would also be useful to your professional well-being to get a 

statement of the authority and jurisdiction of the person or persons signing the 

warrant. Such a legalistic standard is not just one of domestic rights or liberalism, it is a practicality. To the extent you can meet such a standard, you are 

more likely to enjoy actionable intelligence, implement the rule-of-law, and 

have a greater chance of not wasting time and life. This is as applicable to 

strategic military matters as it is to domestic police matters.
4 Defining Enemy

12

As an intermediate definition of enemy we could say our enemy is 

someone the behavior of which we cannot change by peaceful means before 

they do us grave harm. This ‘clear and present danger’ notion might be presented as, ‘what would you do if a strange man broke into your home and 

threatened your family? Would you shoot?’ Unfortunately, the felt imperative 

of immediate defense may be only occasional or barely recognizable in the 

context of an on-going irregular conflict. Dangers more often sneak up, so a 

definition resting on last resorts might cause hesitancy that in turn makes our 

effective use of force less likely or even dangerous to ourselves, and at least 

not optimal. To enforce a definition of enemy that causes good shooters to 

wait until shooting is the only remaining choice could impose an unnecessary

and less than ethical disadvantage on potential victims.

What, then, of the link between impunity and enemy? American military 

strategy-making, and the practical military operations that might be undertaken 

or measured in support of the strategy-making, generally requires some sensing 

of an intolerable behavior on the part of some armed foreign organization. 

Somebody did something bad, is doing something bad, or we reasonably fear

might do something bad. Whether past, present or future, we decide not to let 

them get away with it, and so, on the spark of not abiding their impunity, the 

mental engine of our strategizing ignites. Denomination of the enemy is, or 

should be, inseparably linked to some intolerable behavior. Elemental in our 

strategy-making is the weave of intolerable behavior, its perpetrator and an idea 

as to the satisfaction we can afford to seek as regards that perpetrator. That satisfaction might be a punishment, reduction or elimination of a behavior, or a 

deterrence that alleviates our fears regarding a future behavior. In any case, we 

will want that satisfaction to constitute a favorable change in the relationship of 

domination and submission existing between us and the transgressors.

The above discussion of enemy identifies with the defense and with the 

victim, preferring that an enemy exist before armed response makes good

sense. You may not be satisfied with a purely defensive definition. You may 

be uninterested in supporting the existing legal regime. Maybe you face irresistible opportunities for material gain and dominion, or to realize 

revolutionary goals that you can achieve by the use of force. You might just 

want to take things. Your enemy might be an entire structure of relationships, 

symbols, preferences, assumptions, fashions, and teachings that keep you and 

yours from enjoying life as you feel you deserve. Maybe someone just offends

your sensibilities and to hell with them. In any case, armed organized violence 

may be the only path you have to gain what you want while you are young
4 Defining Enemy

13

enough to play with it. In that case, you will cite the impossibility of peacefully 

beating the system that denies or despises you, or that you despise. Knock 

yourself out, my angry Alinsky friend. You will not need to fret over the definition of enemy; you’ll have all you need. Rules about the use of force? Ha.

This book preaches definitional specificity, to include specificity as to 

location and spatial extent (physical geography). For effective competitive 

plans, your denomination of an ‘enemy’ (and the warrant that names him)

should specify clear territorial, cartographic boundaries, including jurisdictions, sovereign borders, and sanctuaries. These will feed your measurements

of correlative strength at points of potential engagement, the safe reach of your 

coercive force, and, of course, any paths of retreat you might need.

Please see sections: 22, Badassoftheweek.com; 51, Get Willy; 23, Mens 

Rea; 129, Nerd Globe; 115, Physics of Strategy; 109, Your Staff Work 

Sucks; 144, What the Pirate Said to Alexander; and 16, Presence.



“I believe that force, mitigated so far as it may be by good 

manners, is the ultima ratio, and between two groups of people who want to make inconsistent kinds of worlds,

I see no remedy but force.”15F

16

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

--------------

“We are not about to send American boys nine or ten thousand 

miles away from home to do what Asian boys ought to be doing 

for themselves,”16 F

17

President Lyndon Johnson (1964)

--------------

“We do whatever we want, to whomever we want, at all times.”

Ignignokt in the TV series

Aqua Teen Hunger Force (2001)17F

18

--------------

“Impunity is the midwife to new acts of violence.”

Álvaro Uribe Vélez18F

19


14

Strategy precepts of the pre-flight era

Section 5,

Vocabulary of Classic Strategy

Several of the most influential writers on classic military strategy, 

including Jomini and Clausewitz, were participants in, direct observers of, 

or victims of Napoleon’s campaignsin the late 18th and early 19th centuries. 

Military strategy was already old as an academic discipline, and it was not 

until after the arrival of the revolutionary technologies of the 20th century 

(aircraft and radio in particular) that the basic formulae began to lose their 

grip on the imaginations of military theorists. About when our atmosphere 

became available as a plane of military action, the changes in cost-distances diverted strategic thinking, and less respect was accorded to the 

classic principles. In the 21st century, some strategy writers dismissed the 

ancient vocabulary and its attending concepts as irrelevant -- at least as to 

irregular wars. I think that dismissal was a mistake. Below is a list of 

words we associate with classic western military strategy (Frederick, Marlborough, Jomini, Clausewitz, etc.). The concepts can be applied 

advantageously to irregular conflict.

Mass

It is advantageous to marshal and concentrate force at propitious 

places and moments in time in order to gain at least localized and 

temporary superiority of force over the enemy. Mass, and the complementary notion that it is a general’s vocation to determine where 

and when strength will be marshaled and manifest, are central to 

classic strategy, perhaps its heart.

Culminating Point

The culminating point is an imaginary point in time and space beyond which the continuation of a mission (usually in the form of 

an offensive, an attack, or a pursuit) is, to the leader at least, too 

risky. The culminating point is a favorite topic of discussion in 

military strategy and history circles. Although recent insurgency

literature passes over this concept, it is nevertheless vital to the 

conduct and understanding of irregular armed conflict.

Pursuit

After the leader of force A decides for whatever reason that it is 

time to break or avoid contact with an enemy force B (maybe because he thinks A has been or is about to be beaten by B), force B
5 Vocabulary of Classic Strategy

15

may press the confrontation in order to prevent A’s escape. That’s 

when the pursuit begins. Knowing when to withdraw (and having 

secured a path to do so) is part of the essence of good field generalship. Knowing whether to pursue is also propitious, and the 

decision to pursue is equally wrapped up in an understanding, 

maybe intuitive and maybe studied, of the culminating point.

Envelopment

In order to get around your enemy and to seal off his retreat, you 

might conduct an envelopment. If you are Field Marshal Zhukov 

and have 20,000 tanks at your disposal, you can envelop the German 6th Army at Stalingrad, and take 100,000 men prisoner (95% 

to die later in captivity). The word, according to big-maneuver 

people, is generally reserved for vast thrusts deep into enemy territory. A smaller-scale event might be called a ‘pincer movement’. 

At a smaller scale still, you’re a cop serving an arrest warrant on a 

dangerous felon, and you get a backup squad, so you send it around 

to the back door. All are essentially the same; you want to seal off 

his escape.

Economy of Force

Creation of mass often necessitates economy of force. You can’t 

be everywhere with everything, so you will decide to hold things 

together as best as possible with a small force in one location so 

you will have an advantageous correlation of force in another.

Center of Gravity

This is possibly the most controversial of the classic strategy terms. 

Sometimes it is the place on the battlefield (or maybe a capability 

you or your enemy possesses) domination of which can dramatically change the probable outcome of a contest. It might be thought 

of as a checkmate square, or something your control of which so 

confounds your enemy that the result of the contest is foretold. It 

is a wobbly term used for all kinds of things, however. It can be 

confused with the ‘main objective’, ‘biggest advantage’, or a ‘first 

priority’. Some strategerists enjoy arguing whether or not there can 

be only one or many, or if a center of gravity has to exist at all.

Flank (verb)

You hit your opponent in his side, or get around his side in order to 

threaten his capability to safely withdraw or retreat, or because the 

enemy can’t deliver or place as much firepower on you when you are 

located on his flank. It is not quite an envelopment, which you would 

like to effect from two or all sides, but it can be enough to win. If 
5 Vocabulary of Classic Strategy

16

you’re the one being flanked (or enveloped), you might have to countermarch (go back the way you came) in order to prevent having your 

supplies or your route of retreat cut off.

Lines of Communication

These are the paths established and followed to send and receive 

reinforcements, supplies, orders, information; or, and this is often 

the crux -- to withdraw or retreat. If supply lines to a force are cut, 

that force is often obliged to surrender or retreat, hence supply and 

withdrawal are related.

Commitment of the Reserve

History teaches us that it is a good idea to hold on to some sort of 

mobile reserve force in case things go badly somewhere, a hole 

needs to be plugged, or an attack repulsed; or, in case things go 

well somewhere, there is an opportunity to exploit success and 

break through, pursue, or seal off your enemy’s retreat. In many 

historical, classical battles the contenders each had one reserve 

force, and there seems to have been one good time to use it. If you 

commit your reserve too soon, perhaps to check an enemy breakthrough, and then the enemy starts to succeed in another place, and 

still has his reserve, you might face an unpleasantness. Knowing 

when to commit the reserve has been a traditional measure of good 

generalship. It still applies in irregular war, but the formula of 

types and sizes is distinct. Commitment of the reserve is associated 

with the notion of mass, either to create it or respond to the enemy’s 

focusing of mass. ‘Commitment of the reserve’ also connotes a 

degree of timing or urgency.

Countermarch

You might have to go back the way you came. If you were taking 

the initiative and moving toward an objective (to attack or take 

something), but your enemy threatens to (or has) crossed behind 

you to cut off your lines of communication, you may have to turn 

around and countermarch. When you must turn around all or part 

of your force (because you’re about to be surrounded, flanked or 

enveloped) to retreat or confront some force threatening your escape route or a line of supply, you are usually in a bad situation.

Correlation of Force

This is the comparative relationship of strength at points of potential 

battle. Competent generals try to avoid battle when and where the 

enemy would enjoy an advantageous correlation of force. When 

they have had to risk battle with a superior force, they manage to 
5 Vocabulary of Classic Strategy

17

secure their line of withdrawal, not letting the enemy flank, envelope

or force a countermarch. Whether or not the general might decide to 

withdraw depends in part on his estimation of the correlation of force 

in potential battle. The notion of mass is closely associated in that 

massing is an attempt to produce at least a localized and momentary 

advantage in the correlation of force.

Objective

Objective, as used by classic strategists is a word both obvious and 

abstract. It means the goal, purpose, mission, end, achievement, 

etc. We often read that good strategy balances or reconciles the 

objective with the resources available for achieving the objective 

and the ways or methods for so-doing. Wise enough. In classic 

military strategy, however, the objective was often defined as the 

defeat or destruction of an enemy army, and attainment of that end 

almost always entailed seeking to occupy or control the right places 

on the ground. That process often caused the word objective to 

appear inside circles on maps. Sometimes the circle highlighted 

where the enemy or part of the enemy force was to be destroyed, 

sometimes it highlighted a location the control of which would 

confound the enemy as to his options. Sometimes it was a location 

needed to assure the development or maintenance of the force necessary to achieve one of the above.

The above-listed entries express ‘principles’, which, like canons or 

ancient wisdoms, often oppose one-another. ‘Look before you leap’ versus 

‘He who hesitates is forever lost’, In teaching these principles, or at least in

the literature of classic strategy that remains, few succinct statements present 

the dynamics, the interrelationship of themes, or a guiding equation using 

the ‘principles’ as variables. That interplay of principles was taught mostly 

through the study and comparison of many historical examples. Section 6, 

The Operational Equation discusses a rare exception.

Around the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries, an army might move 

two hundred miles to get within that mile and a half wherein it could bring 

its weapons to bear. Some of today’s weapons can be brought to bear on 

an enemy from almost anywhere at any distance. This is part of the reason 

some people argue that the old operational art of position and movement 

is irrelevant to today’s irregular wars. It is, however, exactly because 

weapons can be brought to bear from vast distances that people resort more 

to guerrilla war, care for their anonymity, dig holes, and invoke legal 

cover. Because of these measures, soldiers often still have to walk up to 
5 Vocabulary of Classic Strategy

18

within personal distances in order to bring their weapons to bear, which 

means rules of position and movement still apply. The notion of correlation of force reminds us that the objective of classic military strategy was 

not to position and maneuver in order to come into contact with the enemy, 

but rather to come into contact where and when a strength advantage could 

be enjoyed (at least for long enough to hit and run).

The principles of classic strategy still apply. One of the most significant aspects of classic strategy, however, is not stated in the principles 

directly, but presumed by them. Strategy does not just happen; it is made. 

The creation of sufficient mass at the right time and place, for instance, is 

the conscious accomplishment of a leader. When the greats of the Napoleonic wars talked about the lessons of strategy, they associated strategic 

competence with some previous leader such as Gustavus Adolphus, Marlborough, or Frederick. Strategy was not spontaneous. The etymology of 

the word strategy, at its Greek root, tells us that it means generalship.

Please see sections: 89, The Dot Game and Go; 33, Engineers and Built Environment; 115, Physics of Strategy; 64, Measuring Distance and Comparing 

Power; 122, Ulm and Austerlitz; 72, Land Strategy and Property Strategy; 

143, Seven Strategy Strains; and 22, Badassoftheweek.com.



“Words had to change their ordinary meaning and to 

take that which was now given them.”19 F

20

Thucydides

--------------

“An inexorable process of attrition, caused by continual pursuit and hardship, wore out the commandos.”20F

21

Arthur Conan Doyle in

The Great Boer War

--------------

“Military science rests upon principles which can never be safely 

violated in the presence of an active and skillful enemy.”21 F

22

Antoine Henri de Jomini


19

The nub of classic military strategy

Section 6,

The Operational Equation

To introduce and illustrate the central concept of this section, I offer

an assertion, written at the end of the non-flight age, summarizing a core 

dynamic of the classic principles. It helps explain how they apply to irregular war. In Outlines of Military Geography (1899), T. Miller Maguire, in 

order to arm his students with a working concept of military strategy, 

stated the following:

Once the reader understands that soldiering and fighting are far 

from synonymous -- that in a campaign combats are occasional 

while marching is constant -- that before entering into battle a general must be most careful to secure his line or lines of retreat; he 

understands the leading principles of strategy, whether he can define the phrase to his satisfaction or not. He sees that a general 

whose road homeward or to his base is threatened or cut by a superior force must, if he loses a decisive battle, be ruined as well 

as defeated; while a general who has secured his line of communication will not be ruined even if defeated, but can fall back, 

procure recruits, replenish his waggons, and begin to fight again 

with a fair prospect of success.22F

23

Maguire’s observation remains valid today, and for every type of 

armed conflict. It has two parts. The first is about movement. Before an 

action, someone is going to travel. Even the lone terrorist doesn’t detonate 

the bomb in his own basement -- at least not intentionally. He moves it to 

some other place for detonation. If he is not a suicide bomber, he also 

wants to safely leave the site of the intended detonation (or not have been 

there at all).

The second part of Maguire’s observation depends on the first, but 

is the more consequential point for understanding the military operational 

problem. The careful leader will make sure his line of withdrawal is secure 

in case he attacks or is attacked by a stronger force. About the only terminal mistake an insurgent leader can make is to get trapped. He can recover 

from everything else. When the leader of the Sendero Luminoso, or the 

Tupamaros, or the Tamil Tigers is caught or killed, it might not take all the 

wind out of the revolution, but it is a severe blow.
6 The Operational Equation

20

The equation isn’t all about physical movement. It is about shaping 

physical reality in order to act prudently and to affect the perceptions and 

mindset of the opposing leader. Another expression from Outlines of Military Geography:

The object of the strategist in drawing up his plan is so to arrange 

his marches and his lines of operations that, on the one hand, if he 

wins the battle he will not only defeat the enemy on the field but 

place him in a situation of much perplexity as to his future action, 

his line of retreat, and his supplies; and, on the other hand, if the 

battle be lost, he will have secured for himself a safe line of retreat, 

and an opportunity of recuperating his strength.23 F

24

Again, there are two parts -- movement and secured options -- but this 

statement weaves them together more tightly, and emphasizes the psychological. Maguire reminds us that contacts don’t just up and happen --

someone makes decisions to be someplace. He also notes that competent 

strategy implies the constant measurement of relative power, but with prudence to know that those measurements will often be wrong.

Maguire’s statements make the line of retreat a central geographic 

concept for military art. This does not diminish the significance of battle. 

Maguire was emphatic in his writings about the primacy of battle. Without 

armed action, an insurgent is just a lawyer or a politician. Without robbery, the thief goes broke. And as far as the State, if it does nothing to 

engage the armed insurgent physically, the latter will continue to attack 

and grow until he is the State. Battle was to Maguire the ultimate military 

preoccupation, but he noted that it did not have to occur in order for it to 

be effective. Potential battle, with its results and consequences as perceived in the minds of the contending leaders, could be enough.

Position and movement is hardly the only strategic approach. Section 143, Seven Strategy Strains, lists others, including extortion, 

annihilation, and surrender. To my way of thinking, position and movement is the most ethical and culturally appropriate for Americans. 

Nevertheless, a multifaceted approach combining position and movement 

with extortion perhaps, or with negotiation, appears nearly universal if not 

necessary. Such mixed strategies are devised around timing, separated 

battlefields, the need to economize force, gain time, or to placate allies. 

They are also driven by uncertainty or deception. In irregular war, you 

will almost always mount a mixed strategy. Whatever mixture you might 
6 The Operational Equation

21

follow, if your efforts disrespect the classic military operational equation, 

they will be less likely to succeed. Maguire was emphatic about the importance of perception and the mindset of opposing leaders, but he also 

insisted that the best way to influence the mind in war is to create advantageous facts of power on the ground. There is little substitute for 

physically confounding your enemy.

Please see sections: 143, Seven Strategy Strains; 60, War Nouveau; 139, 

Strategy of Aggregate Tactics; 102, Negotiations; 59, Spontaneity; 10, 

Decisive Battle; 64, Measuring Distance and Comparing Power; and 

139, Strategy of Aggregate Tactics.



“There are few generals who have run oftener, or more lustily 

than I have done. But I have taken care not to run too far....”24F

25

Nathaniel Greene (1781)

--------------

“French troops in armoured vehicles advanced on Sunday towards a central Malian town abandoned by Islamist rebels after 

days of air strikes, moving cautiously for fear of guerrilla-style 

counterattacks by the al Qaeda-linked fighters.”25 F

26

Bate Felix (2013)

--------------

“To the maximum extent feasible and possible, the fight must be 

taken to the enemy. The enemy must be given cause for concern for 

his own home area and thus restricted in his capability to provide for 

the needs of his guerrilla movement in another area.”26 F

27

General Maxwell Taylor, 1961

(On the war in South Vietnam)

--------------

“The machine, which seems at first to protect us, subjects us 

that much more seriously to the great challenges of nature.”27F

28

(My sorry translation)

Antoine de Saint Exupéry

Terre des Hommes (1939)


22

Anonymity, Distance, Institution

Section 7, Sanctuary

Sanctuary is where one goes to be safe, and more to the point, to 

get away, and still more to the point, to ‘get away with something’. It is 

the where of impunity, the geography of impunity. If you are trying to get 

away, sanctuary is the destination of escape from whomever is trying to 

make you comply, punish you, deter you, etc. It is the where to of your 

retreat or withdrawal. Sanctuaries can be drawn on a map.

I place sanctuaries into three categories: clandestine, physical, and governance. The categories (types, phases, whatever) aren’t mutually exclusive; 

they can combine or meld into one another. As a concept, sanctuary can be 

delimited by time as well as space. You might enjoy a time of the day, week, 

or year during which it is safe to commit this or that nefarious act. If you are 

the leader of some irregular armed force, being in sanctuary means you can 

safely and deliberately plan and initiate. What you plan and initiate will probably include the destruction of some other leader’s sanctuary, probably 

someone working for a government.

Clandestine (or furtive) sanctuary. Safety is provided by anonymity, with perfect anonymity obviating the need to be in any particular place. 

As the pursued, you can move and act in the same geographic space as your

pursuer because he doesn’t know to pursue precisely you. The thing is, as

an insurgent or separatist, at some point you will have to assume a name and 

a public presence, or it will be hard to set much of a movement (insurgent, 

revolutionary, separatist...) in motion. To use ‘social media’ to its fullest,

for instance, people will eventually need a clue as to who you are, even if it 

is just a pseudonym. The rival of the fugitive or anonymous agent can still 

(had better) map the rebel sanctuary. This may have to be done by exception, 

however. A government analyst, for instance, might draw those areas 

wherein he is confident that no subversive can enjoy such sanctuary-by-anonymity. The area drawn might be no bigger than the cone of silence around 

himself and Agent 99, but the purpose of the map is therein revealed -- to

expose the geographic extent of operational insecurity and the need to better 

address the question of controlling anonymity.

A lot can be done in the shadows, but at some point in the proceedings there needs to be some naming, some identity, and that point can occur 

at about the time you as a rebel decide you want to attack something big, like 
7 Sanctuary

23

a government army garrison, but you realize that explosives alone aren’t 

enough to do the trick. (Even the organized crime guy discovers at some 

point that he wants to enjoy the wealth he is gaining, and that it is hard for 

him to drive his Bentley without someone noticing he’s driving a Bentley.)

Physical (often remote) Sanctuary. If you need more than clandestine sanctuary, because for whatever reason you are noticeable or need 

to be noticed, then you must prepare or find a physical sanctuary. You 

don’t abandon secrecy; you attempt to keep your people anonymous and 

your safe havens clandestine to the extent possible. However, you recognize that you need something other than just clandestinity if you are going

to begin hitting-and-running. You need to run to a specific safe place, and 

that means putting distance between yourself and your pursuers. Maybe 

you can maintain enough anonymity and secrecy of destination such that 

you or your subordinates don’t have to travel too far to get away. As you 

become more exposed, however, you will likely look to go someplace 

more remote, remoteness being a product of distance. Purely clandestine

sanctuary does not depend on physical distance, but remote sanctuary 

does. The distances that count are those between the points from which 

your pursuers embark to their culminating points (the points in time and 

space beyond which they feel it is too costly for them to continue to pursue 

you). That is their risk distance. If you are the fugitive, you can shorten

followers’ risk distances, that is, how far they think they can safely continue to pursue. You might do this with weapons, deceptions and so on, 

but most of the distance you need in order to escape will relate to basic 

geographic features. Difficult terrain often gives an advantage to the pursued. A border, especially an international border, can do the same.

Governance (often legal) Sanctuary. If you, as an opponent of a

government, no longer have to settle for hit-and-run actions, but in some 

space can hit-and-hold, then within your new space you can openly identify

yourself and get away with doing some existential stuff like taxing and executing people. You enjoy the perquisites of governance. You’re in charge 

within some territory and are now the one working to keep other entities

(including agents of that government you just defeated in battle) from defying your authority in your newly gained space. You can now bestow upon 

your friends some of the impunity (protection from punishment) that comes 

from governing. You may still have to put distance between yourself and 

pursuers from the still pesky government. You’ll still keep secrets, but with
7 Sanctuary

24

this kind of sanctuary you might not have to constantly retreat to the most 

remote places. As far as you are concerned, the old government you are 

defying also grants impunity to its agents, and the geography of that government’s impunity is the geographic extent that their now (hopefully) 

retreating army can defend. You press on, hitting-and-running where necessary and hitting-and-holding where possible, until you close all of the old 

government’s sanctuaries. You force your enemy to submit, go to remote 

places, into anonymity, or to the gallows.

The sanctuary trinity asserted above is conformable to the common 

notion that insurgencies proceed in distinct phases -- phases that can be 

studied and planned as such. Some trace the idea of three-phase insurgency back to Mao, who used political, guerrilla warfare, and positional

(or regular or conventional).28 F

29 The influential 1970s Guide to the Analysis 

of Insurgency claims that there are four phases: Pre-insurgency, Organizational, Guerrilla Warfare, and Mobile Conventional.2 9F

30 I drop “Preinsurgency” since that implies before insurgency (rebellious thoughts, still 

in the mind and before action), and keep three (organizational, guerrilla, 

conventional), which match many other pronouncements on the subject. I 

can see perhaps throwing in a fourth phase between organizational and guerrilla, which would be a ‘criminal’ or ‘terror’ phase, but for our purposes here, 

we’ll stick with three. The phases, like the types of sanctuary, overlap. The 

matrix below offers how the two (phases of insurgency and types of sanctuary) 

might mash up.

In their beginnings, insurgents especially depend on anonymity. 

They roam within the social space, their status as insurgents protected by 

discretion. Insurgents must eventually expose themselves in order to have 

public identity, and so with any luck they proceed into the guerrilla phase. 

In the guerrilla warfare phase, the insurgents have enough strength to target units of the government public force or other pieces of government 

infrastructure or identity, often beginning in remote areas. They do not 

have enough strength to take and keep terrain, however, so they must retreat after contact. They don’t just retreat into the ether. As long as they 

still enjoy enough clandestinity (can keep secret their personal identities 

and the locations of their physical sanctuaries), some rebel warriors might 

get to sleep at home with their parents or in-laws. As they lose clandestinity, they must retire to remote places, which, by the way, is tedious. Once 

the guerrillas gain enough strength, perhaps by convincing more and more 
7 Sanctuary

25

people to support them with food, money, fighters, and closedness of mouth, 

maybe they can hit-and-hold rather than hit-and-run. At that point they enter

into the conventional phase.

 

SANCTUARY►

▼PHASE 

Clandestine Remote Government

Organizational

Maintain impunity 

and initiative 

through

anonymity.

Begin to prepare 

refuges and routes 

for future stages.

Place supporters 

within the existing 

government.

Guerrilla

Protect secret

sanctuaries. 

Maintain personal 

anonymity of as 

many supporters 

as possible.

Keep safe havens 

beyond where the 

government is 

willing to go. Assure a rule of 

silence in communities en route to 

sanctuaries.

Continue to hitand-run in some 

areas still controlled by the 

government, even 

as territory won is 

consolidated.

Conventional

Replace 

anonymity with 

operational

security.

Invoke international law.

Attack and occupy isolated 

government bases 

and capitals. Stay 

only as long as 

government irresoluteness allows.

Govern area-byarea; turn impunity into 

immunity, wear a 

sash, talk up 

peace, tax like 

crazy and collect 

all the guns.

You may have cause to wonder how to usefully, operationally define 

military objectives. If you are working for a government, your descriptions of 

overall goals might invoke abstract positives like stability, sustainable peace, 

legitimacy, cooperation, or initiative. If you’re on the other side of things you 

might use vindication, revolution, liberation, or social justice. Both sides 

might use righteousness. This use of positive abstractionsisstandard practice. 

They fill the lyrics of an apparently necessary music, but a ‘narrative’ is hard 

to point to on a map. At some point, whatever side you are on, you might face 

the worldly necessity of telling people where physically they are to go. Erring 

in that operational test (perhaps because you flounder at finding and fixing 

your foe), you might resort to the use of more abstractions -- this time not abstract goals, but abstract excuses. You might sprinkle your briefings with

complexity, net-centricity, fog of war, uncertainty, ambiguity, or volatility, all 

of which might be perfectly applicable, but none of which hold an edge or gain 

traction. Consider focusing instead on the three types of sanctuary.
7 Sanctuary

26

Plan to reduce your opponent’s impunity by shrinking the geographic 

space wherein he enjoys it. The geography of his impunity is his sanctuary. 

Some sanctuaries belonging to an anti-government guerrilla will be in remote 

places, which can be depicted on a map. Given the means, you can bomb the 

snot out of a remote guerrilla encampment, walk in, jackboot the guerrilla 

leader’s face, and grab his rosters. Meanwhile, to close clandestine (furtive) 

sanctuaries (to expose hidden identities and safe havens) the common tool is

some sort of Big Brother apparat. At first, you might only be able to draw on 

the map those places where you know your enemy does not enjoy impunity, 

but at least the map expresses the extent of your difficulty and gives you a 

baseline for the valid measurement of progress.

Governance sanctuary is a stickier challenge. There might be two 

sets of governance sanctuary -- one being the areas where a guerrilla has 

succeeded in holding territory, which is similar, as far as you are concerned, 

to physical sanctuary (except that it may contain whole communities inside 

of which your enemy is creating all forms of sanctuary). The other kind of 

governance sanctuary may be the product of laws, corruptions or errors of 

your own, or of an allied or host government. That sanctuary still has a 

physical geography. Closing it usually starts with demands for more transparency and inspection.

Another phenomenon to keep in mind regarding sanctuary is the relationship of sanctuary to amounts of coercive strength. A basic rule of 

thumb regarding power and influence is that as distance increases, power or 

influence decreases. Section 64 directly addresses the rule. Here suffice it 

to note that the measurement of distance requires a to and a from, and that a 

sanctuary is generally one or the other. The effective strength that any organization can wield (at a specific place and time) will have an inverse 

relationship to the distance between an organization’s base and the place that 

the power is to be or has to be applied.

On whatever side of a ledger of competitors you find yourself, places 

on a map where your enemy enjoys impunity can be marked as your military 

objectives. Sanctuary is the geography of impunity -- where you or your enemy enjoys impunity. The other guy’s sanctuaries are the places you need to 

affect. Perhaps that means you go there with force to confound your enemy,

to neutralize or destroy him, or to set the conditions for so doing. Routes to 

and from sanctuary are almost as valuable as the sanctuary itself. Destroying,

blocking or even taxing routes changes distances and therewith effective 
7 Sanctuary

27

power and influence. Ultimately, if one cannot get back to one’s sanctuary, 

one is at best in limbo and, more probably, one is about to lose.

Please see sections: 16, Presence; 59, Spontaneity; 35, Comuna 13; 78, Identity; 64, Measuring Distance and Comparing Power; 69, Measuring Effects of 

Actions on Enemies; 138, Raids; 140, Risk Distance and the Pursuit.



“These aren’t the Droids you’re looking for.”30F

31

standard Jedi mind trick

--------------

Computer: Do you identify the word sanctuary?

Logan 5: Negative.

Computer: Sanctuary is a pre-catastrophe code word. 

Used for a place of immunity. 

from the movie,

Logan’s Run (1976)31F

32

--------------

“The first rule of fight club is don’t talk about fight club.”32F

33

Tyler Durden in the movie,

Fight Club (1999)

--------------

“Always let someone know where you’re going.”3 3F

34

Marc Brown and Stephen Krensky,

Dinosaurs Beware!

--------------

INS Agent: If they are in fact aliens from another planet, Sir, 

doesn't that make them Air Force jurisdiction?

INS Commissioner: If they're just visiting, sure. But the minute 

they try to work here, they're mine.

from the movie,

Coneheads (1993)34F

35


28

The central geographic concept in armed strategy

Section 8,

Linearity and the Line of Retreat

Sometimes insurgencies or other forms of irregular warfare are described as nonlinear. The idea of nonlinearity is part of a misleading 

common wisdom about irregular war. Armed struggles of all kinds, including insurgencies, are linear, and often extremely so. To become a 

believer, just accept for a moment that the more relevant lines in classic 

military theory are not what military planners sometimes call the ‘front’,

‘battle line’, ‘forward edge of the battle area’, or something similar to denote the face-to-face phenomena that opposing forces tend to experience 

in battle. The relevant lines are lines of communication, especially supply 

lines, lines of approach, lines of withdrawal, and for our focus here -- any

lines of withdrawal that a weaker force would be obliged to take from 

places of action to its sanctuaries.

If you are a single criminal suspect about to be served a warrant 

and apprehended in your home, the line that counts (if you intend to remain 

at large) is the line out the back door (or that secret tunnel). You intuitively 

understand the classic strategy -- the heart of the operational equation. For 

your enemy to win decisively against you, he must cut off your retreat. 

You figure that if he has an extra cop or two at his disposal, he’s likely to 

send them around to the back door, so you may want to get out before that 

happens. Or you can be like Che, who probably thought he was waging 

nonlinear war. The problem German General von Paulus had when facing 

the Russians at Stalingrad is at its root the same as that facing the single 

felon about to be served an arrest warrant: Once escape is no longer an 

option, the future can get bleak.

Just because you are having a hard time finding your enemy’s lines 

of communication doesn’t mean the lines aren’t there. You better find his 

and secure yours. Usually, if you hear a government briefer use the term 

‘nonlinear warfare’, you can confidently translate it as, ‘We can’t find the 

insurgent lines of communication’. When an insurgent uses the term, he is 

saying to himself, ‘Whew, they haven’t found our lines of communication’,

while to outside audiences he finesses, ‘Don’t bother looking for our lines 

of communication. This thing is nonlinear’. Consider for a moment that he 

probably makes great use of roadblocks. How is that nonlinear?
8 Linearity and the Line of Retreat

29

You might want to leave ‘nonlinear’ out of your irregular warfare 

lexicon or you might leave your enemy free to use his lines of communication while he attacks yours. This does not mean you are constrained to 

move sequentially or make geometric moves to your points of action.

In order to win (decisively, definitively, conclusively, to be sovereign, to have a successful State, to dominate or not be dominated) you want 

to assert a monopoly over the granting of impunity in your territory. You 

especially have to stop any armed competitor who figures to grant impunity 

in the same places as you. To discipline your impunity-granting adversary, 

your best bet is to go capture or kill him. To that end, the line of retreat is 

the central geographic concept. That does not mean retreat is the imperative

event in armed conflict. Battle is the imperative event in armed conflict, but 

the line of retreat is nevertheless a vital geographic concept.

Whether we are thinking of a single criminal, an insurgent column, a 

group of thugs, the Sixth German Army, a Costa Rican patrol boat, Darius’ 

hordes, or you, attention to the lines of retreat to sanctuary is a key to winning. 

The line of retreat runs from a point of violent action to calm safety. If you’re 

in opposition to government, the action may be one of your own initiative, at 

places you choose for a kidnapping, bank robbery, mortaring of a police station 

or a government convoy, making a drugs-for-money exchange, or where you 

plant an annoying bomb. The point of action may also be a place where a 

government force catches you on your way to one of your intended points of 

action. In either case, if you are about to engage with an enemy force of greater 

immediate strength than your own, you better have a secure route of escape. 

If you do not, you could be decisively hurt. If your force is much stronger than 

your enemy’s, then he’s the one with the retreat problem. Since it is often 

difficult to estimate likely comparative strengths, and the costs for guessing 

wrong are so steep, a prudent commander assures the security of his route of 

escape in all cases except those in which the superiority of his force is exceedingly obvious. Of course there are daring and brilliant commanders who sense 

correctly when to defy prudence.

If you think you’ve made it to sanctuary, but your enemy presses his 

pursuit and you find yourself under siege, you might not be in sanctuary, and, 

at best, you are still located along your route to sanctuary; and if that route 

remains unsecure, your participation may be about to end.

It is discomforting spiritually for the warrior to think of the line of 

retreat as the central geographic concept of operational strategy. If that’s 
8 Linearity and the Line of Retreat

30

you, just try to make your lines of retreat those of orderly withdrawal and 

your enemies’ lines of retreat those of routed panic and capture.

What is the psychology of a man on the run? Fugitives without 

sanctuary do not take the initiative. They concern themselves with finding 

sanctuary. They are on the defensive mentally as well as physically. It is 

tough to be both reeling and planning offensive moves. If a guerrilla cannot attack, he is stripped of identity. If your enemy is safe in sanctuary, 

what does he have to do with his time? Plot, of course. His mind is able 

to initiate; he is on the offensive. A secure line of retreat is often, for the 

able strategist, geography for regaining the initiative.

Please see sections: 123, Sea and Aerospace Power; 140, Risk Distance 

and the Pursuit; 15, NGOs, IOs, and Unions; 67, Points, Lines, Spaces; 

63, Roadblocks and Checkpoints; 143, Seven Strategy Strains; 65, Smuggling; and 16, Presence.



“Retreat is a concept which fully enters into that of the attack. I 

retreat over 100 to 200 kilometers so as to go over to the attack on 

a certain line at a certain moment decided by myself...Retreat is 

one of the movements in the general course of offensive operations. 

Retreat is not flight.”35 F

36

Mikhail Frunze, 1922

--------------

“They went ashore to have a nap,

But local tribes had set a trap,

And Drake, exhausted by the fight,

Decided it was time for flight.”36F

37

Roy Gerrard

Sir Francis Drake: His Daring Deeds

--------------

“We just lost the initiative.”

General Garrison in the movie,

Black Hawk Down (2001)37F

38


31

Retreat without strategy

Section 9, White Bird

I distilled this section from four sources: Jerome Greene’s Nez 

Perce Summer 1877, Elliot West’s The Last Indian War, Helen Addison 

Howard’s Saga of Chief Joseph, and Bruce Hampton’s Children of Grace. 

Although an American vignette and long ago, it is illustrative.

Near Slate Creek, on the Salmon River in Idaho Territory, on 14 

June, 1877, three young Nez Percé warriors went on a killing spree in revenge for unpunished crimes, including murder and rape, by white settlers 

against Nez Percé families and the tribe. Chief Joseph had recently decided to capitulate to the federal government’s demand that his band of the 

Nez Percé move to the Nez Percé reservation where the bulk of the tribe 

had already resettled. Joseph had his people busy marshalling at Tolo Lake 

for the trek to the reservation. In line with the Nez Percés’ form of shared 

governance, Chief Joseph did not exercise unchallenged authority. Other, 

more militant and recalcitrant chiefs spurred the three young braves to 

change facts on the ground. Chief Joseph’s efforts to keep his band out of 

an unwinnable war soon became futile, obliging Joseph to lead about 100 

warriors and 500 women, children and elderly toward possible sanctuary 

across the US-Canadian border. That October 5, after an 1,100 mile retreat 

and more than a dozen battles, Chief Joseph surrendered at Bear’s Paw, 

Montana Territory, about forty miles short of the international border.

Joseph incorrectly measured the strength of a treaty agreement he 

thought he had with the Crow, who ultimately sided with the US Army. 

He also did not gauge the resolve of Brigadier General Oliver Howard, 

Commander of the Military Department of the Columbia, to pursue him; 

and he did not correctly measure the impact of modern communications, 

which enabled the US Army to timely deploy columns to intercept his 

route from distant garrisons. Joseph hoped, in vain, that the Lakota Sioux 

would come to his aid, but they would not endanger themselves for the 

sake of the Nez Percés. During the long retreat, combat decisions of the 

Nez Percé warrior chiefs were brilliant and the actions of the warriors exemplary in competence, valor and discipline. Chief Joseph’s operational 

and international strategies, however, were founded almost entirely on 

hope. He was moving away from the sanctuary of the greater tribe, not 

toward it. He was moving instead toward a sanctuary that did not exist.
9 White Bird

32

Responding as best he could to what many regard today (and then) 

as a righteous indignation of his people, Chief Joseph acted on the presiding emotion and not the imposing geography. This is not to say Chief 

Joseph was foolish. He figured, probably correctly, that the invisible line 

between the United States and Canada could protect his people as it did 

the Lakota Sioux. Given Joseph’s acceptance of federal demands (before 

the June killings) that he remove his people to the reservation, he apparently understood how poor the band’s chances of escape were. Still, 

Joseph did what was expected of him to uphold the band’s three avengers 

and their warlike chief, White Bird. Under the justice of the United States, 

they surely would have been found guilty of murder. Joseph had to know 

that the coming retreat and the battles which now underwrite his military 

renown were, if not hopeless, more likely to be paid in honorable memory 

than in land.

Of perhaps 800 of the non-treaty Nez Percés (some had joined the 

march after the events along the Salmon River), probably 350 died. Almost all of the warriors and their chiefs had committed themselves to what 

they determined to be an honorable fate in the service of those they stewarded. By the time they arrived at Bear’s Paw there was less need to 

protect the young hotheads who had precipitated the war. Two had died 

fighting. Their fate, at least, would not be as convicts, but as warriors. A 

third escaped to refuge in Canada and later returned to the Nez Percé reservation where he lived in anonymity in order to avoid prosecution.

It seems no amount of valor could survive this ill-conceived retreat, 

but that’s not entirely true. Chief White Bird was one of the war chiefs

and one of the older men who had roused the young warriors to fatal action 

back at the Salmon by challenging their manhood and courage. Unlike 

Chief Joseph, White Bird intended to fight from the outset; his was the 

mens rea mind. He is also probably due more credit than Joseph (along 

with other war chiefs including Joseph’s younger brother Ollokot) for the 

band’s military successes during the retreat. White Bird and more than 

two hundred others, a quarter of the band, escaped during the battle at 

Bear’s Paw or shortly after the surrender. Most of those made it to sanctuary in Canada among the Sioux, and some, including Ollokot, eventually 

returned to the treaty reservation in Idaho. White Bird didn’t like the Sioux 

all that much, but was murdered in 1882 by a fellow Nez Percé tribesman. 

White Bird had counseled honor killings and was victim of one. He was 
9 White Bird

33

never prosecuted or even captured. He is not, however, remembered or 

revered as is Chief Joseph.

The Nez Percé band led by Chief Joseph Hin-mut-too-yah-latkekht (Thunder-rolling-in-the-mountains) expertly played a poor hand, but 

it was not enough. Chief Joseph had reluctantly gone to war and lost. 

Masterful tactics and a logical operation could not redeem a forfeit strategy. Most of his band, if not killed, was captured and made to live in the 

Oklahoma Indian Territory. Chief Joseph was never allowed to return to 

the Nez Percé homeland to live, and was not buried near his father.

What can we learn from the Nez Percé war?

*The Nez Percé did not have foreign support

*Joseph did not measure his enemy’s strength well enough

*Impassioned young men sparked the violence

(Spurred on by older, more guileful men)

*Most of the war was movement

*Tactical supremacy could not overcome strategic error

*Scale counts. Eight hundred was not a big number

*Being trapped en-route to sanctuary meant decisive defeat

*One cannot retreat to a sanctuary that does not exist

*Technological advantage is advantage

Other relevant lessons are available from a read of the history. For 

instance, all four sources informing this vignette note that agents of the 

United States told the Nez Percés a series of lies, as was almost habitual in 

dealing with Indian nations. Consider, however, that all governments addressed foreign nations through strategy and stratagem, and the United 

States treated many if not most tribes as foreign nations. Most Indians 

were not quickly or fully welcomed into a common social compact. As to 

the majority of Nez Percés, who accepted the treaties, land privatization 

formed part of the approach.

The treatment of the non-treaty Nez Percés after Bear’s Paw was 

almost as controversial a history as events of their retreat itself. Military 

decision-making during the pursuit was influenced by the US Cavalry’s 

dramatic loss to the Lakota Sioux at the Little Big Horn only one year 

earlier. Surprisingly, it is difficult to argue that there was a lack of cross 

cultural knowledge or understanding. The two sides seemed to understand 

each other quite well.
9 White Bird

34

The Nez Percés were militarily expert before the famous retreat.

They had long enjoyed a reputation as dominatingly competent warriors; 

and it was a reputation they did not get fighting against the United States 

government. They got their reputation as warriors by defeating other tribes 

and controlling territory. This characteristic may well have entered into 

the balance of equities when it came time for the Crow or the Lakota to 

decide whether or not to support them against the Bluecoats.

Also, the events were broadly publicized, and commanders acted 

in the light of national and international journalistic attention. The world 

watched the desperate retreat and pursuit of a defiant band of warriors.

Please see sections: 74, Refugees and Displaced Persons; 24, Ruthlessness and 

Resolve; 78, Identity; 38, Cultural Study for What?; 121, Dignity and Honor; 88, 

Escape Geography; 67, Points, Line, Spaces; and 103, Amnesty and Restitution.



“The Battle of Adowa, fought on March 1, 1896, between 

Menelek’s huge army of semi-barbarian warriors and Baratieri’s Italian regulars and native levies under European 

officers, was an epoch-making event. It was the first great 

victory won by a non-European race over the white man 

which had lasting and decisive results.”3 8F

39

A. Hilliard Atteridge,

Famous Modern Battles (1913)

--------------

Lone Watie: Actually, I was looking to gain an edge. I 

thought you might be someone who would sneak up 

behind me with a gun.

Josey Wales: Where'd you ever get an idea like that? Besides, 

it ain't supposed to be easy to sneak up behind an Indian.

Lone Watie: I'm an Indian, all right; but here in the nation

they call us the "civilized tribe". They call us "civilized" because we're easy to sneak up on. White men 

have been sneaking up on us for years.

from the movie,

The Outlaw Josey Wales (1979)39F

40


9 White Bird

35

-- Montana circa 1878 --

The solid line is the Nez Percé’s approximate line of retreat. The dotted line 

is the approximate path of the US Cavalry pursuit. The retreat was tactically 

brilliant, but the pursuit, if at times less so, was operationally brilliant and 

ultimately overpowering. Among the US Cavalry advantages we can include the heliograph, to which the Nez Percé had no solution, along with the 

disperse deployment of well-mounted units, which the Nez Percé warriors 

could outrun, but their assemblage could not.
36

All armed struggles are decided by battle

Section 10, Decisive Battle

After you win a decisive battle, you can move safely to sanctuary and 

your enemy cannot. Armed contests revolve around battle. The assertion is as 

valid in irregular warfare as it is in classic maneuver and positional war, and 

maybe more so. A prudent guerrilla leader, for instance,seeks combat without 

committing to a fight with a superior force unless hisroute of escape is secured 

and a pursuit by his enemy unlikely to succeed. A battle in an irregular war is 

‘decisively’ lost and won either when one force overwhelmingly destroys the 

other in the engagement or when the engagement is followed by a failed retreat. The winner can retire to sanctuary and the loser cannot.

Armed groups don’t arm themselves just to be armed. Folks who do 

that are called gun collectors. The guns are for battles. Organized criminals, 

however, generally don’t seek battle with the government. Meanwhile, most 

insurgents consider battle as imperative to their existence and identity. The 

‘decisive battles’ an insurgent wants to avoid are the ones which are decisive 

in favor of the government, in which cases ‘decisive’ has a crystal clear definition ˗˗ an insurgent unit’s withdrawal to sanctuary (after realizing itself 

overmatched in contact with a government force) failssuch that the insurgents 

are killed or captured. An insurgency without sanctuaries cannot survive long, 

and so the fact of decisive battle leads to the logical observation that an insurgent movement must develop sanctuaries and escape routes to them, at least 

for the leadership, before it attempts battle. Of course, some of the battles may 

be so small, or the investigative abilities of the government so insignificant, 

that some display of force is possible without too much care spent on sanctuary. Che never did grasp the imperatives of operational art. He thought that

simply plodding around making friends in the Bolivian highlands would provide sanctuary enough. It did not.

The possibility of positively decisive battle is the centerpiece of the 

counterinsurgent’s advantage. Routing the insurgent in a contact and sending him running high-tailed into the mist rarely constitutes decisive victory 

for the counterinsurgent, exhilarating as it may seem at the time. Such contacts may in fact be the immediate face of another decisive victory for the 

guerrilla. The government only succeeds decisively by way of successful 

pursuit. Of course counterinsurgent commanders will want to say they just 

won another battle, even when they did not even chance a dangerous pursuit. 

Maybe they won decisively if the cost to the insurgent enemy during a battle 
10 Decisive Battle

37

was terminally high. More probably the government actually loses any time 

it does not win the pursuit. The cop who doesn’t serve the warrant or make 

the arrest doesn`t go home feeling like a winner, even if he feels pretty good 

about still being alive.

Instead of one huge decisive battle or five, counterinsurgent strategy 

may have to accept the proposition of many potentially decisive battles. In an 

insurgent war there may never be a Battle of Midway, but then again, there 

might. Conversely, some military historians, like Russell Wiegley, opine that 

few battles in any kind of war are decisive in the long run.40 F

41

All the above is not to deny there may be exceptions and viable strategic options. If a guerrilla takes too many casualties during his harassments, 

ambushes and sabotages, he may weaken over time. It seems, however, that 

time is increasingly on the guerrilla’s side as time goes on, and that he can 

paint his initiatives as victories regardless of statistics suggesting otherwise. 

Indeed, every little attack that is not answered with an effective pursuit by the 

government may be a decisive victory for a guerrilla. Even for the guerrilla, 

victory after victory in battle might mean nothing if no effort were made to 

exploit them. The potential decisiveness of any series of successful actions

can still be forfeited by subsequent inaction.

Regardless of the technological scope or geographic scale of a potential battle, the counterinsurgent should not presume even a clear advantage in 

power to be sufficient unless his concept of ‘battle’ includes the pursuit. In 

other words, the counterinsurgent must calculate and field an advantage in correlations of force at the points of engagement such that his units can mount 

and succeed in the pursuit of the insurgent enemy after contacts. Then the 

battles may be won decisively for the counterinsurgent. Conversely, the insurgent needn’t be daunted by imposing combat advantages of government 

forces so long as he can disengage quickly and make a safe escape.

Sometimes you may hear an expression like, ‘They lost a lot of battles 

but won the war’ or, conversely, ‘They never lost a battle, but didn’t win the 

war’. We are better off not to assert that battles are won or lost without simultaneously considering the success of the retreats and pursuits. For the 

insurgent, a damaging attack against the State which doesn’t end in the destruction of the guerrilla unit may be favorably decisive. Besides, most 

insurgents don’t plan to always be guerrillas. Mao, for instance. English-language counterinsurgency literature all but forgets that the Huai Hai battles 

were the destination of Mao’s guerrilla efforts. One professor, Dr. Gary 
10 Decisive Battle

38

Bjorge at Ft. Leavenworth, noticed the significance of these battles, so with 

his permission and guidance I paraphrase shamelessly from his Moving the 

Enemy: Operational Art in the Chinese PLA’s Huai Hai Campaign.

One of the largest and most consequential wars of the 20th Century 

was the Chinese civil war of 1946-1949 between the Nationalist government 

of China led by President Chiang Kai-shek and the Chinese Communist Party 

(CCP) led by Chairman Mao Tse-tung. Military forces numbering in the millions fought across the vast space of China in a struggle that ended with the 

Nationalist government taking refuge on the island province of Taiwan, and 

the Communists establishing the People’s Republic of China (PRC) on October 1, 1949. The Huai Hai Campaign was the largest and most decisive series 

of battles of the war. It began on November 6, 1948 and ended on January 10, 

1949. Initially conceived by Communist generals to push Nationalist forces 

away from the Long-Hai railroad and link together the Communist-controlled 

areas in Shandong and Jiangsu provinces, the goal eventually became the final 

confounding of Nationalist military options.

Over a period of several weeks, whole armies maneuvered on a grand 

scale. Maybe this wasn’t the largest or most costly campaign in history, but to 

display the contenders’ operational plans requires maps covering thousands of 

square miles. Five Kuomintang Nationalist armies totaling over a half million 

men were ultimately surrounded and confronted by the calamity of having 

failed the basic lesson of classic strategy. The Communists were now the 

stronger opponent and had compromised the Nationalist’s options for escape. 

Communist columns pressed inexorably toward the headquarters of the Nationalist military commands. Nationalist commanders made their breakout 

decisions too late, and the attempts were complete failures. A few officers and 

soldiers did make it through the surrounding net and eventually found their 

way to Nationalist lines in the South. However, for practical purposes, the 

entire Nationalist force was either killed or captured, and only a few scattered 

Nationalist units could still offer resistance. As a result of the loss, the United 

States stopped assisting the Nationalist Kuomintang government. Soon it fell

to the Communists.

A Huai Hai campaign isn’t the destination of all armed struggles. 

There is only one Chinese mainland, and 1949 isn’t coming back. Still, guerrilla struggles often tend toward conventional battles, and insurgent leaders 

toward conventional military goals. There exists a developmental tendency in 

insurgent wars ˗˗ from latency, to guerrilla warfare, to position and maneuver
10 Decisive Battle

39

warfare. The formula that they develop in three distinct phases may be overdrawn, however. It is better not to distance ‘guerrilla’ from ‘position and 

maneuver’, as if they were distinct types of warfare. Rather, guerrilla is a subclass of maneuver. The phases of insurgent campaigning are more accurately 

labeled as ‘don’t hit yet’, ‘hit-and-run’, ‘hit-and-hold’. The Huai Hai Campaign was the last chapter in a book of internal conflict whose earlier chapters 

were filled with guerrilla campaigns. From chapter to chapter, however, the 

essence of military strategy did not change.

An insurgent will always argue to the world, “There can be no decisive 

battle in this struggle, so don’t look for it.” Why does he say that? He is 

attracted by the effect that propaganda can afford him while he looks for favorable little battles until he can win big ones. If he prudently follows military 

fundamentals, he doesn’t chance contact with a superior force unless he has 

secured an escape route. His ‘hit and run’ battles feature both ‘hit’ and ‘run’. 

To him, history can ignore even a huge lopsided military victory, but victory 

in battle remains the quintessential event. The counterinsurgent leader who 

dismisses its centrality forgets his reason for being.

Please see sections: 122, Ulm and Austerlitz; 131, Is It an Insurgency?; 3, The 

Domesday Book; 139, Strategy of Aggregate Tactics; 140, Risk Distance and the 

Pursuit; 127, Between Liberty and Lawrence; 63, Roadblocks and Checkpoints;

and 69, Measuring Effects of Actions on Enemies.



“The importance of the victory is chiefly determined by the vigor 

with which the immediate pursuit is carried out. In other words, 

pursuit makes up the second act of victory and in many cases is 

more important than the first. Strategy at this point draws near to 

tactics in order to receive the completed assignment from it; and 

its first exercise of authority is to demand that the victory should 

really be complete.”41F

42

Carl von Clausewitz, On War

--------------

“There is no shadow of protection to be had by sheltering behind 

the slender stockades of visionary speculation, or by hiding behind the wagon-wheels of pacific theories.”42F

43

May-ling (Madame Chiang Kai-Shek)


40

Irregular conflicts are not protracted by nature

Section 11,

Protraction and Diligence

Armed social struggles, including insurgencies, are not by nature 

protracted or prolonged. Nature has nothing to do with it. Someone protracts a conflict for a reason. Insurgents typically make the argument that 

their conflict will be prolonged indefinitely if a political solution is not 

found (that government concessions must be made, negotiations undertaken, amnesties granted). The counterinsurgent is often quick to repeat 

the assertion of conflict longevity, sometimes in order to explain or justify 

slow progress. The pamphlet Guide to the Analysis of Insurgency, which 

has been kicking around the US intelligence community for decades, 

makes the following typical assertion:

Insurgency is a protracted political-military activity directed toward 

completely or partially controlling the resources of a country through 

the use of irregular military forces and illegal political organizations. 

Insurgent activity...is designed to weaken government control and legitimacy while increasing insurgent control and legitimacy.43 F

44

A number of other US doctrinal materials state explicitly that insurgent 

war is a naturally protracted affair. It is not.

The Japanese were in near constant conventional campaign from 

September 19, 1931 until September 2, 1945. Che Guevara was beaten 

rapidly and badly in the Congo and then quickly dispatched in Bolivia. 

This isolated and improbable comparison of the two (the warring of Imperial Japan versus Guevara’s bumbling) yields a result that conventional 

war is some ten times more protracted than insurgent war. Such an errant 

statistic doesn’t offer any kind of rule, but it may be closer to the general 

truth than what is usually asserted. If we were to include golpes de estado

(coups) under the semantic umbrella of ‘insurgencies’, then Western Hemisphere insurgencies would not average out longer than conventional wars.

American observers fixate on those insurgent wars that took a long 

time, thereby lending tautological strength to the theory of natural protraction, but even without including golpes de estado, a review of insurgent 

efforts in Venezuela, Argentina, Uruguay, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Bolivia, 

Peru, and elsewhere does not suggest insurgencies are necessarily long in 

duration. There are too many exceptions to the supposed rule. As to those 
11 Protraction and Diligence

41

that are long-lived, someone protracted them, and that someone was almost 

always a guerrilla leader with uncommon capability and opportunity. That 

guerrilla leader was someone who understood the operational equation.

Pointing out the historical occasions of abbreviated insurgencies 

does not erase the fact some irregular wars of the twentieth century, including those in Latin America, have been all but interminable. The case 

this book uses most often is the struggle in Colombia, which has lasted 

decades. The central point here is not about average duration, but about 

the tendency to misrepresent or to lose the sense of causation by abuse of 

the passive voice. Statements to the effect that conflict ‘is prolonged’ or 

that guerrilla wars ‘are protracted’ are at best lazy. Worse, such statements 

encourage the dubious supposition that something other than the resolve, 

attitudes and decisions of the competitors is the cause of a conflict’s pace, 

duration, or intensity. More likely is that as the mindset and decisionmaking of the leaders varies during a conflict, so too will the levels of 

violence and prospects for victory and termination.

Regain focus on the active voice. Insurgent, rebel, revolutionary, 

and criminal leaders all survive by keeping their lines of movement to refuge safe. To them, prolonging the conflict means staying alive and at 

large. Insurgents protract violent contests because the personal demise or 

incarceration of their leaders often means the end of the insurgency. Internal wars are never just protracted. Guerrilla leaders protract them as a 

matter of life and death -- theirs.

So why isn’t it practically, linguistically, logically correct, if protraction is the common result of leaders’ decisions, to call protraction part 

of the nature of a war? Because if an actor builds his designs and plans 

upon the assumption that a war is naturally protracted, he is likely to suffer 

two negative consequences. One is a failure to recognize the precarious 

position of a challenger, perhaps born of tactical and operational disadvantages as to culminating points, potential correlations of force, and 

anonymity during an insurgency’s early development. The counterinsurgent may plan the application of resources according to some pace 

intending to assign equivalent or slowly escalating resources over time. 

Such an approach exactly fails to respond to the guerrilla’s basic problem. 

The guerrilla has to be wary when attacking a superior force, and when 

risking such an attack make sure his line of retreat to sanctuary is secure. 

Therefore, all else being equal, the counterinsurgent should want to accelerate 
11 Protraction and Diligence

42

the war by applying as many resources as practicable, especially early-on, in 

order to change the balance of anonymity, find insurgent lines of retreat to 

sanctuary, and to force the insurgent guerrilla into encounters in which the 

probable correlations of force favor the government. Concomitantly, an insurgent leader who assumes insurgent or guerrilla war is naturally protracted 

might overlook the fact that it is he who has to do the protracting.

The second negative consequence of the natural-protraction fallacy 

relates to a government’s own morale base. There are few examples of a 

democratic country not having their electorates grow weary of a war. This 

weariness is often pegged to the periodicity of elections. That is to say, the 

weariness can be highlighted in a political campaign at the expense of the 

incumbent. Weariness is often made into a political argument and asset, so 

any theory that assumes a conflict will necessarily last beyond the normal 

term of an executive is problematic. Suggesting that the war, by its nature, 

will last beyond the next political cycle may help lower public expectations, 

but may simultaneously decrease the chances of government victory. Government initiative will have succumbed to a standard insurgent 

psychological strategy. By presupposing a war cannot be won during some 

set period of time (say, the term of an executive), a counterinsurgent contributes to prolonging the war, allowing his enemy to survive what might be 

his most vulnerable period.

Ongoing financial profit may also be a protracting factor. This feeds 

what are called the ‘war economy’ theories. Especially when armed groups

are involved in profitable criminal activities, like the Colombian FARC, for 

instance, they find they can prosper without political progress, making prolongation more attractive to them. Some constituencies, like security guards, 

arms manufacturers or military suttlers, also live well on war and thus may 

prefer theories that help keep a war going. These ‘war economy’ observations 

may have some weight, but they don’t reverse the point. In most cases it behooves the counterinsurgent to reject insurgent argumentation that their war is 

necessarily a long one. A government military may sense a vested interest in 

persistent or prolonged conflict if it sees a link between larger budgets, organizational health, and public support. If the objective, however, is to win a war, 

the counterinsurgent should do everything to accelerate the insurgent’s demise

-- the total reduction of its geography of impunity. It is the reverse for the insurgent until he can gain advantageous correlations of force during encounters, 

after which he can speed things up. It is a world of parry and thrust. Mao did 
11 Protraction and Diligence

43

not live and strive to be a guerrilla, or see guerrilla war as the ultimate path to 

victory. He looked forward to having a big army and campaigning Huai Hai.

The antidote to protraction is diligence. Diligence includes traditional 

military values of initiative and mass. It also means respectful and dutiful attention to a task at hand. Diligence is acting in a timely way to put sufficient force 

in the right places and following through before the appropriate moment for action is gone. In irregular war, diligence, follow-through and maintenance of the 

initiative are all but synonymous with successful pursuit.

Please see sections: 102, Negotiations; 69, Measuring Effects of Actions on Enemies; 52, Sovereignty; 41, Dear Westy; 6, The Operational Equation; 116, Songs 

of Chu; 44, Political/Military/Administrative; and 97, Oviedo



“...it is the true policy to incur even heavy loses of a few hours’ 

fighting for an adequate object, rather than prolong a conflict 

for days and weeks by adopting the slower methods that in the 

end waste life....”44 F

45

A. Hilliard Atteridge

--------------

“There has never been a protracted war from which a country 

has benefited.”

Sun Tzu (attributed)

--------------

“A prompt and vigorous pursuit is the only means of ensuring 

complete success.”45 F

46

General Phillip Sheridan (attributed)

--------------

“The pirates would burn any building they passed and kill any peasant they met; but as a rule they were in a hurry to reach a safe camp, 

and had no time to plunder aside from the line of march.”46 F

47

Alfred Duggan,

The Right Line of Cerdic


44

A general’s big decision

Section 12,

Commitment of the Reserve

When and where to commit the reserve is traditionally one of the most 

consequential decisions the military leader makes. This aspect of classic military strategy is a little harder to apply in irregular war. When do we ‘send it 

in’? How much of a reserve should we keep? Part of an answer to this question may depend on our having done a few other things first, like securing

enough resources to begin with, or having found the enemy’s lines of communication. None of the principles of military strategy is easy to apply if sister 

principles are ignored or violated.

If you are a guerrilla taking persistent, careful shots at government 

forces (being sure that you have safe lines of supply and retreat), you will 

once in a while catch a government unit especially off-guard. These are 

just the odds. Ten percent of any government army’s leaders are that 

army’s ten percent dumbest, laziest, and least diligent -- the bottom ten 

percent. Sometimes a bottom-10-percent commander, executive officer 

and senior sergeant all end up in the same small unit. Sometimes an army 

is going to make some simple mistake as to economy of force or soldier 

care, and just then Mother Nature or Murphy are going to align themselves 

to make things even worse. That one lousy small unit will be in exactly

the wrong spot and the wrong time. Once in a while all the disparate 

chance factors for failure will concur to make an otherwise formidable 

army unusually vulnerable.

You, however, are persistent and daring (but prudent) with your 

guerrilla attacks. It is almost certain that uncertainty will eventually favor 

you but, if you are not ready to exploit the favor by having a ready reserve, 

you will miss an opportunity that could have vaulted you to an improved 

level of power. Luck is where preparation meets opportunity. As a military leader, you must always prepare for bad luck. That is why you are 

careful to maintain a secure route of escape. Preparation for bad fortune 

is your key to survival, but preparation for good fortune is your key to 

more good fortune. Keeping a reserve force handy in order to take advantage of an unusually successful attack is classic advice. Murphy 

delivers bad luck more than good luck, however, and you, too, have a hapless 10 percent. Now and then, in spite of your having trained and planned 
12 Commitment of the Reserve

45

to keep the lines of retreat of your subordinate units secure to sanctuary, 

you need a reserve to check a pursuing army unit that is closing down the 

route of escape of one of your guerrilla columns.

A government reserve force needs a technology to help deploy 

quickly to contact (perhaps helicopters, motorbikes, or mules). In the past, 

we kept horse cavalry in the reserve for exactly that reason. Timely commitment of a reserve can help turn a battle which is seemingly won into a 

battle decisively won. To decisively win battles in today’s irregular wars, 

governments have to win the pursuits. Since making quicker decisions as 

to where a reserve should go is part of the speed formula, intelligence derived from aerospace or electronic capacity can give governments an edge. 

The math of culminating points tells us that without a reserve fighting 

force, however, successful pursuit is less likely.

The whole idea of a reserve is subject to scale. Whatever the ‘level’ 

of your unit, and whatever the size of the forces engaged, you will want to 

maintain a reserve fast and powerful enough for you to successfully pursue

a retreating foe, or to save an endangered retreat of your own. That principle reigns whether you are a single beat cop, commander of a huge tank 

army, or anything in-between. Timely application of a reserve force may 

be as much the key to winning in irregular warfare as it is in more conventional, regular forms of warfare.

Please see sections: 138, Raids; 63, Roadblocks and Checkpoints; 116, Songs 

of Chu; 140, Risk Distance and the Pursuit; 10, Decisive Battle; 68, Scale; 64, 

Measuring Distance and Comparing Power; and 6, The Operational Equation.



“It is in the use and withholding of their reserves that the great 

commanders have generally excelled. After all, when once the last 

reserve has been thrown in, the Commander’s part is played...The 

event must be left to pluck and to the fighting troops.” 47F

48

Winston Churchill

--------------

“The main reason the ‘surge’ in Afghanistan is on is because the 

conventional wisdom tells us the ‘surge’ in Iraq ‘worked’." 48F

49

Diana West


46

No retreat, no more insurgent

Section 13, Puthukkudiyirippu

The Liberation Tigers of Eelam (LTTE) waged an on-again/offagain, but mostly on-again, war against the government of Sri Lanka from 

1983 until early 2009, when the Sri Lankan Army (SLA) forced the Tigers 

to capitulate. During the last few years of the LTTE’s existence, the SLA

outmaneuvered the LTTE, beat the Tigers in combat engagements, and 

systematically closed down its lines of supply and retreat. Finally, at a 

place called Puthukkudiyirippu, on the northeast coast, a little south of the 

Jaffna Peninsula, the Army surrounded remaining LTTE units and killed 

almost all of the LTTE leaders.

Sri Lanka is an ethnically diverse land, ethnicity commonly tagged 

as one of the ingredients that led to the Tamil Tigers’ fight. According to 

the CIA World Factbook, about 74% of Sri Lankans are Sinhalese; 7% Sri 

Lankan Moor; 5% Indian Tamil; and 4% Sri Lankan Tamil. Religiously, 

according to that source, about 70% are Buddhist; 8% Muslim; 7% Hindu; 

and 6% Christian. The Factbook also indicates that 74% of Sri Lankans 

speak Sinhala and 18% speak Tamil. These rough ethnic statistics can 

only be made to overlap in a ragged fashion, so ‘ethnicity’ itself is a soft 

concept on which to hang an understanding of the Sri Lankan war.

The political conditions which many Sri Lankans found intolerable

and which, to some Sri Lankans, justified armed revolt, had a slow historic 

build. We can, however, trace the origins of the war efficiently by noting

the Official Language Act of 1956. Making Sinhala the country’s one official language, the Act was a statement of nationhood and a break with its 

British colonial past (with its English-language inheritance). The Act, 

democratically derived, had both a highlighting and degrading effect on 

the rights, honor and material well-being of the Tamil-speaking minority -

- thus the Act is a milestone on the road to the Tamil insurgency. An azimuth had been struck toward the consolidation of an aggrieved yet 

powerful underclass identity. Sri Lankan tinkering with constitutional formulae did not derive a peaceful social compact. It led instead to a 

clarification of who was ‘in’ and who was ‘out’. The cards given to the 

well-intentioned were not all good. The political history of Ceylon had 

rested on accreted arrogance, part of which was an advantageous relationship that an educated Tamil ethnic minority had enjoyed with the British. 

Then the British left.
13 Puthukkudiyirippu

47

The Cold War also provided a left-right/communist-capitalist flagging for political identity as a spur to radicalization and polarization. The 

Sri Lankan mix of real and perceived advantages presented a fertile environment for leaders who could translate resentment into organized action. 

Velupillai Prabhakaran, the charismatic, ruthless leader of the LTTE, grew 

to represent the Sri Lankan Tamil. He was ready to take on leftist radical 

signage and accept whatever foreign support came with it. Sri Lanka was 

to suffer its own volatile concoction of caste, communism and comeuppance. Leadership of the Tamil minority as such, a minority historically 

associated as a surrogate of English imperialism, shifted in makeup toward 

a younger and more ruthless composition. That it then successfully 

donned the cloak of anti-imperial socialism complicates explanations of 

the conflict.

As is typical of insurgent leaders, Prabhakaran’s goal was to rule a 

separate Tamil country, if not become dictator of the whole island. He

variously allowed speculation on the viability of federalism or partial autonomy, but, in retrospect, had always been single-minded about who was 

going to be in charge of any resulting polity: himself. In the course of the 

war, Prabhakaran eliminated competition from other erstwhile rebel pretenders. The goal of the government of Sri Lanka, meanwhile, was peace, 

but a peace that did not divide the island into two countries. Until 2006,

the government constantly sought some sort of ceasefire or negotiated settlement, with pressure for these ‘solutions’ coming consistently from 

international forums and foreign countries.

For a while, Prabhakaran made good military decisions and consequently attracted foreign financial and diplomatic investment. The 

government of Sri Lanka took a dual path of negotiation and a slowly escalating military response that was supposed to create conditions favorable 

for negotiation.

Sri Lanka is one of the world’s smaller countries, but it is not that

small, with over 20 million inhabitants and an area almost the same as 

Ireland’s. The ethnically distinct identities are not evenly dispersed on the 

island, nor are they highly concentrated. The most likely supporters of the 

Tigers lived in the east and north. This distribution facilitated the Tigers’ 

development of geographic sanctuaries, as well as an argument for either 

federalist solutions or territorially-based international recognition. Being 

an island, however, meant that an insurgent’s lines of supply might have 

to pass over seawater. The most salient single piece of ground is not a 
13 Puthukkudiyirippu

48

salient, but a narrow neck between the main island and the Jaffna Peninsula 

in the north. Called Elephant Pass, it is historically the most contested 

piece of ground in Sri Lanka. The LTTE tried unsuccessfully to wrest 

Elephant Pass from the government in 1991, then did so in 2000, sweeping 

out a large, well-defended SLA garrison and capturing expensive pieces of 

military equipment in the process. The SLA did not retake Elephant Pass 

until January, 2009. When the government finally resolved to control the 

pass, its taking marked the beginning of the final chapter of the war. The 

LTTE won no more significant engagements afterwards.

Equality of citizen status was a perpetual issue in Sri Lanka. But

for the insurgent war, Sri Lankan democracy probably would not have 

moved as quickly as it has to ease blatant political inequities. To Prabhakaran, inequities were to be resolved by military victory -- and his 

instrument was the LTTE. The government preferred the path of negotiation until the imbalance in visions about how political change was to be 

implemented became clearer to the Sri Lankan government and people.

After the election of President Mahinda Rajapaksa in November,

2005, he radically changed the government’s military objective. Although

the exact moment of epiphany is debated among Sri Lankans, the strategic 

objective ultimately switched from creating the conditions for a peaceful

settlement to crushing the LTTE. The SLA began to win battles and gain

ground, and this happened because President Rajapaska garnered substantive and extensive support from both India and China, and all but ignored 

the rest of the world’s pleas for restraint. Rajapaksa and his military chief 

Sarath Fonseka resolved to eliminate the LTTE. The mechanism to resolve the conflict would be military victory, and for this the government

built a more powerful military. The President and his military leaders discarded the political-versus-military dichotomy. They dumped complexity 

and ambiguity as guiding descriptors of the challenge. They identified 

Velupillai Prabhakaran as the target and decided they would no longer let 

Prabhakaran grant impunity to anyone. On March 18, 2009, Prabhakaran

was dead and the war ended.

What lessons might we draw from the demise of the LTTE?

• Evolution of a social compact that permits and ratifies the existence of a clearly identifiable underclass favors creation of an 

armed resistance;
13 Puthukkudiyirippu

49

• A capacity to grant impunity to its followers means an insurgent 

group can recruit soldiers, not pay taxes, kill, kidnap, rob, trespass and 

nevertheless represent the aggrieved minority in foreign forums;

• Dirt and walls matter. The LTTE made extensive use of engineered earth bunds (berms and levees) as fighting positions;

• The government ultimately embraced the possibilities of asymmetric weight. The big advantage available to the government of 

Sri Lanka was its capacity to amass and concentrate greater physical military power;

• Sea and air power proved critical for reducing LTTE lines of 

communication for supply and retreat;

• LTTE leaders tried to be the exclusive agents of an aggrieved 

minority. Insistence on exclusivity can become a weakness;

• International peacekeeping and monitoring missions (for instance, the Sri Lanka Monitoring Mission, SLMM) were 

effective only in protracting the conflict and were not trusted by 

the government;

• Foreign military intervention, in this case the Indian Army 

(known as the Indian Peacekeeping Force, IPKF), which fought 

indecisively from 1987 until 1990, will do little besides prolong 

suffering if it is does not resolve to achieve victory. In retribution, the LTTE assassinated the Indian Prime Minister as he ran 

for reelection in 1991;

• Water struggles can present catalyzing events (in this case the 

LTTE closed the sluice gates at Mavil Oya in 2008, cutting off 

water to a large civilian population);

• A major natural disaster (in this case the Tsunami of late 2004) 

can change insurgent prospects. Because the tsunami hit the 

eastern part of Sri Lanka, the disaster caused havoc in rebel areas, opening the area to new observation and reporting, and 

perhaps shifted political attitudes in the rest of Sri Lanka ,that led 

to the election of President Rajapaksa;

• The relationship of impunity and international extradition was almost always present. The Sri Lankan government wanted the United 

States to extradite a man they said was the leader of the LTTE, but 

was in any case a United States citizen living in New York;
13 Puthukkudiyirippu

50

• Until the election of Mahinda Rajapaksa, government leaders 

heard ‘Songs of Chu’ among its people, which disarmed the government and lessened its resolve (see Section 116);

• The LTTE’s identity, existence and survival were highly synonymous with the heartbeat of its leader, the ‘mens rea’ guy;

• Territorial control became and remained a central imperative;

• Suicide bombers are weapons systems. Although the LTTE invented the bomb vest and employed many women for placement 

and detonation, the LTTE leaders were not suicidal; they planned 

to enjoy power;

• Toward the end of the war, the insurgent leaders fell to a strategy 

of hope -- hope that foreigners would come to their rescue. The 

counterinsurgency became a siege with the insurgents enclosed.

Sri Lanka’s insurgent war has much to tell us, with the above list 

just a start. Perhaps the overriding lesson from Sri Lanka, however, is 

about the supposedly protracted nature of insurgent war. Sri Lanka’s war 

was protracted only until the government resolved to win it.

Please see sections: 137, Foreign Support and Foreign Perspective; 106, 

Massacres; 22, Badassoftheweek.com; 52, Sovereignty; 23, Mens Rea; 135, 

Borders and Anarchism; 93, Diseases and Disasters; and 116, Songs of Chu.



“The unforgivable crime is soft hitting. Do not hit 

at all if it can be avoided; but never hit softly.” 49F

50

Theodore Roosevelt

--------------

“I am not for war, I am totally against war.”50F

51

Mahinda Rajapaksa

--------------

“Into da boat.”

Conan in the movie,

Conan the Destroyer (1984)51F

52


13 Puthukkudiyirippu

51

-- Sri Lanka circa 2006 --
52

Lack of it doesn’t spell defeat or a lot of it assure victory

Section 14, Legitimacy

We can divide the concept of legitimacy into two streams, popular 

and normative. One recognizes and measures legitimacy as a degree of 

public sentiment or support -- an attitudinal question; the other recognizes 

and measures legitimacy according to norms of goodness and achievement

-- a behavioral question. One form of legitimacy is about acceptance and 

is a condition of an audience or population. Such public legitimacy can 

range from collective enthusiasm and dedication down to tolerance or even 

fearful resignation. International organizations generally hew toward this 

definition, admitting members to the extent they deem candidate entities

to be authentically representative of a people. The other legitimacy is about 

norms of behavior -- about incorruption, probity, rectitude, charity -- on 

the part of a government or opponent organizations and their respective 

leaders. The two legitimacies often mix, and certainly one may influence 

the other, but they often compete against each other.

If you are a contestant in an irregular armed conflict, you might

want to keep an eye on the legitimacy barometers for acceptance (votes, 

polling data, voiced opinions, investments, travel patterns) if such barometers already exist or can be devised. Be careful about defining your 

objectives according to legitimacy, however. If you assert that legitimacy 

is your goal, be sure to know which you mean. Be careful not to suppose 

that one form of legitimacy necessarily correlates with or builds upon the 

other. All the normative legitimacy in the world won’t assure victory, or 

a total lack of it assure defeat. Likewise, popular acceptance, whether enjoyed by a government or its opponent, may not achieve victory. And the 

question will remain: how much legitimacy is enough?

You can maintain scrupulously clean behavior, but Pontius and the 

crowd might still turn on you (normative legitimacy was not what sprung 

Barabbas). On the other hand, some competitors in irregular wars gain all 

the committed popular support they need by perpetrating the most horrendous and vicious acts imaginable. Popular legitimacy can also be 

ephemeral, superficial and narrow. It can be based on unattractive psychological quantities such as fear, hate, humor or ignorance. Popular 

legitimacy can be at once democratic and foul, so a dilemma will often be 

created by striving for legitimacy: legitimacy-as-acceptance versus legitimacy-as-goodness.
14 Legitimacy

53

Our hope may be that normative legitimacy will lead to popular 

legitimacy, and that popular legitimacy will change conditions in the battlespace -- that our increased popularity, earned by our virtuous, resolute 

behavior and deft propaganda will tip the balance of anonymity in our favor so that our enemy cannot hide his whereabouts, movements and 

sanctuaries. We may hope the high degree of our behavioral legitimacy 

will bring more volunteers into our ranks, earn us foreign support, make it 

easier to finance our war plans, and even cause parts of the population to 

directly fight of their own accord against a mutual enemy.

According to a whole body of literature, whether you are counterinsurgent or insurgent, if you have legitimacy it means you tax instead of steal, 

that foreign allies rally to you, and that people voluntarily offer you information about your opponents.52F

53 However, striving for legitimacy begs 

questions. One of the most disconcerting might be what to do with legitimacy once you have it. The military challenge doesn’t take care of itself just 

because you have earned popular support or act in a scrupulously ethical 

manner. You can work toward greater legitimacy for all the reasons noted 

above, but don’t count on even perfect legitimacy to defeat your enemies.

Also, words are economically vulnerable. Henry might profitably 

repeat the word honor in a St Crispin’s Day speech before a battle outside 

Agincourt, but what if he were to have used it every time he defecated? See 

how many times our manuals use the word legitimacy and compare it to how 

many times Thomas Jefferson wrote the word liberty, a concept with which 

he was obsessed. If, as a fighter, you sense that you must use the term ‘legitimacy’ in the explanation of your actions, then establish an explicit set of 

standards of your behavior and achievements, with a baseline and reasonable 

goals. Set your own moral compass. Embrace normative legitimacy. Do 

so because you think it the right way for you to be. Attend to popular legitimacy second. Don’t make legitimacy the operational goal of your war 

effort. Make defeat of its nemeses the goal. Our forefathers addressed Enlightenment abstractions through defense against their opposites. 

Operationalizing the ‘right to life’, for instance, they inserted habeas corpus

into their plans; the government was not to disappear people, because if people have the right to be, they have the right to be someplace.

If a criminal gang chops Stew up into manageable bits, puts his 

pieces in a 55-gallon plastic drum with mole, water, beer, peppers, potatoes, onions, tobacco, urine and sour cream, and leaves the drum outside 

Stew’s mother’s house over the weekend, that’s not so good. There are, 
14 Legitimacy

54

nevertheless, places not far away where groups do such things exactly and 

grow in popular legitimacy on the fame of it.

If you believe as I do that legitimacy is better measured in standards of 

behavior than in popular sentiment, the question remains what those standards 

for normative legitimacy should look like. The Internet is rich with indexes of 

the relative performance of the countries of the world based on one or another 

calculation.53F

54 The compilation Legatum Prosperity Index looks potentially valuable. Most of the indexes purport scienciness, but contain a lot of political 

and ideological baggage. The Failed States (www.fundforpeace.org) website 

had an explanatory text with the following lead-in: “It is an accepted axiom of 

the modern age that distance no longer matters.” That dubious assertion, if 

you accept it, will hurt your brain and your chances of success. A latter sentence in the same explanation confesses something far closer to the truth you 

might want to digest: “The complex phenomenon of State failure may be much 

discussed, but it remains little understood.” 

Most of the sites and indexes are, in some way, commentaries on legitimacy that mix legitimacy-as-acceptance with legitimacy-as-goodbehavior. Your irregular war is going to create, surface and irritate a lot of 

presuppositions about who and what are genuine and acceptable. It will cause 

a lot of curious legitimacy ratings of one form or another. You will want to be 

aware ofthose ratings, and the Internet is a place to start. The legitimacy propagandists might help inform your strategic communications as regards to 

current prejudices. If you could figure out the ‘methodologies’ of the common 

indexes for global state legitimacy, you might be able to demonstrate progress 

in your programs by showing an improvement in a country’s ratings. I put the 

word methodologies between disparaging quotation marks because most of 

them are un-replicable if not baffling. If you were to make a composite map 

of the countries most considered by the various indices to be failing or to have 

illegitimate governments, you would find only partial overlap of opinion according to the ratings. Still, a few obvious places seem to be universally 

implicated -- Haiti or Zimbabwe, for instance.

The conflating of ‘legitimacy’ as a behavioral norm with ‘legitimacy’ as 

a popularity contest falls into what semanticists might call the fallacy of equivocation. In other words, a variety of lying to oneself. I suggest that you set explicit 

standards of behavior for your own force, perhaps beginning with how children 

are to be treated. You might build an argument for legitimacy upon it (perhaps 

to include the broader ideology that your force supports). If, better still, you 

name and locate all who, in defiance of your will, are able to grant impunity to 
14 Legitimacy

55

their agents, you should be able to map the geography of that impunity. Then 

perhaps you can relentlessly pursue the perpetrators of illegitimate acts. Members of the greater population might help you, but, regardless, if you focus on 

confronting the illegitimacy of your foes and driving it to ground, you can win 

your war. State legitimacy can then tend to itself.

Please see sections: 20, Rule-of-Law; 95, Childhood; 107, Guerre d’Algérie; 

55, Kidnapping; 106, Massacres; 24, Ruthlessness and Resolve; 125, Human 

Rights; and 48, Grading the Social Compact.



King Arthur: The Lady of the Lake, her arm clad in the purest 

shimmering samite held aloft Excalibur from the bosom of the 

water, signifying by divine providence that I, Arthur, was to 

carry Excalibur. That is why I am your king. 

Dennis: ... you can't expect to wield supreme executive power 

just because some watery tart threw a sword at you....if I went 

'round sayin' I was Emperor just because some moistened bint 

lobbed a scimitar at me, they'd put me away.

from the movie,

Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975) 54F

55

--------------

“The mere trade unionist, who thinks in terms of “union politics” 

and “power blocs” and little caucuses with little fakers to run 

for some little office, pushing one’s personal interest here and 

there -- why should he belong to a revolutionary party?” 55F

56

James P. Cannon

--------------

“Thus the principle of collective right--its reason for existing, its 

lawfulness--is based on individual right.”56 F

57

Frédéric Bastiat,

The Law

--------------

“I choose to abuse, misuse and confuse competitors who think 

they're makin' up all the rules, fools...”

MC Hammer from the song

Too Legit to Quit


56

What is to be done?

Section 15, NGOs, IOs, and Unions

Determine how to deal with non-governmental organizations (NGOs), 

international organizations (IOs), and unions. Liberal societies honor the individual’s right of association --the right to hang out with whomever, talk with 

them about whatever, and obtain and spend resources together for projects 

ranging from alpaca shows to zombie dances. Some activities and organizations created in the firmament of this associational liberty tend to challenge the 

authority or instructions of the existing state, the government itself being but 

one of the organizations that the people of a liberal society form. Naturally, 

there will be some friction. In a developed internal war, especially one in 

which foreigners take an active interest, many assemblages of people will try 

to be present to accomplish their goals.

If you’re willing to go a little way out on a philosophical limb with 

me, you could agree that all organizations that people form (if they are 

intended to accomplish anything) are governmental. That might be to argue that ‘NGO’ is a misnomer. Unions, which I distinguished for the 

section title, could be considered NGOs or as governments. Churches 

could be considered government’s and in fact sometimes are. The intention here, however is to save the word ‘government’ for that organization 

that can impose punishment on you -- especially corporal or privative punishment -- that is to say, un-grant you impunity. ‘NGO’, then, refers to an 

entity with a name, plan, resolve, resources and enough presence within 

your conflict space that it might change the balance of prospects for or 

against you -- but doesn’t punish. It is when one of the NGOs either shares 

or challenges a prerogative of the state government that a ruckus ensues. 

Things get complicated when an NGO is tied to an insurgent or criminal 

entity, and more complicated still when it can also punish persons or grant

them impunity as a result. There is plenty of logical and practical overlap 

between what are called nonprofit NGOs, ‘civil society’ and for-profit 

businesses, just as there exist overlapped relationships between some 

churches and some governments. Likewise, there is considerable crossover between some NGOs (or even willing subordination) and international 

organizations (IOs) like the United Nations, the Organization of American 

States, the Pan African Union or the European Parliament.

The lede to Section 81, What a Clergy Wants, betrays a secret ingredient for distilling and understanding the myriad shades of IOs, NGOs and 

unions in your irregular war. Does the organization seek and enjoy any kind 
15 NGOs and IOs

57

of exclusive agency? Is it or does it seek to be the only authorized representative of a person, group or category of people, or does it claim to be the only 

organization that can grant some sort of license or blessing to others?

In the coming decades, IOs may play increasing and increasingly independent roles in irregular armed conflicts. In the 1980s, a movement 

began in the United States to impose what some still call a ‘Tobin’ tax. An 

outgrowth of the original idea is the automatic collection of small portions 

of international monetary transactions for an autonomous United Nations 

account. The UN would then have an independent budget based on international financial commerce. Once the UN is put on a more robust and 

independent financial footing, so the argument goes, it can tackle world 

problems like global warming, hunger and pandemics. It perhaps could also 

deploy armed force with more agility in support of its resolutions regarding 

genocide, nuclear proliferation and the like. That is what a bad idea sounds 

like, especially to the extent the UN could independently impose punishments or become the exclusive agent for whatever.

Unions are a particular kind of NGO and they are not made equally. 

The classic model is a brotherhood of factory floor workers willing to 

strike and refuse both to work and to let anyone else work unless the factory owners and bosses yield to demands, usually including a higher wage. 

That ideal, however, is rare today in much of the world because of the 

distributed nature of production and the differentiation of people’s productive contributions. Unions today are more sophisticated, interconnected 

and subtle in the ways they leverage what power they can attain. It is still, 

however, by way of geography, anonymity and exclusive agency that the 

various unions can be distinguished for the purposes of your irregular 

war’s order of battle. If a labor union can demand that workers at a given 

work place have to vote openly regarding whether or not the union will 

represent them, that union has greater power than if the voting is done by 

secret ballot. A work force that does not enjoy a secret ballot is like a 

religious congregation that must go to confession. Historically, the relationship of unions to revolutionaries or other anti-State actors in irregular 

wars has featured tension and ambivalence. Much of that is due to the 

jealousies of exclusive agency.

As a matter of fact, all they [trade unionists] had achieved was that the sellers of 

labour power learned to sell their “commodity” on better terms and to fight the 

purchasers over a purely commercial deal. These exposures could have served 

(if properly utilised by an organisation of revolutionaries) as a beginning and a 

component part of Social-Democratic activity; but they could also have led (and, 

given a worshipful attitude towards spontaneity, were bound to lead) to a “purely 
15 NGOs and IOs

58

trade union” struggle and to a non-Social-Democratic working-class movement.

Social-Democracy leads the struggle of the working class, not only for better 

terms for the sale of labour-power, but for the abolition of the social system that 

compels the propertyless to sell themselves to the rich. Social-Democracy represents the working class, not in its relation to a given group of employers alone, 

but in its relation to all classes of modern society and to the state as an organised 

political force. Hence, it follows that not only must Social-Democrats not confine themselves exclusively to the economic struggle, but that they must not 

allow the organisation of economic exposures to become the predominant part 

of their activities.57 F

58

The above Vladimir Lenin quote is an archetypical expression by a violent radical of his impatient disrespect regarding what he sees as an insufficiency 

of resolve, vision, and selflessness on the part of the ‘mere trade unionist’. The 

radical’s disdain is tempered by common agendas and common enemies. The 

violent radical typically supposes he can steer, lead, and use a labor union or an 

NGO, however, because he is especially willing to be ruthless. In respect to 

this relationship of the radical to the less visionary and committed organizer, consider the example of “Mujeres Creando” (Women Creating) or 

perhaps Mujeres Creando Comunidad (Women Creating Community) and 

the postmodern design genius of Bolivian Álvaro García Linera. A radical 

leftist, Dr. García set out to identify and unify disparate elements of resistance, to articulate shared demands and mobilize these elements to act. 

He recognized that in late 20th century/early 21st century Bolivia, as in 

much of the world, the classic revolutionary/organizational geography of 

the factory building and factory worker had shrunken and no longer offered sufficient mass to feed the vanguard or front line of a mass 

movement. Dr. García decided on a more complex, postmodern structure.

Mujeres Creando was a small NGO in La Paz dedicated to “recuperative women’s strategies against patriarchic and repressive systems in 

society.”58 F

59 Mujeres Creando is apparently of alternative or non-judgmental sexual orientation. I mention it as a proxy for a range of marginal or 

marginalized identities within Bolivian society that may not ascribe to any 

particular political platform, but which share a sense of rejection and resentment against established power.59F

60 To Dr. García, these identities 

could, in the aggregate, provide a force beneficial to his purposes of gaining national political power. The potential of politically powerful action 

from these identities was basically three-fold: democratic voting and votecapturing; propaganda (especially internationally); and timely, physical 

participation in demonstrations and roadblocks. The activities of such organizations just had to be practically orchestrated, even if only briefly. 
15 NGOs and IOs

59

Another relevant Bolivian group is known as the ‘Ponchos Rojos’, 

which translates directly into English as ‘Red Ponchos’. Many among Bolivia’s current opposition prefer to translate it as ‘Brown Shirts’ -- an 

allusion to the Nazi storm troopers. This may seem paradoxical. A strain 

of fascism has existed in Bolivia since before WWII. Bolivia was then 

home to various members of the post-WWI Nazi diaspora, including the 

infamous Klaus Barbie. Nevertheless, the Ponchos Rojos are ascribed to 

the far left, and long participated in leftist mobilizations, roadblocks and 

demonstrations. They have been invested in the traditional labor movement. They are at the same time ethnically-based (Aymara) and are 

accused of extreme thuggish behavior, a thuggishness that was even displayed against Mujeres Creando, whose sexual orientation the Ponchos 

Rojos deride. The MAS political party run by Dr. García (and his partner, 

union organizer Evo Morales) held a foremost ability to communicate and 

represent the grievances of these disparate outsider identities and to manage their animosities. As a result, the MAS gained the capacity to convoke 

them accurately.

Bolivia has a sparse road network. The people of La Paz, one of Bolivia’s two capitals, live at an altitude more than twice that of the people of 

Denver. Nevertheless, the Paceños (people of La Paz) live downhill from the 

half million people who live in El Alto, where the airport and all the communications towers are located and through which most of La Paz’ water flows. 

If rebels could set up successful roadblocks in El Alto, they could tumble the 

national government. It happened. The MAS erected human geographical 

barriers at the right times and places to successfully challenge the armed forces 

of a sitting government. Once the MAS took over government power, it saw 

to it that nobody else could make the same play.

How does all this affect your winning anything? The practicalities 

of controlling most organizations are not difficult. Whether you are prostate or rebel, know both the de jure and de facto rules that control various 

categories of NGOs, IO’s and unions. Control their anonymity, especially

as to the origins and destinations of their convertible wealth. Note the flow 

of rents, tithes, taxes, commissions, distributions, etc. If you don’t know 

where money is coming from and where it is going, that anonymity of 

wealth may be dangerous to you. Of course, as with so many things, knowing the physical location of assets and agents is going to be critical. Don’t 

allow them geographic sanctuaries to within which your long legal arm
15 NGOs and IOs

60

cannot extend. Seek to control and master the power to convoke. Crowds 

rarely form spontaneously -- especially not those that form in the most 

strategic places. Leaders who do the convoking stay in their sanctuaries 

or need an escape route. Their (your?) physical line of retreat to sanctuary

is covered with people. Those persons’ identities may be key to exposing 

the routes. ‘GIS’ everything if you can. If you can’t, keep the other guy 

from doing so. Identify and specify any exclusive agency an organization 

has or is trying to get. And remember, my delusional paranoid friend, 

every human organization is a conspiracy.

Please see sections: 104, Lawfare; 1, Impunity; 137, Foreign Support and 

Foreign Perspective; 20, Rule-of-law; 108, Common Knowledge; 56, Militias

and Gun Control; 17, Keeping Secrets; and 81, What a Clergy Wants.



“License to kill gophers by the government of the United Nations.

Man, free to kill gophers at will. To kill, you must know your enemy, 

and in this case my enemy is a varmint. And a varmint will never 

quit - ever. They're like the Viet Cong -- Varmint Cong. So you 

have to fall back on superior intelligence and superior firepower. 

And that's all she wrote.”

Carl Spackler in the movie,

Caddy Shack (1989)60F

61

--------------

“...the party member must not become a ‘mere trade unionist,’”61 F

62

Lev Bronstein

--------------

O’ Conspiracy!

Sham’st thou to show thy dangerous brow by night,

When evils are most free? 62F

63

The Tragedy of Julius Caesar

--------------

“To place any dependence upon a militia, is, assuredly, resting 

upon a broken staff.”63F

64

George Washington


15 NGOs and IOs

61

--Bolivia, La Paz and El Alto--

Note the steep drop from El Alto to the capital city of La Paz, visible on 

the relief map in the upper left, but not on a regular map of the cities.6 4F

65
62

90% of presence is being there

Section 16, Presence

Presence is a great and necessary word for the military and political

leader in irregular war. It represents a quality of inspiration -- that you do 

not just put your corporeal self in front of other people, but rather your 

persona, your will, your personality and its effect -- there to be sensed beyond just seen. You matter because you are one who will affect change in 

the environment. A leader will not likely emanate this charisma, this influence, without somehow being there. He might not have to actually be 

standing physically in front of a crowd. It might be via radio or something. 

Presence can be imagined, cultivated, and maintained without much of a 

corporeal element. Some ‘personalist’ leaders have used a lot of posters, 

which are apparently being replaced by tweets. Hugo Chavez hung around

without a brain wave for a while at the end of his presidency, still able to 

inspire followers.

The word presence has a similar, overlapping meaning as it pertains 

to the relationship between armed organizations and individual or collective audiences. There exists a physical presence and a non-physical

presence. Guerrilla groups can use a small amount of the former to create 

and leave behind a lot of the latter, maybe in the form of admiration or 

hope, but often in the form of fear. The following is from a renowned

Colombian historian about the war in his country.

When one talks of ‘presence’ of this or that actor of the conflict in a ‘county’, 

generally it indicates some place removed from the county seat, or better said, 

inaccessible, even to the most locally familiar. So then, what is ‘presence’?: that 

of an encampment (of varying size, placement and equipment) or that of a furtive 

passing, generally under the cover of night, by some armed band? Moreover, 

when an illegal armed contingent announces its presence in a small town or inhabited place, or just passes by, they “take” the community by force of arms for 

hours or exceptionally days. In such cases it is possible that the local inhabitants 

know approximately where they are camped or where they came from. Nothing 

more. It is exactly because the “locals” have to keep their affiliations a secret 

(they sympathize, are neutral, or are opposed to the armed groups, legal or not), 

the armed groups in turn keep the map of their route secret. Their mobility, as 

this suggests, unfolds as “corridors” that are really a meticulously arranged string 

of points of support...65 F

66 (my poor translation)

Please note the relationship between Presence and Sanctuary. Most of the 

time spent by contenders in an armed conflict is not in battle, moving to

and from a battle, or in escape and pursuit after a battle. Most of their time 

is passed in activities we recognize as mundane if not banal. They look 
16 Presence

63

for food, water, sex, entertainment, medical attention, or maybe they stop

to help the landlady carry out her garbage. “Leave the gun, take the cannoli.”66F

67 Many of higher rank, taking a bigger bite out of life, spend a 

certain amount of their time and that of their underlings in activities intended to make themselves richer. They invest in retirement. Closer to 

the play of Section 7, Sanctuary, however, is preparation by the guerrilla 

for safe movement, and improvement of the safety of their sanctuaries. 

That safety (of movement and sanctuary) is tightly related to efforts to create presence. One begets the other.

A guerrilla might enjoy a distinct advantage in a local contest of 

presence. The guerrilla’s communications can be made existential. He

can explain that, while his band is only going to be around physically for 

a short time (in a person’s face or in a town), it is going to stay close 

enough. The potential return visit is made as significant as the current 

visit. Perhaps conditions warrant a promise to protect the audience from 

harm, or perhaps the communication must be cruder -- that severe consequences will come swiftly if submission is denied or silence broken. 

Broader public expectations and rules of engagement might constrain a 

government armed force from making a similar message. In a peaceful 

county, the rules may tell a police officer not to serve a warrant between

10:00 in the evening and 6:00 in the morning, as such behavior is unpleasant and disrespectful to the neighbors. A gentle, liberal government instills 

some fear by suggesting that it will eventually serve process to prosecute

unacceptable behaviors such as ‘accessory to conspiracy to rebel’. In other 

words, there may be quite an imbalance in the influential incorporeal presence available to the contenders.

I do not suggest that the gentler side learn ruthlessness in order to redress 

such an imbalance, which is the advice of some. If we recognize the relationships between a) physical and non-physical presence, b) non-physical presence 

and the protection of movement routes and sanctuaries, and c) presence and distances, we can better measure our relative strengths. It then becomes apparent 

why the ‘gentler way’ of war is often that of position and movement. If we can 

truncate our enemy’s physical presence we might diminish his greater, nonphysical presence, which often as not is his capacity to generate fear.

If you concede sanctuary to an enemy, you postpone or forfeit 

victory. If you concede presence, it can lead to the concession of sanctuary. To allow, say, the nighttime to be unchallenged space for your 

enemy (or winter) -- or you decree that an enemy is not an enemy whenever he is not holding his weapon, or that he is not an enemy when he is 
16 Presence

64

on furlough mowing his grandmother’s grass, then you concede a great 

deal of potential presence. You therefore permit his maintenance of movement and protection of sanctuary. It is not always possible to avoid this 

concession and forfeiture; it may be unavoidable in obedience to the honest 

calculation of relative power. You just might not be strong enough to 

shrink those spaces, but don’t ignore them or wish them away.

Sending patrols out on ‘presence’ missions, to do ‘presence operations’ might be good, given that they might displace the enemy’s 

opportunities for physical presence. On the other hand, they might be no 

more than an idle use of the word -- operational design by semantics. If 

patrols are just there physically and that’s all there is to the presence

(maybe because of disdain for the incorporeal part, or because they are 

casual and intermittent), the presence efforts could be counterproductive. 

The greatest value of presence operations will be realized if built in anticipation of incorporeal effects. What is the left-behind presence to be? 

How much physical presence will be needed to achieve it and how much 

distance must be covered or space occupied? What physical presence is 

needed to meet the goals for non-physical presence?

Soldiers need to know their enemy’s physical location -- to close 

with and destroy him. Perhaps presence operations can produce some useable knowledge on that score but, in any case, presence operations should 

be closely related to sanctuary/anti-sanctuary operations.

Please see sections: 2, Anonymity; 7, Sanctuary; 137, Foreign Support

and Foreign Perspective; 20, Rule-of-law; 65, Smuggling; 56, Militias 

and Gun Control; 78, Identity; and 74, Refugees and Displaced Persons.



“If you're not confident enough to come talk then obviously nothing's going to come of it, because we're not 

even going to meet.”6 7F

68

Kate Upton (attributes)

--------------

“We promise according to our hopes

and perform according to our fears.”68 F

69

Francois de Rochefoucauld


65

Don’t drop the backpack

Section 17, Keeping Secrets

Before declaring independence from King George, the North American 

revolutionaries formed the Continental Army, precursor of the United States 

Army. They had decided that creating some ability to provide impunity for their 

followers was a good step to take before voicing their dissent. They knew that 

at the beginning they had to keep the fact of the army’s existence a secret in order 

to let it gain strength. Anonymity for the army’s membership was essential, but 

even when preserving that anonymity was no longer imperative; the capacity to 

keep secrets remained one of the ingredients of victory.

Keeping secrets isn’t easy. Rituals, rules, inspections, investigations and 

punishments can all help, but ultimately secrets are best-kept because of some 

freely-entered contract. Different ties bind differently and among the most binding are common identities based on family, place, common cultural experience 

(also tied to place), and common missions (especially if tied to place identity). 

There are all sorts of factors that can operate to cause people to leak information, 

including disaffection and dishonor. It doesn’t always take big factors, either. 

Sex and money are often enough, or are part of the formula.

Some kinds of organizations can keep secrets better than others. 

Strength in keeping secrets is an attribute of winning armed organizations, 

whether pro- or anti-State. International organizations, meanwhile, are unlikely to keep secrets well. They rarely have a focused and inspiring mission, 

exclusive membership, tight member origins, and rarely can they punish disloyalty and sloppiness.

Secrets, because they are based on trust, engender mistrust. Section 

106, Massacres, mentions a case in Colombia called Tacueyó, about a FARC 

leader who, feeling left-out by his leaders,stole a bunch of money from the FARC 

and created his own splinter group. Extreme paranoia (he had some good reasons 

to fear, however, given that both the government and the FARC wanted him dead) 

fueled his killing of almost two hundred persons, the great majority of whom had 

wished him no harm. Lack of trust, in the context of an ongoing armed competition, can have separate, but equally ruinous impact inside and outside the skull.

What is the fate of spies in irregular wars, or are they even spies? Under the traditional laws of war between States in the international system of 

States, a spy caught by one of the parties to a declared war could be summarily 

executed or executed after the briefest of military tribunals. If, however, that 

spy were to avoid capture or escape and make it back to his own side’s lines, 

he was no longer to be considered a spy and could not be punished, even if he 

returned to the area of his enemy (that is, if he were no longer spying, of 

course). In other words, the traditional statute of limitations on punishment 
17 Keeping Secrets

66

for spying was the spy’s success at evasion. In these irregular wars there is no 

rule like that. What do you do when you find spies (maybe better to just call 

them infiltrators or moles) in your organization? Summarily dispatching them 

may be seen by the public as untoward. Most insurgent groups and most criminal gangs, however, don’t just kill moles, they torture them to death. About 

the only category of human receiving worse punishment is the traitor/deserter, 

and if you are a traitor-deserter-spy, good luck with that. Ethel Rosenberg was 

executed for spying. The first electrocutions didn’t work, so she was strapped 

back in and electrocuted some more.

A government law enforcement unit finding moles from a criminal 

gang will arrest them and charge them under a number of available statutes. 

A government counterinsurgency force finding moles from an insurgent organization (also their citizens) will probably arrest them and charge them 

under a variety of statutes, perhaps including an espionage or treason statute. 

If they are from another country, but there is no war extant between the countries, the statutes will be a little harsher, the punishments probably a little more 

severe and the protections fewer. There may also be some diplomatic interchange as the government of the foreign country in question may wish to 

protect its citizens.

But what if a foreign force is helping an allied government with counterinsurgency and has its own troops in the territory of the foreign ally? The 

problem gets stickier. The government being defended is supposed to be the 

only one exercising a monopoly on the granting of impunity inside its territory. 

All else working well, the visiting troops, if they were to find a mole in their 

midst, could turn the perpetrator over to the host government and the appropriate prosecution would proceed. If the host country is not in condition to 

successfully prosecute, however, the mole might be released. That would be 

tantamount to allowing the mole’s parent organization to grant the mole impunity. In such a condition, the visiting government is not keeping secrets well

and not doing the basic job of providing protection for its own soldiers. One 

way of sorting things out is by defining sub-territories. The foreign force can 

set out a zone or zones of occupation. Inside those zones, the questions of 

justice, prosecution and impunity would be retained by the visiting government for the purposes of this one kind of offense. It is a partial or sliced 

sharing, or a loan of sovereignty. Another way is for the visiting force to participate in the processing of the captured moles. That could present some 

difficult language problems and surface some cultural divisions.

The question of what to do with moles is further complicated by differences between forensic evidence and military secrets. Most of these kinds 

of problems can be reconciled by thoughtful status of forces agreements, but 

the basic rules for winning armed conflict and the basic responsibilities of a
17 Keeping Secrets

67

government are clear. A military command that cannot maintain its secrets 

(perhaps by allowing infiltrators in its midst to go unpunished) is not responsibly protecting its soldiers.

In 1973, Fabio Vásquez, a leader of the ELN (now a waning guerrilla 

group) dropped his backpack during a skirmish with the Colombian Army. 

The backpack had in it a notebook with a long list of names of members and 

collaborators. The loss of the notebook all but doomed the ELN, which only 

survived on a thread for years. Similarly, when the Colombian government 

killed FARC leader Luis Devia (Raúl Reyes) in a 2008 raid across the Ecuadoran border, it found computers with similar, much longer lists. The loss was 

to that point the FARC’s biggest single setback of the long war and may have

constituted the decisive turning point in the fortunes of the FARC. The next 

big blow to the FARC came in 2010 when another major FARC leader, Jorge 

Briceño, was killed -- and even more digital files taken. Gangsters and insurgents need to keep records and a compromise of these records is costly in the 

extreme. Not only do insurgent leaders have to enforce secrecy among their 

followers, they have to keep secrets. There is no way to just remember every 

person, place and thing. There has to be someplace to keep the records and,

while the flash drive seems like a good idea, it is as dangerous as it is practical. 

Losing secrets means you are not controlling the balance of anonymity.

One of the less-debated freedoms of a liberal society is the freedom not 

to speak, including the freedom not only of association but of discreet association, and the right to reject association. Some feel that democracy is only 

valid when individual votes are transparent and each individual accountable to 

the whole group for his or her vote. This view of democracy, while sometimes 

attractive and just, is one that invites group pressure, extortion, and intimidation. Anonymity is a highlighted theme of this book because control of 

anonymity lies at the heart of what it takes to win an organized conflict. It may 

also be a central value of the social compact.

Anonymity and secrecy are tightly related, with the word secrecy connoting contract and intimacy, while anonymity connotes something impersonal. 

Rooting out traitors is a search for those who you feel have broken a trust, an 

intimacy, with secrecy and collusion in prosecution anotherside of the coin. The 

US Constitution constricts the labeling of people as traitors, the why of which is 

understandable considering who penned the document. Thomas Jefferson, having become President, tried to destroy Aaron Burr as a traitor because he had 

become a personal political foe. Americans don’t like to have the term traitor 

thrown around too lightly, perhaps given the American fondness for insurgency. 

An independent judge and a good lawyer saved Burr’s neck, but also, the flimsy

evidence didn’t meet standards explicit in the Constitution.
17 Keeping Secrets

68

Meanwhile, laws that limit expression can lend anonymity by suppressing the revelation of disaffection. A law can deter the disaffected from 

exposing themselves. Making it illegal to burn a certain flag, for instance, 

means suppressing the most obvious evidence of who would burn that flag.

You can lose secrets because of spying, treason, and your own sloppiness. All three can unbalance anonymity against you. In the process of 

designing against spies, traitors and the careless, however, you might create 

conditions that make your opponent’s secrecy problem easier.

Please see sections: 3, The Domesday Book; 2, Anonymity; 77, Sex; 30, 

Control Technology; 43, Sam Spade’s Whereabouts; 58, Condotierri; 15, 

NGOs, IOs, and Unions; and 83, Why Are Irregular Wars Lost?.



Dunn: Uh, Captain, I'm picking up an overheat in the computer core.

Oveur: How serious is it, Mr. Dunn? 

Dunn: Uh, I can't tell sir. 

Oveur: Well you can tell me - I'm the Captain.

from the movie,

Airplane II: The Sequel (1982)69 F

70

--------------

Peter: Before we go any further, all right, we have to swear to 

God, Allah that nobody knows about this but us, all right? No 

family members, no girlfriends, nobody.

Samir: Of course.

Michael: Agreed.

Lawrence: (through a wall from the apartment next door) Don't 

worry, man. I won't tell anyone either. 

Michael: Who the **** is that?

Peter: Uh, don't worry about him. He's cool.

from the movie,

Office Space (1999)70F

71


69

DE OPPRESSO LIBER

Section 18,

Best of the Best of the Best

The institutions most likely to win irregular wars are those conceived, designed and prepared for that purpose. A global trend has been 

underway in which countries have been growing their institutionalized capacity to prosecute irregular war. Part of the trend is a movement toward 

greater strength and autonomy of special operations forces. Below are a 

few of reasons why.

1. To affect relative aggregate distances to culminating points. Elite forces

-- smaller, better equipped, more intensely selected and trained -- can go 

further, faster, safer. Extending one’s risk distances while shortening those 

of opponents is touted throughout this text as a central preoccupation for 

operational success in irregular war.

2. To dominate elite competitors. Countries across the globe are investing

in elite force development. In this the United States may have impelled a 

new arms race, and therefore a change to its military challenge. Other

countries see that they might have a cat as good as the king’s, if not as 

many cats. The United States and its closest allies appear compelled to 

meet the challenge of a world order-of-battle featuring an increased number of increasingly capable special operations units. Countering and 

defeating other peoples’ elite units could soon become a central requirement for elite units. The coming decades may feature elite-on-elite combat

like the days of old when knights were bold, and....

3. To optimize leader and planner development. One job in a world of 

multiplied special operations contacts will be to orchestrate numerous disparate activities, each with distinct if overlapping logistics and relief 

parameters and partially derivative political consequences. Officers raised 

in a cultural of regular war will not be as well equipped for the challenge.

4. To field appropriate lethality. Elite forces can provide precise application 

of lethal power, but may also be more likely to recognize a wider variety of 

effective less-than-lethal coercive and non-coercive methods. Maneuver 

warfare education and training are sub-optimal for missions that call for 

finely measured or sprinkled quantities of physical coercion.
18 Best of the Best of the Best

70

5. To help absorb the social change mission. Although ineffable, everyone 

knows that America’s armed services, for example, serve as vanguards and 

practice fields for social change. We need make no judgement here regarding the net value of that experience. However, in order to retain 

institutional space for globally competitive physical, mental and emotional 

standards, some portion of the US armed forces will retain rigorous selection criteria. While American elite forces have also experienced what 

many see as an invasion of militarily non-competitive criteria, the on-going movement toward SOF autonomy could serve to preserve and increase 

competitive standards while allowing the maneuver Army and the other 

services to more safely and responsibly attend to social change factors.

6. To better synchronize relevant government assets. ‘Whole of government’ and ‘Joint’ are often just prayerful claims and reassurances. The 

common service experienced within special operating contexts, however, 

has often been a platform for exploiting comparative advantages and creating complementary partnerships. It isn’t ‘whole government’ anyway, 

but rather ‘whole of a fairly tight selection of relevant agencies’.

7. To reduce the number of chefs in the kitchen. The quality of an endeavor’s 

leadership diminishes to the extent it suffers more leaders than it needs. Today, many special operator types take pride in their ability to ‘socialize’ a 

mission, gain the authorities, permissions and buy-ins of all stakeholders 

across the full institutional footprint, and generally own the lingospace. Sadly, 

the ability to socialize missions has risen to rival, as a prized personal attribute, 

the ability to conduct the actual missions. A step toward a common, special 

operations service could go a long way to obviating the need to gain approvals 

from some of what are currently appendix stakeholders.

8. To make the regular forces better. It makes sense, or would at least be 

preferable, to not precipitously reduce big-war readiness in the process of 

improving performance in irregular warfare. However, the notion that regular army formations can be made competent to meet the challenges of 

irregular warfare without reducing big-war competence has proven wrong. 

Trying to make policemen out of artillerymen will leave poor cannoneers.

9. To better use surrogates. Kelly Smith, a US Army officer interested 

enough to write a thesis on the subject, offered that, “They are all fulfilling 

roles that the United States either does not have the capability or the will to do with 

U.S. forces”71F

72 It’s not just the Americans, naturally. From another expert 

on the subject:
 18 Best of the Best of the Best

71

“Hezbollah has closely aligned itself with Iran's Quds Force, an 

elite paramilitary group linked directly to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, 

while fighting alongside the Assad regime. In recent years, the partnership between Hezbollah and Iran has tightened to the point that 

the group's allegiance to Khamenei is paramount, he says.’”72F

73

Hezbollah? -- A fighting force aligned to an elite paramilitary force of one 

government, fighting alongside another government’s regime, but with allegiance to a senior cleric. Hezbollah is not unique for its multiple identities.

On this side of the globe, the FARC, historically associated with the Colombian Communist Party, acts as an armed wing of the regional socialist 

Bolivarian movement, aligns with Cuban government leaders, and traffics 

drugs with a global cartel array that includes other national governments. It 

diversified beyond drug trafficking into illicit mining, directly predatory activities such as kidnapping, and has a robust portfolio of licit corporate 

business holdings. It learned to outsource minor criminal chores such as 

hostage-nabbing and developed part-time militias and a variety of reserves 

and civilian support groups. It is for the second time on the brink of becoming a legal political party. Is Hezbollah or the FARC a revolutionary 

movement, guerrilla, insurgency, drug gang, political party, local government, corporation, surrogate or surrogator? Whatever, in many contexts the 

best way to compete with such entities is to also use surrogates. Kelly goes 

on to state, “It is possible, in fact probable, that the surrogate will have interests of its own as well.” No kidding, Sherlock. And that’s why elite forces 

are trained to be culturally and politically attuned. 

10. Because irregular forces are more responsive to the five attributes distinguishing irregular from regular war. (See the glossary, the preface, the 

synthesis, or sections 73, 99 or 131) The encompassing reason to continue 

to empower an elite force (even at the expense of ‘big’ formations) is to 

improve competitiveness in the global, overlapping set of on-going irregular 

war contests. 

Inevitably, ‘special’ is pulled toward more special and less special --

some elements are allowed by necessity to be less elite than others while, simultaneously, efforts mount to create units even more elite still. That dynamic 

seems to be an historical constant. More preoccupying for a liberal republic is 

the observation that increases in elite coercive assets can correlate somehow 

to the autonomy of executive military initiative at the expense of legislative 

oversight and veto.
18 Best of the Best of the Best

72

Please see sections: 58, Condottieri; 131, Is it an Insurgency?; 81, What a 

Clergy Wants; 138, Raids; 56, Militias and Gun Control; 45, Police or 

Military; 129, Nerd Globe; and 126, Particularization of Power.



“The Winnebagos, Bridger said, were the best of scouts, but they 

had been deadly enemies of the Sioux for many years, and some 

of the chiefs at Laramie had expressly demanded as a condition of 

the treaty that the Winnebagos must leave the country.”73 F

74

Dee Brown,

The Fetterman Massacre

--------------

“As for the kaleidoscope of political parties and trade unions, with 

their tiresome names -- P.S.U.C., P.O.U.M., F.A.I., C.N.T., U.G.T., 

J.C.I., J.S.U., A.I.T. -- they merely exasperated me. It looked at first 

sight as though Spain were suffering from a plague of initials.”74 F

75

George Orwell,

Homage to Catalonia

--------------

“They serve to organize faction, to give it an artificial and extraordinary force; to put, in the place of the delegated will of the nation 

the will of a party...to make the public administration the mirror of 

the ill-concerted and incongruous projects of faction, rather than 

the organ of consistent and wholesome plans digested by the common counsels and modified by mutual interests.”75 F

76

George Washington

---------------

AMAT VICTORIA CURAM

etched on an M1911A1in the movie, 

The Mechanic (2011)76F

77

---------------

“The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.”77F

78

Wayne LaPierre


73

Suffering is a price and a product offered

Section 19, Mercatus

Economics is decidedly relevant to the cause and resolution of your 

war, but economic concerns are difficult to isolate from everything else. 

That said, there are four theoretical points related to markets that might be 

especially useful and are favored in this book. They are: 1. Transaction 

theory and peaceful conflict resolution; 2. Borrowing and speculation as 

causes of organized violence; 3. The certain existence of markets in things 

tangible and intangible (especially land), and; 4.The unlikelihood of beating the market through central planning. These four are themselves all 

intermixed, so the following text is not perfectly divided accordingly.

You cannot: separate the market from the world; separate the market 

from money; or separate armed conflict from the future value of money. 

Money is both a measurement and a promise. Stable, agreed-upon measurement is one of the original human inventions for conflict resolution, an 

accelerator of trade, and a creator of trust. When we talk of the future value 

of money, we are talking about gambling and speculation, or about investment. Some friend of yours may disdain commoditization, mercantilism, 

commercialism, and Bill Gates. That attitude will not succeed to separate 

markets from the environment of your irregular war; don’t let it disjoin your 

study of markets from your understanding of that environment.

Financial debts created under duress might be called an extortion 

market or time-fused extortion. The fact that people take advantage of 

others’ needs by creating untenable debts or charging usurious interest 

rates is the fuel for entire political philosophies, religious edicts, works of 

art, and revolutionary thinking. What is an ethical price for the current use 

of future value? What is one’s ethical obligation to give of one’s surplus

and what right should individuals have to decide where their surplus 

should go? Can central planners decide the best use of private surplus 

better than a free market? What right should an individual or group have 

to decide on the divestment of someone else’s surplus?

If you are in charge of a military occupation, however (let’s concetde that ‘occupier’ might be appropriate even if you are an insurgent 

guerrilla leader), a central question is whether or not you know who owes 

what to whom. If you pretend that there is no market for the current value 

of future wealth, you’re lost. If you pretend that the lending of wealth for 
19 Mercatus

74

the purpose of investment is not happening or that it does not create resentments as well as appreciations and loyalties, you are likely mistaken. 

If you do not know if there is a collective identity of debtors and another 

of creditors, you may be missing an underlying factor of organized violence. If you do not know who has debts, who pays them and who collects 

them, you cannot be fully aware of the dynamics of violence.

It is not uncommon for some organizations to actively, purposefully create or promote a violent environment favorable for their 

investment. Shakespeare’s Falstaff (Henry IV, Part I) says “you may buy 

land now as cheap as stinking mackerel.” Falstaff, a swollen bag of dropsies, was looking forward to the bargains (not just in land, but in young 

maidens) that would present themselves due to the civil war passing 

through. The FARC and its opposite, the AUC, would create geographies 

of fear and violence in order to suppress the market value of land, and then 

extort its sale. Guerrilla groups are filled with Falstaffs.

Speculation about the future value of things, including money, is a 

frequent cause or catalyst of armed social conflict. A debt is often the 

product of a loan, interest accruing. People don’t always want to pay up. 

Debts can take on sophisticated forms, too, like ‘national’ debts, worker 

pension plans or sub-prime mortgages. It is common to create secondary 

markets for debts owed and to provide secondary insurance for that debt, 

thus creating a speculative market regarding the payment. This latter form 

of market is essentially a betting pool on whether or not the debt will be 

paid and on whether or not the insurance will be paid if the original debtor 

doesn’t pay. Other lenders will pay off (assume) debts now in return for a 

higher probability of payment over a longer period. All this ‘securitization’ can be confusing, but essentially it is all about the future value of 

money now. Knowing all this, and that it is really not complicated, can be 

a great advantage to you in armed social conflict, but you have to start by 

understanding there is a market for important things, and that the first important thing is land. There is also sex, retribution, absolution, etc., but 

start with land. It tends to stay put.

There is always a market in land. You may want to suppose not, 

because the form of ownership and the nature of records may be unusual to 

you. A right to charge rents may be ecclesiastical or clan-based. The rents 

might be paid in kind, labor or military service. If someone has the authority 

to determine a land-use, occupancy, or to exclude the presence of certain 
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people on any areas of land -- those authorities and powers are rights in land. 

The rights and their exercise can be traded and almost always are traded. 

Any trading in the privileges associated with determining rights to passage, 

occupancy, free use and enjoyment, rents, or the distribution or alienation of 

such rights and duties, constitutes the market.

Find out all about the market in land. You can intervene in this 

market, changing debt relationships, thus changing the cost of future value 

now. In fact, if you are involved in an armed conflict in some way, you 

probably are changing the market in land whether you know it or not, so it 

behooves you to know how -- and to at least have some control or initiative 

over it. It is an easy condition to test. If you do not know who controls or 

exercises basic rights and obligations regarding occupancy, rents, access, 

divestment, etc., of key pieces of terrain ˗˗ of any terrain ˗˗ then you are 

probably not aware of the conflict-consequences of your actions or those 

of anyone else. The inevitable result is your not being situated to take efficient measures or to anticipate unintended consequences of your work 

and presence.

Banking is a realm into which few soldiers enter, but where sophisticated forms of parasitism have long been known to occur. Sometimes 

they cause a war. In the late 19th century, the government of Colombia 

began to use a combination of tax and monetary policies to divert an increasing share of the country’s convertible wealth into the incumbent 

political party’s coffers. Coffee growers, at least those of the opposing 

political party, were acutely aware of the profit their lands might earn in 

international markets and how much they were losing to inflation and to 

taxes. They resented the forced cheapening of the local currency, matched 

by having to pay export taxes in stable dollars. The government’s attempt 

to redirect the rents of private land, via banking, and without returning 

value through public works, was one of the underlying causes of a costly 

civil war.

‘More absolution, less tithing’ is not a slogan likely to gain converts 

to a new religion, at least according to one observant economist, Larry 

Iannaccone. The Marine Corps recruiter who tells high-schoolers that being a Marine is easy won’t meet quota nearly as fast as the one who tells 

the kids “You’re not good enough, go home, you’re a weenie; if you don’t 

want to get yelled at, humiliated, exhausted, ridiculed and abused, don’t 

waste my time.” The market for some things seems to go against logic, 

but it doesn’t really. As Iannaccone observes, you just have to know 
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what’s being sold and bought. The Marine recruiter is gleaning for the 

candidate looking for challenge, purpose, camaraderie, and honor. The 

Marines figure those prime recruits are especially not looking for comfort 

or efficiency. Honor is also in the mix for the Islamic radical. For the 

recruiter of the suicide bomber, the pitch includes existential purpose ˗˗ an 

answer to desperation and despair.

Few Colombian Catholics are going to commit suicide for a religious 

or political purpose, and especially not for seventy-two virgins. Aside from 

suicide being one of the mortal sins, sex between men and women is apparently a less guarded event in Medellín than compared to, say, in Fallujah. 

Nevertheless, Pablo Escobar knew what the local cultural equivalent to Jihadist suicide looked like. He knew he could recruit a young man to go 

assassinate someone even though to do so meant swift and certain (or rather, 

near certain) death for the assassin himself. The offer was to buy the young 

man’s impoverished mother a house and to throw the boy a celebratory 

party. No shortage of takers. The parallels are easy to identify. They have 

to do with dignity, honor, hopelessness, disillusion, and are tied to territorial 

identity, local culture and the future material value of current action. It 

seems that many Muslim fighters who volunteer for suicide missions are also 

aware of the material support likely to be bestowed on their families as a 

result of their sacrifice. Honorable death often leaves a residual of material 

benefit. It can create a form of debt.

At some point or other, you have been abused by thinkers who 

don’t like market forces and consider them an over billed, false God of 

neoliberal capitalism, and a cynical justification of ethically undesirable 

outcomes. Some of that may be true, but if you so despise Adam Smith’s 

invisible hand that you deny its presence and power in your thinking and 

plans, you will probably lose your war. Marxist revolutionaries, for instance, have often turned into some of the best, if most vicious capitalists. 

They want you to think the market is not happening and that price is a 

fiction, while they work the market hard to their business advantage. Poststructuralism (the zombie of marxism-leninism) argues that power flows 

throughout the social discourse, that all actors, to include perhaps even 

things, have immanent power that emerges in the context of specific events 

and struggles. Ethereal sounding, the economist might just call that same 

dynamic interplay of desires and influences the market; and price the market’s way of measuring manifest power at a moment in time and place. 

For the purpose of winning your war, don’t fall in love or hate with any 
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academic discipline’s way of explaining things, but definitely do not talk 

yourself out of the existence of markets and market mechanisms just because you like philosophers more than economists.

The great names in economics were, at any rate, almost all social 

philosophers. “...[T]hough the sole end which they propose from the labours of all the thousands whom they employ be the gratification of their 

own vain and insatiable desires, they divide with the poor the produce of 

all their improvements.”78 F

79 The quote is from Adam Smith, who was talking about unintended but beneficial consequences of a free market and 

about the role of morality in all social dealings, including those most 

closely associated with money and trade. He was of course talking about 

the ‘invisible hand’ of the market, but the quotation is not from An Inquiry 

into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776) but rather from 

The Theory of Moral Sentiments, finished some two decades earlier, in 

1759. By the way, in 1777 Victor d’Hupay published Project for a Philosophical Community, which is apparently the first commie book of note.

Unintended consequences always seem to tide-in when a government bureaucrat or politician supplants the priest or hacienda owner as 

philanthropist or patron. Among the unintended consequences are those 

related to the generalized payment of what some people call the ‘social 

debt’ ˗˗ a debt supposedly owed by the more powerful to the less powerful. 

People don’t always recognize a debt or want to pay the debts they do 

recognize; creditors naturally get anxious when they feel some debt is due. 

The radical activist advises the downtrodden not to ask for what is rightfully due, but to demand it. Some governments ratify such social debts, 

reinforcing the idea that payment on the social debt is forever due. It will 

be taken from the ‘have’ debtors, supposedly to be paid ‘have not’ creditors. In the process, the middleman government will pocket a handsome 

commission, and the creditors wait patiently in lines for the rest of their

dependent lives.

How you define this basic question of credit and charity (spiritual, 

social, and personal debt) may come to backstop the approach you take to 

your irregular war responsibilities. You might dutifully repeat the notion 

that the government (a government that you might be) is justly measured 

in accordance with the services it provides. Good luck with that; the list 

of services demanded can expand fast and a population that is given much 

might produce little. Speculation and debt are under-considered causes of 

organized violent conflict. They are all traded in markets.
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Also be sure to study what business a business is really in. MacDonald’s, some say, is not in the burger business. It is in real estate. I don’t think 

Starbucks is in the coffee business, but in the brief-moment-of-luxury business. There is always a market for land, a most important object of desire. 

Know the markets, including for souls, money, comfort, and especially land. 

Please see sections: 61, The Geography of Dope; 65, Smuggling; 46, Taxation and Debt; 74, Refugees and Displaced Persons; 54, Extortion; 86, 

Shifting Covet-geographies; 126, Particularization of Power; and 72, 

Land Strategy and Property Strategy.



“The King of England brought seven dollars, and his prime minister nine; whereas the king was easily worth twelve dollars and 

I easily worth fifteen. But that is the way things always go; if 

you force a sale on a dull market, I don’t care what the property 

is, you are going to make a poor business of it....”79 F

80

Hank in Mark Twain’s,

Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court

--------------

Joe Dirt: You're gonna stand there, owning a fireworks 

stand, and tell me you don't have no...spleen splitters, 

whisker biscuits, honkey lighters, hoosker doos, hoosker 

don’ts, cherry bombs, nipsy daisers, with or without the 

scooter stick, or one single whistling kitty chaser? 

Kicking Wing: No... because snakes and sparklers are the 

only ones I like. 

Joe Dirt: Well that might be your problem, it's not what you 

like, it's the consumer.

from the movie,

Joe Dirt80F

81

--------------

“McDonald's...is not a burger-flipping restaurant chain; it is 

one of the world's best real estate portfolios.”81F

82

Anthony Dadlani


79

The rule-of-law is written

Section 20, Rule-of-Law

We hear a lot about the rule-of-law these days, and a lot of programs are 

sold as providing or supporting it. I can suggest no single title to read, but advise 

you start with Wikipedia and go from there. On the other hand, property (ownership systems; how a society divides, distributes, and recognizes rights and duties; 

how these rights and duties are recorded and observed; and how conflicts over important disagreements are resolved) is, as a practical concept, inseparably tied to 

the rule-of-law. In the end, for winning, the key to grading a rule-of-law program will be whether or not it helps you gain advantage in anonymity and a 

monopoly over the granting of impunity.

There are two principal currents of thinking about the rule-of-law. One 

current argues that rule-of-law is about the process and coverage of law, but 

doesn’t speak to the normative goodness of the laws themselves. In other 

words, we would credit a place as following the rule-of-law if the people had 

stable expectations about the consequence of behavior, and if everyone were 

treated even-Steven, regardless of whether or not the laws were harsh and stupid. According to this current, a tyrant could run a rule-of-law country wherein 

no other entity besides his State could grant impunity, even if the tyrant were 

consistently cruel. The other branch of opinion sees rule-of-law as a normative 

condition of justice. By this way of thinking, we would praise a society as 

upholding the rule-of-law only if the laws and their application are reasonable, 

equitable and meet some minimum standards of gentleness as we view it. The 

two currents are similar to those attending legitimacy, one approach to legitimacy resting on acceptance and stability, the other on a baseline of behavioral 

standards. As with legitimacy, the currents that define rule-of-law are almost 

always mixed. I prefer rule-of-law over legitimacy because, at least as a semantic prompt, there is more expectation that law is written, that I might more 

likely find it.

A notion commonly associated with rule-of-law is that nobody be 

above the law. You have to ask, however, whose law is it above which nobody 

can be. The relationship between corruption, rule-of-law, and impunity ˗˗ one 

of sordid intimacy ˗˗ comes into play here. The sale of impunity by government officials is corruption. If a government grants its own members 

impunity, we can say not only that the government is above the law, but that it 

has dragged others above the law with it. The geography of sanctuary for such 

corruptionists is the geography of the government itself.
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Many of us prefer to believe that real rule-of-law (the good stuff)

cannot exist under a tyrant or a corruptionist, no matter how accepting, 

obedient and pacific a people becomes. We would prefer to reserve the 

term rule-of-law for something better. In the cruel world, meanwhile, governance is easy without the good stuff rule-of-law; you can win at irregular 

war by assuring that only your State, good or bad, can grant impunity. If 

in your State the Man happens to be one man, then it is his law, his property, and he is the lord and ruler. A dictator can win an armed social 

struggle, an internal war, an insurgency. It happens all the time and some 

would say that dictators often implement the rule-of-law. There are proponents of strong-arm caudillos (‘lefties’ and ‘righties’) in Latin America 

who support government that, while itself ‘above the law’, at least rules in 

such a way that other, lesser entities can’t grant impunity to their own underlings for crimes against the public. Many Latin Americans are so 

starved of a peaceful social compact that stable expectations, procedures 

and institutions for quotidian conflict resolution are worth the price of losing the power to throw out the tyrant. They become willing to 

democratically vote themselves into slavery. That is the price of a flaccid 

standard for the rule-of-law.

Creating a noble rule-of-law entails two challenges. One is building stable expectations, procedures and institutions for quotidian conflict 

resolution ˗˗ all of which can slow government down. Thus, under the best 

rule-of-law, civil courts expect to see contract documents, and police officers have to get warrants before they make arrests -- paperwork. The 

other challenge is one of cultural education and acceptance. Rule-of-law 

is elusive where people are ignorant of the written law, or if they have so 

little faith in the execution and defense of the written law that the writings 

are empty and merely hypothetical. Some countries are chock full of legalities and statutes that purportedly protect everyone and everything, but

the high incidence of impunity in thos countries exposes the writing as 

inconsequential. Two vertebrate of creating rule-of-law: paperwork and 

education, both expensive and both forfeit to impunity.

It is not uncommon in embattled areas to find individuals who are 

motivated only by the threat of violence or by money. They readily believe 

threats made against them when they are aware that the threats come from 

ruthless persons, practiced in violence and likely to go unpunished. A victim population won’t help the perpetrators’ gentler opponents, whatever 

the attraction of the latters’ gentleness, because victims fear the immediate 
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81

cost of violating the rules of silence imposed by the ruthless. Rules of 

silence supplant the rule-of-law. Fundamental truth by rhyme: Snitches 

get stiches. Money, meanwhile, often measures the value of a victim’s risk

-- how much it will cost to escape or appease the ruthless tormentors. Violence is relatively cheap conduct. So is accessorial behavior to those who 

fear defying the perpetrators of violence. How high might the immediate 

cost of defying the perpetrator and siding with a gentler contestant be? For 

the gentle to win, the cost and probablitily of ‘stitches’ must be reduced. 

Rule-of-law (the good kind) will not exist if the side intending to 

impose a gentle peace does not control the balance of anonymity and close 

down the routes of the ruthless to their sanctuaries. Fortunately, many of 

the same processes that break down anonymity also serve as a foundation 

toward sustainable peace in which the cost of peaceful conflict resolution 

is less than that of violence. The rule-of-law is a combination of written 

evidence, institutions, and expectations regarding how evidence will be 

used by those institutions. To win peace and sustain it ˗˗ to create the good 

kind of rule-of-law ˗˗ takes written inventories, statutes and procedures.

Rule-of-law does not mean more policemen, although more policemen might help. The two main parts of rule-of-law are documents and 

public attitude about the documents. If those two parts aren’t constructed, 

it doesn’t matter how many more policemen we put on the street, unless 

we can be satisfied with a tyrannical rule-of-law and individual liberties 

are of lesser importance. In this latter case, more policemen might be a 

good idea so long as they don’t find a leader prettier than the present tyrant.

If you are going to win an internal armed struggle, your side has to 

dominate the granting of impunity. Your side, your government, might grant 

impunity, but it has to be the only organization in the territory that can do so, 

otherwise violent conflict is still likely. If you want to keep organizations that 

challenge your monopoly (on the granting of impunity) from forming, then 

you are going to have to spend resources on the design of the society. A repressive society can easily succeed at eliminating competition in the granting 

of impunity. Liberal societies find it harder for the obvious reason that people 

freely exercise rights of association, privacy, and owning weapons. If you 

want to design a liberal society that also can dominate the granting of impunity, then you have to work harder. You have to create a lot of documents and 

a lot of people that can read them and believe in them. It takes readers -- and 

that takes education, and that takes time. You need transparent markets, too, 

especially for the most important stuff, like land.
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82

If someone is trying to sell you a program purporting to advance the 

rule-of-law in some territory, think through what the program does to the 

granting of impunity within the territory. One possible indicator is the relationship of the program to the balance of anonymity. If you cannot predict 

the effect of the program on anonymity or impunity, maybe the program is 

a misnomer and you can seek clarification. If you want to shut down an 

enemy organization, you don’t want a program that does no more than provide your enemies a new avenue of legal escape. If, on the other hand, a 

program seems reasonably designed to create stable records and conflict resolution institutions and to educate people as to the economic and moral value 

of peaceful conflict resolution, it might well be a good program.

Please see sections: 14, Legitimacy; 48, Grading the Social Compact; 128,

Global Insurgency and Global Trespass; 131, Is It an Insurgency?; 42, Brigands; 

78, Identity; 90, Prisons and Prisoners; and 103, Amnesty and Restitution.



“There is no person in this room whose basic rights are not involved 

in any successful defiance to the carrying out of court orders.”8 2F

83

Dwight D. Eisenhower (attributed)

--------------

“Never can a new idea move within the law. It matters not whether that

idea pertains to political and social changes or to any other domain of 

human thought and expression -- to science, literature, music; in fact, 

everything that makes for freedom and joy and beauty must refuse to 

move within the law. How can it be otherwise? The law is stationary, 

fixed, mechanical, “a chariot wheel” which grinds all alike without regard to time, place and condition, without ever taking into account cause 

and effect, without ever going into the complexity of the human soul.”

Emma Goldman83 F

84

--------------

“You're trying to kidnap what I've rightfully stolen.”

Vizzini in the movie,

Princess Bride (1987)84F

85


83

A hidden conventional story

Section 21, Iximché

A lot was going on in Guatemala in the early 1980s. This rendition 

of the conflict highlights a relationship between small battles in Guatemala 

City and guerrilla warfare ranging the mountains west of the capital. The 

underlying war of position and movement, obedient to the principles of 

classic military theory, was more consequential than most histories remember. A major operation and turning point was named after an ancient 

Mayan ruin and piece of key terrain called Iximché. Of the personalities 

involved, Colonel Manuel Antonio Callejas y Callejas, who at the time 

directed the Guatemalan intelligence service (D-2), had the greatest individual impact on outcomes.

Sometime early in 1981, a member of the ORPA (Revolutionary Organization of the People in Arms) rented a big house from a dentist in the 

upper middleclass neighborhood of Vista Hermosa along the highway heading east out of Guatemala City toward El Salvador. The new tenant was a 

foreigner, apparently a Salvadoran who used falsified documents. His house 

guests, ORPA guerrillas, converted the home into a revolutionary headquarters, explosives and propaganda factory, and materiel transfer point. From 

there they supported guerrilla units marshalling in the highlands about fifty 

miles west of the city. Careful at first, they grew lax in their security under 

the growing weight of preparations for what was intended as a huge ‘final 

assault’ on the city sometime around Christmas that year.

At 9:45 AM on July 9th, the house was surrounded by upwards of 200 

policemen and another 200 soldiers. The army sealed off the neighborhood with armored cars and troops from the Honor Guard Brigade. Kids 

at the nearby American School, attended by many children of embassy 

personnel, were kept at the school until 4:30 PM, well past their normal 

dismissal. Schools in the area were closed on the following day as well. 

Efforts were made to secure the surrender of the besieged guerrillas using 

loudspeakers, but the guerrillas disdained the ultimatums, choosing instead 

to fight it out. Around noon, one of the army’s M-8 armored cars opened 

fire with its 37mm cannon. The explosion did more damage than expected, 

setting off a huge secondary explosion inside the house (no wonder, since 

the occupants were busy making landmines). The entire roof nearly collapsed. Fourteen guerrillas were taken out that day and another three 

bodies were taken out on the 10th. Four of the dead guerrillas were 
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women. One soldier from the D-2 fell through the roof and died. There 

are conflicting reports as to whether any of the guerrillas were taken alive. 

Perhaps the army was able to conduct a few rudimentary interrogations. 

Regardless, the tenacity of the guerrillas in defending the safe house can 

be explained by the value of the house’s contents. Not only did the army 

find an impressive stash of weapons and explosives, it also claimed discovery of guerrilla plans and valuable lists of other guerrillas.

The D-2 may have been tipped off by an insider. Two ORPA guerrillas had been taken captive and shown off in public two weeks earlier, on 

June 26. Both were young campesinos who had been taken prisoner in a 

rural area. In their public admissions, they spoke of their recruitment and 

international training. They probably gave far more information to their 

interrogators. Mario Payeras, leader of another leftist insurgent group, the 

EGP (Guerrilla Army of the Poor) later suggested that the captives might 

have described the interior of the house and, with that information, the D2 could deduce its type and neighborhood and then slowly check lists of 

rentals. In the search of those records, they would have been attracted by 

the suspect documents of this particular renter. Apparently, earlier in July, 

the D-2 had received a call from a neighbor’s domestic servant reporting 

odd goings-on next door ˗˗ too many lights on too late at night, too many 

adults, and not enough children. The D-2 confirmed the neighbor's suspicions and mounted the assault.

Mario Payeras wrote in Trueno en la Ciudad (Thunder in the City):

According to the classic principles of war, any army, knowing that the 

fundamental factors on which it has based its strategy are threatened, 

had better change that strategy. To the extent that a severance of support 

between rearguard services and the frontlines occurs closer to the front 

lines, the effect is more immediate. The closer the severance is to the 

rearguard, the more global the effect. Inside the Urban Front a similar 

military doctrine applies: to put the enemy commander in a dilemma. 

Either leave the city or risk having your forces destroyed in position.... 

In synthesis, that is what occurred. In the following weeks, having destroyed the rearguard, the anti-guerrilla offensive would have to proceed 

in phases in the countryside, exploiting the initial success and maintaining the initiative. It was the difficult logic of the laws of war that we 

were learning then. We paid for the lesson in blood.85F

86

In the weeks that followed the July 9th assault in Vista Hermosa, the army was 

able to mount a series of attacks on insurgent safe houses that devastated the 

guerrillas’ presence in Guatemala City. Army morale skyrocketed. Cracking 

the Vista Hermosa safe house was the good news the army had long needed
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85

and, as it would turn out, the officers correctly sensed that the 9 July attack 

was a major turning point in the war, perhaps the turning point.

The previous week, on July 4, the EGP held a dedication ceremony 

for two squads belonging to their urban military unit. On that day, the 

guerrillas noted an eerie calm in the city that they thought might presage 

bad news ˗˗ perhaps the government was planning a house-by-house sweep 

(cateo) of the city ˗˗ but the guerrillas discarded that possibility because of 

the huge number of soldiers it would take. The army couldn’t afford to 

dedicate the men needed to make such an operation worthwhile. Nevertheless, in the first week of July, normal vehicle checkpoints in the city 

had all but disappeared. This might have put the guerrilla more on alert, 

but they attributed the situation to impotence on the part of the government. The Guatemalan president, General Fernando Romeo Lucas García, 

reconfirmed the insurgents’ predisposition with a public speech wherein 

he admitted how strong the guerrillas were.

After the events of July 9, it might have seemed more obvious to 

the insurgents that indeed they had observed the calm before the storm, but 

instead they attributed the attack on the ORPA’s Vista Hermosa safe house 

to errors made by that cell. The EGP did not yet sense an immediate danger 

to its own urban operations. The next day this hopeful perspective was 

demolished. On July 10th, a second redoubt was taken, this time EGP. 

Twelve more guerrillas were killed. Although the guerrilla counted on 

informants inside the government, the speed of D-2 operations outpaced 

the speed at which the insurgent moles could inform. Within one month, 

dozens of safe houses had fallen, and although the D-2 continued to clear 

some safe houses well into 1982, the ORPA and then the EGP was forced 

to abandon almost its entire urban presence.

Each week, Colonel Callejas would brief Minister of Defense Aníbal 

Guevara in increasing detail on two phenomena (coup plotting and climactic events in the guerrilla war), but the arrogance of the minister and his 

boss, Romeo Lucas, was by then strong enough that neither could process 

the information. The defense minister was devoting his attention to his 

personal destiny ˗˗ which he thought meant becoming President. His busy 

preparations for that end made him oblivious to both the political and military upheavals that were taking place around him. 

The public psychology in Guatemala in July, 1981 is both difficult to capture and significant for understanding the shift in momentum that was 
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about to disfavor insurgent plans. For some time the revolutionaries had 

succeeded in creating that magic mixture of revolutionary messaging ˗˗

that insurgent strength was growing; that the government military was impotent to fix and destroy them; and that insurgent success was inevitable. 

Guerrilla strategic communication, if formulaic, had the desired effect of 

garnering supporters from throughout the economic spectrum and internationally. It has to be said as well that the insurgents broadly transmitted 

the message of their inevitable rise to power while at the same time never 

ringing an alarm bell that the Guatemalan Army’s hierarchy might hear.

Both guerrilla military powers, the EGP and ORPA, hid the size of 

their military preparations by disciplined avoidance of head to head contests with any sizeable Guatemalan Army units. Now, however, after the 

first of the safe houses had fallen, the G-2 was gaining convincing evidence about the magnitude of the guerrilla challenge. More 

consequentially, the public as much as the army noticed how easily the 

guerrilla units might be beaten. The raids alerted the entire urban population to be curious about what was going on over at their neighbors’. 

Finally there occurred a palpable demonstration of public support; the D2 began to receive hundreds of phone calls.

The anniversary of the Sandinista Revolution in Nicaragua was also in 

mid-July. Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega gave a long, Fidelesque speech 

to commemorate the occasion that fell hard on attentive ears in Guatemala. In 

his speech, Comandante Daniel laid out emphatically and with little ornamentation the radical course that had been mapped for the Nicaraguan revolution. 

Property confiscations were the order of the day.86 F

87 The Comandante also outlined and justified control of the press, including the highly regarded 

newspaper La Prensa. Guatemalans of any material means were offered a 

stiffening reminder of the consequences of socialist revolution.

The number of guerrillas or guerrilla leaders captured or killed in the 

raids was by no means crippling, nor was the loss of materiel. The D-2’s 

urban success had, however, four overarching consequences, as follows:

1. The raids greatly changed the distances of logistical supply to 

the guerrillas’ rural units. The insurgents had to switch (quickly) 

what had been a main line of communication running thirty to 

sixty miles from Guatemala City into the mountains to the west. 

Now they had to run their support activities from Mexico ˗˗ nearly 

a 180 degree reverse. In their urban raids, the D-2 had found hospitals, landmine factories, propaganda centers, and weapons 
21 Iximché

87

smuggling devices. The bulk of these activities would now have 

to be conducted at five times the distance. The D-2 also uncovered 

things like papier-mâché facemasks, uniforms, national police car 

license plates, and so on. These anonymity and infiltration activities would have to be re-constructed to be suitable in their Mexico 

context. At least, as the new intelligence also made clear, the insurgents could count on collaboration from within the Mexican 

government. They could obtain, for instance, official PEMEX 

(Petróleos Mexicanos, the national petroleum company) pick-up 

trucks to haul explosives.

2. They shifted the psychological momentum, giving the Guatemalan Army a vital morale boost at a critical point in the war, and 

making key sectors of the public reassess the possibilities. The 

D-2 had muffled the ‘Songs of Chu’.

3. The raids unlocked a door to intelligence information that 

would help make the next chapter in the war unfold in the Army’s 

favor. Between mid-July and mid-October, the D-2 obtained sufficient hard information not only to see the marshaling of irregular

forces for a major offensive against the capital city, but to convince the Chief of Staff, General Benedicto Lucas Garcia (the 

President’s younger brother) to act diligently. This was no small 

task considering the environment of cocksure oblivion into which 

the regime’s leaders had fallen. Colonel Callejas arranged a helicopter tour of key points in the highlands for the new Chief (who 

had been transferred from command of the distant Poptún Brigade 

in mid-August). They flew to the nearby mountain village of 

Chupol where the General saw a network of Viet Cong-style defense trenches, tunnels and booby traps installed by the guerrillas. 

Finally, the senior military leader was a believer that Guatemala 

had a war on its hands and not just a few annoying rebels. The 

resolve of the Army’s leadership changed tenor and planning for 

a rural counter offensive began immediately.

4. They eliminated part of the guerrillas’ operational formula, 

which was to distract a major part of the Guatemalan Army’s 

overall combat power in reaction to guerrilla urban actions and 

provocations.

The D-2 followed up on leads, uncovering a series of older rural insurgent 

materiel depots, as well as rural logistical improvisations that were occasioned by the collapse of the urban safe houses. Soon, Colonel Callejas 

could outline the shape of the planned insurgent offensive, measure its 

strength and point to its geographic heart, its operational center of gravity.
21 Iximché

88

From urban to rural. Although it is hard to recognize on a tourist map, or 

during a quick drive along the Inter-American Highway, the ground around 

the Indian villages of Chupol and Xepol in Chimaltenango Department has 

always been a military geographic prize. The space that runs roughly from 

Chupol and Xepol, to Tecpán Guatemala and the ancient ruins of Iximché, and 

through Patzún to the south and Comalapa to the east dominates both eastwest and north-south passage through the mountains. These towns sit near the 

continental divide ˗˗ waters to the north flow to the Motagua River and the 

Atlantic, whereas streams to the south flow to the Madre Vieja or Xaya/Vega 

rivers to the Pacific. The departmental boundaries of Chimaltenango, Quiche 

and Sololá meet in the area, as do the de facto boundaries of three major (and 

historically contentious) ethnic groups, the Quiché to the north, Cakchiquel to 

the southeast, and the Tzutujil to the southwest. These indigenous boundaries 

are not contiguous with the modern departmental limits.

The territorial organization of the army (into zonas) had been based on 

the assumption of external invasion rather than an internal challenge, so the 

Xepol-Patzún axis was not a focal point for the design of the major military 

commands. A boundary between two military zones ran across the area, their 

headquarters located in distant Huehuetenango and Guatemala City, respectively. Insurgent choice of the environs as a focal point of extraordinary 

revolutionary effort was no accident and was not predicated on proletariat ripeness or ideological romanticism. The insurgents selected what history, 

movement, and enemy order of battle all indicated was key terrain, if not the 

geographical center of gravity. Both the ORPA and the EGP, whose territorial 

boundaries also met there, recognized the same military criticality as had the 

pre-conquest Mayas and conquistador Pedro de Alvarado.

The Army kicked off Operation Iximché at one o`clock on the morning of November 15, 1981 with about 1,900 soldiers. The terrain objective 

was that key crescent of land in northwestern Chimaltenango Department, 

but the underlying goal was to break up guerrilla preparations for their anticipated Christmas offensive and to wrest control of the rural highland

approaches to Guatemala City. The guerrillas, overextended, overconfident, 

and not alert, were badly routed. The guerrillas had not anticipated the 

weight of the attack or the ferocity with which the army dealt with some of 

their most supportive villages. A clear message raced through the highlands: 

The revolutionary left, with its selective terror and marxist bravado, was no 

match for its better-armed opponent. Insurgent marshalling for a Christmas 
21 Iximché

89

offensive was dead. The army gained strategic initiative. The long-term implications could not be immediately seen by either side, and Operation 

Iximché, which was supposed to last 10 days, essentially went on for two 

years. The guerrillas would try to adjust, but they had no adequate ‘Plan B’. 

They reeled, and in 1982 the army made surprising adaptations to exploit 

gains and frustrate any effective guerrilla return.

Beyond a final assault on the capital city, what was the insurgent 

plan? It is not clear whether the major groups within the insurgent political 

umbrella organization, the URNG (Guatemalan National Revolutionary 

Unity) ever shared the same vision, but militarily there was some concurrence. They would isolate the northwestern areas of Huehuetenango and 

Quiché from Guatemala City and the eastern provinces, proclaim a liberated territory backed by broad international support (especially Mexican), 

then leverage this nascent autonomy for concessions from a besieged central government. For this plan to work, the Xepol-Patzún axis had to be 

effectively controlled both day and night. The territory would be defended 

by a deep battle zone that extended east to Guatemala City, to be supplied 

from out of the northwest (especially after the Guatemala City guerrilla 

infrastructure was decimated). Guerrilla positioning and attacks would 

dissipate Guatemalan army strength by coaxing the army into static defenses and reactions against urban guerrilla initiatives. The ‘final assault’ 

might or might not take the capital, but the army's strategic reserve (composed mainly of units in the urban area) would be so stretched to protect 

the city and its suburbs that it could not effectively answer the insurgents 

in the highlands.

If the urban guerrilla infrastructure was back in place in three 

months (as EGP leader Ricardo Asturias later claimed), it was back in 

place on a much smaller, more timid scale, like a re-grown salamander tail. 

The urban rearguard was no longer able to fill the same role. Three 

months, moreover, (in fact, it was more like six) meant that the urban front 

could neither distract army forces away from Chupol when the army 

launched its rural counterattack in November nor disrupt the general elections the following March. Whatever lessons the urban front might have 

learned, and however well-organized it might later become, its moment 

had gone. It had three main missions: supply the rural units, misdirect 

Army resources, and confound the elections. It could do none of these. 

Now it just served to prove the guerrilla still had a pulse.
21 Iximché

90

Destruction of the guerrillas’ Guatemala City network of safe 

houses was the first clear strategic defeat suffered by the guerrillas. Alone 

it would not have been sufficient to unsaddle revolutionary plans, but the 

urban campaign led almost immediately to the army’s rural counterpunch. 

That punch caught the revolutionaries overextended and in the midst of 

marshalling for their attack on the city, and not preparing for the army’s 

move. The balloon of guerrilla geographic presence quickly deflated, 

sending insurgent cadre streaming back into Mexico.

The Guatemalan Army could not definitively beat the URNG because insurgent sanctuaries lay inside Mexican territory. Eventually, the 

contenders would come to a negotiated agreement; the army had to accept 

a bitter half loaf. The Guatemalan government just didn’t have the power 

to beat an insurgent foe that had Mexico as an ally. But inside Guatemala, 

in 1981, the Guatemalan Army, guided by Callejas y Callejas ˗˗ a student 

of geography, history, and strategy ˗˗ beat a huge insurgent force militarily.

Colonel Callejas later became Army Chief of Staff, retired, and is aging gracefully. He is one of the graduates of the School of the Americas 

about whom the radical left is most resentful and vituperative. Mario Payeras lived anonymously in Mexico City and died young in 1995. His 

remains were exhumed by thieves and scattered. He left behind an appreciable body of literature, however, and has become a minor martyr in the 

leftist revolutionary firmament.

What are some relevant lessons from this obscure history?

* Smart guerrillas think about the classic strategy principles;

* Police forensics can have military operational impact;

* Public records are powerful resources;

* A guerrilla sanctuary in a foreign country presents a difficult 

operational and geostrategic challenge;

* Internal wars are international wars;

* Leadership is critical;

* Timing matters;

* Rural and urban are connected operationally;

* Cottage industry explosives had become an insurgent staple;

* Kidnapping had become an insurgent staple.

Please see sections: 34, Urban or Rural; 3, The Domesday Book; 140,

Risk Distance and the Pursuit; 64, Measuring Distance and Comparing 
21 Iximché

91

Power; 125, Human Rights; 55, Kidnapping; 137, Foreign Support and 

Foreign Perspective; and 136, Weapons.



Crowded the nations there were (Tzatz ri amaq' chu k'oje'ik).

Not counted people (Mawi ajilan chi winaq).

Warriors (E aj lab'al),

Also killers (E pu kamisanel),

Murderers (E kamisay)...

Not only two eight thousands (Mawi xa ka chuy),

Three eight thousands of nations (Ox chuy chi amaq')

They encircled (Xkotkomij)

Around citadel (Chirij tinamit).87F

88

Allen J. Christenson

Popol Vuh: Literal Translation

--------------

“What chance would Christianity have to exist if the truth 

were to be found in counting votes?”88F

89

Manuel Ayau

--------------

“Into ta tunahl.”

Conan in the movie,

Conan the Destroyer (1984)89F

90

--------------

Longshanks: Who is this person who speaks to me as though I 

needed his advice? 

Prince Edward: I have declared Phillip my high counselor. 

Longshanks: Is he qualified? 

Phillip: I am skilled in the arts of war and military tactics, Sire. 

Longshanks: Are you? Then tell me, what advice would you 

offer on the present situation? 

from in the movie,

Braveheart (1995)90F

91


21 Iximché

92

-- Guatemalan Highlands circa 1982 --

The black dotted lines are principal highways. The grey dashed oval indicates 

the approximate objective terrain of the Guatemalan Army in late November, 

1981. As soon as the army controlled that area, the communists abandoned 

their military offensive and retreated in haste toward Mexico.
93

ම��ද රාජප�ෂ

Section 22, Badassoftheweek.com

Who leads insurgencies, drug mafias, separatist movements and the 

like? So many great examples are noted on the website Badassoftheweek.com

it just seemed fair to name this section after the website, presented by Ben 

‘Amazing’ Thompson. A lot of Thompson’s heroes are fictional, some aren’t 

even human or even vertebrate, but that doesn’t matter. There are still plenty 

of historic examples to profile the kind of person who becomes a successful 

anti-State leader. There is no single profile of attributes, but most of the successful leaders are most of the following:

Aggrieved; Athletic; Brave; Charismatic; Creative; Egoistic; 

Horney; Male; Perseverant; Rich; Risk-taking; Ruthless; 

Smart; Student of military art and history.

There are plenty of examples of great insurgent leaders. George Washington

is my favorite. Spartacus is a standout. Pick your own; they all understood 

and respected the operational equation inherent in classic military strategy. 

Washington was especially careful to secure his lines of retreat. He didn’t 

enjoy too many straight up victories in battle against the British, but he never 

got caught. Spartacus, in a funk, finally defied one time too many not just 

his Roman masters but the timeless principles of war.

Note that ‘male’ is on the list of successful insurgents’ basic characteristics. Few women rise to lead major criminal or rebellious armed 

organizations, although it happens. Badassoftheweek.com honors a few. 

The vast majority are male, gender holding true more than the other characteristics. Guerrilla war leadership is an alpha boy’s club.

As for counterinsurgent heroes, it’s harder to find historic cases. Abe 

Lincoln might be up there, depending on how you define things, and no, it 

is not simple jingoism that I pick Americans and it’s no coincidence either. 

Lincoln might actually fall into both categories, insurgent and counterinsurgent. Colombia’s president, Álvaro Uribe, might be in the making as one of 

history’s most successful counterinsurgents, but we’ll have to wait a little 

longer to see. Sri Lanka’s President Mahinda Rajapaksa or even his former 

Army Commander, General Sarath Fonseka, has a solid resume, and some 

would include Francisco Franco on the short list. Whether or not the successful counterinsurgent personality is the same as that of the insurgent is a 

question beyond the reach of this book, but it might be so.
22 Badassoftheweek.com

94

Mao was not a prettyman, but he beat the Kwomintang using strategies 

that are now clichés of irregular warfare. Che was hunted down and killed by 

a Cuban-American who is still alive forty years later drinking rum and coke 

and retelling the story. While Che wasn’t smart enough to hide his campfires, 

Mao mastered military strategy. According to some, Mao’s last words were 

‘There is a serious tendency toward capitalism among the peasants’. Che’s 

last words are debated, but were probably not as his iconographers relate. I 

suspect he said, ‘Gee, I wish I had secured my line of retreat’.

The competent insurgent or gang leader can grant impunity to his underlings in defiance of the State. If an insurgent leader is dead, however, he is 

not going to grant impunity to anyone, so one conclusive measure of success, 

say, against a given insurgency group, is the destruction of its leadership. This 

destruction may not have to mean killing; it could mean disrupting the means 

of communication between insurgent leadership and subordinates or the suppression of receptiveness to the insurgent leaders’ message within a relevant 

population. I believe, however, that the physical bodies of the leaders are usually the optimal target. We hear arguments about some insurgent movements 

that they are spontaneous or ‘networky’ or that other phenomena of the age 

make the replacement of insurgent leaders all but endless. Reject such a notion. We just don’t know of any movementsthat succeeded without effective, 

named, flesh-and-blood leaders -- any more than we know of effective governments without human heads. Effective leadership is a rare commodity and 

in the majority of successful insurgencies, the leadership appears both stable 

and jealous. Besides, spontaneity grants fleeting impunity, if any at all. Somewhere someone is granting impunity in defiance of your assertions of territorial 

sovereignty. You’ll want to make that stop. If you gain physical domination 

over the granter of impunity, he will not be a granter of impunity much longer.

The above assertion about ‘cutting off the head of the snake’ is not

offered to argue that a counter-leader strategy is the only useful approach in 

insurgency or irregular wars. Do not dismiss other parallel, complementary 

efforts. It only insists that, ultimately, the engine of an insurgent movement 

is its leaders. Everything else about the insurgency ˗˗ its financial strength, 

its public and international support ˗˗ redound to the insurgency’s well-being, and so they are worthy of targeting in an overall counterinsurgent plan. 

It may likewise be useful for an insurgent to attack public and international 

support for a government, or to attack the economy. Regardless, all organizations are forfeit to a lack of leadership. The heart of an insurgency is also 

its head, the insurgent leader; of the revolution, the vanguard; of the mafia,
22 Badassoftheweek.com

95

the mafia don; of the dictatorship, the dictator; and as long as leadership remains at large, it can prolong or revive the insurgency (or revolution, 

rebellion, or criminal gang). The leader is the mens rea, the impelling will, 

intention, spirit. The fact that a given counterinsurgent can’t find and fix his 

insurgent enemy’s leaders does not make the point any less valid. It only 

means the counterinsurgency is unlikely to succeed, this probably due to an 

inadequate intelligence function or simple lack of will to act diligently.

By the way, Chairman Mao and General Washington deserve their 

own sections as guerilla, insurgent and revolutionary military leaders, but 

only Washington as planter of revolutionary change. The political direction Washington set and the propositions for which he led have survived 

his death by centuries.

Please see sections: 85, Paul Emil von Lettow-Vorbeck; 134, Luigi Galleani; 76, Gender; 106, Massacres; 23, Mens Rea; 144, What the Pirate Said 

to Alexander; 58, Condottieri; and 81, What a Clergy Wants.



Before the boogeyman goes to sleep at night,

he checks under the bed for Chuck Norris.

Scientific fact

--------------

“For too long have we sat under the thumb of mankind!

The time has come to oppose that thumb!”

Mojo Jojo to his Simian Army 

The Powerpuff Girls (2002)91F

92

--------------

“We follow ideas and not men, and rebel against this habit of 

embodying a principle in a man.”92F

93

Errico Malatesta

--------------

“You ever consider suicide?”

Jesse James in the movie,

The Assassination of Jesse James by 

the Coward Robert Ford (2007)93F

94


96

Who is the culpable author?

Section 23, Mens Rea

Mens rea means criminal intent. Someone can be held responsible, 

accountable or culpable for criminal, immoral or dangerous activity. That 

‘someone’ may include the intellectual author of an irregular war. This book

is about winning at organized armed violence and, so, tautologically-speaking

at least, it is ‘organized’ violence if someone organized it. War doesn’t selforganize. The system or the structure of society might indeed be unworthy, be

its own quiet organizer of violence and despair, etc, etc. Maybe that unworthiness is a motivating factor for the intellectual authors of resistance or 

insurgency, but insurgencies don’t just up and happen as a result of injustices.

Some academics disdain the notion of human nature and diminish concepts like guilt or shame as products of social constructs, the authorizing 

weight of the latter being subject to constant reevaluation. If human guilt and 

shame are simple artificialities foisted upon us to keep us in a submissive state, 

then we are called to depreciate the guilty mind mens rea as an element of our 

forensics and our prosecutions. Such thinking forms part of the psychological 

foundation for the “It wasn’t me, it was society!” defense. Some of it may be 

valid, but it is a tough wave for the jurisprudentially-inclined to ride. It asks 

us to take a difficult leap of logic -- to accept the argument that human nature 

is ‘merely a human construct’, together with the consequence that by so saying, human nature is invalidated as a reference for determining how to deal 

with our miserable species. In other words, under this selectively-applied poststructuralist’s argument, guilt is called-out as a social construct that is not really real, and so we are cautioned to focus less on capturing and punishing 

intellectual authors of insurgencies or crimes, but instead to focus on fixing the 

things in society that create the resistance or survival desires and behaviors. If 

you are inclined to resistance against the establishment and simultaneously 

find wisdom in that post-structural mantra about guilt, you will want to press 

the argument that your personal criminal or rebel behavior is not your fault, 

but the fault of the system. The argument does not fall on deaf ears(like mine)

alone; it might get you out on parole earlier, or give you a few more minutes 

to escape capture, or to formulate a plea bargain -- but don’t convince yourself. 

In Margaritaville and everywhere else, it is mostly your own damn fault.

The above-noted post-structural viewpoint about guilt notwithstanding, mens rea remains a basic element of criminal jurisprudence in our and in 

most societies. Fault, culpability, criminal intent, authorship of crime, badness 
23 Mens Rea

97

-- mens rea -- is Latin for a fundamental part of why someone deserves to be 

punished. It is also a fundamental concept for winning an irregular armed conflict. It is connected to the definition of enemy. ‘Public enemy number one’ is 

a phrase the substance of which depends not just on the behavior of an individual, but on the intent of that individual, as interpreted by the rest of us, to 

lead himself or others to future unpleasant behavior that we cannot abide.

And...leadership requires and exposes intent.

We might agree that: Public Enemy Number One’s mother didn’t 

love him; he was poor and just learned to survive; his Dad was an abusive 

alcoholic; that those disadvantages were the result of a poorly formed society which spawned an underclass in which such conditions are woefully 

normal, as well as an oppressor overclass that eats too much stinky cheese 

on expensive yachts. Agreeing to all that, we might still disagree as to 

whether or not such observations should force us to transpose anger from 

the individual to the society, and so justify chancing his raping and stealing 

on a continuing basis. Maybe some crafty Public Enemy Number One 

crowns himself agent and vanguard of proletariat retribution, even though 

he is himself not poor, but rather a scion of an upper middleclass champion 

of selfishness. Either way, if his is the skull within which plans are made 

for doing harm to others, and especially if he is intelligent, guileful, ruthless and charismatic, he will guide others into violent action.

Mens rea, the guilty cogitation causing violent actions, can be located 

and followed. Bad things sometimes just happen, but usually the ones that really bother us are the product of nasty thinking. If you have no sub-plan to hide 

your nasty thinking, or to locate the physical geographic locus of your foe’s 

nasty thinking, you are making a competitive mistake. Killing Adolf Hitler 

might have worked. Capturing Presidente Gonzalo (nom de guerre of insurgent leader Abimael Guzmán) stopped the Peruvian Sendero Luminoso 

insurgency in its tracks. As time passes for an insurgency (or even for an unjust 

social structure) the mens rea can be spread out a little bit (more leaders, more 

places), making it a little harder to corner. The mens rea of insurgency or criminal enterprise has precise geography, however, while the guilt of a faulty 

social construct has a nebulous geography. Insurgents often of course prefer to 

blame the construct; muchly because they do not want to be located.

Some organizations are resistant to destruction by decapitation. In 

them, subunits act on independent initiative or the organization grooms 

many replacement leaders and has a formula for succession. Such durability 
23 Mens Rea

98

doesn’t change the logic of Maguire’s synthesis (see page 19) ˗˗ it just multiplies its possible occasions. Armed organizations will toughen and 

vaccinate themselves against decapitation exactly because the Maguire 

equation is unavoidable. Its upshot can be ameliorated, but essentially, ultimately, it is the basic mathematic for victory or defeat in military operations. 

If leadership cannot be protected, if it cannot reach and enjoy sanctuary, 

whatever it leads is at mortal risk. Leadership is a precious commodity and 

a supreme element of relative power. Once leadership is neutralized, so is 

power. The quality of mind that makes that leadership an enemy of a State 

is called mens rea. It has a physical geography. The heads within which resides the mens rea can be upsidededly kicked.

Please see sections: 2, Anonymity; 6, The Operational Equation; 9, White Bird;

39, Socio-economic Causation; 115, Physics of Strategy; 59, Spontaneity; 43, 

Sam Spade’s Whereabouts; and 25, Why Humans Don’t Fight.



“You can't hold a whole fraternity responsible for the behavior of a 

few, sick, twisted individuals. For if you do...isn't this an indictment 

of our educational institutions in general? I put it to you...isn't this 

an indictment of our entire American society? Well, you can do 

whatever you want to us, but we're not going to sit here and listen to 

you badmouth the United States of America.”

Otter in the movie,

Animal House (1978)94F

95

--------------

“There's no difference between one's killing and making decisions that 

will send others to kill. It's exactly the same thing, or even worse.”

Golda Meir (attributed)

--------------

“In a way, all of us has an El Guapo to face. For some, shyness might be 

their El Guapo. For others, a lack of education might be their El Guapo. 

For us, El Guapo is a big, dangerous man who wants to kill us. But as sure 

as my name is Lucky Day, the people of Santa Poco can conquer their 

own personal El Guapo, who also happens to be the actual El Guapo!”

Lucky Day in the movie,

The Three Amigos (1986)95F

96


99

Do people respond best to threats?

Section 24,

Ruthlessness and Resolve

If you are not willing to kill someone, you won’t win your armed conflict. You might get lucky, of course, and not have to, so if hanging on to that 

hope is helpful to you, OK. But I assume somebody has the will to kill you, 

otherwise we’d just be talking about global warming.

Roger Trinquier wrote a book titled Modern Warfare. He is one of a pair 

of deceased French Army officers often referenced in US military writing about 

counterinsurgency. The other is David Galula. Section 107, Guerre d’Algérie

talks a little about that war, so suffice it here to say it was probably the worst 

counterinsurgent effort in history or at least since the French Revolution. Trinquier, however, thought he was doing pretty well as a counterinsurgent, for a 

short while at least. He attributed his success to attitude as much as to specific 

tactics or strategies. The marrow of that attitude was a conviction that the populace had to be put in mortal fear --scared to death or put to death.

A Guatemalan once told me that the communist guerrillas and the Guatemalan Army each had to prove to villagers of the mountain tribes that their 

opponents could not protect them. In other words, the guerrillas argued that the 

army could not protect a tribe from the guerrillas and the army would argue to 

the same tribe that the guerrillas could not protect it from the army. Each side

would present their version of the argument by graphic example, what Luigi 

Galleani might have called propaganda of the deed.

A culture of violence can become draconian inside guerrilla bands. 

Leaders of the Colombian Ejército de Liberación Nacional(National Liberation 

Army, ELN), for instance, thought it necessary to require from its recruits a proof 

of willingness to kill, a proof that could only be met by killing. They also required acceptance of death as a penalty for even relatively minor infractions, and 

certain death for betrayals, with betrayal sometimes defined broadly to include 

even minor infractions. In other words, to be part of the unit, you had to be 

willing to kill and die cheaply. Anonymity was especially to be guarded, and 

death was therefore the penalty for breaching anonymity. From Lapham’s Raiders, about American and Philippine guerrillas fighting against the Japanese in 

World War II, we read,

First off, to be successful a guerrilla leader must become, in one way or another, 

the de facto ruler of the territory in which he operates. Failure to achieve authority 

will defeat all his plans and hopes. From this it follows that he must maintain the 

loyalty of local officials and local people, making it safer for them to give him 
24 Ruthlessness and Resolve

100

such loyalty than to pursue any other course. That, in turn, requires that spies, 

collaborators with enemies, and anyone else who breaks down the trust between 

himself and the local population must be eliminated or neutralized without pity. 

Nothing less will suffice.96 F

97

The two centrally significant violent events in mafia or gangster culture 

are retributions for bearing witness or informing against the organization 

(death to traitors) and proof of loyalty by way of the commission of murder 

and torture (can get the job done). For efficiency’s sake, victims of the proofby-murder will be persons who resist the payment of ransoms or for whom 

ransoms are not paid. These deaths are not part of the culture per se, but rather 

part of the business. Similarity to guerrilla violent culture, however, is evident.

A British officer explained the Irish problem to me succinctly: the 

Irish were stubborn and the British resolute. Resolve is neither the opposite of ruthlessness, nor always combined with it. Resolve is a columnar

quality, both for resistance to the Man and to the kinds of cultures of violence that often grow in guerrillas and mafias. Willingness to suffer and 

regain defiance in the face of ruthlessness, or to resist enslavement, is not 

the human norm; most folk fold. The British name their warships Indefatigable, Indomitable, Resolute, Truculent Bastard, etc. Meanwhile, the

existentialist’s take on strategic power admires a leader who can get a congregant to sacrifice himself while killing someone else - at global distance.

Please see sections: 42, Brigands; 16, Presence; 4, Defining Enemy; 84, 

Cultures of Violence; 56, Militias and Gun Control; 107, Guerre d’Algérie; 106, Massacres; and 98, Jorge Verstrynge and Pio Moa.



“‘All are dead but the dog. Let him carry the news to the fort.’ But 

another warrior shot the animal through with an arrow. ‘No,’ he said. 

‘Do not let even a dog get away.’”97 F

98

Dee Brown,

The Fetterman Massacre

--------------

“...through our cruelty they will know who we are. And they will 

find the evidence of our cruelty in the disemboweled, dismembered, 

and disfigured bodies of their brothers we leave behind us.”

Lt Aldo Raines in the movie,

Inglourious Basterds (2009)98F

99


101

If it’s cheaper not to

Section 25,Why Humans Don’t Fight

It might help to know why you want to fight and why your opponent 

wants to fight. It might be more helpful to know why people don’t fight.

Why humans fight:

A. ‘That’s my stuff’.

B. ‘You hurt my feelings’, or ‘You dishonored me’.

C. ‘I’m nuts’.

The three mix. ‘That’s my stuff’ is easiest to understand and the most common. Some people are purists on the matter: ‘What’s mine is mine and 

what’s yours is mine’. A tendency toward arrogation is one of those things 

some folk call human nature while others, who do not believe so much in 

the concept of human nature, will say it is the product of a flawed social 

construct. Either way, we try to tax other people’s wealth so that we don’t 

have to work so hard at just stealing it. If we can be the government, we can 

be legitimate thieves. Instead of self-righteous philanthropists, we can redistribute un-earned wealth to the downtrodden. Meanwhile, a standard act of 

insurgency is to not pay the king’s tax. We might even rob from the government tax collector. Ours is better than his.

‘That’s my girl’ might be used to bridge A with B, alluding to emotive 

reasons generally. Violence may be a response to dishonor, or it could even 

be an arrogation of spirituality. Someone venerates something and has sufficient ego that he wants the rest of us to venerate it along with him, led in 

worship by him. Naturally, he will tax us for the education. The object of 

veneration may be God or a theory but, since the effort to impose communion 

requires so much ego, the personality of the priest himself becomes the object

of veneration. Lots of people are enthralled by and apologize for what today 

is called a ‘populist’. Others prefer ‘mullah.’

‘I’m nuts’ might be less common, but people do fight because they are 

not healthy psychologically. Many successful violent populists have seemed 

to be partially nuts, bi-polar nuts, or drug-induced nuts. We always ask if a 

leader who seems a bit eccentric or radical isn’t actually a little insane. We 

often enter into debate about whether the leader of some foreign government 

whose behavior offends us is or isn’t a little off his rocker. Are Ahmadinejad

or Chávez messianic, crazy like foxes, or do we just not understand? The right 

answer is...they’re probably a little insane. But we all are to some degree and 

we often admire and follow those who are just a little nuttier than ourselves, 

perhaps confusing irrationality with commitment or resolve. We often look to 
25 Why Humans Don’t Fight

102

our radicals, to the activists, to the obsessively invested, for leadership. Resolve is necessary for action and extreme resolve is sometimes necessary for 

mortal action. We admire single-mindedness and perseverance against adversity. It just happens that these qualities aren’t as sane a set characteristics as 

those that guide us to staying comfortable and taking the easy pathways.

There is a longer list of possible reasons why people fight. Domination 

and violence are pleasurable to some people. There is also the notion of war economies, meaning that some people simply benefit economically from selling this 

and that to violent competitors, so it behooves them to warmong. There exist Hegelian-type notions that war is a crucible of history and nationhood, meaning that 

leaders feel and encourage the unifying emotions of mortal challenge.

Use of the concept of mens rea (see Section 23) can aid your understanding of the reasons why people organize for violence. Knowing the 

motivation of the authors of mortal action helps measure the possibilities for 

prosecution, compromise and restitution, or to temper vindictiveness. Organizationally speaking, it also helps us consider the likely effect of a change of 

leadership. If we capture Gonzalo, will his revolutionary organization keep the 

same unity, purpose and determination, or will it fold? If the country’s president loses the next election, will there be a change of strategy toward us?

Some scholars reject the overall parameters of thought within which 

the concept of guilt or criminal intent are featured. They are more likely to 

accuse insidious social forces as the cause of criminal activity, stressing the 

slow violence economic privilege perpetrates against an underclass. Those 

scholars are more likely to excuse an individuals’ violence as being the product 

of an unjust social compact, the construction of which had excluded the individual’s input. This ‘resistance’ perspective, with many sincere adherents, is 

perfectly subject to the three general categories of why people fight. While the 

resistance narrative justifies the violent actions of the underdog, the same narrative accuses some elite of a culpable mens rea, and prescribes justice in the 

form of their punishment. It is still a ‘you’ve got my stuff’ or a ‘you’ve got my 

girl’ proposition. It still involves a desire to defeat impunity, impose punishment, and rebalance a relationship of domination and submission.

Why humans don’t fight:

A. Peaceful conflict resolution is cheaper

B. They don’t think they can win

C. They are convinced fighting is wrong

To ask why humans fight presupposes that peace is the normal human 

condition and war or violent conflict the exception. If, however, the base condition of man is violent and territorial, and peace a recent improvement, then 
25 Why Humans Don’t Fight

103

the efficient question is why peace occurs. Sir Michael Howard (The Invention 

of Peace: Reflections on War and International Order) would probably 

agree.9 9F

100 A point made by John Powelson in The Story of Land: A World 

History of Land Tenure and Agrarian Reform becomes all the more intriguing. 

He noted that no country without a formal system of land ownership and written contracts has ever enjoyed long periods of internal peace.100 F

101 In everyday 

legal parlance, land outside the lines of formal property is subject to ‘possession by force’. Without the unique controlling institution of formalized 

property, violent conflict is inevitable.

Looking at thresholds of peace instead of violence, we also see an

inverse of the transaction cost approach taken by Douglass North and Robert Thomas (Please see Section 82, Conflict Thresholds). People are more 

likely to turn to peace when the cost of peaceful transactions is perceived 

to be less than the cost of violence. Peaceful transaction costs became less 

than the cost of violence when systems that encouraged fulfillment of contractual obligations were emplaced. These include things like statutes of 

fraud and land surveys. If you are the counterinsurgent trying to win an 

internal armed conflict of some kind, you will not achieve a condition of 

generalized human security and social peace without the tedious forms, 

papers, signatures, photocopies, files and maps of obsessive public administration. And...although indispensable, that will still not be enough. You 

will still need property courts, markets and elections. If you are an insurgent, the fluid functioning of these things could do you in. You might want 

to put a wrench in them.

Humans fight because our neighbor has stuff we want; or for pleasure, dominance or revenge; or because we’re insane; or upon some 

combination or inverse of these. The idea of a peace threshold is more concerned with the when, where, who and how people come to live within a 

peaceful social compact. It doesn’t delve so much into the basic question of

why we fight as it does how we might create an environment where it is easier 

not to fight. Andro Linklater’s Measuring America is one of the least heralded, 

but most remarkably well-argued books on this point. It relates the forming of 

the United States, framing that story within an observation about stable measurements and measuring devices as central innovations in human conflict 

resolution and in the creation of wealth. The ‘gram’ or the ‘yard’ reveal themselves as such obviously valuable concepts that we are impressed to return to 

our plans to see if we have overlooked fairness and stability of basic measures 

as a concern in our plans for peaceful territories. Fairness in land measurement 

is a theme of Property & Peace (See bibliography under Demarest), and of 
25 Why Humans Don’t Fight

104

sections in this book that deal with the formalization of land ownership. The 

regulation of measurement goes beyond land, however, to expectations of 

monetary stability, time periods for governance, the value of a single vote, 

number of public school days, etc. The question of stable measurement as a 

column of conflict resolution reminds the most libertarian among us of the role 

that government might have to play in conflict resolution, a role that depends 

on something we so easily overlook --that an acre needs to be the same amount 

of land with every sale if we are to avoid fights.

Jealousy, greed, revenge and fear are common departure points for explanations of why people fight. It would be nice to know why you and your 

enemy are fighting. It would also be nice to know how and why violent groups 

form -- their inception, their birthing --so that maybe we could deter or interrupt 

it (or so we might deter the deterrence as we form our rebel army). List D, the 

Appendix of Miscelaenous Lists (page 582) is a speculative outline of the process of violent group formation -- in case you are interested. However, for 

winning you want to know your enemy’s whereabouts, whatever his compelling

narrative, ethopoetic backstory, angst and or spirituality. You want to attack his 

geographic anonymity. If you know where but not why, your chances of winning are greater than if you know why but not where. Moreover, to sustain a 

liberal peace and not create enemies, know why people do not fight. Encourage

the historically-proven institutions that help people reach and maintain the 

threshold of peaceful concord. Chief among these is administration of the social 

compact based on transparent, liberal distribution of property.

Please see sections: 86, Shifting Covet-geographies; 82, Conflict Thresholds;

16, Presence; 124, Slavery and Underclass; 121, Dignity and Honor; 103,

Amnesty and Restitution; 106, Massacres; and 84, Cultures of Violence.



“Peace is not absence of conflict;

It is the ability to handle conflict by peaceful means.”10 1F

102

Ronald Reagan

--------------

“Mine is better than ours.”102 F

103

Ben Franklin


26 The Chaco War

105

Failure to appreciate distance

Section 26, The Chaco War

At about the time the Asturian kerfuffle devolved into the armed revolution as narrated in Section 97, the Bolivians and Paraguayans were going to 

war against each other over a spit of land -- about a third the size of France. 

None of the five characteristics that distinguish irregular from regular war applied. There were few civilians in the battle area; anonymity was not much of 

an issue; public psychological factors and narrative were uncomplicated; lawfare was undeveloped; and odd, insurgent or paramilitary-type units were 

inconsequential if they existed at all. The war was about as regular as regular 

can be. It was, however, what the great powers thought of as a small war. Although immensely consequential to the parties involved, it was insignificant to 

the world of people who thought themselves in charge of things meaningfully 

geopolitical/geostrategic. A lot of things like that happen in the world. Still, at 

that moment, between the big wars, little else military was going on outside the 

remote, insular Chaco Boreal. Why summarize the history of that little war 

here? Many imperatives and principles applicable in regular war apply in irregular war, as the study of some regular wars, this one anyway, makes clear. Input 

for this section comes from a variety of sources, but mostly from three books: 

Estigarribia’s The Epic of the Chaco, Farcau’s The Chaco War, and Zook’s The 

Conduct of the Chaco War.103 F

104 An abbreviated timeline of the conflict:

* January 12, 1907 -- Paraguay and Bolivia agree to a status quo line.

* February 25, 1927 -- Paraguayan 2LT accidently comes upon a Bolivian 

outpost on the Bolivian side of the status quo line, gets himself killed.

* December 5, 1928 -- Paraguayans retake Fortín Vanguardia.

* May 10, 1932 -- Bolivia declares war on Paraguay.

* July 16, 1932 -- Paraguay retakes the small outpost at Pintiantuta.

* August, 1932 -- Bolivia takes three more Paraguayan outposts.

* September 7-29, 1932 -- Paraguay decisively wins the Battle of Boqueron. 

* Late December 1932 to late February, 1933 --Bolivians fail to take Nanawa.

*May 10, 1933 -- Paraguay declares war on Bolivia.

*October 23, 1933 --Battle of Campo Via. Paraguayans route the Bolivians.

* May 25, 1934 -- Battle of Cañada Strongest, Bolivian victory.

* November, 1934 -- Battle of El Carmen. Over 4,000 Bolivians die. 

*June 12, 1935 -- Bolivia accepts armistice, war ends.

A distant, centennial cause of the war was the imprecise or non-existent 

boundary lines between administrative sections of the Spanish Empire. Ignition in the few decades just prior to the war came in the form of positioning, 

first by Bolivians then Paraguayans, of military outposts (fortines) in the areas 
26 The Chaco War

106

claimed. By way of these outposts, the two countries intended to present to 

the world active evidence and resolve regarding unresolvable territorial desires. One might quip that they could not agree on boundary lines because 

their forefathers had not agreed on any. That is too cynical -- technological 

capacity to exploit land had evolved, slowly at first, then rapidly. National 

identity as Bolivian and Paraguayan only consolidated after independence, and 

after that consolidation of identities the two patriotisms grew dissimilar if overlapping connections to the land. In the first half of the 20th century, wars were 

still declared and blatant land grabbing was something in which sovereignties 

still enthusiastically, unremorsefully engaged. Perhaps, had the Bolivians 

been able to count on the postmodern warfare genius of some of its 21st century

leaders, they might have won much of what they sought by using an all-formsof-struggle, irregular war approach instead of the single-dimensional clash of 

uniformed soldiers. Ah, but anachronistic what-ifs are very whatiffy. The 

Bolivians got hammered.

Bolivia had more population and money than Paraguay, but Bolivia’s political leaders were contemplating the arrogation of land with which they were 

barely familiar. They did not correctly appreciate the distance from their Andean capitals to the points on the ground that controlled the area they coveted. 

Their desires derived in part from the loss of their Pacific coast to a stronger 

Chile in the War of the Pacific (1879-1883). Access to the Atlantic by way of 

the Paraguay River promised to compensate, and imposing the required peace 

on an even weaker country must have seemed somehow natural. The Paraguayans, nevertheless, were more emotionally attached to the land in question 

than what the highlanders perceived -- an operant fact of identity that probably 

should not have been so easily lost on the Bolivians.

The two countries depended on foreign experiences and instruction for 

military education. Both invited foreign officers to hold senior military posts, 

the Bolivians looking to Germany and the Paraguayans to France. After their 

first major setback, the Bolivians contracted a Colonel Hans Kundt (experienced in the Great War), putting him in charge of all war preparations and 

conduct. He did not do well. Just because you’re German doesn’t make you 

Moltke. After briefly flirting with an under-enthused French attaché, the Paraguayans opted for a local talent, Lieutenant Colonel José Félix Estigarribia. 

Estigarribia had gotten some European training, including an indirect dose of 

German thinking via the Chilean military education system and more French 

input during a three-year stint at St. Cyr in France. By comparison to Kundt, 

Estigarribia did very, very well, such that today he is counted among the 20th

century’s most successful ground commanders. Certainly the Paraguayans 
26 The Chaco War

107

approved, eventually making him their president, which, as we all know, led 

directly to our making Eisenhower president.

The Chaco war was a fortress war in a sense, but in the context of a war 

over lines, not points. Outposts helped create or guard lines of communication. 

“Small, well situated forces could contain attacking armies. Terrain had to be 

intimately known beforehand.”10 4F

105 Prudence in their positioning depended in 

great measure on the correct factoring of cost distances. “In the area along the 

Pilcomayo, poorly sited fortines frequently had to be evacuated due to flooding 

during the rainy season. In the interior, however, it was total lack of water for 

months on end that made most sites untenable.”105 F

106 Ultimately, prudence in outpost positioning depended on whether or not they were situated beyond their 

culminating point, beyond where the risk of not being able to relieve them was 

too great. “Logistically, Paraguay, with her shorter lines of supply and communication, was superior to Bolivia, an advantage which largely negated the greater 

size and wealth of the Altiplano-centered republic.”106 F

107 For both armies, if with 

differing degrees of insight, the outposting was conceived as an orchestrated 

whole, not iteratively. Both armies imagined their positioning of outposts as part 

of overall offensive as much as defensive operations.

The total number of soldiers who saw service in the field is debated, but 

probably reached around 200,000 Bolivians and 150,000 Paraguayans. The 

death tolls are even less reliable, but the accepted numbers seem to be about 

50,000 for the Bolivians and 40,000 for the Paraguayans. Doing some coarse 

extrapolation (the total population of Paraguay being then less than 1,000,000 

people), the scale of the Paraguayan sacrifice was as if the United States deployed more than 45 million men into Iraq and Afghanistan and had more than 

12 million of them die. The Chaco War, however, was clearly won and lost. 

Paraguay’s security was assured. It gained land and national pride. As for Bolivia...“the lice-ridden trenches and Paraguayan prison camps became the 

incubators of the Bolivian Revolution of 1952. The officer corps and upper classes had been shorn of any legitimacy as the rightful guardians of national honor 

and managers of the nation’s affairs....It is no coincidence that many of the leaders of the revolution served as enlisted men in the Chaco.”1 07F

108

Both sides assumed debts to secure foreign weapons and other materiel. 

Suppliers were interested in how the equipment would perform. Boats, trucks 

and mortars did well. Airplanes were used extensively. Beyond simple reconnaissance, the airplane contributed directly to setting operational 

objectives. When, for instance, a Bolivian commander spotted the lake-oasis 

at Pitiantuta from the air, it immediately became an objective. However, the 

Bolivians (who enjoyed air superiority throughout) did not fully recognize the 
26 The Chaco War

108

potential of the technology to affect the imperative figure of the war. “Paraguay’s logistics could not have withstood intensive air attack.”10 8F

109 The 

Bolivians failed to use their airpower to interdict tenuous Paraguayan supply 

lines during key engagements.

The Battle of Boquerón was the first major battle of the war. The Bolivians there were evidently well-led, disciplined and had carefully fortified their 

position, but they could not be readily resupplied. The Bolivians hoped to resupply by airdrops, but that failed. Although the total manpower of each army 

was not much more than 20,000 men at the time, the Paraguayans could deploy 

twelve thousand to the battle zone compared to perhaps half as many Bolivians. 

At first, the Paraguayans tried (as seems to be a universal blunder) frontal assaults. Estigarribia later took to heart the need to avoid the grave losses inherent 

in such actions. Ultimately, however, due to impending storms or water shortages, the amounts of time available for an effective siege would start running 

out, and so ‘final’ assaults were hurriedly attempted. The siege of Boquerón 

lasted long enough for water shortage to take a disproportionately high toll on 

the besieged, but the besiegers ran short as well. Estigarribia had to order the 

abandonment of hundreds of cavalry horsesto their deaths.

The Paraguayan’s victory at the Battle of Boquerón wholly changed the 

psychological expectations on both sides, gained Paraguay a needed store of war 

materiel and greater diplomatic leverage. Perhaps the early Paraguayan victory 

should have ended the war then. Many hoped the war would not last much 

longer than Boquerón -- that perhaps the League of Nations or the other American states would intervene to spare the two republics a costly war. Several peace 

commissions were assemble and failed. Even with the outcome of the entire war 

seemingly foretold, the contest bled both sides for two and a half more years. 

The early peace talks may have had the opposite effect. The talking gave the 

Paraguayans time they needed to mobilize, time the Bolivians might have used 

to advantage. In any case, the only effective peace commission was Estigarribia’s army. A few stark lessons that might apply to your war:

-- Thirst can kill, and you cannot move water over the Internet.

-- Being from out of town is not a measure of military expertise. 

-- Siting an outpost beyond the culminating point can define bad leadership. 

-- A small war can cover big distances, and distance matters.

-- Airpower.

-- Competent strategists focus on lines of communication.

-- There probably exists a territorial object of the fight.

-- Negotiate for advantage. Better to negotiate the conditions of his surrender 

than to negotiate the conditions of his and your peace.
26 The Chaco War

109

Please see sections: 86, Shifting Covet-geographies; 68, Scale; 91, Forts and 

Walls; 87, Water Wars; 17 Keeping Secrets; 140, Risk Distance and the Pursuit; 

73, The Catatumbo; and 18, The Best of the Best of the Best.



“The territorial imperative is as blind as a cave fish, as consuming as a 

furnace, and it commands beyond logic, opposes all reason, suborns all 

moralities, strives for no goal more sublime than survival.”109 F

110

Robert Ardrey,

Territorial Imperative

--------------

“True to my idea that the Chaco war would be a war of communications, I endeavored in my orders at this initial stage to shut off 

the enemy from the roads leading to his base.”110 F

111

José Félix Estigarribia



-- Chaco War Theatre of Operations --

Appreciation to Wikipedia, from which map is adapted
110

Squat and occupy

Section 27, ‘Nonviolent’ Action

In the fall of 2011, the ‘Occupy’ events briefly occupied center 

stage of American political news. From the perspective of mid-2014 it 

does not appear they earned the term movement, since it all but peteredout, but it was at least an organized mobilization of material and human 

resources designed ostensibly to challenge the existing power structure. 

Its organizers imagined it would have sufficient strength to deserve respect 

as a social movement, that is, as a coordinated group action able to attain 

political goals and reach a level of self-sustainment by attracting new supporters. The organizers seemed to obey certain established and published 

principles or guidelines for such activities and as far as I can make out, the 

Occupy leadership was usefully informed by the writings of Saul Alinsky 

and Gene Sharp. Outside of the United States, Gene Sharp is considered 

a guru whose ideas guided the actionists of political change in Eastern Europe and, more recently, the leaders of actions we refer to haphazardly 

(maybe euphemistically or ironically) as ‘The Arab Spring’. Gene Sharp, 

on the politics of nonviolent action, states,

Nonviolent obstruction is similar to nonviolent interjection, except that 

the human bodies are used not only for psychological intervention but as 

a physical obstruction. Such physical blocking occurs when the obstruction is undertaken by very large numbers or when the obstructers are so 

placed that the work, vehicle, police, troops, or the like cannot proceed 

even though they injure or kill the demonstrators. As in the previous 

method, the risk of arrest, injury, or death is involved. Such obstruction 

is unlikely to last very long unless: 1) the numbers are exceedingly large, 

are maintained over a long period, and are beyond the control of the personnel, equipment, and weaponry which the opponent is able and willing 

to apply; 2) the opponent is unwilling simply to kill all the obstructers by 

whatever means may be available; 3) the workers or the enforcement officials, police, or troops are, or become, sympathetic to the demonstrators; 

or 4) the demonstration of public opposition to the grievance, or to repression of the actionists, is strong enough to induce the opponent to 

abandon the objectionable activity or halt it for a time.111F

112

Professor Sharp pretty much sums it up, but to militarize and drag 

things out a little, let’s compare it to what Frederick the Great had to say. 

Frederick (1712-1786) was being great at warring well after the age of 

castles, between the times of John Churchill, 1st Duke of Marlborough 
27 ‘Nonviolent’ Action

111

(1650-1722) and Napoleon (1769-1821). Marlborough might have been 

to Frederick what Napoleon was to Clausewitz. In any case, Frederick 

referred to his system as position warfare, within which he greatly esteemed the capability to establish survivable encampments. The military 

term for this camping art was castrametation. “Castrametation. A camp 

is a battlefield that you choose, because it becomes one as soon as the enemy attacks you.”1 12F

113 For today’s nonviolent occupiers, the encampment 

might be in a park, plaza, or stadium, but the math is similar. How much 

water and food can the occupiers count on, and how resolute are they? Do 

they have allies who can interrupt an impending assault by the authorities? 

Can they keep the place clean enough that it does not sicken them? Do 

they, or at least their leaders, have an escape route to sanctuary?

Frederick used another term we can apply, coup d`oeil. That was 

Frederick’s term for a leader’s ability to quickly comprehend the advantages and disadvantages of a particular piece of terrain. Coup d`oeil

can be directly translated as a glance, a knowing glance, or as the ability 

to understand a great deal at a glance, but for Frederick it was the glance 

made to measure the potential effect of occupying a piece of terrain on 

relative competitive strength. “[B]y far the most superior talent is to know 

how to distinguish at first sight all the advantages that can be drawn from 

the terrain.”113 F

114 (Tim Thomas notes that this is comparable to the Chinese 

‘shi’ – see Section 113, Unrestricted Chi Whiz) Professor Sharp’s nonviolent interventions, because they so often involve invasion and occupation 

of territory or the blockage of passage, are successful or not depending on 

the quality of their leaders’ coup d`oeil, or if you prefer, on their sense of 

shi. Perhaps today’s nonviolent coup d`oeil must absorb a broader set of 

human geographic factors than what Frederick needed to notice. Advantageous terrain for occupations will be selected partly according to legal 

accommodation and political temperament, or perhaps the economic value 

of a nearby activity against which some stress might be applied.

The other organizer I mentioned in the first paragraph is Saul 

Alinsky, whose work Rules for Radicals is a staple of American protest. 

Alinsky taught “how to create mass organizations to seize power.”114 F

115 

Alinsky explained his life purpose in adversarial terms. “The Prince was 

written by Machiavelli for the Haves on how to hold power. Rules for 

Radicals is written for the Have-Nots on how to take it away.”115F

116 By way 

of example and as part of the identity he chose for himself, Mr. Alinsky 

evoked the Republican cause in the Spanish Civil War, asserting, “This 
27 ‘Nonviolent’ Action

112

means revolution.” Rules for Radicals was to “propose certain general 

observations, propositions, and concepts of the mechanics of mass movements and the various stages of the cycle of action and reaction in 

revolution.”116 F

117 Fundamental to the Alinsky method is creation of stark 

differentiation. “As we have indicated before, all issues must be polarized 

if action is to follow.”1 17F

118 Part of the process is inducement to overreaction 

on the part of the government. Occupation places are battlefields where 

the actionists choose to have the government attack them. Beyond polarization, Rules for Radicals proposes thirteen specific tactical rules, my 

three favorites being:

Rule number 1: Power is not only what you have but what the enemy thinks 

you have;

Rule number 7: A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag;

Rule number 9: The threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself.

While Professor Sharp seems to have lately inspired actionists 

across a long gamut of ideological fascination and intention, Mr. Alinsky 

is more clearly tied by style and intellectual heritage to the political left. It 

seems to me that outside of the United States, Mr. Alinsky is less of a 

source for radical organizational planning because there are many other 

sources who have said the same, these running from Vladimir Lenin to 

every other radical leftist since. In the Alinsky/Sharp method (allowing 

myself the luxury of throwing the two together, something probably neither of the two would like), potential actionists are asked for more than 

their voice, vote, or financial contribution. They are asked for their physical presence at a specific place and time. In this they are subjected to and 

the object of the principle of mass, so we return again to the age of classic 

strategy. Henri Jomini had this to say:

... There exists a fundamental principle of all the operations of war, a 

principle which ought to preside over all the combinations in order that 

they be good. It consists:

1. In carrying ... the mass of the forces of the army successively upon 

the decisive points of a theatre of war...;

2. In maneuvering in such a manner as to engage this mass of the 

forces with fractions only of the hostile army;

3. In directing equally, on the day of battle... the mass of one’s forces 

upon the decisive point of the field of battle...;
27 ‘Nonviolent’ Action

113

4. In managing so that those masses be not merely present upon the 

decisive point, but that they be put in action there with energy and concert, in a manner to produce a simultaneous effort....

I am far from pretending, nevertheless, that the whole art of war consists 

merely in the choice of a good direction to be given to masses, but it 

could not be denied that it is at least a fundamental point of strategy.118 F

119

Jomini put mass at the heart of Napoleonic strategy. We can put 

Jomini’s observation about mass somewhere in nonviolent strategy, if not at 

its heart. If nonviolent actionists can be easily surrounded because so few demonstrators are convoked or can remain together, a nonviolent action could 

easily be made to fail. The Los Angeles police department figured out the 

numbers and simply overpowered their 2011 park occupiers.

More than 200 people were arrested in the operation that involved 1,400 

officers...It was a stark departure from old LAPD crowd control techniques, Beck said. In years past, police would have used a single 

skirmish line to sweep through the park and push people out. 1 19F

120

Can action leaders convoke enough people and keep the actionists in place 

long enough to exact a concession or cause an over-reaction? Can they 

accomplish such massing while maintaining their anonymity, or at least 

get to legal or diplomatic sanctuary? If ‘action’ leaders cannot pull off that 

trick, the authorities can make their future actions less likely.

Actionists may make short term or limited demands, like prisoner 

releases or amnesties, money payments, or suspension of the enforcement 

of some law. Their leverage often derives from the potential to interrupt 

commerce and is created by the implication that the actionist group can 

either prevent or incite some future action. For instance, if actionists can 

close a port for any appreciable period, they can exact concessions from 

port authorities or shippers who despair of finding a less costly resolution. 

Again, if the actions have no physical staying power, the leverage potentially available to the actionists is likely forfeited. Longer term or strategic 

goals are likewise dependent on the capacity of the actionist leaders to execute repeat performances.

Great potential exists for ‘nonviolent’ actions to put local and foreign national interests at risk in places across the world. Some actions may 

present to us little obvious extortionary value, but might nevertheless be 

diversions in solidarity with other occupations at more lucrative places. 
27 ‘Nonviolent’ Action

114

Using the ‘Occupy Wall Street’ example, perhaps a solidarity demonstration in Lawrence, Kansas comes across as effete, but many such 

demonstrations might lend a kind of cover to a more financially consequential event in the port of Oakland. Hundreds of ports around the world 

are more vulnerable to effective nonviolent action than is Oakland.

To recap how to be a successful organizer of a nonviolent action:

1. Create and maintain sufficient mass (physically advantageous correlation of force at a place of occupation). This may be the main 

determinant of success at that location;

2. Select the place for a nonviolent action carefully. This is the coup 

d`oeil (or perhaps shi), a uniquely valuable leadership skill;

3. Anticipate the culminating point of all actions (both physical and 

psychological/political);

4. Prepare and improve encampments (castrametation) because they 

are battlefields the actionist leader chooses;

5. Try to orchestrate multiple, simultaneous actions. Create an expansive, interwoven geography of places, events, opportunities and 

potential influences, rather than a mere compilation of many places of 

occupation and confrontations. Some confrontation locales may be diversions, tests, or accidents, while the most consequential locales may 

be revealed as such only in the course of unfolding events, and;

6. Your defeat is less likely and any future leverage you generate more 

secure if the authorities cannot mount a successful pursuit of you, the 

actions’ intellectual and logistical leader. In other words, don’t get 

caught. Basic rule of strategy: plan for a secure escape to sanctuary 

or don’t leave it to begin with. (Unless you want to be a martyr, then, 

by all means, knock yourself out.)

On the other hand, to effectively counter these Alinsky/Sharp 

power transfer schemes, a government can establish or change in the public 

mind what constitutes violent and what does not. A government can assert and 

emphasize that blocking passage is ipso facto a violent act that provokes more 

violence, and that sending unwitting masses into physical danger is also a violent act. Coup d`oeil is not just a quality for actionist leadership. Authorities 

do well to have the assets and plans ready to quickly achieve superiority of 

mass at likely locations for nonviolent action. (‘fustest with the mostest’) Finally (send me a stern note if I failed to mention this elsewhere), if you want 
27 ‘Nonviolent’ Action

115

to take away the capacity of ‘nonviolent’ actionists to take away your power, 

don’t let the actionist leaders go scot free. Pursue.

Please see sections: 59, Spontaneity; 54, Extortion; 63, Roadblocks and 

Checkpoints; 32, Land-use Planning; 15, NGOs, IOs, and Unions; 33, Engineers and Built Environment; 89, The Dot Game and Go; and 94, Poop.



Eric Cartman: Ma'am, I need to clear out your giggling stoners and 

your drum-circle hippies RIGHT NOW, or soon they're gonna attract 

something much worse!

Elderly Woman: Ooooo, what's that? 

Eric Cartman: The college know-it-all hippies.

from the TV series South Park

“Die, Hippies, Die” episode120 F

121

--------------

“It is not that one general is more brilliant or experienced than 

the other; it is a question of which general has a better appreciation of the battlefield.”

Erwin Rommel (attributed)

--------------

Dr. Evil: Scott, I want you to meet daddy's nemesis, Austin Powers. 

Scott Evil: What? Are you feeding him? Why don't you just kill him? 

Dr. Evil: I have an even better idea. I'm going to place him in an easily 

escapable situation involving an overly elaborate and exotic death.

from the movie,

Austin Powers: International

Man of Mystery (1997)121F

122

--------------

“Oh great, real bullets.”

Lucky Day in the movie,

The Three Amigos (1986)122F

123

--------------

“The life of man upon earth is a warfare...” 123 F

124

Job 7:1 as quoted in

Saul Alinsky, Rules for Radicals


116

Stamina

Section 28, Takeovers and Sieges

Sieges attempt to turn sanctuaries into the last stop on someone’s line of 

retreat. Let’s say the Grand Vizier surrounds your town and bombards it with 

dead horses and rutabaga. If the Vizier can breach the walls, enter, and start 

slaughtering everyone and you have no escape, you better have some sweet negotiating skills or you are about done. However, it is often just as hard to keep a 

siege army fed and watered as it is to keep the people inside a castle fed and 

watered. In order to beat the siege, you want to stay alive and resisting, your 

walls more or less intact, until his provisions run out and it is too risky for him 

to continue. The Grand Vizier will have to lift his siege if some Polish field army 

threatens his Janissaries and his line of withdrawal. On this matter, Machiavelli 

had counseled, “I judge those (princes) to be in constant need of help who cannot 

take the field against their enemies, but are obliged to retire behind their walls, 

and to defend themselves there.”124 F

125 Maybe you’re just in a small castle and don’t 

have Polish king friends. You do your calculations and decide it best to negotiate, so you offer to give back your besieger’s daughters and to offer him a higher 

percentage of the water that runs through your little realm or maybe just to pay 

him the tribute he asked for to begin with.

Things haven’t changed. The castle might only be a remote police station or a forward operating base, but the math is the same. How good are the 

walls and roofs; how much food, water and ammunition have you stored up, and 

how resolute are you? Do you have a field force or allies that can interrupt the 

siege? Do you have an escape route? Sieges are a permanent feature of armed 

conflict. They are communal tests of will. Resolute resistance to sieges provides 

the material of military legend and national heritage. Texans have the Alamo, 

the Spanish Numancia; the French Camerone, the British Khartoum, and so on. 

Sometimes it is the siege that provides national pride, like the Vietnamese victory at Dien Bien Phu. Sometimes these battles are just heroic footnotes and 

sometimes they are milestones of change in political history. If you build a fort 

or fortify a town, provision it well. If you conduct a siege, bring extra lunch and 

be sure to keep your route of withdrawal secure.

Takeovers (say, of a governor’s office, or a foreign embassy, or a court 

building) are a common feature in many of today’s armed conflicts. The takeover is usually done by an insurgent or resistance group, followed by a siege of 

sorts from the authorities. In a typical takeover, the insurgents intend from the 

outset to negotiate. When you conduct a building takeover, you turn your nose 

up at the operational equation. You don’t expect to escape, but rather you have 
28 Takeovers and Sieges

117

such confidence in the negotiating position that you have or will gain that you 

figure you’ll walk out with a net win. Your withdraw plan leads out the front 

door after having gained the respect of your opponent.

Building takeovers are spectacular and daring. Like roadblocks they 

combine classic strategy (operational art) with extortion. There are some rules, 

however. You need to assure you have the necessary provisions, and you need 

to measure the psychology of your opponent correctly. If at all possible, you 

want to have help on the outside.

One of the most famous takeovers in history occurred in Bogotá in 1985. 

The M-19 guerrilla group invaded the Colombian Supreme Court Building and 

took all of the judges and a bunch of other people hostage. The takeover had 

been carefully planned, even to making sure weeks’ worth of extra food was onhand in the cafeteria. The M-19’s idea was to put the president of the country, 

Belisario Betancur, on trial. While they prepared the show trial, they were also 

going to destroy some prosecutorial files pertaining to some drug lords, including Pablo Escobar, who had funded the operation.

It might have gone well, but these things are subject to chance and confusion. Supporters of the M-19 were supposed to produce a huge student and

worker demonstration in the great plaza outside the court building, which would 

have made military and police siege operations difficult. Unfortunately for the 

insurgents, some local army units reacted immediately, beating any large crowd 

to the scene. Then government leaders made an early decision that there was 

going to be no negotiating with the guerrillas. The M-19 had expected that President Betancur would capitulate, but communication with the president was all

but shut off. The building caught fire and, while the details of who and when are 

still being debated to this day, the result was that the building was gutted. The 

invaders executed most of the judges, but could not themselves escape the conflagration. Most of the assailants and many of the hapless bystanders died. The 

event invited a national soul-search, and to major political changes, including a 

new and more liberal constitution. Within five or six years, however, the M-19 

was almost completely disappeared.

That the M-19 risked such a violation of the principles of operational art 

might seem curious, except that they had successfully taken over the embassy of 

the Dominican Republic in Bogotá in 1980, a hundred diplomat hostages being 

ransomed for a lot of money and a flight to Cuba. They had also stolen Simon 

Bolivar’s sword (still missing) and in a separate coup robbed thousands of weapons right out from under the Colombian Army’s nose. The M-19ers were 

takeover champions. They calculated well and were immensely daring, but the 

operational equation always includes chance. Some days the bear just gets you. 
28 Takeovers and Sieges

118

By the way, the M-19’s legendary co-founder, Jaime Bateman, had died in an 

airplane crash in 1983. That’ll happen, too. The other co-founder, Alvaro 

Fayad, died holed-up in an apartment in Bogotá in 1986.

Takeovers don’t need to be strategy-defying all-or-nothing rolls of the 

extortion dice, either. They can be planned so that escape routes and outside 

help are in place. They can be combined with other strategies, perhaps to lure 

your enemy into a trap from which he has no viable escape. Takeovers of the 

right places can yield useful things like money, information, hostages, and munitions. In an urban world, if you are a rebel and you never takeover anything, 

you’re not much.

On the other side of the ledger, you want to pay attention to control architecture so that takeovers of your most valuable places are more difficult and 

containing a takeover is easier. Inspect your reaction plans building-by-building, 

site-by-site, and make sure that the reaction plans are not one-size-fits-all. Every 

takeover force will have different capabilities and different leadership. In a given 

case it might be best to do little. Just waiting may be enough to disarm an opponent who is inside a building. There have been some terrible siege force failures. 

One occurred in Waco, Texas in 1993.

Please see sections: 91, Forts and Walls; 8, Linearity and the Line of Retreat; 6, The Operational Equation; 140, Risk Distance and the Pursuit; 

34, Urban or Rural; 33, Engineers and Built Environment; 1, Impunity; 

and 63, Roadblocks and Checkpoints.



“It is sometimes wise, Gordon Pasha, to provide the man with a few 

sunny hours of fraudulent hope so that when night comes he will 

have a more perfect inward vision of the truth of his hopelessness.”

The Mahdi in the movie,

Khartoum (1966) 125F

126

--------------

“‘Sir, this is a really bad idea,” said Whittaker. ‘A. Really. Bad. Idea.

Anyone we drop off there is going to die’.” As he said it, he thought 

he saw Lochner’s eyes glaze over.”126F

127

Jake Tapper,

The Outpost


119

Caterpillars are bugs, too

Section 29, Heavy Machines

Drones, cell phones, DNA forensics, genetically modified foods, the 

suite of machines that make up GIS technologies, and of course the Internet

all seem to be transformational technologies. The landmine was the most influential insurgent weapon of the late 20th century, with the radio-detonated 

explosive device the most troubling so far in the 21st. This section underscores

something old-school, however, not electronics or high-tech items, or even 

weapons, but big wheels, levers, drills, etc. -- heavy machines. We have not 

neared the limits of creativity in their use, especially in irregular war. Heavy 

machines allow the side that has them to more rapidly change physical geography to its advantage, and most machines can be operated remotely. It may 

be due to conservatism or to failed experiments or to obsession with electronics and miniatures, but here is some iron we may see take on more of a role in 

irregular armed conflicts:

˗˗ 800-ton bulldozers. (The biggest commercial bulldozer is the Komatsu D575 at about 150 tons) There are a lot of huge dump trucks 

and cranes. Eight hundred tons is not a fanciful size for a machine. 

Such a bulldozer just wouldn’t cross European bridges. It would have 

to be transported modularly. It could shape urban terrain and reform 

it with favorable observation, fields of fire and control.

˗˗ 3-D Concrete Printers. Huge programed jigs that tirelessly build 

concrete structures layer on layer. The speed of building sturdy housing and fortressworks is about to go up and the price go down. 

˗˗ Tunnel Boring Machines. For both tunneling and tunnel discovery. 

Hezbollah has employed these to great effect.

˗˗ Barrier Transfer or Zipper Machines. For high speed barrier emplacement in urban environments.

˗˗ Scissor-lift armored trucks. A throwback to medieval siege engines, 

they allow protected access to upper stories in an urban area.

Some people think the tank has run its historical course as a weapon 

system, but don’t count on it. Infantrymen admire and respect things that 

are faster, better protected or carry bigger guns. Something like the US 

Stryker may prove itself soon enough. Technical trucks (a Toyota Hilux 

with a machinegun in the bed) still provide mobility and firepower, and 

heavy robot tanks are definitely coming soon. Not having tanks and being 

an insurgent is a coincidence of poverty, but cost-points change.
29 Heavy Machines

120

Because of the resources required to develop and deploy them, we 

can suppose that the potential advantage of huge machines would go to 

governments, as opposed to the enemies of government. It may be that 

fashion and fascination with electronics, miniaturization and flight has 

caused a major area of potential advantage to be overlooked. Asymmetry 

does not necessarily spell disadvantage to the side with more weight.

The other side of the coin is seen in intemperate application of 

heavy machines. Scenes like a large armored vehicle crashing into the 

Branch Dividian compound in Waco, Texas, or of Israeli armored bulldozers flattening parts of Jenin may cause a reaction that makes their use

counterproductive. In any case, when and where to use a bulldozer, the 

railroad, or any heavy machine, is a significant question for irregular conflict. A potential advantage held by most counterinsurgents is the 

capability to design, acquire and employ heavy machines.

Please see sections: 34, Urban or Rural; 72, Land Strategy and Property 

Strategy; 89, The Dot Game and Go; 19, Mercatus; 63, Roadblocks and 

Checkpoints; 91, Forts and Walls; 31, Holes in the Ground; and 68, Scale.

Mr. Prosser: Do you know how much damage this bulldozer would sustain if I just let it roll over you? 

Arthur: How much? 

Mr. Prosser: None at all.

from the movie,

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

(2005)127F

128

--------------

“Railroad iron is a magician’s rod, in its power to evoke 

the sleeping energies of land and water.” 128F

129

Ralph Waldo Emerson

--------------

“Every earth digger and mechanical contrivance in the country 

had been mobilized to dig the colossal hole in which the nine 

giants were to be permanently imprisoned.”129 F

130

Roald Dahl,

The BFG
121

ELDORADO 5-9970

Section 30, Control Technology

There are always new technologies available for invading people’s 

privacy and since most of them have other, positive, uses these things will 

become cheaper and won’t go away. Control technologies, however, are 

found along a wider gamut than just electronic devices. Walls, overhead 

walkways, even gondolas can be part of a control design. Electronics and 

architecture do not exist in different worlds. Also, legal and organizational 

innovations combine with new uses of physical technologies to form part 

of the suite of available control technology.

Personal identification (ID) cards are not optimal unless they can 

be made much more cheaply than it is to counterfeit them. ‘Good’ for an 

ID card means accurate, inexpensive and hard to fake. If you’re the one 

trying to remain unidentified, you want a bad ID card system.

Accurate, durable, easy-to-read, hard-to-fake cards can now hold or 

cue up more and more personal information. For the controller, one useful

upshot of comprehensive ID-carding (beyond determining who someone is)

is the revelation of strangers -- those who are out of place. ‘What are you 

doing here?’ is an easier-made and stronger question if everyone has to carry 

an ID card and every ID card tells a story. Apparently, unique systems are 

under development that don’t require ‘carding’, but instead can make nearperfect identifications on the basis of facial recognition technologies and the 

like. Wearing masks is likely to become more popular.

If you are planning a revolution or an insurgency, start propagandizing against government individual identification systems (sometimes 

referred to as biometrics), and, when the time comes, try to sabotage the 

digital archives.

Mass, remote photography can help detect anomalies in human activity, especially when the collected images are combined with automated 

change detection technology. One of the latest related technological curiosities is GigaPan® and its similars. Used during the Obama presidential 

inauguration, it makes taking comprehensive photography of big areas inexpensive and easy.

Vehicle GIS trackers and registries are another thing. To help control truck traffic and truck-born contraband, you could require that all the 

trucks carry GPS tracking devices. Tagging select purchase items can also 
30 Control Technology

122

be a powerful aid, especially when combined with camera monitors. Another interesting technological development is shipping containers with 

GPS activated locks that only open at pre-set destinations, thus helping to 

control shipment pilfering.

City governments have historically controlled their populations 

through bureaucracy, statute, religion, education, and by:

• Controlling commodity access;

• Segregating castes, races, classes, and trouble-prone businesses into designated 

neighborhoods;

• Controlling movement to and through key neighborhoods and centers;

• Controlling services, especially waste removal;

• Maintaining a system of rewards and punishments for public behaviors;

• Establishing a routine of entertainment and socializing times and spaces, such 

as stadiums;

• Controlling demonstrations, marches and parades via licenses and fixed routes.

These aspects of urban control can help further military and police objectives. Some cities have rebuilt key centers to incorporate control 

architecture. While perhaps appearing to improve access to an area, this 

new architecture actually allows a small security element to control or 

deny access. Many of these city centers are self-contained with their own 

water, food and electrical supplies. All of the control measures can be 

augmented with electronic monitoring technologies.

Some technologies especially contribute to the efficiency and effect

of urban forts. Extensive, closed-circuit television (CCTV) monitoring is 

a fact of life in most European, Japanese, Canadian, and US cities. CCTV 

watches high-traffic areas, high-crime areas, isolated loading docks, passenger terminals, store displays, parking lots, and the like. The average 

urban US citizen might appear on a CCTV screen many times in the course 

of a normal day of city living. Traffic light and speed zone automatic cameras increase this coverage.

The counterinsurgent will want to install CCTV throughout as 

much of the urban area as possible, starting with high-incident areas and 

key facilities, but then surreptitiously along theoretical routes of insurgent 

escape to sanctuary. CCTV and other sensors, mounted on buildings, vehicles, robots, aerial vehicles, fencing or even tethered blimps provide 

semi-permanent urban and even outlying rural coverage. The urban fortress provides a safe place to house or monitor the various electronic 

sensors. They decrease the space available as criminal sanctuary, help 
30 Control Technology

123

land-use planners incorporate security into spatial planning. It may come 

to a point where impunity is mapped according to those spaces out of the 

reach of the network of video monitors. Sadly, instead of CCTV, many 

armed groups today use networks of children.

Control technologies make it harder and harder for a dumb insurgent to succeed in urban areas. Strangely, although the global population 

is on the rise and we are finally admitting the imperative to address security 

challenges of the urban environment, there seems to be more and more 

accessible and relatively unpopulated rural space and increasing reason for 

insurgents to design their survival as a rural formula. Maybe the world is 

not shrinking and the conflicts not necessarily going urban. There are few 

histories of purely urban or rural insurgencies. They are more likely both.

Please see sections: 99, Seven Metropolitan Lines of Effort; 34, Urban or 

Rural; 20, Rule-of-Law; 72, Land Strategy and Property Strategy; 142, Conflict Geography; 43, Sam Spades Whereabouts; 91, Forts and Walls; and

75, The Price of Real Estate, and Tourism.



“It seems that you've been living two lives. One life, you're 

Thomas A. Anderson, program writer for a respectable software 

company. You have a social security number, pay your taxes, and 

you... help your landlady carry out her garbage. The other life is

lived in computers, where you go by the hacker alias "Neo" and are 

guilty of virtually every computer crime we have a law for. One 

of these lives has a future, and one of them does not.”

Agent Smith in the movie,

The Matrix (1999)130F

131

--------------

Handler: You will notice that I have told them they may smoke. 

I've allowed my people to have a little fun in the selection of bizarre tobacco substitutes... Are you enjoying your cigarette, Ed?

Prisoner: Yes ma'am.

Handler: Yak dung. Hope tastes good, like a cigarette should.

from the movie,

The Manchurian Candidate

(1962)131F

132


124

One technological answer to the Man is to dig

Section 31, Holes in the Ground

By holes in the ground I mean holes in the ground. Digging, making bunkers and tunnels and improving caves was a feature of State 

military expenditures long before the appearance of the airplane, but has 

become more so since. Digging is a life-saver for any force without 

enough money to gain air superiority. The tendency increased with WWI 

and has been so strong since World War II that any consideration of the 

irregular warfare operational environment that does not address the unseen 

underground geography would be incomplete. The under-dirt-and-rock 

realm is a fourth plane of today’s military operations, especially considering the vast below-ground built environment of almost every modern city.

Many strategies, such as ‘peoples’ war’, depend greatly on underground facilities for headquarters, communications, population protection, 

materiel storage and so on. Although US planners haven’t paid much attention 

to the underground plane of military operations, history tells us that subsurface

space is critical in irregular war. In Colombia, the government only recently

uncovered ‘Mono Jojoy’s Caves’, where the FARC maintained a headquarters 

for years in spite of dogged efforts by the Colombian government to find it. 

Vietnam was a tunneled war. Much of the arms trafficking into Gaza is 

through tunnels. The Hezbollah dug tirelessly in southern Lebanon -- far more 

than the Israelis had estimated -- and they continue to dig, even into Israel. 

Underground battlespace doesn’t just demand special tactics, techniques and procedures. It calls for explicit strategies, intelligence efforts, and 

equipment acquisition. Today, the price of machinery for digging, hardening 

and preparing underground facilities for occupation are high enough to give 

an advantage to governments but, as the sophistication of Mexican drug trafficking tunnels attests, advanced underground works are within the reach of 

many organizations. The tunnel is a technology of secrecy and anonymity. It 

is also that of the sapper, the military engineer whose job it was, and is, to 

emplace explosives under things, especially walls.

It would be a good idea to explicitly address the underground plane 

in your plans, strategies, training, and equipment. Classic strategy demands attention to the security of your and your enemies’ lines of 

communication to base (sanctuary). In the century of the drone, many of 

these lines will run under the surface of the earth. Tunnels are part of the 
31 Holes in the Ground

125

geography of impunity. Their main purpose is protection – and to get away 

with something.

If there is a single glaring item of equipment shortage in modern 

government armies, it is the absence of high speed drilling machines designed to conduct remote underground reconnaissance for discovery of and 

reporting about underground facilities. If there is a single gap in operational military intelligence collected at the national scale, it regards the 

extant condition of underground facilities in likely irregular conflict areas, 

and about the capability or propensity of potential enemies to operate underground. If there is a single major overlooked area in US military 

doctrine, it is about how to approach the fourth plane.

Please see sections: 8, Linearity and The Line of Retreat; 29, Heavy Machines; 34, Urban or Rural; 92, Graves Registration; 17, Keeping Secrets; 

67, Points, Lines, Spaces; 65, Smuggling; and 57, Dogs and Mules.

 

“Food for five years, a thousand gallons of gas, air filtration, water filtration, Geiger counter. Bomb shelter...Underground...goddamn monsters.”

Burt Gummer in the movie,

Tremors (1990)132F

133

--------------

“I would not rule out the chance to preserve a nucleus of human 

specimens. It would be quite easy...heh, heh...at the bottom of 

ah...some of our deeper mineshafts.”

Dr. Strangelove in the movie,

Dr. Strangelove (1964)133F

134

--------------

“Now remember, walk without rhythm,

and we won't attract the worm.”

Paul Atreides in the movie,

Dune (1984)134F

135

 
126

The bookend to private property

Section 32, Land-use Planning

Land-use planning is a counterweight to Madisonian property systems (those based on a market for highly divisible real estate rights), or a 

complement to them, depending on your ideological preferences. Landuse planning has become a universal language among city government 

managers. The term ties itself to central planning and government-oriented and directed solutions, so for some it carries an anti-private property 

bias. Zoning is an early and still popular form of urban land-use planning, 

but the theories have evolved to tackle issues like density versus sprawl, 

or saving cultural patrimony. The ‘built environment’ is land-use planning’s result, but preservation of the non-built environment is typically 

part of the concern. One of the bywords of land-use planning is ‘sustainability’, which supposes a balance or reconciliation of environmental 

stewardship, social equity, and economic maximization over the long term.

Municipal and regional land-use planners in Medellín, Colombia 

internalized the design values supposed by ‘sustainability’, but the city had 

to wrest land-use dominance from violent illegal armed groups. To provide the urban population with both immediate security and longer-term 

conflict resolution services, the Medellinenses have had to innovate beyond the confines of mainstream urban planning theory. ‘Sustainability’

in a violent urban geography has to comprehend security goals. In the long 

run, attainment of basic sustainability goals should facilitate a peaceful social compact and vice versa. Urban designs that ease policing are also 

likely to help against an urban guerrilla enemy. Sustainable land use plans 

for cities suffering organized violence have to assess control architecture 

and technology, address disputed territories, measure citizen cost-distances in terms of fear and extortion, and measure the relative power of 

numerous armed groups.

When an administrative territory or jurisdiction fits neatly within a 

single level of a hierarchy, we say it is nested (townships ‘belong’ to one 

county, counties to a state, the states to the federal union). By and large, 

administratively nested territories are not as prone to conflict as un-nested 

territories. As noted in Section 49, Territorial Scrutiny, overlaps in territories mean conflict. If your goal is to civilize an area, you probably want 

to nest territories, at least the administrative ones. If you don’t know what 

territories to seek or know if they are appropriately nested, then you are 
32 Land-use Planning

127

facing a significant gap in your knowledge of the area. It behooves you to 

fill that knowledge gap as soon as practicable.

If you are trying to build a more peaceful society, you won’t want 

to tolerate geographically overlapping tax, service, and representation territories if you can help it. Administrative territories, say, an Afghan 

alaqadari, have boundaries that were established by someone for a reason. 

That reason had some administrative logic associated with something such 

as water conflict resolution or taxation, the edges of ethnic groups, or watersheds. You want to know the original logic of the boundary to see if the 

logic is still valid and still has meaning. The lines, in other words, represent or represented something. You want to know the history of the 

reasoning and of the parties to the reasoning. You may, on the basis of 

that knowledge, decide to adjust the boundaries or attempt to give them a 

new meaning. Lines (or color fades or map measles, whatever) may not 

say much at all to some local societies, but that does not mean they can’t 

have a lot of explanatory meaning for you. They may have a proscriptive 

value at different levels of a conflict. If you are in a military, you are 

comfortable with the idea of a battalion sketch delineating the areas of responsibility between two subordinate companies. Your enemy might like 

to know where that delineation is as well. As for other people’s maps, 

including those showing some national borders, the people who made the 

lines originally might not have been any smarter than you. 

As far as achieving a peaceful social compact is concerned, while 

administrative units are best nested, it is sometimes good to have human 

identities overlap. Such an overlap can mean that the human tendency 

toward ‘we-versus-they’ is softened. To ‘imbricate’ means to overlap in a 

pattern, like roof tiles or fish scales. To ‘Tessellate’ means to pattern elements side-by-side, like the squares of a checkerboard. You’ll want to 

imbricate your roof and tessellate your floor so you won’t trip up on the 

tile edges of the floor or slide on water leaking from the roof. As mentioned above in terms of nesting, you’ll generally want to assure that public 

administration is tessellated. Mostly you’ll want the identities (like Nijmegenites and Arnhemites) to match the nesting of the administrative 

units, that is to say, be likewise tessellated. That way you won’t have administrators tripping over each other or playing we-and-they with 

physically proximate communities. But some of the identities you’ll want 

imbricated. (There is a city-region called Arnhem-Nijmegen) Court jurisdictions, for instance, especially for real property matters, need to be 

tessellated according to the location of the land in question. At the same 
32 Land-use Planning

128

time, jury catchment areas can be imbricated, depending on the nature of 

the case, because their function is one of cultural leavening and disinterest. 

When people have tried to tessellate transportation districts, they have 

sometimes ended-up with one width of railroad track meeting another 

width at the territorial border. This can perhaps promote the cohesion of 

a national identity, but doesn’t keep the train on the rails. What you tessellate and what you imbricate is a choice you will make, consciously or 

unwittingly, when trying to implement a social compact. Cultural affinity 

and sensitivity is hard to tessellate. In the process of territorial scrutiny,

noticing nested and overlapping territories is revelatory, but so too is identification of tessellations and imbrications.

Land-use planning, as a modern professional and academic endeavor, depends heavily on GIS technologies. It daily concerns itself with 

the interface between the logic of sustainability and the logic of optimal 

positioning for collective land uses, especially public enterprises such as 

airports, parks, water systems and other infrastructure. However, although 

land-use planning usually connotes this technical approach to the spatial 

distribution of human activities, it is also inextricable from political philosophy about the social compact ˗˗ the relationship among members of 

the polity within geographic space.

This book was written in Kansas. Fort Leavenworth is located near 

the geographic center of the United States and was seen from its founding 

as an appropriately central launching place for military operations intended 

to dominate and pacify much of a continent. When historians return, as 

they regularly do, to the entertaining debate about where the Old West began, Ft. Leavenworth has a good argument, as do Abilene and Dodge City. 

Although Kansas is a sparsely populated state that derives much of its 

identity from a 1930’s movie, it is also nicknamed The Free State, after a 

role it played at its birth ˗˗ a spark in the timing of the American Civil War. 

Liberty, as an American proposition, has been a land-use plan, an idea 

about human nature tied to land, boundaries, and the administration of the 

social compact. Kansas is one of those imagined and then executed plans 

for a better world, and to a degree it is because of Kansas that American 

exceptionalism is more than a notion, but a provable fact on the ground. 

Kansas territory was not just an idea, it was a land-use plan. Especially if 

your irregular war unfolds in an urban environment, be familiar with the 

vocabulary, theories, methods, and fashions of land-use planning.
32 Land-use Planning

129

Please see sections: 49, Territorial Scrutiny; 94, Poop; 91, Forts and 

Walls; 47, Why the County; 87, Water Wars; 34, Comuna 13; 99, Seven 

Metropolitan Lines of Effort; and 63, Roadblocks and Checkpoints.



“The construction of Popular Power is based on the territorial-organizational 

emphasis that the New Geometry of Popular Power gives us. With this emphasis, the strengthening of the base social movements is promoted.”135F

136

United Socialist Party of Venezuela,

Red Book

--------------

Article the First: No person demeaning himself in a peaceable and orderly 

manner shall ever be molested on account of his mode of worship or religious sentiments in said territory.

...

Article the Second: The inhabitants of said territory shall always be entitled to the benefits of the writ of habeas corpus, and of the trial by Jury; 

of a proportionate representation of the people in the legislature, and of 

judicial proceedings according to the course of the common law; all persons shall be bailable except for capital offences, where the proof shall be 

evident, or the presumption great; all fines shall be moderate, and no cruel 

or unusual punishments shall be inflicted; no man shall be deprived of his 

liberty or property but by the judgment of his peers, or the law of the land; 

and should the public exigencies make it necessary for the common 

preservation to take any persons property, or to demand his particular services, full compensation shall be made for the same; and in the just 

preservation of rights and property it is understood and declared; that no 

law ought ever to be made, or have force in the said territory, that shall in 

any manner whatever interfere with, or affect private contracts or engagements, bona fide and without fraud previously formed.

T. Jefferson and J. Madison, excerpt,

Northwest Ordinance 1787136F

137

--------------

Hector was the first of the gang with a gun in his hand

And the bullet in his gullet and the first lost lad to go under the sod

Morrissey, from the song,

First of the Gang to Die137F

138


130

It can be rebuilt to suit

Section 33,

Engineers and Built Environment

‘Built environment’ is a term for all the man-made physical terrain we 

associate mostly with cities, but also other man-made elements outside the 

cities -- buildings, roads, dams, cell-phone towers, etc. It includes things 

built with stone, sand, mud, wood, glass or steel. It connotes a broader 

range of geography than the word infrastructure, in that burned-out factories, abandoned quarries, old graveyards, or even agricultural terracing are 

all part of the ‘built environment’, but are rarely considered ‘infrastructure’. The shape of the built environment can advance or impede the 

competitive aims of parties to almost any conflict, so competitors with the 

capacity to change the built environment to their advantage should probably do so. Oddly, beyond the scale of single buildings and some business 

parks or downtown areas, few irregular warfare planners seem to have 

latched onto the advantages available through the calculated re-design of 

the built environment.

Urban land-use planning theory in the United States seems preoccupied with aesthetic arguments, like density versus sprawl, and not so 

much with the challenge of organized violence. Not all foreign cities have 

been able to afford that indifference. Medellín, Colombia is an example 

of a city where planners have had to build ease of policing into their concept of land-use sustainability.

Space is a key concept in Geography, and for our purposes we’ll 

focus on spaces of association and communications. A lot is said of the 

revolution in electronic communication that defies both space and distance. A chat room doesn’t need a room with walls and the geographic 

distances between individuals in the virtual room don’t matter. Nevertheless, when armed conflict comes into play, the weapons weigh something

and people have to get together. As organizations grow, bigger spaces are

often needed. If an organization is to remain geographically anonymous,

the spaces are either going to be hidden in difficult terrain, like caves and 

jungles, or hidden in plain view like hotels and churches.

The synagogue, in fact, may be one of the most consequential architectural inventions ever. Synagogues may have inspired the most 

attended association and communication spaces in more than half the 

world. It isn’t just that a church building is used for something spiritual or 
33 Engineers and Built Environment

131

religious, but that for centuries it was often the only space available for

indoor meetings. For clergy, the church building represents a way to get 

people together for the purposes of guidance, comfort, harangue, organizing for action, and financing.

Architecture (design at the scale of single buildings or complexes), 

while important, is dependent on urban land-use planning, which is more 

concerned than architecture with the relative location of urban elements --

with distances. Distance is a geographer’s obsession, and it is with distance that engineering of the built environment can have the greatest 

impact. In cities, the calculus of distances in time between your or your 

enemies’ likely sanctuaries and likely targets is based on the structure of 

the built environment. You can rearrange that structure to your advantage. 

If you have no plan for doing so, you are leaving that initiative to your 

enemy by default.

If you ask engineers to build something, like a bridge, they will, 

regardless of how wide the gap or difficult the terrain. They will, in fact, 

design and build anything, but they are generally not so good at deciding 

why. We also know that if engineers are not given something to design or 

build they can still figure out how to blow stuff up -- which goes to a significant oversight in irregular war thinking and preparation over the last 

half century. The most creative and influential participation of engineers 

in irregular warfare has been the ‘blow stuff up’ part.

Irregular wars, or at least the leftist revolutionary insurgencies of 

the recent past, are about tearing at the fabric of the establishment or of the 

system. Even insurgent philosophers use terms like ‘deconstruction’,

hence a convenient marriage between the violent political activist and the 

indolent engineer. The counterinsurgent, meanwhile, has not found 

enough ways and occasions to tell engineers what to build where. Civil 

engineering’s contribution to recent counterinsurgency has been late in 

coming and reactive. It has been how to make a vehicle that is harder to 

blow up, or how to make a device that will make it more difficult for an 

insurgent to detonate his bomb.

In 1994, author Mike Davis wrote Urban Control: The Ecology of 

Fear on the control architecture of Los Angeles (really how engineers were 

being put to the service of the establishment to make protest and resistance 

difficult). What Professor Davis saw was actually the rarest of exceptions. 

Davis’ fears were drawn from the modest assumption that more than a 

handful of persons were as astute as he, and had figured out the urban Dot 

Game. In fact, few government planners have taken full advantage of civil 
33 Engineers and Built Environment

132

engineering as a means to control civil resistance, with the Israeli government being a possible exception.

So much of the world is urban now, you almost have to build or rebuild something if you are going to contribute to the structure of life. The 

question should almost never be whether to build, just what to build with the 

money and expertise available, and where. Bridges are usually a good

choice. Sports complexes seem to be what the Chinese like to build, maybe 

partly because schools and hospitals, though they sound good, are like 

churches in that they are not just structures, but include the people and institutions in them. They require educated professionals and professional 

materiel. It’s easy to build a school building, but if the educational effort is 

not sustainable, the psychological effect of an empty school building can be 

worse than no school at all. Pure water systems are a contribution in most 

places, but they always seem more expensive than expected because of environmental impact and competition for source waters. Sewers are good, 

especially when the engineers find an adequate place for the waste material 

to go. Roads are also good, but not necessarily so much as people will claim. 

Every road benefits someone more than someone else. The road-building 

constituency rarely talks about the differentials. Like bridge building, road 

building can be a great idea, but it is not a great idea ipso facto. Some say

stuff like, ‘The insurgency begins where the road ends’. There exist ring 

roads and road networks, but some roads, especially in remote areas, end. 

However, the bad guys use roads too, so if you don’t have a good idea in 

advance about whom specifically a road will favor or disfavor, you might 

want to re-think. ‘Engineering’ means building thoughtfully.

Please see sections: 101, Magical Realism; 91, Forts and Walls; 29,

Heavy Machines; 77, Sex; 129, Nerd Globe; 37, School Lunches; 99, 

Seven Metropolitan Lines of Effort; and 62, Bank Robbery.



“If it ain`t baroque, don’t fix it.”

Les Grau (attributed)

--------------

Construction Worker: I think we need more dirt.

Construction Boss: Yes, more dirt.

Brian Biggs

Everything Goes: On Land 138F

139


133

City is where insurgency goes to die

Section 34, Urban or Rural

We all know what a city is, but what does the difference between city 

and country mean for winning or losing an armed conflict? Many writers will 

refer to an armed group like the Colombian FARC as a rural guerrilla, but 

what does that observation mean and what can we do with it?

Urban means a lot of buildings and people. Exactly where rural ends 

and urban begins geographically and historically is a question we will skip for 

the most part. Some of the answer is statistical protocol. The United States 

government, for example, uses several categories for a variety of purposes, 

including a thing called the Standard Metropolitan Statistical Area (SMSA) 

which is somewhat arbitrary, but more or less means a place with a core of 

more than 50,000 persons and a surrounding population of more than 100,000. 

Definitions also often include a legal concept such as incorporation of some 

kind. Urbanites generally share services such as a power source, entertainment, potable water, and a sewer system. Some would say that a restaurant is 

the beginning of urban. Others would say a market, a well, or a wall.

In rural environments people supply their own basic services. The 

more rural, the fewer shared services, until there are so few shared services, an 

area is no longer considered even rural, but primitive or wild, so maybe ‘rural’ 

correlates to independence. Bottled propane is a sign of ruralness in some 

countries. Propane can be sent through a pipe network or delivered in a truck. 

If your place is so rural you have no delivery system but have to get it yourself, 

then you might be rural. If you are using wood and coal you mined yourself, 

you’re really rural, although you just might be so urbanite you can play at being rural. At any rate, more rural means less dependence and fewer networks. 

It does not necessarily mean less wealth. In America it is unmistakably rural 

for farmers to dedicate a half million dollars to building an insanely powerful 

pulling tractor solely to compete against other tractors in sled-pulling contests. 

Of course, that rural dude’s wealth might depend on a distant market network.

Maybe eighty-five percent of Colombians live in cities of over fifty 

thousand people, most of which have centralized sewer systems. Debates 

about rural versus urban are often won with behavioral and linguistic arguments rather than according to infrastructure statistics, however. Where rural 

and urban begin and end in Colombia are academic curiosities and matters of

self-identity. If a person rides a chiva (a colorful bus-like truck conversion 

with a wooden cabin, no doors and a pithy saying on the bumpers) as an economic necessity, he or she probably calls the chiva a misto and is almost 
34 Urban or Rural

134

certainly a rural Colombian, scientifically speaking. The geographic extents 

within which chivas roll as mistos has shrunken a lot because suburban areas 

have reached out, roads have improved (allowing lighter-framed buses), and 

fewer people live in some of the more remote areas. If you live in Colombia and 

regularly ride what the city folk call a chiva (but which you call a misto) and you 

occasionally ride a mule, then you are rural, and might also be a campesino.

A map of Colombian National parks gives a 75% solution to the location 

of guerrilla sanctuaries inside Colombia. The parks are remote. If we were to 

identify those points in Colombia farthest from the cities and from the main roads 

in terms of cost-distances, those points would often fall within areas Colombians 

considered suitable for designation as national parks, many of which the FARC 

used as refuges. The FARC is a rural movement, which makes sense because 

its early leaders were born in rural areas, but also because it has had to depend 

on lines of communication that lead out of the country. Staying rural, and remote,

meanslearning how to walk (a lot). Rural people can walk. Because of the need 

to maintain long lines of communication in rural areas, FARC leaders, even 

those with city roots, had to depend on rural people and consequently assumed 

many of the perspectives, knowledge, habits, and values of rural life. The FARC 

indeed has had urban cells and urbanite leaders for years, and its overall military 

strategy was to surround and then take the cities. In the fifty-plus years since the 

beginnings of the FARC, however, Colombia saw a huge increase in urban life 

while the percentage of the population that could still be called rural greatly 

shrank. The cities the FARC wanted to surround grew and grew while the rural 

population on which the insurgency depended grew smaller and smaller. The 

FARC had not implemented nor changed its strategy fast enough to keep up with 

the change in spatial demographics. Paradoxically, much of the impetus for urbanization had come from the violence that the FARC impelled in rural areas.

Cities might be where insurgencies go to die. This is probably because 

the insurgent organization cannot control anonymity there. Anonymity is so easily achieved in a big city that too many people can safely inform on the outlaw. 

This vulnerability depends, however, on how the insurgent uses urban geography, and on timing. On moving into a city, an insurgent encounters criminal 

organizations already in control of key neighborhoods and key smuggling 

routes. The criminals are natively urban, with urban skills at controlling anonymity, keeping secrets, and imposing violent will. The rural insurgent, used to 

walking, doesn’t roll like the gangster, who is used to the speeds, technologies, 

timing and pitfalls of urban life. This presents a challenge for the rural guerrilla 

wanting to ‘take’ a city. He confronts a paradox of city life: the city offers the 

possibility of great anonymity, but simultaneously presents an organization with 
34 Urban or Rural

135

greater difficulty in controlling that anonymity. Gangsters and guerrillas alike 

depend on codes of silence, but enforcing that code in a city with which you are 

not familiar is a trick.

Some urban geographies are more amenable than others to an insurgent. 

One is the university campus, especially in Latin America, where a great deal of 

tolerance and amnesty is traditionally afforded to youthful and scholarly reflection and expression. On campus, a radical can get away with having some public 

personality profile -- and remain at-large. Poor, often peripheral and densely 

crowded neighborhoods are also more likely to host insurgents and crime bosses. 

People refer to relatively poor urban wards in US cities as slums, which suffer 

some unique challenges associated with phenomena like high crime rates and 

illicit drug use. The mix of social characteristics that cause people to refer to 

neighborhoods as slums in the United States, however, is not quite the same as 

in the marginal, informal sprawls in the developing world. The zones that we 

casually refer to as slums in Latin America (favelas, turgurios, barrios populares) are heavily populated, covered with ramshackle housing and perhaps suffer 

a lack or shortage of waste removal systems, potable water or electric power. 

They are often exposed to costly environmental events like mudslides or flooding. They may be home to populations with nowhere better to go. Although 

these areas are almost always worse off in terms of basic services and conveniences than the slums of the more developed cities in the United States, that 

disadvantage does not equate to a community of incapacitated people, broken 

families, criminal culture, academic underachievement or even lack of hope (although some of these ailments are patently present). The human capital in the 

slums of many cities is often capable, mobile and successfully aspiring.

The most obvious distinguishing characteristics of a Latin American underprivileged urban area may indeed be the most easily changed. The civil 

engineering, or physical arrangement, architecture,street pattern and urban plan 

can greatly assist government or anti-government elements. The side that can

reform the built environment in its favor should do so, competitively speaking.

The kinds of things that can be done to gain advantage from the physical 

environment include the creation of controlled passage-ways and elevated bridges, 

and construction and relocation of walls. These things are sometimes called control architecture. The advantage normally pertaining to the government stems from 

greater capacity to change the physical structure. Administrative devices, such as 

the imposition of street naming conventions and the formalization of addresses, 

also break down anonymity. Re-organizing streets and traffic to speed the safe 

flow of persons, especially children and home makers to and from schools, as well 
34 Urban or Rural

136

as unimpeded, un-extorted access to basic services also seem to give government 

an advantage over insurgents and criminals.

For understanding geographic advantages and disadvantages in irregular 

war, it appears there really are revealing differences between rural and urban. 

Rural ethics, habits and necessities don’t always mix well with their urban counterparts. However, concentrating too much on the distinction between rural and 

urban might itself throw us off. The in-between, suburban or transitional areas 

may be the hardest to understand and the greatest challenge. It is too easy to 

speak of urban conflict as distinct from warfare ‘in the field’. Maybe the most 

difficult, vital areas are the transition zones around cities. It seems almost all 

cities depend on rural lines of communitction, and as for inlands cities...well.

Please see sections: 29, Heavy Machines; 27, ‘Nonviolent’ Action; 37, 

School Lunches; 91, Forts and Walls; 94, Poop; 75, The Price of Real 

Estate, and Tourism; 32, Land-use Planning; and 97, Oviedo.

“The lowest and vilest alleys in London do not present a 

more dreadful record of sin than does the smiling and 

beautiful countryside.”

Sherlock Holmes in

The Adventure of the Copper Beaches 139F

140

--------------

Stranger on the highway: I'm from the city...Doesn't matter 

what city; all cities are alike.

Billy: Well, why'd you mention it then?

Stranger on the highway: 'Cause I'm from the city; a long way

from the city, and that's where I wanna be right now.

from the movie,

Easy Rider (1969) 140F

141

--------------

“We was always taking long walks, and we was always 

looking for a guy named ‘Charlie’.”

Forrest Gump in the movie,

Forrest Gump (1994)141F

142
137

The Hunter’s redemption

Section 35, Comuna 13

On the 30th of May, 2002, Medellín’s mayor, Luis Pérez Gutiérrez, 

assembled his municipal cabinet and a group of newspersons, mounted a 

tour bus and headed over to the western hillside borough known as Comuna 13, or San Javier. People of the borough had been complaining. A 

major police sweep into the borough a week earlier had left bitterness and 

bad publicity. Public order was flagging, and so the mayor decided to visit 

the borough, take a sounding, and show his interest. As they arrived, a 

lead car was shot up and immobilized by gunfire, blocking the way. The 

adrenalized bus driver managed to back up to safety from the bullet storm. 

The residents’ complaints had been understated. For the mayor it was a 

frightening experience, but it was also degrading and embarrassing to realize, finally, that an entire sector of his city was completely outside the 

constituted government’s civil authority. Comuna 13, an area of over 

seven square kilometers and a hundred thirty thousand people, had fallen 

outside the de facto territorial limits of government control. Outlaws, rebels and gangsters had gained a zone of complete impunity from 

government authority. For several years they had been fighting mostly 

among themselves for dominance. The population of the zone, many with 

few economic options, had become terrorized by that fight and were all 

but enslaved by the various violent groups.

The month before the mayor’s bus ride, the country’s president, 

Andrés Pastrana, ordered the Colombian Army to retake what was known 

as the Despeje, a demilitarized zone in south-central Colombia that Pastrana had conceded to the FARC for the purpose of conducting a national 

peace process. Pastrana had been elected on a campaign of seeking a negotiated settlement with the insurgents and he had fulfilled his promise 

through a series of demarches and concessions. After what seemed to the 

public and government to be a long, violent series of insincerities on the 

part of the FARC, President Pastrana reversed course and ordered the Despeje to be retaken by the Colombian State.

The end of the peace process led to a changed security dynamic in 

Medellín. During the years of efforts to maintain cease fires with the rebel 

groups, the Pastrana administration had been loath to authorize substantial 

offensive operations. During the peace process period, the FARC planted 
35 Comuna 13

138

units outside Medellín and attempted to create a presence within the city, 

or at least within a few of its peripheral zones, Comuna 13 in particular. 

The FARC took active measures during the peace process to improve its

geographic positioning. It exploited the depressed pace of government 

military initiative. Now the peace process had collapsed and, to a degree,

the green light went on for more aggressive counterinsurgent operations 

within Medellín. Attention and resources from Bogotá, however, were to 

be aimed at retaking the Despeje, to addressing the presence of FARC units 

nearer to the capital and closer to the upcoming presidential elections. 

Also, the scale of urban insurgency in Medellin may not have been correctly measured in Bogotá, or even seen as an integral part of larger 

insurgent strategies. At any rate, Mayor Pérez would not find a responsive 

ear in Bogotá until after the inauguration of a new president.

On May 21st, a week before Mayor Pérez’ rejected visit, about 

seven hundred police officers and soldiers implemented Operation Mariscal, descending more or less simultaneously (in this case more like 

ascending since the borough is almost all hillside) mostly on residential 

addresses in the borough. The objective was to issue outstanding warrants 

to members of the various armed groups and to interdict what government 

intelligence warned might be an organized attempt to disrupt the presidential elections that were scheduled for May 26th. Mariscal, which met 

organized resistance, indicated to the public forces how thoroughly infested the borough had become. It also exposed some weakness in 

government operational practices.

Liberal party presidential candidate Álvaro Uribe Vélez won the 

May 26 elections by a large margin. He had campaigned on a platform of 

toughness against the various insurgent enemies of the State, especially the 

FARC. Colombian voters not only rejected the failed Pastrana ‘peace process’, they were attracted to the idea of beating the FARC definitively. 

Uribe’s inauguration in early August marked not only a sharp turn in national military strategy, but a change of fortunes for Comuna 13.

Medellín was returning to hyper-violence. During some days as 

many as twenty five murders occurred. The city suffered over two thousand 

murders in the first half of 2002. The violence actually never deteriorated to 

the levels suffered during the early 1990s before Pablo Escobar was taken 

out, but the people of Medellin had every reason to fear it might.
35 Comuna 13

139

On October 14, during a spike in inter-gang violence in Comuna 

13, a stray bullet entered an apartment in an adjacent sector of the city, 

killing the beautiful only daughter of one of the mayor’s friends, a prominent doctor. At the wake, the mayor was not only moved by the total 

deflation of his friend, but by the parallel depression of another man whose 

college-age son had suffered the same fate. The war had reached the heart 

of an otherwise oblivious elite. Calculating that the city itself did not have 

the resources to deal with the problem at the appropriate scale, Mayor Pérez called the new president on the phone asking for help with Comuna 13. 

President Uribe picked up the phone and ordered the head of the chief of 

the armed forces to take back the borough. 

On October 16, 2002, a joint force of Colombian army, national 

police, municipal police and other government agencies, a force more than 

twice as large as in Mariscal, surrounded and entered the borough to serve 

arrest warrants. This ‘Operation Orion’, the shooting part of which lasted 

only twenty-four hours, resulted in about four hundred detentions. Not all 

the warrants were served, the government forces suffered several casualties, and more civilians were killed. It was the single biggest urban 

operation ever attempted in the country, however. It did not bring economic equality to the borough or eliminate desperation in the lives of many 

of its residents. It was a successful counterinsurgent event nonetheless. 

On Tuesday, October 21, Mayor Pérez again loaded up his cabinet 

and a bunch of media people and headed for Comuna 13. This time he 

went to the middle of the borough, led a public prayer, raised the national 

flag, and took a long march up and down the borough’s labyrinth of stairway streets. Colombian flags had been distributed generally and were 

flying and hanging everywhere. There was cheering, no shooting, and no 

mistaking that a change had occurred.

Orion was the last of a series of operations, but it was different than 

its predecessors. Previous operations had failed to create a permanent government presence. Government units had gone in, often with uncertain 

destinations, to serve warrants on the basis of fairly good information 

about suspects, but not about the overall operational options of the enemies 

they faced. The police had approached the problem without visualizing 

the flow of movement in and out of the borough, nor had they planned any 

assault on the relationship between the enemy and the population. They 

had not assembled sufficient resources to remain with sufficient power to 
35 Comuna 13

140

address that relationship -- especially to change the nature of the competition for information. Although the authorities had always hoped to enter 

and stay, they had never assigned enough personnel even to protect the 

policemen themselves.

Finally, after Operation Mariscal revealed itself as another rung on 

a ladder leading nowhere, an army intelligence sergeant with an integral 

view of the problem (perhaps from the experiences of a humble background) spoke up at a brainstorming meeting and laid out all that had to be 

accomplished. The authorities had to seal off the zone, go in big, clear the 

entire area, stay there, and then create conditions in which the residents 

were confident that they could talk to the police so that it would be easy to 

sort out the criminals. That meant involving everyone in and with the government, including engineers, social workers, teachers, local NGOs --

everyone -- and that meant not offending the population with high-handedness or mistakes. The military and police commanders, and the city’s 

civilian leadership, listened.

Lessons from Comuna 13 might include the following:

Achieve resolve at the top. If the bosses aren’t on board, failure is likely. 

In the Comuna 13 case, the president and the mayor were resolute and committed. Sadly, the resolve came only after a long period of obliviousness, 

wishful thinking and half measures.

Effect military-police coordination. Operation Orion was unusually favored in this regard. The senior police officer was General José Leonardo 

Gallego and the senior army commander was General Mario Montoya 

Uribe, commander of the army’s 4th Brigade, headquartered in the city. The 

two were friends, familiar with each other and the area since boyhood. This 

relationship did not hurt. The two knew the practical capabilities and cultural expectations of their forces as well as the personality of their partner, 

so appropriately dividing up roles and missions was not a difficult challenge.

Surround the area. The terrain in and around Comuna 13 is steep and broken, with a mixture of built environment (much of it of precarious) and 

undeveloped rural terrain. Surrounding the neighborhood could not be done 

with police assets alone and, in fact, was never completely accomplished by 

the army. Sealing off the borough had several positive effects. One was to 

keep out reinforcements from nearby rural-based insurgent units. Another was 

to frighten insurgent leaders within the borough to try to escape. (Perhaps the 
35 Comuna 13

141

fact that holes remained in the cordon actually lessened the violence.) Another 

was to secure dominant terrain so that the outlaw groups would not take the 

best firing and observation positions. Finally, the cordon also helped prevent 

innocent civilians from accidently straying into harm’s way.

Take dominant terrain and own it. The mayor had given an order well 

before Operation Orion for the police to buy key properties on which to build 

new local police stations. Getting hold of those properties took a little more 

legal and financial effort than originally anticipated, but the decision to dominate key ground permanently proved smart in the long run. Covering 

militarily significant terrain with a police fort makes future control of the 

area by an insurgent force much more difficult.

Start building. The city determined that staying in the borough meant making 

a constant effort to improve everything to the extent resources allowed. A huge 

highway tunnel project, a gondola extension off the city metro line, and a major 

urban housing project all evidenced government presence and commitment.

Control anonymity. One control on anonymity was the simple presence of 

more policemen. It became harder for a stranger to go unnoticed. Less visible, but effective to the mid-term success of the operation, was a local onestop center where residents conducted mundane business with the city (connection of services, payment of fees and bills, enrollment of children in 

school). The building was organized in such a way that residents felt confident of their anonymity should they choose to denounce criminals in the 

neighborhood. A small architectural and administrative innovation helped 

the city attack the law of silence or omertà. Such rules of silence are built 

partly on a foundation of loyalty and mostly on one of fear -- but such fear 

does not constitute an intractable cultural human condition. A simple opportunity for discreet conversation can defeat it.

Once control of the balance of anonymities became a focus of the 

government’s operational design, ideas to address anonymity came easily, 

and the whole outlaw ‘culture of silence’ was put at risk as the flow of information from the public to government authorities increased. Because the 

carrying of cell phones had become common in Medellín, an anonymous 

call-in number to the police was maintained. Vehicle registries were also 

groomed as an anonymity-control measure. It became increasingly more 

difficult for a stranger to gain or maintain anonymity inside Comuna 13 and 

easier for peaceful citizens to exercise it.
35 Comuna 13

142

Control the location and movement of children. As noted in Section 37, 

School Lunches, a number of programs were developed to address the quality of life for children in the borough. Schools were the natural geographic 

focus of these efforts. Since 2002, horror stories about accidental shootings, 

drug-related kidnappings, and other tragedies in Comuna 13 have occasionally been published, but most stories coming out of the borough are hopeful.

Encourage community. Medellín’s public administrators built a modern 

library and funded parades, art programs, and other events to garner participation, encourage joint effort, and engender community pride. These things 

were not relegated to the status of details. The government, in conjunction 

with local and international NGOs strived to increase the provision of basic 

services to the area. City administrative leaders saw equitable, orderly distribution of services (as opposed to violent pirating) as intimately connected 

with civic culture and education.

Address cost-distances. City planners poured over maps to determine service access points, school locations, military outpost locations, and 

transportation hubs, and adjusted these to the extent possible. Medellín’s 

municipal management corporation, Empresas Públicas de Medellín, is 

highly GIS competent.

Support rule-of-law systems. The city’s security office coordinated with 

other city managers to perfect street names and the formal addressing of residences and businesses. This facilitated the formal service of criminal 

process by prosecutors. Before the streets and addresses were formalized, it 

had been difficult to serve warrants and to follow other rule-of-law practices.

Add local support to demobilization, disarmament and re-insertion/reintegration. The city government also collaborated with national and 

international organizations to conduct Demobilization, Disarmament and 

Reintegration (DDR) programs of ex-guerrillas and paramilitaries. While 

these have had mixed results, most observers praise them over the alternatives. (See Section 103, Amnesty and Restitution)

Be careful making alliances. An accusation exists that the precipitous drop 

in crime after 2002 was not due to the government’s presence, but to a select 

group of outlaw being aided by the government. The history of collaboration 

between the government and illegal rightist armed groups in Medellín is yet 

to be fully exposed or understood. Some coordination and alliance occurred 

in Antioquia as elsewhere in Colombia, especially between the government 
35 Comuna 13

143

and elements of the United Colombian Self Defense Forces, AUC. As the 

AUC evolved into an uglier and uglier component of the country’s outlaw 

violence, however, those associations became an embarrassment and a political yoke. Some of the calm reigning in Comuna 13 since 2002 may owe 

to the dominance of a single surviving criminal gang. The larger truth, supported by a great deal of evidence, is that the borough returned to the fold of 

municipal, civil governance. It is no longer being organized politically or 

militarily by insurgents.

Don’t take victory for granted. As great as the Operation Orion victory 

was, underlying weaknesses in the social compact, especially in the control 

of corruption and the power of illicit drug organizations keep Comuna 13

vulnerable to social deterioration. In late 2009 and 2010 Medellin and Comuna 13 experienced a renewal of high violence levels, even if not compared 

to earlier periods. This violence was apparently the result of turf battles between small, ascendant new criminal gangs battling over the same drug trade 

corridors.

Go in big and stay. ‘Take, hold, build’ has no better example than Operation Orion. After all, operational art in irregular warfare isn’t just about the 

lines of communication and not getting caught during a retreat; it is also 

about not retreating. Start with unified, resolute leadership. It took a couple 

of epiphany moments for Medellín’s mayor to commit, but when he did, he 

not only went to his president to assure support, he listened to a sergeant 

explain what governance meant.

Understand the connection of rural and urban. Comuna 13 lies along 

the main east-west route in and out of the city, and not going through the 

borough entails a costly detour for people, materiel, and merchandise moving between the Panamanian isthmus region and the middle of Colombia. 

Outside Comuna 13, a number of insurgent and criminal groups maintained 

rural connections for supply and escape.

Buy informants. The city created a hefty fund to pay informants inside the 

borough. This direct assault on anonymity paid dividends quickly.

Expect legal attack. First General Gallego and later General Montoya 

would suffer legal demands and accusations stemming from their conduct of 

operations in Medellín. A cursory check of Internet sites reveals a cyber 

realm populated mostly by left-apologetic criticism of these officers, their 

institutions, and the results of their efforts, especially Orion. The Colombian 
35 Comuna 13

144

government branches are differentiated and independent enough that accusations of government abuse can be effectively forwarded regardless of the 

political or ideological stripe of the chief executive. That’s the good news. 

The bad news is the degree to which radical anti-State individuals gained 

positions within the government, the low prices at which some government 

personnel were purchased, and the ease with which outside perceptions were 

manipulated. Had these two officers acted during the regime of a different 

president, they might have been far more vulnerable to legal attack, independent of the nature, ethic or effectiveness of their decisions. 

Paradoxically, a key factor in making these two leaders vulnerable was the 

spectacular degree of their counterinsurgent success, especially in Medellín.

Remember terrain. Although Comuna 13 is an urban area, the land is precipitous. High ground in and around the borough is key terrain. This matters 

in even the lowest-intensity of armed encounters, especially due to the new 

prominence of snipers.

Train for explosive booby traps. One of the first serious government casualties in the borough was produced by a cadaver-bomb.

Find money. The actions, activities, and programs required money. Medellín 

was lucky enough to have had some. Peace requires a social investment. Medellín has been trying to make that investment and, sincere arguments to the 

contrary notwithstanding, recent history tells that in the midst of a larger, complicated national armed struggle, Medellín tackled what seemed to be an 

intractable problem and succeeded. The self-concept of the people of Antioquia, Paisas as they are known, is one of can-do problem solving, and in 

that spirit, the Paisas opened their checkbook. They are not much for existential angst. Post-structuralism is not catching-on in Medellín.

The physical and human geography of Comuna 13 is unique and 

the lessons are not all easy to generalize. This successful counterinsurgent 

vignette doesn’t delve into the causes of the conflict or identities the antiState actors. For that background, and for additional sources, there are 

three books of note, all in Spanish. They are Ricardo Aricapa’s Comuna 

13; Yoni Rendon’s Comuna 13 de Medellín; and Pablo Angarita’s Dinámicas de guerra y construcción de paz. Of particular interest in the history 

is an episode of organized land squatting.

Please see sections: 99, Seven Metropolitan Lines of Effort; 25, Why Humans Don’t Fight; 74, Refugees and Displaced Persons; 89, The Dot Game 
35 Comuna 13

145

and Go; 2, Anonymity; 107, Guerre d’Algérie; 75, The Price of Real Estate, and Tourism; and 95, Childhood.



Riff: We gotta stand up to them Doc; it's important.

Doc: Fighting over a little piece of street is so important?

Gang: To us it is!

Doc: To hoodlums it is.

Gang: Who're you callin' a hoodlum?

from the movie,

West Side Story (1961)142F

143

--------------

“It was all about an invasion [organized squatting] of one of 

the farms that a man, whose last name was Arroyave, had in 

the uphill part of San Javier, on the extreme western side of 

the city; a farm that was as neglected physically as it were the 

tax payments -- so much so that the back taxes were worth 

more than the farm itself. That is to say, its owner was, in 

fact, the Municipality of Medellín.”143 F

144 (my translation)

Ricardo Aricapa

Comuna 13

--------------

Suha: One day things will be better. 

Taxidriver: Sounds like you're not from here.

from the movie,

Paradise Now (1995)144F

145

--------------

“Ya know they always say if you live in one place long 

enough, you are that place.”

Rocky Balboa in the movie,

Rocky Balboa (2006)145F

146


35 Comuna 13

146

-- Comuna 13, Medellín, Colombia circa 2002 --

Above, Comuna 13 is shown in the west of Medellín. Below, dark lines 

are main roads, dotted lines the Antioquia border. Except for Santa Fe 

de Antioquia, the included towns are scenes of historic violent events.
147

Culture, land, measurement, whereabouts

Section 36, The Denver Broncos

Entertainments, including sports and games, can tell a lot about a 

culture ˗˗ about society, including how people from or within that culture 

are likely to fight. Knowing thoroughly about entertainments also helps in 

the control of anonymity. Entertainment rights are valuable property, so 

their locations, times and modalities are clues to personal whereabouts.

The fall football schedule: In Oklahoma, on a Friday evening in October, 

a small town high school will host a football game. That game was scheduled in advance and the schedule published on the Internet, carried home 

as flyers by members of the student body, put up on posters in local businesses and printed in the local newspaper. All of the town’s high school 

players are listed by name and position. It will also typically include their 

year, weight, height, and jersey number. The high school football schedule 

is a formal property record. In fact, it is one of the most formal and most 

effective property records in the society. It states exactly where a very 

specific group of humans has a right to do a very specific thing at a very 

specific place and time. The individuals who have a right to play almost 

always show up to do so. The record is accurate, rarely in error, and transparent. The system of such records is comprehensive in that all the high 

schools in the league also have schedules. Rarely do more than two teams 

show up for a ballgame. The document is the most disseminated of a larger 

weave of other documents that the schedule reflects. In that weave is a 

league charter, an agreement regarding gate receipts, about contracting referees, about the location of the playoff and championship games, and so 

on. The football schedule is what we see of an entire rule-of-law apparatus 

of written documents.

The schedule also reflects a central aspect of community identity. 

The football game is a moment of collective expression. The players represent not just a town, but a dimension of life. Meanwhile, and while 

participating in that moment of hotdogs and energy, Spencer, a private investigator, sees the football game and the football schedule from a 

vocational angle. He knows that the coach will put Grayson, a fast, fearless kid, in for the kickoff as the ‘gunner’, whose job it is to fire himself 

down the field at breakneck speed to tackle the also-fast kid who will catch 

the kickoff. Spencer knows Grayson will be standing on one of the forty 
36 The Denver Broncos

148

yard hash marks at seven o`clock on the evening on 8 August wearing the 

number 3 on the back of his jersey. He also knows that Grayson’s mom 

and dad will be in the north stands wearing the school colors, one or both 

of them even wearing a matching number 3 jersey. That’s when Spencer 

will politely (since Spencer’s daughter is one of the cheerleaders) serve 

Grayson’s dad a summons to appear in court.

The game itself. American football explains a lot about America, and a 

description of that sport can illuminate many of the themes in this book. 

A football field is divided by many lines, with the opposing teams fighting 

not only for every yard, but for every inch. A pair of officials on the sideline measures progress with a chain, not coincidentally evocative of the 

survey chains used to square up the new territories of the early republic. 

Other officials keep time, because the game requires constant decisionmaking regarding what is time-in or time-out. Different amounts of time 

are accorded to different activities, which are measured to the second.

Lack of promptness is invariably punished. While the number of players 

on the field is unremarkable, each has a specialty. Many of these specialties match patterns of natural gifts ˗˗ a 230-pound athlete will more likely 

be a linebacker, whereas a fleet 160-pounder more likely a wide receiver 

and a 300-pound youth an offensive lineman. The coaching staffs and batteries of officials are organized by specialty as well. The game requires a 

lot of gear. Players are variously armored, electronic communication is 

ubiquitous, and practice fields are replete with blocking sleds, targets, and 

obstacles. Football is an athletic contest, but games are considered incomplete if not surrounded by collateral activities. There are bands, 

cheerleaders, food, coronations, awards, recognitions, lotteries, food, parachutists and even jet planes if you’ve got `em.

The rule book for American football is about eight-feet thick. Few 

living humans know all the rules, such that games require a committee of 

five people to regularly confer. The players’ jerseys are all numbered and 

most leagues require players’ surnames be put on the jerseys. This helps the 

officials control anonymity and assign accountability for infractions. Once 

every few years, the sports journalists report a football game in which no 

infractions occurred, but most games don’t go five minutes without some 

rule being broken. Many of the coaches’ playbooks are immensely complex, 

the combinations and permutations of their strategies being marvelously varied. This leads to a whole industry of scouting and spying, since a marked 
36 The Denver Broncos

149

advantage goes to the defensive coordinator who anticipates his opponents’ 

plays. Not only are the players specialized as to their skills and attributes, 

they each have a particular task to complete during a given play ˗˗ a specific 

block, running pattern or throw to make in order for the team to effect any 

of the myriad plays the coaches devise. Any failure of individual responsibility can cause failure of a play, meaning that teamwork is built on 

responsibility for completing individual assignments.

Finally, and essentially, American football is violent. People regularly promote efforts to tame the game or at least make it safer and less 

likely to injure the players. Violence, however, is part of what makes the 

game not only enjoyable and exiting, but probably why so many young 

males are attracted to it and so many young females attracted to them. Accordingly, with this atavism undaunted, each new generation of linebacker 

defines the game and the linebackers’ personal mission in it as one of separating quarterbacks and running backs from a few moments of light.

American football is territorial, flamboyant, sexual, and (perhaps 

being repetitive here) violent. It is also complicated, technology-heavy, 

legalistic in the extreme, and incrementally and minutely measured both 

as to time and space. It is tied inextricably to money, contracts and place 

identity. It is about individual prowess and responsibility in a group context. It is serious business and fun at the same time. Especially...it is 

violent, but the violence is poured on and poured over by a thousand rules 

and banks of judges. It is a legitimated violence. Rarely do young men 

fight in the stands at American football games. The young men most prone 

to face-smashing are getting their faces smashed on the field, and liking it.

There are two major points that this section tries to make, and they 

are not about violence, American football or the Denver Broncos (paragon 

of the activity).146 F

147 First, many cultural activities, especially entertainments, are inseparable from place identity. Entertainment activities imply 

sets of rights and duties that people are highly likely to exercise -- because 

they want to. Knowing about these activities is to know, with actionable 

accuracy, where groups and individuals will be, what they will be doing, 

when they will be doing it, and who they will be supporting. Property 

systems are social compacts which associate people with specific places 

and rights. Property systems don’t just tell us who has the deed to the 

ranch, they tell us the where of civil and human rights generally. The Sam 

Spades of the world understand this well.
36 The Denver Broncos

150

The second point, related to the first, is that enjoyable voluntary activities describe manners of thinking and organizing. They will even reveal 

hierarchies and interpersonal relationships that will carry over into what 

might seem to be more serious enterprises. If you disdain learning about fun 

and pastime, you will fail to learn people’s predispositions, who they admire, 

to whom they sense a debt, who they voluntarily follow, and when people 

are likely to be where. Property analysis is the detailed study of power relationships as revealed by exercised rights and duties, including organized 

pastimes and voluntary exertions.

Please see sections: 47, Why the County; 3, The Domesday Book; 118, Democracy; 48, Grading the Social Compact; 40, Popular Support; 78, Identity; 70, 

Measuring Effects of Actions on Structure; and 22, Badassoftheweek.com.



“Football is an honest game. It's true to life. It's a game 

about sharing. Football is a team game. So is life.”147 F

148

Quarterback Joe Namath

--------------

“Football linemen are motivated by a more complicated, self-determining series of factors than the simple 

fear of humiliation in the public gaze, which is the emotion that galvanizes the backs and receivers.”148 F

149

Lineman Merlin Olsen

--------------

“When I played pro football, I never set out to hurt 

anyone deliberately -- unless it was, you know, 

important, like a league game or something.”1 49F

150

Linebacker Dick Butkus

--------------

“The trouble with Scotland is that it's full of Scots.”

Longshanks in the movie,

Braveheart (1995)150F

151


151

Not all social programs are bad

Section 37, School Lunches

Several sections of this book are dedicated to the simple idea of 

cutting the enemy off at the pass, that to win armed struggles you better 

pay close attention to physical routes of escape to sanctuary, yours and his. 

It is about the bottom line of biological survival, about beating your enemy 

in physical time and space. That is indeed the book’s attitude, so admiring 

mention of a social program like government provision of school lunches 

might seem out of character. Not at all. Routes are composed of people, 

not just space and distance. The time scale of strategy includes time to 

recruit, to convince, to be the rightful font of power and governance, or 

not. This book does not suggest that the essence of strategy is all geometric, all physical or all anything. It doesn’t even define the essence, except 

to tie it to an equation about the timing and placement of power by guileful

enemies. To win at irregular war requires having a grasp of victory in time. 

Is victory or defeat to be determined after a week, a decade, a century? 

Winning at irregular war can mean just eliminating the enemy or it can 

mean that plus achieving a social condition less likely to spawn new enemies. Regardless, a meal can keep a child in a building and off the street

during that one critical hour.

A school lunch is probably a good thing in its own right. A hungry

student is not a good listener and is a poor learner. Beyond compassion 

and the compelling logic that human brains are society’s most valuable

natural resource (and that the bodies housing and fueling those brains need 

to be nourished), there is your goal -- to win. If a child is inside a school 

building to get fed, he or she is not being a messenger or a look-out or a 

carrier of contraband, or a thirteen-year-old assassin. The child is not participating to change the weight of a factor in the operational equation. You 

don’t want child enemies.

The geography of armed conflict does not get much simpler than 

this. Programs are good that keep children in safe places where it is difficult for some gangster to recruit them. If children are progressing in 

peaceful pastimes, that’s good. The ancillary benefits for the responsible 

insurgent or counterinsurgent leader, or for law enforcement, is the better 

development of human resources coming out of childhood.
37 School Lunches

152

This book chooses school lunches because government programs 

to provide meals have been shown, in places like Medellín, Colombia, to 

be effective in drawing underage participation away from armed conflict. 

There are probably other useful programs as well. Western militaries are

fond of completing certain kinds of projects in foreign countries that take 

advantage of what seems to be excess engineering capacity. They like to 

build schoolhouses and medical clinics. The ‘build something’ notion 

promises an amorphous ephemeral change likely to benefit the builder. 

The basic idea is that doing something useful will be appreciated. It probably will, but a school is not just a building, and a good school is much 

more than a place of learning. A good school is a place where kids are 

taught by competent teachers who are not teaching hate. The building, 

faculty, administration and families all factor in to what defines a good 

school, and how the educational environment will resist the recruitment of 

underage children into armed conflict.

Seek programs that keep children in safe places advantageous to 

them and to you. A building alone is never a school. Create places that 

protect, inspire, equip and enlighten. Keep track of the enemy’s side of 

the school question. Plenty of places dishearten, instill hatred, teach methods of destruction, and preach slavery. Those places are schools, too, and 

may even have school lunch programs. It would be a shame if you were 

helping to pay for such a negative education.

Please see sections: 33, Engineers and Built Environment; 95, Childhood; 55, Kidnapping; 90, Prisons and Prisoners; 14, Legitimacy; 40, 

Popular Support; 17, Keeping Secrets; and 30, Control Technology.



“The miser, starving his brother's body, starves also his 

own soul, and at death shall creep out of his great estate 

of injustice, poor and naked and miserable.”151F

152

Theodore Parker

--------------

“Well, the puke pile is over there. It’s a pretty big pile of puke.”

Miss Clipper in the movie,

Joe Dirt (2001)152F

153


153

Own deception

Section 38, Cultural Study for What?

Interest in foreign cultures is now fashionable in military educational circles. The new interest, however, begs a question: What is the 

purpose, from a military competitive point of view of understanding foreign cultures? The answer can be divided into seven parts as follows:

1. To find people and things. Cultural knowledge helps locate individuals, their 

wealth and their supporters. ‘Locate’ means establish their precise whereabouts 

-- where they will sleep tonight, where their mother is buried, the number of 

their bank account and the bank routing number, where their motorcycle is sitting, their email address, where and when they play golf...and where they feel 

safe. For the competitor in a violent struggle this is the first and most compelling reason for cultural knowledge. It is what Sam Spade, the private 

investigator, knows. The rest is useful, too, but if he knows where you are while

you don’t know where he is, you are the prey. To control anonymity, you must 

know the culture.

2. To communicate good. Cultural knowledge can improve communications 

with others so as to endear and not offend, to facilitate collaboration and compromise, and to settle disputes peacefully when preferable. This involves 

language beyond the verbal, and into customs, prejudices, habits, mores, expectations, fears, historical grievances, community pride and the like. All 

knowledge is grist to the mill. It will be especially productive to identify aspects 

of the culture related to honor and dishonor.

3. To identify objects of desire, sources and holders of power, grievances, 

agents (especially ‘exclusive’ agents), resolution mechanisms, debts, tax relationships, jurisdictions and expectations. In short, to comprehend the territorial 

geography of conflict and conflict resolution.

4. To set reasonable objectives. Knowing how or if to change the social compact, how long it might reasonably take you to implement such a change, and

how long the changes might last. This may include determining the interrelationship between peoples’ behaviors and their surrounding environment in 

order to derive durable improvements in human flourishing and harmony. 

When good intentions are not built on sufficient knowledge, the reward may be 

a set of nasty unintended consequences. In a domestic legal setting we demand 
38 Cultural Study for What?

154

due diligence of doctors and lawyers -- that they avoid negligent practice. Strategic due diligence presupposes the programmed and resourced study of foreign 

culturesin order to avoid strategic negligence.

5. To put things in the right places. Whether you want to optimally place a fish 

pond, police station, camera, or a shooter, it is local cultural knowledge (and 

usually the kind that cannot be gained via remote sensing) that will guide best.

6. To correctly time actions and activities. Knowing when to act and not act is 

a much easier standard if we are steeped in local cultural knowledge.

7. To get the joke or make the joke. Jokes work the same mental pathways as

military deceptions. For practical purposes, military deceptions are jokes. Irregular armed conflicts are generally clothed in law, economics, propaganda 

and other aspects of quotidian, civilian life. Not being able to get civilian jokes 

means being vulnerable to the dangerous military or criminal ones. Just as the 

insurgent can move from military uniform to civilian attire, so can military 

thought hide in civilian guise.

The best time to get cultural knowledge of a place is well before 

participating in organized armed violence there. It is never too late.

Please see sections: 49, Territorial Scrutiny; 53, Hohfeldian Grievance Analysis; 48, Grading the Social Compact; 110, Knowledge Gaps; 43, Sam Spade’s 

Whereabouts; 142, Conflict Geography; 78, Identity; and 19, Mercatus.



A Moscow radio host puts out a question on his call-in show:

“Какая часть речи диван?”

(What part of speech is ‘couch’?)

After receiving various incorrect answers, e.g., “A noun?”,

“A verb?”, the show host gives the correct answer:

“Это местоимение.”

(It’s a pronoun.)

--------------

“Zander: My God. How could this happen?

Carmen: We thought we were smarter than the Bugs.”

from the movie,

Starship Troopers (1997)153F

154


155

Of course, so what?

Section 39, Socioeconomic Causation

Improving overall socioeconomic conditions in a country suffering 

some organized armed internal strife might not help the counterinsurgent win, 

and might do the opposite, although one would suppose that a more robust 

economy could support a more robust government counterinsurgent effort. 

Economic development measures, however, often aren’t targeted so as to influence the specific sets of individuals positioned to help the government. 

Furthermore, there are examples of violent groups, such as Spain’s ETA, about 

which the economic causation model seems wholly irrelevant.

The idea that insurgency can be traced to human suffering has been 

lavishly serviced by studies sponsored by the US government and others. For 

example, the 1966 Human Factors Considerations of Undergrounds in Insurgencies, one of a series of works from the Special Operations Office at 

American University that, during the Vietnam War, held considerable sway 

on US government counterinsurgency thinking. In 1966, word was that 

“There are few comprehensive studies on the relationship between economic 

factors and insurgencies.”15 4F

155 The work mentions that one contemporary comparison of Gross National Product (GNP) and domestic political violence 

showed low levels of violence in countries with high level GNP and with a 

low GNP. The middle range countries seemed most susceptible. In Latin 

America, the work noted, some of the highest economic achievers relative to 

the region -- Colombia, Venezuela, and Cuba ˗˗ had suffered insurgencies 

while others had not. (Since 1966, Argentina, Colombia, Uruguay, Chile, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Peru and Guatemala have all been stricken with 

insurgencies, as well as other countries to a lesser extent.)

A more recent and influential example of the kind of effort sought by the 

1966 study is a sequence of three reports on “state failure” by the State Failure 

Political Instability Task Force (PITF), the latest of which is titled Internal Wars 

and Failures of Governance, 1955-Most Recent Year.155F

156 The PITF authors 

define “state failure” as revolutionary wars, ethnic wars, adverse regime changes, 

and genocides or ‘politicides’.156F

157 A1995 version of the report claimed to find that 

three factors predicted seventy percent of all insurgency problems: failure of international trade, high infant mortality and undemocratic elections.157F

158 Near the 

center of their analyses lay the same unshakeable assumptions regarding the significance of underlying socioeconomic conditions as a cause of State failure and 

insurgency.

The big danger of the assumption of socioeconomic causation to your winning is this: constant mention of socioeconomic performance leads inexorably, 
39 Socioeconomic Causation

156

even if unintentionally (but it is probably intentional), to prescriptions aimed at improving general socioeconomic conditions. Unfortunately, nobody has a clue 

about how much overall economic performance improvement might move a 

given society away from spawning, harboring or empowering insurgents or 

terrorists. Worse, little has been done to trace the effects of an economic assistance program on insurgent or criminal finances. Likewise, a little 

improvement in, say, electoral democracy might not be a stabilizing move, all 

else remaining equal. According to one of the later PITF reports, the “odds of 

state failure was seven times as high for partial democracies as for full democracies and autocracies.”15 8F

159 Sidestepping the issue of the validity or usefulness 

of the reports or the definitions on which they were based, it seems on the 

surface that moving a place from really poor to poor (or from poor to a little 

less poor and from undemocratic to somewhat more democratic) might encourage more persons, not fewer, to violent rebellion.

Colombia is a mixed or middle-performing country economically. 

Things inside Colombia aren’t the same everywhere. There are 1,100 counties 

for which there is pretty good (or at least relatively consistent) socioeconomic

data and pretty good violence data. Some of the 1,100 counties are poor, some 

rich, some violent and some not. The country isn`t geographically homogenous 

as to violence or economic prosperity. According to a 2002 study by Mauricio 

Archila, et al titled 25 años de luchas sociales en Colombia 1975-2000 (25 years 

of social struggles in Colombia 1975-2000), there was little correlation between 

poor counties and violence in those counties, but there was some correlation between violence and counties that were doing better economically.159F

160 Counties 

with the most protests and the most violence didn’t coincide with where there 

was the most poverty. According to the authors, Colombians didn’t appear to 

fight because they were poor. Perhaps some fought because they perceived that 

they were comparatively poor; or, more probably, because they were led to perceive their comparative poverty and then, retributively motivated, led to fight.

Some years ago I was shown a georeferenced map of Colombian counties where the government had mounted economic assistance programs, and 

other georeferenced maps where the worst armed violence had occurred. 

Nothing jumped out of the maps regarding a possible correlation between the 

programs and the violence, and the briefer claimed that none existed. Enough

longitudinal (over time) data was available that such a correlation analysis 

could be made. It is often against bureaucratic interest to make any such careful analyses because what is suspected might be proven true -- that there is 

little correlation geographically between changes in violence and economic 

assistance programs. More troublesome is that it is probably now possible to 

overlay maps of the timing and location of assistance programs to parasitic and 

extortion efforts of insurgents. There may have been a correlation between 
39 Socioeconomic Causation

157

economic assistance programs and efforts by the insurgents to siphon off 

wealth distributed or created by those programs.

Maybe a spatial correlation between economic assistance programs 

and the amelioration of violence does exist, but little effort was put into auditing the effects of the assistance programs. (Perhaps things have improved in 

recent years.) Having accused those aid programs of little correlation with 

counterinsurgent goals (just correlation, never mind causation), however, there 

surely have been some significant exceptions. The best of these exceptions 

are situated along insurgent lines of communication and in urban areas where 

the prices of basic services invite piracy, black marketing and gang formation.

If you are able to provide economic aid, be careful to analyze the effects by starting with a geographic detailing of where comparative wealth will 

be generated and what the psychological effects of changed wealth comparisons is going to be. Roads oftentimes don’t make all people richer; they 

usually make some people richer. It would be useful to have a way of measuring if the wealth your programs create ends up in the hands of your enemies, 

keeping in mind that the amount of financial wherewithal needed by a typical 

insurgent to create an explosive device may be one tenth what the government

will need in order to deal with it.

A poor insurgent might wish to find ways to quietly encourage all 

kinds of foreign economic assistance programs, especially going to locales 

where he enjoys impunity. Those programs will rarely be formulated so as to 

reduce hisimpunity. He will find ways to take much, if not most, of the money 

generated by the programs. Geographic specificity of economic programs is 

valuable because dominance of the operational equation demands relevant 

placement and timing. Every attempt should be made to anticipate the likely 

effect of an economic program on sanctuaries and routes to and from those 

sanctuaries. If a program proponent cannot address this effect, it may be counterproductive in the extreme.

Insurgents justify violence by pointing out economic suffering, often 

blaming that suffering on government failure. Governments, however, are 

rarely able to make positive changes in economic performance, but the socioeconomic argument is never taken away from the agile insurgent. 

Socioeconomic improvements may be good ideas in their own right, but an 

observation regarding socioeconomic injustice should not be allowed to pass

as the first part of some logical syllogism that demands government effort at 

socioeconomic improvement as a feature of government counterinsurgency. 

Miserable economic conditions are a motivating factor for foot soldier recruitment, especially among young males, but this is as true for a government army 

as it is for an insurgency. Economic assistance can also motivate individuals 

to inform, but the most effective of such programs pay informants directly.
39 Socioeconomic Causation

158

A counterinsurgent will prefer that government programs not fund an

armed enemy. Find a way to measure the extent to which money spent ends 

up going to your enemy. Even if you find such a measurement, you will want 

to know not just how much socio-economic progress is achieved, or even how 

much it buys you in terms of the public’s attitude, but rather the change in the 

overall balance of advantages between you and your foe within the relevant 

frame of time. That is a tall order. Meanwhile, the clever insurgent knows 

that the socio-economic causation argument gets as much of its power from 

the guilty feeling of the well-to-do as it does from the suffering of the poor.

Please see sections: 70, Measuring Effects of Actions on Structure; 19, 

Mercatus; 66, GIS; 102, Negotiations; 105, Genocide Geography; 74, Refugees and Displaced Persons; 116, Songs of Chu; and 16, Presence.



“We must reject the idea that every time a law is broken, society is 

guilty rather than the lawbreaker. It is time to restore the American 

precept that each individual is accountable for his actions.” 160 F

161

Ronald Reagan

--------------

“How will we arrange a funeral for him in these circumstances?...Who will come?...I will have to apologize to the 

whole world on behalf of my son.”161F

162

Meer Hayet Kabir

--------------

“The fact that the black market involves breaking the law is 

something against it. It's an undesirable feature.” 162F

163

Milton Friedman

--------------

“The militant champs on his bit”163F

164

Frantz Fanon

The Wretched of the Earth


159

You may have to do something with it

Section 40, Popular Support

The importance of ‘popular support’ as a theme in American counterinsurgency literature can be summed up by the clichéd admonition, ‘The 

civilian population is the center of gravity’. After all, if we are not servants to 

the betterment of the condition of our people, what are we? A problem quickly 

arises, however. Once we have asked the big softball question, ‘Are the people 

not central?’ and answered purely, ‘Of course they are!’, the challenge of the 

enemy (your focus?) still remains. Depending on how one measures it, there 

is little to suggest that broad popular support is necessary for the success of an 

insurgency, even though logic insists that such support would be helpful. Any 

cursory review of insurgencies in Latin America reveals that some of the longest running ‘revolutionary movements’ have continued to profit, protect and 

encourage their insurgent leaders for decades on the back of marginal public 

support. The numbers in Colombia speak clearly. President Álvaro Uribe was 

elected with over 62% of the popular vote during a first round election that 

was essentially a referendum on his hard line against the country’s illegal 

armed groups. He was then reelected with undiminished support for having 

progressed militarily in the war. Active supporters of the leftist insurgent guerrillas probably do not exceed 2% of the population and some indications hold 

it as low as 0.2%. It appears that only the amount necessary to secure routes 

of escape, places of refuge, and a surviving black market is actually necessary 

for FARC survival. With sufficient financial and international support, the 

FARC barely needs any Colombians at all.

The mixture of relevant public psychological quantities includes 

ambivalence, apathy, fear, confusion, etc. These vicissitudes all bear on 

the resources and options available to the contenders in an internal conflict. 

It would be foolish to suggest that public psychology does not matter. It 

does, and so contenders in internal wars attend vigorously to the various 

components and dimensions of public attitude. That said, the optimal public attitude for successful insurgency or counterinsurgency is situationspecific and valid knowledge about that attitude is usually sparse. Ignorance on the part of the majority population may alone suffice for the 

outlaw, and a little fear among the right sectors seems to go a long way. 

Yes, the government could usefully expend resources on the general morale and behavioral propensities of the population, and more particularly 
40 Popular Support

160

on those elements of the population that can immediately assist in defeating the insurgent. Obviously, depending on its type and level of command, 

a given military unit might be wholly dedicated to the material wellbeing 

of a civilian population. A construction battalion working on a hospital 

can easily assert that the civilian population is its ‘center of gravity’.

The counterinsurgent operational planner might do better, however, 

to not swallow whole insurgent arguments that the conflict is principally a 

psychological question, an ideological fight, a political contest or a fight 

for justice. It will be all those things, but insurgents’ arguments that fix on 

public attitude are almost always obedient to the knowledge that danger 

lies in being captured, not in being out-debated. They know the names and 

addresses of the few members of the civilian population to whom they need 

to apply the effective dose of persuasion. A government usually does not 

know the names and addresses of these persons, and so the government 

usually administers its psychological medicine en masse. The wholesale 

dose rarely has the intended effect on the specific individuals needed by 

the insurgent, and the government effort often suffers the side effect of 

enlarging the profile of the insurgent. As long as an insurgent leader enjoys the minimum overall mix of public attitude and consciousness that 

allows his secure movement from points of action to sanctuary, he will be 

able to prolong his insurgency. With rare exception, an insurgent leader 

must be physically defeated or be made to conclude that his physical defeat 

is unavoidable. The same holds true for the warlord, mafia don, etc.

The above argument downplays popular support and emphasis on 

the civilian population in operational planning in favor of physically intercepting insurgent leadership. Don’t fall in love with the argument. 

Successful interception of insurgent leadership can depend on active support of the population at large, and there may be a direct relationship at the 

national level between popular support and a counterinsurgency budget, or 

between popular support and a preferred counterinsurgent strategy, or between popular support and international support to the government or to 

the insurgent. Still, watch out with the ‘center of gravity’ stuff. If you’re 

the counterinsurgent, the indices of support for you, your efforts, and the 

government can skyrocket ˗˗ and you could nevertheless have an enemy 

as strong as or stronger than ever. The argument warns ˗˗ especially if you 

are planning or leading something in the military dimension of counterinsurgency ˗˗ that your job focus is the enemy, and that public support needs to be 
40 Popular Support

161

sought, aimed or translated in such a way that you can better adjust the variables of the operational equation to your advantage. If you are the insurgent 

and find that you enjoy a lot of public support, hey, run a candidate. It worked 

for the Spanish Communists in 1936 and for Hugo Chávez in 1999.

Information from members of a motivated public often exposes insurgent leader whereabouts. However, the counterinsurgent leader can take a 

lesson from the Colombian electorate. President Andrés Pastrana was elected 

in 1998 on the promise to engage the FARC guerrillas in negotiations to seek 

a peaceful settlement of the war. By 2002, the electorate came to perceive that 

the FARC had not negotiated in good faith and the public persona of their 

president had been reduced to one of submissiveness. Their reaction was to 

elect Álvaro Uribe, whose stated intention was to defeat the FARC militarily. 

After Uribe’s election, the Colombian government and military continued to 

enjoy high levels of public support, but the chore of defeating the FARC remained. The challenge of popular support for the Colombian military was

clear: the military gained and enjoyed overwhelming public support, but the 

public expected the military to do something with it. Without public support, 

counterinsurgent success is difficult, but support of the people is a tool and an 

advantage, not the ultimate goal. It might be appropriate as an intermediate 

goal, but it is not the goal. The Colombian military has progressed, but has yet 

to close FARC lines to sanctuary.

Mao said, “Propaganda materials are very important. Every large guerrilla unit should have a printing press and a mimeograph stone.”164 F

165 Also,

There are some militarists who say: ‘We are not interested in politics but only in the profession of arms’. It is vital that these 

simpleminded militarists be made to realize the relation that exists 

between politics and military affairs. Military action is a method 

to gain a political goal. While military affairs and political action 

are not identical, it is impossible to isolate one from the other.165F

166

And on the relationship between the people and the troops he said, 

The former may be likened to the water and the latter to the fish who 

inhabit it. How may it be said that these two cannot exist together? It is 

only undisciplined troops who make the people their enemies and who, 

like the fish out of its native element, cannot live.16 6F

167

This last statement may be the most often cited, especially in support of 

the idea that the people are the center of gravity for counterinsurgency. 

Mao’s comment was made in the context of the war against a foreign occupier, the Japanese. It follows a list of rules for the troops, guiding them 
40 Popular Support

162

to not steal, to replace what they borrow, be honest in their transactions, 

etc. Much of the rest of Samuel Griffith’s Mao Tse-tung on Guerrilla 

Warfare, the text from which most of these ideas entered American strategy literature, is about movement, speed, position, mass, correlation of 

force, the goal of constructing regular units, etc. The rest of the book, in 

other words, is about the operational equation.

Please see: 16, Presence; 43, Sam Spade’s Whereabouts ; 98, Jorge Verstrynge and Pio Moa; 116, Songs of Chu; 38, Cultural Study for What?; 

22, Badassoftheweek.com; 78, Identity; and 130, Globalization



“...the generation that carried on the war has been set apart by its experience. Through our great good fortune, in our youth our hearts were 

touched with fire. It was given to us to learn at the outset that life is a 

profound and passionate thing. While we are permitted to scorn nothing but indifference, and do not pretend to undervalue the worldly 

rewards of ambition, we have seen with our own eyes, beyond and 

above the gold fields, the snowy heights of honor, and it is for us to 

bear the report to those who come after us. But, above all, we have 

learned that whether a man accepts from Fortune her spade, and will 

look downward and dig, or from Aspiration her axe and cord, and will 

scale the ice, the one and only success which it is his to command is 

to bring to his work a mighty heart.”1 67F

168

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

--------------

Mona Lisa Vito: The car that made these two, equal-length tire 

marks had positraction. You can't make those marks without positraction, which was not available on the '64 Buick Skylark!

Vinny Gambini: And why not? What is positraction?

Mona Lisa Vito: It's a limited slip differential which distributes 

power equally to both the right and left tires. The '64 Skylark had 

a regular differential, which, anyone who's been stuck in the mud 

in Alabama knows, you step on the gas, one tire spins, the other 

tire does nothing.

from the movie,

My Cousin Vinny (1992)168F

169


163

Advisors. Ha.

Section 41, Dear Westy

The text below is an abbreviated transcription of a declassified personal 

letter written by Major General William Yarborough to Lieutenant General William Westmoreland in February, 1964. Yarborough was commanding the 

United States Special Warfare Center at Ft. Bragg, and Westmoreland was on 

his way to command MACV in Vietnam. This is advice from a buddy who had 

direct experience with the geography and the mission. How good was it, and 

was it followed?

[Deleted are brief introductory paragraphs about the importance of the letter 

and the adequacy of current doctrine]

As I see it, the biggest problem of all relates to the 

‘‘isolation of the battlefield’’ and this is not within the 

capability of MACV to do completely; I refer to the political 

isolation of the battlefield, particularly to the role which 

Cambodia and Laos, as havens for Viet Cong activity continue 

to play. It is quite evident that our weak handling of Sihanouk and our ‘‘no solution’’ solution to the Laotian affair 

have played strongly into the hands of the Viet Cong, who 

could not ask for anything finer than safe havens not only 

in North Viet-Nam but in the two countries I have just mentioned. I neither saw nor see on the horizon any stiffening 

of our attitude toward Sihanouk, no black propaganda attacks 

on his lack of neutrality, nor any hard-boiled solution to 

the Laotian imbroglio. These areas must be sorted out eventually by our Department of State as a matter of national 

policy and, in my view, should invariably be mentioned in 

the same way as a field combat commander, in discussing 

terrain, talks about obstacles which lie in his path.

Cambodian units are known to be operating inside the 

Delta area. Those fighting in the Delta believe that they 

are being directed from Cambodian military command posts 

across the Mekong. The fact that they believe this, whether 

it is true or not, is ample indication of a serious propaganda void. The disputed status of various provinces inside 

Viet-Nam vis-a-vis their Cambodian affiliation is a political and psychological matter bearing upon the Viet Cong 

activities in that area. The propaganda approach of the 

Vietnamese Government in general is too flamboyant and is 

not being communicated in a meaningful and usable way to 

the forward fringes where conflict is raging. Propaganda 

in ‘‘rear’’ areas is voluminous and often garish, but the 
41 Dear Westy

164

propaganda of the deed the areas of contact with Viet Cong 

or Viet Cong supporters requires first attention and practical application. Government promises are too ambitious 

and are not, in many areas, being carried out to the letter----essential in the propaganda field.

A completely new look has got to be taken at psychological warfare in an overall sense and I would not be 

averse to hiring the world’s finest specialists, whether 

they are American, German, British or whoever. It is quite 

obvious that we are going to have, for a long time, difficulty finding adequate psychological warriors in the 

uniforms of our country or any other country unless they 

are reserves called to active duty, I cannot emphasize too 

greatly that the entire conflict in Southeast Asia is 80 

percent in the realm of ideas and only 20 percent in the 

field of physical conflict. As long as the Viet Cong continue to believe as strongly as they do in their cause, 

there can be no peace. As long as the Vietnamese and the 

unassimilated Montagnard lack belief in their cause, the 

same condition will prevail. No war can be lost physically 

through perpetration by the enemy of repeated terrorist 

acts, but a war can be lost mentally and morally through 

these means. This, in my view, is a danger to be guarded 

against at all costs.

We may continue to lose small outposts for a while 

longer and continue to suffer the loss of innocent noncombatants but this does not, by any means, mean the physical defeat of the military forces of the country. Again 

the propaganda value to the Viet Cong of these acts must be 

compensated and overshadowed by competent propaganda put in 

the right place by the Republic of Viet-Nam. Under no circumstances that I can foresee should US strategy ever be 

twisted into a ‘‘requirement’’ for placing US combat divisions into the Vietnamese conflict as long as it retains 

its present format. I can almost guarantee you that US 

divisions entering a ‘‘G’’ conflict area could lie almost 

un-attacked for months or years, would reap nothing but 

propaganda reverses as alleged ‘‘representatives of a new 

colonialism,’’ and could find no targets of a size or configuration which would warrant division-sized attack in a 

military sense. The key to the beginning of the solution 

to Viet-Nam’s travail now lies in a rising scale of population and resources control. Whereas under Diem’s regime 

the Armed Forces were prevented from entering into this 

field of endeavor, now that situation is changed, and the 

Army must be trained to carry out such operations, otherwise 
41 Dear Westy

165

the result will be more Viet Cong than ever. [Deleted is deleted

a sentence about an enclosed tape] 

To counter accusations that the Republic of Viet-Nam, 

in establishing population and resources control measures, 

has itself become a police state, skilled propagandists 

must be brought into battery to point out that even in the 

freest nations, in times of stress certain rights and freedoms must be held in abeyance temporarily while the nation 

is in danger. Only through population and resources control 

will the currently unimpeded movements of the Viet Cong be 

brought to a halt. Only through population and resources 

control can the Viet Cong recruiting systems be interrupted 

and destroyed, but I stress again the absolute requirement 

for thorough training on the part of the Army and the police 

in order to avoid counter-productivity in this. I have 

left with Dick Stilwell copies of the British training manuals, ‘‘Keeping the Peace (Parts I and II)’’ which go into 

great detail concerning training and training objectives in 

this area. Note carefully the repeated British emphasis 

upon a legal basis for population and resources control. 

This means that if there is not in being a legal basis for 

the Army to act, it must be obtained. Thereafter, the Army 

must stay within the legal bounds imposed, and it goes 

without saying that both the Army and the people must know 

what these limitations are. Population and resources control measures should not be advertised as being imminent or 

in effect if the Government does not, in fact, have the 

power to enforce.

The strategic hamlet program is obviously a part of 

the population and resource control systems. It is, admittedly, no panacea for the entire country but good beyond 

question in those cases where it is feasible from the point 

of view of adequate defense, sufficient civil servant administrative types, medics, means of livelihood for the 

populace, etc. Strategic hamlets established without this 

framework are doomed to failure from the outset and it is 

folly to try to establish a strategic hamlet if it cannot 

be protected, if the people are not indoctrinated in the 

reasons for its establishment and if there is no civil 

administration, medical support or the other things I have 

mentioned. [Deleted a paragraph on the need for low level administrators]

Of deep concern to me since I am providing about 50 

percent of the special forces in country is the problem of 

border control. As you know, special forces working with 

CIDG groups, and more particularly with Strike Forces, are 
41 Dear Westy

166

attempting to control the Laotian and Cambodian borders by 

combat operations. These borders can never be controlled 

completely by military means alone. Again, the border security is another facet of the overall population control

system which must be in effect, meaning that Viet Cong or 

any unauthorized person having succeeded in evading military Strike Force personnel and penetrating inland must 

still be forced to negotiate the population control system 

inland under numerous conditions, involving showing of credentials, interrogation as to reasons for movement and the 

other mechanics of a really effective control system.

The military cannot always be fully employed in the 

internal security business without permanent abandonment of 

a democracy’s freedoms resulting from permanent subjection 

to some degree of martial law. It seems to me, therefore, 

that right now a considerable segment of the ARVN should be 

designated as national police operating under the control 

of ARVN in the emergency but destined to take on civil 

police roles at the end of the emergency. It should be 

these police forces which are left in permanent residency 

inside areas that have been ‘‘cleared’’ of Viet Cong. They 

should not be left, however, without first having established adequate communication nets consisting of both 

teletype and radio, and without having built chopper pads 

and air strips and tying them into quick reaction military 

forces. Nothing is more futile than a large-scale military 

sweep through Viet Cong country since always there must be 

left behind a tangible symbol of governmental power and 

authority. Obviously, you don’t want the ARVN scattered in 

small packets throughout the country. Just as obviously, 

you want national police scattered in police garrisons 

throughout the country. This must be an objective. I do 

not feel that police systems such as we know in our United 

States are adequate for Viet-Nam and would look upon our 

police advisors with some sang-froid. I would be inclined 

to urge search for police advice in Germany or even France.

My long conversations with General Nghiem, the Commander of the Special Forces High Command, indicated to me 

his strong feelings in support of aggressive cross-border 

actions. These tactics are years overdue and, in my best 

judgment, can no more provoke massive intervention by Chinese forces than should Viet Cong activities provoke massive 

intervention by US forces. General Nghiem feels that actions 

outside Republic of Viet-Nam borders would do a tremendous 

amount to raise the morale of the beleaguered people in the 

South and would show those in the North that we are not so 
41 Dear Westy

167

fully occupied with the Viet Cong that we do not have the 

capability of doing anything else. It would also give hope 

to the people in the North, a hope which they are hardpressed to muster at this point. I am aware of what is in 

the mill on this score but here, since I have had personal 

experience in organizing a force for this kind of action, 

must point out very strongly that real experts are needed 

in order both to plan and to execute this kind of a deal. 

This is an Army operation into which the Agency must be 

integrated completely and for which support must be provided 

by the Air Force and the Navy. [Deleted are two paragraphs about 

getting the right advisors.]

The great J-2 weakness in MACV I hope has been remedied by 

the new incumbent. I was not impressed at all by my J-2 

briefing from the former intelligence chief, considering the 

inescapable importance of intelligence to counterinsurgency. 

Still lacking as of the time I was there was a central 

repository for intelligence information which is one of the 

major weapons needed for fighting subversion. I mean a 

central registry to which every member of the intelligence 

community contributes -- not a series of registries compartmented by the various intelligence organizations.[Deleted is

some text in which Yarborough opines that the Viet Cong are not particularly good]

The fact that this war can be won is beyond question but 

the overriding requirement is for an amalgamation of all of 

our instruments of national power -- the economic, definitely 

the psychological----with the military power. The orchestration is what has been missing. In attaining this 

orchestration, the world’s successful counter-insurgency experience has shown that very frankly the military commander 

must queue up along with the other policy-making and action 

elements of the government and cannot always be pre-eminent. 

The clear-cut decisions and direct action that we think so 

highly of in the military may have to give way to political 

expediency and economic facts of life, and the courses of 

action evolving may have to be watered down and emerge as a 

compromise in order to take into account the semi-militarypolitico-sociological aspects of the counterinsurgency problem. [Deleted are three paragraphs recommending another expert, an 

assessment of the Malay situation, a copy of the Special Warfare Center’s 

Counter-insurgency Planning Guide, a study of two Buddhist sects (the CAO 

DAI and the HOA HAO), and closing pleasantries]

Some touchstones in the letter, for comparison with assertions 

made elsewhere in this book, include database creation, action against 
41 Dear Westy

168

sanctuaries, distinguishing police and military roles, border control and 

cross-border operations, population and resource control, observance of 

the rule-of-law, propaganda and propaganda of the deed.

There are hundreds of good Vietnam War histories and analyses, 

and it is from among them you will have to decide to what extent Westmoreland followed Yarborough’s advice, or if the advice was worthy. It 

does not seem to me that Westmoreland followed much of the advice.

Please see sections: 45, Police or Military; 66, GIS; 3, The Domesday Book; 86

Shifting Covet-geographies; 109, Your Staff Work Sucks; 95, Childhood; 117, 

Strategic Communication; and 85, Paul Emil von Lettow-Vorbeck.



“We was always taking long walks, and we was always 

looking for a guy named ‘Charlie’.”

Forrest Gump in the movie,

Forrest Gump (1994)169F

170

--------------

We must use skillful stratagems to deceive the enemy and cause them to 

make a wrong assessment of our intentions...The greatest surprise for 

the enemy was the timing of the general offensive. This is one of the essential points that made them completely passive strategically. The U. S. 

imperialists and their henchmen wrongly reckoned that they might have 

another two years to carry out their sabotage of the Paris Agreement.170F

171

Vo Nguyen Giap,

How We Won the War

--------------

Journalist: “What do you think about the U.S. involvement in the war?

Animal Mother: I think we should win it.”

from the movie,

Full Metal Jacket (1987)171F

172

--------------

“Rule 22: When in doubt, know the way out.”

Columbus in the movie

Zombieland (2009)172F

173


41 Dear Westy

169

-- Southeast Asia Vietnam War Era --

Dien Bien Phu

Son Tay

Hue

Saigon
170

Robbin’ countries

Section 42, Brigands

(Much of this section is adapted from Property & Peace.)

Brigandage is evil combined with social organization and a plan. Brigands 

(gangsters, organized criminals, thugs, pirates, etc.) are often the master employers 

of terror and terrorists. They combine organizational expertise, aggregated disposable wealth, and amorality; and are to be feared in direct relation to the destructive 

capacity of the weapons that may come into their hands. Bridging what is a police 

problem and what is a military one, brigandage also straddles the cut-line between 

civilized-but-unlawful and uncivilized behavior. Sir Michael Howard recommends we use the medieval term latrunculi for them, to distinguish the fight 

against these common enemies of mankind from wars against legitimus 

hostis or legitimate enemies. Physical coercion for profit is wedded by the brigand 

to the timeless political aspiration of avoiding government regulation and taxation, 

and of acquiring impunity for criminal acts by any means ˗˗ best by assuming government power itself.

Governments can become confused or divided by what may be seen 

as a question of ‘public safety’ versus what is ‘national security’, and so 

respond inappropriately. Parts of government go ‘on-the-take’ and further 

confound successful governance. When states fail initially to confront organized crime, they risk grave errors of omission ˗˗ moving from simple 

irresponsibility or appeasement, to corruption perhaps, then on to criminal 

negligence ˗˗ until the State has neither the power nor the willpower to 

contain the criminal enterprise. When this happens, a government has forfeited a country’s sovereignty and, if that government were supposedly 

stewarding sovereignty belonging to the people, then it has lost to the brigands the people’s status as sovereign owners. Logically, a government 

losing to brigands (in the fight to maintain a monopoly over the granting 

of impunity) could more surely relegate a people to slavery than by losing 

to insurgents or to another country.

Today, some criminal enterprises have global reach, and their dayto-day activities, while perhaps not rising to the dramatic level of the 9/11 

attack on the World Trade Center in New York, are often of a similar character and lead to a similar result. Far more people have fallen in Colombia 

(or Nigeria, Thailand, Sri Lanka, and elsewhere) to the piecemeal terrorism 

of armed criminal groups than died in the World Trade Center. For decades 

the Colombian FARC murdered, kidnapped, and bombed on thousands of 
42 Brigands

171

occasions, finally becoming too powerful to destroy without concerted military effort. Originally motivated by political confrontation, it lost its 

ideological compass when its funding changed from political donation to 

drug profiteering. It continued to cloak itself as a revolutionary force engendered and motivated by Colombian social injustice. The FARC 

‘contextualized’ its violence using the argument of political necessity. 

While that argument is still used by some foreign governments as a justification for accommodations they make to the FARC (accommodations 

sweetened by FARC money and anti-American sport), the idea of FARC as 

a champion of justice is all but exhausted within Colombia. The FARC’s 

brigand colors are transparent.

Brigand organizations metastasize, internationalize, and politicize. 

They call at first for routine compromises of the law, using minor coercion, 

perhaps justifying themselves as a social rebellion. Their initial presence 

and activity rarely inspires a reaction at the level of strategy or of military 

response. When finally it does, it is often too late for a peaceful cure. 

Many of these organizations plague the world and, as a convenient part of 

their efforts to establish or feign legitimacy, they often disparage, or even 

target, the United States. Most of the world’s countries acquiesce or collaborate with these outlaw organizations to one degree or another, so some 

foreign banks and governments impede US efforts to curtail outlaw finances ˗˗ either because they fear domestic political repercussions or 

because they gain directly from the illegal enterprise. Others simply disagree with the US view of the nature, progress, or virulence of the problem.

Operationally, most criminal organizations depend on smuggling to 

one degree or another, and smuggling means routes and speed. Competent 

(surviving) smugglers become experts at logistics. Theirs is the world of 

lines of communication and the math of escape. Because that geographic 

math is so often contiguous with the geographic math of military strategy in 

irregular warfare, the two activities (profit smuggling and politically motivated armed violence) can hardly help but trip over each other.

(I stole this following paragraph from Lucas Winter, who knows 

about these things.) In March 2008, 30 gunmen ambushed Guatemalan 

drug trafficker "Juancho" León in Zacapa (near the Honduras border), killing him and nine companions. León was relatively new to the business, 

with a background in theft rather than contraband; his practice of seizing 

and reselling others’ shipments irked the country’s more established smuggling families. Amidst the discord, the "Zetas," one of the region's most 
42 Brigands

172

ruthless and powerful drug trafficking organizations tripped upon a convenient way of making business inroads -- force and intimidation. With

these innovations they seized key smuggling routes along Guatemala's 

Mexican border. By the end of 2010, they controlled much of the mountainous and underserviced province of Alta Verapaz, including its capital, 

Cobán. The province is relatively near Guatemala City and to the northern 

province of Petén, which hosts major smuggling routes into Mexico. In 

December, army and national police units were sent into Alta Verapaz, 

after locals pleaded that something be done about Zeta enormities. While 

a handful of operatives were arrested and some equipment and weapons 

seized, most of the contraband merchandise had already been moved to 

safety (some say with government complicity). The Zetas felt more than 

simply inconvenienced, however, forcing three provincial radio stations to 

read an open threat of war on President Colóm (“in shopping malls, 

schools and police stations”), who they accused of receiving from them 

$11 million for favors that were never returned. The government lifted 

martial law in February 2011 and, although troop reinforcements remained 

in the area, the Zetas soon returned.

A government may have to use its military to contain and dismantle 

a corrupted police unit. Military units and other parts of a government can 

become corrupted as well, however, and the police, if ethically healthy, must 

be readied to capture and jail errant military or other government personnel. 

This is one reason why the oft-touted virtue ‘unity of command’ has its limits. If you are an insurgent, some brigand may seem like a natural ally 

because of a shared State enemy. Nevertheless, the Brigand poses a threat 

to the morale and integrity of your organization, to your best lines of communication, to your allies, and to both your substantive and perceived 

legitimacy. Be careful to determine if the alliance of convenience should be 

you with the brigand against the State, you with the State against the brigand 

˗˗ or if the brigand and the State are one-in-the-same, or both separately and 

equally to be opposed. All brigands are smugglers, but not all smugglers are 

brigands. Junior Johnson from Wilkes County, North Carolina was a convicted moonshine smuggler, but not a brigand. Junior just liked to drive fast; 

Ronald Reagan pardoned him in 1986.

I don’t agree with most professional critics’ film ratings, but I agree 

that The Godfather is among the best ever, so I offer here part of my take on 

that movie. The first scene of The Godfather I and the last scene of Godfather II are the same. I like that bow. The undertaker had fled the tyrannies 

of Europe to America’s promised rule-of-law, and it was good -- until that
42 Brigands

173

rule-of-law was, for him, belied. When what he loved was endangered, his

aspired America neither protected honor nor avenged dishonor. He slumped

back into the arms of the familial dependency he had wanted and tried to 

escape. I bet I’m more optimistic about the American dream than Francis 

Ford Coppola is, but it is a worthy subject, well treated. The movie is not so 

much about gangsters, but a little bit it is.

Please see sections: 121, Dignity and Honor; 20, Rule-of-law; 46, Taxation 

and Debt; 90, Prisons and Prisoners; 45, Police or Military; 65, Smuggling; 

126, Particularization of Power; and 144, What the Pirate Said to Alexander.



“And his partners in the posse ain't tellin' off ****...

...Cause damn it feels good to be a gangsta.”173 F

174

Geto Boys from the song,

Damn It Feels Good To Be a Gangsta

--------------

Van Cleve: I now ask you, sir, do you remember the names 

Charlie Monger, Red Dog Johnson or Carlos Ramirez?

Devereaux: No.

Van Cleve: The incident may be too trivial to recall. But isn't it 

true that you summarily hanged three of these men on the afternoon of June 4th?

Devereaux: They were stealing my cattle.

Van Cleve: I thought you didn't remember them.

Devereaux: I didn't ask their names.

from the movie,

Broken Lance (1954)174F

175

--------------

“Concentrated power has always been the enemy of liberty.” 175F

176

Ronald Reagan (attributed)

--------------

“Murdered by pirates is good...”

The Grandson in the movie,

Princess Bride (1987)176F

177


174

Why private detectives find their mark

Section 43,

Sam Spade’s Whereabouts

Probably every plaintiff’s law firm in the United States has on staff or compacts a private investigator, a PI, a Sam Spade. That’s because in America, if you 

want to stick it to someone else using the legal system, you, your lawyer, or his PI

have to find your target and give him or her a piece of paper. That is what Sam 

Spade is paid to do: find your opponent and give him an unfriendly piece of paper 

that puts him on notice or calls him to court: ‘You’ve been served’. It is called 

service of process, fair processes being considered an inseparable element of justice. Your lawyer also wants the PI to find your nemesis’ things ˗˗ a car, boat, 

house, bank account ˗˗ because lawyers want to be paid. Sam Spade does too, and 

to keep putting food on the plate he has to find his mark, and he almost always 

succeeds in spite of not having satellites, phone taps ormaybe even a good camera. 

There are two main reasons why Sam Spade succeeds. The first is because he 

knows local culture. He knows what’s going on in his town or county. He has few 

local knowledge gaps and he doesn’t have to ask ‘cultural study for what?’ For 

him, every bit of knowledge about the local culture helps him with the whereabouts. He knows which bumper sticker goes with what congregation, what 

vehicles will show up in the parade, who organizesthe service club charities. He 

follows all the sports teams and knows the favorite cigarette brands. He understands sex and sexuality.

The other big reason Sam always finds his prey is that he is familiar and 

competent with public records. He can get hold of school registration lists, 

team rosters, cadastral records, and can decode the license plates and tombstones. 

He can read a map. Sam might not worry that for a liberal society to thrive, 

the public records must be transparent and stable. For him, public records 

are simply part of what makes it possible to find people and their property 

so that he can successfully serve process and get paid. If the public records 

are shoddy and inaccurate, if they are hidden from inspection, are not comprehensive or are subject to manipulation and fraud, it is harder for Sam to 

succeed ˗˗ and the social compact is at risk.

If you want to measure the condition or progress of an ongoing

counterinsurgency campaign, and you are apprised of the fact that the public records are inaccurate, incomplete, and hidden, then you can be sure 

that the counterinsurgency program is not sustainable and probably not 
43 Sam Spade’s Whereabouts

175

going all that well. No social compact is sustainable without solid evidence. It is like a contract with no writing. A society without solid, 

accurate, comprehensive public records is a society that will eventually be 

in conflict. Sam Spade will fail and with him the likelihood of peaceful 

conflict resolution. As a counterinsurgent, you might not be able to teach 

the would-be sleuths enough culture, or give them tracker’s instincts, but 

you can work to improve and perfect the system of public records.

There are Sam Spades around the world as well as other categories 

of people, like real estate agents, prostitutes, bar tenders, truck drivers, and 

taxi drivers, who have inside knowledge of local culture and who know 

where people are likely to be when. They are the best computers for finding 

people, and they are most effective when transparent, comprehensive, accurate public records are available to them.

Place is a central theme of this book. The idea includes ‘sense of 

place’, and distance, especially as understood by costs in time, money and 

cultural affinity. Putting ‘where’ back into the ‘who, what, when, where, 

why, and how’ question set is a uniquely useful contribution of Geography. 

To do so (to put the where back), helps resist concentrating too much on 

why governments fail or why there are insurgents or why there is crime. 

Not that these aren’t good questions, but being an insurgent or a criminal 

is about keeping your whereabouts and the whereabouts of your sources 

of power hidden from your enemies. It is especially about protecting the 

routes of escape that you and your people may have to take between the 

places of your offensive actions and your sanctuaries. If the counterinsurgent knows exactly where the insurgent is, but can do nothing about it, 

that’s called a political problem. If he can’t locate the insurgent or the 

sources of his wealth, that’s called an intelligence failure. If he knows

exactly where the insurgent is and can confound insurgent retreat to sanctuary, the government is close to a win.

Most people, bad people included, have a mother or a mother-figure they favor. The relationship they have or had with their mother is a 

prominent factor in their makeup (or so Sigmund tells us). Finding where 

a person’s mother is or is buried can be a significant start to fixing the 

whereabouts of a person in time, and for better understanding that person, 

if that’s worth something. If you’re serious about finding a hard-to-find 

enemy, go find his mother and, if you are really serious about finding enemies plural, establish systems that make finding everyone’s mother easy. 

Fouling this up is also a good way to create all the enemies you‘ll ever 

need. Don’t disrespect peoples’ moms in the process of figuring out where 
43 Sam Spade’s Whereabouts

176

they are. There aren’t that many cross-cultural constants on which we can 

depend, but this is one of them. Most mom’s love their babies. Maybe 

there is some culture that doesn’t love its mothers, but I am not aware of 

any. See if your system of knowledge regarding your enemy or potential 

enemy or his supporters or yours, includes knowledge about where all persons’ mothers are. Especially useful is when and where an adult son is 

likely to visit or send a message to his mother. Don’t forget your own 

mothers; protect and love them.

Big Brother is not built on weaponry; it is built on scrupulous civil 

administration and cultural knowledge. To the extent whereabouts cannot 

be hidden, insurgency is difficult. The prospective insurgent must learn to 

live ‘off grid’, but, if he were to stay entirely off-grid and completely anonymous, how would he accrete and maintain fungible wealth sufficient to 

present a threat? How would he gain broad popularity? How would he 

visit his mom? It is tough to be public and private at the same time, to 

move from a latent stage of insurgency to a mobile stage without exposure. 

For many, it is tough just to keep from communicating with their mothers.

Please see sections: 108, Common Knowledge; 3, The Domesday Book;

38, Cultural Study for What?; 66, GIS; 8, Linearity and The Line of Retreat; 30, Control Technology; 40, Popular Support; and 78, Identity.



“It’s not fer me, it’s fer me ma.”

Mickey from the movie,

Snatch (2000)177F

178

--------------

Kasper Gutman: You're a close-mouthed man?

Sam Spade: Nah, I like to talk. 

Kasper Gutman: Better and better. I distrust a closemouthed man. He generally picks the wrong time to talk 

and says the wrong things. Talking's something you can't 

do judiciously, unless you keep in practice.

from the movie,

The Maltese Falcon (1941)178F

179


177

Can you find those files or not?

Section 44,

Political/Military/Administrative

It takes administrative effort and excellence to create a peaceful, 

liberal society. Aside from that, it takes administrative effort and excellence to win militarily, at least in some armed struggles.

Too often, conversations about how much military effort is appropriate begin with ‘military’ somehow counterpoised against ‘political’. 

This is especially curious coming from the pens of Clausewitzophiles, one 

of whose mantras is that ‘war is politics by other means’. Most of the time 

we have a pretty good idea how to translate the terms, though: shooting 

people is an activity thrown into the ‘military’ column and building a society in which people are not disaffected or indifferent is thrown into the 

‘political’ column. The distinction makes some sense and echoes the two 

goals of neutralizing the enemy and not making more of them. A website 

called The Mudville Gazette has a little piece called ‘20%military80%political’ that outlines arguments attending the war in Iraq. The question 

really being asked, however, is whether military organizations should do 

all the things that are not archetypically military.

If a military goes someplace and destroys or clears away enemies, 

that military will still have to remain in place facing the question of what 

to do so that it can leave and not have its efforts wasted. Large spaces have 

to be occupied, even if the enemy is only located in a few small places. As 

a result, militaries are forever confronted with challenges that they may 

not deem spiritually martial.

A lot of the sections of this book are about the traditional martial

vocation -- how to close with and destroy the enemy ˗˗ which is a notion 

dependent on the definition of enemy. A soldier might like to say that 

either there are battles or potential battles or, if not, then let’s go home. 

Experience tells us, however, that there is a lot else that the soldier (or the 

insurgent) can or has to do besides combat. The situation boils down to 

this: You are there, someplace, and you can’t just stand around whittling, 

not able to get that decisive battle to occur. What do you do?

The answer about what to do is spread throughout a number of the 

sections of this book. Mostly they are engineering, knowledge creating, 

or administrating. The proven innovations in long-term conflict resolution 
44 Political/Military/Administrative

178

aren’t headline-worthy, like combat or elections. They are folded into the 

boring details of civil administration. The long-term stability of a society 

seems to require many different pieces, but a lot of those pieces depend on 

things like statutes of fraud. The statutes of fraud require written evidence 

of duties and rights in order to ease administration of justice and services. 

Uninspiring, perhaps, but therein lies another question: Can peace be solidified administratively? The answer is that apart from whether peace can 

be solidified, it cannot be solidified without administrative excellence. It 

might not be enough, but it is essential.

The good news is that not only can conflict resolution mechanisms 

be designed and implemented, but the exact same civil systems that operate to release people from the perceived advantages of everyday violence 

can also provide a system of intelligence that helps expose the lines of 

communication and retreat of intelligent enemies. 

Don’t hesitate in creating the inventory, your Domesday Book, on 

which administration excellence depends. Build what almost every sheriff 

uses to find a perpetrator, fugitive, or witness. The human environment can 

be shaped administratively to cough up detailed information about the connections between individual habits and precise locations. This means that 

the military may have to attempt what would ideally fall to civilians ˗˗ to 

create a comprehensive, precise and transparent census, impose a system of 

individual identification cards for everyone, and map exactly who owns 

what and with whom, who is resident where, what the tenancy and debt relations are, the marriages and business associations, tax duties and 

destinations, the descriptions of cars, bicycles or mules, who has licenses to 

practice medicine and law and to sell real estate, cut hair, ordain, or circumcise. It means street signs, phonebooks, and license plates. With the 

availability of GIS technologies, the locations and linkages can be exposed 

almost instantaneously, once the data is input. Will there be gaps in the data; 

will people try to hide their assets and identities? Of course, but so what? 

That’s all detective fodder. When soldiers start talking “take, hold, build,” 

they’re right, but probably the first thing to build is the inventory. 

If this smacks of Big Brother, it should. Both the rule-of-law and 

population control are created on the basis of records, not batons. If a 

person wants to create impunity for his actions, he is generally obliged to 

maintain anonymity for himself and his wealth. Once the authorities know 

the particulars of his motorcycle, phone, or apartment, it is harder to act 
44 Political/Military/Administrative

179

outside the law without consequence. It is difficult even to stand distant 

from home without that fact being apparent.

As long as no system of institutional knowledge regarding individual identity and wealth is created, other cultural and physical geographic

knowledge is rendered less valuable for the capture of enemy leaders. If 

the lines of communication, especially the lines of retreat and sanctuary of 

enemy leadership, are not identified, military success against that enemy 

is not likely. In order to see the finely-scaled placement geographies of 

insurgents, as opposed to the lines of communication of an army tank 

corps, maps must be drawn on the basis of individual identities linked to 

wealth. That wealth exists everywhere in the form of preferential rights to 

the use of places and things. Such recognized preferential rights are what 

we have come to call property, and records of such rights either exist or 

can be created. Once a system of laws and administrative and technical 

capacity are married in such a way as to enable the mapping of property 

rights, then control of a population is, if not easy, practicable. So maybe 

Hans Morgenthau was right about power, that it is simply influence over 

behavior. Influence over the behavior of a population lies in the condition 

and use of mundane administrative records.

Please see sections: 113, Unrestricted Chi Whiz; 132, Turducken and Hybrid; 66, GIS; 72, Land Strategy and Property Strategy; 4, Defining Enemy;

18, Best of the Best of the Best; 20, Rule-of-law; and 1, Impunity.



“Throughout past history liberty has always walked

 between the twin terrors of tyranny and anarchy. ”179 F

180

Theodore Roosevelt

--------------

“Tell all those pencil pushers, better get out of my way.”

Lynyrd Skynyrd in the song,

Gimme Back My Bullets

--------------

“Lighten up, Francis’

Sergeant Hulka in the movie,

Stripes (1981)180F

181


180

Real distinctions beneficially observed

Section 45, Police or Military?

Americans distinguish between what is police and what is military. 

They know that, at least archetypically, one wears blue and the other green; 

one makes arrests and the other goes overseas. Further articulating the differences gets a little harder, but one of North America’s criticisms of Latin 

America in the second half of the 20th century centered on militarism -- that 

Latin America had too many military governments or too many military men 

in power. In most cases, military governance tended toward a rightist and 

‘anticommunist’ flavor of oppression. As such, this military governance 

was often excused and sometimes coaxed by the United States government 

during the height of the Cold War against the Soviet Union. As the Cold 

War played out, the US expected rightist regimes to democratize and armed 

forces to go back to the barracks and away from political life. To a considerable degree this did indeed happen, such that by the mid-1990s almost all 

the countries of Latin American were experiencing democratic electoral 

practices and were putting civilian institutions in charge, even if the armed 

forces in many States continued to wield partisan political influence.

Although the negative term ‘police state’ might have been used 

here and there to describe dictatorial regimes, the core offense was called 

‘militarism’, even while, in the firmament of disabling isms, fatalism, medieval Catholicism, sexism, and cronyism probably played greater roles in 

maintaining what for many seemed a stagnated and unjust status quo. Militarism was targeted, especially by academe, as the most offending ism

because it was rightist and because it was conveniently wearing a uniform 

(often designed after a US or German uniform). With this as the inferential 

parameter, aid from the US to Latin American countries after the Cold War 

took a shift toward police organizations and away from the military, even 

while an analysis of the effective differential in repressive capacities of the 

two types of organization was hardly attempted. The difference between 

what is police and what is military is nevertheless central to understanding 

of the rule-of-law, limitations on political power, and the control of government excess. Furthermore, few conversations can go to the marrow of 

irregular warfare more quickly than those about the proper separation of 

things police and things military.

Legal distinctions between what is police and what is military vary 

from country to country and many countries have organizations that seem to 

confound distinction. The linguistic cognates are treacherous in translation. 
45 Police or Military

181

The variation should interest us because the nature of public forces influences counterinsurgency efforts, the rule-of-law, and even reflects traditions 

about the definition of tyranny versus good governance. Americans may 

take the concept of police for granted. For instance, the word ‘police’ is used 

at least 183 times in the US military manual Counterinsurgency, but the definition of that word has to be inferred. Also, the question ‘What is the 

difference between a police officer and a soldier?’ is a little different than 

the question ‘What is a police situation and what is a military one?’ We’ll 

go over both. Below is a list of hints from a North American cultural and 

institutional perspective.

A. In flagrante delictu. Obligations are as defining a set of distinctions 

as authorities. Obligations are intimately tied to public expectations and 

police ethic. Police officers have an obligation to pursue persons in the 

act of committing a crime. Military personnel normally do not. If a 

crime is not in progress, but the police know, or are pretty sure they 

know, who did it they have to go get a warrant to that effect from a judge, 

or assure that an arrest warrant is extant. In many jurisdictions, if the 

police have time, they are required to present it to the suspect at the time 

of arrest. In normal military circumstances, even if the military know 

who they are going to go ‘arrest’, they don’t need a warrant.

B. Dead or alive. Police are granted leeway in applying deadly force in 

their self-defense or the immediate defense of others. The ‘dead or alive’

announcement, however, is one in which prosecution and sentencing 

have been achieved before capture, this because someone is considered 

so dangerous that nonlethal action is deemed ineffective in stopping 

grave harm (See Section 4, Defining Enemy). The use of snipers is an 

interesting area of overlap and of definition between police and military. 

Police snipers are ready to kill someone who poses an immediate threat 

because they are armed and dangerous, are holding hostages at gunpoint, 

or are threatening a vulnerable public personality. Military snipers are 

often able to take targets of opportunity, kill enemy leaders, take out vehicle drivers, and so on. Police and military snipers are distant relatives 

in terms of their respective authorities. Military personnel are granted 

advance immunity from prosecution for premeditated killing. The police sniper’s State-granted immunity will be more limited than that of the 

military sniper. Theoretically, the police officer will not enjoy impunity. 

He is not going to rest beyond the reach of indictment and judgment if 
45 Police or Military

182

his target’s status and behavior did not rise to the thresholds that permit 

the sniper to kill. The military sniper, on the other hand, might be 

granted impunity by his State in defiance of any moral or legal characterization that another State or entity might make of the sniper’s action. 

Killing by the military sniper is a creature of state sovereignty. His State 

might discipline his excesses or misjudgments, but will probably not allow any other entity to do so.

C. Incoming. Military people are authorized to use indirect fire weapons 

and area weapons in certain contexts. This again is tied to what I call the 

premeditated immunity of the State as it applies to weapons that are generally useless for making an arrest. We should hope it would be an 

extreme situation wherein the police would use an armed aerial drone, 

for instance.

D. Not on my beat. Police are commonly used as a deterrent presence. 

That is to say, the police chase and capture perpetrators and serve warrants, but they also just cruise for the purpose of dissuading criminal acts

– what they might call ‘presence patrolling’. Criminals are the police’s 

counterpart and are often distinguishable from insurgents because criminals usually do not attack government forces, while insurgents make it 

their business to do so. You can hardly be an insurgent if you don’t 

attack your enemy. You’re a dumb (or a tad crazy, and that’s not so 

uncommon) criminal if you make it your business to attack the police. 

Hence, it is reasonable for a police officer to be on patrol deterring criminals from acting, whether or not that officer is looking for any particular 

criminal or intent on serving some warrant.

The soldier can be put at counterproductive risk if sent on patrol 

simply to deter insurgent action and not for the purpose of closing with the 

insurgent at a known location. Insurgent guerrilla military initiative presupposes attacks on government forces, so a soldier might become no 

better than bait, rather than a deterrent to insurgent initiative. When soldiers are sent on ‘presence’ or ‘deterrence’ patrols, we might say they are 

on police missions. In a better plan of patrols, one designed to perplex 

insurgents as to their lines of communication, what we might still label a 

deterrence patrol can be a key activity in offensive operational art.

The above delineations expose what in some situations can be a 

principal conceptual error in counterinsurgency. We may like to say that 

the police are the backbone of the counterinsurgent force, or should be. In 
45 Police or Military

183

a way this is certainly true, since good governance, application of the ruleof-law and so forth will provide the best long-term counterinsurgent condition. Nevertheless, if a violent armed insurgent force exists, it will likely 

conduct premeditated attacks against police. In such conditions, a counterinsurgent force often cannot safely exist and operate under a police ethic 

of criminal deterrence. When the public force is the natural target of a 

politically motivated armed enemy, to send elements of the force out without a fixed notion regarding when and how to enter into battle is to leave 

that force at a disadvantage in terms of initiative and strategic planning. 

Not only is it not the predator, nor even prey, but simply bait. Here are 

some other relevant tendencies:

E. Plea bargains. The military might turn a prisoner over to the police, 

but when would a police unit turn a prisoner over to the military? (This 

may have been the case, briefly, with Abdulmutallab, the Nigerian bomb 

terrorist in late 2009.)

F. Evidence versus intelligence. Eventually the police (in situations we 

would honor as within the rule-of-law) must expose the source of their 

evidence in order to succeed in bringing a suspect to conviction. The 

military is not expected to reveal its sources. Police intelligence is constrained by prospective use in a court as evidence, while military 

intelligence is constrained from using information as evidence in order 

to protect sources and methods. This is not simply a matter of habit. It

is also one of the reasons that the wistful goal of world government will 

not be realized in our lifetimes or those of our children.

G. Longevity of personal relationships. Police officers are usually married-in permanent members of communities. Soldiers are more often 

from somewhere else. The soldier is naturally a traveler and a visitor. 

Local cultural knowledge, including of public records and community 

ethics, takes a longer time for the soldier to grasp. The soldier is someplace foreign exactly because something there has offended something 

elsewhere, whereas the policeman is from there, and is the more appropriate repressor when the problem is from within.

H. Territorial scale. Police beats are often delimited by the legal relationships that a police department or office has with the judicial 

institutions that empower it with warrants, prosecutions, etc. Legal jurisdictions and police jurisdictions generally correlate.
45 Police or Military

184

I. Chains of command. Military personnel often report up through a 

chain of command that is within or leads into the federal government, 

while most police chains of command do not. Many military combat 

units suppose the maneuver of at least dozens of elements, while only 

the largest and most complex police operations suppose the coordinated 

physical movement of more than a few elements.

J. Crew-served and automatic weapons. When would an American police organization appropriately use a machine gun?

K. Knowledge cultures. Police investigators tend to form investigations 

around clues and focus their theories on suspects. Military intelligence 

officers tend to form collection around requirements and concentrate 

analyses on enemy units. The difference draws the importance of personal identity. These days, criminal gang membership has created an 

overlap in this tendency.

The difference between police and military moves to the top of 

American political debate when internal organized violence poses a threat 

to the viability of the State, the economy of part of the country, or to some 

basic value of our national exceptionalism. Use of the military along the 

Mexican border is a recurring issue with some politicians and pundits calling for more military and others calling for less. I personally prefer the 

no-military option and think the US Border Patrol is the right force for that 

job. I also think the events in Waco, Texas in 1993, during which federal 

police tried to serve an arrest warrant on David Koresh at a compound of 

the Branch Dividians religious sect, and the events at Ruby Ridge, Idaho 

in 1992, should be required curriculum material for both federal police 

agents and US military officers. The Wikipedia site for Ruby Ridge includes the following sentence: “FBI HRT sniper Lon Horiuchi was 

indicted for manslaughter in 1997 by the Boundary Court, Idaho prosecutor just prior to expiration of the statute of limitations for the crime of 

manslaughter, but the trial was removed to federal court and was quickly 

dismissed on grounds of sovereign immunity.” Sometimes key violent 

events can supply aspiring insurgents with what they perceive to be righteous purpose, argument, rallying cry, and targets. Timothy McVeigh cited 

the events at Ruby Ridge and Waco as motivations for his bombing the 

Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building on April 19, 1995, the second anniversary of the Waco siege.
45 Police or Military

185

If police can adequately suppress crimes (including such crimes as 

sedition, insurrection or subversion) within the confines of police attributes and the rule-of-law, then counterinsurgency is perhaps ipso facto

successful. If the capacity of the police is exceeded and the State finds 

itself obliged to employ military units to suppress crimes, such a condition 

may be evidence of an organized, armed challenge to the State, and at least 

of inadequate police capacity. If a State must employ military force to stop 

some organization from granting impunity, the condition begins to define 

State failure, at least in those areas where the State’s monopoly on granting 

impunity is defied. Employing military force, meanwhile, can exacerbate 

lawlessness, making it harder to regain a police ethic and the rule-of-law. 

Instead of employing military units, States sometimes change the attributes 

of their police toward those of a military organization. That too may be 

evidence of a failing rule-of-law or of failing counterinsurgency strategy.

Please see sections: 52, Sovereignty; 16, Presence; 82, Conflict Thresholds; 37, School Lunches; 13, Puthukkudiyirippu; 50, US Persons; 127, 

Between Liberty and Lawrence; and 136, Weapons.



“People who live in large towns have no idea of the tyrannical 

conduct of the police in country places far removed from court; 

they have no idea of the harsh and overbearing manner in which 

they execute their duty, or how they neglect their duty and abuse 

their powers.”18 1F

182

Ned Kelly (1879)

--------------

“This line is the best place to kill the Chinamen.

It’s better to do it here and now.... I want lots more wire 

and mines expended, not human life.”182 F

183

James A. Van Fleet (1951)

--------------

“Obviously, I've got to open my eyes and admit to myself that 

my whole night is ruined. At which point I got nothing to do but 

think about the problems of Jimmy McNulty.”

Baltimore Police Sgt. Jay Landsman in

the television drama series, The Wire183 F

184


186

Certainty and uncertainty

Section 46, Taxation and Debt

Taxes are one of the two certainties. Whatever your job in your

irregular war, find out who taxes whom, and how. 

The power to tax is the power to destroy, and taxes aren’t always

called taxes. If an entity is redistributing wealth it did not earn, it’s probably a theft or a tax (or both). In The Geography of War and Peace: From 

Death Camps to Diplomats, one of the authors, David Newman, looks at 

tax boundaries, tax-taking records and evidence, because tax so often appears as a theme in genocide research. Tax assignments can outline a 

vulnerable minority, and tax rates might measure how much a dominated

or duped population can bear. A tribute system is a kind of debt arrangement that is almost purely extortion-based. The Ottoman vilayets and 

sanjaks are sometimes cited as examples. Little in the way of governance 

service was provided by the greater Ottoman State in many of its subordinate territories. Internal matters were left to local custom and structure, 

but an imperial tax was nevertheless collected.

Debt and taxes are closely related. When someone is owed money 

they usually want to collect it. Of the various lines of investigation that 

this book advocates for unraveling and dominating armed conflict, 

knowledge about debt is one of the least practicable to obtain, but most 

likely to prove useful if obtained. Who owes what to whom is a significant 

index of power hierarchy. Part of that relation can be painted by understanding taxation. Debt can itself be treated as property in that it can be 

bought, sold, given, or inherited.

Purgatory is a tax territory, a virtual geographic space invented by 

religious clergy. It is not a nice place, either. It is worse than the mortal 

vale -- it is a place where the soul suffers. The amount of time one spends

in purgatory is correlated roughly to the quantity of un-absolved sins one

commits here on earth, but even in a ‘state of grace’, some believe that 

additional purification is needed to assure speedy entrance into heaven. 

There is nothing about purgatory in the Bible, so why invent the place?

Because as clergy you can collect an indulgence from your parishioners so 

that they, through your intervention with the Almighty, might reduce time 

spent there. Since being rich is tantamount to needing more purification, 

the Roman Catholic clergy managed a progressive tax scheme (or reverse 

toll) that extracted indulgence money in accordance with one’s wealth. 
46 Taxation and Debt

187

Improvements to the innovation came soon enough -- parishioners could 

pay to shorten the suffering in purgatory of relatives already deceased. In 

the face of such an option, clergy could profitably encourage a sense of 

guilt on the part of family members for allowing their stinginess to let their 

deceased relative suffer. The collecting of indulgences continued for centuries even past Martin Luther’s protest against the extortion. It funded

the construction of magnificent cathedrals in many parts of the world, especially Latin America. The cathedrals became toll booths to heaven.

Purgatory was an invented geography over which a church had sovereign tax authority. For efficient collection of that tax it was necessary 

for the clergy to develop and cultivate a belief among the congregants that 

such a place existed, that the congregants had a debt to pay, and that the 

clergy were exclusive agents of intervention. Many debts and many taxes, 

although not as obviously artificial as indulgences, depend at least in part 

on the establishment and maintenance of a belief that the taxes are necessary or a debt owed and that the tax or debt collectors are the rightful

middlemen for fulfillment of the purification.

The issues of taxation and debt will be woven into your war. They 

are a possible cause of the war, might shape the locations of your war’s 

costs, guide the struggle over anonymity, and determine power to make 

war. The most consequential objects of debt and taxation are highly physical, like land, but can also be entirely fabricated. Find them.

Please see sections: 48, Grading the Social Compact; 54, Extortion; 105,

Genocide Geography; 65, Smuggling; 81, What a Clergy Wants;

63, Roadblocks and Checkpoints; 62, Bank Robbery; and 14, Legitimacy.



“Someday, and that day may never come,

I will call upon you to do a service for me.”

don Vito Corleone in the movie,

The Godfather (1972)184F

185

--------------

“Over 4.5 Billion people could die from Global Warming related causes by 2012.”185F

186

headline in The Canadian


46 Taxation and Debt

188

-- Hell with Limbo (Purgatory?) circa 1300 and 1888 --

The upper image is by Dante,186 F

187 and the lower image is of the 

floor plan of the Cane Hill pauper and lunatic asylum in Britain.187 F

188 It has been closed for some time, not to worry.
189

A more useful scale than country

Section 47, Why the County

Almost every country in the world has an administrative or formal 

territorial unit approximately equivalent to what in the United States is 

known as a county. In Iran they are called rayons and in Colombia municipios and they generally have a great deal in common as a geographic 

unit. They are often the object of considerable local geographic data collection. Most Mexican counties (also called municipios), for instance, 

have their own website, which is usually informative. In Colombia, every 

municipio government is required by national law to prepare a land-use 

plan (Plan de Ordenamiento Territorial or POT). Even rural, under-populated and poor municipios often produce sophisticated POT. For 

instance, Toribío (a conflictive municipio in southern Colombia through 

which FARC smuggling routes pass) received an international grant and 

the help of foreign specialists to prepare its plan. It is exquisitely detailed

and includes numerous GIS-generated maps that represent both physical 

and non-physical cultural phenomena. Included are the lines of privately 

owned plats along with tribal boundary lines, township lines, and environmental risk areas.

The Canadians have managed to confuse the county level of governance, but within most of their Provinces they have something akin to 

the county. A few of the smaller US States have eliminated the county. 

Counties today are one of the greatest employers of practical geographers, 

who earn their livelihoods on the basis of expertise in geographic representation and analysis. For them, GIS has almost become the universal 

epistemology for land-use planning. Precise geographic predictions regarding traffic, floodplains, or development costs have become an 

administrative expectation at the county level. County governments do 

almost nothing in the absence of knowledge about land ownership.

Not only does most knowledge about real property ownership reside at the county level, the size and shape of the county is often intimately 

associated with familial histories and shared ownerships, physical compartmentalization of terrain, peculiar economic phenomena such as 

watersheds, mines or a popular beach, or other fairly obvious factors that 

guide decisions, affiliations and identities. For internal or irregular armed 

conflicts, the county is probably a good choice of scale for analysis and 
47 Why the County

190

operational design -- or at least a good place to begin. The county can be

a useful tag upon which to build an understanding of the relationship of 

residents with their surrounding environment, and of the local fit in the 

greater world. In many countries, including most in the Western Hemisphere, the county is a focus for tax collection and redistribution, 

developmental programs, land-use planning and reform programs, quality 

of life statistics, distribution of government services, voting representation, marriages, notaries, cadastres, school planning, etc.

To not have a collection of county-level data and a grasp of problems at the county scale might equate to being out of touch with the most 

revealing administrative events and social performance facts. Rural insurgents especially know counties; understand differences among counties; 

and deal with county governments. Innumerable popular seasonal events 

ranging from religious celebrations to concerts, fairs and contests are 

planned and organized at the county level. Many profitable extortions occur at the county level as a result. In Colombia, for instance, the central 

government redistributes a percentage of the national oil, gas and coal production profits to county governments, with those counties that produce 

hydrocarbons receiving a larger percentage. From some rural counties the 

FARC would threaten away large portions of those hydrocarbon royalties.

Mexico has about 1,500 counties and Colombia about 1,100. China 

has about 2,000. Iran has over 300 and Liberia about 15 (which have Senators). The point is that while the country, national or federal level is 

impressive, the right knowledge or operational starting scale for your approach to an internal war might be the next level down (state, province, 

department), and more probably the next one down from that. If there is a 

rule regarding scale, it is probably that we should not bite off more geography than our resources can chew. Also, it is good to dominate land and 

property knowledge, details of which are often only available or understandable at the county scale.

This book stresses the importance of lines of communication, and 

the lines of communication of almost any armed group will lead in and out 

of a county, which means that the county level will almost never be the 

right scale for the whole geography of winning. Nevertheless, it is probably a good idea to orient your search for relevant geographic knowledge at 

the county level. You can adjust from there.
47 Why the County

191

Please see sections: 49, Territorial Scrutiny; 80, Why You Should Like 

Geography; 38, Cultural Study for What?; 110, Knowledge Gaps; 135,

Borders and Anarchism; 35, Comuna 13; 86, Shifting Covet-geographies; 

and 78, Identity.



“My first book on Faulkner bears the title Yoknapatawpha: 

Faulkner’s Little Postage Stamp of Native Soil.” The title of 

this volume was chosen to signify that I am following Faulkner’s progress from the provincial to the universal....”18 8F

189

Elizabeth Margaret Kerr,

William Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha:

A Kind of Keystone in the Universe

--------------

“Jesse Duke has been to two places in his life:

Hazzard County and Korea.”

Narrator in the movie,

The Dukes of Hazzard (2005)189F

190



-- Yoknapatawpha County circa 1936 --
192

Evidence, institutions and compatibility

Section 48,

Grading the Social Compact

Many thoughtful scholars believe, kindly and with reason, that not 

only is it a dubious exercise to make normative judgments about the quality 

of a foreign society, it is a kind of conceit to which US Americans are especially prone. Let’s do it anyway. Some cultures or polities are more likely 

than others to promote human flourishing. Some social compacts are more 

peaceful, better at stewarding the environment, more successful materially, 

and happier than others. Others are just plain offensive, built in favor of 

small minorities of men to service egoistic and cruel dimensions of their human nature. In the long run, any claim we might make to victory in an 

irregular conflict may be forfeit if we cannot accept the notion that it is acceptable to judge such societies. After all, revolutionaries have all judged 

their societies. They measured it, it failed in their eyes, and they acted to 

improve it. Rebels aside, societies are not equally worthy. 

This section offers a way to measure a society as ‘better’ and ‘worse’, 

maintaining, however, that State is not equivalent to society. Still, while a government might be minimal (in this regard I like to think minimal and optimal are 

pretty close), it seems in any case that a healthy social compact requires a healthy 

government. So, for the purpose of measuring a society, irrespective of what you 

consider government’s proper role, my advice is that you closely inspect the property regime. Begin by describing three broad aspects of the real property 

ownership system in as much detail as possible. They are:

1. Quality of the evidence that delineates rights, duties, and the 

identity of owners of valuable things (this is sometimes referred 

to as clarity of allocation);

2. Capacity of owners (or claimants) to act on conclusions logically drawn from the evidence (this is in some contexts referred 

to as ease of alienability or as security from trespass depending 

on the mix of owner rights and government duties involved); and

3. Basic rules delimiting participation in the compact (this we at 

times refer to as liberality).

‘Valuable things’, by the way, means land, water, transportation means, 

taxation and creation and control of negotiable instruments, but especially 

real property. We are measuring the quality of the social compact using 
48 Grading the Social Compact

193

one of the closest proxies, the real property regime. We can further unpack

the three streams of inquiry (clarity of allocation, ease of alienability/security from trespass, and liberality) as suggested in the Appendix: 

Miscellaneous Lists, List A (page 573).

Transparency of public records of ownership (or its absence) may 

be the first clue to the overall condition of the social compact. As a quality 

of evidence in a functioning liberal social compact, transparency is the 

principal antidote to government corruption. Governments tend to want to 

keep some forensic information close-hold, and there exist valid justifications for doing so. Nevertheless, no amount of technical precision or 

completeness of coverage will cause a system of public records to serve 

the purposes of human flourishing if those records are kept for the exclusive consideration of a few. Sometimes lack of transparency may seem to 

be due not so much to some attempt to hide data as it is to the simple lack 

of good record systems. This may be true, but if a leadership group exists, 

and that leadership is able to aggregate wealth, then there are probably 

secret records someplace which that leadership group uniquely controls.

We might note the extent to which a society, as a system, is likely to create 

enemies within itself and for its neighbors. Normative measures of State behavior 

(which some writers relate to State failure) are approached in other parts of this

book. Maybe (and this is by no means certain) humans are less likely to rebel in a 

society where most material aspirations are fulfilled. Even so, there remains harsh 

disagreement as to how the material cup is to be filled and regarding who is responsible to fill it. Ahead ofsuch questions about the definition of the State or the 

proper role of government, we are confronted with debate about human nature --

if, for instance, there exists a latent and natural tendency toward territorial competition. My thinking is that most effective rebelliousness operates nearly

independently of the level of material well-being in a society, but corresponds viscerally to territorial habit. I think most historic observations support such a

position. Nevertheless, there remains reason to believe that the manner of organizing a society greatly influencesthe methods of territorial competition, the social 

and material costs of that competition, and the distribution, sharing, balancing, diffusion or concentration of power that the competition requires and creates.

A property system is not just public records. Property is relationships 

-- who has what rights and duties as recognized by others, how that evidence 

isrecorded, and how that evidence can be used. The property system is a contract about contracts, an agreement about agreements, and a mechanism for 
48 Grading the Social Compact

194

peaceable conflict resolution. Uncovering how good the property system is to 

expose how good the social compact is, and therefore, to a degree, how good 

the society is. Perhaps, since the property system is government in a most 

basic sense, therein exists a measurement of how good the State is. We can, 

as argued throughout this book, measure the success or failure of a State according to its control over impunity. (Those organizers who are not of the State, 

but who can grant impunity to their members, are reasonably defined as enemies 

of the State.) Such a measure of State success, however,says little about contributions to or detractionsfrom human flourishing.

Please see sections: 72, Land Strategy and Property Strategy; 92, Graves 

Registration; 95, Childhood; 130, Globalization; 118, Democracy; 77, Sex; 

62, Bank Robbery; and 70, Measuring Effects of Actions on Structure.



“There’s only two things I hate in this world: people who are intolerant of other cultures ...and the Dutch.”

Nigel Powers in the movie,

Austin Powers in Goldmember (2002)190F

191

--------------

“The Killdozer does its homicidal work with much enthusiasm...and I'm still wondering how a 50-ton machine with a 

roaring diesel engine which belches huge clouds of black smoke 

could possibly sneak up on and surprise anyone. But the Killdozer 

manages to do just that, much to the detriment of the workers. Another issue is the one lesson I learned from this movie: If a 

maniacal bulldozer controlled by an alien force is lurking about --

don't get drunk.”

from a review of the TV movie

Killdozer (1974)191F

192

--------------

“Of the gods we believe, and of men we know, that by a necessary law of their nature they rule wherever they can.”192 F

193

Thucydides


195

Overlapping territories exposed

Section 49, Territorial Scrutiny

Territorial scrutiny is a map-based investigation and analysis method built 

upon human territorial nature. The idea is to expose, understand and explain conflicts through territorial mapping, keeping in mind Alfred Korzybski’s caveat that 

“the map is not the territory represented.”193F

194 It happens that over time and because 

of new technologies, human territoriality has become increasingly mappable. The 

matter of what actions to take on the basis of detailed territorial knowledge is considered throughout this book and how to organize territories is expounded upon in 

Section 32, Land-use Planning.

People’s rights, duties, privileges, delimitations, obligations, powers, capacities, and trespasses are almost all associated with territories that 

can be cartographically displayed. It might be a shoe salesman’s territory, 

a telephone billing exchange, a sports league school set, a catchment area 

for insurance patients, fire vulnerability zones, a language-group density

gradient, a Kiwanis club membership spread, and on and on. It might also 

be something more legally formal or administratively consequential, such 

as a gas or water line easement, a building setback line, or a noise abatement zone. There could be a theoretical area where people might be at 

great risk of mud slides, or where they might be fearful of UFOs. It could 

be a territory where people pronounce a word in a curious and distinguishing way. It might be the estimated borders between the zones of action of 

two gangs or guerrilla groups or it might be the series of way-stations used 

to move stolen emeralds. It might be the boundary of duties or privileges 

to organize a public event (such as a religious celebration or parade) in one 

locale as opposed to another.

With some exceptions, there exists a potential conflict whenever territories 

overlap. Nested Identities is the title of an interesting and useful anthology edited 

by Herb Guntram and David Kaplan.194F

195 Some human collective identities coincide with administrative or formalized territories. People often have a 

hierarchically/geographically linked set of identities typically growing from the 

self to the family to the school to the town and so forth to the nation-state. As such, 

you will want to name, to your own satisfaction, the competing identities related to 

the place you are scrutinizing. This is not to suggest that individualswho are members of a given competing identity will necessarily be located in the place you are 

studying, just that they have some influence on the rights, duties, conditions and 

events in the place. Try to map the whereabouts of the identities’ members, what 
49 Territorial Scrutiny

196

the members of each identity consider to be ‘theirs’, where the agents or representatives of the identity are located. Map all the significant administrative territories. 

See which administrative concepts and identities are cozily nested and contiguous, 

that is, if the power identities and administrative boundaries are copacetic.

The likelihood that a territorial overlap exposes a conflict increases as 

the distance between the proponents of each of the territories increases. In 

other words, if the engineer who is in charge of servicing the water line is the 

same individual who services the gas line, then the distance between the proponents is nothing. The guy might have a conflict in his own head about 

whether the gas line goes over the water line or vice-versa, but that hardly 

presents much fuel for armed social conflict. Maybe he just says to himself

something like, ‘I’ll run the gas line over the top of the water line since it is 

smaller and it is more urgent that I get to it quickly if there is a problem’. 

That’s not much of a conflict, and resolution is easy. If, on the other hand, the 

water pipeline engineer sits in Omaha in a large company with a number of 

subordinate engineers, and the gas line company headquarters is in Wichita, 

then there could be some digging arguments that will be harder to resolve. If 

instead of talking about a couple of simple utility easements, we are talking 

about a couple of lucrative drug smuggling routes, overlapping turf boundaries 

of two violent cartels, a fiber optic cable line, and the edges of two soccer team 

fan-bases, the conflict is going to be rougher.

In the context of armed conflict, especially if it has been ongoing, the organization with the headquarters that is further away from an area in question is 

probably the more powerful organization overall. This may seem counterintuitive 

since one of the basic theories of geography is that everything influences everything else and that closer things influence more than distant things. It takes strength 

to maintain armed force at a distance, so, if an organization can maintain defiant 

armed force a long way from its base, it isprobably powerful in accordance. (More 

on the relationship of distance and power is considered in Section 64, Measuring

Distance and Comparing Power.) This does not mean that the identity with the 

more distant headquarters is the more powerful organization in that one little 

place at a given moment in time, however. Also, again, distances should be 

measured as cost-distances, not just Euclidean distances.

The scale of map images matters. In the context of visual analysis some 

territories are more easily depicted as lines such as airline routes, or retail distribution networks. They are territories nevertheless, and so exposure of the 

legalistic and strategic-competitive importance of relationships (such territorial

jealousies) has to be guarded from semantic distraction. Don’t let words like
49 Territorial Scrutiny

197

‘flow’, ‘network’, or ‘assemblage’ distract you from exposing territorial overlaps. You are seeking to unravel organized human conflict and that means 

analyzing places and privileges (territories) that are coveted enough for humans

to fight over. Those things are going to have a spatial manifestation or reference. 

Scale mistakes are easy to make. Pick the right scales for the interpretation of 

territorial conflict, and do not let your thinking become frozen at one scale of 

space or time. An image of a network of airline routes can give the impression 

of ‘flows’ in and out of territories. When the pilots land, however, they will do 

so under some territorial agreement allowing them to fill a passenger gate or 

refuel. All routes are territory.

Plenty of misleading and stupid things can be done with maps. A current 

conversation in international matters revolves around the present meaning of 

some national borderlines drawn long ago by the cartographers of colonial powers. Sometimes observers accuse the lines as being artificial, arbitrary and 

damaging because they were originally drawn indifferent to or disdainful of local 

territorial interestssuch as tribal or economic relationships. Commenting on the 

British challenge in the northwest of India in 1893,

Sir George Robertson an, expert in frontier politics, puts the matter so 

clearly that his words on the subject may be quoted at length: ˗˗ ‘To the 

superficial observer’, he says, ‘nothing could seem more statesmanlike 

that to lay down distinct boundaries demarcating respectively the spheres 

of influence of the Amir of Afghanistan and the Government of India, 

and so to prevent all fear of collision of those two powers. A weal point, 

however, in the plan, was the practical ignoring of all the intervening 

tribes, who, as they owed allegiance neither to the Afghan chief nor to 

the Government of India, not unnaturally objected to what they imagined 

was the parceling out of their country without their consent.195F

196

The lines, however, were in few cases arbitrary as to the relationships between 

the colonial powers. Today, although they may be locally dysfunctional, national governments are generally loath to change the colonial lines.

It is constructive to map identities of persons and collectives who 

consider themselves to be in the rightful current exercise of significant 

rights (‘owners’) as well as groups and individuals who are not in exercise 

of those rights, but claim they should be (‘claimants’). When nominating 

owner and claimant identities it is useful to keep in mind that any given 

individual can belong to multiple, competing identities; can be ambivalent, 

capricious and indecisive over time; and that some identities can be as 

fleeting as they are powerful.
49 Territorial Scrutiny

198

The fact that owner identities (which for a lawyer might become 

classes of plaintiffs or defendants) can overlap even while the territories in 

question don’t appear to overlap, is what makes territorial scrutiny a ‘postmodern’ concept. A collective identity has members, but is not necessarily 

an organization, and it is not the same as the sum of its membership. Collective identities are key to your conflict analysis to the extent they

influence the conflict at particular moments in time and in places valuable

to you. Territorial scrutiny is suitable for use in forensics, but also in support of a property approach to understanding and improving a social 

compact. By specifying the spatial and temporal condition of territoriality, 

the manifestations of abstractions like sovereignty, human rights, civil

rights, property rights, power and wealth can be visualized and analyzed 

on the same plane. Territorial scrutiny can reveal the practical overlap of 

those concepts. The object of conflicts is often reflected in tax plats, resource concessions, easements, building codes, land-use plans, 

development and aid schemes, service boundaries and schedules, school 

districts, and sports events schedules. The movement of objects of desire 

(opium, emeralds, water, prostitutes, bananas...) is also consequential. 

These details of property can be visualized, compared, correlated, and even

modeled because of the GIS revolution. Ultimately, all territorial lines 

represent power relationships. Every formal territorial construction reflects preferential rights and duties that together reflect at least part of a 

social compact. These reflections of related power can be collated and 

correlated and in so doing many dangerous imbalances can be recognized.

On top of any of these possible layers just mentioned we can place 

a map layer of the areas in which a suspect collective identity (let’s say a 

clergy, a guerrilla band, or a police unit) is able to enjoy impunity from 

punishment for a specified set of actions (like harboring fugitives, kidnapping, or extortion). The patterns and anomalies exposed in the spatial 

comparisons might speak volumes. The complexity of created, shared, 

traded, excluded and denied rights pertaining to a locale is something that 

a GIS can help us see and test, the various layers and scales of territorial 

information resting in unseen relational databases.

Lines on a map express human power relationships, as well as relationships with the natural environment. In those places where the details of 

competitive territoriality have not been recorded in maps, revealing lines and 

spaces can be created. Territorial scrutiny can even help us visualize such phenomena as indifference, ambivalence, distraction, confusion, whim, anger, 
49 Territorial Scrutiny

199

forgetfulness, paranoia, etc., when these are discovered by suitable methods. It 

can, in other words, allow for rational input of the seemingly irrational.

Please see sections: 127, Between Liberty and Lawrence; 66, GIS; 38, Cultural Study for What?; 7, Sanctuary; 26, The Chaco War; 135, Borders and 

Anarchism; 48, Grading the Social Compact; and 73, The Catatumbo.



“It is a common habit to blame life upon the environment. 

Environment modifies life but does not govern life. The soul 

is stronger than its surroundings.”196 F

197

William James (attributed)

--------------

Cowboy: Okay, what are we gonna do now?

Swan: We're going back.

Vermin: You mind tellin' me how? ... Coney Island must 

be 50 to 100 miles from here!

Swan: It's the only choice we got.

Cochise: Yeah, real simple. Except that every cop in this 

city is lookin' to bust our heads.

Swan: We got somethin' else to think about than the cops.

Vermin: Yeah, what?

Snow: The truce. Is it still on?

Vermin: If it ain't, we're gonna have to bop our way back.

from the movie,

The Warriors (1979)197F

198

--------------

Justice J.B. Wilson: Mr. Murphy. Just how much of Lincoln 

County are you after? 

Lawrence Murphy: Well, Mr. Chisum came out here several 

years ago, put his name on everything he could. I've only been 

here a little while. Just getting started. Do you have anything to 

say to that, Mr. Chisum? 

from the movie,

Chisum (1970)198F

199


200

The Constitution exported by degree by decree

Section 50, U.S. Persons

The saying, ‘Countries don’t have friends, they have interests’, is a 

realpolitik staple ascribed to de Gaulle, Kissinger, Bismarck, and numerous 

other geopolitical alpha males of lore. We want to be careful with its use 

these days, even if it still serves to explain some government decisions and 

behaviors. The United States is home to so many families with international 

membership that in the case of some countries, US bilateral relations are not 

just a matter of friendships, they are a matter of families. To suppose that a 

democratic government could rise above those familial relationships to assert an ostensibly greater national interest is the more naive view. It isn’t 

just the United States and its ‘US Person’, either. Irregular conflicts will 

involve many countries with shared families, companies and migrants. Hundreds of thousands of Colombians live in Venezuela and vice versa, for 

instance. For the United States, the obvious examples are Cuba, Colombia, 

the Dominican Republic, Israel and Mexico. The existence of family ties is 

a complicating factor that itself should invite careful examination, not just at 

the philosophical level, but at the operational one.

There now are several overlapping definitions of ‘US Person’ that 

can be easily googled, but, more or less, a US Person is a United States 

citizen, a permanent resident alien, an unincorporated association substantially composed of United States citizens or permanent resident aliens, or 

a US corporation unless directed and controlled by a foreign government 

or governments. You may see the inclusivity expanded or contracted a bit 

depending on the agency and context, in any case, US Person status engages a range of constitutional protections including those relating to 

illegal government searches, invasion of privacy, and warrantless arrests. 

It is an example of a self-imposed dilution of State power. For many law 

enforcement purposes, the rights accruing to United States citizens have 

been extended beyond US borders. Along the US-Mexico border, US federal officers apply a broad interpretation of US Person. Guided also by the 

intent of another requirement, the Posse Comitatus Act limiting military 

authority in domestic territory, US federal officers are normally cautious, 

presuming almost anyone within the United States to be a US Person. 

They may presume, for instance, that anyone heading toward Mexico from 

the interior of the United States to be a US Person.

The ‘US Person’ is a human identity category that can be traced at 

least back to a Ronald Reagan executive order (No. 12333), and it was a 
50 U.S. Persons

201

substantial invention. To a degree it mooted many arguments about 

whether or not the US Constitution applied to noncitizens. Most rights we 

claim as Americans are not granted by the US Constitution; rather the Constitution asserts protections of those rights from infringements by the 

government. It is perhaps an interesting historical note that the US government would constrain itself as to infringements on the rights of persons 

who are not citizens of the United States, but creation of the ‘US Person’ 

was born of the same spirit that motivated the founding fathers to keep the 

government at a distance from tyrannical practices. Creation of the US 

Person was recognition that to lord it over the relatives or foreign interests 

of US citizens was too close to infringing on the rights of the US citizens 

themselves. Does it make law enforcement harder? Yes. Does it lessen 

the rule-of-law? Perhaps not.

Every day the number of persons who fall into the US Person category increases, especially in the United States’ near-abroad. Any irregular 

conflict in which forces of the United States government might find themselves engaged in the Western Hemisphere will encounter an everincreasing proportion of US Persons. If we were to add to the definition, 

as is likely, close family member of a US citizen, it would be exceptional 

in a country like the Dominican Republic to find a non-US Person. Today, 

for the United States, in the context of some potential irregular wars, the 

idea that countries have interests and not friendships becomes a dangerous 

intellectual anchor. Beyond friendships there are families by the hundreds 

of thousands. The implications of operational law in such situations, tied 

as families are to democratic politics and to tort law if nothing else, should 

sober all commanders to think about the golden rule. It would be the exception for the United States military to find itself in a place in the 

Americas where they would not be at once in a foreign land -- and not so 

much. Many Americans outside the US know this better than do Americans inside the US. An operations plan for a United States government 

unit that does not explicitly address the phenomenon of the US Person 

might be a dangerously incomplete plan. The depiction of an operational 

environment that does not attempt to define the social and legal geography 

of the US Person might be a dangerously incomplete depiction.

Anonymity is a central theme of this book. The fact of the US Person 

cuts in both directions as far as the creation and control of anonymity is concerned. On one hand, the individual rights of US Persons, backed by their 

access to grievance mechanisms, can hamper investigation and surveillance. 
50 U.S. Persons

202

On the other hand, the condition of ‘US Personship’ can make the establishment of comprehensive biometrics, perfection of public records, or the 

creation of Big Brother easier. In any case, and for all parties, the extent and 

implication of US Personship should be a matter of attention, as should analogous conditions elsewhere.

In the 1970s, a dominant current of American opinion and emotion, 

soured from the Vietnam War, turned against what was perceived to be 

overreaching by the federal government in the name of national security. 

The Church Committee, among other things, investigated a project carried 

out by the US Army called COINTELPRO, under which military intelligence personnel secretly collected and filed private information about US 

citizens, especially on college campuses within the United States.

In the spirit of discipline imposed by public reaction to the perceived violation of civil liberties, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and 

the Central Intelligence Agency were led to maintain separated geographies of responsibility. The FBI worked inside the country and the CIA 

worked outside the country. They rarely traded files and, when the 2001 

World Trade Center attack came, this failure to share information was perceived as a weakness. New laws, The Patriot Act among them, increased 

cooperation between the two agencies (broke down the geographic boundaries), as well as among other principle components of the US intelligence 

and law enforcement communities.

In 1983, Executive Order 12425 gave the International Criminal 

Police Organization (INTERPOL) status as a public international organization entitled to the immunities accorded under the International 

Organizations Immunities Act of 1945. The 1983 order expressly excluded some immunities regarding search and seizure, as well as regarding 

taxation. Some tax exclusions were dropped in 1995 (Executive Order 

12971). In 2009, Executive Order 13524 further amended EO 12425, exempting INTERPOL from search of all INTERPOL properties and files. 

In other words, the 2009 amendment released INTERPOL from oversight 

by the United States. It is too early to say if INTERPOL is beyond the 

reach of civil actions for abuse of process, or if it is relieved from Freedom 

of Information Act requests. However, it seems that, whereas the US Person executive order was designed to limit infringements by the US 

government on the rights of individual humans, even if not fully US Citizens, Executive Order 12425 goes in the other direction, releasing foreign 

police from accountability. During the period in which I considered the 
50 U.S. Persons

203

rewrite of this section, many controversial changes occurred or were exposed regarding surveillance laws. These changes affect not just US 

Persons or NGOs; they affect US citizens. Their complexity and opacity 

make brief comment difficult.

‘US Person’ is a legal innovation, as is ‘US Citizen’. Your performance in irregular war may be subject to such legal innovations; and 

winning could depend on how well you understand such concepts of identity and their relationship to other concepts, like sovereignty, impunity, 

anonymity, and sanctuary. If you are a US service member, you took an 

oath to defend the fundamental outline of a legal innovation.

Please see sections: 2, Anonymity; 124, Slavery and Underclass; 60, War 

Nouveau; 104, Lawfare; 45, Police or Military; 52, Sovereignty; 84, Cultures of Violence; and 107, Guerre d'Algérie.



“If I were to live my life over again,

I would be an American.

I would steep myself in America,

I would know no other land.”199F

200

Henry James

--------------

How soft your fields so green, can whisper tales of gore,

Of how we calmed the tides of war. We are your overlords.

from the Led Zeppelin song

The Immigrant Song

--------------

Man Stoner: What's the Immigration Service doing here, man?

Pedro: My cousin needed a ride to his brother's wedding in Tijuana; so 

he called the Emigras, Man. They'll deport the entire wedding party, 

Man. They get a free bus ride across the border and lunch. When the 

wedding is over, Man, they'll just come back across the border.

from the movie,

Up in Smoke (1978)200 F

201


204

Manhunt

Section 51, Get Willy

On November 4, 2011, in Popayán, Colombia, orderlies wrapped 

the carcass of Guillermo Sáenz in plastic after some forensic work to confirm his identify and satisfy the public. Sáenz, who used the nom de guerre

Alfonso Cano, had been the overall commander of the FARC since late 

May, 2008, but had spent most of the time evading capture, rarely able to 

regain his footing or take military initiative. On news of his death, Colombian officials and commentators immediately pronounced the opening of 

possibilities for another round of peace negotiations with the FARC. 

Among the reasons for the government to consider negotiations – it had a 

more favorable hand than a decade earlier when talks had failed. Now, 

whoever replaced Sáenz at the helm of the FARC inside Colombia could 

reasonably fear for his life. The remaining senior FARC leadership would 

be harder to hunt; most were in foreign lands, probably Venezuela. Bagging Sáenz was nevertheless a significant military and political 

achievement, accomplished at cost.

The government’s decapitation strategy had been proving itself, but 

it had never been conceived of as a simple matter of killing the insurgent 

boss and watching the organization wither away. The FARC was longestablished, with a systematic leader replacement strategy. The government intended to target the leaders because they were, by police reasoning,

the authors of the organized violence. By military reasoning, putting the 

FARC leaders to flight meant denying them the initiative. Whomever the 

FARC leader at a given moment, he was consubstantial with the physical 

location of the FARC’s headquarters, which meant the location of the organization’s personnel, contract, and inventory files, as well as keys to the 

principal communications means. To go after the leaders logically also 

meant going after the most significant terrain and the greatest intelligence 

treasures. Finally, to kill the FARC leadership seemed the ultimate ‘propaganda of the deed’ when it came to public perceptions. Killing FARC 

leaders would place the FARC in a weaker bargaining position in the event 

of some return to negotiations.

The hunt itself unfolded in south-central Colombia, in and between 

several national parks (Nevado de Huila, Las Hermosas, Puracé, 

Munchique, Farrallones de Cali, and Serranía de Los Picachos. See map 

on page 209 following this section’s text), often at high elevations, obeying 
51 Get Willy

205

headwaters and remote mountain passes. Remote is the key word. The 

counties (municipios) around where the departments of Cauca, Tolima, 

Valle del Cauca, and Huila approach each other are remote in all kinds of 

ways. Roads end, electric service is sparse, and there are few stores or gas 

stations. Keeping their commander alive became the FARC’s central military preoccupation, and in service to it, the guerrilla planners counted on 

the combination of remoteness and movement options.

The protective troops were organized in three rings, the innermost 

composed of about a dozen highly trusted and experienced guerrillas, and 

the outermost with as many as three to four hundred foot soldiers. Ten to 

fifteen counties comprise most of the geographic extent in which Sáenz’ 

final failure to escape took place. The highest point on the map is the 

volcanic peak Nevado de Huila (17, 600 ft.) in the national park of the 

same name. The Saldaña River and many of its key tributaries gather on 

the northeastern slopes and flow in Tolima Department northeast headed 

for the Magdalena River. The Páez River rises on the southwestern slopes 

of the Volcano then flows south-southeast into the Magdalena in Huila 

Department. On the other side of the mountain crest just west of Tolima’s 

border the rivers flow toward the Cauca River in either Cauca or Valle del 

Cauca departments. There are a lot of streams and a lot of water. Water, 

slope, vegetation, altitude, few roads, and few people. 

Curious but understandable, descriptions of the area made by residents and officials of all political types extol the region as a 

communications hub from which one can go east to the jungles and plains 

of Meta and Caquetá, north toward the nation’s capital, west to the Pacific 

port of Buenaventura, or south passing out of the Colombian Massif to 

Ecuador. It is obviously true and simultaneously ridiculous. Every map 

of Colombian road or river networks or of altitudes or seasonal weather 

disruptions tells the same story, one that everyone knows: it is a region 

around which one travels to get places, not through which. But it is nevertheless a roundhouse for those who wish to elude law enforcement and 

to have open travel options. It is indeed a hub for transportation -- of contraband and escape. The transportation geography of furtive or fugitive 

traffic is different from that of innocent traffic. At altitude, the headwaters 

are easier to cross, ancient pathways lead everywhere, and the intent traveler can impose intolerable costs on his pursuers. That is to say, the 

escaper can shorten his pursuer’s distance to the pursuer’s culminating 

point. The traveler has to be patient, as passage is not as fast as it would 
51 Get Willy

206

be going around the ‘long’ way, and for the guerrilla it helps to have rifles 

and landmines.

Southeast of the volcano we find Páez county, sometimes called 

Belacázar, the first name taken from a predominant local indigenous identity and the second from a conquistador. Toward the eastern border of the 

county is a small town called Riochiquito, famous in Colombia as a place 

according to guerrilla legend where the FARC was named, if not birthed, 

in the 1960s. At that time, the Colombian army was chasing Pedro Marín, 

the man who had preceded Sáenz as FARC commander. Five decades in, 

the FARC still counted on the geography of the area for sanctuary or escape thereto. It was never just a matter of the topography. The makeups 

of the local populations are one with their surroundings. It is said they are 

predisposed to self-reliance, distrust of government, and physical durability. What’s not to like? The FARC, even after the bulk of its leaders hailed 

from elsewhere, engaged the local cultural predispositions. Apparently, 

we need to be careful in describing the local attitudes, however, as they 

vary more than the popular accounts reaching foreign audiences suggest. 

There is a considerable black community in Páez, for instance, and romantic notions of rural communes in sustainable balance with nature, busy 

resisting the Man, should be held with reservation if not cynicism. The 

area around Riochiquito, geographic center of FARC lore, has a higher 

degree of private property land ownership than many of the surrounding 

zones. Relationships between the locals and the FARC are spotty at best. 

According to some who might know, there has existed a changing patchwork of sympathy, enthrallment, fear, indifference, and rejection. The 

place is rough terrain.

The hunt for Sáenz began in earnest in early February, 2008 when 

the Colombian Army launched a major operation to go dig him out of the 

Cañon de Las Hemosas area in Tolima Department where he was thought 

to be holed-up at over 11,000 feet. Although the army did not find Sáenz, 

it did considerable damage to the FARC security units in the area. By 

October, intelligence had again fixed his approximate whereabouts to the 

Barragán paramo in Roncesvalles county. During 2009, the G-2 slowly 

improved its intelligence nets, but in spite of an otherwise successful 

bombing of a FARC headquarters camp in October, Sáenz continued to 

evade successfully. In February and March of 2010, the FARC security 

rings absorbed additional loses in attacks against encampments in the Las 
51 Get Willy

207

Hermosas area. In early 2011, Sáenz apparently moved toward the headwaters of the Atá River and by late June the trail led back to Páez, Cauca, near

the border with Huila Department, northwest of Riochiquito. Around July 

3, 2011, the army almost caught Sáenz in La Honda township, still in Páez. 

In late September, news came that the 6th FARC Front was protecting his 

movement back toward Planadas County, Tolima. There, the FARC’s 

Jacobo Arenas column was to accompany him back south toward the coast. 

The fabric of the protective circles had been rent, and a decision made to 

break out of the encirclement and head for the Munchique National Park 

area east of the Panamerican highway toward the coast. The little hut in 

which Sáenz was briefly lodged was under observation from other dwellings. On November 4, 2011, government special operations forces and 

police killed Sáenz near Honduras Township, Morales County, then transported his corpse to the departmental capital, Popayán. The government had 

put the offending mens rea and the privilege of habeas corpus together.

It appears the FARC had long since demoted the area around Nevado de Huila as a sanctuary, knowing it could only provide temporary 

relief and could not serve as a base in which to recruit, recover or rearm. 

There are too many unfriendly bugs, animals, plants and temperatures; human population is sparse, radio signals weak; and repeated movements 

invite the enemy to reverse ambush tactics. Still, FARC units could escape 

hot pursuit, and columns carrying supplies or contraband could rest briefly 

on the way to and from safer areas in Meta or Caquetá. It is from the 

internally remote high ground that FARC units descended on the communities between the parks to enforce silence about the movement of their 

columns, attack pesky police posts, make payments to collaborators, and 

receive ransoms, prisoners, or portions of other parasitic schemes. By 

2011, however, technology and an increased government resource base 

extended the distances to police and army culminating points during the

pursuit, and shortened the practical, service distances to remote civilian 

populations. People with an affinity to the government, who were indisposed toward the FARC, could get everywhere faster and with more 

strength. At the same time, more and more information broke into the 

backwoods to convince some of the independently minded to think more 

independently. Sáenz’ use of the central cordillera was doomed in part by 

the fact of shrinking sanctuary. In late October, his security rings falling 

apart, he was hustled out of the bubble toward Munchique. Although a 

likely choice for escape for some of the aforementioned reasons, 
51 Get Willy

208

Munchique is a smaller reserve, and the surrounding population not well 

prepared psychologically to host a FARC leader. Morales County, for instance, had a Conservative Party voting history. It was not good sanctuary. 

There Sáenz met an inglorious, exhausting little marxist martyrdom, literally run to death.

The hunt for Guillermo Sáenz’ was one of numerous by-name manhunts conducted by the Colombian government as a central column of its 

overall counter-FARC strategy. To then say that the FARC leadership was

the enemy ‘center of gravity’ or that the population was therefore not the

government’s ‘center of gravity’ would be an unnecessary and perhaps 

damaging semantic exercise. The leaders of the FARC are the intellectual 

authors, the mens rea perpetrators of acts that the people of Colombia (and 

for a time, their government) could not abide. They are the men who grant 

impunity to an organization of violent perpetrators. That they were to be 

hunted down obeyed its own logic within the social compact.

Please see sections: 88, Escape Geography; 17, Keeping Secrets; 64, Measuring Distance and Comparing Power; 20, Rule-of-Law; 23, Mens Rea; 7, 

Sanctuary; 78, Identity; and 137, Foreign Support and Foreign Perspective.



“All the approaches could be observed from concealed positions. 

Yet what I sought was a way of escape. As Platus has said, not 

even a mouse trusts himself to one hole only.”201 F

202

Mathurin Kerbouchard in

Louis L'Amour, The Walking Drum

--------------

“‘How long have you been living here?’ I asked. ‘About two 

months, bwana’. ‘Did you know of the surrender talks between your 

leaders and the government?’ ‘Ndiyo’. ‘But you did not wish to 

surrender?’ The terrorist was silent. I thanked him for his cooperation and then shot him twice through the head.”202 F

203

William W. Baldwin,

Mau Mau Man-Hunt


51 Get Willy

209

--South-central Colombia circa 2012--

The white dotted line traces the approximate path of Guillermo Sáenz’ 

last effort to abscond. The hash-marked areas are National Parks. Sáenz

exploited the high ground and historically FARC-dominated places. He 

tried to reach an old smuggling route to the Pacific Coast. He failed. He 

was caught and killed at Chirriadero, to the West on this map.
210

I own this place, not you

Section 52, Sovereignty

Some political scientists like to define sovereignty as a summa 

potestas, a unified authority supreme in internal affairs and independent 

with respect to external affairs. Anytime anyone invokes sovereignty, 

however, they are almost sure to be saying something pretty close to, ‘I’m 

the owner of this place and you’re not.’

There are some particular ownership rights and duties that we can 

usefully tie to the word sovereignty or to territoriality at the level of States 

in the international state system. The trick is to determine what individuals 

control these rights, where those people sit, how much power they have to 

freely exercise their claimed rights and to limit others’ behaviors. 

Roughly, how might we, in this age, identify a sovereign? The sovereign...

1. alone can conscript soldiers from the population within a delimited territory;

2. alone can impose taxes within the territory;

3. can deny entrance into the territory;

4. delegates those who uniquely represent the territory to international organizations;

5. has a monopoly on granting impunity for acts committed 

within the territory.

When a State or government cannot effectively control who can grant 

impunity for behavior within its asserted territory, adherents of a defiant entity might enjoy impunity for acts of violence there. If so, they probably also 

choose not to pay the State’s taxes, refuse service in its army (except subversively), and come and go as they please. Things are not copacetic. 

Impunity and sovereignty are correlative if not co-constitutive. Sovereignty, 

in a sense, is the ultimate geography of impunity. Salient among the details 

is international respect of the above-listed items. Extradition, for instance,

is tied to this sovereignty-by-recognition. Member countries agree to support each other’s control over impunity.

Land outside the formal lines of property ownership is possessed 

by force. As with property systems at every scale, regional and global

membership societies recognize certain boundaries for the purpose of conflict avoidance and resolution among the members. It has been a long time 

since the world had much territory outside formal international boundaries. 
52 Sovereignty

211

Almost all the land on earth now falls within the lines of some internationally recognized country, although some irredentism still exists. This isn’t 

the same as saying that the boundaries and borders all work all the time, 

just that somebody thought they were divvying up rights and duties and 

made some commitment, idle or otherwise, to help enforce the club’s concept of rights and duties. Almost all territorial borders and boundaries 

relate to a commitment to effect eviction (to deny entrance or use by someone who has no right according to the agreement of the social compact). 

The idea of international recognition seems sometimes to throw people off. 

It shouldn’t. If the United Nations uses the argument that it is protecting 

the principle of sovereignty when it goes in to kick the Iraqis out of Kuwait, it is saying that the club leaders made agreements about the lines and 

that they aren’t going to accept a violation of those lines.

The rules of the bigger clubs come from multilateral agreements 

like the UN Charter, from customary international law, bilateral treaties 

and business contracts, but the point is always the same. There are some 

agreed-upon rights associating member States with specific land and water. The agreements are in place to avoid constant fighting. Some people 

suggest that there is no international law or that international law doesn’t 

work, but this is simply not true. Most leaders of States want to have recognized property rather than constantly have to possess by force. 

Otherwise, there would be a lot more international fights than there are. A 

leader wanting to gain more rights on the other side of some internationally 

recognized line may have to trick or defy the rules, and since enforcement 

is expensive, lesser violations often go unpunished.

The clubs of countries in the international property system grant representational exclusivity. One of the big benefits of membership is that (for

the most part) club members agree to do business only with one recognized 

representative entity. The United States Government sends a representative 

to the United Nations, not fifty. There are exceptions and odd cases. For 

instance, Puerto Rico sends its own representatives to some international 

bodies. If an international body admits a delegate from a defiant entity (a 

delegate not endorsed by the State), the international body affronts and diminishes that State’s sovereignty saying, “You are not the full or wholly 

legitimate owner of that territory.” Recognition in international forums of 

an entity such as the Palestinian Liberation Organization is an example.
52 Sovereignty

212

If a State can’t maintain a monopoly over the granting of impunity 

within its borders, it might not be able maintain other characteristics of 

sovereignty, even to include not being the only entity invited to send a 

representative to the meetings of some international body. We might argue 

in a given case that a ‘non-State’ entity is illegitimate (in the normative 

sense of ethical standards) and so does not deserve representation to an 

international forum, or to send ambassadors to other sovereign States. We

may argue instead that a State needs the assistance of the other members 

of the club to help it regain rights lost to unworthy trespassers, claimants,

and usurpers. On the other hand....

These questions come up all the time. Sometimes the cases are clearcut. In South America, Hugo Chávez proposed that the international clubs 

recognize the FARC as a legitimate international representative of Colombians. His idea was a direct insult to the Colombian government’s claim of 

unique sovereign representation in the international system. In a way, 

Chavez’ assertion made sense. The FARC was able to grant impunity to its 

members in much of Colombia, FARC members could come and go against 

the wishes of the formal State, didn’t pay government taxes, assessed their 

own taxes, conscripted soldiers, and often murdered without consequence. 

President Chávez’ proposal came at a time when the fortunes of the FARC 

were waning precipitously, however, and when the hyper-violent modus operandi of the FARC had become more evident to the world. If President 

Chávez had been acting as a good member of the traditional international 

clubs, he would have supported the rules of those clubs recognizing and 

guarding Colombia’s sovereignty -- which includes Colombia’s right to a 

monopoly over the granting of impunity within Colombia and the right to 

send unique representatives to international forums. Chávez would have 

helped seal off the FARC routes to sanctuary in Venezuela and helped eliminate the FARC leaders’ granting of impunity. President Chávez did not 

want to be a good club member (at least of the clubs as he saw them) -- and 

Venezuela gave him enough power that he didn’t have to be.

A confusing political drama in Honduras raised questions about the 

nature of the international system. Components of the Honduran State decided in 2009 that their president, José Zelaya, was breaking the law. 

Following orders from their Supreme Court and congress, a Honduran military unit arrested President Zelaya. It then deposited him on the tarmac 

in neighboring Costa Rica. No internal armed conflict ensued, but some 
52 Sovereignty

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international bodies and foreign governments refused to admit delegates 

from Honduras after the ouster. They continued to recognize the booted

executive and not the rest of the government that, apparently in accordance 

with the Honduran constitution, kicked him out.

In front of a house in Boiling Springs, Pennsylvania sets a curious 

plaque commemorating the house’s first owner, abolitionist Daniel Kaufman. Daniel provided a way station on the ‘underground railroad’ 

established to secret slaves out of the antebellum South and to freedom in 

Canada. Maryland slave owner Mary Oliver sued Kaufman in property 

court and won, costing the Northerner about $4,000.00, a lot of money at 

the time. Although northern states had abolished slavery and many citizens were morally offended by the institution, others in Cumberland 

County, Pennsylvania were still slave owners well into the 19th century. 

Daniel’s older brother David (who moved to Texas as a young man where 

he died in 1851) was apparently pro-slavery. Most citizens of the North

admitted the human, owner/not property status of Blacks (notwithstanding 

the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 or Dred Scott decision of the Supreme 

Court in 1857). Legal conditions, however, were such that a citizen of the 

North did not have the right to defy the slavery laws of the South. In fact, 

violation of Southern property law drew a sanction. A central fight-causing dilemma of sovereignty existed. Nice people advocate cross-cultural 

understanding and tolerance, but the most conflictive aspects of culture 

involve property. It may seem that varying systems of property can live 

together in a globalized world, but there is no way to respect sovereignty 

while simultaneously defying property laws. Sovereignty and property are 

the same quantity. When the ownership regimes of two States differ radically in terms of the basic rules regarding who can own what, the potential 

for a fight exists.

The list of five ownership rights at the beginning of this section

typifies national sovereignty. Transnational gangsters often recruit foot 

soldiers within a particular ethnicity, tax a select set of products or smuggle 

them across international boundaries. They protect their members from 

State prosecution and mock the territorial map (and therefore the whole 

scheme of rules) of the countries in the international club. That’s why 

pirates and terrorists are explicitly considered enemies of the State system. 

It boils down, again, to the words territory and impunity. Anonymity remains the sibling of impunity at the international scale. If a State, 
52 Sovereignty

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supposedly a member in the club of sovereigns, provides anonymity for 

the identity and wealth of a transnational gangster, that State is really violating the terms of the club agreement and undermining someone’s 

national sovereignty. Some bankers have been so good at maintaining fiduciary discretion (euphemism for secret bank accounts) and so many 

people appreciate the anonymity that they have provided for individual 

wealth; that they have been given a pass on what most analysts understand 

as willful, continuous accessorial behavior to massive international crime 

with purposeful disrespect for international sovereignty. Secret international bank accounts constitute major sanctuaries in the firmament of 

irregular wars. Of course, if your cause is just and your government a 

tyrant, you might not consider your secret banking accessorial behavior; 

but rather a noble risk.

Please see sections: 118, Democracy; 20, Rule-of-law; 24, Ruthlessness 

and Resolve; 105, Genocide Geography; 72, Land Strategy and Property 

Strategy; 97, Oviedo; 137, Foreign Support and Foreign Perspective; 

and 127, Between Liberty and Lawrence.



“One result of identifying sovereignty with might instead of legal right 

was to remove it from the sphere of jurisprudence, where it had its 

origin and where it properly belongs, and to import it into political 

science, where it has ever since been a source of confusion.”203 F

204

J. L. Brierly,

The Law of Nations

--------------

New occasions teach new duties,

time makes ancient good uncouth,

They must upward still and onward,

who would keep abreast of truth.

from the James Lowell hymn,

‘Once To Every Man and Nation’ (1845)

--------------

“If goods don’t cross borders, soldiers will.”204 F

205

Frédéric Bastiat (attributed)


215

Lawyers are lazy

Section 53,

Hohfeldian Grievance Analysis

The name of this section is both an admiration of and theft from Wesley Newcomb Hohfeld’s ideas about how to analyze complex cases 

(especially property cases) in civil legal practice. He’s been dead for many 

decades, so he won’t mind; apologies to his great-great grandchildren. 

Hohfeldian Analysis is adapted here as a practical way to dissect existing or 

nascent violent organized struggles for the purpose of determining the likelihood that one party or another will prevail, how much effort that might 

take, and the best way to win. It could be applied to forecasting future conflict, but for explaining if or why a given society is likely to experience 

chronic conflict, I recommend something more like what is offered in Section 48, Grading the Social Compact. For identifying which of the many 

locales in the world might demand the attention of their neighbors because 

of such problematic conditions, I suggest public participation, as proffered 

in Section 108, Common Knowledge.

Every day, some process akin to Hohfeldian Analysis is applied by 

practicing civil lawyers for quickly analyzing the situation of a prospective 

client during initial consultation. Let’s say the lawyer is competent, honorable, and wants to give the prospective client an honest estimate 

regarding his chances for a positive outcome. This actually happens, really. The lawyer will try to accurately identify:

1. The object(s) of the conflict (the grievance);

2. All rights and duties potentially at issue;

3. All interested identities of potential parties to the issue as 

they relate to each right and each duty (and the identities’ 

agents and any overlaps in identity membership and affinity);

4. Preferred and acceptable goals of each interested identity 

(and of the leadership agents of each identity, especially exclusive agents);

5. Resources and capabilities that each of the identities can

bring to bear on the issue (especially of the prospective client: Get the money up front!);

6. Jurisdictions (derived from the location of the objects, rights, 

parties, and courts);
53 Hohfeldian Grievance Analysis

216

7. Mechanisms of resolution (court, settlement, police, prayer) 

and procedural rules;

8. Likely outcomes under a variety of circumstances; and

9. The likely costs and risks of distinct courses of action.

There aren’t many simple civil cases, so this process goes on in one 

form or another, at varying levels of efficiency, thousands of times every 

day, and it generally leads to favorable results for someone, even if only 

for the lawyers.

The identities of the parties may be precise, like ‘Cullen Barclay 

Demarest’, or they may be amorphous, such as ‘theatergoers’, ‘the environmentally responsible’, or ‘patriots’. The membership of the identities 

can overlap and members can enter and drop out of an identity at will, even 

whimsically. The significant identities exhibit some level of intent and 

resolve, however (depending on the quality of their leadership or agents, 

which includes their lawyers), and one key to a useful analysis is to correctly match the objects at issue with the right identities and the identities 

to their resolve, resources and objectives, and leadership. If this is done 

well and quickly, it is then not so hard to determine jurisdiction, resolution 

mechanisms, chances for success either in settlement or trial, risks, costs 

and potential rewards. It is also easier to game the inevitable counterclaims and cross claims.

To best analyze property disputes, Hohfeld noted that the relevant 

rights and duties were not derived from relationships between persons and 

things (like land or personal possessions) but between and among persons. 

Rights, according to Hohfeld, are formed by the nature of multiple interrelated relations among people. In this light it makes sense that ‘social 

compact’ be understood as almost synonymous with ‘property regime’. 

Terms like ‘rule-of-law’, ‘justice’, ‘sustainability’, or ‘peace’ fit comfortably 

within the meaning of the social compact and within Hohfeldian analysis. 

When contemplating and listing the ‘objects’ of a civil conflict, it is an easy 

shorthand to say, for instance, ‘the lot at the northwest corner of 121st and 

Washington streets’, but the object is really a less tangible set of rights and 

duties, such as the right to exclusive use of that lot along with duties to pay 

taxes and keep it safe. We say that the thing is the object, but we are really 

talking about a concert of rights and duties that will be recognized by the rest 

of the community. That is what transforms the lot from being a mere thing 

or location into being property.
53 Hohfeldian Grievance Analysis

217

A similar process, with some adjustments, can be helpful for the 

analysis of armed conflicts of the type contemplated by this book. As to 

armed conflict, however, we’ll add some elements to the question list.

To number 5, resources and capabilities of the parties, for instance, we’ll

highlight the capability to maintain or dominate anonymity.

To number 7, the mechanisms of resolution, we can add ‘physical elimination of the enemy’.

We could add a specific 10th question directed at sanctuaries and routes to 

and from sanctuaries, or we could consider physical sanctuaries as part of 

the jurisdictional problem contemplated by number 6.

Please note that this is a learning device built for speed. It is supposed to assist common sense get to some practical answer to a problem. 

It does not matter which of the categories of analysis you land on first --

the identities, the objects, the agents, etc., although starting with the grievance is a good idea. It also doesn’t matter if some of the questions and 

answers overlap a little -- better in fact. Keeping the identities consistent 

with their agents and understanding the real power of those agents does

matter. After all, part of classic strategy is not engaging a stronger foe 

unless you have a secure route of escape. You don’t want your measurements of strength to be faulty.

A country like Bolivia, with a constant, complicated internal struggle that includes competitive, overlapping identities, organized criminal 

activity, strong political parties, high regional income differentials, regionally specific international economic dependency, a politically astute 

population, and so on, is a laboratory of social conflict. We can usefully 

dissect that conflict by applying the Hohfeldian lawyer’s approach suggested above. If it helps you remember key questions to ask, that’s good. 

It might even serve for the paragraphing of some sort of report. Checking 

boxes, however, can threaten reason.

Depending on who ‘we’ are, the scale of our contemplation might be 

outsized in relation to our interests and power, or at least it might be too large 

a scale for efficiently dissecting the relevant interests and identities at play. 

The Department of Santa Cruz, Bolivia, for instance, might be an appropriate scale of analysis. Time is the other inescapable scale-setter. If we were 

to need final resolution of some issue within the period of a president’s remaining term in office, the relevant objects, identities and goals would take 

a different form than if we were serenely planning the inheritance of our 

great grandchildren. In this regard, the fashionable term ‘sustainability’ seems 
53 Hohfeldian Grievance Analysis

218

to argue a lengthening of the time period for valid objectives. One of the common sources of self-delusion or confusion, and a technique for deceiving 

others, is the mismatching of practicable scales of time and space with proposed goals and rationales. You can always stump your opponent or yourself 

by lowering or rising to different scales in time, geography or concept.

A weakness inherent in many approaches to the analysis of human 

competition is insufficiency in identifying and locating the agents or brokers 

representing an identity to the conflict or their sources of power, their ability 

to maintain anonymity, and the locations of their sanctuaries and routes 

thereto. Hohfeldian Analysis is vulnerable to criticism as a technique for 

irregular armed conflict because of the anonymity typically at play in armed 

struggle. The dispute environment in which Wesley Hohfeld proposed his 

formula was, and remains, one in which ‘discovery’ is enforced by the regime of laws and in which public records can be made transparent if they are 

not already. The lawyers’ environment is one in which all parties are forced 

to submit to a common information rule and where unnamed entities rarely 

exist or where at least their agents are made known. Not being able to precisely establish the names, home ground and wealth of the competition 

identities and their agents can make Hohfeldian Analysis hard to employ. 

This fact serves to highlight again the importance of anonymity as a central 

issue of irregular conflict. It also suggests another way to determine how 

well things are going in your irregular war. That is to say, if Hohfeldian 

Analysis cannot be effectively practiced, it is probably because anonymity 

reigns, in which case we can be sure that measurements of the attainment of 

‘rule-of-law’ or ‘control over the granting of impunity’ are not going to look 

good for the government. In any case, consideration of an armed conflict 

using something like Hohfeldian Grievance Analysis might speed planners 

and leaders to reasonable appreciations of a given conflict.

Hohfeld asserted that relationships among people regarding valuable things (interests in land always considered valuable) could be paired 

as correlatives or as opposites. Hohfeld also insisted on the need for clarity 

and precision in the use of the language. Let’s just say, however, that his 

pairings were not patently clear and so we’ll take the liberty to change 

those pairings a little in order to further our aims as to the analysis of armed 

conflict, as follows:

Pairings: Right/Duty; Privilege/Restriction; Power/Duty; Immunity/Liability

The pairings can be useful for testing the relationships associated with objects of contention. If you gain a right related to a piece of land, what are 
53 Hohfeldian Grievance Analysis

219

the duties and to whom do they belong? If you gain some power, such as 

control over who gets to take the SAT exam, what duties of fairness do 

you incur? If you win the privilege of serving as mayor, what restrictions 

does that place on other aspirants?

Adding one more twist to the process, we can apply a juridical contribution of one of Hohfeld’s contemporaries, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. 

Holmes is credited with what is called ‘legal pragmatism’. The gist of legal 

pragmatism is the idea that the duty owed as a result of making a contract is

not to fulfill the contract, but rather to fulfill the contract or to pay the monetary consequences of not fulfilling it (often called damages). This was a 

big deal, a significant innovation, because it took away some of the sense of

revenge and punishment in civil law, thus ameliorating the judgmental logic 

of morality, and replacing it with a practical, or pragmatic, sense of restitution or fairness. This is valuable to your analysis of grievances because it 

can offer an easier path to conflict resolution. It is not a universally understood or necessarily cross-cultural concept. In other words, the philosophy 

of justice with which you begin your analysis of a fight will also impose 

itself on the options you have for conflict resolution. You might have to 

teach legal philosophy.

Please see sections: 48, Grading the Social Compact; 127, Between Liberty 

and Lawrence; 68, Scale; 49, Territorial Scrutiny; 70, Measuring Effects of 

Actions on Structure; 112, DIME and PMESII; 20, Rule-of-law; and 77, Sex.



“Common sense and a sense of humor are the same thing, moving at 

different speeds. A sense of humor is just common sense, dancing.”

William James (attributed)

--------------

“And so, when the sacred months are over, slay those who ascribe 

divinity to aught beside God wherever you may come upon them, 

and take them captive, and besiege them, and lie in wait for them at 

every conceivable place! Yet if they repent, and take to prayer, and 

render the purifying dues, let them go their way: for, behold, God is 

much forgiving, a dispenser of grace.”

Surah 9, ayah 5, Koran205 F

206


220

I’ll protect you from me

Section 54, Extortion

Extortion is an activity, like smuggling, that all but defines organized 

crime. It is also one of the main strategy alternatives applied by both regular 

and irregular armies everywhere. Intimidation is a related term for a more 

direct, clumsier use of force, but it, too, is an obvious and universal concomitant of concentrated power.

Every extortion is a protection racket. When you extort you create a 

threat to your target and allow him to buy his or her way out of the threat. You 

offer to protect your target from you. Sometimes you have to communicate 

the threat discreetly, because a sense of dishonor can increase the stakes. 

Sometimes you have to communicate the threat more openly, but in every case 

you have to make the threat credible. If your target does not believe that you 

will carry out your threat, your extortion won’t work. You may want to make 

a threat especially indiscreet, so that others can be extorted more easily. Mexicans, for instance, are hard to impress, so if you are a Mexican gangster, you 

may have to roll a half dozen or so heads (formerly attached to the bodies of 

some of your enemy’s employees) onto a nightclub dance floor. Extortion 

knows no scale limits. You can make money by protecting a parked car from 

having its paint scratched (by you) or assure an emperor that you won’t destroy 

any more of his cities. You might just stand near a stop light and wash windshields with a squeegee then ask to be paid or you might point out to the CEO 

of a large company that you can provide diversity education to help protect the 

company from some unfortunate race riot.

Kidnapping is the queen of extortions. You take something of the 

highest value, a daughter maybe, and ransom her back to her distraught father. 

If you do this well, you can make it seem as though you’re the good guy for 

sparing her delicate life. One of these days someone is going to come up with 

a great movie plot wherein a father finds that his wife is murdered and his 

daughter kidnapped. He then spends the rest of the movie plotting and executing the rescue and a gruesome revenge. That is to say, kidnapping can be 

a high pay-off activity, but it entails some risk.

Extortion’s little cousin, bribery, requires less technical expertise and 

physical risk than kidnapping or outright theft and requires less post-act logistical preparation for product movement, storage and fencing. You might be 

able to bribe a government official with some money to allow you a particular 

privilege, speed a bureaucratic process or overlook an infraction, and maybe 
54 Extortion

221

this can proceed with no threat of violence. For this reason, bribery is often 

considered less of a crime than extortion. Bribery leads quickly to extortion, 

however, when the government official starts getting uppity and asks for too 

much or doesn’t respond to your needs diligently, in which case you may have 

to threaten to expose his corruption, along with the photos you took of him 

with that one prostitute. Be careful with police officials, however. You need 

to know how far their corruption has reached. The police department has guns, 

too, and you could start a fight you cannot afford. Your extortions have to be 

in proportion to your capacity to fulfill your threat and to withstand any incidental retaliations or mistakes.

Extortion warfare might be a suitable term for the course of action most 

favored by gangsters, insurgents, or terrorists. Extortion may be collective or 

highly individual, and is often both. The particular tactic of communicating a 

threat might be a letter to a local government, a kidnapping or bombing, or just 

a kiss on the right cheek, but kidnapping defines a recourse to violence that 

can be applied in the absence of revolutionary strategy, with or without a political goal, and almost regardless of advantageous correlation of forces save 

that advantage gained by amorality. Extortion is an available option for a 

whole array of identities, and is aided by every advance in communications 

and information technology. It is supremely flexible in that some form of violence can be leveraged against almost any vulnerability.

Successful extortion, as well as resistance to extortion, requires detailed knowledge of the wealth to be extorted and where the extortionists can 

most efficiently and safely endanger that wealth. The extortionist must nevertheless have a sanctuary and be able to move to it safely in case the target 

resists. So, while the use of extortion can sometimes free a leader from having 

to find his enemy’s line of retreat and maneuver accordingly, it does not mean 

he can then ignore operational equation of classic strategy. If you resort to 

extortion, you not only have to be sure you can make good on the threat (actually you might be able to deceive that part), you will probably run some risk 

of exposing your own route to sanctuary.

Extortion is the principle alternative way to defeat a foe besides confounding his route of retreat to sanctuary. The key is to threaten something of 

such essential value to him that he is compelled to surrender to you in exchange for its salvation. For instance, if NATO begins to destroy all of 

Belgrade, the Serb Army, otherwise neither perturbed nor dislodged, gives up. 

Or, in the face of spectacular and disheartening loss, the Japanese Emperor 
54 Extortion

222

spares the Americans a counter guerrilla campaign on the main islands of Japan. The strategy of holding at risk things of value requires a certain flexibility 

of moral boundaries, a requisite level of ruthlessness. In a sense, extortion is 

an attack on the sanctuary of the spirit from which there is no physical retreat.

Another strategic approach, gentler, and one to which we might aspire 

under the moniker of legitimacy, is to create a social compact within which 

(A) a great majority of citizens enjoys a sense of belonging, and (B) anonymity 

for reporting illegal behavior to the State is assured. Under such conditions, 

resistance forces cannot plan secure routes of escape to sanctuary; and their 

management of risk for an anti-State movement is problematic at best. It is 

then hard for a rebel organization to enjoy the secrecy and impunity needed to 

grow, or when beaten, to return. Unfortunately, while positive changes in society can rarely be made to outpace changing grievances, there is always time 

for extortion.

Please see sections: 62, Bank Robbery; 95, Childhood; 102, Negotiations; 

76, Gender; 106, Massacres; 81, What a Clergy Wants; 143, Seven Strategy Strains; and 74, Refugees and Displaced Persons.



“Catapultam habeo. Nisi pecuniam omnem mihi dabis, ad 

caput tuum saxum immane mittam.”206 F

207

Brutus Maximus

---------------

“You can't catch me, you don't have a hope of catching me,

so you take my friends instead.”

Ned Kelly in the movie,

Ned Kelly (2003)207F

208

---------------

Dr. Evil: As you know, every diabolical scheme I've hatched has been 

thwarted by Austin Powers. And why is that, ladies and gentlemen?

Scott: Because you never kill him when you get the chance, and you're a 

big dope?

from the movie,

Austin Powers:

International Man of Mystery (1997)208F

209


223

The basic extortion

Section 55, Kidnapping

Kidnapping is the paradigmatic extortion, a version cruel and effective enough that it deserves its own policy prescriptions and its own 

counter-strategy planning and resourcing.

Kidnapping is the ultimate protection racket. If you are the kidnapper, you promise to protect the hostage from harm if the hostage’s family 

(or company, government) pays up. Interestingly, although kidnapping is 

one ruthless option to military operational math, the modern industrial version appears to be dependent on mastery of similar map algebra. The 

kidnapping mastermind establishes a formula to communicate terms, setting up contacts and exchanging goods in such a way as to minimize the 

risk of having the victims pursue his people with any success. He attacks 

in such a way that he can withdraw to or remain in sanctuary and negotiates 

in such a way that the mechanisms of the negotiation do not give away the 

geography of his lines of communication.

High kidnapping rates metastasized from Colombia to Argentina, 

then to Mexico and other places after the FARC learned to industrialize it, 

formalize it, and give business clinics on how to make a safe and profitable 

go of it. Part of the genius of the industrial kidnapping business-plan is a 

total consciousness of geography. Time, distance and location are key factors in successful industrial-scale kidnapping.

Of course, control of anonymity and secrecy are inherent in successful 

kidnapping as well, making a secure means of communicating with the mark 

critical. Therein also resides a major weakness for kidnapping as a criminal 

enterprise. Security of communications is always dependent on codes, technology, and tradecraft, and those are always subject to compromise.

Given the nature of this particular criminal enterprise, tied as it is 

so closely to anonymity, a trend of increasing kidnapping can be seen as a 

measure of State failure. If you are working for government and you cannot stop kidnapping, you are doing poorly. If you are opposed to that 

government and you can kidnap with impunity, you are doing well. However, there may exist a slowly building legitimacy toll against any

organization that becomes too closely identified with this particular funding activity. During various negotiation sessions between the government 

and the FARC, the question of contrition and propitiation (victims’ restitution) for kidnapping had been a stumbling block. It can prove especially 
55 Kidnapping

224

difficult for a government to sincerely offer amnesty to perpetrators of this 

crime, since the government may have little control over the efforts of victims to recur to autonomous judicial institutions and vigilantism.

The existence of kidnapping is its own proof that a government 

must try to neutralize the criminal mastermind. When should we negotiate 

the release of a hostage and pay the ransom? On occasion, some amount 

of negotiation should be undertaken and maybe a payment made, even if 

the stated policy is never to do so. The fact of the kidnapping shows that 

the kidnapper has power. Once in a while we have to buy time. Then we 

are doubly accountable for breaking the impunity.

Please see sections: 95, Childhood; 14, Negotiations; 24, Ruthlessness and 

Resolve; 16, Presence; 63, Roadblocks and Checkpoints; 131, Is It an Insurgency?; 25, Why Humans Don’t Fight; and 90, Prisons and Prisoners.



Ethan: Well Reverend, looks like you've got 

yourself surrounded.

Clayton: Yeah and I figure on getting myself unsurrounded.

from the movie,

The Searchers (1956)209F

210

---------------

Bad Guy: Please understand...it was all business.

It wasn't personal.

Bryan Mills: It was all personal to me. (kills Bad Guy)

from the movie,

Taken (2008)210F

211

---------------

I’ll try to make the stars shine brighter for you

And I’ll take you...on my shoulders, hold you way up high

I’ll even chase the rainbow hangin’ in the sky

Cause after all is said, after all is done, I’d do anything for you

from the Phil Collins song,

Come With Me


225

Self-defense units, paramilitaries, vigilantes...

Section 56,

Militias and Gun Control

Here militias represents an entire set of armed groups that aren’t 

national armies, gendarmeries, police or national guards, and aren’t necessarily anti-government insurgent armed forces or criminal gangs, either. I 

also put the subject of contractors into a separate section, Condotierri. 

That may seem a long list of what militias might not be, but the naming 

conventions can include paramilitaries, community self-defense forces, 

private armies, private guard forces, tribal militias, political party armed 

wings, vigilantes, and posses. All the names and definitions are contextual, overlap, and are subject to imperfect translations. Whatever these 

less formal armed forces are called, they can change the face of an irregular 

war and change prospects for the success of any of the players. Notably, 

the framers of the Constitution of the United States used the word militia, 

and used it in the same paragraph as arms, closely associating the two with 

an essential political right.

Don’t be diverted by debate about whether or not militias can be 

effective against insurgents or criminal bands. They can be. They might 

also become the insurgent or criminal bands. Any debate will depend for 

its logic on local situational variables, but the bottom line is that when it 

comes to the question of whether to design, create and employ irregular 

forces, all sides of an irregular war will consider it.

The fact that there are so many names and organizational formulae 

for militia is hint enough toward a method for categorizing, evaluating and 

treating these organizations. Don’t do so according to their name. You 

don’t have to call anything a militia, but there are a number of characteristics that demarcate the interest you will take in militia-like organizations. 

A number of other notes in this book cover the pertinent characteristics of 

armed forces and the milestones of armed conflict. You will recognize 

some of them in the discussion below.

Foremost is the question of impunity. Let’s say for the sake of fluidity that you represent a national State. You want to know if some militia 

under consideration is able to grant impunity to members of its force. If 

the militia can grant impunity independent of your grant, then you may 

have a problem. If, on the other hand, you can arrest and punish members 
56 Militias and Gun Control

226

of the militia, including its commander, then that militia is part of your 

armed forces, and you might be responsible for its actions. How you delimit its missions, territories, obligations, armament, and recruiting is of 

interest, of course, and is in no way a mystery. If, on the other hand, the 

militia can grant protection to its members from punishment by your government, you might want to ask the following four questions:

1. Is the militia leadership able to convey some sort of immunity to its 

people for violent acts in accordance with some form of written social 

compactsuch as articles of confederation or a hierarchical system of sovereignty that limits the types of actions for which immunity can be 

granted? In other words, maybe the members of the militia enjoy some 

sort of immunity apart from what would be granted by the central government, but it is limited within a known geographic space, or only 

applies to certain kinds of acts or categories of person. Instead, the militia 

might enjoy impunity because of some written or unwritten negotiation 

or treaty-like agreement that your State acceded to because the militia in 

question was strong enough to force it or because you wanted that militia’s help to defeat some other armed force. It happens all the time, even

in the context of major wars, e.g. the Sicilian mafia and its dealings with 

the United States government during WW II.

2. What are the militia’s obligations and authorities? Is it required to 

muster and deploy if there is a natural disaster? Are its members 

obliged to serve warrants or chase a criminal in flagrante delicto? Can 

they implement dead-or-alive orders such that they do not have to attempt capture and arrest? Do they have formal geographic limitations 

or otherwise observe jurisdictional or territorial boundaries outside of 

which they do not go? If so, you will want to know exactly why, because the answer might form the basis of a method for your re-asserting 

control over it later.

3. How hard is this bunch? Levels of ruthlessness and resolve often come 

into play when dealing with a militia. What is it, by the nature of its membership, willing to do? The platoon chasing Rambo in the movie First 

Blood might be about average for a militia. That comedic militia was 

willing to shoot at Rambo, but not if it entailed any danger.

4. Finally, there is the mundane and sordid question of how rich the militia is. Does it have its own trucks? Transportation forms half of 

Maguire’s operational synthesis and, if the members all have to walk, it 
56 Militias and Gun Control

227

is not the same kind of militia as the volunteer force of private pilots and 

plane owners that helped the Guatemalan Army during the 1980s. The 

other half of Maguire’s formula is about battle strength. How much machinegun ammunition can the militia get or carry?

These are the four big questions (impunity/authorities and obligations/resolve/wealth), but the militias theme is better divided into two 

parts. One is legalistic and turns almost completely on the question of who 

can grant impunity and for what acts. That part relates directly to State 

success. The observation about impunity implies that you seek a complete 

understanding of the legal framework within which a militia exists, to include what flexibility you have to influence the laws or other rules that 

limit the militia in terms of leadership, territorial powers and obligations. 

If what you confer is the only immunity or impunity the commander and 

personnel of a militia are likely to enjoy, then it is your militia and its actions are probably your responsibility. The other part is the practical one 

revolving around what the militia can do for you, independent of the impunity question. That part can be tallied according to the last three 

questions about the militia’s obligations and authorities, its psychological 

hardness, and its material capacity.

OK, the question was just divided into four parts, then put back into 

two parts and now we will try three parts: A local militia might be an autochthonous organization (locally birthed and not created by the central 

State as an extension of its power), or it might have been created by an 

outside entity, but the challenge for the State regarding a militia can almost 

always be divided as follows: (1) how to maintain its discipline and loyalty, (2) what to specify as its missions and mission parameters, and (3) 

how to get rid of it when it is no longer needed or goes bad.

To maintain discipline there are some tried and true aids. One is recordkeeping. Another is control of material sustenance. Another is co-opting or 

extorting its leaders. Training and indoctrination can also help a little. Section 49, 

Territorial Scrutiny, mentions imbrication and tessellation. Correct tessellating (assuring clear, non-overlapping administrative boundaries) and 

imbricating (assuring an overlap of identity) can be useful. If you do not 

maintain discipline of a militia, it will obtain its own power to grant impunity and it will become part of your State’s failure. Even in a condition of 

pure challenge to the State, however, a militia can be of assistance in defeating another State enemy. There is little doubt that the United Self-
56 Militias and Gun Control

228

Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC), for instance, became a tremendous 

problem for the National Liberation Army (ELN) guerrilla in some locales. 

Meanwhile, as the AUC grew in power, it also grew in its capacity to defy 

the Colombian government. Eventually the Colombian government had 

to defeat and dismantle the AUC.

The missions and parameters you give to a militia should be limited 

geographically if at all possible, and specific rules of engagement delivered and explained. Militias can be immensely useful in a conflict that 

features many roadblocks and checkpoints. Your government’s (or maybe 

your insurgent movement’s, if you are the insurgent) monopoly over the 

granting of impunity should be made explicit and proven at early opportunities. The militia’s mission types and territorial limits should be clearly 

expressed in terms of the impunity. In other words, if one of your militias 

has a member operating outside its designated territorial space, you want 

to have the militia itself punish the infraction and, if it does not, you will 

probably want to punish the commander of the militia. Such a move can 

entail a price in loyalty and effectiveness, however, so you will have some 

weighing to do in relation to every militia.

Technically-identified militias, such as civil air patrols, can be useful and easy to control because they depend for their existence on outside 

deliverables such as fuel and their activities are easy to monitor. One of 

the tricks to creating effective militias is control of their initial identity and 

role. Weapon types are consequential. You cannot make an arrest with a 

mortar, nor can an armed unit that does not have indirect fires compete 

against an enemy unit that does. If you are going to deny indirect weapons 

(or other crew-served weapons) to a militia as a control measure, for instance, you might want to assure that, if necessary, you can provide timely 

artillery cover. If not, you might be setting up for some kind of failure. 

The introduction of unoccupied armed aerial vehicles (armed drones) complicates the matter.

If a militia defies the central State’s asserted monopoly on the 

granting of impunity, the State might have to fight militia as it would any 

other insurgent organization. Autochthonous militias more likely to form 

where the State (via either the central government or some subordinate or 

affinity government) is not providing the service of conflict resolution and 

justice, especially as those terms apply to questions of land and trespass on 

land. If the State is not present in the land/trespass equation (if the government 

cannot effect legal eviction), the result historically and universally is violent 
56 Militias and Gun Control

229

self-help. When no effective property regime defends the lines of land ownership, the almost certain result is devolution to a condition of possession by 

force. Unless your government or the society through some working division 

of obligations and authorities provides a service of eviction of trespassers, you 

will more than waste your time with a decree that there be no militias. Such 

a decree will be worse than idle. Not only will militias form, they will do 

so out of resignation to the fact that your government is not adequate. The 

militia will form in a context of disrespect to your State. It will be born 

with a need to grant impunity to its members and with a need to organize 

surreptitiously for the use of armed force.

Once a militia begins to use force, it will harden. So, although a 

decision to form militias must be tempered by the fact that disciplining 

militias entails high risk, keep in mind that militias will form where the 

State does not provide property conflict resolution. If militias do not form 

even though a de jure government is not providing property services, it is 

probably because those services are being provided by an insurgent or 

criminal. Some anti-State group is probably now sovereign over that land. 

That is State failure.

Debate about militias is tied to debate over gun control, and to the 

issue of autochthony. Gun control is a visceral issue for many Americans. 

The founding fathers of the American republic decided on language in the 

US Constitution that tied citizens’ right to bear arms to a co-relationship 

between a free State and a ‘regulated militia’. Nobody at the time supposed that the militia they had in mind would be regulated by the central 

government, however. The militia was conceived as all able-bodied males 

and the regulation they had in mind was locally autochthonous. Many of 

the American revolutionaries felt that political power grew out the barrel 

of a gun and that the technology of firearms was singularly significant to 

the experiment in liberty.

Rounding up all the weapons seems to be an historically popular measure for governments and occupation forces to take when they set out to pacify 

or bring stability to an area. It is what the Romans did in Britannia. However, 

a generalized condition of gunlessness can make extortion of a local population by insurgents or organized criminals easier. Numerous indigenous 

villages in Colombia have found that out. Militias that are truly autochthonous, meanwhile, are likely to seek independent sources of weaponry.

Privately owned weapons can also help challenge a government 

that improperly and exclusively grants impunity. Let’s say a government, 
56 Militias and Gun Control

230

especially a local government, improperly tries to let its agents get away 

with criminal behavior, but cannot disarm the local population. Even if 

that government doesn’t suffer discipline from an outside entity, it may 

face effective challenge from the local citizenry.

If you do a good job of organizing local militia, the militia may end 

up being called the police. If you do a really good job organizing local 

militia, they not only end up policing, they will not grant themselves impunity for violent acts. Your success in irregular war may be tied to the 

formation of incorrupt militias, whether they are formed by a central government or are autochthonous. Tied to that formation is the question of 

who gets guns and where they come from.

A State’s monopoly over the tools and application of coercive force 

is not as great an element in State failure as the monopoly on granting 

impunity. Either a wider or a more restricted dispersion of lethal tools 

might help a State maintain unity and control over the granting of impunity, depending on other factors.

Please see sections: 44, Political/Military/Administrative; 45, Police or 

Military; 19, Mercatus; 86, Shifting Covet-geographies; 63, Roadblocks 

and Checkpoints; 1, Impunity; 24, Ruthlessness and Resolve; and 103,

Amnesty and Restitution.



“Who has seen a militia without weapons?”211F

212

Hugo Chávez

---------------

Kit Carson Holliday: Oh, Jeb, what does pride got to do with guns?

James Ewell Brown 'Jeb' Stuart: Kit, the two things kind of 

come together down South. You can't pry them apart. Not even 

with guns.

from the movie,

Santa Fe Trail (1940)212F

213

---------------

“Broke into the wrong...rec room, didn't ya...!

Burt Gummer in the movie,

Tremors (1990)213F

214


231

Dogs are heroes; mules are mules

Section 57, Dogs and Mules

Dogs are good people. There are bad dogs and,for those of you who don’t 

believe in the concept of human nature or dog nature, consider at least if it is possible to build a social construct for bad dogs. In the sixteenth century the Spanish 

created the Canary Island Hound, a vicious canine used to threaten, scatter and tear 

apart indigenous villages and villagers in the Americas. But those aren’t our dogs. 

Our dogs find people buried in the rubble, check luggage for drugs, find landmines 

even if there is no metal in them, and protect our bunker from rats. In the context 

of irregular war, dogs are usually counterinsurgent, but with the right indoctrination and some rib roast, they could be insurgent.

It is good to have a plan for the treatment and employment of canines, and, depending on the human cultures involved, to make evident 

their allegiance and care. No insurgency was ever won or lost on the basis 

of canines; canines are no ‘center of gravity’, but, again, they are good 

people. In Colombia, the government army and police have used dogs 

extensively for mine clearing, drug sniffing and victim recovery.

Mules and other beasts of burden (mules get to represent the set) 

may or may not be endearing, but their care and application lie closer to 

the nub of winning and losing, at least in the context of active insurgency. 

A ‘demobilized’ FARC guerrilla leader related to me that in his block 

mules were an integral part of FARC logistics and operational movement. 

For years it was puzzling and reassuring to the guerrillas that the Colombian army disdained the use of bestias. The guerrillas, meanwhile, 

maintained sizeable units dedicated to animal husbandry and pack-loading. 

The mule provided a means to transport water or mortar components too 

heavy for the individual guerrilla fighters. They also changed the formula 

of speed and distance when the government units were pursuing them in 

rough terrain, which Colombia has. The mule was a significant element in 

the strategic math of creating advantage in aggregate culminating points. 

The landmine was an extremely influential to this same end, but mulehandling was also a technology that gave the guerrilla a capability to gain 

separation from pursuing army units. The culminating points of army units 

in contact were shortened by landmines and those of the guerrillas lengthened by mules. A simplification to be sure, but in general this formula 

worked hundreds of times over.
57 Dogs and Mules

232

Search for applicable technologies that change weights of the variables in the operational equation, most of which has something to do with 

movement, time, distance and weight. The Colombian State sought the 

help of dogs, many of whom gave their lives in combat and have been 

honored for their service. FARC snipers have shot many dogs trying to 

sniff out landmines. The government had until recently been less astute 

than the FARC in the use of animals that could change advantage in operational art, this in spite of Juan’s bestia, Conchita, radiant on the national 

coffee symbol. By the way, dogs often make heroic sacrifices, but never 

commit suicide. Mules, on the other hand, have been known to shoot 

themselves in the head.

Please see sections: 79, Suicide; 140, Risk Distance and the Pursuit; 23, 

Dogs Rea; 95, Childhood; 125, Human Rights; 84, Cultures of Violence; 

31, Holes in the Ground; and 43, Sam Spade’s Whereabouts.



“Well! The last to go will see the first three go before her. 

And her little dog, too.”

Wicked Witch of the West in the movie,

The Wizard of Oz (1939)214F

215

--------------

“Be thou comforted, little dog, Thou too in Resurrection 

shall have a little golden tail.”

Martin Luther (attributed)

--------------

Pedro: Man, what is in this ..., man? 

Man: Mostly Maui Waui, man, but it's got some Labrador in it.

from the movie,

Up in Smoke (1978)215F

216

--------------

Squints: Quiet! Are you trying to wake it up? It just went to bed! 

Smalls: What just went to bed? 

All: SHHHH! The Beast.

from the movie,

The Sandlot (1993)216F

217


233

Fine print of outsourcing

Section 58, Condottieri

Mercenary armies were the norm among the Italian city-states in the fifteenth century and well into the sixteenth. Machiavelli didn’t like them. He 

said, “Mercenaries and auxiliaries are useless and dangerous,” then he went on 

and on about it.217 F

218 Not a fan. He favored a State militia system. The Italian 

mercenaries were called condottieri, which translates to contractors. There’s a 

bit of pejorative linguistic residue that we might find on the image of currentday defense contractors. At least I enjoy finding it, but it’s more fun than fair. 

There is a strong logic of efficiency for exploiting professional capacity that for 

whatever reason is found outside the active force. Plus, most defense contractors 

are not gun-toters. American experience with contractors is more that of the 

suttler, in the supply and logistics tradition.

In recent years, the United States has drawn on an increasing number of 

contractors to provide training and education. Nevertheless, it seems that the 

demand for qualified special operations personnel has led to an increase in the 

hiring of individuals who serve in roles that seem closer and closer to ‘shooter’ 

positions. These might include personal security members and combat trainers. 

The trend has occurred in conjunction with the prevailing distaste for conscripted 

service, and also in view of a legacy of overlap between military special operations forces and covert action capacity in some civilian agencies.

The above-noted trend pressurizes certain legal, ethical and political issues. These include the fighter-contractor’s status in international law, for 

instance, or the contractural obligations a government has or ought to have toward wounded or prisoner contractor-fighters. At play are questions regarding 

how long a military career should last (some contractors are soldiers who left 

active service before retirement age), what the fair market value is for military 

services, what amount of transparency we should demand regarding contractfighters and their salaries, and what level of ‘deniability’ we should afford leaders who recur more and more to the employment of contractors.

There is another dimension to contract-fighters that is and will remain a 

feature of irregular wars. The irregular armed elements, whether revolutionary 

armies, drug gangs, separatists, a hybrid, or whatever, generally count on some 

form of hired fighter. The FARC, while it invests in political indoctrination for 

recruiting and retention in its primary units, outsources many aggressive activities, such as kidnapping or highway robbery, to criminal elements. Many foot 

soldiers have switched among the various guerrilla organizations in Colombia, 

irrespective of ideology. Members of a dying M19 might change over to the 
58 Condottieri

234

ideologically compatible FARC or join the anticommunist AUC seeking better 

remuneration. After defeat in irregular wars, former guerrillas need something 

to do, as do government veterans. Machiavelli was not sanguine on this angle

of soldiery either.

Do you not have within the memory of events of your time, many soldiers in 

Italy, finding themselves without employment because of the termination of 

wars, gathered themselves into very troublesome gangs, calling themselves 

companies, and went about levying tribute on the towns and sacking the country, without there being any remedy able to be applied? Have you not read 

how the Carthaginian soldiers, when the first war they engaged in with the 

Romans under Matus and Spendius was ended, tumultuously chose two leaders, and waged a more dangerous war against the Carthaginians than that 

which they had just concluded with the Romans?218 F

219

Today, the young male ex-combatant might adhere to a government 

reintegration plan of some kind, or become a freelance condottiero.

Please see sections: 19,Mercatus; 22, Badassoftheweek.com; 137, Foreign Support and Foreign Perspective; 56, Militias and Gun Control; 15, NGOs, IOs, and

Unions; 17,Keeping Secrets; 95,Childhood; and 121,Dignity and Honor.



Silent Rip: “You sure this is where the topplegangers’ hideout is?

Gunhaver: “I hope so. If not, we’re surrounded by an entirely 

different ragtag band of mercenaries.”219 F

220

from the web comic

Homestar Runner, Cheat Commandos

--------------

Lt. DeBuin: How many are watching?

Ke-Ni-Tay: One man see as many as ten.

Lt. DeBuin: Can we find him and kill him?

Ke-Ni-Tay: You cannot.

Lt. DeBuin: But Ke-Ni-Tay can?

Ke-Ni-Tay: (nods affirmatively)

Lt. DeBuin: But will he?

Ke-Ni-Tay: Ke-Ni-Tay sign paper. Ke-Ni-Tay soldier.

Lt. DeBuin: All right. Find him and kill him.

from the movie,

Ulzana’s Raid (1972)220F

221


235

Rare, but technology helps

Section 59, Spontaneity

Spontaneous public action, in favor of one side or another in an 

armed contest, is more urban legend than historical phenomenon. Maybe 

it happens, but it is rare. The Cairo riots in 2011 that led to the downfall 

of President Hosni Mubarak were at first widely acclaimed as spontaneous

uprisings. Here is what more careful reporting uncovered:

On January 25, the first day of protests, the organizers from the youth 

wings of Egypt's opposition movements created what appeared to be 

a spontaneous massing of residents of the slum of Bulaq al-Dakrour, 

on Cairo's western edge. These demonstrations weren’t, as the popular narrative has held, educated youth who learned about protests 

on the Internet. They were instead poor residents who filled a maze 

of muddy narrow alleyways, massed in front of a neighborhood 

candy store and caught security forces flatfooted....That protest was 

anything but spontaneous.221F

222

The core of planners in Cairo had decided they would try to replicate the 

mobilization successes that ousted Zine al-Abidine Bin Ali in Tunisia. Major events in Tajir Square were designed and executed to foil the capacity 

of the security forces to manage large crowds without the imposition of 

excessive force.

Most of the time in most places, crowd actions are organized, fomented and directed by nameable leaders. Here is a famous episode from

Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in which Colonel Sherburn faces down a mob that has come to his home, ostensibly to lynch him.

‘Why don't your juries hang murderers? Because they're afraid the 

man's friends will shoot them in the back, in the dark ˗˗ and it's just 

what they WOULD do. So they always acquit; and then a MAN 

goes in the night, with a hundred masked cowards at his back and 

lynches the rascal...You didn't want to come. The average man 

don't like trouble and danger. YOU don't like trouble and danger. 

...But a mob without any MAN at the head of it is BENEATH pitifulness. Now the thing for YOU to do is to droop your tails and 

go home and crawl in a hole. If any real lynching's going to be 

done it will be done in the dark, Southern fashion; and when they 

come they'll bring their masks, and fetch a MAN along. Now 

LEAVE ˗˗ and take your half-a-man with you’ ˗˗ tossing his gun 

up across his left arm and cocking it when he says this.222 F

223
59 Spontaneity

236

Mark Twain tells us that the courage of a crowd and most of the 

individuals in it is derived from its leaders. Lenin criticized what he called 

the cult of spontaneity. He believed the great problems of history had to 

be resolved by force and that meant a militant organization, and that meant 

leaders. Today, myriad post-structural activists may halfheartedly distance their philosophizing from Lenin’s, but regarding this insistence on 

the necessity of a vanguard they remain constant. The proletariat might 

sometimes just up and do something, but for that something to induce class 

struggle, it must be directed. Much of leadership in armed conflict is ‘encouragement’ and the amelioration or control of fear. This aspect of 

human nature can be adjusted in the short term by alcohol, drugs or enthrallment. In the longer term, anonymity helps, as does superior 

firepower. Training and indoctrination is a proven tool and engagement 

with the courage of a leader is heralded in literature and art. Not all groups 

have a ‘fearless leader’, even while leaders invariably are so-called. Few

psychological operations are more effective for damaging a mass following than those which expose the leader as a coward. Although spontaneity 

of action is rare, spontaneous dissipation of mass action is common. After 

a crowd is panicked or disheartened, whether by gas canisters in a plaza or 

by exposure on an Internet chat forum, followship is hard to regenerate.

In January 2008, Carlos Andrés Santiago, a 22-year old pharmacy 

student, initiated a march against kidnapping and against the FARC guerrillas. The result was a protest march of more than four million persons 

against the leftist revolutionaries, an odd event given that mass action was 

supposed to be the domain and purview of popular leftist movements. It 

must have been disconcerting for leaders of the FARC to witness the new 

technologies of globalization being used to turn the vehicles of conscientization and public mobilization against them.

There exists what we might call a Hobsbawmean effect (after Eric 

Hobsbawm, who wrote about these things), in which the power of the mob 

or potential power of the mob is harnessed and leveraged by leaders adept 

enough to attach themselves to certain identities and grievances. The 

grievances do not have to be against the establishment, as proven by Mr. 

Santiago. Many palpable, shared grievances need little organized leadership for translation into action. One of the legendarily effective 

propaganda messages of World War II was a simple poster of how to prepare a Molotov cocktail (wine bottle half filled with gasoline and a 
59 Spontaneity

237

kerosene rag). The resistance did not need much by way of orders or messages. Those inclined got the message.

The leader who successfully represents the potential mob can transmute mere potential into leverage against almost whatever group might be 

harmed by mass action. The leader who learns to influence a small group 

of psychologically tenuous individuals has a related and potentially more 

fearful power. If the leader can convoke a crowd to listen to her sing, she’s 

an entertainer. If she can convince a lot of people to go vote for her, maybe

she’s a democrat. The point being that motivational ability is not what separates 

those who would form an anarchic mob from those who would motivate us to go 

to a concert or vote. The difference is in the match-up of a propensity in the audience to do something violent and individual mens rea. When an audience is 

motivated to take mortal action, there is almost always a pre-existing propensity, 

plus a leadership that harbors an element of ill will. If we are talking about ‘organized’ violence, someone is organizing.

In 2009, Ms. Susan Boyle sang in a television competition called 

Britain Has Talent. She was an unlikely competitor. Few occasions are 

filmed in which a crowd is caught being so genuinely, spontaneously surprised and delighted. Well, they weren’t asked to go kill anyone. The

promoters who had encouraged Ms. Boyle to sing were backstage, and 

they were absolutely certain about what the crowd reaction was going to 

be. So was it a spontaneous reaction? The crowd had been targeted.

Because of the new huge anonymous communications, a lot of people can be immediately motivated to do little things, bad and good, like 

send a few bucks to save a kitten from microwave doom. For the audience 

there is no fear, no mortal risk, no accountability, no Colonel Sherburn to 

face ˗˗ just the amassed gratification from a million poignant instances of 

no moral dilemma at all. The generated poignancy is then fungible. That 

is, the organization dedicated to saving kittens can also be putting up roadblocks. Although Lenin was correct that there is little spontaneity, we have 

to add that now there is a huge Internet-resident crowd that has within it 

every human propensity and impulsivity.

There are no spontaneous armed uprisings, no rhizoidal insurgencies, no headless, starfish armies. There might be some interesting and 

annoying phenomena, like flash riots, that you will want to keep your eye 

on that don’t entail much hierarchical direction. If you are in an armed competition, your competitor is being organized and led by somebody. Not all 
59 Spontaneity

238

armed organizations are built like a German infantry battalion, but someone 

has the mens rea, is the intellectual author, the distributor of funds, the cheerleader or ideologue, or plans to be in the nucleus of the vanguard, or the 

bishopric of the clergy. If an insurgency were to break out and no one in it 

wanted to lead or intended to take over, what would that leave, exactly? For 

some inexplicable reason, it seems to be those most taken to the cult of leadership who most talk up the idea of chaos and spontaneous, swarming

movements. If there is one thing we have learned from twentieth century 

revolutionary movements, it is that the anarchists get killed by the organizers. To win at irregular war, find and pursue the organizers.

Please see sections: 56, Militias and Gun Control; 17, Keeping Secrets;

23, Mens Rea; 14, Legitimacy; 117, Strategic Communication; 15, NGOs, 

IOs, and Unions; 22, Badassoftheweek.com; and 121, Dignity and Honor.



“A human group transforms itself into a crowd when it suddenly responds to a suggestion rather than to reasoning, to an image rather than 

to an idea, to an affirmation rather than to proof, to the repetition of a 

phrase rather than to arguments, to prestige rather than to competence.”

Jean François Revel, attributed223F

224

---------------

“But our current best assessment, based on the information that we 

have at present, is that, in fact, what this began as, it was a spontaneous, not a premeditated, response to what had transpired in Cairo.”224F

225

Susan Rice

---------------

“We reject wholesale references to the “spontaneity” of the movement.”225 F

226

Leon Trotsky

---------------

“One of the most horrible features of war is that all the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from 

people who are not fighting.”226 F

227

George Orwell,

Homage to Catalonia

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239

Small war just before air power

Section 60, War Nouveau

The turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries witnessed an eclectic, near-simultaneous stew of small wars, all in the context of 

accelerating globalization. Each contest was unique in terms of cause, motivations of the protagonists, strategic consequence, as well as in weapons 

and methods employed. The principal conflicts occurred at about as great 

a set of distances from one another as earthly possible and while their participants were often ignorant of goings-on in other parts of the world, each 

conflict nevertheless influenced efforts and outcomes in distant theaters. 

Military strategic thinking drew on centuries of conflict in which the variables of time and distance had changed little. Railroads and steamships 

had matured in the 19th century to make a difference in logistic calculations, but soon the radio and airplane, among other technologies, would 

help unhinge confidence in classic strategic theory.

Among prominent pieces in the conflict stew of 1900 were the Second Boer War, which pitted the British Empire against a group of 

transplanted Europeans; Colombia’s Thousand Days War, a federal/antifederal contest; the coalition expedition to put down the Boxer Rebellion 

in China; the United States’ suppression of insurrectionists in the Philippines; the foretelling armed defiance of the ‘Mad Mullah’ Mohammed 

Abdullah Hassan in the Horn of Africa; and, throughout 1900, American 

military governance in Cuba lead by General Wood.

The year 1900 started what some call the ‘American Century’, but 

most of the big geostrategic news was happening elsewhere. In the table 

of fin de siècle events below, four consequential events from 1899 and 

three from 1901 are mentioned in order to frame those of 1900.

1 4 February 1899 Philippines Private William Grayson kills 

a Filipino

2 24 August 1899 Southern Africa Boers place an order for six 

wireless sets

3 9 September 1899 France Alfred Dreyfus is convicted 

of treason for the second time

4 15-17 December 1899 Colombia Battle of Peralonso

5 19-24 January 1900 Southern Africa Battle of Spion Kop, Natal

6 2 February 1900 United States Hawaii becomes a US territory

7 4 March 1900 Horn of Africa Mohammed Abdullah Hassan 

attacks Jijiga
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8 15 April 1900 France Exposition Universelle opens 

in Paris

9 26 May 1900 Colombia Battle of Palonegro

10 10 June 1900 China International force dispatched 

to Peking

11 11-12 June 1900 Southern Africa Battle of Diamond Hill

12 16 June 1900 Cuba The Cubans hold local elections

13 2 July 1900 Germany First Zeppelin flight

14 14 August 1900 China International Relief Force 

reaches Peking

15 17 September 1900 Philippines Battle of Mabitac

16 1 October 1900 Southern Africa Dutch De Gelderland recovers Kruger

17 27 February 1901 Cuba McKinley signs the Platt 

Amendment 

18 23 March 1901 Philippines Aguinaldo captured 

19 15 September 1901 United States President McKinley killed by 

Leon Czolgosz

1. February, 1899. Commodore George Dewey had taken Manila in 1898, 

but did not allow the Philippine revolutionaries, who sought and expected popular recognition as liberators, to enter the city as victors over the defeated 

Spanish. This affront notified the Filipinos that the Americans did not intend 

to grant the locals immediate independence. Tense relations led to an incident 

in which two American soldiers on guard duty, one of them Private Grayson, 

killed at least two Philippine nationals, who were looking to provoke an overreaction by the Americans. Legendarily, at least, the incident sparked the 

Philippine Insurrection.

2. August, 1899. Invention of the radio was an incremental process, and 

recognition of a single most-deserving ‘inventor’ became a global public controversy, much of the evidence highlighted in patent suits and propaganda. 

Nikola Tesla, Guglielmo Marconi, and Thomas Edison stood out among the 

contenders. By 1899, in any case, working production models of wireless 

communication devices were on the market. The Boers immediately recognized the advantages the device would lend to an army in defensive positions, 

needing to take advantage of internal lines in a large theater. They placed orders for six wireless machines, but unluckily for them, the British intercepted 

the delivery. The Boers were described by the British popular press of that 

time as being “solitary, uneducated, solemn people who were resistant to 

change.”227 F

228 Their appreciation of the radio showed they were not resistant to 

innovation if it involved fighting the British.

Arguably, the most prolific and ingenious were the Americans 

Tesla and Edison, but this did not prompt the US Navy to apply the device 
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to military purposes quickly. Newly-launched American naval vessels 

would not incorporate this technology until after 1906.

3. September, 1899. In 1894, French artillery Captain Alfred Dreyfus, an 

Alsatian Jew, had been convicted of treason for having allegedly given 

military technical secrets to the Germans. He was dishonored and sent to 

Devil’s Island to rot. His family and a growing circle of activists continued 

to investigate, finding undeniable evidence of Alfred’s innocence. Although ultimately exonerated and rehabilitated, he was convicted again in 

kangaroo court in 1899. Sickened but unbroken, Dreyfus fought in WWI.

4. December, 1899. Peralonso was the first significant battle in a federalist/anti-federalist civil war that eventually cost the lives of perhaps as many 

as 150,000 Colombians. It was a set-piece confrontation of regulars, or as 

close to regulars as the contenders could afford at the time. The insurgents, 

the Liberals, sent the government army, the Conservatives, into a ragged retreat. Victory for the Liberals is credited with securing long-term leverage 

for Colombian liberalism after the war. Nevertheless, an inexperienced Liberal general failed to exploit the opportunity that presented itself. He, like 

General Meade at Gettysburg, did not, or perhaps could not, pursue the broken Conservative army, preferring instead to recover and marshal strength. 

The battle (won, but not decisively, even though it seemed to be) lent false 

hope regarding Liberal military prospects.

5. January, 1900. Boer general Luis Botha defeats a larger British force 

using modern weapons fired from well-entrenched positions. Earlier, in 

1881 during the First Boer War, the British had lost a quick series of battles 

at Majuba Hill, Bronkhurst Spruit, and Laing’s Nek. The Boers won those 

by fighting from fixed positions and using more rapid and effective infantry fire. As a result, in an 1887 military history text (A Summary of Modern 

Military History) T. Miller Maguire stated,

Still another point of great importance seems not to have been 

fully recognized, and this was that rapidity of loading, with 

increased accuracy and range, would no longer permit infantry in masses approach as heretofore a position defended by 

troops using breach loading arms....the attempt to move in 

masses under fire had to be absolutely abandoned.228 F

229

Maguire’s 1887 reference, however, wasn’t even to the lost battles of 

1881, but rather to a Prussian victory over the Austrians in 1866. The 

Austrians lost because they charged the Prussians, who were waiting in 
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prepared positions and equipped with superior breach-loading ‘needle 

guns’. In other words, Maguire was complaining in 1887 that by 1881 the 

British hadn’t learned a lesson that they could have learned in 1866. At 

the turn of the century, Maguire was dismayed further. The Battle of Spion 

Kop in 1900 indicated that the British had still not absorbed the exact same 

lesson. Maguire lamented a continuing tendency of British tardiness to 

respond to key technological changes. WWI would see the British make 

the same mistake again. Makes you wonder.

6. February, 1900. The transition of Hawaii from island kingdom to member 

in the American union reached the milestone of official territory, in spite of some 

American attempts to reject imperialism. US involvement in the Philippines 

predicated continued possession of the Hawaiian Islands. Dewey had been at a 

clear disadvantage for coaling and rearming during the events in Manila in 1898. 

The long Pacific lines of communication made incorporation of Hawaii a logical 

and comfortable decision for the American strategist, but conditions also had to 

present themselves to offset American public embarrassment at its own imperialism. A commission appointed by President Grover Cleveland in 1893 had 

found the United States guilty of dishonorable behavior, but subsequent investigations claimed otherwise, and that competing outside actors, specifically Japan 

and China, were meddling to influence the outcome. Strategic military necessity 

occasioned by the Spanish-American War settled the issue. America asserted 

permanent possession.

7. March, 1900. Mohammed Abdullah Hassan, a Somali, overran an Ethiopian garrison to recover a number of camels the Ethiopians had previously 

commandeered. Not a seminal historic event, it is instead an emblematic tick

mark in a long and successful career of resistance against foreign presence. Hassan was charismatic, astute, and identified strongly with Islamic jihad against 

Christianity, especially Ethiopian Christianity. Surviving all British and Ethiopian expeditions to discipline or destroy his ‘Dervishes’, Hassan operated in unor under-governed territory that was of secondary importance to the British. The 

British had larger strategic concerns, beginning with the Boers and proceeding 

to the Germans, so it was not until after World War I that Hassan felt a level of 

imperial attention that destroyed his following. Never himself capitulating, Hassan died of the flu in 1921.

8. April, 1900. The official artistic style of the 1900 Paris World’s Fair 

was Art Nouveau. As a style of architecture and applied arts in vogue for 
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perhaps twenty years, it featured floral and nature-conscious themes, flowing lines and softened hues. It reflected optimism and cultural confidence, 

but at the same time harbored a sense of rebelliousness and defiance 

against the older design schools. America had its enthusiasts and prime 

examples, such as Tiffany lamps and Maxfield Parrish illustrations, but 

other, more technological currents and ideas tempered the American version. A euro-centric style, and a fanaticism for some, Art Nouveau was 

short-lived, giving way to Art Deco and other Modernism. Art Nouveau 

is perhaps the first artistic style to be swept along by the phenomenon of 

globalization, and its spread reflects the Western imperial stamp of the 

times, even to the extent of America’s competent participation, but incomplete enthusiasm. As for France, new imperial adventures in West Africa, 

Madagascar, Siam and elsewhere generally were going well.2 2 9F

230

9. May, 1900. In Colombia, only five months after the battle of Peralonso, 

the Battle of Palonegro dashed Liberal pretensions of fielding military 

forces able to defeat the Conservative government in open battle. This 

time the Conservative army won, but, as at Peralonso, the winning army 

could not or did not pursue its routed foe. After Palonegro, the Liberals 

felt compelled to pursue a guerrilla strategy that prolonged the war and 

undermined any moral containment of the horrors about to be visited on 

the Colombian nation. Military command inexperience and failure at conventional warfare led to a long and destructive guerrilla contest. As a result 

of national prostration, Colombia would soon be made to concede a huge 

swath of territory to Brazil in the southeast. The definitive peace agreement was finally signed in late 1902. It would become known as the 

Wisconsin Treaty, its eponym the American battleship Wisconsin, on 

which the treaty was signed. The name evokes the American imperial 

surge as well as the geostrategic consequence of internal war that befell 

Colombia. It would also lose Panama.

10. June, 1900. Logistical challenges held up the international mission to 

relieve the foreign legation in Peking. The principal delay: so many horses 

and mules had been expended in southern Africa to support the British 

prosecution of the Boer War.

11. June, 1900. The Battle of Diamond Hill was the last formal, or setpiece, battle of the Second Boer War. Unlike the Colombian battle of 

Palonegro, it was not especially bloody, with fewer than 250 casualties on 
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both sides. Like Palonegro, its indecisiveness was followed by months of 

destructive guerrilla war.

12. June, 1900. Cubans successfully implemented General Leonard 

Wood’s Military Order 164, which called for local elections. Suffrage was 

granted to Cuban males over 20 years old. The elections went well, and 

maybe they had a beneficial counterinsurgent effect. Wood’s war on the 

mosquito population was definitive, however, all but eradicating malaria 

and yellow fever as health factors.

13. July, 1900. The first Zeppelin flight lasted for eighteen minutes, and 

was followed by other, longer flights. Lack of investment or government 

interest resulted in the ship being scrapped. Not only had the American 

Century begun, but the Century of Flight.

14. August, 1900. The China Relief Expedition reaches Peking. The Boxers resisted European commercial exploitation and foreign constraints on 

Chinese sovereignty. The intentions of the United States government were 

arguably purer than those of its coalition partners in the sense that the official policy of the United States was one of universal openness and not 

privileged concessions. The difference may not have been perceptible at 

the moment; the United States participated in the foreign military coalition. 

American capability to contribute to the international relief force rested in 

good measure on the proximity of American units in the Philippines. 

American diplomatic leverage rested partly on America’s commercial engagement with Japan. America’s participation in a coalition was rare; 

perhaps the first time America participated in a multinational force since 

the American Revolution.

15. September, 1900. One of few Philippine victories in the insurgent 

war, the Battle of Mabitac involved a futile American infantry charge 

against a prepared Filipino defensive position. About twenty US soldiers 

were killed. Pickett’s Charge was no more instructive to these Americans 

than the First Boer War had been to the British.

16. October, 1900. The Netherland’s Queen Wilhelmina evacuated President Paul Kruger and his Transvaal government cabinet aboard the De 

Gelderland in open defiance of the British blockade. A European power 

had identified with the underdog and with common ethnicity, even if not 
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to the extent that it could openly side against the British. Sending the armored cruiser was a gesture, and a bittersweet one at that. Kruger’s wife 

was too ill to travel and died soon after. Kruger himself died a few years 

later, still in exile. (And he wasn’t even Dutch)

17. February, 1901. The Platt Amendment was made to a US military 

appropriations act. It partly defined the terms of Cuban-US relations and 

effectively replaced the Teller Amendment, which had been more of an 

anti-imperialist gesture. The Platt Amendment mandated that Cuba would 

contract no foreign debt that could not be serviced from ordinary revenues, 

and facilitated US intervention in Cuban affairs. It limited Cuba’s span of 

action in foreign diplomacy and prohibited other foreign powers from obtaining basing rights on the islands. It is a milestone in the development 

of a form of partial American control that would mark some of its relations 

in the coming century.

18. March, 1901. As a Philippine insurgent leader, Emilio Aguinaldo had a 

history of being irresolute. He had accepted a payoff from the Spanish and 

later accepted one from the Americans. His personal capitulation greatly aided 

a favorable outcome for the United States, and apparently for Aguinaldo himself. He died of heart disease at the age of 94.

19. September, 1901. Philippine insurrectionists/liberationists hoped for 

the election of anti-imperialist William Jennings Bryant. When Bryant 

was not elected, morale among the insurgents slumped. McKinley’s assassination by anarchist Leon Czolgosz brought no relief in that regard. 

McKinley had actually been dubious about America’s overseas adventures. He was succeeded by his Vice President, Teddy ‘Big Stick’ 

Roosevelt, who was hard to kill.

Art expert Paul Greenhalgh opines,

Art Nouveau was developed by a brilliant and energetic generation of artists and designers, who sought to fashion an art form appropriate to the 

modern age. During this extraordinary time, urban life as we now understand it was established. Old customs, habits, and artistic styles sat 

alongside new, combining a wide range of contradictory images and ideas. 

Many artists, designers, and architects were excited by new technologies 

and lifestyles, while others retreated into the past, embracing the spirit 

world, fantasy, and myth.230 F

231

This ‘extraordinary time’ was one of rapid globalization -- of both 

theory and activity. Some strains of thought which blossomed at the time 
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246

would bear bitter fruit, like violent anarchy or ethnic nationalism. Coincidentally, the United States of America came of age as a world power -- in 

a global stew of irregular war. It was a turning point for the old customs, 

habits and styles of not just art, but military art as well. Some of the more 

enlightening observations regarding the new technologies, however, 

would go un-recognized until WWI or after. The best observations appreciated how all those new technologies radically changed the variables of 

time and distance, but did not discard time and distance. The best military 

thinkers did not forget the decay that power suffers with time and distance.

Please see sections: 123, Sea and Aerospace Power; 130, Globalization; 

135, Borders and Anarchism; 26, The Chaco War; 72, Land Strategy and 

Property Strategy; 11, Protraction and Diligence; 83, Why Are Irregular 

Wars Lost?; and 23, Mens Rea.



“At Sagamore Hill we loved a great many things -- birds 

and trees and books and all things beautiful, and horses and 

rifles and children, and hard work and the joy of life.”2 31F

232

Theodore Roosevelt

---------------

“The deepest instincts of the nation told it must fight and 

win, or forever abdicate its position in the world.”232 F

233

Arthur Conan Doyle,

The Great Boer War

---------------

“At the present moment, July 26, the British have communication 

from Johannesburg and Pretoria to the sea-coast by two routes -- to 

Cape Town and to Durban. The actions of the Boers show that it is 

not in their power seriously to incommode either the one or the other. 

The trivial raids performed by their mounted men under De Wet and 

Botha may protract the sufferings of the war, and add to the close of 

the struggle a certain luster of persistent resistance; but, barring events 

now unforeseen and scarcely to be anticipated, they cannot change the 

issue, which has become simply a question of endurance between 

combatants immeasurably unequal in resources.”233 F

234

Alfred T. Mahan,

The Story of the War in South Africa

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--World Map circa 1900--
248

¿Quién peca más?

Section 61, The Geography of Dope ‘¿Quién peca más, la que peca por la paga, o el que paga para pecar?’

(‘Who sins more, she who sins for pay or he who pays to sin?’) Sexist saying? 

Maybe. As for an answer to the question: Who cares? That’s not the point. 

This Spanish saying is often used to introduce a weighty, heartfelt argument 

from Latin Americans about the drug trade and drug war. The allusion is to 

prostitution, but is extended to the relationship of men and women generally in 

machismo society. The strategic application of the reference is obvious enough 

(at least as extended to the illicit drug trade) ˗˗ that buyers of illicit drugs are as 

bad as sellers. The idea of she and he is then combined with a personalization 

of countries as in ‘The United States buys the drugs, so why is Mexico any 

more of a sinner for selling them?’ The practical application of the saying is 

connected to arguments about whether to attack illicit drugs at their source or 

instead to invest in demand reduction ˗˗ source versus destination, supply versus demand. The argument is not weightless and when made by the agile 

lawyer seems to resonate, especially inside the stereotyped ‘Catholic mind’ 

wherein a little sense of guilt can go a long way to unhinging logic. Here are 

three defenses to keep in your mind, whether you are on the defense or not:

1. The great majority of persons in both seller and buyer countries 

don’t participate in either sale or purchase of illicit drugs. The dichotomy, if not entirely false, is one of displacement and projection of 

identity. The battle is between, on the one hand, those majorities in all 

countries who neither sell nor buy and, on the other hand, those individuals involved in illicit trade, whether producing, processing, 

moving, wholesaling, retailing or consuming.

2. Regardless of any moral equivalence between seller and buyer, the 

suppression of illegal drug use at the demand or user end invariably 

means invasion of private space. In the process of empowering police 

to inspect and repress the use of drugs, there will be a costly consequence in terms of civil rights. One might say, ‘Well, that is what you 

get for bogarting that joint, Buddy’, but law enforcement often entails 

an invasion of the spaces and rights of third parties and a destruction 

of privacies and associations that touch accidentally beyond the use of 

illicit drugs only because of physical geographic proximity. In the 

process of empowering police to repress drug use, it is impossible not 

to both empower but also embolden police to peek at other behaviors 

and effect other intrusionsinto private lives on the wings of expanding 

and maybe enjoyed suspicions. Drug use suppression at some point 

has the side effect of violating citizens’ rights. Suppression of the 
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seller, on the other hand, has a distinctly different geographic signature. Sellers must build contraband routes, supply chains, production 

facilities and source contracts. Clearing marijuaneros out of a national park is not the same as searching an apartment.

3. Illicit drug production and sale enterprises cause more governmental corruption than does drug use. The money at the profit end and the 

structures needed for the industry are far more toxic to the functioning 

of government than the post-distribution use of illicit drugs. Use-suppression does little to relieve the extortive pressure put on 

governments in illicit drug producing lands.

Offering the above arguments is not to say that demand reduction is not 

worth doing and the ever-present, if wistful, ‘third way’ is legalization. Legalization is a chimera, however. In a world of tort law wherein cigarette 

manufacturers are sued for producing something patently poisonous and plaintiffs’ lawyers presentsecondhand smoke asso intolerable thatfew public places 

are left for it, it is hard to see how a more dangerous poison could be made legal 

and also lawful. Unless lawful, a black market will still reign, and along with 

the black market all the other unpleasantness follows. Anyway, we tend to forget mens rea in our economic analyses. What kind of person knowingly sells 

dangerous drugs to children?

Not all drugs are equal. A weakness in commentaries about the drug 

trade (including the one above) comesfrom throwing all illicit substances in the 

same bag. Marijuana is not the same as heroin. Growing habits and habitats, 

processing needs, transport challenges, effects on the human body ˗˗ all are distinct one from another, and suppression of their markets are likewise dissimilar, 

except for the fact that the same criminals often are involved with trade in various drugs. Suppressing the dealers usually means suppressing someone who 

is responsible for a variety of nefarious behaviors. Suppressing drug use of one 

kind or another does not offer the same, multiplied benefit.

As an aside, allow me to address a standard libertarian argument -- that 

what an adult puts into his or her body is simply no business of government; 

that the answer to the drug war is a no-brainer -- government should not be 

allowed to care. Not wanting to be called coy on this matter, I assert emphatically that I consider this a wrong-headed and wrong-hearted argument. 

Libertarianism, as I would design it, is about choice and more especially about 

the individual’s right and power to make choices. So in the first instance it 

might seem I would join in any call to make drug use legal. I have to side,

nevertheless, against the infatuating availability of choices that destroy choice, 

that is, of freedoms that are likely to forfeit freedom. Drugs are like democratic 

elections (or maybe vice versa). They can smell like choice for a while, but the 

choice-making condition can be destroyed in the process.
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Illicit drugs are a feature of many irregular wars and probably a feature 

in yours. It may even be the central feature, motivating its own outlaw, national, 

and international armed strategies. There exist large, resolute, well-organized 

and well-equipped criminal drug-armies that rudely defy the State by granting 

impunity to their members. The drug trade may also be a columnar logistic 

element to an insurgent’s or even to a government’s capacity to sustain their 

war efforts. In any case, debate will ensue about whether resources, perhaps 

resources that would flow toward you, should be used to suppress illicit drug 

use or drug supply. You will want to have an opinion on the matter.

Successful illegal business requires organization and secrecy. Organized armed groups already have some organization and enforce what secrecy 

they can. They also are always in need of funds, so they get mixed up in capitalist enterprise. Meanwhile, even criminal gangs dedicated to direct robbery 

(rather than to the sale of some desired commodity) find themselves in business 

because they have to launder stolen money, fence stolen goods, or negotiate 

ransoms. There seems no way for the outlaw to avoid stretching out to Adam 

Smith’s invisible loving hand. It’s out there, even where the long arm of the 

law can’t reach.

Among commodities traded illicitly, cocaine and heroin seem to have 

the greatest impact on armed conflicts today. Colombia and Afghanistan, respectively, are the obvious focus countries. Marijuana and methamphetamines 

also weigh in as kindling for organized internal and international armed conflict. Illicit agriculture, or agro-industry, is distinct in its physical geographical 

footprint. Crops take up rural space, which changes the dynamic of communications routes, who is likely to control access or to tax, and where labor will 

come from. When smuggling is tied to rural lands, the geographic distribution 

of money is also distinct. Someone has to pay someone else for labor and inputs, as well as for raw harvest and production. 

A prevailing theory in the early years of Colombia’s struggle with the 

coca leaf was simple: Money from coca was the lifeblood of the FARC and 

other major criminal organizations plaguing Colombian society and challenging the Colombian government; reducing illicit income from the coca agroindustry would reduce the power of these antigovernment armed groups; and 

as a result, the government would be able to gain the upper hand.

President Clinton’s Presidential Decision Directive/NSC 73, August 3, 

2000 (PDD/NSC 73) was published while US support to the Colombian government was picking up momentum in the late 1990s. The decision explicitly 

distanced (mentally) counternarcotics from counterinsurgency, allowing the 

former but not the latter. Here is the text:

As a matter of Administration policy, we will not support Colombian counterinsurgency efforts...This Administration remains convinced that the ultimate 

solution to Colombia’s longstanding civil conflict is through a successful peace 
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process, not a decisive military victory, and believes that counterdrug progress 

will contribute to progress towards peace.

“We will not support Colombian counterinsurgency efforts.” How goofy 

does that sound in retrospect? The directive made spending money in favor of 

the Colombia’s fight against its armed opponents confusing if not more difficult, 

since the insurgent FARC was already up to its bandoliers in the cocaine trade.

Organized armed groups have to feed and pay their soldiers, so they 

get money from someplace. It could be a foreign State, legal enterprises, 

direct predation, or it could be from illicit commerce. If it is illicit commerce, the organization’s lines of withdrawal to sanctuary are likely 

contiguous with the lines of commerce (product-to-market; inputs-to factory) because of the need for secrecy.

Money laundering and fencing are downstream crimes or after-the-fact 

crimes. They can be a weakness of almost any criminal enterprise. After something is taken illegally, it has to be bartered or converted into a liquid asset. 

Cash, although liquid, has both physical form and unique identification. In 

most organizations the handling of money is delegated to persons the top leaders trust or it is not delegated at all. For this reason, the geographies of illicit 

money transactions are often the geographies (sanctuaries and lines of escape 

to sanctuaries) of the leaders.

The world of irregular conflict is linear and the critical lines are often those 

along which illicit product, inputs, and financial instruments flow. The physical 

and human geographies of lawbreaking, whether simply criminal or politically 

insurgent, overlap so much that policies which artificially distinguish them can 

be counterproductive.

In 1943, allied war planners suggested that a bombing raid on the Romanian oil fields around Ploesti could be a knockout blow to German war-making 

capacity and thereby shorten the course of World War II in Europe. Churchill 

called the Ploesti fields the taproot of the Nazi war machine, so a huge air raid 

was mounted against the fields. The Ploesti raid was no knockout blow; the 

immediate results were insubstantial. Fifty-four of the 177 B-24 Liberators sent 

on August 1, 1943 did not return. A resilient, determined enemy took countermeasures and found alternatives. Eventually, however, Nazi use of Romanian 

oil was reduced by as much as 85%, at least by the time the Russians occupied 

the fields in 1945. Hurting the Nazi oil resource base was a good idea and later 

bombing campaigns against Nazi fuel infrastructure did speed the end of the 

war. The Battle of the Ardennes in late 1944, in which the final German offensive stalled for lack of fuel, is often cited as evidence.

Starving the Nazi war machine of Romanian oil was accomplished more 

by railhead interdiction and destruction of rolling stock and production facilities 

within Germany than by bombing facilities in the production fields. Not only 

that: airpower may have been most effective in Europe when, during major allied ground operations after D-Day, it weakened Wehrmacht operational 
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reserves. The strategic air campaign attempted to hit as many critical industries 

as possible. Ultimately, for Nazi Germany to be defeated the Allies had to close 

with and destroy the Wehrmacht on the ground.

How does the history of Ploesti apply to irregular conflicts? The aerial 

glyphosating of plants in the coca fields of Putumayo, Colombia, for instance, proved inefficient in hurting FARC guerrilla finances (never mind 

stopping the market flow of cocaine). Massive aerial attack against the dense 

Putumayo coca crops was supposed to cause grave harm to the FARC’s cocaine-based financial health -- just as the raid on Ploesti was to deprive the 

Nazi war machine of its supposed lifeblood. The coca fields were seen by 

some planners as the taproot of the FARC war machine. Perhaps if aerial 

spraying could have been done simultaneously throughout the entire coca 

cultivation area, it might have had the intended effect, but that was never 

physically possible. Putumayo was densely cultivated in coca, and therefore 

the locus of a significant amount of the FARC’s overall war-making 

strength. The long-term value of eradication spraying has turned out to be, 

as many anticipated, underwhelming. Spraying achieved the immediately 

visible result of knocking out a lot of commercially valuable vegetation, but 

the guerrillas shifted to other income sources, protected other crop areas, 

dispersed cultivation, replanted, improved the species genetically, shipped 

from storage, increased kidnapping and other extortions, exerted political 

pressure to end the spraying, and took other countermeasures. Aerial eradication made it a little more difficult for the guerrilla groups to fund their 

respective wars, but they did.

Neither the raid on Ploesti nor the Putumayo coca eradication was an abject failure, even if neither were decisive. The costly experience at Ploesti led 

to better planned and executed follow-on operations that evolved with the 

broader counter-oil strategy. Like Ploesti, the coca field targeting may have 

been the result of the obvious. That is to say, oil field infrastructure in the World 

War II case and coca plants in the Colombia case, stuck out in aerial photos, 

prompting a planning momentum that left little room for the painstaking identification of less dramatic and more disperse transportation nodes and 

infrastructure. Had there been a methodology in place that could precisely scale 

the relative economic-military value of European transportation terrain, then 

perhaps the Ploesti fields themselves might never have been rated as the optimal 

target area as compared, say, to more distant railheads. In Colombia, while 

drug traffickers use all means at their disposal for product shipment, cost constraints have them employ roads and rivers, probably in a measure consistent 

with the routes’ carrying capacities.

The Putumayo aerial eradication strategy recognized a place in Colombia 

as particularly valuable economically to the outlaw enemy and, therefore, a valuable military target. Unfortunately, the Putumayo spray plan, perhaps like the 

Ploesti bombing raid, was not based on a sufficient understanding of the relative 
61 The Geography of Dope

253

economic value of terrain as a targeting guide. The Putumayo plan didn’t do 

enough to identify terrain that might have influenced the overall value of the 

final product, cocaine, more than the coca fields. It was not based on a geographic concept of inputs that included transportation routes and means as being 

of equal or greater importance than raw material source locations.

The importance of the coca plant itself was perhaps over-rated as a factor 

in the commercial value of cocaine. Consider another widely available product 

on which there can be some physical dependency ˗˗ water. Bottled water is an 

extremely lucrative offering in the United States and bottled water can sell for 

more money than the soft drink on the shelf next to it, even if the water was 

drawn untreated right from a municipal water service. This might make you 

question the value of sugar, but don’t be fooled into thinking the price of bottled 

water is closely associated with the quality of the H2O. The plastic in the bottle 

is not worth much either. To choke off water-profits from some ill-doing watertrafficker, we might try drying up the sources of water, maybe because it is easy 

to see an offending lake on an aerial photo or find a water main. That strategy 

seems unlikely to succeed. It might be more efficient to knock off the truck on 

the way to the store. Where is the most valuable geography in the bottled-water 

industry? It is not the lake, but rather the bottling plant or some point on the 

road to the convenience store or maybe the shelf in that store. The value of 

bottled water is the fact that it is found in a portable form in the convenience 

store, not simply that it is water.

While this analogy of water to oil or coca is soon overdrawn, the question 

it highlights regarding relative geographic value -- ingredient source vs. factory 

vs. route to market -- is valid. The coca fields are not as relatively significant 

in the business as they appear in an aerial photo. They are more replaceable 

than other parts of the product-to-market geography. This question of relative 

geographic value is more easily understood when land is considered as property

and lines of communication are accepted as being as necessary as sources or 

destinations. Still, maybe in all cases the truly critical geography sets between 

the ears of the mens rea mind.

Brenda Fiegel, who has studied the Mexican drug geography extensively, 

offers the following anecdote: On 20 April 2011, Sinaloa Cartel operator Frediberto Pineda was arrested in Gaston, South Carolina. This same individual was 

originally, and unsuccessfully, deported from the US almost 10 years earlier

and was living in the country illegally. Phone taps initiated by the DEA had 

recorded multiple conversations from the residence where Pineda was arrested 

to locations throughout Mexico. The majority of those conversations concerned cocaine shipments and the earnings they generated. In the wake of this 

arrest, residents in Gaston (population 1,034) began questioning how a prominent Mexican drug cartel was able to establish itself within their small 

community without anyone noticing. It was common knowledge that Mexican 
61 The Geography of Dope

254

drug cartels were operating in large metropolitan areas like Los Angeles, Houston and Chicago, but it seemed nearly unfathomable to residents of Gaston that 

these same organizations would target small town America. Part of the answer 

can be found in information that goes beyond what was provided by police regarding this case -- the Mexican cartels were diversifying their methods in an 

attempt to expand their operational bases into previously uncharted waters, to 

include outlying areas like Gaston. That diversification effort included the exchange of gang attire for khakis and polo shirts and to having tattoos removed. 

More disturbing, perhaps, was news that had surfaced in January of 2011 that 

Mexican drug cartels were cavorting with Afghan heroin dealers to amplify 

distribution of that drug, leading many to speculate on just how far-reaching the 

tentacles of these billion dollar drug trafficking organizations really extended.

Please see sections: 63, Roadblocks and Checkpoints; 46, Taxation and 

Debt; 42, Brigands; 19, Mercatus; 65, Smuggling; 23, Mens Rea; 86, 

Shifting Covet-geographies; and 54, Extortion.



“And now, my pretties, something with poison in it...but attractive to the eye, and soothing to the smell ... poppies... poppies,

poppies will put them to sleep.”

Wicked Witch in the movie,

The Wizard of Oz (1939)234F

235

---------------

“I'm sorry, Bruce. These boys get that syrup in 'em, they get all 

antsy in their pantsy.”

Captain O'Hagan in the movie,

Super Troopers (2001)235F

236

---------------

"Well, boys, we've a man's work ahead of us this day.”

Sergeant Mulcahy in the movie,

Fort Apache (1948)236F

237

(having been ordered to destroy a load of contraband whiskey)

---------------

“Okay. You wanna play rough? Okay. Say hello to my little friend.”

Tony Montana in the movie,

Scarface (1983)237F

238


255

Because that’s where the money is

Section 62, Bank Robbery

Bank robbery is a classically romantic activity, something Bonnie and

Clyde do, and, as difficult as human genius can make it to rob a bank, someone 

always does. Banks are forts for money. In spite of successful robberies, their 

existence proves that sometimes defense is or seems more economical than offense, and passive defense sometimes better than active defense. If this were 

not the case, there would be no banks.

If you have some responsibility for the planning or conduct of some 

activity related to irregular war, you ought to know where the banks are. These 

days they might be piggy banks, ATMs, money order stores, computer servers, 

armored cars, or brick and mortar banks. Know where they are; somebody is 

going to rob them, maybe you ˗˗ and it won’t be well done or well stopped 

without understanding the escape routes.

Once dollars get into a bank they are not only economically fungible, 

they become unloved. They become the money of nobody but the system, 

making bank-robbing more ideologically palatable than robbing from stores 

and individuals. Centralized account insurance can make it worse, as the depositors then don’t care if the bank is robbed. Also, there’s more money at the 

bank for robbers to rob. Here are seven typical bank robbing modi operandi:

* Enter the local bank building wearing Richard Nixon facemasks and holding 

some white nylon bags and machine pistols. Tell everyone to get down, leap 

over the cashiers counter, go to the vault, withdraw cash, stuff it into the bags 

and then leave, making some violent threats on the way. Jog a block and a half 

to the getaway car, get in, take off the masks, drive around the block past the 

bank and away.

* Practice printing money until your bills pass the tests at the local bank counter, 

then start distributing it and exchanging it for real bills.

* Watch who has bankcards and is buying durable goods with them. Pick up a 

daughter in one car and the Dad with the bankcard in another. Tell him his 

daughter is fine, ask him for his personal identification number for the bank 

card and go to an ATM at a convenience store and withdraw money. Repeat 

until there is no more money in his account. Let the Dad and daughter go somewhere near each other and not near a phone.

* Learn a lot of math, generate your own PIN and break into other people’s

accounts without the kidnapping. Go to the ATM yourself.
62 Bank Robbery

256

* Forget individual accounts and learn a lot more math to break into the banks 

accounting systems to move money into your account.

* Don’t bother with the childish math and get to the uber-math. Shave points 

off some reverberated commissions on money market speculation, put it into 

an algorithm that is timed to make automatic buy and sell decisions at the 

conjunction of certain dates and market conditions, and... whoosh.

* Mix banking with government and get the government to give your bank 

money out of its reserves or new issue. This may not seem like bank robbery, 

but the money is a measure of confidence and the money of the bankers isn’t 

really theirs to begin with. They’re supposed to be doing something with it on 

behalf of their depositors that maintains or increases the financial power of the 

depositors, so when they do things that reduce the money’s relative value, it is 

almost the same as the counterfeit scheme above, or plain robbery, it just takes 

a larger scale in numbers and time for the effect to set in.

This section is not meant as a sideward comment on the shenanigans 

and robberies surrounding the United States financial melt-down and bailouts 

of 2008 and 2009, although they did bother. It is about the geography where

your irregular war is unfolding. If you are the insurgent you have to know about 

the banking system and it behooves you to rob it. Banks are core places ˗˗ 

physical, mathematical and psychological ˗˗ of the system you think you are 

trying to overcome. One of the absolute basic services that government performs is the provision of fair measure, and money is the most basic of these. 

Trust in the money can be imputed as trust in the government. If the government can’t maintain the worth of its measures, its authority will wane. It isn’t 

called the ‘coin of the realm’ for nothing so, if you’re down on the system, you 

will want to take away its coin. Besides, someone is going to rob the bank, why 

shouldn’t you? You may not have the mental or educational wherewithal to 

implement the high-end econometric robberies toward the bottom of the above 

list, but that’s OK; you can kidnap the daughters of the people who can.

If you fancy yourself as the counterinsurgent, on the other hand, then 

you want to know where the banks and bankers are and, if it is at all in your 

power, to reshape the geography of money to your best advantage. Depending 

on the level of commercial development, you may find it advantageous to limit 

some kinds of transaction to cash or have certain control technologies placed 

on banking machinery. If you are the counterinsurgent, the system of exchange 

is one of the basic things you are supposed to protect, since it is one of the basic 

things that government is supposed to provide. It may be that the public has 

lost the sense of linkage between the official money and personal ownership,

and so you may want to make that linkage more psychologically meaningful. 
62 Bank Robbery

257

When a bank is robbed anywhere in your land, that robbery redistributes a little 

slice of everyone’s rights. That slice of power often goes to someone who is 

either an insurgent or a criminal. If your enemy robs a bank, he gets stronger. 

So if you do not understand the measurement and geographies of fair exchange, 

you might not have sufficient grasp on one of the classic means that your enemy 

has for increasing his power relative to yours.

Bank robbery is more than just another outlaw activity. It moves to the 

essential purpose of government. If you are an insurgent, you need to figure 

out how to rob banks. Everyone needs a ‘money and banking’ class.

Please see sections: 42, Brigands; 55, Kidnapping; 129, Nerd Globe; 97, 

Oviedo; 30, Control Technology; 75, The Price of Real Estate, and Tourism; 65, Smuggling; and 33, Engineers and Built Environment.



Doug (FBI Agent): You're a pretty good judge of size, right?

Krista: Size of what?

FBI Agent: (shows a $20 bill) What do you think? 6 inches? Under or over?

Krista: Under.

FBI Agent: Wrong. 6.1 inches. See, I know everything there is to 

know about money. Thickness: 0.0014 inches; weighs about 1 

gram. You know what that means? That means this $20 bill isn't 

even worth its own weight in Oxycodone.

from the movie,

The Town (2010)238F

239

---------------

Chief: How can we believe a man who would sell out his friends?

Siegfried: Dumkopf! Who else are you supposed to sell out? You 

can't betray enemies.

from the movie,

Get Smart (1965)239F

240

---------------

“We have this money. We can hide. Could we do that?”

Jason Bourne in the movie,

The Bourne Identity (2002)240F

241


258

Guerrilla Op Art nutshell

Section 63,

Roadblocks and Checkpoints

Roadblocks should be highlighted in military analysis, planning, and 

measurement of success, irrespective of the side you are on. They are little 

temporary outposts. If you want to win an irregular conflict, the orchestration 

of roadblocks is a gimme. They offer a way to effect strategic extortion, steal 

wealth directly, kidnap selectively, take initiative away from the enemy, and 

improve chances of enjoying a favorable correlation of force in distant encounters with the enemy. Roadblocks can be quick, only intended to instill fear or 

they can be planned to cause some piecemeal or clumsy reaction by the enemy 

force. They can be mounted through popular movement organizations on the 

back of some real or trumped-up social question. In this form we can expect 

them to last for as long as a suitable response fails to mount. A roadblock by 

a labor union-type of organization, a transport union perhaps, can be placed 

quickly. These can be ruinous to overall commerce and industry and yet can 

be selectively targeted so that extortion demands can be made to specific individuals. In addition, they can be disassembled before government authorities 

can assert dominance of the situation.

Blocking the passage of people and things almost always hurts something 

and someone. Blocking passage is violence. It is also a popular component of 

taxation, extortion or just outright robbery. Roadblocks and checkpoints, moreover, adjust the weight of variables within the operational equation. A roadblock 

planner can apply map algebra to determine the relative cost-distances of effective 

violent action and an opponent’s response to that action. A highway robber can 

anticipate the correlation of forces likely in the event of a confrontation with the 

authorities at different points along the road, or within a network of roads, as well 

as what security he will need along escape routes from the loci of potential confrontation to safety. His risk analyses will weigh time against the wealth he might 

happily redistribute by conducting the roadblock. Highway robbery can be profitable if the math is right.

If a government has no strategically practicable plan to address the 

problem of roadblocks, a smart outlaw can mock law enforcement, and a cunning insurgent can all but paralyze and certainly bleed road-bound trade. 

Roadblocking links the two major strategy options (position and maneuver in 

anticipation of battle, and extortion). As insurgent, you set up a roadblock as 

a place of battle chosen by you, and with it you hold the free functioning of 
63 Roadblocks and Checkpoints

259

the society at risk. The government is all but obliged to respond to a roadblock

and so your action gives you the added possibility of inviting a ham-handed

response, which you will then further exploit.

It seems everyone everywhere thinks a successful government can 

assure free flow on roads. The street is psychologically, if not legally, 

public space. People tend to disrespect a government when some group 

defiantly collects ‘taxes’ along a road with impunity. If such a force can 

continue to make movement so costly or dangerous that wealth is held at 

risk generally, a government will be seen to fail. When a government cannot effectively assign culpability to highway robbers or subversives for 

blocking public ways, the public will quickly assign accountability for the 

road blockage to the ineffective government.

Roadblocks are a building block or basic move of operational art position and movement in irregular warfare. A basic example: A resistance 

(insurgent?) leader plans a roadblock on a highway 20 miles outside a provincial capital, just on the city side of a road junction. The intersecting road leads 

to remote areas. He uses a group of radicalized union members, but he doesn’t 

want them jailed; he plans for them to leave the roadblock in the hands of some 

local supporters when sufficient government force beginsto arrive. The leader 

calculates that in order to dislodge his thirty male and female activists, the 

government will try to reach the roadblock with at least twenty police or military personnel dressed in riot gear and carrying smoke weapons and clubs. Not 

wanting to chance failure, however, the government will want to send closer 

to fifty police. Because of the locations of the police stations in the city, the 

time of day, and the time needed to collect the force, the insurgent can count 

on at least an hour before a force strong enough to dislodge the roadblock arrives. During that hour, the protesters erect a large barrier on the road about a 

quarter mile in the direction of the city that will take a backhoe or other piece 

of heavy equipment ten minutes to remove. In the other direction, at the far 

side of the junction, they set up a barrier that can be removed quickly, but that 

stops the traffic going toward the city. So, when the police finally start to arrive with sufficient force, the roadblockers let traffic move across the junction 

and pile up behind the main barrier, providing them an additional ten minutes. 

The organizers then pack up and move out along the side roads enjoying at 

least a fifteen minute head start. They’re gone. Before the police get to the 

junction, the protest leaders might already be at home stupid drunk while they 

watch the police chief on TV explain why his troops are shooting teargas at 

teenagers. The cost-distance to the junction for the government was fifty times 

the pay of one policeman, transport for all of them and a backhoe, and the cost 
63 Roadblocks and Checkpoints

260

to commerce of having the road blocked for an hour (not to mention having 

had to keep police available in reserve), plus an opportunity cost of not having 

some of the police where they otherwise might have been. To these costs are 

added the psychological and political weight of having clever rebels stick it to 

the Man. Government overreaction to roadblocks might be the only goal an 

anarchist or insurgent has, especially if he is clever enough to use surrogates 

to build and occupy the barriers. Blocking people’s passage against their will 

is a form of violence, but the nimble practitioner of the roadblock can make 

only the reaction to the roadblock score as violence in the public’s eye.

The above simplification gives a basic pattern of roadblock warfare --

the basic move in a roadblock Go game. Real operational environments include many routes and potential constrictions, public events and special days, 

the locations of police stations and public transport, lookout locations, synchronous armed actions, and so forth. Some moves in that game can be 

contemplated and calculated in advance; with the side willing to do the necessary calculations getting a step or two ahead of their opponent.

There exists, however, an emergent phenomena being used now as a 

counter to anti-government demonstrating. Venezuela’s regime, in response 

to anti-government roadblocks, created a form of modern cavalry based on the 

motorcycle -- the colectivo -- not exactly a gang, not exactly a military unit, 

and not exactly a militia. A leader, perhaps from the National Guard or the 

communist party, calls on whoever is available from his cell phone’s contact 

list, rallies them at a convenient location not too far from the roadblock but out 

of Molotov range. The wannabees watch the bikes while some dismounted 

gentlemen go beat the snot out of the student demonstration leaders, take their

identification cards and send part of the posse over to the students’ homes to 

trash the place and beat up family members. In other words, the colectivo

commander nimbly mixes quick position and maneuver with ordinary tactics 

and extortion or intimidation.

In English, we generally refer to police or government roadblocks as 

checkpoints. The term connotes an event or contraption that is not designed to 

impede traffic or collect a tax (that’s a tollbooth), but simply to conduct inspections. Checkpoints can help crack anonymity, make smuggling more expensive, 

improve the balance of culminating points in relation to actions and battles, and

apprehend fugitives and scouts. They shouldn’t just be set up anywhere. If the 

design is to increase the cost of smuggling, they need to be placed in accordance 

with an economic analysis of source location, warehousing, transshipment processing, etc. The viability and efficiency of the inspections, protection of the 
63 Roadblocks and Checkpoints

261

checkpoint personnel, their rules of engagement, and their vulnerability to corruption should be explicitly addressed in plans, tested and inspected. The 

checkpoint plan should include an integrated legal concept. In this regard, the 

government can announce off-limits routes for commercial passage. That is to 

say, along with major inspection points, the government can make legal checkpoints, inviting licit traffic to flow through main routes. Places where people or 

things are moved from one form of transport to another (trans-modal locations) 

are typically used as taxation points, legal or illegal. Whether to government 

bureaucrats, longshoremen, mafiosos, insurgents or some combination, transmodal localities present special opportunities for siphoning wealth. When stuff 

is transferred from a truck to a train or a train to a boat, or even from the trunk of 

a car to a suitcase, the places where these transfers occur have a regular and often 

predictable physical signature. They should be identified and considered according to the quality of the opportunity for wealth diversion that they offer. Transmodal places are special and should be a key feature in place inventories and 

geographical analyses. Crime statistics show over and over again that transportchange locations are high crime areas. They are among the most likely places 

guiding the logic for locating roadblocks and checkpoints.

Please see sections: 6, The Operational Equation; 88, Escape Geography; 

74, Refugees and Displaced Persons; 142, Conflict Geography; 57, Dogs 

and Mules; 103, Amnesty and Restitution; 136, Weapons; and 54, Extortion.



“The government of Colombia and even the United States 

do the same thing... If you don't pay your taxes, you go to 

jail. Here we don't have jails, so we detain people.”241F

242

Raúl Reyes (dead narco-guerrilla)

---------------

Roy Boone: Ready?

Gator McKlusky: I was born ready!

from the movie,

White Lightning (1973)242F

243

---------------

“Has anybody got a dime?”

Taggart in the movie,

Blazing Saddles (1974)243F

244


262

How far away is it really?

Section 64, Measuring Distance

and Comparing Power

Geographers obsess about distance, and so should anyone competing 

in an irregular war. Distance and strength are intimately related, so an accurate 

sensing of relevant distances is indispensable, especially when a leader dares 

to defy the classic principles of war.

Distance has an inverse effect on influence and power; power or 

influence diminish as distance increases. It is sometimes called ‘distance

decay’. According to Geography Professor Waldo Tobler, everything is 

related to everything else, but near things are more related than distant 

things. That assertion is called the First Law of Geography, and I haven’t 

heard anyone credited with a Second law of Geography yet, so there’s that. 

Our choices about what we can do at the end of our trail have to be scaled 

according to how far down a trail we expect to go. When you calculate 

relevant distances to likely confrontations in an armed struggle, the distances will have a relationship to the correlations of force at the points of 

potential contact with your enemy. If a point of intended contact is so 

distant that you will have inferior relative strength at that contact point, 

you are overreaching as to your goal. The Dutch have a museum at Arnhem where they go to discuss this very topic.244F

245 If there are potential 

points of unintended contact short of your planned destination -- points 

whereat you might face a stronger opponent --your plan is that much riskier. Risk is highly correlated to distance.

Military planners are familiar with the conceptual ‘culminating point’, 

a term which is beaten to death elsewhere in the text. The culminating point 

exists at a theoretical distance in time and space beyond which our risks of 

continuing are too great, and the ‘risk distance’ is the distance to the culminating point. We want long risk distances for us and short ones for them. Risk 

distance has a complex interrelationship with cost distance, the risk distance 

usually shortening as the cost distances increase. As there may exist several 

potential geographic routes to an objective, the routes will present varied risks; 

the distance to our likely culminating point might be shorter along route option 

A than along route option B. Elementary rookie first-day stuff, yes, but for 

some reason distance is missing as a factor in many current contemplations of 

why an irregular force might be able to defeat an ostensibly stronger force. 

Comparisons of strength (whatever mundane or exotic factors we might consider) cannot be reasonably made without involving the factor of distance. The 
64 Measuring Distance and Comparing Power

263

amount of potential strength we have as we sit at home is almost meaningless. 

It is only the relative strength we bring to the point of contact with our enemy 

that matters, so the distance to that point matters much. 

Distances in irregular war are best measured as cost-distances, relative 

cost-distances, and risk distances. Cost-distance is such a common concept 

we tend to take it for granted. How far is it from Colorado Springs to Denver 

in terms of the gas or time? Those measures are cost-distances, also sometimes 

called friction distances. The practical distance between Colorado Springs and 

Denver is longer or shorter depending on the vehicle we use, the price of gas, 

the weather, the traffic, and so on. In urban areas, cost-distances can be especially complex, even involving such quantities as the emotional cost of fear 

due to criminal risk or the opportunity cost of aesthetic preference (as in: you 

would have preferred to walk through the park). Distance can also be expressed in terms of opportunity costs. Given the same inputs, would another 

pathway or destination yield a better result or advantage?

Multiplicity of route options complicates comparison of relative 

cost-distances, that is, your cost-distances relative to those of your enemy, 

or, say, of a riot population relative to riot control personnel. Construction 

of a public mass transportation line can drastically change relative costdistances, as can the interruption of bus service, or the location of public 

transportation stops and stations. What slows you down might not slow 

down your enemy as much. Manipulations of the built environment, especially the calculated use of walls and bridges or watercourses can change 

the aggregate cost-distance advantages as to specific human collectives. 

Student protestors, for instance, tend to move via public conveyance from 

a university; farm protesters tend to drive tractors in from farms; and so 

on. An armored vehicle might shorten a cost-distance by reducing a risk 

factor, but simultaneously lengthen a cost-distance by increasing the factors of time and fuel ˗˗ and exposure, or because it can’t use a particular 

road or bridge. One footstep into a certain gang’s territory might be a 

‘bridge too far’ for a couple of beat cops.

A lot is made of how modern information technologies shrink distances. Compared to just a couple of decades ago, it takes a lot less time to 

spread an idea to millions of people on the other side of the globe, but the 

amount of time it takes to send a rifle bullet or a grand piano has not changed 

much. Ideas are powerful, to be sure, but when you determine to apply physical coercive force, the mass inherent to the exercise slows things back down, 

lengthening the calculated cost-distances, and shortening the distance to that 

theoretical culminating point. In most irregular wars, the world is not so much 
64 Measuring Distance and Comparing Power

264

smaller than it was when T. Miller Maguire made his observations about globalization around the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This is 

especially true in regard to remote smuggling geographies, given that the requirements of clandestine transport are so dissimilar to those of licit transport.

Because they seem to live in a realm of pure math and electrons, computer trespassers give the impression they act beyond the parameters of the 

military operational equation. Nerds seem to escape the concept of those distances which impel classic military strategy. They seem to escape the bounds 

of mortal earth on gossamer boogers. False. Think in terms of cost-distances: 

In the case of a computer criminal, the distance from his keyboard to the desk 

of some FBI agent correlates with the protection the hacker is afforded by the 

legal and political regime at the place where he sits at his keyboard. For the 

FBI agent, the distance in flight hours might be longer from the agent’s desk 

in Miami to Memphis than it is from his desk to the criminal’s keyboard on 

some island in the Caribbean. The ‘real’ or at least the operational or effective 

distance between the FBI agent and the perpetrator may be far greater than the 

distance to Graceland because the government of the country where the criminal sits has created a condition of anonymity and impunity that immensely 

changes the relative cost-distances for the FBI agent. Practicably, it could be

a much longer trip from the agent’s desk to the criminal’s keyboard, so long 

that to bring power to bear on such a nerd might take a sovereign decision and 

a different implementing agency – someone with a different license. Measured as Euclidean problems, distances are often reduced to little more than 

getting an airline ticket and a taxi then checking your watch now and then. 

Measured in terms of impunity, however, the comparison of distances involves 

visas, possible extradition orders, local police cooperation, or maybe all the 

costs of a military operation in defiance of someone’s sovereignty. Such impunity derived cost-distances can nevertheless be mapped and measured. 

Sometimes, just the cost of the airline ticket creates enough distance to abet 

impunity. On the Michelle Malkin blog, ‘Hangfire’ stated,

Bad guys here (and the cops) count on visitors not being able to come 

back to Hawaii to testify against the perps. If you have to save money for 

years to spend five days here, you really can’t afford to come back and 

spend weeks in a hotel waiting for the defense to stop all delaying tactics. 

All the defense attorneys here demand that their client face their accuser 

in person, as is their right. Written affidavits just don’t cut it.245F

246

Historical affinities can also change the map of psychological costdistances. Perceptions make some places closer in terms of political action, and these, in turn, can bear on the factors noted above. Many 

Americans perceive the Philippines to be closer to the United States than 
64 Measuring Distance and Comparing Power

265

Nigeria, even though the air distance from Los Angeles to Manila is about 

7,300 miles and from Miami to Lagos only about 5,600 miles. Influence 

of one group of humans on another is usually greater as distances are 

closer, and again, influence-distance (or culture-distance or affinity-distance) is a cost-distance.

The maps that are appropriate for the accurate use of artillery fire, 

with their scale representations of almost frictionless distance and their gridded division of two-dimensional space may be perfectly inappropriate for 

expressing distance in conflicts where artillery rarely is used. This is not a 

call to take charts away from artillerymen or pilots, but it is a suggestion that 

in your irregular war you might do better to configure some maps in terms 

of relevant cost and risk distances, which are likely to include factors as 

seemingly abstract and unrelated to distance as fear, law or aesthetics.

Since one of the keys to winning armed conflicts is to pick fights with 

weaker opponents (or at least a place and moment in time when an opponent is 

most likely to be weaker), it is good to practice measuring relative strength. A lot 

of measuring the strength of armed groups has to be done the old-fashioned way, 

with spies and photos and bean-counters. Below are a couple of tips relevant to 

some of the new kinds of armed groups. One is based on distance and how distance and power correlate. Another has to do with what is called a ‘power-law’.

1. Distance to the boss. The scale of a group’s territory or the distance from 

its boss to his foot soldiers is one way to measure the group’s power relative to 

other groups. Since distance diminishes power, any sustained presence of an organization’s people at a distance from its headquarters can be correlated to its 

relative overall power. For instance, in Medellín, Colombia, during the height of 

the violence in the mid-1990s, a neighborhood might suffer the presence of any of 

more than a half-dozen illegal armed groups. The least powerful groups would be 

the ones with little territorial scope, and whose boss was close-by. These would 

include small neighborhood groups of locally-spawned bullies organized around 

control of pirated and makeshift services such as water hoses, power lines, or TV 

cables. Other small groups organized in response to dishonors associated with the 

lack of sewage and refuse removal.

The Medellín Cartel was less local but more powerful. Its boss 

lived on the other side of the city and controlled high-profit crime in most 

of the city. Cali is another Colombian city about 200 miles away. If the 

Cali Cartel could maintain personnel with impunity in Medellín, it was 

either because it could defy the Medellín Cartel or because the two had 

come to some kind of an agreement. Meanwhile, the national-scale revolutionary movements, like the FARC and the ELN, wanted to establish 
64 Measuring Distance and Comparing Power

266

their own territorial advantages inside a few of the boroughs of Medellín. 

Their headquarters were in distant parts of Colombia. They were more 

powerful organizations than the cartels.

Being a more powerful organization overall does not mean it has more 

power in the neighborhood at a given time than one of the more local groups. The 

FARC might have enough power, and reputation of power, to keep someone on 

the block for a while, but even the most local thugs get good information on the 

outsider’s location and habits, and maybe don’t like the way he looks at their girlfriends. Calculating distances will not lead us to a measurement of an entity’s 

absolute power. We observe, however, that those armed groups able to maintain 

presence at a distance from their bases and bosses are usually more dangerous 

than those which cannot. Nevertheless, they are not necessarily the more dangerous entity at a specific place or given moment.

2. The power law. The ‘power law’ proves something with math and economics 

that soldiers have known for a long time.246 F

247 You don’t want to attack an opponent 

unless you can marshal enough force to get the job done safely. It is the same old 

operational equation again. The power law helps us predict that, given rational 

guerrilla leaders, the guerrillas are going to make smaller attacks and kill fewer 

people per attack if they can’t marshal enough force at a given place and time to 

do something bigger, safely. Over time and in the context of a lot of space, it is 

logical that if the guerrillas’ attacks begin to cause larger numbers of casualties,

and they attack larger size government units or other targets, that they are getting 

better at marshalling forces, which means they are getting stronger. Changes in 

weaponry can make a difference, as can improved transport, information, etc. This 

is where the ideas of correlation of force and creation of mass apply to irregular 

war. However, while it may seem that economics’ ‘power law’ only proves the 

obvious, it at least provides a way to extract from many disparate events (which 

individually may not say much) some indicator about the course of the combative 

capacity of an established guerilla force. It also suggests a way to classify individual events as being unique or not.

The inverse relationship of distance to strength has been consequential for the structure and positioning of modern armed forces. The 

risk to large ground formations necessarily increases as they might move 

farther from the shore on distant continents. Much of the world’s land 

surface simply lies beyond the culminating point for a force of any great 

size. Accordingly, one way to increase risk distances has been to use small 

units able to move quickly, avoid detection, and perhaps persuade the locals to help. One might say that the essential role of special forces has 
64 Measuring Distance and Comparing Power

267

always been to increase the extent of the earth’s land surface on which a 

general prudently can bring ground force to bear. 

Please see sections: 7, Sanctuary; 69, Measuring Effects of Actions on

Enemies; 89, The Dot Game and Go; 68, Scale; 30, Control Technology; 

16, Presence; 56, Militias and Gun Control; and 130, Globalization.



“I fancy that the American...has a great love of measurement. He will 

mention the exact size or weight of things, in a way which appears to 

us as irrelevant. It is as if we were to say that a man came to see us 

carrying three feet of walking stick and four inches of cigar.”247F

248

G. K. Chesterton,

What I Saw in America

---------------

“When studying ourselves, we are looking at a fresco with a magnifying 

glass. Consequently, these early impressions which great men have given 

of themselves are nearly always slanders upon themselves, for the stronger 

man is weak to his own conscience, and Hamlet flourished to a certainty 

even inside Napoleon.”2 48F

249

G. K. Chesterton

Robert Browning

---------------

“If you’re not sure why you’re measuring what you’re measuring, 

any measurement system will do.”

Rick Sinnreich (attributed)

---------------

“...now I know that in New York every day more people come from far 

lands than would make up the whole Lacotah nation...To fight is useless...But my heart is Lacotah...and for those that take the last warpath 

I shall say: Heya-kie, it is a good day to die.”2 49F

250

Spotted Tail as imagined by

George MacDonald Fraser in,

Flashman and the Redskins


268

Damn near killed `im

Section 65, Smuggling

Smuggling means moving valuable things secretly and contrary to 

some law. Pretty much all criminal organizations have to smuggle, and 

smuggling almost defines the difference (as well as the overlap) between 

an archetypal mafia and an archetypal insurgent organization.

We know that the prudent leader does not risk getting into a shoot-up with 

a stronger force unless he has secured a route of withdrawal to his own base or 

sanctuary. The insurgent, however, wants to maintain the initiative, looking to effect battle against government forces when conditions afford. The criminal leader, 

on the other hand, is not looking for that battle, but rather, almost always, to avoid 

it. There are in-between cases, but, by-and-large, that’s the operational difference 

-- the insurgent is looking to take shots against the army or the police; the criminal 

is not. Still, successful leaders of both types will have secured their routes to sanctuary just in case they suffer a run-in with a stronger force.

The quality of an insurgent’s supply routes (and these may be dispersed) delimit the relative strength the insurgent’s units will enjoy at 

chosen points of attack and during his units’ escapes to sanctuary. The 

routes are an integral ingredient in the insurgent’s capacity to battle the 

government forces. The routes of insurgent supply are often the same as 

those of withdrawal. For the smuggler, supply routes are integral to his 

enterprise; they are not established or maintained in order to enable expenditure in battle against the government. For the smuggler, any battles 

against the government constitute overhead that should be reduced as 

much as possible. Smuggling routes are for moving merchandise from 

source to buyer without being taxed or punished. Secure routes for the 

smuggler are part and parcel of the main event, and their quality determines the margin of profitability. The supply route is what the smuggler 

does and who he is, while the insurgent is defined by battle, with continuous success in battle dependent on the routes.

If advanced in his art, the head smuggler will only sometimes be 

found along the smuggling route. He will rarely be involved directly with 

the activity. The operational equation, however, tells us that he will almost 

always stay on what amounts to his route of escape to sanctuary (or in it). 

The accomplished insurgent leader often has a different leadership problem, and may have to place himself where battle might occur, or along 

supply routes. If he is a survivor, however, he will rarely move without 

confidence in a secure escape route to sanctuary.
65 Smuggling

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Smugglers and insurgents, often the same entity, make every effort 

to establish relationships with people at decisive way points and constrictions along smuggling routes and other safety-valve alternate escape

routes to sanctuary. These relationships may be coerced, but they are often 

romanced and voluntary.

When smugglers and insurgents share or intend to share the same 

geographic space, a common problem imposed by physical geography is 

likely to occur. The smuggler is probably going to know the best routes, 

have the informants and have imposed the necessary silence. As a result, 

the insurgent is likely, unless he is one-in-the-same with the smuggler, to be 

the newcomer. While the insurgent might get lucky and be able to bring 

coercive, extortive force to bear against the smuggler and his family, it is 

also highly possible that the smuggler will hold an advantage of knowledge. 

The insurgent will likely have to negotiate and use the same routes for supply 

and escape. The latter is especially significant, because unless the insurgent 

has achieved some semblance of peaceful coexistence with the smuggling 

organizations, the insurgents’ movements to sanctuary from points of contact against government targets could be compromised by the smugglers. 

Failing to pay old smugglers their due can be counterproductive.

Smuggling is done by amateurs, individual professionals, and by 

experienced organizations. Basic smuggling for individual consumption 

or sport-risk differs in a number of ways from the smuggling conducted by 

organized criminal organizations. The operative difference for our purposes is the development of established routes. Routes can be graded as

good or not so good in accordance with their security, throughput, and 

speed. There is no single business model for establishing and protecting a 

viable smuggling route, but achieving and maintaining the silence of persons along the route or who participate in warehousing along the route is 

always a central feature.

A criminal smuggling organization will often use newbies or ‘virgins’ as a method for testing security systems and other observation. This 

is akin to flying over radar stations so that they will turn on and identify 

their frequencies and fans. The more mature smuggling organizations will 

also preplan cooperation with official agencies of governments by giving 

up hapless or rival smugglers to the authorities. What appears to be a naturally phased development in the life of smuggling organizations, along 

with their natural tendency to negotiate, suggests opportunity for cooptation by insurgent or counterinsurgent organizations.250 F

251 
65 Smuggling

270

Not all smuggling is going to be seen as a bad thing, even by the 

most respected governments. For instance, rare earth elements are critical 

to Japanese manufacturing, Japan getting most of its rare earth from China. 

Maybe 20% of that arrives via the black market, so maybe the Japanese 

government isn’t going to mount an aggressive campaign against that particular smuggling phenomenon. Remain impressed by Smith’s invisible

hand. If a gallon of gasoline costs twenty-five cents in Venezuela and four 

dollars in Colombia, smuggling is going to happen, as too the correspondent corruptions. Adam the libertarian might suggest we stop all that by 

letting the free market soften the price difference, but Adam’s cousin the 

smuggler would point out what little business sense his dopey cousin has.

People smuggle things with nominal weight, like personal identification cards, or heavy things like other people and weapons. Smuggling is a 

nearly universal activity in irregular war; the routes might fairly be seen as 

geographic ‘centers of gravity.’ They are physical, linear phenomena (there 

are no ‘nonlinear’ armed conflicts). Where there is smuggling, we might still 

find an apparent rule-of-law, but not an applied rule-of-law. Smuggling means 

getting away with something, and all but measures a failure of a government.

Please see sections: 140, Risk Distance and the Pursuit; 25, Why Humans 

Don’t Fight; 63, Roadblocks and Checkpoints; 8, Linearity and the Line 

of Retreat; 136, Weapons; 3, The Domesday Book; 86, Shifting Covet-geographies; and 67, Points, Lines, Spaces.



“We have a little closet there, a little suitcase....For people who 

smuggle contraband, the human body, the alimentary system, is 

a handy pocket....Hooping is a way of life in prison.”2 51F

252

Mary Roach

---------------

“It didn't seem to worry most of the boys. They put in their 

time, looking ahead to payday. But not me. That paycheck 

wasn't money, it was a bill of sale. Three months of that, 

back to whiskey. It's been hard on your ma, but damn foolishness to one person is breath of life to another.”

Elroy Jackson Sr. in the movie,

The Last American Hero

(1973)252F

253


271

The new empirical

Section 66, GIS

GIS stands for Geographic Information Systems or Geographic Information Science. Sometimes the ‘G’ turns up as georeferenced or 

geospatial and the ‘I’ as intelligence. The term is thrown around freely to 

encompass the physical and organizational technologies that together allow data on every kind of phenomenon to be organized in database form

˗˗ perhaps to be visualized on a computer screen and made subject to calculations and analyses otherwise difficult for the human mind to execute.

As a knowledge revolution, GIS is almost as consequential as the 

Internet. Tens of thousands of licenses for commercial GIS software are 

sold all around the world to academic, governmental and nongovernmental 

organizations, which are using the software suites in combination with location and time specific data to create files on everything from endangered 

species to real property ownership to the wiring of buildings. GIS is not 

new epistemology, but it might be thought of as empirical epistemology 

revisited and restated to engage the new technology. Because the technology is so powerful and investments in it so great, it is hard to see a 

reasonable way around it short of something like deep ecological rejection 

of and abstention from history. That might be a good idea; let’s not reject 

the option out-of-hand. Nevertheless, for those of us at least temporarily 

committed to vacuous and futile human competitions, GIS is big.

With changing levels of enthusiasm, the US military has for decades 

prescribed a process of information management, visualization and analysis 

known as Intelligence Preparation of the Battlefield (IPB). The purpose of 

IPB is to define the battle environment, describe the likely effects of that 

environment and the human threats within it, and predict the likely actions 

of those threats and identify propitious times and places for action. GIS applies to a greater set of variables and endeavors, most not associated with a 

human threat. Practically speaking, however, GIS is how civilians spell IPB.

A consolidating set of analytical and presentation protocols also 

emerged in the wake of recognition of the suite of technologies associated 

with the term GIS. Consensus as to what constitutes a best-practice in GIS 

methodological science to some degree depends on the specific practical 

application or on theoretical preferences and traditions within a given academic discipline. The explosion of GIS is occurring within and as part of 
66 GIS

272

the accelerating pace of globalization, making GIS use highly internationalized. GIS science is tied to a select set of tools, prominently to relational 

database software such as PostgreSQL® and PostGIS®.

GIS is the certain future of both intelligence organizations and public administration. It is the technological/ methodological key to a universe 

of knowledge in the files of government agencies, public administrative 

units, non-governmental organizations, business enterprises, and in the 

best-practice research efforts of university scholars. GIS is raising quality 

standards in social science research, making the research of disparate disciplines compatible for comparison and enrichment, and allowing research 

to be more easily tested for veracity and scholarly diligence. The same 

tools, the same processes and almost the exact same body of knowledge 

that allows citizens to check tax equity, the effects of and responsibility for 

environmental harm, or optimal traffic design, are those that can help you 

find your enemy before he finds you. The universe of GIS-based 

knowledge, almost wholly unclassified and often outside formal government intelligence apparatuses, probably has within it the material needed 

for you to name your enemies and to trace their wealth and associations.

The US federal government has barely applied GIS to questions of 

national security. As yet, almost all of the extensive investment in GIS by 

the various US government agencies still revolves around the precise location and representation of physical phenomena. Government interest in 

GIS is tied to remote sensing, targeting and precise movement of friendly 

units. While this is all useful, the US government has only recently picked

up on the importance of GIS for building knowledge about human geography ˗˗ about culture, cost-distances, whereabouts, ownership, land value, 

and the integration of these with the many other themes scattered throughout the sections of this book. Although some might fear so, the US military 

has not yet figured out Big Brother.

We might already be going into a post-GIS era in which the so-called 

neogeography is the more powerful, if dependent, phenomenon. Not really 

as new a term as it seems, neogeography refers to dispersed, nearly spontaneous and generally voluntary public participation in creating GIS data files 

about all kinds of interesting phenomena. An age of nearly spontaneous map 

creation by millions of personal GPS recorders is beginning. This phenomenon of ubiquitous amateur but accurate geographers could be used to 

advantage in human competition.
66 GIS

273

The way knowledge is organized and presented contributes to or 

detracts from the success of any endeavor. The way words and terms are 

related and distributed in the columns and lines of a GIS makes a difference in the way priorities will be determined. The human mind, however, 

does not seem to work like the GIS we’ve created with computers. The 

human brain is still better at the most complicated tasks and transcendent

matters. So the interface between GIS and humans will remain an uncomfortable one. There are some people, ‘deconstructionists’ perhaps, who 

see GIS more negatively still. They see GIS as some ultimate perfection 

of a Western, positivist, realist, rationalist, and imposed reality that is, for 

them, not the best way to go. They might be right as a transcendental 

matter. As far as irregular armed competitions go, however, if you build 

a good GIS and your anti-GIS enemy doesn’t, he’ll be lamenting his mistake from his prison cell or his early grave.

Military planners are forever being asked to think critically, meaning be aware of logical fallacies and impoverished assumptions. One of 

the logical fallacies of which we are constantly being warned is called post 

hoc ergo propter hoc, the rooster fallacy, or ‘after this therefore on account of 

this’. It is risky illogic because events are not necessarily caused by preceding 

events, however proximate they are in time and however often the correlation occurs. The rooster crows, then the sun comes up, but it is illogic to assert that 

roosters cause the sun to rise. Post hoc ergo propter hoc fuels jokes and deceptions, but this fallacy is not the rooster booster of evil logic. In social science it is 

more probably the inverse. Although a correct sequence of events does not necessarily evidence causation, it is a rare phenomenon indeed that does not obey logical 

sequence of causation.

This is where the disciplining value of GIS comes in. A common laziness 

(or perfidy) allows excessive abstraction in place or time. The assertion, ‘The very 

year the new national government was elected there were seventeen murders of 

union leaders’, is not the same as saying ‘Seventeen union leaders were murdered

in Gong Province in June of 2007 and national elections occurred in September of 

that year’. The first sentence is a typical dissemblance, implying that the government was connected with the murders. The second tends, by the logic of sequence, 

to argue the opposite. Lies often appear on thematic maps that sloppily aggregate 

statistics in time and space.

Responsible GIS uses a scale and resolution of data that is as consistent geographically as the data will allow, or at least that confesses 
66 GIS

274

whatever geographic or temporal illogic might hide in the representations. 

GIS will not establish many theories of causation with certainty, but it can

demolish many theories of causation. We can suppose that some social 

scientists do not care for the challenges of GIS-based research because the 

demand for precision is made greater and because the logic of temporal 

sequencing and physical proximity is likely to ruin pet theories of causation. For this reason and others, the measurements and observations of a 

place experiencing organized armed conflict should be mounted in a georeferenced relational database if at all possible within the technical and 

financial means available. GIS is no secret to success, but it is the best 

methodological lie detector of the age.

‘A’ GIS might be no more than a spreadsheet of no greater value 

than the data that goes into it. On the other hand, the term can be made to 

mean a superior epistemology that allows transparency of knowledge and 

replicability of method. In studying places, it can make for better science.

Please see sections: 112, DIME and PEMISII; 108, Common Knowledge; 

47, Why the County; 136, Weapons; 111, Knowledge Cultures; 88, Escape Geography; 56, Militias and Gun Control; and 1, Impunity.



“Historical geography means putting place at the center of 

history. No supercomputers are required.”253F

254

Anne Kelly Knowles

---------------

Q. What do you call a map of outhouses in the woods?

A. A shaded relief map.

Gishumor.com

---------------

“What is a country? A country is a piece of land surrounded on all sides by boundaries, usually unnatural.”25 4F

255

Joseph Heller,

Catch 22


275

The shapes of showing

Section 67, Points, Lines, Spaces

When faced with the need to manage violence over a large area, 

thinking in terms of points, lines, and spaces can be a valuable exercise. A 

lot of this book is about returning the strategist’s mind to the importance 

of ‘where’. ‘Where’ has a shape, and that shape determines a lot about 

how to find the right where and what to do with it after it’s found. At 

different scales the wheres change shape. On a 1:100,000 scale map, a 

family residence, if it can be fairly depicted at all, is but a point. To the 

owner of that lot, meanwhile, a problem with the neighbor over the common fence line is a big deal. One man’s point problem is another man’s 

line problem.

If a proposal arises to disassemble a crew of malevolent computer 

geeks, the appropriate force selection might be a special operations or 

SWAT team; if closing off an enemy tank army were a valuable strategic 

option, some powerful set of fast, armored maneuver units would be the 

better fit; or if the general’s problem were returning a whole province from 

internal violence to a peaceful social compact, then a larger force composed of police, medical, engineering, intelligence, and social service 

personnel might be the right prescription. Depending on the scale of map, 

these three challenges might be fairly characterized and depicted as point, 

line, and space, respectively.

Geographic Information Science is heavily invested in the trigon of 

visual power just described. But the point is not that because programs like 

ArcGIS® are glued to a point-line-polygon mental skeleton, the strategist 

should follow suit. Rather, when the designers of ArcGIS® attacked the 

problem of organizing knowledge for ease of analysis and depiction, they 

responded to the common conditions of life and language as we see and hear 

them. Things happen at a point on the ground or point in time; or they happen along that river, ridge, road, or border; or ‘over time’, in that county, or 

during that period. That’s the way of things as we generally conceive of 

them ˗˗ as points, lines and spaces. The GISers, figuring within the confines 

(or liberty) of 0s and 1s, saw that lines could be formed of points and polygons of lines ˗˗ albeit when we get right down to pixelating things it’s hard 

to say if the pixels are points or little boxes. No need worry about that. It’s 

not about following the GISers, it’s about following what they followed.
67 Points, Lines, Spaces

276

In Colombia, some of the fiercest fighting in the last decade took place in 

the context of enormous manhunts -- for leaders of the FARC. Some of these unfolded in what can be described in terms of points, lines and spaces(or polygons if 

you are GIS-nerdy). Special operations unitswere sent to assault high value targets 

(FARC leaders) when distances, assets and surprise warranted (point operations). 

Regular units were maneuvered to fix, attrite, and flank FARC units deployed to 

protect its leadership (line operations). In the meantime, the government designated various counties and communities, mostly rural and remote, as 

‘consolidation zones’. Therein, long-term presence work (developmental and informational) would hopefully change the balance of anonymity. This, in turn,

might dry up FARC support along lines of communication to sanctuary on which 

their leaders depended for survival (area operations).255F

256

Part of what is successful in ‘Western’ culture revolves around the 

innovations that moved talking toward publishing -- ink, paper, Gutenberg

and all that. Mapping is part of it. Having the right maps at the right scales 

depicting the right points, lines and spaces will help you win. Without 

them, without spatial awareness, the mind has to work harder to reach useful interpretations of physical and cultural phenomena.

Please see sections: 7, Sanctuary; 51, Get Willy; 47, Why the County; 31,

Holes in the Ground; 72, Land Strategy and Property Strategy; 129,

Nerd Globe; 142, Conflict Geography; and 111, Knowledge Cultures.



Q. What did the little acorn say when he grew up?

A. Geometry.

---------------

“We ... declare it to be our Royal Will and Pleasure. that no Governor or Commander in Chief ...do presume, upon any Pretense

whatever...to grant Warrants of Survey, or pass Patents for any 

Lands beyond the Heads or Sources of any of the Rivers which fall 

into the Atlantic Ocean from the West and North West...”256 F

257

King George

The Royal Proclamation of 1763


277

Size matters in things, time and ideas

Section 68, Scale

You will want to create hierarchical systems (of administration, 

control, law, representation) of the appropriate size, with the right intermediate levels covering the right amount of space. Creating organizations 

or territories, conducting analyses at inappropriate levels, or thinking in 

inappropriate amounts of time (using inappropriate scales) will hurt you.

Cartographic scale, sometimes called representational fraction, is a neat invention that gives map readers a useful idea of the relationship of distances on a 

map to distances on the ground or sea. Map people also use the word scale as a 

synonym for extent (usually the extent of earth represented by an image on paper 

or a computer screen) or they will use it in the sense of granularity, resolution or 

detail, that is, the amount of information on a map. All these definitions of scale 

are interrelated and around them swirls a lively intellectual debate. But that debate 

is not what this section is about.

Scale is also used by geographers and others to classify levels of 

phenomena. This meaning of the word scale can be related to its meanings 

noted above, but it is more of a homonym. It sounds and looks the same and, in a 

given case, may even share some meaning, but it is a different concept. The fact

that the concepts sometimes appear in the same paragraph or sentence is confusing. 

Geographic scale, for the purposes of this section, is not about how big you make 

the squares on your map ˗˗ it is about your selection and ordering of categories of 

human activity, their relationship, how much territory they cover on the ground, 

and how much time they consume.

The phenomena you categorize will have some human ingredients 

and some non-human ingredients. Water catchment areas are a good example. Part of what defines a water basin and, therefore, part of what 

would define the categories or levels (scales) of water catchment areas, 

will include ancient geological formations, the fact that water flows downhill, and rainfall. Another part of what defines the categories will be dams, 

pumps, aqueducts and water laws. Your scaling, in other words, will be 

informed by a combination of manmade contraptions along with factors 

that are not manmade.

You will probably find many scaled territorial units already established in 

the geography of your armed conflict, and others you can find and map if you look. 

The scales you find are not magic. If they don’t work for you as a practical, 

operational matter -- if they do not distribute power, provide justice or services or 

security in a way that you think is optimal, you can change them. People get used 
68 Scale

278

to the inefficiencies and injustices they have, however, so do not trifle with administrative territories. Still, if you don’t like the voting districts, or the school tax 

districts, consider changing them.

Poorly chosen study categories can throw off your understanding

of a place, which can lead to the creation of clumsy administrative units,

which could cause you to lose your war. Strategies for social development, 

security, knowledge generation, or whatever are greatly enhanced by the 

explicit discovery and recognition of optimal scales (particularly administrative power scales) and especially of hierarchical and nested scales. 

Imagine if you came into a large area where there was some kind of water 

management problem, but you knew neither the administrative history of water 

districts, the location of records, nor the people in charge. Nevertheless, you 

wanted to study the stewardship and application of the water resources. You selected some scales at which to study the phenomenon of water management. In 

other words, you determined amounts of water coming from watercourses or other 

spaces of sizes you chose, determined to what use the water seemed to be put by 

volume and where, and how much it was taxed or for how much it was sold. 

Maybe you invented a set of categories with sizesthat exactly matched the categories and sizes invented by the people who set up the system in the first place. 

Probably not, however, and since your invention of scales was different, it became

hard for you to use old data. Maybe (being a biologist and not a political scientist) 

you focused on the non-manmade aspects of the resource (how much water in various watersheds and sub-sheds), but you then find that your categories don’t match 

the political boundaries where water decisions are made or at which money is accumulated for a project. This is no small challenge of understanding, since the 

scale at which decisions are made to fund and build dams, pumps and filters might 

not have much of a relation to where the water naturally flows.

Water is valuable, but this section is not about water any more than 

it is about representational fraction. It is about proper scaling as it applies 

to water, militias, taxation, church dioceses, school boards, electric power, 

cell phone use, county commissions, zoning ordinances, sports leagues, 

and on and on. All these things will impinge upon lines of communication 

and sanctuaries. If you have the power to impose a hierarchy of territories, 

you can structure the social compact to concentrate or distribute political 

influence, create or dissipate grievances and to reveal relationships. To 

not fail at that miserably, address the distribution of power relevant to each

particular issue at the optimal scale. 

Some phenomena are only illuminated at certain scales. For instance, 

say the decisions governing the content of school textbooks are made by a 
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279

federal-level board whose members are elected by an international association. 

You could waste a lot of time studying the preferences of students and teachers 

if you are wanting to know why the content is what it is. Students and teachers 

might not be the optimal scale to satisfy your curiosity. You might do better 

to go directly to the international association, unless, of course, you are wondering how the content decisions reflect the preferences of teacher and student.

Scales are cultural and often natural. The term ‘natural’ is derided 

by some social scientists as a semantic contraption, but consider the difference between woodworking and house-framing, that is, between 

furniture or cabinet-making and home construction. These are two closely 

related but distinctly different scales. At the furniture scale, the direction 

and appearance of wood grains is a significant matter, the aesthetics of 

visible joints a concern. Distances are related to things like the height of 

human knees when sitting at table or the width of an average human derriere. The house builder is not as often worried about wood grains, but is 

worried about insulation and roofline. Furniture fits inside the house, not 

vice-versa. The scales are distinct, if they overlap a bit, and are commonly 

related to the normal size of the human body. They, like most scales in 

human geography, are in this sense ‘natural’.

The measurement of distance and location are intimately tied to the 

passing of time, so to ignore or mistake the scale and form of places or 

spaces is a formula for mistaking the relevant quantities of time. Carpenters like to say ‘Measure nine times, cut once’. Many philosophers like to 

throw space and time together, which usually means they like to see geography and history thrown together as well.

Distances seem to be shortened by speed. Karl Marx, commenting on 

the role of capital on globalization back in his day said space was being annihilated by time.257F

258 He was saying that capital was shortening distances to 

markets by technological advancementsin the speed of product movement. In 

the 19th century, however, Karl could not send a grand piano over the telegraph lines. We have to add weight to the mix of scale problems. If something 

is heavy, it can un-annihilate space. Appropriateness of scale applies to space, 

time, weight, and, if you want to get fancy, resolve.

In an armed conflict, the scales of knowledge and the scales of organization 

and operations have to be in sync. Learning that most of the people in Mexico 

speak Spanish doesn’t help as much as knowing that in that one county where the 

dental unit is going to work most people speak Tenik, a rare indigenous language. 

To say that there are only 8,000 FARC guerrillas left in Colombia might be good, 

but if you are going to a municipio where 2,000 of them are running around, your 
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concern should mount. Scale and the classic military concept of mass are 

closely related, as are scale and the relative measurement of power. Your care in 

determining scale will weigh heavily on the time it takes you to win.

Seeing things as scale problems can help you measure those things in 

better geographic detail. Not seeking the geographic footprints of problems (in 

other words, calculating the balance of resources, objectives and methods in the 

abstract and apart from geography) is a formula for failure. To a lesser degree, 

so is indifference to administrative power scales. Time is the same way. All 

things are possible in time, they say...but they don’t say how much.

Please see sections: 64, Measuring Distance and Comparing Power; 142, 

Conflict Geography; 87, Water Wars; 34, Urban or Rural; 66, GIS; 139, 

Strategy of Aggregate Tactics; 29, Heavy Machines; and 47, Why the County.



“According to the map, we’ve only gone four inches.”

Harry in the movie,

Dumb and Dumber (1994)

258F

259

---------------

“What is this? A center for ants? How can we be expected to 

teach children to learn how to read...if they can't even fit inside 

the building...I don't wanna hear your excuses! The building 

has to be at least...three times bigger than this!”

Derek in the movie,

Zoolander (2001)259F

260

(on being shown a mock-up of the proposed ‘Center For Kids Who 

Can't Read Good And Wanna Learn To Do Other Stuff Good Too’)

---------------

“The soldier’s load cannot on average be made to exceed seventy pounds’ weight...it follows that a marching soldier cannot 

carry supplies for more than ten or eleven days...These figures 

have not varied over the centuries.”260F

261

John Keegan,

A History of Warfare


281

It’s not that hard

Section 69, Measuring Effects of 

Actions on Enemies

We find, given war-making and other cultural habits, that efforts to 

stop an existing enemy are not always consistent with the job of bettering 

the physical and psychological conditions that create more of them. This 

section and the next deal with the problem of how to measure the effect of 

action in service to a reasonably expressed goal ˗˗ a problem complicated 

by the confounding relationship just noted. How do we measure progress 

in neutralizing our enemies and simultaneously determine if we aren’t creating more of them?

When an armed conflict doesn’t rise to the level of international war 

in which a country’s government might be able to surrender, evacuate territory and pay reparations, the word victory may seem to have less weight. 

Nevertheless, in irregular war just as in any other, citizens, soldiers and 

comrades demand and deserve to know how things are going. They demand to know what their blood and treasure are paying for and if their 

aspirations are being fulfilled.

Measuring success in irregular armed conflicts shouldn’t be difficult unless the goals are wobbly. As Ulysses S. Grant once said, “This 

isn’t rocket surgery.” Criticism to the contrary notwithstanding, the 

United States national security goal for places like Iraq, Afghanistan, the 

Philippines or Colombia is obvious enough: that those places not be cradles, harbors or exporters of contraband and murder. Whether the specific 

object of smuggling is drugs, people or plutonium; or if murder is perpetrated by way of suicide, landmine, or a weapon of mass destruction;

America’s best understanding holds some places more likely than others 

to be enablers or source-grounds of internationally dangerous behavior. 

When we cannot timely deter or punish smugglers and murderers from 

doing us grave harm, we might label them national enemies and try to visit 

violence on them. The lead documents of US national security strategy 

name a few such enemies and express the observation that underlying social, economic and cultural conditions help a place to become one of those 

wherein enemies of the US are formed or abetted.

We can divide our measurement instrument into three levels of success as follows:

CONCLUSIVE: The extent to which an action or program ends an opponent’s grant of impunity is the conclusive measure of success. Ending the 
69 Measuring Effects of Actions on Enemies

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opponent’s grant of impunity is victory. Tied closely to this is the extent to 

which one side captures or kills the other side’s leaders (the enemy organization’s mens rea).

CONDITIONING: Overall, items that measure the likelihood that, in any 

given encounter, one side will enjoy an advantage in risk distances and correlations of force are substantial indexes of conditioning success. To this we 

can add decisions and actions taken over time to improve the probabilities that 

subordinate leaders will encounter their enemy. Also tied closely is whether 

an enemy leader’s routes of escape are blocked, thereby denying him sanctuary. Finally, if an enemy’s sanctuaries are forced away, an increase in 

practical distances faced by that enemy may constitute a reasonable proxy for 

reduced enemy strength. All these are conditioning (battlefield shaping?)

measurements. They are not conclusive as to victory, but they are measures 

of conditions that reasonably lead to victory.

ENCOUNTER: Records of whether encounters with enemy elements result in 

local victory or defeat can form a significant contributory measurement. The 

outcome of armed contacts must be considered along with the outcome of pursuits after the contacts, however. These contacts, pursuits, and their outcomes 

may or may not be indicative of anything beyond the events themselves. We 

can reasonably suppose that continuous failure to best the enemy in contacts, or 

failure to win the pursuits (whether escaping or pursuing) will lead to negative

results in the conditioning category, and ultimately as to conclusions.

(1) Conclusive indices of success: On the government side, the ultimate grade 

should depend on whether or not a challenger continues to grant impunity in defiance of the government. If the government kills its enemy, that particular enemy

is not going to protect anyone from the government’s laws and punishments. If 

not defined and identified correctly, however, the real enemy will continue to protect his followers. Honest measurement is tied to correctly and precisely defining 

an enemy. Of the indices of conclusive success, first and foremost isthe measure 

of impunity being granted by an identity other than one’s own. You might not 

have to kill your enemy. You might win conclusively by just capturing him,

‘psyoping’ his people against him, taking away all his financial strength, or 

extorting him by placing something of great value to him in jeopardy. Regardless of how you might achieve it, however, if you have not stopped the 

unauthorized granting of impunity by your foe, you have not beaten him.

(2) Indices of success conditioning: To what extent have you improved the 

probabilities that in any given combat contact with the enemy your subordinates will enjoy advantage in the correlation of force? Short of those contacts, 
69 Measuring Effects of Actions on Enemies

283

what steps have you taken to change the balance of anonymity in your favor? 

Overall, what have you done to set the conditions for conclusive success?

If you are to kill or capture your enemy, you will probably have to block 

his route to sanctuary. (Remember, if you catch him in his sanctuary or close his 

sanctuary, it is not his sanctuary.) In order to establish indices to measure success 

in blocking your enemy leaders’ lines of retreat to sanctuary, you first have to find 

those lines. If you have not found them, some measurement of their being blocked 

may nevertheless be possible, but it is a more difficult task.

A senior insurgent or criminal leader sometimes resides outside the territory 

at issue. If a FARC Commander, for instance, slept someplace in Venezuela, he 

at least kept some subordinate level of command inside Colombia. To close with 

and destroy second-tier leadership, the same truth reigns as for the top leadership: 

to finish them, close the routes of their escape. ‘Closing’ need not necessarily be 

conceived in a geometricalsense. That is, if the enemy leader cannot move along 

a route of escape fast enough to prevent effective pursuit, the route is effectively 

closed. The route does not have to be crossed in a purely geometric, two-dimensional or Napoleonic sense.

(3) Indices of encounter success: What is the level of victory or defeat 

during encounters with the enemy (battles, firefights, ambushes, etc.)? An

encounter might be as limited as service of a warrant by the police, or as 

extensive as a division-size operation. It might entail the destruction of 

materiel, capital assets or inventory. An encounter might be a simple terror 

attack. Indices in this category should not be used to measure success 

overall, but only to test and validate the selection of techniques, tactics, 

procedures, combat leaders, equipment, training and intelligence categories. Record of contact success and failure might be kept on a national 

scale for a variety of reasons. They are highly situation-dependent and in 

the aggregate can mislead. Nevertheless, over time a change in the averages may indicate some change in overall relative strengths.

Your rival’s measures are similar, if opposite. If your rival kills or 

captures all of your leaders, including you, he wins conclusively. Your 

death may be an unnecessarily radical requirement for conclusive evidence 

of his success, however. For instance, you as a government leader might 

negotiate terms with an insurgent, which for the insurgent might be a partial victory or a measure of conditioning success. His just staying in the 

business of insurgency might be a sufficient, fulfilling level of success for 

a given insurgent. By not being defeated, especially if, coming out of negotiations, he can grant some measure of impunity (or has saved himself 

or his followers from being punished for past offenses), he may have won 
69 Measuring Effects of Actions on Enemies

284

conclusively. His conclusive measures might just be those that prove an

avoidance of failure. Half a loaf for the insurgent might be victory.

The three categories, Conclusive, Conditioning, and Encounter, are 

revealing in that order, and whatever success story the conditioning and 

encounter numbers purport, your detractors can cogently argue that your 

efforts are not progressing well if the numbers in the conclusive category

are not substantively improving. However, if the enemies you identified 

as having wielded the power to grant impunity are dead or in your controlling custody, and you can show that you regained a monopoly on granting 

impunity throughout the territory, you’ve won, at least for now.

Unfortunately, if impunity is the norm for criminal behavior in a

society you are trying to defend -- because of the lack of law enforcement, 

generalized corruption, prosecutorial ineptitude, lack of judiciary resources or institutional infrastructure, overcrowded prisons...or whatever 

-- it will be hard for you to tell if the leaders you’ve named as your enemies

are giving their followers impunity or not, since they might have it anyway. You may have to settle for counting dead or captured enemy leaders 

as your substantive measurement of success. Monopoly by the State over 

the grant of impunity would be the truer measure, but if that is elusive, at 

least the enemy leaders you named and neutralized will no longer be protecting their followers.

Let’s say you can name and neutralize enemies, but are hard pressed to

confirm what portion of the total number of enemy leaders you are neutralizing. 

Depending on the capacity of your enemy to replace its leaders, it is difficult to 

know how many must be neutralized before you have doused the mens rea.

Battles and other actions are hard to hide and should be carefully 

recorded as to time, place, participants and results. Governments are wise 

to make data about actions public as soon as possible so that a public 

ground truth stabilizes. This can go a long way to avoiding false accusations and claims but, obviously, if the government has done something 

wrong, such as a clear human rights violation, it may find itself on the 

wrong side of life’s ledger and the beauty of transparency. Individual government and anti-government leaders may calculate that hiding things is 

personally advantageous. These days, ‘truth commissions’ or ‘truth, reconciliation and restitution commissions’ are common features of the 

political landscape. The data on which these commissions rest their findings is often opaque, but does not have to be.

Some information can be more powerful if made public, the location 

of landmines being the obvious example. Not only does public knowledge 
69 Measuring Effects of Actions on Enemies

285

of the presence of landmines in an area directly increase safe practices, it 

encourages submission of information on landmines that only the public 

might possess. Reasonably, however, some data cannot be released to public 

scrutiny until after an appropriate time lapse. This is because the public includes violent partisan members and some information has a time value that 

directly influences military or forensic operations in progress. Some information is kept confidential because public exposure is too likely to adversely 

affect the acquisition of more information or hurt an informer. In some individual cases, child or other victim protection is involved. For instance, the 

results of prisoner interrogations, if made public, could discourage cooperation from prisoners, endanger their lives or change the quality of 

information. Nevertheless, ultimately public opinion matters, and there 

probably exists a publicly presentable truth about every event that is precise 

enough for public decision-making, not detrimental to current operations,

and not likely to endanger anyone.

Depending on the situation, it may be useful psychologically and 

practically to identify publicly some or all of your targets in advance, and 

then to announce their demise. The deck of cards of most wanted Saddam 

Hussein regime leaders worked well for the Americans in Iraq, and the 

rapid crossing-out of the top fifty of the ousted regime clearly showed progress against the former regime. That set of leaders is not coming back. 

In Colombia, a similar set of cards was proposed and prepared, but Colombian leaders made a determination that its use there was culturally

inappropriate. An insurgent can make similar public announcements and 

tallies to considerable psychological effect.

One conclusive measure of victory over an enemy leader is his 

death. If you isolate on this measure, or over-rely on it and the methods 

leading to it, you may suffer the unintended consequence of creating more 

enemies. The conclusive measurement is of the ability to grant impunity, 

which can be depicted on a map. You can probably map where impunity 

is the result of organized defiance.

Measures of personal success for the insurgent (or crime boss, etc.,) 

probably do not match those that generally apply to the liberal politician or his 

generals. The insurgent can be successful without eliminating the government’s 

capacity to grant impunity. A given insurgent may only have to keep the government from keeping him from granting impunity. So long as the insurgent 

leader is at large and perpetrating, he is successful, if not victorious. We would 

suppose, however, if an insurgency’s true goal is the control of national power, 

that conclusive success is the same for him as for the government -- to attain 
69 Measuring Effects of Actions on Enemies

286

exclusive power to grant impunity. This, too, is a practical exaggeration. Insurgents might take the reins of a country’s government, control the banking system

and the national military, and enjoy recognition from international forums and 

bodies. They could gain these powers and privileges of national governance 

without having completely wiped out the ability of the old regime to grant some 

degree of impunity to its people.

The text offered above introduces three categories (CONCLUSIVE,

CONDITIONING, and ENCOUNTER) of index items to measure effects of 

actions we might take against our enemies. Near the end of this book, Appendix: 

Miscellaneous Lists, LIST B (page 576) offers a few individual index items or 

proxies that you might seek and present to trace progress in your irregular war. 

All of the items, and changes in their values, can be depicted cartographically.

Please also see sections: 4, Defining Enemy; 66, GIS; 111, Knowledge 

Cultures; 103, Amnesty and Restitution; 75, The Price of Real Estate, and 

Tourism; 7, Sanctuary; 106, Massacres; and 16, Presence.



Dexter Griff: It’s just a box canyon in the middle of nowhere. 

No way in or out. The only reason that we set up a red base 

here is because they have a blue base over there, and the only 

reason they have a blue base over there is because we have a 

red base over here.

Dick Simmons: Yeah, that’s because we’re fighting each other.

Dexter Griff: No no, but I mean, even if we were to pull out today, and they were to come take our base, they would have two 

bases in the middle of a box canyon. Whoopdie f---in` doo.

Dick Simmons: What’s up with that anyway?

from the online video comic series

Red vs Blue: Why Are We Here? (2003)261F

262

---------------
69 Measuring Effects of Actions on Enemies

287

 Infamous ‘Hockey Stick’ Climate Graph262 F

263

---------------

“If we torture the data long enough, it will confess.”

Ronald Coase (attributed)

---------------

“One of the most important things an international court could 

do – in my view it is probably the single most important thing 

it could do – is to settle the scientific dispute...”

Dr. Phillipe Sands to the

United Kingdom Supreme Court263 F

264

---------------

“You got to saddle up your boys, you got to draw a hard line”

from the song

Beer for My Horses264 F

265


288

Will the place you create spawn enemies?

Section 70, Measuring Effects of 

Actions on Structure

The last section suggested ways to measure the impact of actions 

taken to close with and neutralize an armed enemy. Those actions can affect 

both the enemy and conditions in the society, conditions which in aggregate 

we can call the structure. Your actions might further the creation of more 

enemies or not even address whatever conditions helped spawn, motivate or 

empower your enemies. So you might try to measure what effect your actions against the enemy have on the structure of life, in addition to measuring 

those actions you take to change the structure directly, if you are taking any

action at all. As with section 69, this section is not so much about what to 

do; but rather how to measure the effects of what you do.

Besides closing with and neutralizing an enemy, success in armed 

social conflicts may mean establishing conditions from which new enemies do not spring. Maybe if liberty and property are protected and 

material progress is a reasonable expectation for everyone, such conditions 

are met. We see that even in places where all parts of the trinity of human 

flourishing (freedom, security and material prosperity) are abundant, disaffected elements exist, armed and angry. Misery does not equal 

insurgency, either. In many of the poorest, disease-ridden, illiterate areas 

of the world, where the populace is barely eking out an existence, the people do not rise against the government. Conversely, there are insurgencies 

or violent opposition groups in economically developed, healthy, literate 

countries; and leaders of the discontented often emerge from the educated, 

upper-middleclass children of privilege. It seems that the measure of successful action against an insurgency cannot validly found itself on an 

assumed correlation to material improvements.

Whether or not the poorer strata of a population are provided with 

government services may be crucial or of little importance. A population 

may tolerate government corruption or fight it. Good governance to some 

societies may mean an all-encompassing social welfare system, whereas 

other societies may view good governance as non-interference in the lives 

of the populace. Measuring the success of governance, therefore, may require some measurement of popular perceptions and expectations. New 

schools, roads and inoculation programs are often popular, visible signs of 
70 Measuring Effects of Actions on Structure

289

government interest, but are they measurements of counterinsurgent success, the fuel of propaganda, or nothing at all?

Violent insurgent ideologies today are variously described as religious, nationalist, ethnic, or regional; of a marxist tint, or ambiguous in 

their intellectual determinants. They often involve competing armed 

groups vying for supremacy over control of the movement in question. 

Even while political hegemony might remain an insurgency’s ultimate 

goal, the insurgency’s leaders might enjoy financial profitability and renown by merely staying alive. You might not want to measure the success 

or failure of a given insurgency by the degree to which it has attained some

proposed political goal. Being the champion of a utopian dream, even a 

pipedream, can be a materially rewarding career path.

In a counterinsurgency, might a spike in violence in a territory be 

evidence that the government is losing control? Contrarily, if violence 

slowly diminishes, does that mean the government is doing something 

right? Associated statistics might include the numbers of incidents of violence, identities of victims, number of victims per event, identities of 

perpetrators, or the logical purposes of the violence. Whether the violence 

occurs in primarily one-sided attacks or in clashes between armed groups 

is also significant. One-sided attacks suggest initiative or maybe the capacity and resolve to intimidate and extort. An increase in attacks or 

clashes initiated by government forces against an outlaw armed force may 

mean that the government is gaining ground. This may be a false reading,

as the initiative of government forces may be due to a mere increase in 

resources or to newly aggressive leadership. Evidence that government 

forces are taking the fight to outlaws (and only perhaps thereby protecting 

civilian populations) might be a positive sign of government effort, but the 

same evidence might tell us nothing about the overall condition of the society as to its likelihood of producing more outlaws.

Offered below is a laundry list of indices that might serve to measure 

progress of a counterinsurgency to establish conditions of human security, 

along with an improved likelihood that more insurgent enemies are not being 

created. For a suggestion regarding specific items to track in order to measure 

the effects of actions on structure please look at Appendix: Miscellaneous 

Lists, LIST C on page 581. You may find some of the items In the Appendix

inappropriate to the level of education and economic development in some 

societies. Some are highly universal, however. One is tourism. There are few 
70 Measuring Effects of Actions on Structure

290

societies where some form of tourism will not provide a useful measure for 

changes in human security. Another is the price of real estate. Tourism and 

the price of real estate are considered in Section 75.

Regarding baselines, stability, testability and availability: Whatever 

indices used, you may want to fix a baseline for measurement, as well as durable measurement increments. Our ruler should be armored against 

manipulation or it cannot give an honest measure over time. To aid in credibility, the instrument must be subject to repetition and testing by those 

disinterested in the upshot of the measurement, as well as by those who are 

stridently invested in the arguments that the data might support or undermine. 

Be careful with definitions used in statistical presentation. For instance, in 

regard to landmines, ‘Known Landmine Locations as of 01/11/2008’is a more 

durable map title than ‘Landmine Locations’, given the typically incomplete 

nature of these datasets, not to mention the danger and liability caused by a 

map negligently claiming to display all current locations.

It may be possible to form a baseline of data regarding how many 

felonies are committed in relation to cultural norms. A map can be created 

based on the number of felonies that the State fails to investigate, lead to 

arrests, successfully prosecute or punish. Such data gives an idea of overall impunity for the commission of crimes, but the impunity may be caused 

by simple State inefficiency or prosecutorial weakness. If the impunity is 

particular to a specific entity (say, to members of a specific mafia or guerrilla) then it becomes apparent that the State does not have a monopoly on 

the granting of impunity. In some places, data on felonies is so hard to 

build and the prosecution of felonies so unlikely that the above measures 

are impossible to create or are meaningless. If such is the case, what level 

of respect is the State due as a representative of the territory or the people 

in it? This is exactly the question posed by some insurgent group, given 

that they, through ruthless efficiency, strictly prosecute even petty crimes.

Metrics based upon practicably unavailable data (or which could so 

become) are formulas for frustration, misdirection, and loss of credibility over 

time. The collection of some kinds of data depends on unsustainably expensive collection assets. The best longitudinal data is resistant to purposeful 

influence, either by opponents or proponents of the policies under scrutiny.

Regarding causality: Can we ever be sure of causation? Even if available 

data clearly show the insurgent force to be weakening and the conditions of 
70 Measuring Effects of Actions on Structure

291

society improving, it may be difficult to claim that the government’s (or anybody’s) policies caused such trends. What is to say that other policies 

might not have worked better? There will always be room for logical (never 

mind merely argumentative) attack. However, some faith in data can be built 

on the basic logic of proximity in time and space. As mentioned in Section 

66, GIS events can suggest causation when there is a continuing pattern of 

correct temporal sequence and spatial proximity. Although anecdotal evidence might suggest that the implementation of a particular government 

tactic was followed by a reduction in political violence, a stronger argument 

for causation is available if that same tactic, implemented in town after town, 

were followed by a similar decline in violence in each place. In such a scenario, the burden of proof regarding causality reverses and those who would 

deny causality are invited to prove their contention with better data. Because 

of the logical power of physical proximity and temporal sequence, the most 

convincing indices of causality (convincing because of their durability under 

honest examination) are those that can be presented geographically over 

time. Although causation is hard to prove, factual misalignments in time 

and space can easily disprove many theories of causation.

Regarding State failure: We can draw a map of spaces within a State’s territory wherein entities other than the State successfully grant impunity. Such a 

map will show where the power of the State is incomplete -- where it is not

sovereign. If the map (supposing it is an accurate, comprehensive depiction)

shows few places where impunity can be granted by an entity other than the 

State (including the State’s acquiescence or license), the State is not failing. If

the map shows that in the greater portion of space and population the State 

does not hold a monopoly on the granting of impunity, the condition instills 

doubt that the polity within that territory could function as a democracy in the 

context of that State. It may be that the State has an attractive philosophy, 

sincere leaders fairly chosen with many loyalists, but is simply under successful attack. It may be that the State is under-powered, or that it is corrupt.

State is not synonymous with society, system, or structure. I at 

times confuse myself and thereby my usage of State with central state or 

government, or even nation, but these also are not equivalents. The grant

or denial of impunity can be divided in various reasonable ways. A system, structure, society, or polity is not necessarily better-off because a 

central government has the monopoly. On the matter of State failure, US 

Army doctrine aligns itself with other US federal agencies. As one might 
70 Measuring Effects of Actions on Structure

292

expect, our federal doctrine is distinctly statist. It ties success to virtuous 

government and government virtue to the extent to which government 

provides for peoples’ needs. Many of us do not agree with such a manner of describing success and failure.

Please see sections: 66, GIS; 75, The Price of Real Estate, and Tourism; 109, 

Your Staff Work Sucks; 48, Grading the Social Compact; 142, Conflict Geography; 80, Why You Should Like Geography; 90, Prisons and Prisoners; and

53, Hohfeldian Grievance Analysis.



“Some people wonder all their lives if they've made a 

difference. The Marines don't have that problem.”265 F

266

Ronald Reagan

---------------

“...you may fly over land forever; you may bomb it, atomize it, pulverize it and wipe it clean of life, but if you desire to defend it, protect 

it, and keep it for civilization, you must do this on the ground...”26 6F

267

T.R. Fehrenbach,

This Kind of War

---------------

“Logic...has never played more than a small part in the history of weights 

and measures. The rest has been about the distribution of power. In its 

rawest guise, greater accuracy has given empires the power to explore new 

areas and to exploit them at the expense of the less accurate. But measurement is also about the power of society to allow a just exchange of goods 

and cash, and at its most fundamental level it has, like language, the power 

to express a personal value between the individual and the material world.”

Andro Linklatter,

Measuring America267F

268

---------------

“Domprobst is invariably starched and magnificent; its flavors are 

always standing at attention. It has a particularly emphatic slate 

statement, with nuances of pistachio or pecan, cassis and quince. 

Medium-bodied, high-bred and snappy, coltish and itchy to take off 

full-gallop.”268 F

269

Measurement of a Riesling

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Land promise

Section 71, Jerusalem

The Hymn Jerusalem (built on William Blake’s poetry from the 

early 19th century), the histories of the song and poem, and even the lives 

of the authors and artists befit themes in this book. Here are the lyrics:

And did those feet in ancient time

Walk upon England's mountains green?

And was the Holy Lamb of God

On England's pleasant pastures seen?

And did the Countenance Divine

Shine forth upon our clouded hills?

And was Jerusalem builded here

Among those dark Satanic Mills?

Bring me my Bow of burning gold:

Bring me my Arrows of desire:

Bring me my Spear: O clouds, unfold!

Bring me my Chariot of fire!

I will not cease from Mental Fight,

Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand

Till we have built Jerusalem

In England's green and pleasant land.269 F

270

‘Dark Satanic mills’ became Brit-speak for poor human stewardship of the natural and human environment. It has been interpreted in other 

ways, all ‘subversive’, and it could have become a catch phrase for the 

global insurgency, or at least parts of it. Maybe it is paradoxical that the 

music now mated to the poetry was written during World War I in an effort 

to brace British national resolve. In one way or another, the poetry is seditious, protesting as it did the failed observance of labor rights and 

women’s rights and the rights of British subjects generally. It speaks of 

the desire to create the idyllic Jerusalem, the just City of God, in England. 

In time it became a beloved national song representing the best that the 

British would believe about and aspire for themselves. Its singing in the 

1981 movie Chariots of Fire brought the hymn to the American ear in a 

particularly apt way.2 70F

271

At the beginning of the movie, a young, self-consciously Jewish 

sprinter is singing the hymn along with the rest of the Cambridge choir. 

Not far removed is allusion to a contemporary Zionist movement that 
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would have liked to see a New Jerusalem created on earth. Many of the 

Zionists didn’t see Jerusalem being built in England any time soon; however, the Jerusalem they had in mind was the Jerusalem.

This brings us to the central issue confronting Zionist strategists 

between about 1897 and 1949, which was the mortal vulnerability of the 

European Jewish population in its dispersed condition. The Zionists reasonably feared being killed in mass. In response, they resolved to create 

an independent Jewish State in Palestine, but the Nazis (rather than the 

Russians as earlier Zionists had predicted) engaged in murder at a pace and 

scale that overcame the capacity of the Zionist enterprise. Before the appearance of the Nazis, however, and before Arabs in Palestine could 

consolidate a common identity with leadership able to oppose them, the 

Zionists had already formulated and launched their unique land strategy.

As it formed in the 19th century, the national purpose of the Jewish 

collective contained within it three parts. One was fulfillment of the Scriptures as interpreted by Jewish religious leadership; a second was simple 

survival in the midst of variously hostile polities; and a third was prosperity. 

Establishment of a Jewish presence in Palestine concerted with the first of 

these purposes. Redemption was to come through human effort to gather 

the scattered of Israel into the Holy Land. By the end of the 19th century the 

still small but growing set of Zionist leaders interpreted the messianic significance of redemption in and from Palestine as necessary for the second 

purpose, survival. Regarding the third purpose, prosperity, those same Zionist leaders had to create arguments and conditions to overcome inertia of 

complacency, logical doubt, intra-ethnic distrust, and divided national loyalties among disperse elements of the European Jewish Diaspora.

Jewish grand strategy, or strategic vision, would be provided by Zionist leaders. If we begin in the late 19th century with Theodor Herzl and 

Chaim Weizmann, we can say that Zionist leaders faced not only the task of 

translating national purpose into a practicable vision, but also the task of 

consolidating Jewish cultural and religious identity into a national secular 

one accessible to Zionist strategic leadership. In this respect, these late 19th 

century Zionists already enjoyed a strategic legacy of sorts. One of the innovations necessary for a project of national geographic consolidation was 

the secularization and broadening of the study of Hebrew as a language. 

Earlier leaders, beginning perhaps with Yehuda hai Alkalai, willed Hebrew 

to become not only suitable for religious purposes, but for secular communication among Jews for the explicit purpose of enabling a common Jewish 
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political life in Palestine. To this we can add strategic recognition by the 

Zionists of a relevant global trend: accelerating globalization.

Globalization was more than a phenomenon at which to marvel; it 

meant opportunity to communicate and implement an un-Diaspora that had 

not previously been practicable. It allowed Zionists to apply tithes and other 

donations from areas where economic conditions or moral empathy provided surpluses to fund migrant families from other areas where the 

domestic environment and social conditions created pressures for migration. 

Like today, globalization meant more than advances in financial communication and transportation technologies. The expansion of free market 

principles also eroded feudal land ownership patterns within the Ottoman 

Empire, opening a door for Zionist strategic thought. For the Zionists, useful 

globalization occurred incrementally. Throughout the period, occasions increased during which liquid financial means, effective diplomacy and travel 

potential coincided with localized Jewish demands for an escape.

Growing nationalism, especially in Eastern Europe, was another relevant international trend that Zionists recognized as both a force for Jewish 

unification and a factor increasing discrimination and ethnic resentment. 

Warfare in the Balkans before World War I spurred a varying mix of local 

alliances and coalitions that in every case seemed to prejudice Jewish populations. The wars not only produced waves of migration, they also spawned 

specific national and international policies based on ethnic movement and 

redistribution. In every case, a central issue was land ownership.

In order to implement Zionist national policy, the construction of a 

strategy formulation process was also necessary. On October 29, 1897, 

Herzl and other continental Zionist leaders convened the First Zionist Congress in Basel, Switzerland. This was the beginning of a process of 

process-formation that ultimately increased capacity to excite solidarity, 

marshal resources and induce action from a dispersed and disparate collective identity. By 1903 and the Sixth Zionist Congress, Herzl was trying

steer the concept of a Jewish homeland to include a site in eastern Africa -

- not a concept appealing to other Zionists, including Weizmann, who considered the notion a betrayal of the national purpose. When Herzl untimely 

died in 1904, Zionist leaders and especially Weizmann (who became president of the World Zionist Organization) permanently re-sighted the 

decision azimuth solely toward Palestine.

We might say that according to Herzl’s analysis, the Palestine goal 

would achieve the desired ends, the Jewish population would support it and 

consider it entirely ethical, but it was not feasible to achieve it directly in that 
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the means did not appear to exist. The rest of the Zionist leadership, which 

would prevail, made a different assessment, believing that an Africa detour

was not suitable because presence in Palestine was an element of the basic 

national identity that gave the strategy meaning. Whether in Palestine or eastern Africa, the national objective of the Zionists from the outset was the 

construction of an independent Jewish homeland. Although Herzl despaired 

of its being immediately established in Palestine, there was little divergence 

among Zionist leaders that an independent state was the goal. European Jews 

needed a place where the granting of impunity did not belong to their enemies.

The operational strategy to support the Zionist goal centered on incremental migration and real estate purchase and development. It was not a 

land strategy in the abstract. It was a buy land and live on it strategy. Such 

a construct reconciled well with available Jewish national power in the form 

of intermittent flows of migrants, a growing amount of liquid financial capital, but limited physical force. It could be tailored to disparate and 

incremental migrations at the family and community level. It also presented 

a legal approach that did not challenge ethics shared by Jews with non-Jews. 

Furthermore, it entailed less risk of sparking Judaeophobic reaction. It was 

subject to support by quiet diplomatic efforts tailored to whichever geographic, judicial and bureaucratic paths presented themselves.

This real property strategy had to be supported by the creation of specialized organizations and processes, key examples among these being the 

Palestine Land Development Corporation and the Committee for Population 

Transfer of the Jewish Agency, which were ultimately composed of specialists 

in the areas of land purchases, settlement, economics, law, and local Arab culture. Also indispensable was the development, beginning in 1921, of a loyal,

organized armed force. This became increasingly evident as strategic competitors analyzed Jewish intentions and finally began to take and then execute 

decisions against the Zionist strategy.

The Zionists recognized they could begin the process of land acquisition with a company chartered from the Turkish government, this in 

spite of protestation from some anti-Jewish Ottoman diplomats to whom 

the strategy was apparent. Up until World War I, official Turkish resistance was also subject to amelioration indirectly through intervention 

by the British government. After the war, the Ottoman strategic actor disappeared, but the fact of Ottoman governance had postponed consolidation 

of other Arab Palestinian leadership entities.

The League of Nations mandate to the British ratified British pretensions of rule in Palestine, making the Zionists one of the first non-state 
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actors to be a significant party to a decision of a 20th century international 

organization. The Zionists with whom British functionaries dealt were often patently British (Chaim Weizmann’s youngest son died serving as a 

Royal Air Force pilot in World War II) and some of the British functionaries were themselves Jewish. As the early 20th century passed, the 

‘British Imperial Self’ surrendered to the fact of diminished British power. 

Meanwhile, the claim of a Jewish right to a homeland grew morally attractive in the Anglophone popular imagination. The British government also 

did not understand their own constant contribution to the foundation of 

Zionist operational power inside Palestine. British institutions and economic assumptions furthered the secularization, bureaucratization and 

marketing of real property, thus facilitating a Zionist terrain-objectives

strategy that British military experts would not grasp.

The Zionists recognized the long-term weakening of the British imperial proposition. They also recognized that moral support against that 

proposition could be translated into operational power as financial contributions allowed land acquisition through purchase, especially growing 

contributions from the United States. Finally, the Zionists understood that 

the land acquisition strategy was difficult for the British to see and therefore difficult to oppose by force. Significantly, Zionist strategy was not 

dependent on British goodwill or reactive to British imperialism. It attempted instead to maintain initiative through broad diplomatic 

maneuvering and resource positioning that would produce the greatest 

amount of migration to and land acquisition in Palestine. Key events such 

as the Balfour Declaration are milestones in the relationship between the 

British Government and the Zionist project, but the overall Zionist strategy 

was to constantly change the facts on the ground, plat-by-plat. The idea 

was not to seek grand strategic acts, but to constantly act -- incrementally 

but with strategic intent.

Raphael Lemkin, one of the 20th century’s most famous activists, 

conducted a parallel media and diplomatic effort. Lemkin, inventor of the 

term genocide, dedicated his life to the idea that ‘sovereignty’ should not 

lend impunity to a government for collective murder. (Lemkin’s efforts are 

put into context by Samantha Power in A Problem from Hell.) Lemkin immersed himself in the history of the mass killing of the Armenians. Although 

his celebrated campaign was not about Zion or the Jews, the underlying connection with Jewish history was easily inferred, especially by North 

Americans. Lemkin’s personal strategy was to build the structures of international law that might help protect peoples from their own governments. 
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The Zionists felt a less idealistic approach was necessary. Neither strategy, 

as it turned out, was implemented fast enough.

So, did implementation of a patently land-based strategy itself delay 

fulfillment of the objectives? If Uganda (or perhaps Arizona?) had been an 

acceptable substitute for the literal Palestine, or if Jerusalem could indeed 

have been built in England’s green and pleasant land, would the strategy 

have had a better chance to succeed before European Jewry was stricken? 

The sunk costs of the enterprise were of a spiritual and millennial nature. A 

refuge other than Palestine might only have been temporary, a return to the 

Holy Lands remaining the mythical redemptive prize. Reallocation from 

one European state to another, or to America or Africa, could not have had 

the same emotional magnetism as a return to Palestine.

The Zionist effort was briefly supported by the Nazi’s themselves. It 

was fitfully endorsed by the British, but was simultaneously resistant to any 

countering British military response. It matched details of facts on the 

ground to national purpose, national interests and operational objectives. So 

powerful was the Israel land strategy, it was imitated by Hezbollah.

Please see sections: 105, Genocide Geography; 31, Holes in the Ground; 

75, The Price of Real Estate, and Tourism; 78, Identity; 91, Forts and 

Walls; 44, Political/Military/Administrative; 48, Grading the Social 

Compact; and 53, Hohfeldian Grievance Analysis.



“Our forces saved the remnants of the Jewish people of Europe for 

a new life and a new hope in the reborn land of Israel. Along with 

all men of goodwill, I salute the young state and wish it well.”271F

272

Dwight D. Eisenhower

---------------

“We Jews have a secret weapon in our struggle with the Arabs; 

we have no place to go.”

Golda Meir (attributed)

---------------

“Can't you understand that you make me feel like a Presbyterian 

when you can't, just for a minute or two, forget that you're a Jew?”

from the movie,

Exodus (1960)272F

273


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--Palestine circa 1920--

This image is found on many websites and used for a range of political/historical arguments. What is labeled ‘Palestine’ is approximately contiguous 

with what was known as the British Protectorate of Trans-Jordan/Palestine 

or ‘Palestine under the British Mandate’ from 1923-1948.273F

274
300

From agrarian reform to ethnic cleansing

Section 72,

Land Strategy and Property Strategy

Unless the duration of your role in an irregular war is to be breathtakingly brief, you need a land strategy. If you ask your people, ‘Who owns 

the land exactly here?’ and they can’t say, then the chances are you don’t 

have a land strategy and you need one even more. If you do not have a 

grasp of how the land is owned, you cannot really win one of these conflicts. The best you might be able to do is get things calmed down a bit so 

you can yell ‘victory’ and get out. Too bad, because if you are a United 

States American, your entire political heritage is wrapped up in land strategy. The Zionists had no land, some money, and a people to save. They 

bought land. The American revolutionaries had a lot of land, no money 

and a revolution to manifest. They sold land. These are two huge examples of land-centered strategies, both of them wrapped up in questions of 

property and property regimes.

In 1785, the Congress of the Confederation (which had been the 

Continental Congress and would become the United States Congress) 

owed debts to officers and men of the Continental Army. The Congress 

worried about the land west of the Appalachian continental divide and 

wanted to manifest the principles of the revolution. So, in fulfillment of 

the Northwest Ordinance, it sent surveyors out west to measure the land. 

The survey started at what the surveyors called The Point of Beginning 

along the Ohio River where East Liverpool, Ohio is today. The parcels 

were sold at auction in New York City in fee simple absolute. That means 

you bought the whole thing, all the rights from the heavens to the core of 

the earth. You could do what you wanted with it and all the government 

kept was the duty to make sure that what was yours was yours.

That was a land strategy. It was also a property strategy. It manifested a revolutionary change in the relationship of the individual to

government; it placed an affinity population in an area that might have 

otherwise been populated by opposition identities; it paid down a national 

debt; and it ignited an era of exploration and productivity. It framed the 

relationship that Americans were developing among themselves. Those 

relationships were about the land, but among people. America’s revolutionaries understood that land rights, civil rights and human rights 
72 Land Strategy and Property Strategy

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overlapped almost completely. They knew that for rights to be enjoyed 

they had to be enjoyed some place. The government was to be prevented 

from ‘disappearing’ people. Slavery was to be unlawful. The protection 

of liberty was an actual strategy, a land reform, a land-use plan.

If there is something in a society you want to change because it is defective or not good enough, probably there exists some corresponding 

shortcoming in the property regime. Unfortunately, the factors affecting ownership may be so ingrained in existing, administrative, legal and customary

practices that your leeway for change isn’t great. Knowledge about land ownership might help you not try to change what is impracticable to change.

If you are going to attempt to change something (Let’s face it, 

you’re an American), you need an appropriate land and property strategy. First 

learn what the existing relationships are among people regarding land. You 

especially want to know who will gain and who will suffer from a transference of rights related to the most valuable locations. Some of the best 

pieces are sitting along your enemy’s lines of retreat to sanctuary, or along 

yours, or are the source ground of his wealth and power to fight you, or of 

your power to fight him. If you are thinking about building something, whether 

as modest as a fish pond or as ambitious as a railroad bridge, the effects on everyone’s property values should be calculated in advance.

The term ‘land reform’ is a broad-brush label given to a wide array 

of land-focused strategies for resolution of political struggles. Results have 

been mixed and depend ultimately on subjective measures. Too many land 

reform notions, however, have been bad ideas. The flaw is generally traceable to a failure to understand or admit the nature of property. Property, even 

real property, is not just the thing itself, but rather an agreement regarding 

the concert of rights associating people with things. Strategies that begin 

with a complete understanding of the preferential rights and duties of all 

owner interests are more likely to succeed than any strategy that only envisages preferential occupancy of a delimited space. It is hard to find a land 

reform project that hasn’t suffered unexpected and unintended effects of 

tinkering with forces and relationships that were incompletely understood. 

For those interested in securing and centralizing government power, however, land reform has had a long record of successes. Economic progress, 

individual liberty and upward mobility have not fared as well.

“The most disheartening conclusion...may be that whenever a reformer 

(such as a king, a government, or a revolutionary junta) has changed the 
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land tenure system by fiat, he, she, or it has retained a substantial portion 

of the rights instead of yielding them to the peasant.”274F

275

One basic ownership right is the right to get rid of a thing. This single 

characteristic of ownership can probably be blamed for half of land reform 

failures. If a program distributes land to a poor farmer, he might immediately turn around and sell it. If a plan includes incentives for him to stay on 

the land ˗˗seed credits, agricultural advice, and technical capitalization ˗˗ the 

government enters the rural economy in a pervasive, expensive way. Even 

with all necessary aid, there is little a government can do to assure the market 

value of food staples. The next logical step is price supports and other market 

interventions. Pressures build toward new re-redistributions of ownership 

portions -- perhaps in the form of mortgages or uneven taxing schemes. Reform regulations often include tenure requirements such as residence during 

a fixed number of harvests before the occupant receives title. In these cases, 

the government effectively creates a new form of serfdom. The whole process may succumb to corruption and loopholes that allow the black market 

sale of quit claims, false appraisals, and so on. Finally, governments are 

even less able to assure farm labor supplies. As it turns out, not all peasant 

children are as enamored of the pastoral lifestyle as the cosmopolitan land 

reformers would want. There is something mystically attractive about the 

indoor toilet. On occasion, the forced reapportionment of rural terrain may 

have positively supported strategic interests.

The program of Military Government included taking over all Japanese properties as rapidly as possible for the benefit of the Korean 

people, relieving labor from the conditions of absolute servitude 

under which it has existed for the last forty years, returning to the 

farmers the land... (Gary L. Olson, US Foreign Policy and the 

Third World Peasant: Land Reform in Asia and Latin America)275F

276

In post-World War II Korea, land reform measures were taken by a 

military occupation force that followed another foreign occupier. The Americans were motivated a desire to undermine the appeal of socialist and 

communist arguments within the large Korean rural population. In that case, 

large tracts of virtually ownerless properties were available for redistribution.

In the case of the American occupation of Japan, the number of 

pure owner-cultivators was increased from 52.8 percent of the total farming households in 1946 to 61.8 percent of the total in 1950. Tenant 

households dropped from 28.7 percent to 5 percent. One million former 

landlords were dispossessed. Rights in land had been purchased by the 

government by instruction of the Supreme Command Allied Powers. The 
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plan had its roots partly in pre-war academic appreciations of a relationship 

between feudal tenure systems in Japan and the power of militarist elites. 

General MacArthur’s directive to the Japanese government stated in part: 

In order that the Imperial Japanese Government ... destroy the economic bondage which has enslaved the Japanese farmer for centuries 

of feudal oppression, the Japanese Imperial Government is directed 

to take measures to insure that those who till the soil shall have a 

more equal opportunity to enjoy the fruits of their labor.276F

277

These post-WWII land programs seem to have had a direct effect on 

elections that favored pro-United States elements. One observation is essential: In one case, reforms were imposed on a defeated enemy; in the other 

they were imposed on a country that had been previously occupied by a foreign army. The observation does not lead to a conclusion that such changes 

must be imposed, but does discredit the argument that changes must be indigenous or locally motivated, even while that might be preferable.

Some will say that the centerpiece of your effort should be the ‘ruleof-law’. OK. Rule-of-law for a Kansan means that if she is in her home and 

the police want to come in to arrest her, they need to have a piece of paper 

with her name and address on it signed by a judge. Part of the Kansan land 

strategy says that as to some private spaces strangers need special permission 

to enter, including and especially agents of the government. She also has 

rights on the street in front of her home, including a right to be safe and not 

harassed. Am I stretching the meanings of strategy, land and property --

forcing them to overlap? No, they just do overlap. By the way, closing off 

your enemy’s route of retreat to sanctuary is a land strategy.

Although land might be property, property is not land. Property is 

the result of an agreement among people regarding obligations and preferential rights related to something valuable, land perhaps. So property is not 

so much the place as it is the mix of recognized rights and obligations that 

some group of persons has sorted out among each other about the place and 

things in it. When durable evidence exists regarding who owns what; and 

the evidence is precise, comprehensive and transparent; we say the place has 

formal property records. A place is unlikely to enjoy peace for long, or at 

least won’t enjoy liberty, if it does not have a system of formal property. For 

humans to flourish (enjoy material success, establish human and spiritual 

relationships as they see fit and treat each other and their surroundings with 

respect), the social arrangement has got to include a formalized system of 

property ownership. You are probably wasting your time engaged in a project, program, strategy or movement aimed at improving the material 
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performance of a place if your effort is not built around formal property. 

Property is man’s most successful conflict resolution invention, and we are 

stressed to find examples, save small isolated communities, where peoples 

have long survived in peace where the property regime was not formalized. 

Saying that a place will not enjoy peace unless there isformal property is not 

the same as saying it will have peace if there is formal property. The assertion is unfortunately negative. Formal property is a necessary, but not 

necessarily sufficient condition. The formalization of property is mostly to 

be associated with the evidence of ownership. There still needs to be ways 

to do something with the evidence. We need property courts, markets and 

democratic processes. Then, even if the evidence of ownership is excellent 

and there exist vibrant, incorrupt courts and markets, there is still likely to 

be trouble if the basic rules of ownership are illiberal or out of balance with 

the basic expectations of the culture.

Liberal and formal are not the same qualities. Liberal refers to the 

most basic rules delimiting the distribution of rights, however evidenced and 

whatever can be done with that evidence. A property regime is more or less 

liberal to the extent more categories of persons are admitted as owners of a 

broader array of rights. The ultimate expression of private ownership -- total, independent, unencumbered and uncompromised individual exercise of 

rights in land ˗˗ may not constitute property ownership at all. Such a condition is sovereign lordship (meaning that an owner enjoys complete impunity 

for whatever he does on his land), which must be defended by unyielding 

force. It is only when lords reach agreement with their neighbors that property is created. That is to say, in order to speak of property at all, an

agreement must exist regarding conflict resolution ˗˗ which leads inexorably 

to the recognition of a role for government. The question, therefore, does 

not revolve around the epochal and fantastic argument regarding private versus public property. There is no private property. Things are only ‘property’ 

as the result of a community’s agreement. Still, rather than focusing solely 

on owner rights, we want also to underline duties, especially those of government in the social compact. We see that where the State fails to shoulder 

its immediate duties (conflict resolution and prevention or amelioration of 

trespass) the property regime is less likely to promote human flourishing.

Whatever side of a conflict you find yourself, have some plan, program, intention ˗˗ something ˗˗ that directly addresses the administration of 

the evidence of ownership. This ought to start with real property ˗˗ with land 

and the things attached to it, but it should reach into all significant forms of 
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wealth, from motorcycles to bandwidth, attorney’s licenses, savings accounts, phone numbers, voter registration, even names. The combination of 

durable evidence regarding preferential rights, along with the realistic possibility of doing something with that evidence, is what gives strength to a 

social contract based in property. If, nevertheless, there is a category of people that is excluded from owning; then there still exists great potential for 

conflict. Such a system, well-named ‘apartheid’, can be quite formal

There are, then, three broad points to be made about your land strategy: 

The first is that you have one. The second is that it be informed by current 

culture and by the variability of value and diverse ownership. The third point

is that your land strategy include a property strategy. There are in turn three

broad points to be made about property strategy: Property records should be 

formalized -- precise, comprehensive and transparent. Second, there need to 

exist institutions that can put the records to use -- property courts, markets, and 

local elections. Thirdly, a property regime should be liberal as well as formal.

Please see sections: 107, Guerre d'Algérie; 20, Rule-of-law; 87, Water 

Wars; 48, Grading the Social Compact; 110, Knowledge Gaps; 66, GIS; 

86, Shifting Covet-geographies; and 94, Poop.



“When the Argives were disputing land boundaries with the Spartans and were maintaining that theirs was the fairer claim, he 

(Lysander) drew his sword and said: ‘The man who has this within 

his grasp argues best about land boundaries.’”

Plutarch, quoting Lysander

(circa 395 BC)277F

278

---------------

Jublain: In a new land a man might become a king. He might take 

hold of land as did the Normans when they came to England or the 

Saxons before them.

Barnabas: I do not want to be a king, I said, ‘I want only freedom to 

grow and do and be as much as time will allow.’ 278 F

279

Louis L'Amour,

Sackett’s Land


306

Irregular war microcosm

Section 73, The Catatumbo

Section 26 asserts that The Chaco War was archetypically regular -- that 

it did not feature in abundance any of the five phenomena that distinguish irregular from regular war. The violent struggle for control of Colombia’s Catatumbo 

region (ongoing as of this writing) does. Armed contenders not only deal with 

the civilian population in-place, they import population and force much of it to 

stay put; the contenders invest considerable competitive effort in influencing the 

non-fighting population psychologically; anonymity is hotly contested; some of 

the contenders are adept at using laws and courts to their military advantage; and 

a wide variety of types and compositions of armed organizations were formed 

for the fight. Several participant formations are formally uniformed, hierarchical, equipped and trained according to fixed regulatory documents, and led 

by professionally trained officers. Nevertheless, the war is archetypically irregular. The Colombian Catatumbo is of valuable instruction to us because it is a

theatre in an orchestrated war-by-all-means-of-struggle. ‘All means’ includes 

many of the specific lines of effort mentioned elsewhere in this book, an approach that in the aggregate we could call postmodern or cocktail or whatever. 

The orchestrators (who are of the bolivarian movement, with the FARC as its 

most active coercive element) appear more agile, resolute and tireless than their 

government opponents, and as a result may be on the cusp of unchallenged control of the region. The several causes of or reasons for their victory are visible 

enough in detail, but if we can afford an overall descriptor of the reason, ‘government failure’ might work, even while that expression does not assign enough 

credit or blame to the aggressors’ initiative and guile.

The Colombian government’s failure in the Catatumbo is of not checking the impunity of guerrillas and smugglers. Said government failure is 

directly connected to its incapacity or unwillingness to terminally pursue elements of violence-perpetrating organizations on the ground. The details of 

impunity in the Catatumbo, however, are decreasingly clear, because part of 

the government’s overall failure is reflected in the spread of the culture of silence and lost freedom of the press:

“At the Radio Station, we are subject to a rule imposed by illegal 

armed groups -- we have to stay quiet about a number of themes about 

which we do not often speak. When it is news about public order --

that they killed someone or they killed him we don’t say so, we only 

talk about what is nice and good in Catatumbo.”27 9F

280

A survey of selected environmental and initiative factors exposes why the 

Catatumbo is so contested and why liberty there is so increasingly absent:
73 The Catatumbo

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Territorial Scrutiny. The waters of the Catatumbo River descend from 

mountains in Ábrego county, Colombia, to drain into Lake Maracaibo in Venezuela. The river lends its name to the surrounding region, which hasn’t any 

specific borders as ‘Catatumbo’ per se, but more or less comprises seven 

counties (municipios) in Colombia and about as many in Venezuela. The international boundary splitting the Catatumbo north to south is wholly 

contrived. The demarcation is not along the crest of the Andes, as it is farther 

north along the Serranía de Perijá, or along a river. The Catatumbo and major 

tributaries cross the border perpendicularly. The long thin shapes of several 

of the counties make effective administration impracticable, especially given 

the completely un-nested condition of other administrative entities such as the 

national park and indigenous reservation boundaries.

Scale. Geography loves scale...and toponomy...and water basins. We 

could throw Omaha and Wichita into one basket as Mississippi towns, 

which they both most certainly are. We could call those cities ‘Western’ or 

Midwestern’ and get away with it as well, and we could video-interview 

people in either and get away with claiming we were in the other. The Catatumbo shows some of that. Tibú, county seat and center of the regional oil 

industry, is most certainly in the Catatumbo, but the Tibú River doesn’t contribute to the Catatumbo until it is well inside Venezuela. To get from the 

Tibú River at Tibú to the Catatumbo River at La Gabarra (massacres) it is 

about as far in driving time as Wichita is from Omaha. National scale maps 

reveal the relationship of the zone to other old smuggling corridors within 

and across Colombia, which in recent decades defined the country’s most 

violently contested areas. For a smuggling organization it makes good business as well as security sense to weave routes and safe havens across 

regional space on a strategic scale.

Escape Geography, Covet Geography and the Culminating Point. If fugitive elements are escaping from inland Colombia eastward they can take 

advantage of uphill slopes. Once on the Venezuelan border they are all but 

home free. If Colombia government units based along the border happen to 

chase them toward the west, the chased element still often has the advantage 

of moving uphill. The Colombian government’s response to lawlessness and 

loss of sovereign control has understandably included the placement of more 

police and soldiers in the region. The activity of these detachments has included attempts to build relationships with Venezuelan counterparts, man 

border crossing points more effectively, and improve the image of the Colombian government among the locals. Stopping the contraband of cheap fuel 
73 The Catatumbo

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runs counter to that last notion, however, so all along the border there are informal concessions to smuggling. Most of the oil production and exploitable 

hydrocarbon reserves of the Catatumbo Basin are on the Colombian side of 

the border. However, because of the opposite relationship of hydrocarbon 

reserves and production at the national scale, a gallon of gasoline might easily 

cost $.25 in Venezuela while the average price in Colombia runs closer to 

$4.00 per gallon. 

“...having just passed a military checkpoint, we are all suddenly obliged 

to stop for what appeared to be the advance party of some celebrity and 

turned out to be -- surprise, my reader friends -- the logistical team of a 

caravan of gasoline smugglers of -- surprise again -- eighty trucks that 

left speeding from a farm where, surely, they used an alternate pathway 

to slip past the checkpoint, about which they were timely advised...”

As Junior Johnson might have said, ‘a place where an eighty-truck caravan 

can sneak past a checkpoint...is nice’. Add to this a growing number of 

unprotected and poorly regulated mineral mines, a major coca cultivation 

area and a set of agricultural advantages that makes some licit crops as 

profitable as illicit crops. After their demobilization, some ex-paramilitary 

leaders apparently leveraged government crop substitution programs and 

subsidies to aggregate parcels into sprawling palm oil plantations. Profitability depended on favorable market prices for hydrocarbons and on 

continuing subsidies from the national government. Now palm oil producers may enjoy laws (argued on environmental protection grounds) that

require fixed biofuel percentages in the national gasoline mixtures. Crop 

substitution can substitute one unsustainability for another, as favored 

crops can draw untenable levels of government funding.

Massacres. The history of La Gabarra (see map page 312) did not begin on 

August 21, 1999, but for some it might as well have. Dozens of men from the 

surrounding countryside were in town that Saturday evening for beer and prostitutes. Most worked in one way or another in the cocaine coca industry, 

directly or indirectly for the FARC. A unit ofthe anti-communist AUC arrived 

in town with a list. All on that list, or who were not carrying a valid ID card 

proving otherwise, were murdered as FARC collaborators or were carried 

away to be disappeared elsewhere. The numbers have never been ascertained 

with any precision, but at least 35 bodies were scooped up by the garbage tractor the next morning. The AUC then took over control of not only the coca 

agroindustry, but just about everything. Five years later, the AUC disarmed 

and demobilized under government supervision, after which the FARC came 

back and retook not only the coca agroindustry, but just about everything. 
73 The Catatumbo

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Since then, various parts and parcels of the region have been contested by remnants and outgrowths of the AUC, the ELN, the FARC the Colombian 

military, other government ministries, and odd assortments of start-up gangs.

Non-violent action. In recent years, the bolivarians successfully mounted social and political mass actions (marches, strikes, roadblocks) in support of and 

based upon the FARC’s negotiating positions at peace talks it conducted in 

Havana, Cuba. For instance, a group called the Catatumbo Peasant Association (Ascamcat), supportive of the FARC if not a dedicated surrogate, mounted

hundreds of roadblocks and strike actions. The national government made 

continual concessions involving tacit abandonment of law enforcement actions against illicit agricultural and smuggling activities.

Colombian counties receive significant royalties from the central government to hydrocarbon producing locales like the Catatumbo. Such

remittances attracted bribes and extortions. Additionally, the management of 

county government resources and the locally produced rules for political representation are, as elsewhere in Colombia, a vehicle by which illegal armed 

organizations can gain county-level political power through legal electoral actions backed by coercive force. By gaining control of a county government, 

the bolivarians had only to bribe or intimidate themselves.

Land-use. The FARC has insistently promoted the establishment of a Catatumbo peasant reservation zone (zona de reserva campesina). At first, this 

constitutionally-created communal land entity was only a patch-worked territorial demarcations in various townships of the principal Catatumbo counties. 

Now it looks as though it will cover more than half of Tibú county and overlap 

its borders into other counties. The distance to the headquarters of the persons 

controlling the rights and duties associated with the peasant reservation is not 

clear. FARC, or other bolivarian leaders, are set to control the peasant reservations. They could be seated across the border well into Venezuela or even 

on a Cuban beach. In terms of cost distances and culminating points, La 

Gabarra might be far less remote to the bolivarian leaders than to the Colombian government authorities, including even those in the county seat of Tibú.

Mens Rea. It is sometimes by way of looking to the pronouncements, experiences, associations and history of leaders that a better picture of a struggle 

can be gained. As for the Catatumbo struggle, there are many personalities 

worthy of note, but we might validly tag a fellow named César Jerez as the 

mens rea leader of the bolivarians. He is not of local campesino stock. He has 

some overseas hard science education, having earned a Master’s degree in petroleum engineering in Baku, is a professor of the Russian language, editor of 

the progressive news agency Prensa Rural and is a spokesperson for the NGO 
73 The Catatumbo

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promoting the peasant reservation zones nationally. He is a long-time ally of 

the FARC. César has more in common with Bolivia’s Álvaro Garcia Linera 

than he does with peasants. He clearly understands and can orchestrate an allforms-of-struggle struggle.

Lawfare. The bolivarians use lawfare patiently and strategically, placing 

judges, arguing constitutional interpretation regarding designation and ownership attributes of communal lands and the assignment of what organizations can 

legitimately control rights associated with those lands. Moreover, in the context 

of the broader negotiations, the bolivarians seem to have won dominant influence over the judicial entity that will determine who will be defined as victims, 

who as perpetrators, and who is due restitutions accordingly. The process will 

especially benefit bolivariansin the Catatumbo region given that they have been 

relatively successful in migrating to or keeping their affiliatesin the zone.

Outposts. The wisdom of initial placement of government outposts correlates

to their effectiveness; an outpost’s being able to remain in existence a lower 

bar than its being able to operate effectively. When, for instance, the AUC 

came to La Gabarra to discipline the workforce not to work for the FARC, a 

detachment of soldiers was located scant meters away across the river bridge. 

We might forgive the Captain in charge, with around sixty men, for having

agreed not to move his men out to confront a well-armed force three times that 

size. Certainly the Captain might have found omission easier to justify seeing 

that FARC supporters were the ostensible targets of the AUC massacre.

In La Tarra, up-river from La Gabarra and squarely along an upslope

smuggling corridor, the military outpost is frequently attacked by one guerrilla 

organization or another. Every time one of these attacks occurs and the government cannot respond with a terminally effective pursuit of the attackers 

(usually) is evidence that the government is not winning and does not have the 

initiative. Elsewhere throughout the area, roadblocks and checkpoints, government or otherwise, are like little temporary outposts. They are used to 

dissimilar effect, however. Outlaw roadblocks have been effective to intimidate the population into staying or leaving depending on the desires of the 

given guerrilla, paramilitary or gangster group. Military checkpoints are often 

fooled, avoided or have been strategically incapacitated by negotiations. 

Property and Sovereignty. Every up-and-coming gangster wants to have 

records of who lives where and who owes him money or labor. If he fancies 

himself a vanguard of the proletariat, he in any case needs records of who is 

supposed to be where, and what they have. The bolivarians seem to have managed an agreement within which the government of Colombia will provide all 

the needed administration and paperwork, to which the bolivarians will have 
73 The Catatumbo

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proprietary access. Rather than claim that this or that balance between individual and communal ownership is best, the argument throughout this book

has favored liberal property regimes featuring fluidity, divisibility, precision 

and transparency. The Catatumbo will not have that. The government in Bogotá appears to have conceded local property conflict resolution to the 

bolivarians, who imitate the ancient hacendados in a new old form of feudalism. Sovereignty may have shifted, as the bolivarians do not recognize the 

border with Venezuela in the way the government of Colombia recognized it.

What is going on in the Catatumbo is part of a broader irregular war. 

Its outcome is yet uncertain and indeed the opinions expressed above as to that 

outcome may prove wholly pessimistic and mistaken. The war is nevertheless 

being both won and lost. It features all the five distinguishing characteristics 

of irregular war, just as the Chaco war featured none of them. The topics of 

perhaps fifty sections of this book apply mightily in the Catatumbo.

Please see sections: 65, Smuggling; 7, Sanctuary; 131, Is It an Insurgency?; 

49, Territorial Scrutiny; 61, The Geography of Dope; 88, Escape Geography; 15, NGOs, IOs, and Unions; and 32, Land-use Planning.



“It must be admitted that the assailant generally has the moral advantage 

over the assailed, and almost always acts more understandingly than the 

latter, who must be more or less in a state of uncertainty.”280 F

281

Antoine-Henri Jomini

Summary of the Art of War

---------------

“The Words of the proverb: ‘A bridge of gold should be made for 

the enemy,’ is followed religiously. This is false. On the contrary, 

the pursuit should be pushed to the limit. And the retreat that appeared such a satisfactory solution will be turned into a rout.281 F

282

Maurice Comte de Saxe

My Reveries

---------------

“Yesterday, about 1 P.M., Brydon, an Assistant Surgeon, of the 

Shah's Service, reached this place, (on a horse scarcely able to move 

another yard) wounded and bruised from head to foot with stones, 

and he, alone, has arrived to tell the fearful tale.”282 F

283

Dr. William Brydon

---------------
73 The Catatumbo

312

---------------

“Every geostrategy analyst knows that without territorial control 

there is no power, and to get it, just gaining territory is not enough,

but that it is more important to seduce the heart, the sympathy and 

loyalty of those who occupy those territories, if what is wanted is to 

triumph in the struggle.”283F

284

Ricardo Puentes Melo



-- The Colombian Catatumbo --

Map includes ArcGIS and Augustin Codazzi Geographic Institute SIGOT files

La Gabarra

Tibú
313

Confounding place, identity, and impunity

Section 74,Refugees and Displaced Persons

Out-of-place people are a regular feature of organized armed conflict. Generally, the connotation of refugees is of persons away from their 

country homeland, perhaps exiled. Displaced persons usually connotes 

displacement within a country, the currently fashionable term in international organizations being Internally Displaced Persons (IDP), of which 

there are tens of millions in the world.

Internal armed struggles invariably displace persons, families, 

communities, or even whole populations. At one end of the spectrum are 

whole peoples removed by force, their option being death, while at the 

other end of the spectrum an insecure environ contributes to voluntary individual decisions to uproot. The displacement may be an emigration from 

the country and continent or it may be a house change from an outlying 

area to a nearby city. Every point on the plane of refugee and displaced 

person types and motivations can have an effect on your prospects for winning. In one way or another, the demographics of migration can affect 

your chances of success.

Internal displacement is a challenge and an opportunity. People are 

displaced for a reason and sometimes there is someone to blame. Many 

persons are displaced by disasters of one kind or another. It should be 

obvious how useful it can be to gain an understanding of where displaced 

persons have come from, where they wish to go, the impediments they 

face, what their survival needs are, and why they are displaced. Certain 

population cohorts can show distinct behaviors during forced relocations. 

Young men especially tend to leave refugee flows in order to forage or 

find some answer to their displacement and even to seek revenge for it.

Some refugee or displaced populations, or parts thereof, may be participants in or pieces of a concerted strategy that uses migration to change 

demographic facts to thereby gain political leverage. The speed of such migratory strategies can vary, which will in turn influence what possible 

responses a destination polity might make. Whether to welcome, resist, or 

take indirect measures is dependent on so many factorsit is futile to make any 

non-contextual suggestions. It behooves you, if population displacement is a 

factor in the midst of your irregular war, to consider if any part of it is the 

product of a competitive strategic design, and who’s exactly that might be. As 

sections 127 and 135 elaborate, representation according to place-identity is 
74 Refugees and Displaced Persons

314

often at odds with pure democracy, and those two at odds with demography.2 84F

285 This year, 2016, the British voted to leave the European Union, partly 

in response to controversy about the freedom of movement within Europe of 

immigrants, particularly those from Islamic countries. When a politically empowered individual moves physically, he necessarily takes his power into the 

space of another, inciting thereby a territorial challenge. Is it possible that the 

mass movement of Moslems into Britain is part of a directed strategy related 

to domination and submission? In any case, a majority of voting Brits decided 

they wanted to wrest control of a lot of things, including migration, from continental bureaucrats. 

A lot of off-putting stories seem to come out of Africa. Robert Feldman, of our own office and a close observer of things Africa, gives us the 

following: In late September, 2005, the UN High Commission for Refugees 

reported that approximately 300 armed Arab men riding horses and camels 

attacked the Aro Sharow Internally Displaced Persons camp in West Darfur, 

Sudan. Most of the camp's 5,000 or so residents (subsistence farmers) fled 

into the countryside, though not all...29 were killed. The conflict in this impoverished western section of Sudan had been going on for several years. 

Tensions between the Arab pastoralists in the northern section of the region 

and Black African farmers in the southern section were already inflamed when 

drought struck in the 1980's. With shrinking pasturage to the north, the Arab 

herders pushed further south where their livestock began grazing on land farmers used to raise crops. Essentially, three different groups became embroiled 

in fighting: (1) armed southern rebels, including the Sudan Liberation Movement/Army (SLM/A) and the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM), who 

accused the government of oppression and claimed to represent the rights of 

southern farmers; (2) an armed northern militia, the Janjaweed; and (3) the 

Sudanese government, which, backing the Janjaweed, brought its coercive

power to bear against the southern farmers and their rebel groups. The UN 

Under-Secretary General for Humanitarian Affairs condemned the September 

attack.28 5F

286 He went on to criticize all parties --the Janjaweed, government, and 

the southern rebel groups -- for increasing attacks on humanitarian workers.

In some situations, the longing for original lands is inconsolable except by 

commitment to help return people to their former places. It can be difficult to fulfill 

a promise offull restitutionof landsto a displaced population, especially when they 

and those who would help them are under violent threat, but the effort can be a 

powerful motivator. Forcing displaced persons into camps, although it can ease 

logistical burdens related to the immediate needs of a displaced population (and 
74 Refugees and Displaced Persons

315

concerns of the hosts in hosting locales), can quickly sour any advantageous human potential that a displaced population might have presented. Not only can a 

refugee population become dependent and lose self-reliance skills, it can be made 

an easy target for violent attack. Internally displaced persons had rights in land 

somewhere before gaining the empty identity of IDP. They may have thought they 

had the right not just to be, but to be somewhere, and somewhere of their own 

choosing at that. What were those rights and what happened to them? You can 

probably best express solidarity with innocent victim IDP or international refugees 

or by actively addressing questions about rights and duties that previously existed, 

or about the future of rights and duties that might associate them honorably with 

some new place. Doing nothing might be the poorest option.

Today we reasonably fearthat guileful leaders cause and then use the cover 

and poignancy of civilian migration flows to hide the deployment of what amount 

to foot soldiers and logistic trainsin an irregular war. These deployments may be 

loosely directed, facilitated, or just induced. Whatever the level of authorship or 

accessorial behavior, there is a mens rea (which resides perhaps in a government, 

a clergy, a group of brigands, or some stew of these) which we need not treat as 

innocent victims.

Please see sections: 72, Land Strategy and Property Strategy; 78, Identity; 9, White 

Bird; 105, Genocide Geography; 90,Prisons andPrisoners; 127, Between Liberty 

and Lawrence; 135, Borders and Anarchism; and 124, Slavery andUnderclass.



“I prayed for twenty years but received no answer until

I prayed with my legs.”

Frederick Douglass (attributed)

---------------

“Home is where you make it. Everybody know that.”

Old Cajun Man in the movie,

Joe Dirt (2001)286F

287

---------------

Russian Interrogator: Why are you here? 

Emmett: Why am I here? Why are you here? Why is 

anybody here? I think it was Jean-Paul Sartre who once 

said, ‘How do you spell Sartre?’

from the movie,

Spies Like Us (1985)287F

288


316

True measures of human security?

Section 75, The Price of Real Estate, 

and Tourism

The Price of Real Estate. There are several connections that tie the price of real 

estate to winning irregular war, especially if the conflict is widespread.

Key terrain is key terrain. Military people are used to the idea of key terrain 

and what makes the terrain key, or at least so they think. What terrain is most 

important in an irregular conflict may have little to do with cover from weapons 

fire, and everything to do with the marketplace. People tend to fight over the 

places of greatest value in relation to material wellbeing and, while some places 

may have great emotional value, others may have purely military value. A good 

way to detail variation in value over a broad area is to encourage and allow a 

market in real estate to operate, and to create mechanisms that reflect the price 

decisions of that market.

Measuring Success. Regardless of what else might be used to measure operational success during an irregular war, relative success or failure over time will 

manifest itself in an improved overall value of the real estate. For an organized 

crime boss, the overall value of his real estate is a pretty good measure of his

success.

Find extortions, corruptions and money laundering. Abrupt changes in market prices bespeak all these things, but if the market is invisible, so too are 

these activities. Make the market for real estate both vibrant and transparent, and by so doing, many activities and places will be vaccinated against 

violent illegalities.

Pay for the conflict. There is often a spatial logic between where costs of conflict fall and who owns land and other valuable things. Determine the spatial 

logic so that the persons causing or benefiting from the placement of the costs 

of the conflict are those burdened.

Real estate people know everything. If there is a real estate market, there is 

someone who will act as an agent for sale and purchase. To be an effective 

agent for the exchange of something valuable, the agent needs to know about 

the thing being sold and about both buyer and seller and about the environment. 

Few people know more about the details of value in a community than do real 

estate brokers and appraisers.
75 The Price of Real Estate, and Tourism

317

Property is the foundation of conflict resolution. Property statutes, courts and 

processes lie at the heart of day-to-day conflict resolution, but much of the content of arguments over real estate have to do with the real estate’s value. Where 

there is no market to establish value, there is only the argument.

Land strategies can work, but they should not be attempted in the absence of knowledge about what places are really valuable and which places 

aren’t. If you fancy yourself as a planner or leader in irregular war and you have 

little clue about the market value of land in the operational area, you’ll want to 

change that. If other people are around who are acutely aware of the market 

value of real estate, they almost certainly know more than you do about what’s 

going on in that place.

Look for cadastral records. Cadastral records are usually tied to a land 

taxation system that is based on value appraisals done by a government or by 

certified professionals, and the appraisal values are generally tied by formula to 

an anticipated market value or to a theory of tax equity. If the cadastral system 

is broken, fix it. If there is no cadastral system, maybe create one. Societies do 

exist where literacy isthe exception; resolution of land conflicts follows patterns 

of familial seniority or ancient feudalism-like inheritance; evidence is oral; debts 

are paid entirely in kind; and there are few public records. Such places are rare. 

They are themselves not likely to be the source grounds of much danger to the 

world. To the extent they become so, due perhaps to foreign presence, the creation of formal records can still proceed if it can be shown (especially to those 

who make decisions regarding occupancy of land)that a material and social benefit will accrue from the records.

Tourism. Tourism locations, patterns and rates provide a significant index of 

human security, especially if we expand the idea of tourism to include recreation 

and entertainment. If people are willing to vote with their feet and wallets to be 

someplace other than their home because to do so is pleasurable, it says a lot 

about a place. In addition, data for tourism and recreation is relatively easy to 

find, establish and maintain.

Recreation and tourist sites can include anything from religious pilgrimage destinations to neighborhood swimming pools. The point is that people 

make voluntary decisions to be someplace. People don’t keep going to places 

that are too unsafe, expensive or not pleasurable in some way. Tourism and 

recreation geographies include the destinations and the routes to and from them. 

The geography of tourism can be organized along common scales according to 

tourist origins and administrative peculiarities. For instance, international tourists need to obtain passports and visas, exchange money, and make bookings 
75 The Price of Real Estate, and Tourism

318

through travel agents. Local recreational sites have other fiscal and territorial 

features. In every case it is possible to create a baseline of destinations, origins, 

and visits, and maybe amounts of money spent.

Tourism and recreation measurements (such as the number of miles traveled, by how many people, and down what roads or to what ports) can provide 

a publicly accessible and geographically clear appreciation of the progress of an 

internal armed conflict.

As a measure of progress in providing human security, there are few 

things that a government can do that are more innocuous (even helpful) than the 

careful calculation and transparent presentation of tourism and recreation data. 

Tourism industries, their expansion and success, are heavily dependent on the 

built environment. Tourism is cosmopolitan and urban, even when it is nature 

or eco-touring. As such, there are few things more subject to planning, or more 

subject to the market. A tourism plan has to be a business plan.

An insurgent group may wish to create a psychology of insecurity or 

follow a counter-economy strategy in which tourism and recreation are targets. 

Measuring tourism is then all the more instructive -- its presentation may have 

the added benefit of exposing destructive extortion strategies.

Please see sections: 70, Measuring Effects of Actions on Structure; 66, GIS; 

68, Scale; 59, Spontaneity; 92, Graves Registration; 47, Why the County; 

80, Why You Should Like Geography; and 86, Shifting Covet-geographies.



“Out of the land we came and into it we must go.

If you will hold your land you can live -- no one can rob you of land.

If you sell the land, it is the end.” 288F

289

Wang Lung in Pearl S. Buck’s,

The Good Earth

---------------

Guard at Walleyworld: That's not a real gun, is it Clark?

Clark Griswald: Are you kidding? This is a Magnum P.I.

Guard: It's a BB gun.

Clark: Don't tempt me. I could put an eye out with this thing.

Guard: You couldn't even break the skin with that thing.

from the movie,

Vacation (1983) 289F

290


319

Half the world, a twentieth of the violence

Section 76, Gender

Dying in irregular wars is done or suffered at a rate of about twenty 

young males or more to each female.290 F

291 Twenty times as many males as 

females are mortal victims in most armed conflicts. For some other difficult cost categories, like limbs lost to explosives, the ratio of males to 

females is higher still, and the numbers of male killers to female killers is

way higher. Few females become leaders of armed guerrilla or criminal 

organizations and even in the most female-welcoming guerrilla armies, the 

female roles tend strongly away from combat action and toward service, 

supply and information. Irregular warfare is a young man’s game, the few 

exceptions proving the rule. Why this is the case I do not know, except to 

recur to human nature and territoriality. Testosterone, he explained.

Having asserted the above about the male character of armed conflict, I believe that most governments (and maybe most insurgent groups)

would be better situated to succeed in irregular conflicts if they counted on 

ground forces with a higher female content in the gender mix. For readers 

who take that assertion as un-macho, here is the disclaimer: combat actions, whatever their level of conventionality or regularity, will continue 

to be athletic events that generally favor the male. That is to say, there is 

a significant dimension of physical strength, speed and exertion on which 

success in irregular warfare depends and in which males will best, in the 

aggregate, females. At least this will be true for ground combat.

In the government armies of Latin America, young women appear to 

have contributed to counterinsurgent success beyond the weight of their relative 

numbers. Guatemala’s special operations units (including the renowned Kaibiles) began assigning women in the 1980s to civil affairs and psychological 

operations duties. Women in many of Guatemala’s highland tribal groups would 

only talk with other women. To open communication with what amounted to an 

unheard half of the population, the army applied the parsimonious solution of 

adding women to their force structure. The result was a flood of useful information about guerrilla infiltrations and whereabouts. A senior retired 

Guatemalan officer also told me about the matriarchy. Whenever a government coup loomed (often), the intelligence unit in charge of suppressing 

such things fanned out to spy on several women’s coffee klatches. As it 

turned out, not all the generals wore the pants in their families, and officer 
76 Gender

320

assignments in their units were often made by the older wives. The assignments were indeed a feminine conspiracy.

Colombia’s FARC has had a relatively high percentage of women, 

at times as high as 30% according to some sources, even in some combat 

units. Colombian army observers would claim that the female guerrillas 

were often competent, durable and committed fighters, but that during 

ground pursuits they were often caught first because they were slower runners. Many women who have reported their experiences in the FARC and 

other guerrilla ranks claim to have been demeaned and sexually abused. 

They also become pregnant. Many are forced to abort. Not aborting further slows their track times, increasing their vulnerability and that of their 

unit. Some guerrilla women, inspired toward nurturing and protecting 

their young, wished desperately to escape their guerrilla overseers.

Having asserted that combat will continue to be an athletic event, 

one of the most often fronted arguments in favor of more equal gendering 

in armies touches on the fact that so many women in military service have 

to endure equal endangerment ˗˗ that is, the positions in which women find 

themselves are equally dangerous when compared to those in which the 

men find themselves. This equality of danger is, in an appreciable portion 

of cases, the truth of the matter. Less debated (often ineffable), but more 

poignant, is the duty to kill. The positions of most maleness in the US military are those in which the soldiers anticipate and are expected to kill and 

to do so at a close enough range to lend a personal aspect to the act. 

Whether or not a society should place male and female youth equally into

that drama of moral hazards is a central question. As to this, the armed 

drone stands out from among the technologies moving a change (at least in 

the broad psychological realm) in the distance between male and female.

Drones, androgynous, markedly decrease the physical strength needed to 

bring death and simultaneously lower the level of ruthlessness and spirit of 

physical domination that seems necessary in order to kill.

Most irregular war tasks do not directly involve killing. Instead, they 

are jobs like psychological operations, police investigation, civil affairs, 

medical attention, PowerPoint slide making, and road building. Failure to 

include sufficient women in the force is a failure to recognize that the populations with which militaries will deal are about 50/50, and that gendermatch can matter. In cities having suffered extreme violence, like Medellín, Colombia, males perpetrated the vast bulk of all violence. In contrast, 
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women led and labored on the bulk of constructive actions like lobbying 

for community services and infrastructure improvement, self-help education programs, food distribution and child care. To my way of thinking, the

two genders should not be treated equally -- if by equally we mean the same. 

They are different, and variably valuable as to our prospects of victory. It is 

reasonable that they should be treated differently, to include different accommodations, privileges, duties and obligations. The tension that goes with 

figuring out what are reasonable and appropriate differences...is just life.

Please see sections: 18, Best of the Best of the Best; 96, Combatant Status; 109, Your Staff Work Sucks; 106, Massacres; 35, Comuna 13; 97, 

Oviedo; 94, Poop; and 121, Dignity and Honor.



“Women hold up half the sky.” (Mao, attributed)

“Women fill all the best bleachers.” (Yogi Berra, attributed)

---------------

“Behind every scheme to make the world over, liesthe question: What kind 

of world do you want? The ideals of the past for men have been drawn 

from war, as those for women have been drawn from motherhood.” 291F

292

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

---------------

“We’re no longer in the Middle Ages. Incessantly watching over a 

young girl won’t prevent her from taking a lover if she wants to.”292F

293

Colonel Stella Levy in

Jean Lartéguy, The Wall of Israel

---------------

“The trend toward homogenized androgyny in contemporary Western societies is clearly in evidence, and could undoubtedly lead to 

an insect-like third sex...”29 3F

294

Amaury de Riencourt, Sex and Power in History


322

Motivating environmental change

Section 77, Sex

Sex is attractive, powerful, dangerous stuff. It is more of an element in armed conflicts than people want to admit, especially irregular 

armed conflicts. For many people, it is a more delicate subject to address, 

ethically and emotionally, than even the most extreme violence. Sex, or 

human sexuality, is a driving factor behind or within many conflicts. It...

-- influences physical and social differentials in urban built environments;

-- provides a way to make money, which encourages agency (pimping);

-- increases affective values that can make extortion and kidnapping more 

lucrative. It is difficult to distance kidnapping, illicit trade and slavery 

from the subject of sex;

-- creates taboos and constraints related to ethnic, religious or other collective identities that can indicate the existence of an underclass or of a group 

potentially the victim of massacres or genocide;

-- affects soldier and unit performance;

-- drives power relationships that cause some groups to dominate sexual 

opportunities or to carefully control sexual property (as in the maintenance 

of sexual roles, privileges, and constraints);

-- causes pregnancies and babies -- or abortions, legal and illegal.

To a degree, cities organize around sex. This is due to the nature of 

markets, moralizing tendencies, and sometimes fear, especially of sexually 

transmitted diseases. City leaders often try to concentrate prostitution, or at 

least low-price prostitution, into ‘red light’ districts where bordellos, strip 

clubs and streetwalkers are more densely situated. It isn’t just that cities have 

pay-for-sex areas. Young single people also seek healthier sex. This hunt 

manifests itself architecturally in bars, nightclubs, singles gymnasiums, restaurants, etc. Married couples often seek to gain some separation from the hunt

and look for places to live and work that are specifically not close to the places 

of sexual fervor. Tourist hotels begin to distinguish themselves according to 

family atmospheres or hunting atmospheres. Accordingly, some locales will 

have architectures favoring safety, parental control and movement limitations, 

while other architectures are designed to provide intimacy, anonymity and 

suggestiveness, along with the opportunity for contact and negotiation (not to 

mention the coincidence and varying permissions of alcohol and recreation 
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drugs). Hence, there occurs within most cities a sexual geography, a geography with which police detectives are familiar.

A similar sexually-induced or influenced geography can be seen at 

the scale of the single home or at the global level. Some places become 

known for particular practices, sexual license or taboos. Because of the 

taboos and the social and physical dangers attendant to sex, discretion (anonymity) is often sought as a complement in sexual endeavors. As a result, 

those geographies that provide anonymity are often used not only by those 

with rarified sexual hunting practices, but by those with anti-State proclivities. In other words, the whereabouts of non-standard sexual practices 

and insurgency or organized crime can coincide because of the care taken 

to provide secrecy.

Criminality is integral to most irregular armed conflict and, as a rule,

one thing leads to another. Once criminals get the hang of keeping secrets, 

making bribes, and smuggling, they tend to diversify and rarely specialize in 

a single vice. The sex slave trade probably got started fairly early in human 

history. Maybe the trade is one of the negative phenomena of globalization

or perhaps its exposure an achievement of globalizing information. Some 

places are more notorious than others for sex trade, but there is little to indicate that the industry is weakening. Greater awareness of the international 

sex trade, including human slavery and even including child sex slavery, has 

sparked some increase in direct international law enforcement cooperation.

Prostitutes learn a lot and, apparently, don’t always keep the 

knowledge secret. Additionally, madams and pimps, if they are going to 

do well in the business, need to keep records and these records, which tend 

to get subpoenaed, often become trading chips for other information.

The lines of withdrawal to sanctuary for many in irregular conflicts 

often take detours through sexual geographies. For instance, insurgent 

leaders are likely to visit their wives, lovers, or favorite prostitutes, or have 

boys, girls or women shipped to them. This is a traditional security weakness. Venereal diseases can have a destructive effect on small unit 

efficiency. Guerrilla units often detour from preferred mission routes or 

risk exposure in order to seek medical attention for all kinds of diseases;

sexually transmitted diseases are high on the list.

Proscriptions against sexual contact between members of separate 

races or religions are common worldwide. Where those proscriptions are 

formalized it may be a good indicator of the existence of an underclass and 
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of a potential victim identity. Numerous unchallenged interracial, interethnic or intercommunion sexual liaisons and marriages, on the other hand, 

may indicate group adhesion -- or be a warning of potential social stress if 

such sexual intermixing could be made into a divisive issue.

Religions, castes, and classes can diverge as to sexual privileges. 

A clergy or a dominant caste may create and maintain special sexual privileges for themselves, as well as permit or foster a market for the 

satisfaction of sexual desires. These systems of preferential property rights 

in sex rarely favor control by females. Females in most societies have less 

negotiating strength regarding the value of sexual acts and opportunities. 

Among males, small minorities often control the market for the highestvalue sexual prizes. Because of systemically weaker power positions, 

most females face highly circumscribed sets of sexual choices, while some

women are reduced to outright sexual slavery. Many children, sharing a 

similar relative weakness, are also reduced to being sexual commodities. 

These relationships, in which women and children have little negotiating 

power regarding themselves as objects of sexual desire and performance, 

are often perceived as being integral to a culture. However, what members 

of one society might paint as a cultural norm, members of another may see 

as violation of physical integrity or as a malfeasant discrimination against 

a category of humans.

When a power relationship considered normal within one social compact is perceived from the context of another social compact as the perpetration 

of a crime, the question of impunity can become a cause for inter-cultural conflict, even among allies. What if nobody in a neighboring county investigates 

or prosecutes that which, in your country, is considered sexual abuse? Legalistic contraptions intended to respect the neighboring State’s monopoly on the 

granting of impunity, like extradition, cease to work. It becomes harder for 

one society to respect the prosecutorial culture of another. Lines of retreat to 

places of impunity begin to follow cultural differentiation. Sexuality is not the 

least of factors that drive such differences.

Cross-cultural sex shock can cause barriers to communication, disagreement and distrust between allies. Typically, North Americans are subject to sex 

culture shock, especially when confronted by some of the practices of soldier-aged 

young men on other continents. Open discussion of sexual topics can exact responses of embarrassment, revulsion, titillation, or fear. It is nevertheless 

advantageous to surface those sexual issues that will affect your likelihood of 
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having to fight, where to fight, and winning. Military efficiency can be negatively affected by ignorance regarding sexual practices. In addition, sexual 

practices and geographies present an exploitable link to information about the 

whereabouts of your enemy or even regarding impending violent events.

Please see section: 102, Negotiations; 81, What a Clergy Wants; 61, The 

Geography of Dope; 65, Smuggling; 55, Kidnapping; 105, Genocide Geography; 110, Knowledge Gaps; and 130, Globalization.



“I am a very good shot. I have hunted for every kind of animal. 

But I would never kill an animal during mating season.” 294 F

295

Hedy Lamarr (attributed)

---------------

“I see your spacesuit saved you from the acopaplypse -- so do 

you wanna, like, recopulate the earth?” 295F

296

Beavis on the TV show

Beavis and Butthead

---------------

Blanche: I was once arrested for that in Chattanooga. 

Dorothy: Blanche, are you allowed to go back to Chattanooga? 

Blanche: Are you kidding? The sheriff still writes.

from the TV show,

The Golden Girls296 F

297

---------------

What makes a man?

Is it the power in his hand?

Is it his quest for glory?

Give it all you got,

To fight to the top,

So we can know your story.

from the theme song of the movie,

Orgazmo (1997)297F

298


326

How many names can a person have?

Section 78, Identity

Personal Identity. Anonymity and personal identity are inseparable. Anonymity means you cannot be identified as you, nor can your things and 

relationships be identified as yours. Personal identity, beyond simply being 

the most particular of ownerships, often rests on our relationships, possessions, memories and aspirations -- these things and our personal identity 

might be considered co-constitutive. If you gain perfect anonymity, you run 

the risk of losing personal identity or maybe the ability to express that identity. You might suffer...an identity crisis. Spies sometimes suffer these, 

insurgents not so much perhaps -- maybe since at some point they have to 

express their identity if they are going to translate it into power. Anyhow, 

anonymity is a dilemma for the insurgent. Criminals, meanwhile, want to 

enjoy their ill-gotten lucre and so they’re often in the same boat as the insurgent, needing to keep their anonymity, but finding that conspicuousness was 

one of the goals of their illicit behavior. Finding the right balance of anonymity and profile is of central value in every thoughtful, organized 

challenge to the structure of things. Therefore, the destruction or preservation of personal identity is concomitantly worthwhile.

Careful ID carding of populations -- and centralized ID inventories

-- can serve either to protect or to endanger personal identity. Creating 

firm evidence of identity is a practical step against theft or fraudulent use 

of personal identity. On the other hand, identity and marking systems have 

been implicated in assisting the perpetration of genocides, so ID cards are 

not necessarily or always a positive tool of peace or moral behavior. Nevertheless, no property system that orders rights and duties related to land, 

professional licenses, bandwidth, etc., can be fully functional as a tool of 

a peaceful social compact unless there is a parallel, transparent method of 

ensuring correct personal identification. Owner and owned are absolutely 

co-constitutive. Accuracy and transparency of the things owned is almost 

meaningless without accuracy and transparency of the identity of owners. 

This might seem to create a practical and philosophical dilemma with privacy values, but not really.

Moderation and reasonableness in transparency as to types of 

wealth, location, timing, etc. are built into the best identification systems. 

For instance, while real property might be subject to the transparency of 
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public knowledge, purchases of personal items might not be. Although 

records pertaining to real property might be available for public inspection, 

the property itself (at least from the ground) might not be. While there 

might be a requirement to carry an ID card, a requirement or the right of 

the government to inspect the cards can be limited to specific places and 

times. In this regard there are common and varying practices in jurisdictions around the world -- which should suggest considerable room for 

creativity in balancing the needs of anonymity and privacy against the 

needs for transparency and forensic power.

Recent discoveries about DNA coding have so changed television 

crime stories it is a wonder anyone watched them before. We also have to 

wonder, however, if DNA falsification and planting (instead of dropping 

a weapon at the scene of a crime, a lot of faked DNA gets spilt around) 

isn’t coming soon. In the meantime, all personal identity systems are twoedged swords that can favor good governance and bad.

Family. Family identity, like personal identity, can become the fuel of tortuous debate. Almost everywhere, the definition of who is in and who is out is 

a central cultural question. It is too easy to say, ‘Oh, family is so significant in

this culture’, or ‘family values must be respected’. For one thing, it is more 

than likely that in whatever land you find your irregular war, you will encounter what, at some point will be an unacceptable level of nepotism, that is, 

someone will overstress your appreciation of family values. On other occasions they may act unbearably cruel to whom you might have supposed to be 

family. That in mind, in the course of your inventorying, definitely categorize

and mark family relationships, nearly-family relationships, para-family relationships and anything that seems close. Be careful regarding the definitions 

of in and out. Find shared property ownership and understand the rubrics of 

family events. Your mapping of debt and obligation can start here, as well as 

your quest to find the disaffected cousin.

Collective. ‘Family’ may be the first and most obvious collective identity, 

but our ability to artifice other equally powerful collectives makes such 

effort a central focus for understanding human competition. It can be hard 

to fake a place of common origin, or a common mother, but it can be easy 

to create a sense of belonging in a ginned-up category. Race is one of 

them, because, while they have dubious scientific boundaries, there are 

enough palpable clues to give the notion meaning enough. Every leader 

wants to represent a collective identity of some sort and, if an activist 
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leader doesn’t trip across an identity suitable for his leadership, he should

be able to fabricate one.

Sense of Place. ‘Where you from, Son?’must be the number one cliché question 

that the General asks the Private. Trite, expected and unimaginative, everyone 

likes it and is almost always happy to answer. The General can’t go wrong, because it is an essential question for most people. It is almost like asking, ‘Who are 

you, really?’ Personal identity, who we are, is often tied to physical geographyand 

even to some imagined and remembered physical geographies. We might be 

Southerners, Yankees, Paisas, Texans or whatever, and we can be more than one 

thing at a time and feel ourselves more from one place than from another depending on a whole rafter of other situational factors, including not only where those 

making up the rest of the ‘we’ are from, but where ‘they’ are from. Some say it’s 

harder to get people to fight for the revolution than it is to get them to fight for 

Mother Russia. Strangely, we can be we and keep them they for only the duration 

of a basketball game, or for generations. When nested identities become un-nested, 

internal conflicts of identity can grow, as well as conflicts of loyalty. Oftentimes,

leadersintent on creating certain kinds of collective identity do so for the purpose 

of overcoming place identity. They want to avoid the power of place origin and 

place representation by appealing to identities that are more amorphous and placenon-specific. Typically, those leaders at some point feel they have to build a palace, and that has to be located someplace. In fact, they often become a place. 

“What does the Kremlin, the Vatican, the Pentagon, the Casa de Nariño, think?”

Creating or tapping into the sense of place is a staple of effective 

leadership. A country with powerful national symbols can motivate citizens more easily toward national missions. The United States, held 

together by frail ideas, nevertheless counts on many symbols of the whole 

-- the Stars and Stripes, Statue of Liberty, Rock and Roll, the Golden Gate, 

hamburgers, Coke, Mount Rushmore, Muhammad Ali, the ice cream cone,

Winning Irregular War. The master of irregular conflict will know placeidentity language, which symbols communicate what to whom, and the 

master will try to manage them accordingly. It is not just about psychological operations or diplomacy either. Knowing where people are from 

helps identify not just who they are, but where they are.

‘Everywhere we go-oh, people wanna know-oh, who we ah-are, where 

we come from’. Pride of action is often tied to pride of origin. The city where 

you find yourself might be pleased at having a sister city wherever you came 

from, that is, if you don’t screw up. If both those cities are proud of what 
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you’re doing, that’s good. If not, it behooves you to know why. When Americans are abroad, they should never be just from America. America is all the 

places from which its citizens hail. There are some persons for whom this rule 

(that identity is tied to locale) does not apply. Some people have led a roaming 

existence, including in our own military. Some individuals, maybe just due to 

the possibilities of wealth, have become so traveled and sophisticated they take 

pride in everyplace and no place. Most of us aren’t like that. I don’t want to 

be like that. I want to be from right here. God made this corner of the earth. 

He was sleepy when he coughed up your little trash-hole, unless you’re from 

Steamboat or something.

Please see sections: 15, NGOs, IOs, and Unions; 65, Smuggling; 135, Borders and 

Anarchism; 74, Refugees and Displaced Persons; 92, Graves Registration; 22, Badassoftheweek.com; 113, Unrestricted Chi Whiz; and 27, ‘Nonviolent’ Action.



Pinkley: Where are you from, son?

Soldier: Madison City, Missouri, sir!

Pinkley: Never heard of it.

from the movie,

The Dirty Dozen (1967)298F

299

---------------

I’ve got a name, I've got a name

And I carry it with me like my daddy did,

But I'm living the dream that he kept hid

from the Jim Croce song,

I`ve Got a Name

---------------

Inigo Montoya: Who are you? 

Man in Black: No one of consequence. 

Inigo Montoya: I must know... 

Man in Black: Get used to disappointment. 

from the movie,

Princess Bride (1967)299F

300


330

Is what’s worth dying for worth living for?

Section 79, Suicide

Eschatologists generally agree that King Solomon wrote the Book 

of Ecclesiastes, a middle portion of the Bible. It is an existential essay by 

a man who has everything and is yet tortured by a sense of meaninglessness and hopelessness. Solomon believes, however, that something exists 

greater than his self and that a Savior is to come. Solomon banks his hope 

in that salvation. It’s a sizeable chunk of the Christian message, even 

though at first glance the book seems so out of place that some think it is 

a wonder it was included in the Bible at all. It doesn’t say much about the 

history of the Jewish nation or the old covenant or anything about the life 

of Jesus and the new covenant. It is, however, about hopelessness, meaninglessness, and that these afflictions are not limited to the poor. Christ’s 

mission, apparently, was about this health and sickness of the soul, rather 

than about material well-being. Nevertheless, although hopelessness may 

be dispensed irrespective of worldly fortune, worldly misfortune can create and conjoin with hopelessness. Furthermore, luck often has nothing to 

do with it. Other men are sometimes to blame straight up for creating or 

allowing conditions that engender and fuel existential crises. These conditions are well known to us ˗˗ poverty, degradation and physical illness 

can weaken the spirit. Sometimes suicide is late evidence of something or 

somebody in the human experience that needed fixing. Who should have 

fixed it is a question we often find at the heart of armed struggle.

Some of us, not as astute as the leaders just mentioned above, notice 

that some of the other kids in high school are into a bunch of seemingly 

unhealthy, counterculture, gothic, emo psycho-babble. We do not grasp 

why they don’t stop all the whining and go out for wrestling or cheerleading or something. Not afflicted, we have a tough time sensing the urgency 

of the search for the meaning of life, or why ‘existentialism’ should be 

counted as a movement of literature and art (often foisted on us) instead of 

being roundly dismissed. Most American art tends to be pretty sweet. 

Beer commercials, mostly; good stuff. There is another vein of art however, including American, that taps into, exposes, and expresses 

Solomon’s suffering. It is so much present in the art world, and so many 

souls drawn to that art, that many critics don’t admit art as being art unless 
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it suffers. Authenticity becomes a reflection of some sort of pain. Everything else is mere illustration or commercial schlock.

How does existentialism, depression and pained-art lead back to 

winning insurgent war? It is because of their connection to the perception 

of them versus us, insiders and outsiders, the resistance and the system. It is also 

about the strong connection between failed or missing dignity and honor. Dignity 

and honor bear especially on the mindsets of young men, many of whom are attracted to violence. Desperation, existential dilemma, unhappy sexual outlet, the 

search for honor, testosterone and guns make for a common and volatile soup. The 

mix doesn’t necessarily lead to suicide of course ˗˗ homicide is more often sufficient. It only needs an organizer for it to become organized homicide.

Once in a while, an individual gifted with the requisite combination 

of charisma, intelligence and wealth recognizes existential stress in others 

(perhaps, but not always wrestling with it themselves) and can translate that 

stress into action. Sometimes this same leader is ruthless, selfish, creative 

and energetic. That’s when things get interesting.

The person resolved or coerced to commit suicide-homicide is someone’s 

enemy, but the intellectual author of the suicide-homicide usually survives. The 

intellectual author usually just commits homicide, or perhaps just an efficient act 

of war. Most suicides are committed by heroes or chumps. The worse enemy is 

the leader who spots, vets, develops and convinces chumps and heroes to become 

suicide-homicide weapon systems. The leader (agent, intellectual author, or mens 

rea guy) is the more difficult operational challenge for his enemies. An act of 

suicide-homicide appears to present no route of withdrawal to sanctuary, but that 

only seems true because focus is drawn to the weapons system and not to the mens 

rea author. The latter scrupulously observes the operational equation by 

launching a weapon that affords himself, the intellectual author, a short 

cost-distance to sanctuary. If he is really good, he can establish not only 

the appearance that there is no line of retreat, but can motivate heroes and 

chumps in such a way as to create the public notion of spontaneity and 

broad moral acceptance. In fact, he is probably a much more unique and 

vulnerable leader that he wants us to presume.

The attentive criminal, insurgent or counterinsurgent leader will seek 

to dominate the explosive mix of existential stress, the search for honor, and 

violent propensities. However, local cultural knowledge is more useful than 

vague acceptance of the existence of existential plight. While a good deal is 
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made today of the willingness of some radicalized Islamicists to commit homicide-suicide, the phenomenon is cross-cultural. Only the details differ. As 

Section 19, Mercatus noted, recruiting assassins requires an understanding of 

the local interpretation of the dilemmas presented by poverty, honor, faith, and 

suicide. Drug lord Pablo Escobar contracted young Medellín men who knew 

they would be killed after they made a hit. But the deal included a guarantee 

that the hit man’s mother would have a house provided for her to live in for 

the rest of her life. The local envelopment of happiness, home, motherhood, 

and honor with the meaning of life were served in the sacrifice. Of course, the 

police were Paisa, too, so eventually the tracing of moms with new houses, 

dead sons and going-away parties started leading back to the mens rea.

Please see sections: 121, Dignity and Honor; 93, Diseases and Disasters; 128, 

Global Insurgency and Global Trespass; 81, What a Clergy Wants; 95, Childhood; 13, Puthukkudiyirippu; 100, What the Foucault?; and 23, Mens Rea.



“There is as much courage in supporting with firmness the afflictions 

of the soul as there is in standing steady under the grape of a battery of 

guns. To give one’s self up to grief without resistance, to kill one’s 

self to escape it, is to abandon the battlefield defeated.”

Napoleon Bonaparte (1802)300F

301

---------------

“When the nerves break down, there is nothing left but to admit 

that one can’t handle the situation and to shoot oneself.”30 1F

302

Adolf Hitler (1943)

---------------

“‘I’ve never had a man commit suicide, because the men always 

had something to do.’”302 F

303

Colonel Raspéguy in 

Jean Lartéguy, The Praetorians

---------------

“I killed myself so many times I don’t even exist anymore.”

Phil in the movie,

Groundhog Day (1993) 303F

304


333

The propaedeutic of winning

Section 80, Why You Should

Like Geography

All kinds and categories of knowledge, all disciplines, and all approaches to knowledge can help the astute competitor win an armed 

conflict. Among the modern academic disciplines, however, Geography 

is probably the one that gets to the most relevant knowledge fastest. It 

obsesses about distances, fascinates about the interrelationship between 

human activity and the natural environment; and revels in travel and exploration. Vocationally, geographers solve transportation puzzles, order 

ownership records and land-use plans, and calculate the environmental 

costs of human activities.

Property is where Geography, Law and Economics cross. It is difficult to understand property regimes, urban planning, or agrarian reform 

on any significant scale without a grasp of geographic theory. Peaceful 

plans depend on geographic knowledge. So do not-so-peaceful plans.

Geography is probably the most hyphenatable discipline. Most geographers in the major geographical societies of the United States consider 

themselves to be human geographers of one stripe or another. They are 

economic geographers, cultural geographers, and so on. The common denominator of Geography, however, is recognition of the importance not 

only of place and distance, but of differentials in environmental conditions, 

human approaches to that environment and the potential for peaceful or 

conflictive interaction. 

Again, all knowledge is grist to the mill, but Geography should be 

the discipline of choice for those who want to win violent struggles. It 

teaches the measurement of distances, inventorying everything, cultural 

exploration, and precision mapping in time and space. It accepts a broad 

range of the meaning of truth, without abandoning latitudes, longitudes, 

wind directions and soil samples. Below are ten reasons to favor Geography and geographers:

Distance ˗˗- perhaps the most profiting theoretical concepts special 

to Geography revolve around distance. The dissipation of power as 

distance increases or the increase of influence and identity as distance 

decreases; the idea of cost-distance and its various measurements by 
80 Why You Should Like Geography

334

time, money, fuel, etc.; and distance as a question of cultural affinity 

or perception -- these are easy to Geography. The distance to the 

culminating point (what I call the risk-distance) is a key to planning. 

Distance is passed over by other disciplines even while it is central to 

the study of armed conflict. 

Place ˗˗- Place is also prominent in other disciplines like Anthropology and Sociology, but concepts of place-identity and the relationship 

of these to hierarchically nested and un-nested, formal and informal 

territoriality is more thoroughly considered by way of Geography.

Maps ˗˗- Attacks on mapmaking by 'critical geographers' may be all 

the evidence the discipline needs of its theoretical uniqueness. Even 

English Literature cannot claim language or writing as a special purview, while maps and map-making are stuck to Geography. As one 

of the first and still spectacularly effective methods to communicate 

ideas, Cartography belongs to Geography.

Inventories ˗˗- While the tendency to catalog and count is derided by

some, it is a theoretical as well as a habitual strength of Geography in 

that it bespeaks a basic empirical intention. Truth, for most geographers, 

is not a floating matter of pure perception and human invention (although 

these matter), but is still an objective quantity that, more than likely, has 

a latitude and longitude, a moment and second.

Exploration ˗˗- Other disciplines explore, but geographers will explore anyplace. Going out and reporting back is more than research, 

it is search and research.

Hyphenation ˗˗ Geography is always a willing partner to other disciplines. Geography is often the ecumenical keystone of many 

multidiscipline research efforts.

Embrace of Technology ˗˗- It isn't just that Geography dominates 

GIS, but that as a thought culture, Geography embraces new ways to 

make its maps, descriptions and discoveries. GIS allows us to better 

match the right temporal and spatial scales to our objectives, projects, 

and analyses.

Environment and Human ˗˗- The interrelationship of humans and 

the environment has always been one of Geography's central themes. 

Effort to dominate that environment (including the men and women
80 Why You Should Like Geography

335

in it) has been more prominent in, and more favored by Geography 

than by other disciplines, but this fact does not diminish the strength 

of its methods and habits in service to other passions.

Conflict ˗˗- Geography is criticized as a discipline of empires, but what 

is lost in such criticism is that Geography has been the one discipline to 

take head-on the question of power and human competition in ecological 

space. Nothing in the discipline today insists on taking one side or another in human competition, only that the natural environment, distance, 

weight, time and space are central considerations. Terrain and weather 

can favor either contestant in combat, but generally favor the side that 

understands and engages or adapts them best. Likewise, the contestant 

is favored who best understands and engages principles from the discipline of Geography.

Attitude ˗˗- I think Geography is by and large a happier discipline, more 

optimistic than the other social sciences. Geographers, by-and-large, are 

more pragmatic problem-solving types. Other traditions offer more psychological space for accusation, lamentation, cynicism and suffering-asauthenticity. Geography’s tone of discovery, meanwhile, is almost always buoyant. In any given university, others are more likely to be poststructural. Geography generates a winning mind-set.

Please see sections: 32, Land-use Planning; 43, Sam Spade’s Whereabouts;

49, Territorial Scrutiny; 64, Measuring Distance and Comparing Power;

72, Land Strategy and Property Strategy; 8, Linearity and the Line of Retreat; 31, Holes in the Ground; and 142, Conflict Geography.



“War is God’s way of teaching Geography.”

Alexander von Humboldt

(attributed)

---------------

“I don't want to be a product of my environment;

I want my environment to be a product of me.”

Frank Costello in the movie,

The Departed, (2006) 304F

305


336

The ethic of exclusive agency

Section 81, What a Clergy Wants

Clergies want to provide a service, which can be valuable. They want

to be paid for that service as well. Clergymen would like to be your agents, 

middlemen, go-betweens, representatives, spokespersons, lawyers. When life 

is good for the clergy, the clergy invents its own vocabulary or speaks its own 

language, has its own licenses and schools. When things really get good for a 

clergy, it no longer has to expend energy selling the idea of their agency to the 

clients. They just presume clergy is a natural and necessary part of life. Tithes, 

indulgences, pledges and donations are too often the equivalents of commissions, retainers and fees. Offensive as it may sound to put religious clergy in 

the same bucket with lawyers and sports agents, the point here is not about 

charlatanism or even about religion. I want to underline that spirituality or 

theology are questions apart from an establishment of religions’ leadership, 

just as ideology is a question apart from the quality of the vanguard. We can 

measure the justness of a law separately from the caliber of the bar and the 

judiciary. Our arguments about the value of the workers’ labor can be assessed 

independently of the virtues of the union bosses.

The concept of clergy and exclusive agency are almost the same; 

only the linguistic protocols for their use vary. A vanguard of the proletariat seeks almost the same kind of exclusive agency as some religious 

leaders do, so when I use the word clergy, I don’t mean to disparage religion, but only warn that clergies, whatever the religion or denomination,

bear watching because of their tendency to seek exclusive agency.

You will be helped in your armed conflict if you understand the rents 

of agency, especially exclusive agency. Where rents of agency are collected, 

who exactly pays them, to whom they go, and what they pay for is key. It is a 

property issue. The places and methods of delivery of tithes and indulgences, 

the catchment areas and variety of paid services all have a geographic mark

and, as the clergy system becomes more complex, it begins to consecrate seminaries, require examinations, create exclusive schools, and perform 

ordinations. There arises a concomitant sense of jealousy and fierce protectiveness regarding the ‘right’ to exclusive agency. If there are too many 

lawyers, it will cheapen the bar. Bolsheviks don’t tolerate other communists 

even wanting to be the vanguard. Remember, by clergy I don’t just mean religious clergy; I mean a collaborative institution of exclusive agency. Take
81 What a Clergy Wants

337

inventory of agents and agency of all kinds, because through clergies flow 

matters of morale, followership, enthusiasms, and enthrallments.

Freedoms and opportunities for speech and assembly are closely tied 

to powers and opportunities for representative agency. It can be hard to remember that the profitable feature of exclusive agency is not freedom of action 

and expression, and not fiduciary responsibility, but exclusivity. Separating 

the two for analysis can be difficult and has been a thorny question for Americans since the founding of the Republic. It appears in the form of a debate 

about whether or not churches, for instance, should be taxed or whether a given

organization is a church such that it should not be taxed.

Where is all this going? The first section of the book is about a successful State versus a failed State and that a successful State has an exclusive 

power to grant impunity. Religious clergymen (at least your ambitious types) 

aspire to be the exclusive granters of absolution. If they get enough power 

they will protect that exclusive agency (that they will call a right) with apparatuses like inquisitions and the simple control of private spaces. Impunity and 

absolution are not so far apart that if you can combine the Church and the State, 

there is hardly any difference at all. You can ease the defense of your right to 

exclusive clerical agency by building a theology and creating a religious belief 

among followers (your clients or perhaps congregants) for whom you intend 

to be the exclusive agent. Please keep in mind that defining the success of the 

State in accordance with its capacity to maintain exclusive agency in the granting of absolution (impunity) is not to say that such success makes the State 

good ˗˗ just successful at being a State.

When a government asserts that to be successful a State has to provide 

material benefits, it can be a subterfuge for claiming a right to exclusive 

agency. Once people are convinced that their care is properly in the hands of 

a good state, then it is a lot easier for whoever put themselves in charge of the

State to establish the same sense of exclusive agency that clergy wants. They 

will claim that only the State can rightly provide this and that.

Hopefully the concept of exclusive agency makes it easier to see 

why some religions want to make sure they control the State and why some 

States want so badly to either be the religion or kill off religions, or at least 

organized clergy. Whenever you see a group bent on maintaining any kind 

of exclusive agency, and especially when they try to get others to believe 

they have some spiritual right to exclusive agency, you have also found a 

font of grievance and resistance.
81 What a Clergy Wants

338

Exclusive agents, by the way, tend to create specific geographic 

spaces for the exercise of their advantage. It is easier for a rabbi to create 

and maintain influence if he has a synagogue. If you want exclusive 

agency for bringing big league football to the American fans, you need 

stadiums. If you are going to maintain exclusive agency for the provision 

of civil justice, you want court buildings. These spaces are not hard to find

and they lead back to the operatives and owners. As is highlighted in other 

parts of this book, it is often easy to find geographies of power, and if you 

have the capacity to change the built environment; you have the capacity 

to greatly adjust the shape and possibilities of exclusive agency.

It can be dangerous to posit one religion as better than another, either for the good of the universe, or for winning your war. Consider, 

nevertheless, a handful of desert prophets -- which of them did not kill and 

which did; and consider, from among the beliefs and religions they inspired, which are oriented toward sparing souls from desperation and 

hopelessness, which are based on free will, which demand taxes, which 

invite or exclude, and which are most jealous.

Please see sections: 42, Brigands; 115, Physics of Strategy; 79, Suicide; 

95, Childhood; 46, Taxation and Debt; 131, Is It an Insurgency?; 15,

NGOs, IOs, and Unions; and 119, America’s Revolutionary Strategy.



“The real religion of the world comes from women much 

more than from men - from mothers most of all, who 

carry the key of our souls in their bosoms.”3 05F

306

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

---------------

“The Clergy is the greatest hindrance to faith.” 306 F

307

Martin Luther

---------------

“Employing his most artful and persuasive manner, John D. Lee 

set out step by step, early that Friday morning, to gain the trust and 

confidence of the travelers from Arkansas, in order to betray them 

and deliver them over to their waiting assassins.”

William Wise,

Massacre at Mountain Meadows30 7F

308


339

You cannot make an arrest with a fighter jet

Section 82, Conflict Thresholds

Sometimes we claim armed struggles fall along a ‘spectrum’ of violence (less to more), a convention that may or may not reflect the 

relationship of one conflict to another, or be helpful for determining which 

struggles are more urgent than others, or when to change our strategies for 

dealing with them. There are some thresholds, however ˗˗ ethical, technological, economic, legal, territorial and emotive ˗˗ that are distinct enough 

to help guide our strategies. None of them exists independently. They 

don’t act sequentially to announce the status of a conflict nor do they, singularly or in the aggregate, describe war. Thresholds nevertheless 

illuminate a field of organized human conflict that includes thermonuclear 

war and peasant roadblocks. A few of the thresholds inspire other sections 

of this book, like Weapons, Mercatus, Kidnapping, and the first section, 

Impunity. Conflict-as-thresholds is a device, not a philosophy. Some of 

the thresholds might be milestones in a struggle with which you’re dealing. 

If you establish a shared understanding of the thresholds relevant to your 

struggle, you might be able to anticipate arguments and decision-points, 

and maybe even push the thresholds backward or forward in time a little.

Ethical Thresholds ˗˗ It is hard to make an arrest with a 155mm howitzer. 

A potential act of killing has been anticipated before its use. The cannoneer who pulls the lanyard and all ranks above him, to include those who 

ordered the forging of the tube, presuppose their permanent impunity from 

prosecution for some future willful act of killing. We pass a distinct ethical 

threshold when the cannon fires, but even before forging the tube or training the artilleryman, impunity (or sovereign immunity) had been 

bestowed. The forgers and trainers foresaw an act of war. We cross another ethical threshold when we excuse the killing of persons who are 

clearly not resolved participants, such as small children. If we assert ‘collateral damage’, for instance, as morally justified, we cross an ethical 

threshold. The fact that we might ponder whether such thresholds engage 

immunity or impunity is exactly what makes them ethical thresholds.

Technological Thresholds ˗˗ Use of a cannon heralds and emblemizes 

war beyond the expectations of trial justice, to say the least. Other technological thresholds include manufacture and use of the unmarked 

landmine, instruments which are also extremely difficult to employ within 

contemplation of a law enforcement process. They come into play beyond 
82 Conflict Thresholds

340

the normal rule-of-law. Employment of an armed aerial drone would be a 

clear technological threshold. Use of this technology is too new historically to allow us to analyze its full impact on armed struggles, but it is grist

for impassioned debate, especially as the low per-unit cost of the machinery spreads the technology to more and more potential contenders.

Economic Thresholds ˗˗ In The Rise of the Western World, a New Economic History, Douglass North and Robert Thomas outlined the idea of 

transaction cost as that concept relates to conflict.308 F

309 They asserted that 

people resort or accustom themselves to violence until they perceive that 

the costs of peaceful conflict resolution are less than the costs of violent 

action. The nation-state, they argued, could afford high-end means of applying organized force, and so could make the costs of violence seem high 

to a would-be challenger to the nation-state’s authority. (Here we would 

say that impunity is the absence of such a cost for violence.) Peaceful 

transaction costs would generally be higher than the costs of violence if it 

were not for the invention of systems that encourage fulfillment of contractual obligations. If contenders were to calculate the transaction costs 

of peaceably resolving a land dispute, for instance, and found it uneconomically high compared to the use of violence, they might prefer the

violence. Depending on your part in an irregular war, you may or may not 

want to see an administrative and judicial environment in which land disputes can be peacefully resolved at economical advantage.

Territorial Thresholds ˗˗- The economic thresholds strongly influence

another category ˗˗ territorial. These are perhaps the most naturally understood thresholds in that they relate closely to what many think is a natural 

element of human character. The title to Robert Ardrey’s popular work, 

Territorial Imperative, is succinct. The territorial thresholds are reached 

by the physical act of crossing a demarcated boundary in a way not authorized by the occupiers (perhaps sovereigns). The invasion of Kuwait by 

Iraq or the taking of the Falkland Islands by the Argentineans are easy 

examples, but so are property trespasses by squatters, or tossing a bag of 

excrement onto the roof of a downhill shack. In the broader range of human conflict, almost every territorial trespass is subject to spatial mapping, 

and those territorial violations that imply war are often the most ardently 

mapped. Spaces outside the lines of formalized mapping are known as noman’s land and are usually subject to possession by force.

Legal Thresholds ˗˗- Legal thresholds overlap the territorial thresholds, and 

tend to delimit the geography of military action, rather than the geographic 
82 Conflict Thresholds

341

object of the conflict. For instance, United States domestic law places clear 

boundaries on the physical space of action of the United States military. The 

Posse Comitatus Act exists because of concerns that the whole panoply of 

American civil rights and duties might be overmatched by an organized armed 

force, however noble its leaders, whose members might enjoy immunity from 

civil prosecution and, as the reasoning goes, impunity for socially dangerous 

behaviors. Thus, with some exceptional prescriptions, the US Army does not 

operate within the geographic boundaries of United States territory.

The Colombian government has had to face many of these questions in recent years. For instance, in 2008, the Colombian armed forces 

raided just across the Ecuadoran border to take out a major FARC headquarters. The Ecuadoran government claimed the attack was a violation 

of Ecuador’s sovereignty. The Colombians saw it as more of a hot pursuit 

of a terrorist organization and an action within the common defense agreements of the two neighbors. Some Ecuadorans have moved to prosecute 

the Colombian Minister of Defense in their or international court. Our first 

reaction to that notion might be ‘Fat Chance’. Nevertheless, the Ecuadoran 

stance does encumber the Colombian State, not to mention the defense 

minister. In this kind of context, the denial or rejection of extraterritorial 

jurisdiction can be considered a threshold marker.

Emotive Thresholds ˗˗- Any dehumanization or demotion from privilege 

can become or lead to a conflict threshold. We are talking here about the 

formalized establishment by fear and hate of vulnerable and resentful collective human identities. Persons committing trespasses or violence 

against such a collective are sometimes led to expect impunity for those 

acts. In other words, a nation, premeditating impunity, could designate a 

category of humans as a target, abuses against which impunity would be 

granted. The Nazis, for instance, not only crossed the threshold of publicly 

identifying Jews, they premeditatedly established a public understanding 

of impunity for violence against them. This is an historically extreme example, but by no means the only. A sense for those locales around the 

world where human disqualifications occur would be a good start to predicting organized violence that could escalate toward war or genocide. As 

with the disqualification of the European Jews, disqualifications often start 

in the realm of property rights, reaching the thresholds of war only in late 

stages. The emotive threshold can become wrapped tightly to other thresholds, such as the territorial. For instance, Bolivians have indoctrinated 

themselves to hold the loss of Pacific coastal territory as a shared emotional void, the recovery of which is now an article of patriotic faith.
82 Conflict Thresholds

342

We might hope that our domination of the technological thresholds 

of war will appropriately match our understanding of the other thresholds, 

but we probably always perceive an imbalance. Israeli angst in their decisions to use a 500-, 1,000-, or 2,000-pound bomb is exemplary. Might we 

conduct war with nonlethal weapons that stun and disable without permanent harm? Using nonlethal force where possible (in order to meet 

standards of proportionality and discriminate use) may be a good thing in 

its own right, and might secure the blessing of Sun Tzu’s ghost. The overmatching advantages that perplex and confound an enemy can sometimes 

be found beyond lethal weaponry.

In Makers of Modern Strategy from Machiavelli to the Nuclear 

Age, contributor John Shy quotes of Jomini, “strategy, like politics, must 

find some ‘juste milieu’ between wars of the past fought by professional 

armies and the new yet old barbaric warfare unleashed by the Revolution.”309 F

310 Jomini was talking about the French Revolution. The 

‘Revolution’ is a little different these days. The thresholds may arrive as 

dissonance or cacophony. In the analysis of irregular wars globally, however, a solid sense of the thresholds can be useful. The passing of various 

thresholds fuels premonitions that the time is coming when established 

governments will launch militarily against enclaves that harbor, train, promote or aim powerful math minds against digital systems. Meanwhile, 

more athletically-oriented organizers of violence will continue to manage 

the more traditional kinds of violence.

Please see sections: 25, Why Humans Don’t Fight; 104, Lawfare; 39, Socioeconomic Causation; 129, Nerd Globe; 76, Gender; 94, Poop; 110, 

Knowledge Gaps; and 22, Badassoftheweek.com.



The very existence of flame-throwers proves that some time, 

somewhere, someone said to themselves, You know, I want to 

set those people over there on fire, but I’m just not close enough 

to get the job done.

George Carlin (attributed)

---------------

“The progress of our arms, upon which all else chiefly depends...”

Abraham Lincoln (second inaugural)


343

Amplius prodest locus saepe quam virtus

Section 83,

Why Are Irregular Wars Lost?

Why does a government sometimes lose or not win? Why do insurgent or other irregular forces fail? Below are my lists of reasons, 

starting with why a government might fail. A government might fail at 

irregular war if it makes mistakes, that is, if it does not...

1. express clearly what winning is, what it will look like, that is, 

clearly express the goals, the objectives.

2. act quickly to neutralize opponent irregular leadership at the first 

clear opportunity;

3. control anonymity;

4. identify and locate the insurgent leadership, the mens rea;

5. effectively pursue the enemy after contacts;

6. locate enemy sanctuaries;

7. trace the routes, the lines of communication, to and from enemy

guerrilla sanctuaries;

8. cut distances to anti-government sanctuaries (That is, the government fails to lengthen the distances to the culminating points of 

its own units when they are in pursuit of the enemy);

9. develop a sense of collective resistance against the irregular forces;

10. prevent a generalized atmosphere of impunity for crimes;

11. deny international support to the irregular force;

12. address palpable socio-economic and political grievances.

The above omissions aside, a government can also lose if the executive 

loses heart, or for whatever reason doesn’t care or gives up. Why might

anti-government forces lose or not win? Maybe if they do not...

1. maintain anonymity early in their organizational development;

2. plan escapes carefully when planning offensive actions;

3. prepare physical sanctuaries;

4. ever attack government forces or take offensive actions;

5. develop a sense of collective resistance against the government;

6. develop international support;

7. secure a dependable flow of financing;

8. shorten the risk distances of government forces when those forces 

pursue them during their escapes to sanctuary;
83 Why Are Irregular Wars Lost?

344

9. develop a systematic way to replace leaders;

10. measure strength correctly/ hold terrain only when they can prevail;

11. keep secrets, especially of rosters and accounts;

12. correctly identify grievances within the population/effectively 

grow the consciousness and intensity of grievances;

Some readers may be off-put at seeing competition about palpable 

socio-economic grievances in the number 12 spot on my list of things that 

might cause a government to fail. They would have given that cause a much 

higher priority, maybe at the top. History and logic will defend my assertion 

that the failure of a government to take care of human material needs does 

not have as close a correlation to the prospect of State failure as do the other 

items listed. While government resolution of public grievances may be a 

good idea and occasionally a reasonable part of a long-term prescription for 

a peaceable social compact, grievances can be generated out of nothing and 

attempts to satisfy them effectively ridiculed.

Please see sections: 2, Anonymity; 8, Linearity and the Line of Retreat; 137, 

Foreign Support and Foreign Perspective; 64, Measuring Distance and Comparing Power; 121, Dignity and Honor; 23, Mens Rea; 110, Knowledge Gaps; 

and 22, Badassoftheweek.com.



Male Announcer: The THX account is six percent over 

budget. The case is to be terminated.

Female Announcer: Discontinue Operations.

from the movie,

THX 1138 (1971)310F

311

---------------

“It matters little who wins. To make a people great it is 

necessary to send them to battle even if you have to 

kick them in the pants.”

Benito Mussolini (attributed)

---------------

“They’re not gonna catch us. We’re on a mission from God.”

Elwood Blues in the movie,

The Blues Brothers (1980)311F

312


345

Silence and bloody proof

Section 84, Cultures of Violence

Culture is a broad, amorphous something. For the purposes of winning, it is useful to talk of ‘Mafia culture’, ‘gang culture’, or ‘guerrilla 

culture’, and to avoid painting a whole people as having a violent culture. 

There are two principal characteristics of violent organizational behavior 

that focus attention in this regard. One is the rule, law, or ethic of silence 

(or culture of anonymity), the other is proof of resolve to kill (which feeds 

a version of existentialism).

Colombia is a violent place, but a look through the ample Colombian literature on violence reveals that some physical object of contention 

is nearly always present in the formula (some piece of Covet-geography), 

not just human foible. And that is only what is seen. What is not seen is 

the absence of a functioning mechanism for the peaceful resolution of conflicts over rights and duties associated with the objects of contention, 

particularly land. Violent behavioral habits exist, but they matter in the 

presence or absence of certain characteristics of the political, administrative and economic surroundings, many of which can be changed rapidly. 

This hopeful thought should be tempered by recognition of a psychological 

reality about domination and submission. It is the emotion-turned-philosophy of simple resistance that cannot be appeased by cost calculations of 

almost any kind. While we can allow as how a talented economist can 

price out anything, the idea that life gains meaning through rejection of 

oppression from external authority has its own cultural labels and adherences. The struggle over domination and submission has an independent 

purity. Some folk just don’t want someone (you maybe) to be in charge 

of them in any way. Period. Still, a peace might more likely be achieved 

by changing administrative conditions than by trying to change human behavioral dispositions. Colombia is a violent place, but Colombians aren’t 

innately more violent than anyone else.

As noted in Section 82, Conflict Thresholds, some free-trade economists argue that people resort or accede to violence when the cost of so 

doing seems less than the nonviolent transaction costs.312 F

313 In practical 

terms, this counsels governments to create a chance for peaceful coexistence by putting in place rules and mechanisms for affordable conflict 

resolution. Establishing institutions to resolve conflicts about the use and 
84 Cultures of Violence

346

occupation of land isthe most obvious and positively consequential. Large 

polities have done this successfully, however, only with the use of formal

records and some kind of property courts. The likelihood of social peace 

increases as more agreements are openly published, land ownership 

mapped, titles granted, courts made available for eviction of trespassers, 

and markets created for the realization of the transferable economic worth 

of rights and duties.

Does all this disciplining of contractual obligations constitute culture? 

Arguably yes, but the suite of innovations that make a social compactstronger 

does so in great measure because of the simple destruction it causes to anonymity. That is to say, in peaceful societies, the right to privacy has some 

specific exceptions. The identity of wealth, especially the nexus between individuals and valuable property (real estate, vehicles, significant chattel, 

professional licenses) can be made precise, comprehensive and transparent. 

Making the identity of wealth publicly visible leads to accountability, tax equity, and environmental responsibility. It is hard in an administratively open 

society for individuals to hide their personal identity and sources of power in 

relation to quarrels about land and other things of value.

Cultural understanding -- knowledge of pertinent elements of human 

psychology, sociology and geography -- can further competitive success in internal conflict. Social network analysis, for instance (identifying nodes and 

linkages in human relations) has long been a staple of competitive intelligence 

efforts. This book stresses knowing who owns what, and that knowledge includes the who and the where as much as the what. The step from social network 

to social compact, however, is an essential one -- one that involves evidence, 

institutions, and stable expectations. That said, practical mechanical and organizational innovations are readily available that trump and obviate many human 

phenomena that we might too respectfully honor with the term culture. Simple 

infrastructure investments that alleviate dispiriting conditions and invite human 

aspiration are often powerful in the long term. To the extent these kinds of things 

(transportation systems, toilets, property registries, school lunches) are cultural, 

so be it. They can beat the cultures of violence.

There are violent places in Colombia, but it is becoming a more 

peaceful country as its leaders finish putting in place those innovations 

proven to strengthen the social compact and alleviate simple human urgencies that can be exploited by amoral entrepreneurs and charlatans. When
84 Cultures of Violence

347

this book was being written, the Colombian government, with broad support of the Colombian electorate, was attaching part of its hope for a 

peaceful future on land restitution. Many Colombians acknowledged

transparent, divisible rights and duties as the civic key to long-term peace.

Their optimism stated, Colombians may never be able to build a 

peaceful society if powerful armed groups, bent on defying the Colombian 

government’s monopoly on granting impunity, enjoy sanctuaries either inside Colombia or in neighboring countries. Cultures of violence follow 

the basic rules of operational art and strategy. They follow anonymity and 

sanctuary. They feature leaders able to grant impunity to their followers 

for violent acts. Sometimes those leaders enjoy a special protection afforded by international boundary lines. Often, with a view to geopolitical 

advantage, a national leader cedes sanctuary to a violent group, tacitly condoning its unpunishable presence. That complicity might help fuel the 

impression that his countrymen or his neighbors suffer a violent culture, 

when the truth might be closer to that of the violent impact of international 

war or the ultimately violent consequences of appeasement.

Please see sections: 103, Amnesty and Restitution; 25, Why Humans Don’t 

Fight; 38, Cultural Study for What?; 48, Grading the Social Compact; 24, 

Ruthlessness and Resolve; 95, Childhood; 76, Gender; and 42, Brigands.



“Where’s my money, Man.”

Stewie on the TV series

The Family Guy313F

314

---------------

Guillermo: The people we've encountered since things fell apart? 

The worst kind. Plunderers. The kind that take by force.

Rick Grimes: That's not who we are.

Guillermo: How was I to know? My people got attacked and you 

show up with Miguel hostage. Appearances.

T-Dog: Guess the world changed.

Guillermo: No. It's the same as it ever was. The weak get taken.

from the TV series

The Walking Dead314F

315


348

What’s a Moschi?

Section 85,

Paul Emil von Lettow-Vorbeck

About this officer’s WWI exploits, popular military history writer 

Edwin P. Hoyt wrote,

For what it is worth, my opinion is that von Lettow-Vorbeck was 

the most successful guerrilla leader in history, and that his record 

has never even been approached by any others, in terms of impact on his enemies, in terms of survival in the field with no

sources of supply for months on end, in terms of managing a racially mixed fighting force with enormous skill, in terms of sheer 

courage and heroism, and finally in terms of superb generalship 

that kept his enemies almost constantly guessing.315 F

316

Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck was not an insurgent leader, even if we 

stretch the definition of insurgency about as far as it can go. He was 

fighting for the Kaiser against the British Empire. Some anti-colonial ‘narrative’ might be wedged into the history because a decade earlier, 

Lieutenant von Lettow-Vorbeck had fought in actions to suppress native 

uprisings on the other side of Africa. Of the potential for a subtext of native resistance against European overlords, the Prussian remembered it 

mostly as an unrealized worry. “The fear of a native rising had been expressed in many quarters...But none of these fears turned out to be 

justified. Later, a very intelligent captured Belgian Askari told me outright: ‘You know quite well that the natives always side with the stronger 

party’, and an English Masai admitted frankly: ‘It is all the same to us 

whether the English or the Germans are our masters.”’31 6F

317

Regardless the insignificance of insurgent or self-determination energy during the war, in his introduction to Battery Classics’ 1990 edition 

of von Lettow-Vorbeck’s reminiscences, Dr. Thomas Ofcansky asserts, 

“My Reminiscences of East Africa has gained a reputation among military 

strategists as a crucial treatise on insurgency warfare.”317F

318 Reading that, I 

couldn’t help but think of the exalted position in which American military 

curricula have placed Lawrence of Arabia in recent years. Crediting T. E. 

Lawrence as an excellent writer and his work The Seven Pillars of Wisdom

as a milestone in the literature of warfare, not to mention Lawrence’s having been a tremendously successful guerrilla leader, we are left wondering 

if Hoyt’s superior praise of von Lettow-Vorbeck wasn’t a bit high. Looking into it, however, I don’t think so. The Prussian artillery officer 
85 Paul Emil Von Lettow-Vorbeck

349

confounded the British and remained undefeated for four years until after 

the armistice in November, 1918. That von Lettow-Vorbeck is not as well 

remembered in English-speaking military imaginations owes to Germany’s having lost the war and to von Lettow-Vorbeck’s not having the 

likes of a Bertrand Russell for an editor or of a Lowell Thomas for a publicist. Measuring from events and the impact that a single military leader 

had on those events, however, the Prussian looks pretty good, even by 

comparison to Lawrence.

The first shots of the war along the east coast of Africa can be attributed to the British cruiser HMS Astraea, which bombarded Dar-esSalam on August 8, 1914, trying to knock out a radio tower. (The British 

could count on buried cables for communications with their distant colonies, while the Germans had to rely mostly on long-range radio 

transmission. Communication between Germany and its African colonies 

would soon be all but cut-off.) Von Lettow-Vorbeck, however, initiated 

the first significant engagements northeast of Mount Kilimanjaro along 

and across the border with Kenya. His goal was to make his presence felt 

in British territory along a significant economic line of communication in 

order to draw British forces in reaction. That line was the Uganda Railway 

running from Mombasa past Kilimanjaro through Nairobi to Kisumu on 

Lake Victoria. In 1914, a parallel railway, called the Usumbarra or Northern Railway, ran in German East Africa from the Indian Ocean port at 

Tanga to a town called New Moschi, southeast of Mount Kilimanjaro. The 

British had hoped to move a force from Longido (northwest of Mt. Kilimanjaro) to Moschi, take the railhead and move eastward along that rail 

line to pincer and destroy any German forces between Kilimanjaro and the 

port city of Tanga. By securing the Moschi area in advance, however, von 

Lettow-Vorbeck denied the British any hope of mounting timely pressure 

from two directions during the ensuing battle for Tanga, which took place 

between November 3rd and November 5th. The British landing at Tanga 

was one of the most bungled moments in British military history.

Military leaders are at times made to appear effective by the ineptitude of their opponents. Major General A. E. Aitken, commander of the 

British invasion force from India, performed so badly at Tanga he was 

subsequently reduced in rank and retired, his actions and demeanor held in 

contempt as (negatively) exemplary. As such, some of the reports of his 

hubris and nonchalance may have since been exaggerated for educational 

effect. In any case, by Jove, he did not do well. One chronicler reports him 

to have said at the outset, “The Indian Army will make short work of a lot 
85 Paul Emil Von Lettow-Vorbeck

350

of niggers.” 318 F

319 We can add that at least he did not limit his ethnic disdain 

to the Africans. “The German troops are ill-trained, ours are magnificent and 

bush or no bush I mean to thrash the Germans before Christmas.” General 

Aiken had held an officers’ conference at the Bombay Yacht Club prior to 

the departure of the expeditionary force for the east coast of Africa. There 

he apologized to the officers for their having to be involved in such a simple 

affair and that he would do his best to get them all reassigned to France when 

it was over. He expressed his central concern: “There is one thing, gentlemen, about which I feel very strongly. That is the subject of dress. I wish 

officers and men to be always turned out. I will not tolerate the appalling 

sloppiness allowed during the Boer War. That is all gentlemen, thank you.”

However incompetent General Aiken might have been, the ubercompetent German commander was the principal author of the outcome at 

Tanga. Before the battle, an Askari NCO reported to the Colonel, “Adui

tayari” (the enemy is ready). Actually, the Germans were ready and the 

British not so much. The Schutztruppe (name given the German colonial 

protective forces) had blocked any British hope of pressuring Tanga from 

inland and, consequently, it was the Germans who were able to move reinforcements down the rail line from the west. A resolute, competent, 

energetic defense assured that an eight to one advantage in troop strength 

was not nearly enough for the British. Beyond not taking the port, they left 

behind sixteen machine guns, 600,000 rounds of ammunition, and sufficient 

other gear to equip three more German companies. At the start of what 

proved to be a grueling four-year campaign across thousands of square 

miles, the British Empire gave a valuable gift to a clever foe.

Soon after the Battle of Tanga, Lettow-Vorbeck engaged the British in another more or less fixed battle at Jassini near the border with the 

British East African Protectorate. He had won that second battle decisively as well, but decided that the high cost his force had paid required he 

thenceforth place nearly complete reliance on guerrilla tactics, guerrilla 

operations, a guerrilla strategy. He would fight the British on his terms, 

which meant rarely giving the British much of a battle at all, and always 

making them suffer a failed pursuit. For more than a year the Schutztruppe

lived well, basing around the Moschi area southeast of Mt. Kilimanjaro, 

attacking the Uganda rail line inside the British East Africa Protectorate. 

After finally being pushed away from Kilimanjaro, the Schutztruppe and 

its native allies marched, converged, dispersed, and re-converged in obedience with the imperatives of their hit-and-run war.
85 Paul Emil Von Lettow-Vorbeck

351

United States Army Major Thomas Crowson, who perceptively 

chose to write his military thesis on this episode, included among a selection 

of quotes a passage from the Schutztruppe’s pre-war field training manual. 

The extract reflects the German perception of the native Askari fighter.

He has no fixed line of retreat, for after a defeat his forces break 

up into small parties, which retire in all directions, and concentrate again at points previously agreed upon, often in the rear of 

the victorious troops. ... The natives think themselves beaten 

in a fight only when they have suffered great loss: flight and 

escape with small losses they regard as success.319 F

320

“Aha,” you say, “no fixed line of retreat.” Yes, but let us highlight 

the word fixed, and remember that von Lettow-Vorbeck wisely adopted 

and adapted the Askari sense of guerrilla war. Like the Askari, he chose 

his rally points to lead either to safety or to again threaten his enemy’s 

columns or lines of communication. At the scale of a single engagement, 

the Askaris’ and the Germans’ disengagement tactic might not have been 

uni-linear, or even mucho-linear, but at an operational scale it most certainly was aligned to their own and to their enemies’ lines and to a studied 

understanding of distances and sanctuary. It is possible to imagine an entire war in which both sides, with many warriors and camp followers, never 

march to battle, but rather by angelic anticipation and resolve descend, 

each individual fighter of his own accord, on places mutually and consensually chosen for battle. Afterward they disperse as though blown out of a 

perfume atomizer. Possible to imagine, it just never happened, including 

not in East Africa. They had marching orders.

The WWI actions in East Africa were not insurgent, counter-insurgent, revolutionary, separatist, or anything transnational, sub-national, 

religious or ethnic. They compose, nevertheless, an episode of irregular warfare set within a conventional global contest of empires. Victory in the 

greater contest ultimately went to a nation whose resolve, resources, and alliances prevailed. In this theater, meanwhile, military victory was achieved 

over and over by a commander who imposed the cost of his aggressive attacks on his enemy, while always assuring the security of his escape routes. 

That security was, in turn, built on a foundation of geographic acclimatization, empathy for another culture, technological innovation, and the 

application of basic leadership principles.

The perseverant British did finally win in East Africa, themselves 

learning and adapting. They deployed troops to East Africa from the far 

reaches of their Empire, including from Africa. Africa is large, however, 
85 Paul Emil Von Lettow-Vorbeck

352

the steaming distance from Cape Town to Dar-es-Salam as far as from 

Indian ports, and the climate as distinct. A quantity of cultural proximity 

did assist the South Africans, but famed Boer general Jan Smuts did not 

best the Prussian.

It is worth adding that in the various writings about von LettowVorbeck, his leadership is not compared only with that of General Aitken 

or other British military commanders he faced, but to that of the German 

governor of German East Africa, Dr. Heinrich Schnee. Dr. Schnee aimed 

to declare the colony neutral -- to countermand von Lettow-Vorbeck’s intention to fight, opining that the colony could do little to help Germany 

win. Von Lettow-Vorbeck was the governor’s subordinate, but could not 

abide such a decision. The officer chose loyalty and action over obedience 

and quiescence. By the way, Dr. Schnee was married to an Englishwoman.

Please see sections: 68, Scale; 38, Cultural Study for What; 131, Is It an 

Insurgency?; 132, Turducken and Hybrid; 47, Why the County; 8, Linearity 

and the Line of Retreat; 7, Sanctuary; and 142, Conflict Geography.



No one could make a greater mistake than he who 

did nothing because he could only do a little.

Sir Edmund Burke (attributed)

---------------

Charlie Allnut: I don't know why the Germans would want this 

God-forsaken place. 

Rose Sayer: God has not forsaken this place, Mr. Allnut, as my 

brother's presence here bears witness. 

from the movie,

The African Queen (1951)320F

321

---------------

“When the enemy has adopted guerrilla warfare, the search 

for information acquires special importance.”

from a 1905 US Army field manual321 F

322

---------------

“I just took the short cut and got there first with the most men.”322 F

323

Nathan Bedford Forrest


85 Paul Emil Von Lettow Vorbeck

353

-- East Africa circa 1914-1918 --

I approximated the line of movement based on von Lettow-Vorbeck’s 

Reminiscences.323 F

324 The distance between Dar-es-Salaam and Kigoma on 

Lake Tanganyika is a little over 800 miles.
354

Radix malorum est cupiditas

Section 86,

Shifting Covet-geographies

Some places are more desirable than others. Organized armed violence often ensues when the relative value of real property changes 

abruptly and there are no systems in place to handle the change peacefully. 

An index of real-time changes in real estate market value can be highly 

revealing, if not the easiest thing to maintain, if you were to want to anticipate the changing places of armed conflict in the world. When a new 

source location for oil, gold, leavorite, or any saleable commodity is discovered, people fight over control of the location, transport nodes to it, 

labor resources necessary for its exploitation, associated tax revenues, insurance coverage, proximate business locations, and even related 

trademarks. Everything that can be sold, traded, or held at risk for the 

purposes of extortion: water, coal, bananas, guano, cardamom, feathers, 

emeralds, coca, heroin, ink, cattle, gold, silver, salt, bandwidth, goldfish, 

babies, hardwood, medical cadavers, rare earth, and on and on, will be violently fought over in the absence of alternative means of coming to 

agreement about ownership.

The cost of violence takes its own geographic shape (where the natural environment is damaged, landmines are placed, people thrown in 

unmarked graves, innocents hit by stray bullets). Not only can the locations of covet-geographies be mapped, so can the ‘where’ of the cost of 

violence. The reasons why the costs of an armed struggle are located where

they are located can be explained in part by changes in the geographic locations and values of saleable material.

The shifting covet-geography tells us a little about why people 

fight. The logical leap from why-the-where to just why isn’t that far, except that for the latter we would have to rest our thought process on some 

philosophical assumptions about the nature of man, the nature of social 

constructs and all that falderal. However, the changing geographic loci of 

commercializable things tells us much about where to expect violent actions to occur and where the costs of violence might be imposed. The 

question Why-the-where?, meanwhile, might speed our doing something 

useful. We have to be careful, however, in how we conceive and map the 
86 Shifting Covet-Geography

355

geography of a commercializable item. The geography of Colombian coffee, for instance, is not just coffee fields, but those plus the transportation 

routes to the processing plants; routes to the ports; the locations of farm,

processing and transportation labor; the location of associated banks; and 

so on. A significant change in the value of any part -- to a mountain pass, 

for instance -- could be a cause of violence.

There is a major exception to the above observation that the geography of armed conflict and the costs of armed conflict correlate to changes in 

the commercial value of places. That exception is battle plans. When groups 

travel to attack each other in obedience to their understanding of military 

principles, the places where battles occur are generally not related to changing differentials in real estate values, but to the possibilities of attacking a 

foe and either being able to withdraw safely or pursue successfully. The 

terrain of battles and the terrain of real estate values coincide in some way. 

Perhaps it is exactly when the terrain of organized violence is not related to 

commercial value that it must be related to military strategies.

Please see sections: 25, Why Humans Don’t Fight; 80, Why You Should 

Like Geography; 53, Hohfeldian Grievance Analysis; 47, Why the 

County; 8, Linearity and the Line of Retreat; 72, Land Strategy and 

Property Strategy; 49, Territorial Scrutiny; and 142, Conflict Geography.



“Unfortunately there is one thing standing between me and that 

property: the rightful owners. ...Wait a minute... there might be legal precedent. Of course....land-snatching... (He thumbs through a 

legal casebook index.) Land, land... (He finds the entry he is looking 

for) ‘Land: see Snatch’. Ah, Haley vs. United States. Haley: seven; 

United States: nothing. You see, it can be done.”

Hedley Lamarr in the movie,

Blazing Saddles (1974)324F

325

---------------

“Moses dragged us for 40 years through the desert to bring us 

to the one place in the Middle East where there was no oil.”

Golda Meir (attributed)


356

Hydrate or diedrate

Section 87, Water Wars

It wouldn’t seem that water would be much different than any other 

commodity or that it is so scarce it would merit constant mention. However, 

the human body is 95% water and can’t long endure without replenishment. 

We can divide water conflicts into three categories: Water we need for combat; 

water we possess or can control in order to make money; and water we figure 

to deny others because we just hate them and want them dried-out dead.

1. Water for fighting. Soldiers in the United States military are logistically 

well-supported, but still sometimes run out of water at the front, which endangers them and impairs their fighting effectiveness. At the fighting end of 

logistical distances, which might just as likely be measured in yards as miles, 

the weight of water is increasingly felt. Water doesn’t move over the Internet. 

A soldier has to carry it and he consumes it more rapidly as he does more work, 

so getting an ocean tanker full of fresh water to the closest port may not be 

enough, close enough. Big-war water moves in huge ships, cisterns and pipes, 

but in the more usual conflicts it is a canteen problem. From Colombia, which 

is one of the four or five freshwater-richest lands in the world, come many 

anecdotes of soldiers and guerrillas fighting fiercely over some damp 

streambed during the dry season or at altitude during a dry spell. When soldiers find themselves too many hours away from water resupply, other 

determinants of strength begin to fade toward insignificance. In the aggregate, 

small unit water problems can spell a significant strategic advantage for the 

side better able to assure that its fighters have water. More water is a classic 

ingredient of advantageous risk distances and correlations of force. It might 

even constitute a fair distinction between police work and a military operation, 

because military operations so often require consideration of water’s urgency.

2. We want a better deal. Contests over the price of water are ubiquitous 

and happen at many scales, from small urban residential areas to bordering 

nations. Sometimes you or the neighbor, the municipality, the evil corporation or the uphill country wants a better price or maybe even needs it to keep 

providing the water. Water sources, courses and distribution systems that 

serve multiple ownership identities are always a potential object of conflict. 

That is why water courts of all kinds exist and why there is a whole regime 

of international water law. One of the best-used arguments is that water is 

so elemental to human life it should be free and not subject to commercialization. This is a great emotional argument that works all the time, but it is 
87 Water Wars

357

also highly problematic. If water is worth something, then waterworks, water delivery systems and water storage facilities are worth financial 

investment, and that means dealing with the market for money, which means 

borrowing. That means we get to the question of interest rates and how 

much is a usurious rate and how much isn’t. This generally gets us to a 

question of who gets to commit extortion, the guy with the water, the guy 

with the money, or the guy that organizes a bunch of people who demand 

water, but don’t want to pay its worth. Sometimes the water is tied indirectly 

to a parallel problem of money and future value, such as when the water is 

contained in order to produce electricity.

3. Thirsty? Restricting water as a toll of extortion is common in irregular war. 

FARC units have on many occasions isolated and shut off intake pumps or interrupted municipal aqueducts in order to announce their presence and power, and 

therewith to extort concessions from towns in Colombia. If the international conventions held sway, which they don’t, such actions would be in violation of the 

rules of war as postulated. I mention those wistful rules only to point out that some 

deliberative bodies, interested in the normative course of civilization, have at times 

concluded that leveraging the scarcity of water to extract concessions is villainous

behavior. It seems, however, to be effective.

If there is a fourth category, it is the unintended effect of changing or 

damming a watercourse ˗˗ ruining its drinkability with toxic waste; overtaxing 

it; or changing its course and destroying habitats in the process. This kind of 

negligence or crime can cause human population displacements and armed 

conflict. They are not exactly about water, but a result of poor resource management or stewardship.

The rise of Evo Morales in Bolivia is tied in recent urban lore to his 

participation as a leader of the aggrieved underdog in a ‘water war’ in the medium-sized city of Cochabamba. The facts revolve around a municipal water 

distribution system the management of which had been privatized. The company may or may not have overreached on prices, but in any case made a few 

boneheaded and culturally unacceptable revenue strategies. Evo Morales’ personal participation or effectiveness in the actual events is debatable and the 

whole history is a lot less engaging than the term ‘war’ merits but, in the end, 

the distribution and appraisal of water was catalyzed political competition, 

some of it violent. Meanwhile, the Bolivian government, backed by everyone 

along the Bolivian political and ideological spectrum, was claiming from Chile 

a higher price for water that flows from Bolivia into Chile and which is used

there by a combination of residential areas and mining concerns.
87 Water Wars

358

Water is one of many natural resources over which people fight. It has 

some special characteristics, not the least of which is that it flows downhill. 

Watersheds and streams often mark human territories. Availability of water 

often determines the relative value of real estate. Entire court systems are built 

around the need to resolve conflicts over water. Today, there may be a few 

places in the world where water could spark an international incident or even 

start a larger war. Those rarities aside, it is highly likely that the irregular war 

in which you find yourself will feature within it one or more of the types of 

water fight listed in this section. Don’t lose the water fights.

Please see sections: 49, Territorial Scrutiny; 19, Mercatus; 121, Dignity and 

Honor; 47, Why the County; 54, Extortion; 86, Shifting Covet-geographies; 

125, Human Rights; and 75, Price of Real Estate, and Tourism.



“Moisture is the essence of wetness, and wetness is the essence of beauty.”

Derek in the movie,

Zoolander (2001)325F

326

--------------

Lt. Escobar: You must really think I'm stupid, don't you Gittes. 

Jake Gittes: I don't think about it that much but, gimme a day 

or two and I'll get back to yuh.

from the movie,

Chinatown (1974)326F

327

--------------

Some of the known perils of Dihydrogen Monoxide are:

“Death due to accidental inhalation of DHMO, even in small quantities.”

Dihydrogen Monoxide

Research Division3 27F

328

--------------

Water? Like out of the toilet?

The Attorney General in the movie,

Idiocracy (2006)328F

329


359

Not an even playing field

Section 88, Escape Geography

The geographies of greatest relevance in irregular wars tend toward remote areas, but it is not the remoteness per se that is significant. Certain 

geographic phenomena favor the escapee. Those involved in clandestine transport

are likely to seek, gravitate to, or be naturally selected toward those geographies 

most favorable to the escape. That which might otherwise be the least passable 

terrain becomes transportation hubs – for clandestine transportation.

If a US or allied force were fighting for a government or against one, 

at one point or another it will find itself in a deadly pursuit, either chasing 

or being chased. The prospects of success in that pursuit are tied intimately 

to the relationship of the culminating points of those forces. Each can anticipate arriving at a point in time and space where it would no longer be

prudent to continue. Wet, sloped terrain holds its own advantage for the side 

trying to escape. When the chase is in wooded, mountainous terrain, the 

pursued usually knows which direction he will take when he gets to a junction of two watercourses. His pursuer, on the other hand, is often obliged to 

make a blind decision as to which stream to follow. If for no other reason 

than this mundane fact of slope, water, and gravity, an advantage is given to 

uphill escape. Every left-or-right dilemma presented to the pursuer shortens 

the distance to the pursuer’s culminating point (his prudent risk distance). 

With a little help from landmines and snipers, the fugitive can augment his 

enemy’s perception of the cost-distances, that is, greatly shorten his enemy’s 

risk distance. Other terrain can be made to do the same. Tunnels can be dug 

or jungle paths cut to confound the follower. As it happens, long upslopes 

and jungles are also often ‘remote’.

The geographic phenomena that can shorten the risk distances of the 

pursuer more quickly than those of the pursued are not limited to physical 

geographic phenomena. Boundaries, especially international borders, can 

do the same trick. If we were to imagine a daring, defiant rabbit whose mission in life was to eat carrots right in front of every dog in the neighborhood 

and then run, and if every dog in the neighborhood were collared to a long 

chain, the rabbit would only have to outrun the dogs to the ends of the dogs’ 

chains. That space beyond all of the chains is sanctuary for the rabbit, but if 

there were no space outside the length of all the chains, the rabbit will likely 

be consigned to his fate -- if all the dogs are alert and resolute. The chains 

define a specific geographic limitation for each dog. It is imposed by the 

dog’s master because the master feels he or she takes too much risk to allow 

the dog to go free, not perhaps because of the danger posed by pirate rabbits, 

but because of other dogs and other masters. International borders act on 
88 Escape Geography

360

units of armies and police in a similar way as the chains work on the dogs. 

So it is that an upslope, a jungle and an international border can have a similar, commonly measurable effect – they serve to shorten the pursuer’s risk 

distance more than they shorten that of the fugitive.

Some groups of persons, communities perhaps, are either predisposed or purposefully convinced to not tell which way they went (that is, 

the fugitives). Such people, too, form part of the escape-favorable geography. It is both wise and common for groups that are compelled to 

prepare routes of escape to prepare the people along those routes. That 

preparation may include a threat to return and punish if the people snitch. 

It should come as no surprise that many small communities that experience 

this form of left-behind ‘presence’ are located in what we would call remote areas.

Distances, including risk distances, involve start and end points. For 

the fugitive during a pursuit, the happy end point is his sanctuary. A start 

point might have been a place where he attacked a government unit or a 

piece of infrastructure, or it might be where he went to receive the fruits of 

an act of subsistence -- a logistical act. Perhaps it is a place where he receives a saleable quantity of drugs or a kidnapping hostage or the proceeds 

of a robbery. From those places he moves to sanctuary. Financing of irregular armed groups often revolves around the proximity of commercially 

valuable substances to sanctuary.

River barriers have long been a central geographic planning factor for 

Western armies. Their significance has in the main revolved around their being crossed -- by either friend or foe. While techniques for crossing streams 

continue to occupy small units in irregular war, more attention needs to be 

paid to the longitudinal control of navigable rivers. What goes upstream and 

downstream may be more germane than what goes across. Opportunity also 

resides in the proper design and deployment of riverine vessels. Riverboats,

like helicopters, can become the workhorses of resupply, communications and 

deployment. In addition, because river courses in low-lying areas constitute 

principle economic transportation arteries in so many lands, the thoughtful 

distribution of riverine support services can give an advantage in establishing 

favorable relationships with remote communities.

A special leadership aspect of operations in remote areas is worth 

mention. It is regularly noted that when placed in primitive conditions, soldier attitudes and standards of behavior can become increasingly atavistic. 

Preparations for irregular war should seek not only to master physical movement and actions on contact in difficult terrain, but an appreciation of the 

psychological effects of continuous existence in such places. It is good to 
88 Escape Geography

361

teach the Boy Scout how to light a fire, but he may also need to be forewarned about the Lord of the Flies.

Although urbanization has seemingly proceeded everywhere, the 

world is not covering over with cities. Many urbanizing countries have seen 

rural populations decrease and remote expanses expand. The urbanizing 

world demands we heed its built-terrain and land-use vocabulary. As a consequence of that same urbanization, however, some rural communities 

experience new isolation that makes them vulnerable to the biddings of irregular armed groups. The world’s tank-brigade-free extent (where it is highly 

unlikely that the US would deploy a tank brigade) probably covers 75% of the 

world’s land surface. (I claim absolutely no science behind that estimate.) 

What’s left is still sizeable, includes a desert or two, as well as a lot of mountainous and jungled terrain closer to the equator where that tank brigade would 

have a rough go of it anyway. The amount of earth open to potential meddling

via special operations forces is far greater. Considering the broad range of 

reasonable scenarios applicable in the lower latitudes, observe that they are

rich in escape geography.

Please see sections: 64, Measuring Distance and Comparing Power; 65, 

Smuggling; 49, Territorial Scrutiny; 7, Sanctuary; 85, Paul Emil von Lettow-Vorbeck; 86, Shifting Covet-geographies; 16, Presence; and 142, 

Conflict Geography.



The reaches opened before us and closed behind, as if the forest 

had stepped leisurely across the water to bar the way for our return. 

We penetrated deeper and deeper into the heart of darkness. 329F

330

Joseph Conrad

Heart of Darkness

--------------

“Old longings nomadic leap,

Chafing at custom's chain;

Again from its brumal sleep

Wakens the ferine strain.”

Jack London

Call of the Wild 330 F

331

--------------

Snitches Get Stitches


362

Take, hold, sign

Section 89, The Dot Game and Go

The Dot Game. The Dot Game (or Dots and Boxes) is a fine and

dangerous pastime if you’re the parent of a small child -- fine because little 

kids love it and can play it for hours on a long road trip; and dangerous because you, the parent, are delighted in it for about two minutes. Beyond that,

it is instructive as the essential ‘Take, Hold, Build’ game. Try it out. Make 

a bunch of dots at the interstices on a page of graph paper. As a first move, 

you draw a line between any two points on the board then let your doobiepicking opponent take a turn. When you can make an enclosed square, you 

can mark that square with your initials -- it’s yours. Also, whenever you fill 

in a square you get another turn. The winning objective is to end the game 

(when all the dots are connected and squares signed) with more squares than 

your opponent. It might be the most basic territorial board game possible.

But what if you could take three turns to every one of your progeny’s? You could destroy the child’s fun and self-confidence and save 

some time in the process. In armed struggle, while the dots have to be 

adjusted to the nature and value of the landscape, you will do pretty much 

the same thing, especially in an urban setting -- gain moves to possess more 

squares. Just as in the Dot Game with your kid, the lines don’t always 

have to be drawn contiguously. Unlike the kid’s game, you can create 

urban lines with physical barriers and control technologies that especially 

favor your side. And you can apply various methods in various parts of a 

city simultaneously. Your priorities regarding which squares to possess 

will usually be based first on control of movement and then on control of 

market value, the latter related to the former. The right choices will maximize placement of your signature on the most valuable pieces of terrain 

and deny use of those pieces to your enemy. It apparently took a while for 

US forces to figure out the imperatives of the dot game in Iraq, but they 

finally started getting it.

Think about what it means to put your signature on an urban square. 

Hopefully it means your enemy cannot move into it, and at least not 

through it. Better still if it means that when you have your signature on a 

square, your opponents cannot enjoy impunity from your punishments in 

that space. Scale matters; don’t make the squares so big that you might be 

lying to yourself about being in control before initialing. Unlike the Dot 

Game you play with your kids, you won’t concede any territory in armed 
89 The Dot Game and Go

363

conflict that you don’t have to, so if your enemy puts his initials on a block, 

you’ll want to go after it and get it back -- but maybe not right away.

Go. Go is an old Chinese board game played on a 19x19 line grid. 

While the Dot Game becomes predictable almost immediately, Go is unrelentingly complex. Played by two, the object is to control more of the 

board than your opponent by denying him options for movement while 

maintaining your own. Players have to find a balance in the use of their 

resources (the playing stones) between close-in and more distant positioning. An earlier name for the game was weiqi (pronounced wei ch’ i) 

meaning ‘encircling territory’.

Games can be good mental exercise. They can teach basic lessons and 

create psychological awareness of and disposition toward basic strategic phenomena -- such as uncertainty, deception, or the significance of distances and 

the balance between the concentration of force and economy of force. Is there 

a board or electronic game that sufficiently mimics the complexities of irregular war? If it were to exist, it would combine something of the Dot and Go

games, allow multiple players with changing alliances, reward successful deception, and punish mismeasurement of strength.

Please see sections: 49, Territorial Scrutiny; 28, Takeovers and Sieges; 

32, Land-use Planning; 19, Mercatus; 66, GIS; 67, Points, Lines, Spaces; 

30, Control Technology; and 99, Seven Metropolitan Lines of Effort.



“But Big Jule cannot win if he plays with honest dice.”

Harry the Horse in the movie,

Guys and Dolls (1955)331F

332

--------------

“Most actions do not aim at anybody’s defeat or loss.

They aim at an improvement in conditions.”332 F

333

Ludwig von Mises

--------------

“...actions should be considered as links, as steps leading to the operative principle, never as the operative principle itself.”33 3F

334

Carl von Clausewitz

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364

School of resistance, extortion inventory, place of shame

Section 90, Prisons and Prisoners

Prisons can be places where human rights are violated or where gangs 

form or insurgents communicate, recruit and train. People organize amnesties 

and prisoner exchanges around prison populations. Prisons always seem to be 

too small for the number of prisoners and when the prison capacity grows, that 

growth just seems to invite judges to send more prisoners. There never seems 

to be much racial or social equity in prisoner mixes, either. Some scholars will 

argue that prisons are the architectural manifestation of a system that punishes 

behavior that is itself the result of the way the system is organized and, anyway, the difference between some prisoners and some prison guards is just a 

matter of conviction. Prisons can become high value targets for armed groups 

wanting to spring their comrades. Wardens and staff become targets for kidnappings and vengeance attacks.

By way of example, consider the jail break sprung by the radical Islamist group Boko Haram (which translates to something like ‘western 

education is a sin’) at the Bauchi Prison in Nigeria. On September 7, 2009, 

shortly after the close of Friday prayers and the breaking of the fast of Ramadan, gunmen riding pickup trucks surrounded the Bauchi Central Prison and 

began shooting at security guards from four well-chosen locations. Simultaneously, fifty men wielding AK-47s, knives, and cutlasses hacked past the 

guards to gain entrance to the prison. There, the attackers moved from cell to 

cell, freeing some 721 of the 759 prisoners. The scene, known in its aftermath 

as the 9/7 attacks, was one of the largest prison breaks in African history, but 

it was hardly the only nor the last.334 F

335 Closer to home, consider the Baltimore 

City Detention Center where inmate Tavon White, ostensibly the leader of 

something called the Black Guerrilla Family gang, was indicted for having 

allegedly fathered five children with four of the guards, along with less productive illegal activity.

Where you put prisons, how you build them, who you put in them and 

for how long, and who guardsthe prisoners are all substantial issues. If you are 

not going to kill all of your opponents, you need a system of incarceration. Having to maintain a growing prisoner population is one of the accelerating costs of 

allowing a war to drag on. This problem alone is a big reason why you ought 

not to accept the notion that insurgencies are by their nature prolonged.

Courts are intimately tied to prisons. While the functioning of a court 

is not as dependent on the architectural design of its walls as is the prison, the 

courts’ functioning and rules are closely tied to the functioning of the prison 
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365

walls. If legal requirements are such that prisoners are too easily released, the 

result can be a tendency on the part of those doing the capturing to choose a

more severe and immediate justice, i.e., killing instead of capturing.

What to do with abandoned children is a related and potentially sensitive question. Institutions like orphanages and reform schools quickly 

approach the status of prisons. Actually, a lot of regular schools do, too. 

The inconsistent functioning of other architectural manifestations of the social compact, like old-folk homes and insane asylums, influences internal 

armed conflict to a lesser degree.

Invest in an optimal built environment for detainees, prisoners, captives, the incapacitated, and highly dependent populations. Design policies 

that do not confound their use. Get your conflict over with as quickly as possible. If you let it drag on, you will have prison and prisoner problems. That 

said, all of these comments about government prisons pertain to an insurgent 

force as well. Maintaining a population of kidnap victims in miserable conditions became a major operating cost for the FARC.

Please see sections: 37, School Lunches; 121, Dignity and Honor; 96, Combatant Status; 95, Childhood; 110, Knowledge Gaps; 11, Protraction and 

Diligence; 97, Oviedo; and 69, Measuring Effects of Actions on Enemies.



“Me they can kill... You they own!”

Papillon to Dega in the movie,

Papillon (1973)335F

336

---------------

“You probably heard we ain't in the prisoner-takin' business; we 

in the killin' Nazi business. And cousin, business is a-boomin'.”

Lt Aldo Raines in the movie,

Inglourious Basterds (2009)336F

337

---------------

“Danbury wasn't a prison, it was a crime school. I went in with a Bachelor of marijuana, came out with a Doctorate of cocaine.”

George Jung in the movie,

Blow (2001)337F

338

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366

AYBABTU

Section 91, Forts and Walls

T. Miller Maguire, whose words are used in Section 6 to help introduce the operational equation, believed that nobody could build an 

impregnable fort. He said, “A fortress once invested is certain to fall, unless a relieving field-army can beat the besiegers away.”3 38F

339 He also 

claimed forts were almost indispensable in both the defense and offense. 

While chiming in with the maneuver generals' contempt for fortifications, 

Maguire included a clear exception when it came to the "works devised by 

ourselves to meet the exigencies of irregular warfare.” Military architects 

are rare today. In a world ever more dominated by urban terrain, built

environment, building takeovers and sieges, the disdain toward forts and 

walls that this rarity implies just can’t be right.

As for walls, the Chinese didn’t keep building their Great Wall because 

it didn’t work. Forts and walls, like locks, are best rated according to the cost, 

time, or effort it takes to breach or go around them. Forts and walls work best 

when part of a greater system of defense or offense that is planned around costdistance. The venerable 1940 US Marine Corps Small Wars Manual recommends establishing fortified advance bases for logistics support to units 

moving inland from the coast. What does that say? It reflects the fact that for 

the American Marines, their lines of supply or withdrawal reached the US 

Navy. It also says that to be effective inland, the Marines had to lengthen the 

distances to their culminating points. They had to change the geographic facts 

of cost- and risk distances. They had to lengthen their risk distances. Forts 

have always been part of the military answer to geographic reality, even when 

not recognized as such. Almost every port becomes a fort. The Marine manual said their little forts would:

1. cover productive areas and their lines of communication with 

their markets;

2. afford protection to the local population in that area;

3. form a base of supply, rest, replacement, and information.

Forts (outposts is common related term) can be an effective part of an 

offensive campaign when placed across enemy LOCs, placed to endanger enemy lines of retreat, shorten the distance in time and space to enemy 

culminating points, cover withdrawals and otherwise lengthen the time and 

distance to friendly culminating points. The Marine manual put less emphasis 

on using forts to interdict enemy LOCs because identifying the enemy line of 
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367

retreat or lines of resupply had been so difficult. If you cannot find your enemy’s lines of communication, it is harder to place your forts optimally.

In the 16th and 17th centuries, the forts of continental Europe were 

deployed in such a way as to promise an invader that, if he did not take them, 

the forts' garrisons would play havoc on his line of communication and retreat. The forts were located not so much for protection of the area where 

they were built but as part of a greater strategy of defense in depth. They 

also served expansionist aims by extending and protecting friendly lines during strategic advances. In 21st century Colombia, many new, fortified police 

stations have been placed abreast known guerrilla LOCs. The police presence serves to counter the isolation and marginalization of rural communities 

affected by the internal conflict, affect the flow of information, and to increase the operational range of friendly military forces by maintaining 

supplies. The driving idea behind the location of the new stations is to 

change the shape of the Colombian battlefield by confounding guerrilla resupply, undermine the guerrilla’s ‘rule of silence’, and thereby make

guerrilla escape routes less tenable in the face of Colombian military pursuit. 

In other words, while police outposts help protect and service remote communities, the strategic logic for their geographic placement is part of offenseminded military initiative, not the simple defense of towns or infrastructure.

The Colombian’smilitary logic followed an appreciation of the compartmentalized geography and a mutually supportive relationship between police 

and military. The police, anticipating their being magnets of attack by the 

FARC, fortified their stations. The military high command knew that almost 

any station was subject to besiegement and to being overrun if a relief force could 

not be dispatched in time. ‘In time’is a math that correlates the speed and weight 

of the relief column with the amount of time the outpost’s design affords its defenders. In other words, fort architecture can have the same kind of influence on 

the military operational math as the speed of the maneuvering force. A fort and 

a helicopter have something in common.

Fortifications can be permanent or temporary. They can be large, super-modern government or commercial buildings or a knocked-together site 

consisting of barbed wire, an observation post, and a communications center. 

They can also be used in urban networks to disrupt enemy movement, fragment enemy neighborhoods and safe havens, and force the enemy to abandon 

key corners. The key is location, location, location.

A one-story police station in a high-rise neighborhood located at the 

end of a dead-end street might not be well-placed. Fortifications are best situated to dominate their surroundings and allow rapid deployments in multiple 
91 Forts and Walls

368

directions. Obviously, it is not the building itself, but the forces it protects that 

must be enabled by location to disrupt enemy capability to move, marshal, and 

transport. The best fortifications are located and constructed for ease of defense, ease of relief, and ease of launching raids, sweeps, and counterattacks. 

Fortifications are often necessary to support a system of roadblocks or checkpoints, the positioning of which should also support offensive operations. 

Forts can...

• Seal off distinct, reasonably sized sectors;

• Back up patrols with a reserve force;

• Provide or withhold from the residents access to electricity, fuel, water, 

and food, as well as services such as medical care, sewage processing, 

garbage collection, and firefighting;

• Segregate or isolate suspect individuals from the general population;

• Protect shipments and convoys;

• Remind the population of your presence and strength;

• Support networks of roadblocks or checkpoints.

Well-placed fortifications (combined with normal city infrastructure 

such as freeways, tunnels, railroad yards, rivers, factory blocks and walls) can 

seal off areas to create funneling and filtration points. Forts should provide 

control, information and ease of action, and deny these to your enemy. Forts 

can also provide a useful show of force. Also, fixed fortifications can allow 

foreign contingents to participate in a coalition strategy without the political 

exposure of direct offensive action. If your forts do none of these things, you 

might want to close them down or move them.

Insurgent forces must maintain access to their supplies, redoubts, arms 

caches, hospitals, and sanctuary areas, both internally and in neighboring countries. When government fort placements disrupt insurgent LOCs, constraints on 

the insurgents mount, and the probability of insurgent tactical advantage in any 

given encounter diminishes. A government fort system that focuses exclusively 

on friendly force protection or the protection of economic targets is not as dangerous to the insurgent as one designed to create operational advantages, to 

disrupt guerrilla operational and logistics movements, to shape the battlefield, to 

be part of the offense, and to wrong-foot the insurgent. The insurgent line of 

withdrawal to sanctuary is the most significant geography.

Forts have been shortchanged in recent military technological innovation efforts. Insurgencies end in various ways, often including political and 

economic agreements, sometimes due to military actions, and rarely on the 

application of any single technology. Forts, however, can be an effective part 

of either counterinsurgent or insurgent effort.
91 Forts and Walls

369

Walls, like forts, are supposed to slow people down. The wall systems 

you devise will be tested in the context of a movement and space-control game 

with your enemies. Can he out-race your reactions to his attacks or you to his? 

You want to anticipate pursuits after contacts to see how a wall affects or might 

affect the relative culminating points and probable next-contact moments. 

Walls are for keeping people out or in and for separating groups one from another. Wall placement can make a checkpoint plan more effective, can 

separate licit from illicit commerce or help protect valuable infrastructure. 

Walls aren’t high tech, but you need a wall plan, especially in an urban environment, even if you are the insurgent. In San Salvador in the 1980s the 

Communist guerrillas created some almost invisible routes and walls by opening a series of holes through the adjoining walls of adjacent urban homes. The 

routes were protected from visibility by the street-facing walls, allowing the 

movement of combatants parallel to streets without being on the street. Walls 

change the advantages in the Dot Game that is urban warfare. Forts and walls 

begin to be the same thing at certain scales. A gated community, for instance, 

starts to look like a fortress.

Be confident in rebuilding the urban ‘built environment’ to your competitive advantage. The walls you build can be above or below ground, just as 

are routes of approach and escape. Heavy machines can help you control the 

pace of change in the built environment to your liking. You want to build your 

walls and tear down his at the speed that best suits your analysis of the moves. 

Deciding to design forts and walls into a strategy is also a decision to revisit 

the design of heavy machines.

Placement is the first, most critical question for inserting forts and 

walls into a security strategy. Especially rural military outposts must be placed 

respectful of the imperative of the culminating point. It is almost always imprudent to position an outpost where it is at great risk of effective besiegement, 

probably meaning too far away for a relief force to arrive during bad weather. 

Fort and wall locations in urban areas can more often safely incorporate other 

design elements. Placing a police station is typically more subject to concerns 

related to population density, so that crime deterrence and civic assistance missions are suitably within range. They still should be placed within range of 

timely relief.

Your engineers might also revisit control architecture more generally. 

Forts and walls are terrain that you can build to suit your rhythm of defense 

and offense at the scale of time and space that you can best handle. They are 

not the only structures that influence the operational equation, however. The 

location of everything, especially transportation nodes and convocation 
91 Forts and Walls

370

sites, matters. Even small adjustments might help you gain or retain the balance of advantages in risk distances and the probable correlations of force 

during engagements. Proper urban design can also help you gain advantage 

in the balance of anonymities.

If you are with the government, you want to be on the offensive as 

much as possible. If you are not, you are either being beaten or you are allowing your enemy to get away to where he can regain strength and the initiative. 

Please see sections: 28, Takeovers and Sieges; 107, Guerre d'Algérie; 6, 

The Operational Equation; 33, Engineers and Built Environment; 138,

Raids; 31, Holes in the Ground; 69, Measuring Effects of Actions on Enemies; and 89, The Dot Game and Go.



“And he...showed me the holy city Jerusalem...having a wall great 

and high; having twelve gates...on the east were three gates; and on 

the north three gates; and on the south three gates; and on the west 

three gates. And the wall of the city had twelve foundations...and he 

that spoke with me had for a measure a golden reed to measure the 

city, and the gatesthereof, and the wall thereof...and he measured the 

wall thereof, a hundred and forty and four cubits, according to the 

measure of a man, that is, of an angel.”

Book of Revelation, 21, 12-17

---------------

Before I built a wall I'd ask to know

What I was walling in or walling out,

And to whom I was like to give offence.

Something there is that doesn't love a wall,

That wants it down." I could say "Elves" to him,

But it's not elves exactly, and I'd rather

He said it for himself.

from Robert Frost,

Mending Wall

---------------

“It was like I was empty. Well, I'm not empty anymore.”

Davy Crockett in the movie,

The Alamo (1960)339F

340

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371

RIP

Section 92, Graves Registration

You will want to know all the laws, customs, expectations and sensitivities related to the care and disposition of human remains. Be 

scrupulous, disciplined and respectful in preparing and registering all human deaths. Caring only for the mortal remains of your own people can 

become an offense of its own. Cultures vary as to the treatment of mortal 

remains, some requiring purifications and diligence as to burial or cremation. The first and most consequential step is to precisely identify cadavers 

and to safely record that information. Biometric options run from the rudimentary recording of scars and tattoos to the most technical DNA 

evidence. Today there are few unknown dead, only human remains that 

might be temporarily difficult to match to their name, family and home; 

the human corpse has a unique genetic makeup. With some ugly exceptions, there is normally no reason to be anything but exact as to the identity,

storage, and burial of remains.

Informal burial has been a constant, poignant and politically abused 

issue in Colombia. Recently, as the country overcomes organized violence 

and increases the rule-of-law, it faces the question of thousands of nameless remains buried in hundreds of counties. Eventual identification of 

these remains is expected to clarify the fate of tens of thousands of individuals who have been reported missing over the past few decades. One 

locale becoming an emblem of that challenge is in a remote area southeast 

of Bogotá known as the Macarena. A few NGOs (all with a leftist ideological lean) announced the existence of an unmarked site with almost 

2,000 corpses ˗˗ what would have been the most horrendous mass grave 

since the war in the Balkans. The attending accusation was that Colombia’s national army had negligently or criminally disposed of the bodies in 

order to hide extrajudicial killings of one sort or another. The Macarena 

area is all the more significant because it had for years been a stronghold 

of the FARC until after 2002 when the government began to reoccupy the 

region. Extensive multi-agency investigations, however, turned up no 

such common gravesite, and none of the accusers provided evidence of a 

specific place, leading to counter-accusations about the propagandistic nature of the accusation.
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372

A large gravesite does exist in Macarena, however. It is a formal 

cemetery next to a military camp. Some four to six hundred persons were 

buried there in recent years, but individually and on many separate occasions. According to the government, the cemetery is open to the public 

and has kept careful records of each interment. Nevertheless, the government also says that the vast majority of those buried were members of the 

FARC, or other illegal armed groups, killed by the army in combat actions. 

Exhumations and autopsies may have revealed that a handful of the 

corpses correlate to what are called ‘false positives’ in Colombia. That 

medical reference is to a scandal in which at least one military unit murdered innocent young men in order to claim higher numbers of killed 

enemy guerrillas.

A mix of statutes and administrative processes causes the government 

of Colombia to pay indemnities for murders or wrongful deaths for which it is 

responsible. This legal responsibility may, depending on the circumstances, 

even include deaths directly caused by armed enemies of the State -- or at least 

that is an active legal theory. This potential for financial restitution has spurred 

the government to greater care in protecting basic rights, but also acts as an 

incentive to accuse the State and generate evidence against it for the independent purpose of profitable litigation. In the case of the Macarena gravesite, the 

curator claimed to have been offered bribes to say that unregistered burials had 

occurred. The curator also asserted that his family received death threats for 

refusing the bribes.

All in all, the human remains of the armed conflict are a persistent 

evidentiary, jurisprudential, emotional, and therefore political lesion. One 

of the wisest things that Colombian senior military leaders did in the last 

few years was to order scrupulous record-keeping of interments of all 

corpses. Not to say that the orders were everywhere followed, but they at 

least generated a record of accountability and due diligence regarding dignity in death, rule-of-law as to the location of a person’s mortal remains, 

respect to surviving family and estates and the preservation of forensic evidence. The Macarena case, instead of becoming the emblem of 

government human rights abuse, was reduced to its still formidable role as 

emblem of a complex national challenge to correctly honor the deceased, 

heal anguish, and strengthen the rule-of-law.

Also related to the Macarena accusations, the government counterattacked in a sense, releasing news of a whole series of informal grave sites 
92 Graves Registration

373

encountered and recorded over the past several years in territory previously dominated by the FARC or one of the other illegal armed groups. 

Rather than a single huge common grave, some 400 bodies were distributed into about forty grave sites, mostly unmarked. The remains are 

thought to be of guerrillas who were executed for having committed disciplinary infractions. The disposition of these former guerrillas may take 

some time, but as that time passes, more and more friends and relatives of 

deceased guerrillas will be willing to come forward and express their concern or curiosity. Because the government captured FARC computers with 

files containing the names of thousands of guerrilla foot soldiers, it is at 

least possible that many of their fates eventually will be revealed. It is 

doubtful, had the FARC gained political power or even been able to remain 

sovereign in the Macarena, that it would have done anything to reveal the 

whereabouts of the remains of these departed.

The process of resolving missing person cases, especially of rural 

teenagers in the most conflictive counties, is a morbid prologue of the conflict. The war in Colombia is hopefully winding down now and as it does 

more and more disappearance and missing person cases will be closed. 

Since there is no statute of limitations on murder, the process could conceivably generate a continuing flow of homicide cases as well, although not only 

is the evidence deteriorating; many of the responsible leaders are themselves 

dead. Plus, extracting a financial recovery from the defendants is much more 

likely if the defendant is the government and not, say, the FARC.

Prerogative writs are orders from superior courts to other courts or 

government organizations that they do or stop doing something -- and that 

the burden of proof for showing that a writ is unreasonable belongs with 

the government, not with the citizen petitioner. The historical appearance 

of prerogative writs was a significant step in Western liberal governance, 

although most of the writs have counterparts in other jurisprudential cultures. The writ of habeas corpus, which means ‘produce the body’ or 

‘show the body’ is probably the most commonly known. The idea is now 

related to imprisonment ˗˗ that a custodian of a captive person must show 

he has detained someone, why and usually where. This is connected to the 

theory that a person cannot be held ‘incommunicado’, that whatever offense or crime he might have committed, a person has a right to 

communicate his or her existence to the outside world. The idea of clandestine imprisonment is in turn connected to that of clandestine 

disappearance, kidnapping, murder and obstruction of justice. According 
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374

to many thinkers, clandestine confinement is almost the same as burial. 

Secret confinement is often done as part of some anticipated extortion --

e.g., kidnapping. Clandestine imprisonment, informal burial, and kidnapping draw close to one another. The prerogative writs are an historical 

expression of preoccupation about the right to personal identity, to proof 

of life, and to proof of death. The writs have been advanced in the past 

forty years by GIS and DNA technologies.

Today it is harder to escape the forensic unraveling of a crime even

if bodies are buried or discarded. Not only is it harder to get away with 

murder in a world of genetic mapping, it is harder to get away with false 

accusations of human rights abuses, not only because of new technologies, 

but because researchers, journalists and even common citizens are 

equipped and increasingly expected to give plausibly accurate location 

data with their denunciations. Rule-of-law is about people knowing and 

believing in certain rights. It is also about things written down -- like the 

prerogative writs and maps. Human identity carries into death.

Because human identity, dignity, honor, place, and liberty so overlap, it behooves you, if you are involved in an organized violent contest, 

to be respectfully scrupulous regarding human identity, even after death. 

The writ of habeas corpus is one of our great jurisprudential inheritances. 

It was invented with the understanding that human rights have a geographical reference. Where people are is part of that they are, even as to their 

mortal remains.

Please see sections: 106, Massacres; 38, Cultural Study for What?; 110,

Knowledge Gaps; 69, Measuring Effects of Actions on Enemies; 17, Keeping 

Secrets; 90, Prisons and Prisoners; 78, Identity; and 121, Dignity and Honor.



Here Rests in

Honored Glory

An American Soldier

Known But to God

The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier


375

Predictable unpredictables

Section 93, Diseases and Disasters

This section was written in the wake of the 2010 earthquake in 

Haiti, mooting any intended assertion that disasters are practicably predictable. Every once in a while a disaster will be of such a magnitude that ‘no 

one could have predicted it’. Not only was there no way to anticipate the 

level of need that the Haitians would face, there is no rationale and logic 

that can be emotionally adequate in the face such enormity. More people 

died in Port au Prince than in Hiroshima. Nevertheless, so many earthquakes, hurricanes, and volcanic eruptions occur in Central America and 

the Caribbean Basin it seems irresponsible to call them unpredictable. We 

might not know exactly the where and when of an earthquake epicenter, 

but our response preparations can cover quite a range of effects. The effects of floods are more predictable still and we at least know from where 

most of the volcanoes will spew.

Attacks from weapons of mass destruction are more frightening because other humans are working the surprise issue, and diseases seem so 

egalitarian and cruel that, regardless of our knowledge of their method of 

reproduction, we are afraid. Still, locating populations at risk and calculating probable material and environmental costs in the event of potential

occurrences is the work of an increasingly competent community of scientists and humanitarian workers.

Predictable or not, big events can change the direction and character 

of irregular war. A big earthquake in 1976 in Guatemala was followed by a 

long civil war. That may have been mostly coincidence; the timing of the 

internal conflict may have had more to do with the lives of the revolutionary 

leaders and the development of external support in relation to the Cold War 

in the late 1970s. That said, a lot of political history is blamed on the earthquake and on the nature of aid programs and the intentions of foreigners 

during the response and reconstruction stages. New money, coming in on 

top of a people whose normal leadership hierarchies and expectations had 

been disrupted, gave space to new organizational forms, new ideologies, and 

new debt relationships. How such things might play out in Haiti or elsewhere is to be seen, but there is no doubt that big events can be game 

changers providing competitive advantage and opportunity.

In Guatemala, the activist left not only did a good job inserting itself in an organized way within communities affected by the 
93 Diseases and Disasters

376

earthquake, it also did a good job propagandistically, painting the government and allied aid as self-interested and as privileging the already-rich. 

Regarding reconstruction after the earthquake, one anthropologist who had 

long worked in Guatemala, Robert M. Carmack, asserted that “the 

wealthy, who owned the materials, vehicles to transport them, and companies of construction greatly profited from the earthquake. Engineers, 

lawyers, architects, and other ‘professionals’ similarly benefitted from the 

increased need for their services. Many of them raised their prices, an 

added burden partly shouldered by the already broken poor.”340F

341 Be vigilant regarding charlatans of all kinds. They may be religious, ideological, or 

(most commonly) government or NGO bureaucratic. They will be present, 

along with the sincere and well-meaning, to exploit the vulnerable material 

and psychological conditions that reign in the wake of a disaster.

During Colombia’s war, a transcendent natural disaster occurred

November 13, 1985, when Armero, Tolima was wiped out by lahars after

the eruption of the Nevado del Ruiz volcano. More than twenty-three 

thousand Colombians in Armero and other towns perished. Geologists had 

predicted the eruption and some ineffectual warnings were made and hazard maps produced. A less effectual evacuation effort and worse response 

saved almost nobody. A number of factors added to the scope of the disaster, including a simultaneous and severe storm that made communication 

about and perception of the onrushing mudslide difficult. People severely 

criticized the government for its inadequate response before, during, and 

after the event. The sequence of things could not have been worse for the 

government, as it happened one week after the M-19 takeover of the national Supreme Court building, which ended in an inferno. The general 

mood of the country and confidence in the central government was at ebb. 

Colombians will point to the results of the 1986 elections as a near term 

reflection of the mood. Public willingness to reform the national constitution in 1991 was a longer term consequence of the paired disasters, one 

man-made and the other environmental. The Armero lahar brought about 

other tragic consequences. Colombian government welfare institution, for 

instance, tended to hundreds of children separated from their parents, 

many of whom had died. Unfortunately, because of errors of registration

and inadequate biometrics, as many as 250 of the children went, and apparently remain, imperfectly identified.
93 Diseases and Disasters

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Reflecting the geography, it behooves you to have a contingency 

plan for the next natural disaster and the situations (physical and psychological) of any populations it might put at risk. Plan accordingly to quickly 

and effectively ameliorate suffering, set a sustainable course for recovery, 

take political and military advantage of changed conditions as appropriate, 

and to counteract exploitation by your enemies and transgressors. Apply 

to disasters the adage that luck is where preparation and opportunity meet. 

Check to see if the balance of anonymity is radically changed for or against 

you because records have been destroyed, control of human movement 

made impossible, etc. Act quickly if key walls and bridges are compromised, which might give your side a distinct physical advantage or 

disadvantage. Determine if there will be a displacement of communities.

On December 26, 2004, a magnitude 9.0 undersea earthquake off the 

west coast of northern Sumatra, Indonesia, unleashed a tsunami that affected 

more than 14 countries throughout South and Southeast Asia and stretched as 

far as the African coast. Within six hours, the deadly waves traveled more than 

3,000 miles and carved a trail of death and destruction as they arrived on land. 

More than 220,000 people died and millions of others were affected, including 

injured, missing, and displaced. The World Health Organization (WHO) determined that an estimated three to five million people lacked the basic 

necessities for survival during the immediate aftermath of the tragedy. In 

many places the physical environment was badly damaged or destroyed, including entire communities, homes, businesses, tourist areas, and 

infrastructure (roads, bridges, power and telephone systems, and public buildings). For many, their means of livelihood and way of life had been wiped 

out. The island country of Sri Lanka saw 35,000 people killed, 500,000 displaced, and the entire eastern coast affected. In India some 12,000 died and 

600,000 were displaced. The nuclear power station on the east coast of India 

at Kalpakkum, Tamil Nadu, was stuck by the tsunami, but successfully shut 

down; no damage to the reactors or release of radiation was reported. Widespread inundation of the India coastline occurred. The US pledged and provided over one billion US dollars and used US military forces extensively to

help with rescue and recovery. Devastation from the tsunami drove both the 

government of Indonesia and the Islamic separatists on the island of Aceh 

to resume peace talks. The same tsunami had a dissimilar effect in Sri 

Lanka, where the eastern coast was hard hit, weakening the position of the 

Tamil insurgents, who controlled that part of the island.
93 Diseases and Disasters

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Dealing with diseases and natural disasters is its own reward. A competitive advantage lies in doing the best work that resources allow on behalf of

those afflicted and in appropriately condemning those practices of your enemy 

that reduce opportunities for medical progress or humanitarian assistance. 

Governments are usually far more capable than antigovernment challengers to 

work on disease prevention and control. Those governments with rapid logistics capacity should have an advantage in disaster relief, distances considered.

Some things will seem to startle us even if their eventual occurrence is 

fairly predictable. They need not surprise our plans.

Please see sections: 13, Puthukkudiyirippu; 33, Engineers and Built Environment; 14, Legitimacy; 15, NGOs, IOs, and Unions; 105, Genocide

Geography; 110, Knowledge Gaps; 47, Why the County; and 116, Songs 

of Chu.



Markoff: How do you feel tonight, Lieutenant? 

Lt. Martin: I'm dying.

Markoff: I hope not, sir.

Lt. Martin: I'm going to die. I'll be buried under the sand 

and forgotten. When I was a little boy, I thought soldiers 

always died in battles. I didn't know there were so many 

soldiers...and so few battles...and so many fevers.

from the movie,

Beau Geste (1939)341F

342

---------------

Puthukkudiyirippu...see Eyjafjallajökull.

---------------

A town this deep in the crapper's got nowhere to turn but GOD!

Jonas in the movie,

Leap of Faith (1992)342F

343

---------------

“O warrior, unafraid and willing, with your blood you renew the world!”

High Priest in the movie,

Apocalypto (2006)343F

344


379

Excrement meets dignity

Section 94, Poop

A poignant, irritating and significant section in Mike Davis’ Planet of 

Slums is titled “Living in Shit.”344 F

345 Unvarnished is hardly a sufficient descriptor. 

The paragraphs examine a pitiable human urgency and failure of decency on a 

massive scale due to the lack of basic facilities. Davis describes, for instance, how 

whole populations of Muslim urban women cannot evacuate during the daylight 

hours. This tactical, personal matter presents both strategic necessity and opportunity, but not if it goes unmentioned. Excrement, with its frustrating disposal and 

dishonoring presence, has been shown repeatedly to be a factor in generating the 

kind of existential despair that can inspire violent behavior. The geography of fecal 

matter matters.

This subject of excrement is so disagreeable it is usually ineffable, 

but it can’t remain so for the person asked to win a war or enable social 

peace. It is in some places tied too closely to the problem of human honor 

and dignity; to the practicalities of security architecture; and to securing the 

support of the population.

From the history of Medellín, Colombia we learn that during the worst 

of the uncontrolled ‘squatting’, in which marginal neighborhoods rapidly overpopulated, some shanty dwellers couldn’t or wouldn’t take the time to act civilly. 

Ricardo Aricapa writes,

The problems arose as the squatting [no pun intended] increased, the distances to 

the ravine grew; and people forgot their decency. They then preferred to do their 

business inside their shacks and later put their bodily waste in black plastic bags 

˗˗ there was always someone who used transparent bags ˗˗ which they would 

throw wherever, as slyly as possible, like someone pretending not to have thrown 

the rock by hiding the hand. These flying leftovers almost always landed on the 

roofs of other homes.34 5F

346 [my translation from the Spanish]

To this unpleasantness is reasonably ascribed a portion of the city’s gang formation and no small number of machete events.

The Johnson County, Kansas Rural Comprehensive Plan pays considerable attention to issues such as density versus sprawl, aesthetic and lifestyle 

preservation, environmental stewardship and so forth. Chapter Eight, however, 

wherein the hydrological engineers opine, reveals something at the heart of what 

is urban ˗˗ what to do with wastewater. The problem of city annexation, questions of density, economic development, environmental carrying capacity and 

ecological protection depend in many places on the flow of water and the flow 
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380

of human waste. This is true in Johnson County, one of the richest, flattest American counties. It is more so in most of the rest of the world. The processes of 

city annexation, at times contentious and at other times collaborative, are built 

around a well-established mix of rights and duties ˗˗ the city’s right to plan and 

tax matched against a duty to provide services. Among the most coveted and 

valuable services is sewage removal and processing. It turns out the stuff indeed 

flows downhill, and so it is that the sewage engineers have more to say about the 

efficient shape and growth of a city than other planners, who might prefer to 

concentrate on higher-order, genteel challenges such as cultural heritage. Still, 

the poop has to make its way to places where it can be processed or dispatched. 

That problem solved, engineers can tackle roadbed suitability, potable water provision, or power lines, but the real challenge is sewage. To be urban is easy; to 

be a functioning city takes a sewer.

Poop is nasty. Doctors associate it with diseases that can have an unpredictable and never pleasant impact on the course of any kind of warfare. 

Waterborne illnesses, such as cholera, are spread through sick people’s poop that 

contaminates the water supply. You might want to have a plan for poop. Find 

someone who can explain to you in detail the cultural and engineering condition 

of human waste in the battlespace of concern to you. You might have a clean, 

clear opportunity to take positive action. This argument about the management 

of excrement applies also, with different variables as to cultural sensibilities and 

physical mass, for other forms of human waste ˗˗ trash, garbage, grey water ˗˗

these are all consequential, if execrable, substances.

Please see sections: 121, Dignity and Honor; 79, Suicide; 34, Urban or Rural; 

89, The Dot Game and Go; 33, Engineers and Built Environment; 19, Mercatus; 25, Why Humans Don’t Fight; and 80, Why You Should Like Geography.



“Our errors are surely not such awfully solemn things. In a world 

where we are so certain to incur them in spite of all our caution, a 

certain lightness of heart seems healthier than this excessive nervousness on their behalf.”346 F

347

William James

---------------

“To kill a human being is, after all, the least injury you can do to him.”347 F

348

Henry James


381

孟母三迁

Section 95, Childhood

We like to think all peoples prize their young and place them in a 

special, separate category of protection. Legal concepts like statutory rape, 

custody, guardianship, or juvenile prosecution all draw off social norms 

that set the developing human being apart from the fully formed adult. 

Most societies recognize that the child is not yet sufficiently developed 

emotionally, physically or mentally to make valid independent decisions. 

We want the human child to have the opportunity to grow up ˗˗ then do 

stupid things. This separation of status ˗˗ child or adult ˗˗ is significant to 

the shape and conduct of armed conflict.

Childhood becomes an issue in irregular war in a variety of ways. 

The most obvious is in the recruitment of the under-aged for soldiering. 

While there is a general international standard of eighteen years for military service in more formalized armies, many national militaries allow for 

voluntary service by seventeen-year-olds, and there are many stories of 

successful military service of younger soldiers who lied about their ages. 

In guerrilla armies, the foot soldiers are often younger. Use of pre-teen 

children as lookouts, couriers and servants is common, as is sexual enslavement of teenage girls. International slave trading is becoming 

ubiquitous or at least has become more visible. In other theaters, children 

are paid to deliver or even plant explosive devices or pieces of them. Simple abandonment of children is also normal in the context of hostilities and 

forced displacements.

Theories asserting a causal relationship between distressed childhoods and internal armed conflict can be tenuous or confused, however. 

After all, it seems the leaders of insurgencies, criminal empires and revolutions are as often the scions of the rich as they are the sons of poverty. 

Still, the criminal gang or rebel army sometimes consciously improves the 

condition of an abandoned child, giving identity, respect and material opportunity. It is hard to say with any exactitude what physical or 

psychological malnourishment is produced by a sociopathic parent as compared to a noble rebel. Regardless, it takes no leap of faith to believe that 

the neglect of children leads to bad results for any society. Societies suffering internal conflict always seem to experience the exacerbating 

participation, at one level or another, of abused or neglected children, and 

of adults whose childhoods were less than ideal. 
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Children can in fact make good soldiers. A fourteen-year-old can 

be a ruthless, obedient, enthusiastic, courageous fighter. Kids are easier 

targets for recruitment arguments and lies. In sum, it makes sense for an 

armed group to recruit children when older youths are resistant.

Programs, laws, and campaigns that address the fate of marginalized children are more than a good idea. They might not only shrink the 

universe of potential recruits for your enemy, they increase human capital 

capable of finding peaceful pursuits and solutions.

Organized crime often leads to the organization of youth groups 

and the outsourcing to such groups of specific criminal activities. The gobetweens or intermediaries between children’s gangs and adult organizations should be an early target of investigation. Separation of the two 

entities is a step toward possible recovery of the younger participants.

International sex tourism is often linked to child abandonment, 

abuse and use in other organized criminal behavior. Governments can profile and monitor sex tourism as a method for identifying child abuse and 

for tracing that abuse to other criminal organizations.

An appendix to the US Army’s field 2006 manual Counterinsurgency

has a warning to “keep the children at arm’s length.”3 48F

349 Thankfully, that bit of 

shortsightedness was left out of the 2014 replacement. It may be necessaryto teach 

rules of engagement for how soldiers are to interact with the children they meet. 

Admittedly, care must be taken that those interactions don’t individually or in the 

aggregate endanger either the soldiers or the children. Let’sreject the attitude presented by that 2006 manual, however. It should have addressed the larger question 

of where children should be, who should be taking care of them, what they are 

being taught, what their aspirations become, etc. It would be preferable to promote

a structure of life that can handle specific rules of engagement with children. If a 

dull point of military instruction must be given to harden one’s heart to them, then 

there should be another set of instructions dealing with the reasons why that first

unfortunate instruction was necessary -- so as to make it as unnecessary as it is 

unattractive. It takes five years for a twelve-year-old to become a seventeen-yearold. If we are going to let a war go on for six years, then how we treat a ten-year 

old might be how we are treating a soon-to-be combatant. Will our lack of strategy 

cause our 19-year-old corporal to face the same person, armed, when the corporal 

becomes a 24-year-old sergeant?

Childhood deserves direct, formal consideration by any who presume to make plans and decisions in the context of an irregular war. 
95 Childhood

383

Assertions abound as to the legitimacy of governments, insurgents and social movements. In this one area, however, we have a sort of litmus test. 

If an organization willfully abuses children, that organization should not 

be considered legitimate. If you find that your organization is not explicitly, actively considering children who are vulnerable to conditions 

imposed by an armed struggle, you have an opportunity. The actions you 

take to address the fate of children can change the nature of your physical 

lines of communication and those of your enemy. They can also build 

actual, substantive legitimacy, that is, rectitude.

Please see sections: 14, Legitimacy; 124, Slavery and Underclass; 125,

Human Rights; 78, Identity; 70, Measuring Effects of Actions on Structure; 90, Prisons and Prisoners; 15, NGOs, IOs and Unions; and 77, Sex.



“Which brings me to my second point, kids:

Don't do crack.”

Lawrence Taylor in the movie,

The Waterboy (1998)349F

350

---------------

“Each new generation born is in effect

an invasion of civilization by little barbarians,

who must be civilized before it is too late.”

Thomas Sowell (attributed)

---------------

“Great is the man who has not lost his childlike heart.”

Mencius (attributed)

---------------

“May you grow to be proud, dignified and true

And do unto others as you’d have done to you”350 F

351

Bob Dylan (or Rod Stewart?) from 

the song, Forever Young


384

Legitimacy meets impunity meets amnesty

Section 96, Combatant Status

We can address some of the more consequential characterizations 

of anti-State actors by using the lens of impunity. Who can confer impunity, and where might that person go to enjoy it? Let’s say a guy who is 

not a US citizen sets off a bomb in the United States, but gets caught. If 

he then were to escape, where would he go? Or rather, will authorities 

where he goes extradite him back to the United States or will they absolve 

and maybe protect or even honor him? If the person were designated a 

combatant, he might enjoy some exception from an extradition treaty and 

maybe therefore impunity for his actions. A foreign country might protect 

him from the processes of justice in the United States, and do so while 

remaining within the rules of the club of countries. Like other things, the 

concept of impunity has a relationship to geography. Generally, distance 

and time from the place of the action lessen the power of the State and 

increase the possibility of impunity.

Gaining ‘belligerent status’ could be a useful achievement to move 

an insurgent force toward becoming more than an insurgent force. As influential as words like belligerent and combatant can be, they beg a 

warning about cognates in foreign languages: These terms and others that 

surround them are translated with fair consistency within the formal regime of international law pertaining to armed conflict. There is less 

consistency among interpretations inside various countries’ legal systems 

and still less consistency among public arguments, commentaries, and 

their translations.

What it means that an individual prisoner be classified as a combatant or as an unlawful combatant; or that an armed political movement 

gain belligerent status, are not questions to address haphazardly. Planners 

and their leaders should build an early, shared understanding of the pros 

and cons of attaching these legalistically-charged terms to specific sets of 

individuals, and should not allow such understanding only to stay within 

legal staffs. Try to establish theoretic coordination and agreement among 

those in charge of your operations, legal analysis, and propaganda (among 

lawyers, press secretaries, ambassadors, and commanders). The bottom 

line has to be tied to the State’s monopoly on the conference of impunity.
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385

The documents and concepts of international humanitarian law 

generally express aspirations for humane behavior and treatment, especially as to defenseless humans, the natural environment and cultural 

patrimony. At its best, humanitarian law can be used to protect people by 

overcoming or sidestepping arguments about the categorization of individual participants or entities. In practice, however, international law can be 

as much political argument as it is juridical statute and process. It is itself 

subject to use as leverage in irregular conflicts -- lawfare. 

Take an approach that neither dismisses the importance of legalisms nor relegates the discussion to lawyers. Frame the semantics 

according to their effect on your gaining or losing the control that your 

organization seeks over the granting of impunity. Especially to be considered in this regard is the effect on likely lines of retreat to sanctuary, yours 

and his. If, for instance, a majority of members within the international 

club of countries were to succumb to the late Hugo Chávez’ argument that 

the FARC be considered a belligerent, the lines of escape for FARC members to sanctuaries within Venezuela would be strengthened.

Please see sections: 90, Prisons and Prisoners; 77, Sex; 43, Sam Spade’s 

Whereabouts; 126, Particularization of Power; 103, Amnesty and Restitution; 

20, Rule-of-law; 133, Snipers and Assassins; and 111, Knowledge Cultures.



Barnsby: Sorry about Marko. 

Lescovar: Thank you. It's a risk we all take. He was a brave man 

and a good friend. Then he got careless. 

Mallory: You think that big sergeant spotted him as a partisan? 

Barnsby: I can't buy that. The sergeant wasn't that bright. He saluted you [Lescovar] - you're wearing a corporal's uniform. That 

doesn't rate a salute in the German army. 

Mallory: Not in anybody's army. Why do you think he saluted you, 

Lescovar? 

Lescovar: Perhaps he recognized my natural superiority. 

from the movie,

Force 10 from Navarone (1978)351F

352

--------------

Tinker, Tailor; Soldier, Sailor; Rich Man, Poor Man; Beggar Man, Thief

skip-rope rhyme and codename source


386

When does revolution begin?

Section 97, Oviedo

In early October, 1934, the city of Oviedo, (in the Principality of 

Asturias, Spain) suffered a violent leftist revolutionary attack. Military 

and police garrisons loyal to the Spanish republic resisted the uprising, 

other government troops were sent to relieve the besieged and in two 

weeks the government had restored order. More than seven hundred buildings in a city of about 100,000 inhabitants had been gutted or leveled, 

almost entirely by the insurgents. The revolutionaries willfully killed a 

number of unarmed civilians, including clerics, some of whom became the 

first Roman Catholic martyrs of the 20th century as recognized by the Vatican. Government forces also committed un-justifiable killings. Both 

sides acted with more discipline and charity than was painted by the propaganda that followed, however. The government threw almost 30,000 

rebel leaders and followers in jail. Oddly, because the government left so 

many insurgents in jail without timely disposition of their cases, their 

plight became a highly influential issue in the elections that were called 

for 1936. Section 98, Jorge Verstrynge and Pio Moa, mentions a debate 

about the start-date of the Spanish Civil War. This section adopts the view 

that it started that first week of October, 1934 with the armed uprising in 

Asturias and complementary events in the rest of Spain.

Remembrance of the Spanish Civil War is a matter of academic faith 

that continues to fuel emotional and political contentiousness.352 F

353 In many 

Spanish hearts the war did not end; its causes and debts have never been reconciled. Some Spaniards will say that today’s youngest generation of voters 

is no longer knowledgeable or cares about the events of the 1930s, but the 

shadow of those events is a long one and it is impossible to escape the war’s 

influence on political philosophy and organization. The flags of political parties in Spain are designed, in one way or another, in relation to the civil war. 

Both leftists and rightists tend to record, if not remember, Spain of the 1930s 

in romanticized, vituperative, and moralizing political tones. In the Englishspeaking countries, meanwhile, that war is all but unknown and of no emotional stature, except among a few Europe-historians and the ideologicallyinclined far left, for whom it remains an icon. The ideological left (marxists, 

post-structuralists, some socialists) prefers a selection of facts about the events 

of the 1930s that forms a sort of liturgy and leftist imaginary. That liturgy, 

chanted not just by the Spanish left, but worldwide, intones the Spanish Civil 
97 Oviedo

387

War as a robbery of democracy by fascists. (Spanish fascism, similar to communism but less internationalist, was a form of class-based State socialism. Its 

most articulate voice was that of José Antonio Primo de Rivera, killed by the 

communist ‘republicans’ in 1936.)

Some basic facts: Nobody knows exactly how many Spaniards 

died in the war, but estimates start in the hundreds of thousands; the contending armies reached perhaps a million armed participants each; 

Francisco Franco came out asleader of the winning side in 1939 and stayed 

in power in Spain until his death in 1975.

Why did Spanish leftists decide to take violent revolutionary action 

in October, 1934? The timing related back to a victory by rightist and 

center-right parties in the general elections held in November of 1933. 

Further back still, in June, 1931, Spain had held its first constitutional elections. In those first elections, Largo Caballero’s PSOE, Partido Socialista 

Obrero Español (Spanish Workers Socialist Party), won the largest number of parliamentary seats (115 of 272). There were over thirty political 

parties at the time, but while it was necessary to make alliances in order to 

form a government, the numbers greatly favored a leftist direction away 

from the monarchy and dictatorship of the past. The Spanish Second Republic was under way (the first experiment in republican democracy was 

a disastrous mess in 1873-1874). The 1931 elections were a huge victory

for republicans and socialists, and a defeat for monarchists and religious 

conservatives. In that environment, Caballero was offered a cabinet post 

as Minister of Labor and Social Services, an offer he accepted. During the 

ensuing two years, the government implemented a number of policies that 

promised to change Spanish life greatly. One aspect unpopular with many 

Spaniards (perhaps more than half and including the sitting President) was 

that of turning a blind eye to physical attacks against the Roman Catholic 

Church. These were perpetrated by leftist radicals and anarchists. No 

doubt the Church was a bastion of the old system and a direct participant 

in traditional governance, but the burning of churches, basilicas, and Catholic icons did not set well in a still deeply religious land. 

In anticipation of the elections in November of 1933 and in light of 

considerable social unrest, Caballero resigned his ministerial post. He had 

probably been an active fomenter of the growing social unrest. During 

most of 1933 and although he was a cabinet member, Caballero’s PSOE 

organized a series of strikes, including a general strike in Zaragoza that 
97 Oviedo

388

lasted over a month, as well as a widespread agricultural strike. Then, in 

the November elections of that year, the PSOE only won 58 seats. This 

time parties tending toward the ideological right achieved a sweeping victory. The political map had completely changed colors. Now, instead of

left and center-left, the parliament was right and center-right. Ironically, 

one of the major democratic reforms of the new republic had been 

women’s suffrage. The numbers suggest they voted heavily for social 

peace and for the church.

In the formation of governments, it was generally expected that the 

parties would be represented in accordance with the number of parliamentary seats they had won in the most recent election. In other words, the 

president would choose cabinet members from the various parties in some 

ratio appropriate to the level of representation that the parties had demonstrated in the elections. The number of cabinet members (ministerial 

posts) that a party might fill was a rough measure of the practical political 

power gained, given that the ministers had broad authority to act within 

their portfolios. The PRR, Partido Republicano Radical (Radical Republican Party), had been the winner of the second greatest number of seats in 

both the 1931 and 1933 elections. In a sense, the PRR was a more centrist 

party, although definitely republican and generally anti-clerical.

To form the first three governments following the 1933 election, 

the PRR was offered the greatest number of cabinet seats. The right-leaning CEDA, Confederación de Derechas Autonomas (Confederation of the 

Autonomous Right) was offered no ministerial portfolios in the first two 

governments formed, even though it had won the highest number of seats 

(115) in the elections. Later in the year, however, on 4 October, the president formed a government that included three CEDA ministers, in Labor 

and Social Services, Justice, and Agriculture. It looked to the PSOE that 

what it considered social progress was about to be undone and, therefore,

the continued utility of the electoral process was questionable. Caballero

and other leftist leaders apparently felt that the value of the electoral process had run its course and that the left would not again be able, or perhaps 

allowed, to re-take the reins of government. To the PSOE and other parties 

of the Spanish left, the historical moment for implementing violent revolution was at hand.

The revolutionary planning, however, was incomplete at best. The 

Socialists’ estimates of relative physical power at any place and time were 
97 Oviedo

389

overly optimistic, their alliances shaky and resources inadequate. Caballero 

was not a consolidating charismatic figure (no Hitler or Mussolini) and had 

to share power and influence across a range of personalities. Spain had little 

experience with parliamentary democracy or socialist revolutions; the many 

political parties were bound to the foibles of their leaders and to tenuous 

sources of financial support. Opinions on all sides indicate Caballero was a 

scrupulously incorruptible, personally disciplined, and nationalistic man. 

His fortune at the time was the failure of his opponents to wholly understand 

that his was the mens rea behind a lot of violent subversive activity. His 

misfortune was being a poor military strategist. By mid-November, he 

found himself in jail for treason.

There cannot be any real-world histories more convoluted and 

multi-faceted than the Spanish Civil War. No single book could possibly 

do the drama justice. Militarily, however, the actions in Asturias in 1934 

are relatively simple to understand. Asturias presented a most favorable 

human and physical geography for a leftist armed revolution. On Spain’s 

northern coast, its millennial ports of Avilés and Gijón connect the Iberian 

Peninsula to the ports of northern Europe. Inland, the Cantabrian Mountains are home to coal mines and coal miners. For years, communists, 

socialists and anarchists had organized coal miners, stevedores and factory 

workers. Oviedo, in the center, is the principality’s capital. By 1934 it 

and the surrounding area were also home to several weapons and munitions factories and to a few major banks. Had the armed uprising enjoyed 

better cooperation among the leftist parties, been led by more militarily 

capable leaders, or witnessed any appreciable success elsewhere in Spain, 

Asturias might have proven a formidable refuge and springboard for further revolutionary action.

From Madrid, the Socialist leaders sent orders via Oviedo to start 

the uprising in Asturias. They also sent the basic military plan, which was 

for the local committees, using the union locals, to take over several key 

towns in the mining areas, and then march on Oviedo. The thought was to 

secure the center of political and economic power. Radical leaders initiated military actions in mining areas of the high grounds south of Oviedo. 

Mieres was the first significant town controlled by the revolutionaries. 

From there, as well as from near Trubia to the southwest (where there was 

a munitions factory) and La Felguera to the southeast, revolutionary columns marched successfully to Oviedo against some government 
97 Oviedo

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resistance. The Minister of Defense in Madrid, counseled in part by General Francisco Franco, sent a column of regular troops commanded by 

General Bosch-Balmes north from Leon toward Oviedo, but this approach 

was ably blocked by revolutionary militias. The main government column, led by General López de Ochoa, approached from Galicia in the west, 

moving north to Avilés and then south toward Oviedo. Another column 

was sent from the east, passing the port of Gijón and then moving south to 

the La Felguera region east of Oviedo. Finally, a column that included a 

contingent of legionnaires was sent by sea from African posts, disembarking at El Musel just west of Gijón then marched south to Oviedo.

Anarcho-syndicalists who controlled much of Asturian port and 

coastal factory labor were slow to contribute to the uprising and proved 

irresolute. Had they planned and resisted the movement of government 

troops into and through the northern ports, the outcome might have been 

significantly different. For their part, the communists and socialists were 

slow to provision the anarchist elements with weaponry and munitions. 

Bitter dissention among these revolutionary groups had been bandaged 

over by agreements together called the Workers’ Alliance, but remaining 

distrust contributed to failure in Asturias. In total, revolutionary leaders 

probably motivated around fifty thousand people to participate directly in 

the uprising. The government suppressed the rebellion with a total of 

about eighteen thousand soldiers and constabulary. The government 

troops had to travel far greater distances than the revolutionaries to arrive 

at the points of contact, but the insurgents were only able to stop one of 

the government columns -- in the mountainous terrain with which the 

miner militias were most familiar.

The leftist leaders did not respect the northern approaches to Oviedo

and did not close that backdoor. In retrospect, they did not think in terms of 

operational art or classic military strategy. They did not plan in accordance 

with the central significance of lines of communication. They were in effect 

hoping to control an area that could resist long enough that larger political 

truths might allow local gains to stabilize; but hope is not strategy. What 

they had done was take a centrally-located city, becoming themselves surrounded, and this only after ruining the electrical power and fresh water 

supply. By the short time it had taken to dominate most of Oviedo, the uprisings in the rest of Spain were already cold dead. There could be no 

effective international support in such a situation as that which the Workers’
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Alliance had created, so the possible routes of escape for its leadership 

closed fast. The revolutionaries had quickly captured enough weapons with 

which they might have armed all of their supporters, but the military moved 

immediately. The most effective aspect of the government response to the 

revolution was its diligence.

General López, in charge of the overall operation to repress the uprising, was a decided republican, an atheist, and not a rightist. There is no 

evidence that he acted other than honorably in his treatment of the defenseless, yet, in an injustice normal to the civil war, he was assassinated in 

1936, having gained a reputation as the ‘Executioner of Asturias’. Francisco Franco, who later led the rightist Nationalists in the later phase of the 

Civil War, did not arrive in Oviedo until after the uprising had been suppressed. Almost no falangistas (‘phalangists’ -- far right or fascistic 

elements) participated in the repression of the uprising.

Several individuals were executed for treason following the October events, but hardly any of the leaders. In fact, many of the leaders were 

then able to commune in jail. In a sense, they had made it to the sanctuary 

they needed ˗˗ fed, housed and clothed by the government where they 

could review failure and better plan the next attempt. Largo Caballero was 

let go after a few months. The left propagandized widely on the issue of 

releasing the rebel prisoners, and successfully accused the government of 

heavy handedness and cruelty during the suppression of the Asturias revolt. As the February, 1936 elections approached, the right and center 

right formed a loose political alliance, while the PSOE and parties furthest 

to the left formed the more successful Popular Front. Although the division of votes was close, the newly formed government greatly disfavored 

the right. The new president, Manuel Azaña, put only leftists in the government. He quickly released all 30,000 leftist prisoners and restored the 

positions of those who had led the uprising of 1934. (Although he opposed 

union cooperation with the Republican government, Largo Caballero 

would become Prime Minister and Minister of Defense in September, 

1936.) The PSOE instigated ‘victory parades’ that often turned into provocative street demonstrations. President Azaña reposted General Franco 

to virtual exile in Tenerife, a move that would turn out to be one of Azaña’s

gravest mistakes. Church properties were newly under attack and the 

Spanish right, scared and now seeing no possibility of another electoral 

opportunity, would initiate the next armed uprising, in July. It would be 
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against the Republic incidentally, while decidedly against the Socialist, 

Communist and Anarchist left. It would be much better led militarily than 

the revolutionary attempt of 1934.

The themes illuminated by just the 1934 beginning phase of the 

Spanish Civil War are countless. They include as a minimum the relationship between urban and rural, the timeless importance of leadership and 

lines of retreat, money, foreign support, massacres, elections, religion and 

the prerogatives of clergy, prisons, amnesty, strategic deception, the artificial creation of history, vanguards as clergy, weapons, and the value of 

sea power. The Spanish Civil War is often seen as a precursor of WWII, 

rather than as an independent but related phenomenon. It is more valuable 

as a font of lessons about irregular war. The 1934 Asturias Revolution 

was the beginning of the Spanish Civil War. Although it involved some 

foreign ideological presence, especially from the Soviet Union, it was relatively free of foreign meddling. Still, Europe was lurching toward 

Armageddon. Spain’s internal struggle was influenced by the ideological 

battle among liberalism, fascism and communism, the latter two but flagholders for similar propositions.

The answer to the question about when the war began bears on the 

assignment of blame, and to competing claims regarding the word ‘democratic’. The ideological left maintains the argument that the Spanish 

Republic was forced to resort to violence only after the repeated violent 

provocations of the radical right ˗˗ that fascists robbed the people of their 

democracy. The geography and timing of acts of violence, and the names of 

the perpetrators, make the left’s assertion of innocence and self-defense unsupportable. Without siding ideologically with the Spanish monarchy or the 

power of the Roman Catholic Church, we can say confidently that the mens 

rea causing the Spanish Civil War resided in the minds of socialists, communists and anarchists. They believed power grew out the barrels of guns 

and that revolution had to be effected by force. Their use of republican, 

parliamentary electoral processes was convenient and insincere. Spanish 

leftists came to use República and Revolución interchangeably, and to assign 

along with them a kind of divine bolshevist right to rule, a right they called 

democratic. Today those sympathetic with the left see a Honduran like Mel 

Zelaya as a minor Largo Caballero who would only use violence in defense 

of democracy. A fascist tyranny like that in Syria or Iran, meanwhile, gets

an ideological pass because what matters is not left versus right, but rather
97 Oviedo

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upholding a value system of power forged in the crucible of violent struggle 

to be concentrated in the most ruthlessly resolute individuals.

Please see sections: 34, Urban or Rural; 1, Impunity; 137, Foreign Support 

and Foreign Perspective; 118, Democracy; 90, Prisons and Prisoners; 52, 

Sovereignty; 15, NGOs, IOs, and Unions; and 42, Brigands.



“The Falange regards man as a combination of a body and a soul; 

that is, as capable of an eternal destiny and as the bearer of eternal 

values. Thus the maximum respect is paid to human dignity, to 

man’s integrity and his freedom. But that profound freedom entitles 

nobody to undermine the foundations of public social life....;... a 

nation is a unity of destiny in the world order, it is a plane to which 

a people has risen when it fulfils a universal mission in history.” 353F

354

Don José Antonio Primo de Rivera 

y Sáenz de Heredia, 1st Duke of 

Primo de Rivera, 3rd Marquis of 

Estella, Grandee of Spain

--------------

“The Nazi is ready to dally with the Communist.”35 4F

355

G. K. Chesterton

-------------

“If he were not of great ability he would have died last night. It 

seems to me you do not understand politics, Inglés, nor guerrilla 

warfare. In politics and this other the first thing is to continue 

to exist. Look how he continued to exist last night.”

Ernest Hemingway, 

For Whom the Bell Tolls35 5F

356

-------------

“The October Revolution, the historic responsibility for which 

corresponds totally to the leftists, continued as an open wound 

to Spanish social harmony up until the civil war, which was a 

direct consequence and, unfortunately, irreversible.”356F

357

Ricardo de la Cierva

Historia de España para niños


97 Oviedo

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-- The Revolution of ’34 in Asturias --

Note that the Spanish Army was fighting for the Republic.357 F

358
395

Is authenticity at odds with honesty?

Section 98,

Jorge Verstrynge and Pio Moa

Jorge Verstrynge. For about a decade until the late 1980s, Jorge Verstrynge 

was an active member of the conservative Alianza Popular political party of 

Spain, but, after leaving the party, his writing veered almost 180 degrees. He 

became an anti-globalist marxist professor at the Compultense University in 

Madrid. He is the author, among other works, of La Guerra Periférica y el 

Islam Revolucionario: Orígenes, reglas y ética de la guerra asimétrica. (2005)

(Roughly translated: ‘War in the Periphery and Revolutionary Islam: origins, 

rules, and ethics of asymmetric warfare’.). In La Guerra Periférica, Professor 

Verstrynge weaves together total war, unrestricted war, insurgent war, every 

kind of war. His explanations are fluid and measured. He treats Mao well, 

Che roughly, and discusses the Algerian War with care, but something more 

significant arises from the book’s admiration of Islamist radicalism.

Asymmetry is a word some Americans hoist to lament the fact that 

weaker countries sometimes win, because the United States is easy to surprise or because nobody will stand up straight and fight Midway rules 

(aircraft carrier-a-aircraft carrier). Professor Verstrynge effectively coopted the term and nudged ‘asymmetric warfare’ toward meaning ‘The

Asymmetric War’. In the course of Professor Verstrynge’s presentation in 

La Guerra Periférica, asymmetric warfare ceases to be merely a taxonomic category of warfare in which ostensibly weaker forces fight against 

ostensibly stronger ones. Instead, while maintaining a format of academic 

indifference, Professor Verstrynge’s definition of asymmetric warfare becomes fighting against the United States, its interests and its allies.

Resistance would at times be a more appropriate term than fighting, however, and broader concepts such as globalization, the North, the West, 

neoliberalism, capitalism, etc., could be substituted for United States in a 

given instance. Hence, what might have been a workmanlike explanation 

of ‘postmodern’ warfare escapes revolutionary disdain for those who allow themselves naïvité or edgelessness. It escapes being a book for the 

mere trade unionist. Instead of leaving ‘asymmetric’ as only a category of 

conflict to be compared with other types, or filled-out by other terms, Professor Verstrynge clothes it as a stage in the evolution of conflict, 
98 Jorge Verstrynge and Pio Moa

396

mimicking the idea of capitalism being an evolutionary step toward communism. For him, the asymmetric war is not just total or unrestricted war, 

it is tantamount to the ‘totalitarianization’ of war.

Professor Verstrynge’s work hit a perfect note for Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez. Hugo Chávez set his chips down as being antiAmerican, perhaps needing anti-Americanism as part of the signage on his 

jacket. Lieutenant Colonel Chávez was apparently not much good at military art. He was, after all, the militarily least effective leader among the 

plotters in their failed 1998 coup attempt. Nevertheless (or maybe fittingly), Chávez made La Guerra Periférica required reading for his 

military officers. For President Chávez, The Asymmetric War justified

much, and admiring it attracted appropriate company. Professor Verstrynge praised the resolve shown by Islamic fundamentalists. His 

admiration of existential power was not so much for those who commit 

suicide-murder, but for a charismatic, strategically competent leadership 

that could tie ruthlessness to a project of resistance. The radical Islamists 

could convince and send people to commit suicide-murder on behalf of a 

grand concept which the leaders framed. Professor Verstrynge and Hugo 

Chávez, in turn, admired the radicals as ruthless in their willingness to expend human life, and as both clever and resolute in their defiance of the 

great Satan, America.

Aside from philosophically framing opposition to the United States

for the likes of Chávez, Professor Verstrynge’s book offers another little 

problem for global security. It advises countries ‘in resistance’ to obtain 

nuclear weapons. It is pro-proliferation and in no uncertain terms. ‘Asymmetric’ includes nuclear deterrence in this formulation.

Let us be clear: true sovereignty now means possessing ‘the bomb’. 

Furthermore, today, those who can, will, in search of maximum efficiency, combine nuclear, conventional, and asymmetric warfare 

to achieve maximum effectiveness. No potentiality is ruled out, in 

the manner that today the fighters are volunteers and conscripts, 

professionals and mobilized forces, unpaid soldiers and condottieri, 

reluctant heroes and kamikazes, old men of the Volkssturm or 

members of passive defense, and child soldiers, i.e., everyone and 

everybody... Nothing is disdained in the war...35 8F

359

Nevertheless, and following Chairman Mao on this point, Professor Verstrynge opines that the war will ultimately be won by regular forces.
98 Jorge Verstrynge and Pio Moa

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Pio Moa. Pio Moa is another Spaniard, maybe the un-Verstrynge; or conversely, Verstrynge the un-Moa. During his youth, Mr. Moa was active as 

a militant for GRAPO, a maoist armed wing of the Spanish Communist 

Party. (Moa the maoist!) President Franco, good at counter-insurgency, 

caught young Pio and threw him in jail. Not idle in captivity, he used the 

quiet time to educate himself and study history. His learning journey 

steered him away from the radical left, and to a thus transformed perspective diametrically opposite that of Professor Verstrynge. Mr. Moa 

published several works around the same time that Verstrynge’s La 

Guerra Periférica was published, including 1934: Comienza La Guerra 

Civil Española (1934: The Spanish Civil War Begins). It is really a popularization and summary of several more involved investigations Mr. Moa 

did of the Spanish Civil War. The title itself was an instant provocation 

because establishment academia in Spain, Europe and beyond holds the 

Spanish Civil War to have begun in 1936. The difference in starting dates 

reflects a differential selection of uncomfortable historic facts.

As Mr. Moa points out, the men and women who became the leaders of the Spanish Republicans (the ‘left’ during the war from 1936 on) 

were the self-same violent subversives and communists who had tried to 

take power by violence in 1934. Mr. Moa’s statement is clear and his factual assertions well documented. The radical armed leftists who failed in 

1934 to take power by way of arms subsequently succeeded through organization, luck, and the democratic electoral process, but they never had 

any intention of preserving a system that might put their party out of power

again, peacefully or otherwise. Just as Mr. Moa doesn’t see anything unusual about communists calling themselves republicans, he also doesn’t 

equivocate in pointing out that how the communists took power in Spain 

is relatively insignificant in the face of the fact that they planned to quickly 

dismantle the system that elected them.

In his youth, Pio Moa was a genuine violent revolutionary. He effected propaganda of the deed. His insurgent activity and consequent jail 

time lends Mr. Moa a street credibility and authenticity that Professor Verstrynge lacks, thus fixing for us a neat question: Is Verstrynge’s work 

edged and authentic because it admires the untethered ethic of political 

resistance, and Moa’s work the dull servitude of a man beaten down? --

Or: Is Vertrynge’s the work of second-hand experience and jilted ego, 

while Moa’s a reflection of earned experience, unpressured scholarship, 
98 Jorge Verstrynge and Pio Moa

398

and preference for the truth? Asking from a safe distance, it appears to me 

that Mr. Moa tends toward confident, informed argument, and Professor 

Verstrynge toward romanticized argumentation. Whatever, this pair of 

personalities and experiences frames for us a major portion of today’s ideological struggle, as well as the relationship of that struggle to the 

prosecution of irregular conflicts influenced by it. It can be said that the 

Spanish Civil War has been and is still played out daily in Latin America. 

In Honduras, for instance, the rightist-dominated courts and legislature 

threw out leftist President Zelaya. He had started to smell to them like the 

Spanish Republicans of 1936 -- elected, but planning to dismember the

electoral democratic framework entirely in order to keep the left in power.

Please see sections: 23, Mens Rea; 90, Prisons and Prisoners; 128, Global Insurgency and Global Trespass; 103, Amnesty and Restitution; 14, Legitimacy; 81, 

What a Clergy Wants; 116, Songs of Chu; and 24, Ruthlessness and Resolve.



“Perchance he for whom this bell tolls may be so ill, as that he 

knows not it tolls for him; and perchance I may think myself so 

much better than I am, as that they who are about me, and see 

my state, may have caused it to toll for me, and I know not that.”

John Donne,

Devotions upon

Emergent Occasions (1623)359F

360

--------------

“But some will rise and return to feed,

preying on the living with murderous greed.”

Bad Acid Trip song lyrics to

Kernkraft 400 tune Zombie Nation

--------------

“Steel isn't strong, boy, flesh is stronger. Look around you. 

There, on the rocks; a beautiful girl. Come to me, my child.

[girl willingly jumps to her death] That is strength, boy! That is 

power! What is steel compared to the hand that wields it?”

Thulsa Doom in the movie,

Conan the Barbarian (1982)360F

361


399

The metro league champs do this

Section 99,

Seven Metropolitan Lines of Effort

Parts of a city may be hotly contested even while the besieged fully 

control other parts and the attackers still others. These variously controlled 

locales may or may not be contiguous. Contestants may have to either take 

or hold according to a patchwork of urban sectors. There are likely to be 

more than two major contestant organizations. In addition, urban areas are 

intertwined with surrounding geographies we might prefer to categorize as 

suburban or rural or sea or hinterland. With all the caveats in mind, however, seven lines of effort provide a reasonable starting template for your 

competitive planning. They are:

1. Gain, maintain and improve your advantage in anonymity;

2. Gain, maintain and improve your advantage in competitive distances;

3. Control disruptions of service flows;

4. Control convocation spaces;

5. Progressively reduce your opponents’ sanctuary space;

6. Pursue the mens rea;

7. Punish the mens rea;

The above LOE are discussed luxuriously in previous sections. They

can be listed and considered separately, neatly, but they cannot be accomplished separately or neatly. They have to be mixed as one effort. Make 

a map to measure the physical geography of the first six. That map could 

be a fair reflection of your progress toward victory, or lack thereof. Your 

ultimate goal will be to dominate the granting of impunity. Again:

1. Anonymity. Implement specific actions and programs whose immediate

and longer-term goals are to tip the balance of anonymity in your favor. Encourage and enable the reporting of information regarding the identities,

strengths and especially the whereabouts of enemy identities’ armed members and leaders, as well as their support groups. Perhaps use reporting 

websites or hotline phone numbers or offices wherein a citizen can report 

without being seen doing so by agents of the opposition. The side in useful 

possession of a space (able to openly or secretly occupy a space and use it 

for a competitive purpose) can more easily install reconnaissance devices. 

A number of considerations for the preservation of secrets, such as polygraphing, background investigations, oaths and the like may also be useful 

to you. For the most part, the side on the offensive (perhaps effecting a siege 

or take-over of a building or neighborhood) has less opportunity for to assert 
99 Seven Metropolitan Lines of Effort

400

actual, physical presence by which to instill a ‘rule of silence.’ In the long 

run, the holders of urban space also hold the highly advantageous opportunity to create Big Brother systems. We can rightly call the classic, proven, 

columnar innovation for non-violent coexistence (and perhaps ‘population 

control’) formalized property. Such systems are the ultimate reflexive control method to the extent that a population willingly submits to transparency 

of the particulars of identity and wealth.

2. Competitive distances. Build walls, doors and bridges, roads and easements to you advantage. This is best done in an overall plan that considers 

travel distances among police stations, public convocation sites, likely 

sites of opponent perpetrations and bases of government enforcement initiative. Conversely, for the siege, distances to service nodes, convocation 

areas, and other valuable terrain need to be prepared. This offensive preparation needs to anticipate the need for withdrawals or escapes. Tunnels 

are a classic siege preparation, but way-stations made from the offices of 

front organizations, or the coopting of transportation networks are now 

typical. In Bogota, the FARC had briefly converted the immense garbage 

disposal network into a back ally taxi service.

3. Service flows. As cities grow they tend to change in step fashion. For 

instance, a small city might overnight become home to a radio controlled 

taxi network. A megalopolis might finally gain a third major airport, 

bringing a closer coordination of airspace control that all but seals out 

some classes of aircraft. Among the effects of scale may be a tendency 

toward single contract or single network consolidation of some services, 

for instance, sewage removal. As a service becomes monopolized or centrally regulated, it also acquires a vulnerability in that the geography of the 

reins of control may become centralized, or present very specific nodes or 

constrictions. These nodes need to be physically protected, as do the executives or key technicians who wield control. Because large cities often 

find economic advantage in consolidated service systems, the nodes and 

constrictions in these systems present geographically specific targets, targets that can not only be physically occupied, but the occupation of which 

can be defended for sufficient time as to make power concessions appear 

economically and politically feasible.

4. Convocation spaces. Convocation (causing crowds to form) is hardly a 

new tactic, but social media has augmented their practicability. Rules of 

operational art still apply, however, to actions based on the massing of 

people, including protests, demonstrations, or marches. Regardless of the 

speed of instruction, coordination, or movement of such aggrupation, the 

characteristics of the spaces people might fill count for a great deal when 

it comes to how consequential or dangerous a crowd might be to the survival of an established government or economic enterprise. Some cities, 
99 Seven Metropolitan Lines of Effort

401

because of ancient land use planning, have open areas that straddle important lines of communication or threaten significant economic nodes, 

especially trans-modal transportation points. If the formation of a crowd 

can be diverted to spaces presenting little threat to principle transportation 

links or other pieces of economically valuable terrain, the ability of resistance leadership to extort concessions is greatly reduced. A government 

planner, in other words, might orchestrate architecture, traffic patterns and 

land-uses in advance of convocations. A government’s greatest advantage

in this regard is what it can do to favorably manipulate the shapes of built 

terrain. Then, in spite of the new speed of convocation, or the potential 

intensity of mass emotion, a given crowd’s power to effect change might 

be rendered inconsequential.

5. Sanctuary space. A sanctuary is that space within which a contestant 

cannot be punished by their opponent. The idea is shrink the sanctuary 

space of one’s competitors and to increase one’s own. In addition, every 

attempt should be made to map the likely routes to and from sanctuary 

spaces. Sanctuary may be attained through anonymity, legalities, moral 

and electoral risk, and physical distance. Sanctuary is in any case a physical, material place. One either enjoys a place wherein he is safe from the 

punishments of his foes or he is not. Moreover, sanctuary spaces can be 

mapped, and while the cartographic delineations of sanctuary spaces might

be hypothetical, it is that hypothesis exactly that can guide application of 

competitive resources. 

6. Pursuit of the mens rea. The challenge posed here is more than just a 

‘small fries’ versus ‘big fish’ distinction. The locus of competitive intent is 

a human mind. It may indeed be profitable to work intellectually against 

ideas and instructions pouring out of some dangerous mind. Still, for you, 

whatever side you are on, it will be most profoundly and favorably influential if you can neutralize the cranium out of which that danger pours. Your 

material goal of holding or taking the block, borough, metro, megalop or 

cosmos will be advanced according to the extent you can or do bring dire 

physical consequences upon their coconuts. The competitors most likely to 

be effective are those who mount constant, physical pursuit of the locus of 

intolerable human initiative. It is your enemy leaders’ impunity from material and corporeal punishments (and in turn the impunity they can grant to 

their followers) that must be challenged and dismantled. If there exists a 

single imperative for any durable victory, it is that a party definitively disprove any suggestion that his opponent might retain, achieve or bestow 

defiant physical impunity. If a party is not capable of physically pursuing 

the mens rea of their opposition, it is unlikely that they are making progress. 
99 Seven Metropolitan Lines of Effort

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Is it possible to convince your enemy that you can physically neutralize him 

even though in fact you could not? Sure. Use the Songs of Chu if you can. 

Rare. Too many folk from Missouri.

7. Punishment. Pursuit of the mens rea is valuable in itself because a vigorous pursuit keeps a fleeing opponent off balance, makes it hard for him to 

take initiative, and whittles at his moral. However, pursuit is not a goal. 

Only an act of punishment proves the diminution of impunity. The punishments might include no more than the stripping of wealth or of public 

respect, but for it to be positively consequential, punishing the mens rea

probably must include confinement or death. To the extent it can be made

clear that you have a monopoly on punishment (that you can punish ‘them’, 

but they cannot punish you) you are winning and will at least be able to 

negotiate from strength. Meanwhile, if they can close your sanctuary spaces 

-- perhaps occupy and use the mayor’s office, the court building or the police 

station -- you’re losing, and may soon be punished for it.

So where to begin. It depends on when you get there and where there 

is, but here is something to consider: the ontogeny follows the phylogeny. 

Yeah, I’m not sure what that means, either, or if it’s true, but I always wanted 

to use the expression in a book. You might want to remember the phrase

because the growth of individual cities seems to reflect the historical development of cities as a human phenomenon. Maybe. The birth of urban might 

have been a restaurant, a market, a protective palisade, a water well, a transportation node, or a place of common worship. It might have been a

bordello. There exist theories that have proponents. It is evident, however, 

that combinations of these basic things appear early, early in the archeological records of cities everywhere. It’s easy to see how a seaport with fresh 

water and a defensible inland side might soon gain an inn, a market, a church 

and a bordello -- maybe not in that order. These same characteristics reappear during the growth of cities, and parts of cities. Control over these urban 

sub-phenomena can be used to control areas and the people in them. Furthermore, they can be specified and digested in chunks, like the dot game. 

Knowledge about and control over clergies, prostitutes, transportation providers, as well as water sources still provide leverage. Newer things come 

along -- internet service providers, trash removal, emergency medical facilities, sports arenas, especially where there is gambling (I’m shocked, 

shocked). Anyway, the seven LOE can be set to these things. Still not sure 

how to start? Try the ‘physics of strategy’.

Please see sections: 34, Urban or Rural; 22, Badassoftheweek.com; 88, 

Escape Geography; 56, Militias and Gun Control; 23, Mens Rea; 42, 

Brigands; 124, Slavery and Underclass; and 115, Physics of Strategy.
99 Seven Metropolitan Lines of Effort

403



Three German soldiers drinking beer in a Bavarian pub after WWI:

Eric: So, Hans, what are you going to do now that the war is over?

Hans: I’m going back to Hamburg; my father has a sausage works there. 

Where are you going?

Eric: My dad has a watch shop here close-by. I’ll apprentice with him. 

How about you, Adolf?

Adolf: Oh, I’ll think of something.

--------------

Dogbert: “I’m forming a rebel army.”

Ratbert: “Count me in. What are we fighting for?”

Dogbert: “You’ll be fighting for social justice, and I’ll be scheming to be 

an iron-fisted dictator. In the long run, I’ll be a billionaire and you’ll be a 

stain on a tank tread.” 

Ratbert: “Please, please say there will be looting.” 3 61F

362

Scott Adams,

Dilbert

--------------

Inigo Montoya: Is very strange. I have been in the revenge business so 

long, now that it's over, I don't know what to do with the rest of my life. 

Westley: Have you ever considered piracy? You'd make a wonderful 

Dread Pirate Roberts. 

from the movie,

Princess Bride (1987)362 F

363

--------------

“What is the alternative to working inside the system?...Spouting quotes 

from Mao, Castro, and Che Guevara, which are as germane to our highly 

technological, computerized, cybernetic, nuclear-powered, mass media society as a stagecoach on a jet runway at Kennedy airport?”363 F

364

Saul Alinsky,

Rules for Radicals

--------------

“And now,” cried Max, “Let the wild rumpus start.” 364F

365

Maurice Sendak,

Where the Wild Things Are


404

The intellectual détritus of French Man’s defeat

Section 100, What the Foucault?

If you are involved in an organized armed conflict these days it is 

advantageous for you to know a little about post-structuralism and where 

it comes from. In sum, it is the zombie of marxism-leninism. It lurches 

around, soulless, on the same campuses and in the same agencies and headspaces trying to eat the flesh of the surviving ‘structure’ which it still calls 

capitalism, neo-liberalism, or something related. Post-structuralism is also 

the name of an ideological franchise package that can be adopted and 

adapted broadly ˗˗ more broadly than marxism-leninism could be. It appeals to many identities who feel they are on the outside of power or 

consider themselves the despised ‘other’ or underdog. It exists as a movement that a left-leaning intellectual can join if he or she has a need to 

belong. In this respect it is both a presentation to and a request for participation in a population of persons who want to follow something that they 

can believe is ethical, intelligent, has a political effect or purpose, and is 

not a lackey of or apology for the Man.

About the time of the American military involvement in Vietnam, a 

small group of French ideologues nearly cornered the trademark of Philosophy. This didn’t happen all at once and was never complete, but under the 

auspices of the authority gained, post-structuralism was slowly spawned. 

Some of the French persons’ names, in no particular order, are Jacque Derrida, 

Jean-François Lyotard, Jean Baudrillard, Luce Irigaray, and Gilles Deleuze, 

but chief among them was Michel Foucault. He died, apparently of AIDS, in 

1984 at the age of fifty-seven. A little bit of his intellectual popularity is as a 

sort of martyr. At any rate, below is my take on the history of why marxism 

didn’t just stay buried and why post-structuralism prospers either to give an 

intellectual backstop to your war aims, or to cause you a headache as it makes 

it harder and harder to tell the truth.

The pertinent history doesn’t begin or end at any special moment, but to 

lighten the load I’m going to start with Blackjack Pershing and the American Expeditionary Force, the AEF, in World War I. Blackjack was an American alpha 

male. He refused (more or less) to have American soldiers fight except as an 

American Army unit, instead of becoming a troop replacement pool (thus telling 

the French that the American wasn’t just there to help, but to be), and ultimately 

the AEF tipped the balance in the war in favor of the Allies. Even though 

the Allies won the war, the French alpha males did not fare especially well. 
100 What the Foucault?

405

This failure of France’s Man opened a little space in the French discourse 

(about strategy, politics, power, philosophy and, well, everything) to other 

voices besides that of the French Man. Notably, marxism-leninism was 

taking off in a big way just at that time, with the Russian Revolution in full 

swing when World War I ended.

Paris became the kitchen for ideas that would take on monikers like 

existentialism, nihilism, structuralism and etcetera. Long a philosopher’s 

destination, it becomes even more so, especially for marxist philosophers, 

as Germany was then tending toward fascism. When World War II arrived

in France, France’s Man did worse than in World War I. In fact, he was 

an abject failure. Unable to protect France, in came German Fascist Man 

in his stead. This opened up more room in the philosophical discourse

about power. American Man looked potent by comparison to French Man

and, again, saved France. After the war, French Man took another beating 

in Southeast Asia from Vietnamese Man. Then, in almost the instant that 

French manhood is embarrassed in Indo-China, French Man decides that 

he will regain dominance, or at least face, by winning at all costs in North

Africa, but that turns out to be just about the costs France pays -- all. 

France loses terribly, including all of Algeria and French Man with it. This 

opened up a tremendous amount more room for ‘other’ voices in the 

French discourse, and what those voices were saying especially included

an abiding anti-Americanism. This anti-Americanism was conveniently 

agreeable to the marxist-leninist currents for the obvious reasons of the 

competition between the Soviet Union and the United States.

As the Cold War progressed and many in Europe begin to sense the 

stale quality of Soviet governance and promise, some of the French philosophers, who by that time had braced the parameters of fashionable 

European academe, began to think in terms now sometimes called postmodernism and sometimes post-structuralism. The year 1968 looms large 

in all this since it was a good year for dissidence in the United States and 

an active year of rebelliousness in Europe. Distaste for the high-handedness of the Soviet Union (Prague Spring?) sent some erstwhile marxists 

looking for something to spruce up their resistance thinking.

Sooner than the philosophers might have predicted, however, the Soviet 

Union was in precipitous collapse. In the face of political reality, their philosophy had to evolve quickly. The result was a contraption that took big chunks 

from marxism (like criticizing the self-perpetuating structure and voracity of 
100 What the Foucault?

406

capitalism), still garnering for itself the look of moral preference for the downtrodden, but escaping the need to consolidate any specific outcome or vision. 

There was no longer a new communist man or a communist condition or some 

substitute utopia to which aspirations had to be aimed. It became a sort of anarchism with social empathy that could take or leave bombs as suited. It claims, 

falsely, to have invented critical thinking. It eases its own burden of illogic by 

disdaining things like objectivism, positivism and realism. It tells scholars that 

they should include emotive, affective, and politically responsible content to 

their analyses, but that responsible means progressive. It is sort of a virtual, linguistic, almost religious framework for radical goodness in which almost any 

grievance can be made to fit, although there have always been some nearly litmus-test conditions, such as anti-Americanism.

There exist gatekeepers to post-structural approval. To be gonged 

post-structural and, therefore, to enjoy some of the other benefits of membership such as being called progressive, one must pay homage to that group 

of French founding philosophers, and preferably to a coterie of other popular 

marxist or ‘new’ marxist thinkers. Also, there are a number of issues the 

wrong side of which you must not fall. For instance, it appears difficult to 

gain post-structural approval if you are pro-Israel, do not agree that carbon 

emissions from North America are the main cause of global warming (and 

that therefore the United States should pay a monetary debt); or express faith 

in Christ as the Messiah (one may, however, worship Allah).

Less and more than a philosophy, post-structuralism is a political platform the planks of which are provided by leftist-radical du jour. Older leadership 

is peopled by radicals from or supporting organizational remnants of Cold War 

communist or socialist political parties. The Forum of Sao Paulo is a good example of a consortium of these parties. Although the followship may not be as 

responsive as what we might have sensed in the relationship of marxist-leninist 

thinkers to the geopolitical agendas of the Cold War communist parties, there is 

nevertheless a strong connection. It is, as the systems theorists like to say, a 

complex system, but there is a clear, namable community of leadership and guidance (the descendant and inheritor of what used to depend on auspices of the 

Soviet Union or Communist China) to which many self-described post-structuralists attune. The activist post-structuralists rail about the false dichotomies of 

conservative thinking, but they are themselves often guilty of a Manichaen (old 

religion from Persia that stressed a lot of Light versus Darkness) tendency to line 

up everything as either good or neoliberal.
100 What the Foucault?

407

Listen to those who claim they’re progressive. They may be as normal and good as you and I. On the other hand, some of them, ideologically 

contentious, might revealingly admire what they call postmodern or poststructural. They might expressly admire that French crew who cornered 

‘Philosophy’ during French Man’s stumble, in which case they are vulnerable to being, or might already be anti-Americans, which is patently no bueno, 

and you’ll want to know.

Please see sections: 71, Jerusalem; 36, The Denver Broncos; 81, What a 

Clergy Wants; 128, Global Insurgency and Global Trespass; 79, Suicide; 107, 

Guerre d’Algérie; 135, Borders and Anarchism; and 142, Conflict Geography.



“Integrity is the recognition of the fact that you cannot fake 

your consciousness, just as honesty is the recognition of the 

fact that you cannot fake existence.” 365F

366

Ayn Rand,

Atlas Shrugged

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“Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or 

number? No.

Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter 

of fact and existence? No.

Commit it then to the flames; for it can contain nothing but 

sophistry and illusion.”366 F

367

David Hume

--------------

“All music is folk music. I ain't never heard a horse sing a song.”

Louis Armstrong (attributed)

--------------

“Don’ be blabbermouth, you blabbermouth.”

Boris Badenuv (attributed)

--------------

“One sees clearly only with the heart.

 What is essential is invisible to the eyes.”

The Little Prince

Antoine de Saint Exupéry


408

The WWF and the NCAA Both Wrestle

Section 101, Magical Realism

Sometimes the thirst for truth is hard to satisfy with scrupulous science and measurement. In your war, truth will also be a product of 

propaganda and its delivery. The construction and reconstruction of reality itself, activities off-putting to some of us, will be a feature of your war. 

The ‘post-structuralist’ especially seeks to own the construction of truth, 

so the competitor in today’s irregular wars needs to be keen to the making 

of truth beyond the arguments and beyond the numbers.

‘Magical Realism’ is a genre of fictional literature, born in, associated with, and even emblematic of Latin America, that intermixes attention 

to worldly detail (respect for ‘objectively’ factual conditions, events, locations and time of occurrence) with fantastical interludes, incorporeal 

characters, and intangible dimensions of human experience. Genius writers bring us the interplay between greater truths of the spirit and the 

mundane or technically necessary. More than requiring a suspension of 

disbelief, magical realism requires an intention to understand larger truths 

about life, love, and justice: truths that perhaps cannot be explained without the intervention of the supernatural or whimsical. Gifted novelists 

tease out of magical realism the most difficult to explain quantities -- like 

dignity, honor, fate, or even environmental determinism. In the hands of 

a less gifted writer, magical realism becomes a cheesy trick to get the plot 

out of some corner.

When some story tellers attempt to explain the meaning of life they 

create an existentialist marvel. Gabriel Garcia Marquez is an often-cited master of magical realism, but hardly inventor of the style. Argentinean Jorge Luis 

Borges might be closer to the creative beginnings, while another Colombian 

writer, Jose Rivera, can be credited with innovating a precursor or perhaps 

parallel style known as the jungle novel. These writers and their emulators 

also owe a great deal to their Spanish and American inheritance, but that’s not 

the point ˗˗ the point is that there exists a named style of literature in which the 

supernatural is accepted not as science fiction or horror or fantasy, but as a 

dimension of reality that exceeds the boundaries and importance of the thought 

processes or social expectations we build around the idea of ‘objective’ truth. 

Magical realism proffers a truth of equal or greater importance than the truth 

of our five senses. It is the literary rejection of corporeal realism, positivism, 

empiricism, etc. Just because things happen, or just because you can prove 
101 Magical Realism

409

they happen in logical space and correctly sequenced time, doesn’t make them 

the truth that we should care about.

So why talk about magical realism? Because of its evil political twin. 

Magical realism serves an entire universe of ethical justifications in politics and 

ideology. It not only encourages ‘ends justify means’, but glorifies use of what 

used to be called the ‘big lie’ as more than an admirable propagandistic achievement. Beyond propaganda tactics, it forms up an alternative beauty and an 

alternative honesty. It encourages and praises the creation of identities, histories, 

grievances, hate memories, and absolutely anything that furthers political goals. 

After all, it can be cogently argued that truth does not exist outside the mind, that it 

is all perception. This understanding of truth is called solipsism. Magical realism

in fiction, which draws in some way on solipsism, can be a powerful aid to understanding. In politics and war, it can destroy the ethic of replicability in science, of 

trust in fiduciary relationships, and of pride-worthy historical inheritance. The political version of magical realism is not a calm romanticism; it is a license for 

strident partisanship. It is not an egalitarian proposition available to all contenders, 

but rather a purely competitive reality trick that feeds cults of personality and vanguardism.

There are two principal categories of wrestling in the United States. One

is called amateur or folk style. In that category we can also include intercollegiate 

rules and the Olympic styles called freestyle and Greco-Roman. The other category can be subsumed under professional wrestling, featuring organizations such 

as the Worldwide Wrestling Federation, WWF. My favorite US professional 

wrestler was ‘The Rock’(Dwayne Johnson), with his ‘People’s Elbow’,‘People’s 

Eyebrow’ and other gimmicks the infringement of which could cause one to find 

out “what the Rock was cookin`” and be slammed by the bad end of the ‘Rock 

Bottom’. It is wrong to say that professional wrestlers like Mr. Johnson are not 

great athletes or that the winners of a professional wrestling match are not winners. 

It is a different victory, and it is a different set of attributes that takes a professional 

wrestler to the top of his profession than the set of attributes that takes an amateur 

wrestler to the state finals or the NCAA Championships.

We can liken folk style or intercollegiate wrestling to argument and 

professional wrestling to argumentation. When we see a hand raised in amateur wrestling, we are confident that the athlete won on the basis of a 

superior set of athletic attributes -- quickness, strength, durability, resolve. 

The athlete paid in advance in hours of physical sacrifice, discomfort, disappointments, and foregone social opportunity. It is unlikely that his hand was 

raised because of the votes of the fans, because the referee was bribed, or the 

rules unevenly applied. Neither poverty nor wealth, while they might have 
101 Magical Realism

410

helped, was the reason for his victory. His opponent probably won’t claim 

to have failed because of other people, either; he will blame himself.

In the other world of wrestling there are other qualities -- qualities 

of showmanship that reward and understand the aspirations, prejudices, 

and self-concepts of potential followers; of the balance between dangerous 

physical maneuvers and the way they appear to the audience; of the close 

connection between skill during interviews and skill in the ring; and of 

money and social timing. These professional skills are just as, if not more, 

precious than the difficult moves learned by the intercollegiate wrestler. 

The skill sets are not the same and sometimes must overlap; making those 

individuals doubly prized who offer competence in both skill sets.

In the world of legal argument and argumentation, a good lawyer 

cannot scoff at one or the other. He has to master both. Johnnie Cochran 

was known as a master of argumentation, just as Dwayne Johnson was a 

master of professional wrestling. Mr. Cochran knew how to apply ‘tricks’ 

like juxtaposition, change of subject, and other argumentation tradecraft 

that could lead a jury to nullify legal argument and the sober presentation 

of what might otherwise have seemed compelling facts, but Mr. Cochran

was hardly helpless in the realm of argument. He knew the law, what motions had to be made to the court and when, why one logical argument was 

more dangerous for his client than another. He made sure his team dominated both worlds. He knew when argument might not be enough to win; 

when it was time to resort to argumentation.

Magical realism as it is expressed in politics and ideology is like one 

side of that Johnson/Cochranesque professional wrestling/trial lawyering dimension of today’s political truth-making. Some designs are most durable

when they don’t reject new technology or the physical realm of time and space.

An agile competitor will pay attention to personal and place identity, imaginaries, grievances and all the vicissitudes, curiosities and ailments of the 

human mind that might allow him to build an alternative, narrative reality if 

the ‘objective’ reality does not suit his competitive purposes.

What do you do about this political magical realism? Use it or, to 

confront it competitively, remember that ultimately we are not talking 

about some reality floating around inside a propagandist’s or intellectual’s 

head, or about the reality he is trying to create inside the heads of other people, but about the physical head itself -- the bone skull housing and gooey 

brain of the mens rea guy. Don’t get thrown off. If you have an enemy, he 

sleeps and defecates. He has or had a Mom. If he is armed and intends to 

do you harm before you can bring arguments to bear, close off his line of 
101 Magical Realism

411

retreat, put that brain in a cell and then talk to him about all kinds of fun 

philosophical stuff.

Magical Realism can be easily dismissed by the engineering or 

mathematical mind, or compartmentalized as a frivolous enjoyment. That 

would be a competitive mistake.

Please see sections: 16, Presence; 114, R.V. Jones; 27, ‘Nonviolent’ Action; 66, GIS; 121, Dignity and Honor; 116, Songs of Chu; 117, Strategic 

Communication; and 33, Engineers and Built Environment.



“Who ya gonna believe, me or your lyin` eyes?”367F

368

Marx

--------------

“You cannot know yet whether what you see is what you are 

looking at or what you are believing.”368 F

369

William Faulkner,

Absalom, Absalom!

--------------

“...others are using convoluted Orwellian Newspeak of the 

crudest kind hoping to camouflage their treachery.”369 F

370

Hamid Dabashi

--------------

“You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”

Indigo Montoya in the movie,

Princess Bride (1987)370F

371

--------------

“Social criticism begins with grammar and the re-establishing of meanings.”371F

372

Octavio Paz

The Labyrinth of Solitude

--------------

“The truth is you're the weak. And I'm the tyranny of evil men. 

But I'm tryin', Ringo. I'm tryin' real hard to be the shepherd.”

Jules in the movie,

Pulp Fiction (1994)372F

373


412

A move, not the goal

Section 102, Negotiations

This is a recurrent topic in irregular wars, and there seems to be a 

school solution for governments as well as challengers. Insurgents, for 

instance, commonly posture willingness to negotiate and to do so if the 

government will give ground on something valuable, perhaps a demilitarized zone or the exchange of prisoners. A moderately successful 

insurgent (one who has mastered the operational equation of classic military strategy) holds the advantage of being able to offer nothing for

something. That is to say, the insurgent can offer to detonate, rob or kidnap 

less in exchange for some kind of actual advantage such as the trappings 

of international recognition, which could quickly lead to a belief on the 

part of members of the international community that the insurgent organization has the right to grant impunity to its foot soldiers for acts of armed 

violence against government targets.

Since almost all insurgents hold a relatively weaker position (at least at 

the outset) geographically and militarily, if not financially, the insurgent is generally more careful about the security of routes to sanctuary. The result is that 

the insurgent usually needs to play it safe and prolong his life, and that, in turn,

means prolonging the conflict. Consequently, an early insurgent negotiating demand will revolve around the negotiation agenda. The process itself can offer 

much of what the insurgent needs, if that happens to be time, and it often is, so 

delaying is good, for as long as possible, if it can be done, until it is annoying. 

Requiring a specific geographic area for negotiations is one common ploy that 

can provide useful if temporary physical sanctuary as well. Extending the timeline of the negotiations by seeking ‘honest brokers’, working around executive 

schedules, getting sick and the like can give an insurgent months of space. It is 

also called government latency or lack of due diligence.

Toward the end of the term of Colombian President Andrés Pastrana, 

he told the Colombian public it was necessary for him to accede to an ELN 

(National Liberation Army, a leftist guerrilla group smaller than the FARC) 

demand for a demilitarized zone in a strategically valuable part of the country because if he did not, the ELN could do the country a lot of harm. For 

the Colombian public, that was pretty much a final-straw confession of presidential submissiveness. In the next election, the Colombians voted in 

Álvaro Uribe, who campaigned on a pledge to seek peace through victory 

over the guerrillas, rather than appeasement.
102 Negotiations

413

A government, too, should always appear willing to negotiate, provided that the government actually means it will offer the insurgent 

leniency or amnesty upon surrender. If the insurgent makes reasonable

demands, such as a change in patently unfair labor practices or the failure 

to prosecute known criminals, the government might do well to just resolve those issues without attributing its decisions to the insurgent

demands. On the other hand, it might behoove the government, if it intends to take certain actions anyway, to appear to concede the points in 

return for surrender. The government should waste no time in the planning 

processes of the negotiations, for the reasons expressed above. The government should not, in most cases, unilaterally establish a cease-fire or lift 

military pressure due to the negotiations. The principal negotiating chip 

possessed by a government is the offer to lift military pressure and thereby 

lessen the possibility of the death or capture of the insurgent leaders. The 

exchange should be their surrender. Some will argue that this is a bestcase answer or that this attitude toward negotiating strategy is logical or 

available to a government only if it is clearly superior militarily and is in 

a position where such arrogance might bear fruit. Perhaps, but if this were 

not the government position, it would be because a government is willing 

to give up something that does not belong to it, or it is being forced to 

surrender something of great value, like land. Sometimes a government 

must give up space for time.

Negotiating the release of kidnap victims or ‘detainees’ in exchange for the parallel release of imprisoned insurgents or spies or other 

incarcerated individuals can make for a dilemma. It is easy for the hostage-taker to present a narrative of equivalency. It presumes too much to

assert a fixed or school solution for such a case. It would be gratuitous 

given that almost any relevant executive decisions would have to be taken 

from a subjective and pain-ridden point of departure. The notion of cold 

objectivity is cheap. Here’s a school solution anyway: Avoid allowing 

family members of the victims, even and especially those powerful families with political influence, to direct and pressure the government 

position. Necessary separation can be created in part by isolating the chief 

executive by way of a series of lesser negotiators and autonomous administrative entities. The hostage-taker will, of course, demand that a chief 

executive be directly involved in negotiations, but a chief executive should 

nevertheless avoid being, and the appearance of being, an active negotiating element.
102 Negotiations

414

The principal, the fundamental strategy against kidnapping should be 

to never negotiate, even while an occasional negotiation might have to be done 

covertly because of the special value of some hostage. The capable hostagetaker will try to nab politically influential or militarily hyper-sensitive hostages. If the play works even once to secure a valuable concession or reward, 

the hostage-taker is well-paid for the behavior. Try not to expose politically 

influential or militarily sensitive targets to easy-taking.

Please see sections: 96, Combatant Status; 24, Ruthlessness and Resolve;

117, Strategic Communications; 4, Defining Enemy; 11, Protraction and 

Diligence; 55, Kidnapping; 90, Prisons and Prisoners; and 104, Lawfare.



“Diplomacy is the art of being able to say ‘Nice doggie’

...until you have time to pick up a rock.”373F

374

Will Rogers (attributed)

--------------

Korben (from behind a wall): We need to find the leader,

Mangalores won't fight without the leader.

Mangalore Aknot: One more shot, and we start killing hostages!

Korben: That's the leader.

Mangalore Aknot: Send someone to negotiate.

Fog: (to Korben) Uh, I've never negotiated before.

Korben: Do you mind if I try?

Fog: (to Korben) No, sure, sure, sure.

(to Aknot) We're sending somebody in to negotiate.

(Korben walks into the room and shoots Aknot in the forehead. 

All the other Mangalores drop their weapons) 

Korben: Anybody else want to negotiate?

from the movie,

The Fifth Element (1997) 374F

375

--------------

“You can get much farther with a kind word and a gun than 

you can with a kind word alone.”375F

376

Al ‘Scarface’ Capone


415

Injustice justice

Section 103, Amnesty and Restitution

Amnesties can be a mix of plea-bargaining, granting of executive pardons and conditional surrender. Their significant political and ideological 

content raises the stakes for all sides to a conflict; a hinge issue is usually how 

an amnesty candidate is likely to fare after he is given amnesty. Consider the 

first assertion of this book -- that a state fails to the extent some other entity 

can grant impunity. Negotiating amnesty can be seen as an admission of state 

failure. Once again we are back to the word impunity, but in this context it is 

impunity that the state would grant in the context of a process of reconciliation. 

The state’s options are influenced by the bargaining power of the perpetrators, 

by how the balance of justice is perceived by victims and their agents, as well 

as by potential ideological shifts on the part of any of the parties. As with so 

many things, an amnesty plan has to be culturally appropriate. For instance, 

in Latin America a considerable amount of culturalspace exists for amnesties. 

Colombians have recurred historically to amnesties as part of their internal 

conflict strategies, if with mixed results.

An Internet search for discussion of amnesty will hit on Amnesty International, but that organization is as interested in the justice of punishment 

as it is in amnesty, a phenomenon that marks the theme generally. Amnesty 

sounds nice, but it has become complicated by the global spread of ‘Western’ 

law. In one of the ironies of ideological history since World War II, activists 

have achieved the spread of public criminal law to confront what they see as 

state impunity for violation of human rights; but they also spread civil tort law, 

including international mechanisms of criminal forensics and civil discovery. 

International (or extraterritorial) jurisdiction has spread civil actions such as 

wrongful death. As a result, it is now difficult for a government to grant amnesty to an insurgent leader if that leader has been the intellectual author of, or 

accessory to, or perhaps even complicit in kidnapping and murder. To provide 

effective amnesty, a government might not only have to forego its criminal 

prosecution, but also extend special legal and physical protection for amnestees against the motions of civil claimants and extradition requests.

An essential function and economic contribution of formal penal processes is the dampening of the human tendency (or perhaps satisfaction of a 

perceived human necessity) for revenge. In other words, good governance 

includes keeping people from taking violent revenge on their own initiative

(vigilantism). The world of extraterritorial civil law can undermine this 
103 Amnesty and Restitution

416

State function, punishment sometimes being driven more by third party observers than it is by the victims. International activists begin to define justice 

on a global scale, rather than on a local one, and provide otherwise unavailable resources to fuel the pressing of grievances. For better or worse, your 

enemy may be able to find international support for the idea that he should 

be granted amnesty for his felonies, while leaders on your side of the ledger 

should be subject to the justice of punishment. This is the stressful formula 

that many Colombians face.

The book, Walking Ghosts, by journalist Steven Dudley, is a riveting and enlightening account of an 80s-90s reconciliation process in 

Colombia that included the creation of a political party, the Patriotic Union, from amnestied ex-guerrillas. It didn’t go well. Many of the open 

members of the Patriotic Union were murdered and the party eventually 

withered away. Too many ex-guerrillas, officially amnestied by the government, were forgiven neither by some of their former enemies nor by 

some of their former comrades. Regardless of what we call a legal process, 

or what it pronounces, perpetrators and participants may go unforgiven, 

with the goal of the system to control revenge frustrated.

Amnesty is not an automatically good idea. Its potential should be thoroughly reviewed as to victim acceptance, participant survival, international 

jurisdiction, and the effect of precedent setting. Global spread of the rule-of-law 

created dilemmas. Courts, legal theories and investigations are more available 

to victims, so amnesties are more difficult to devise. How would Pablo Escobar 

have ever atoned had he been captured and not shot down? His history alone is 

a roadmap of the difficulties presented. Earlier he had surrendered to the law to 

wait comfortably in a luxury non-prison until he decided he had had enough of 

that gambit and flew the coop. Finally, the only logical end for Pablo Escobar 

was to be killed like a rabid dog. In 2009, Pablo Escobar’s son, emotionally 

burdened, reached out to the families of some of his father’s victims, asking for 

their forgiveness. At least by some, it was granted without reservation.

In the last decade, the Colombian government has gained the surrender of tens of thousands of guerrillas, mostly former members of the 

Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia (United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, AUC), but many ex-leftist guerrillas as well. The process has included 

a variety of programs for their reinsertion and reintegration into the fabric 

of peaceful society. Generally, these are referred to as Demobilization, 

Disarmament and Reintegration (DDR) programs. The Colombian effort 

attracted some international funding, but was not one of the seven or so 

ongoing UN-mandated DDRs. There have been successes and failures, 
103 Amnesty and Restitution

417

the latter caused by lack of resources, bungling, resentments and unmet 

expectations. Beyond the fact of forgiven crimes, the programs had at least 

the appearance of giving ex-outlaw fighters more economic and educational assistance than what the government gave to ex-soldiers who served 

in its army. In addition, jobs are often not available, appropriate or appealing enough to the demobilized young men. Crime bosses will still bid 

successfully for that combat-experienced manpower. 

Smaller, functional amnesties and rewards programs such as drug 

material amnesties and firearm amnesties can give some individuals a second chance, take a few dangerous instrumentalities out of circulation, and 

are relatively painless. Having a set of amnesties of this nature can be a 

good idea. On the other hand, they can also confound some evidentiary 

efforts and give the wrong kind of second chance. That is to say, criminals 

can game such programs to ditch evidence.

Some amnesties have taken the form of buy-back programs. In El 

Salvador in the 1980s, for instance, the government initiated a program 

that not only gave amnesty to individual guerrillas who surrendered; it 

gave them an amount of money if they turned in a rifle. The purchase was 

of a weapon, but really the government was buying a cooperative interrogation in order to find caches of other weapons. The program met with 

some success, although a lot of worthless weapons were purchased and 

there is a distinct possibility that some of the money was funneled to the 

guerrilla command. Adam Smith’s invisible hand can slap you silly.

Note again the relationship of amnesty to our definition of State 

success. A State with a monopoly over the granting of impunity never has 

to grant amnesty. Nevertheless, by so doing, a challenged State might return rule-of-law initiative to itself.

Restitution (especially land restitition) is a closely related theme, as 

it invariably occurs to victims that they should be recompensed by perpetrators as a condition of their forbearance in any negotiation of amnesty. In 

Colombia, the number of those justly claiming victimhood is enormous, especially victims of the FARC. The government’s flagship land restitution 

program was ostensibly to dovetail with a FARC surrender of rural presence. 

The FARC, however, quickly connected its demands to a land reform giving

the FARC control of valuable tracts and the people on them. FARC leaders 

not only demanded impunity for themselves, but victim status for their affiliates(and rural residents that the FARC merely asserted as such). The FARC 

had long since exhausted its moral equity, but its ability to orchestrate a negotiating process, along, perhaps, with an ideological shift in the 
103 Amnesty and Restitution

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government, may have moved the power balances of political domination 

and submission farther toward the FARC leaders than they could have reasonably hoped to achieve by direct military action.

Please see sections: 84, Cultures of Violence; 95, Childhood; 38, Cultural 

Study for What?; 104, Lawfare; 137, Foreign Support and Foreign Perspective; 90, Prisons and Prisoners; 42, Brigands; and 76, Gender.



“By now the police had uncovered a whole series of Ravachol’s crimes, 

including a grave robbery for the jewelry on a corpse, the murder of a 

ninety-two-year-old miser and his housekeeper, the further murder of 

two old women who kept a hardware shop--which had netted him forty 

sous--and of another shopkeeper, which had netted him nothing. “See 

this hand?” Ravachol was quoted as saying; “it has killed as many bourgeois as it has fingers.” At the same time, he had been living in 

lodgings, teaching the little daughter of his landlord to read.”376F

377

Barbara Tuchman

The Proud Tower

--------------

“It's sad that governments are chiefed by the double tongues. There is 

iron in your words of death for all Comanche to see, and so there is iron 

in your words of life. No signed paper can hold the iron. It must come 

from men. The words of Ten Bears carries the same iron of life and 

death. It is good that warriors such as we meet in the struggle of life...or 

death. It shall be life.”

Ten Bears in the movie,

The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976)377F

378

--------------

“We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the 

victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.”378 F

379

Eliezer Wiesel

--------------

“If you want to know the law and nothing else, you must look at it 

as a bad man, who cares only for the material consequences which 

such knowledge enables him to predict,”379F

380

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

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Law as a weapon of war

Section 104, Lawfare

The lede above this section’s title was lifted from the title of Orde 

Kittrie’s Lawfare: Law as a Weapon of War. We could also define lawfare 

as the use or misuse of the law as a means to achieve a military objective.380 F

381 Lawfare is more than just a sophisticated form of psychological 

operations, although it is that. It includes criminal, property, administrative, family and any other category and level of law, as well as legal 

processes, suborning of courts and judges, legislative authorship, constitutional interpretation and a long list of etcetera as these things might be used 

to further a military end. That said, the following text concentrates on a 

narrow band mostly related to accusations of behavioral violations.

Extraterritorial Jurisdiction. Here, the territory presumed by the 

word extraterritorial is that of a national State in the international system. 

A court might investigate and hear a case, issue a decision, and even order 

punishment undeterred by where the illegal acts happened or by the nationalities of the persons involved. With extraterritorial jurisdiction, a 

court’s geographical reach, or its claimed reach, overcomes sovereignty --

it extends into the demarcated territory of a foreign state. For instance, a 

court in Spain might hear a complaint coming out of Chile even though no 

facts in the case were connected to Spanish territory.

Extradition. Extradition is a counterpart word to extraterritorial. 

Many countries keep treaties between and among them under the terms of 

which one country will deliver up a fugitive to the authorities of a requesting country. The governments agree not to provide sanctuary in defiance 

of their counterpart’s sovereignty. To an extent, an extradition treaty is 

recognition of sovereignty while extraterritoriality is denial of sovereignty. 

They both relate to whether one government or another will be allowed to 

grant an impunity. Also, an international court claiming extraterritorial jurisdiction under a multilateral treaty might successfully demand that a 

given country deliver to it a wanted individual -- perhaps to be confined in 

facilities controlled by that court. In 2002, many countries agreed to the 

jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court in The Hague, for instance. 

In a given situation, a suspect might be apprehended, in accordance with 

law, from the territory of a country whose government refused to deliver 

that suspect.
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It is a tendency of governments to provide impunity for their own 

abuses, and the common American cultural response is to favor an individual 

underdog against the State overdog. In this vein, a favorite cliché of popular 

jurisprudence informs us that no entity should be ‘above the law’. Against that 

hope, American courts tend to stress protection of the rights of individual defendants. Let’s say some poor schlub gets arrested and charged with a crime. 

Let’s also say the cops had followed the wrong suspect (our schlub) who they 

interrogate to extract a confession. Meanwhile, they don’t chase other reasonable leads. We have laid on a lot of rules to try to protect individuals against 

such events. Some, for instance, allow accused citizens to take legal actions 

against the government on the grounds of unjust processes or because the government abused existing processes or does not apply them evenly. So let’s say 

the poor schlub is you, and that you have been accused of committing some 

sort of violation of something, maybe human rights, and that a foreign court 

claims jurisdiction and orders you physically to be brought before it. It may 

disconcert you how difficult it is to bring the system to task for abuse of process. Some foreign they might say you can’t be above the law while they are.

In the case of the 2009 Detroit ‘underwear’ bomber, who appeared 

to represent a foreign organization dedicated to waging war against the 

United States, a question arose as to whether or not the bomber was to be 

tried in an American civilian court where all kinds of protections against the 

abuse of process apply, or in a military court where the protections might be 

fewer. 381 F

382 Some protections would have existed in either the civilian or 

military spheres. A nearly simultaneous case involved a US Army major at 

Fort Hood, Texas who was being tried in military court for killing fourteen 

people.382F

383 The US citizen was tried in a military court while the foreigner 

was tried in a civilian court. In this pair of cases we witnessed the tension 

between competing values of sovereignty and civil liberties. A US military 

court might convict and condemn a foreign defendant absent the full panoply 

of protections. In such a case, would the United States Government not protect members of the military court from prosecution by some foreign court?

When one country’s soldiers fight abroad in an allied country, their 

governments often seek a Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA). Sometimes 

these agreements require that the visitors relinquish their government’s 

shielding from prosecution by the courts of the ally or by an international 

court. Such situations are problematic, given that the protections against 

abuse of process may vary widely. This problem of abuse of criminal process is usually generated in the context of some crime committed outside the 

soldier’s official activities. It becomes more complicated when a serious 
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offense is committed during activities related to the sending government’s 

reason for their soldier’s presence in the foreign land. In those cases, the 

sending State is greatly responsible for the situation in which its soldiers (or 

some other category of agents) find themselves. The people of the sending 

country may deem it irresponsible for their government to relegate its agents 

to less protection than they would be afforded in their native land. Moreover, the sending State may wish to assert not just its sovereign immunity, but 

its monopoly over the granting of impunity. This is logical because in situations that are emotionally, geopolitically and ideologically charged, some 

other entity (a third government or a non-state actor perhaps) could use a 

jurisprudential system (the host nation’s or an international system) as an 

attack mechanism.

Be forewarned that your war will be influenced by some set of persons’ legalistic opinions, and so you will want to know exactly what those 

opinions are, whose they are, and where those persons sit when they opine. 

Depending on your status and the loyalty your government extends, you 

could win a war and go to jail for it. Extraterritorial jurisdiction and the web 

of extradition treaties relate to the geography of your potential sanctuaries 

and those of your enemies -- to the impunity you can practicably grant, or 

that your enemy can grant and for how long. It is hard to guess what the 

effect of lawfare might be on your war, except to say that the legal environment is worthy of your concern. In any case, the best soldiers for conducting 

lawfare are...lawyers. You should get you one, or several.

Please see sections: 1, Impunity; 137, Foreign Support and Foreign Perspective; 103, Amnesty and Restitution; 96, Combatant Status; 97, 

Oviedo; 20, Rule-of-law; 130, Globalization; and 77, Sex



“I have nothing to do with this justice; that for me does not exist.”38 3F

384

Augusto Pinochet

(on being detained in London)

--------------

“...a grand jury would indict a ham sandwich, if that's what you

wanted.”384 F

385

Judge Sol Wachtler in

The Bonfire of the Vanities


422

Slicing away at a people’s property

Section 105, Genocide Geography

Genocide is a 20th century word with a legendary etymology. It is 

invoked to overcome the barrier of sovereignty, that is, to justify physical 

intervention into the internationally demarcated territory of a foreign State. 

Genocides are bigger than, say, massacres. For one thing, the word genocide has specific legalistic import as an accusation of the breach of 

international humanitarian law. It also carries greater emotive power related to the targeting and destruction of whole human collective identities. 

When a State kills its own people en masse, the perpetrators will try to 

grant impunity to themselves and their agents. The word genocide was 

invented as part of the legal arsenal to deny that impunity.

Mass killing is a motivator for those being killed to start an insurgency, and not necessarily because their government’s acts were illegal. If 

your definition of the rule-of-law is tied to the stability of laws (or to popular legitimacy or democracy), note that the actions the Nazis took against 

the Jews were legal (Reductio ad Hitlerum!). It may be hard for you personally to justify military intervention into a foreign land absent some 

quantity of national interest unconnected to the morality of the killing, but 

you may not have a choice. Places that suffer genocide face internal violence afterwards. Survivors and/or perpetrators fight over whatever the 

dead leave behind. Genocides cause flows of refugees and it is not likely 

that they or the violence will obey the proscriptive suggestions of international borders. This section is about where genocide occurs and where it 

is likely to occur. Public knowledge about genocides can be readily improved, that is, the signs are fairly obvious; better armed with knowledge 

of the reality, we can ponder the morality. (In the Appendix: Miscellaneous

Lists, List E, page 586, you can find a taxonomy for genocide intelligence.)

Although there are a number of obvious warning signs that remote 

technical sensors can provide (villages burning, for instance), cultural geographic knowledge reveals more about potential mass murder. 

Multidisciplinary geography expeditions could be used to create a fairly 

continuous presence of outside observers in locales with susceptible populations. Such an enterprise would depend, however, on some system of 

prioritizing that could reduce the number of places to be scrutinized. There 

are maybe 75,000 county-level territorial units in the world and, if only a 

tenth of one percent of them are potential scenes of mass killings, it means 
105 Genocide Geography

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people live at risk of mass murder in 75 counties. If this is indeed a reasonable guess regarding the scale of genocidal danger in the world, it 

nevertheless implies a need to expose which 75 counties, which implies 

the building of an organizational engine that can maintain the fielding of 

considerably more than 75 academic research efforts at a time.

Research on genocide points to authoritarian, radical or dictatorial 

regimes as a common characteristic correlated to mass killings. A number 

of national-level regimes exist in which power is highly concentrated in a 

single ruler or clique and where peaceful change away from that leadership 

is unexpected. Liberal regimes that undergo regular peaceful selection and 

de-selection of leadership, and which enjoy formalized property, are relatively unlikely to perpetrate mass killings.

An ongoing armed conflict is logically to be associated with the 

potential for mass killings. This is evident from killings in Rwanda, Bosnia, Cambodia, the Ottoman Empire, and many others. The potential for 

a mass killing increases rapidly when young men are armed, gain a habit 

for killing, need to secure a line of communication, do not have ready 

means to care for prisoners or refugees, feel that a population poses a risk 

or believe a population gives aid to their enemy, or that a population is 

guilty of past offenses against them. If a natural line of march for an armed 

contingent passes through a populated locale, that locale should be a prime 

candidate for monitoring. Depending on the circumstances, an event we 

would characterize as a massacre or as genocide is more likely to occur in 

such places.

Another characteristic worth monitoring is the incapacity of a potential victim population to escape due to terrain, lack of mass transport, 

etc. Lack of ready means of communication and expression with the outside world is a logically dangerous condition, especially if combined with 

others. This is also a phenomenon that is readily detectable and mappable. 

Those counties in the world that are without Internet service, or even working telephone systems may have vulnerable populations due to the 

perception of anonymity that such incommunicado conditions logically 

create. A world map of counties with the poorest communication to the 

outside world could be created.

Collective legal impairments can exist for years without there being 

a mass killing or genocide, but changes in the impairments can be a valuable clues. Changes in legal systems that clearly weaken the power or 

capacity of a potential victim group to protect itself should be considered 
105 Genocide Geography

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endangering events. If a clearly contrasted collective identity exists within 

a polity (especially if led by a dictatorial regime) and government leadership does not belong to the potential victim identity, then the occurrence 

of newly prejudicial legal and administrative impositions can mean impending trouble. The following list of impairments is adapted from Raul 

Hilberg’s The Destruction of the European Jews.

•Restrictions on professions

•Restrictions on divestment and purchase of real estate

•Special physical or clothing markings

•Special naming conventions

•Marriage and intercourse restrictions

•Off-limits locations or concentrations

•Any form of mandatory migration

•Marking of transactions

•Special taxes 

Restrictions on intermarriage and sexual relations are especially

significant as in-group/out-group separators. Such restrictions are easily 

detectable as either a social norm or formal restriction. They might be 

imposed from within the potential victim identity or by the potential perpetrator. This classic phenomenon is an inspiration for literature, art, and 

feud and is also one of the clearest markers of group cohesion and intergroup friction.

Taxation is another item worthy of special note. Few other subjects 

mark and measure the physical territorial limits and spaces of human conflict, or are able to measure conflict as precisely in time or material as is 

taxation. Tax differentials, tax anomalies, tax evasions and tax inequities 

can be detected, described, measured, and mapped. It can be fairly stated 

that wherever a severe tax inequity is matched to a vulnerable collective 

human identity, that tax announces potential violence.

Another indicator of potential mass killing is hate language, especially official hate language. For instance, in Rwanda Radio Television

Libre des Milles Collines helped fuel Hutu anger at the Tutsis before the 

genocide there. Hate literature that appears in schools should be of special 

concern. If the hate literature appears in texts that are centrally published 

or the product of educational literature review boards (as is often the case) 
105 Genocide Geography

425

the phenomenon can be documented and mapped. At least the addresses 

of publishers, review boards, or schools have specific physical geographic 

signatures, and mapping such signatures can have a pronounced effect on 

outsiders’ ability to influence the hate.

Another possible predictor is high contrast in ethnic, racial or linguistic identity. Much ethnographic mapping has already been done in the 

world and, along with updates to local census data, a worldwide by-county 

inventory of highly contrasted populations can be made. There have been 

genocides and other mass killings not associated with highly contrasted 

linguistic, ethnic or racial identity (Cambodia comes to mind, but anecdotes suggest that even in that event ‘educated’ speech was a sufficiently 

contrasting determinant for selection for elimination).

Impunity is a key feature in genocide history. Benjamin Leiberman 

(Terrible Fate: Ethnic Cleansing in the Making of Modern Europe.) noted 

that when Nazi Germany expanded into neighboring lands, the newly arrived German overlords did not have to force foreign populations into 

violent action against Jews. The Germans had only to establish the enabling environment of impunity and its psychological complement of 

release from ethical dishonor. With those conditions emplaced, many populations willingly and perhaps eagerly set about to destroy their Jewish 

neighbors. Pre-existing anti-Semitism was a factor. Hitlerian plans called 

for much more than just the displacement of the Jews, however, although 

the value of the Jew as a scapegoat was never underappreciated. Hitler’s 

plan for the Reich was such an immense ego-national project that mass 

murder could be reduced to a mere technical and administrative challenge. 

Some of the activities proffered above to predict genocide could 

actually facilitate genocide. For instance, ID-carding and human inventorying might be used to monitor the protection of a human identity, but it 

might also be used by a genocidal government to more carefully and completely single-out members of an identity for destruction. In some cases, 

the very effort to discover, monitor and report could increase danger to an 

at-risk group.

A debate exists among those peoples with the capacity to stop genocides. One side of the debate (the side less inclined to act) often 

summarizes its argument as an absence of ‘national interests’. The other 

side of the debate invokes a higher, moral responsibility to act. In this I 

am going to take sides without detouring into much argument. If a country
105 Genocide Geography

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has the wherewithal competently to prevent genocide, it should do so. 

Genocides, however, are rarely just based on hate. They are never just 

disasters or spontaneous combustions, either. They are politically motivated, and so a response designed only to stop immediate killing is 

probably only going to be temporarily effective. The structure that emboldens and empowers groups to commit murder with impunity has to be 

changed. The mens rea of genocide has to be located and nullified.

The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of 

Genocide, adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in 1948 (combined with the Security Council Resolution 1674 of 2006) offers an 

international legal path to override formal State sovereignty and license foreign intervention into lands whose governments appear guilty. Government 

impunity is limited by this jurisprudence to the extent that the sanctuary created by an international border (the formal geography of a national 

government’s immunity) can be legally breached. The existence of this 

thrust of formal international law presupposes its eventual application.

You might ask, “Why would we need legalistic justifications from 

or for a feckless world once we were confident we could act competently 

and decisively, knowing independently the right thing to do?” It is indeed 

a rhetorical question. Why don’t good people act against evil when they 

know the right thing to do and have the capacity competently and decisively to act? When we do nothing, the omission can irritate a guilty 

conscience as much as would clumsy action. On the other hand, there is a 

lot of empty stupid in the conditioners “competently and decisively.” 

Those are not low bars to overcome, and sanctimony (innocent or prideful)

is a blinder to the size of those barriers. We might find it easy to assert a 

moral case for taking military action against a distasteful, dictatorial foreign government, perhaps because it had used prohibited weapons against 

its own people. But what if we had few solid prospects as to what leaders

might fill the vacuum (the moral quality of follow-on leadership, or what 

attitudes they might have toward the United States). Moral strategic conundrum. What would be the cost to moral authority of righteously

punishing a sovereign government on moral grounds to then witness that 

regime collapse and be replaced by something worse? By the way, back 

to etymology: Genocide was invented in the 20th century by Raphael Lemkin as a strategy. He recognized that shaping vocabulary is a basic element 

of strategy-making. He created and advocated a word in order to ease the 

crossing of sovereign international boundaries with force. His word 
105 Genocide Geography

427

changed the legalistic risk distances, but did little to change the underlying 

balances of moral imperative and risk.

Please see sections: 66, GIS; 70, Measuring Effects of Actions on Structure; 71, Jerusalem; 7, Sanctuary; 56, Militias and Gun Control; 48, 

Grading the Social Compact; 78, Identity; and 108, Common Knowledge.



“Repugnance is some kind of wake-up call that there is something untoward going on and attention must be paid. These passions are not 

simply irrational. They contain within them the germ of insight. You 

cannot give proper verbal account of the horror of evil, yet a culture 

that couldn’t be absolutely horrified by such things is dead.” 385 F

386

Leon Kass

---------------

“The fundamental difficulty of subjecting states to the rule of law 

is the fact that states possess power. The legal control of power is 

always difficult...”386F

387

J. L. Brierly

The Law of Nations

---------------

“It is this geographer’s logic, the basis for the logic of the liquidation 

plan, on which we have focused precisely in order to reconstitute the 

process of destruction itself...”

Raymond Kévorkian,

The Armenian Genocide

---------------

“I am Armenian, so of course I am obsessed with laser hair removal.”

Kim Kardashian (attributed)


428

Mile markers of armed conflict, their details surprise

Section 106, Massacres

Internal conflicts are often chaptered by massacres. A massacre 

can change the direction of public psychology, mark changes in the fortunes of contending groups, and expose severe internal divisions or loss of 

leadership in a government army or inside a violent nongovernmental 

armed group. Sometimes massacres are just horrible mistakes or the work 

of the criminally insane.

Be aware that there are various working definitions and that the 

definitions have an effect on statistics and stories. One recognized measure of a massacre is four persons killed in a single incident. I was told by 

a Colombian official a number of years ago that if fewer than ten persons 

-- soldiers, policemen, civilians -- were killed in a single incident, the Colombian public wouldn’t take notice, inured as it was to news of homicide. 

He felt that to earn the term ‘massacre’ an event had to reach some appreciable level of public recognition and impact, which meant at least ten dead 

victims. Another word, atrocity, is commonly used in propaganda pieces. 

Atrocity spans both massacres and genocides, but the word seems to have 

gained no legal or mathematical definition as have the other two. Below 

are seven notorious Colombian cases, out of many dozens, highlighting 

divergence in the nature of massacres. They are all named after the place 

in which they occurred.

Ciénaga Grande -- In 1928, the nascent Socialist Revolutionary Party organized a large workers strike against the United Fruit Company at its 

Colombian Plantations at Ciénaga Grande near the Atlantic Coast town of 

Santa Marta. A local command of the Colombian Army broke up the strike 

by firing into the crowd. The number of victims has become one of the adjustable elements in Colombian political narratives. The strike was a failure, 

even causing a schism among the party organizers. That schism birthed the 

Communist Party of Colombia. The massacre at Ciénaga Grande is the grandfather of twentieth century Colombian massacres -- a failure for the banana 

workers became, nevertheless, propagandistic gold for the radical left.

Tacueyó -- A man named José Fedor, who had been a trusted member of the 

Colombian communist insurgent group, the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, FARC), fell 

into disfavor with the FARC senior leadership sometime late in 1981, stole a 

lot of money from the organization and with it founded an even more radical 

splinter group called the Ricardo Franco Front (after a former guerrilla leader). 
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429

Many of the foot soldiers of Fedor’s dissident group came over from the 

FARC and he recruited others. Paranoia got the best of him and in late 1985 

he perpetrated an especially vicious torture/execution of between 160 and 180 

of his own men, a few of whom might have been infiltrators and all of whom 

he suspected of being infiltrators. The massacre came shortly after an unrelated guerrilla takeover of the Colombian Supreme Court Building, a 

coincidence that would amplify the public impact of the massacre. Although 

it was mostly FARC renegades killing themselves, Tacueyó not only left an 

impression on the Colombian public, it is generally marked as the event that 

took away much of the opinion (held perhaps by a majority of Colombians) 

that the FARC was, as guerrilla movements went, noble.

La Chinita -- In the La Chinita neighborhood of the town of Apartadó, Antioquia, an evening attack during a town celebration on January 23, 1994 left 

35 dead, mostly young men. (Apartado, by the way, means remote). The 

action was a reprisal for failure of commitment, growing out of differences 

between the Frente Popular, the political party of the Ejército Popular de 

Liberación. Popular Liberation Army (EPL) Popular Liberation Army guerrilla organization and the Unión Patriótica, the political party of the FARC. 

As with other Colombian massacres, La Chinita cannot properly be considered in isolation. FARC had been attempting to wrest power in the zone from 

the EPL, and attacked demobilized EPL fighters as traitors to the revolution 

and to arrest increases by the EPL in establishment political power. According 

to the late Carlos Castaño, leader of the Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia 

(United Colombian Self Defense Forces, AUC), many EPL fighters joined the 

AUC. Chinita was really just the beginning of another round of hyper violence, during a year seeing several massacres in the same area. On August 12 

that year, AUC guerrillas killed seventeen persons in Bosque de Chigorodó 

County at a discotheque called the Aracatazo. It was followed quickly on 

August 19 by a mass killing perpetrated by the FARC in Churio Pueblo also 

in Apartadó County. On August 29 the FARC killed another sixteen in Zungo 

Corregimiento in neighboring Carepa County, then murdered six more in 

Pueblo Galleta on September 6, and so it went. Apartadó is located along a 

smuggling corridor and not far from the upslopes leading from the Panamanian border to the Paramillo high ground to the east. However, the Chinita 

massacre was not one in which one group was fleeing and another group chasing. The victims had no chance to confound the decision-making of their 

pursuers by the use of landmines or to otherwise tighten the risk distances of 

their pursuers. This massacre, like all the others included in this section, was 

a milestone of the war that exposes a variety of criminal motivations and organizational schisms.

Machuca -- Machuca is a small town located along the Pocuné River in 

Segovia County, in eastern Antioquia. Unfortunate about its location is that 

one of the major oil pipelines passes near the town upriver. On October 18, 
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1998, the ELN blew up the pipe, spilling thousands of gallons of oil into the 

river, which caught fire, burned down the town and killed eighty-four people, half of them children. At first, the ELN tried to deflect public outrage 

onto the police, but eventually admitted the crime, plausibly claiming that 

the killing was an accident. Segovia borders on the southern Bolivar Department, known as an epicenter of guerrilla presence and organized 

violence. A decade earlier the AUC had entered the nearby county seat, and 

killed what is still an uncounted number of persons, perhaps into the dozens. 

The county is also a center of gold and silver mining, much of it informal. 

Today, FARC and perhaps ELN remnants are taxing and extorting miners 

and mining concerns. It appears that the dreadful plight of families in Machuca owed little to poor economic conditions. Their heritage reached back 

to the successful resistance of escaped slaves and the establishment of the 

eighteenth century autonomous palenques. They were at Machuca as a direct result of an ancient escape. They had not settled in a poor place, but in 

one with a wrong combination of lucrative targets and terrain suitable for 

getting away with violent acts.

Bojayá ˗˗ In 2002, the FARC launched gas cylinders at a church in which 

maybe five hundred civilians were taking refuge from an ensuing battle between units of the FARC and units of the AUC. The gas cylinders are a 

primitive style of artillery, but effective. One of them went through the roof 

and exploded on the altar, killing around 120 civilians, many of whom were 

children. Although the AUC was cited by the United Nations for violating 

human rights (using the villagers as a shield and pillaging), there was no way 

for the FARC to avoid international condemnation. The government, meanwhile, was also found culpable of not doing enough to have stopped the event, 

having been warned that the two warring parties were in the area. The Bojayá 

massacre occurred in the context of a battle between two contending guerrilla 

groups (while there were instances in which the government and the AUC 

colluded, this was not one of them). However, the incident cemented an idea 

that the government could be condemned and sued for a failure to protect its 

citizens, even if the government was not itself a participant or perpetrator. 

This result suggested a bit of a military operational problem, implying that the 

government was obliged to assign forces to protect civilian populations on the 

basis of information about pending clashes between other armed groups. 

Needless to say, a lot of initiative could be stripped away from government 

military leaders. Under such rules of legal obligation, anti-government forces 

could disperse or deceive the government into reactive defense.

Trujillo ˗˗ Trujillo is a county north of Cali, Colombia. Trujillo is actually 

the name given to a series of massacres in about the same place. Well over 

three hundred persons were killed, mostly by members of the AUC and the 

Cali drug cartel, who dumped many of the body parts into the Cauca River. 
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Almost all of the victims were union activists or others accused by the perpetrators of supporting the leftist guerrillas. Some collusion occurred, at 

least early on, by officials of the government armed forces. The details form 

a complex drama that is still being investigated by a truth commission. The 

various explanations of why this place would become emblematic of the war 

and of its massacres all mention its geographic proximity to a major smuggling route to the Pacific coast.

Jamundí ˗˗ In 2006, an army unit, on orders from a drug lord, ambushed 

and killed all the members of an elite counternarcotics police unit that had 

been trained in good part by the United States. In Colombia, both the national police and the army belong to the Ministry of Defense. The shock 

wave of questions, investigations, inter-institutional accusations, self-doubt 

and slumped morale was palpable, even while the action was only tangentially related to the insurgent war.

The above massacres weren’t perpetrated using planted explosive devices, although there have been many mass killings in Colombia involving

explosive artifacts, including some notable urban attacks on civilian targets. (In 

2003, a car bomb ripped open the elite Club Nogal in Bogotá, killing thirty-six 

persons and wounding about two hundred.) None of the above-listed massacres 

involved contact between an anti-government armed group and a unit of the government armed forces, either. Plenty of those occurred, but these massacres are 

part of an odd array of excesses, each with its own character. The motivations

include control of territory, paranoia, and revenge. Notice also that several 

armed groups earned mention here, not just the FARC. The preservation of anonymity regarding illegal and materially profitable activity is often a factor. It 

seems that in Colombia remote towns can be especially vulnerable if they happen to be located between something of great (and transportable or convertible) 

market value and places perpetrators consider likely sanctuaries or necessary 

market nodes – perhaps a warehousing or transportation transfer point. Such a 

hypothesis is encouraged further by a parallel fact that hundreds of remote Colombian towns not en route to a criminal sanctuary, but otherwise equivalent to 

the victim communities, have passed through decades of conflict without seeing 

any organized violence at all. 

Many of the massacres in Colombia have been followed by forensic 

efforts, some better than others. In Colombia such forensic efforts have 

been improving over time, which has meant a growing body of evidence 

that can be made available not only for criminal prosecutions, but for civil 

litigation. If a guerrilla or criminal force (or for that matter, a government 
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unit) commits a massacre, how are they to fare in the context of a peace 

process that proposes amnesty for criminal perpetrators?

Massacres, a category or scale of unethical killing that falls somewhere between simple murder and genocide, will probably mark and 

possibly define your irregular war. Their occurrence will be used propagandistically by you or by your opponents. You will do better to have 

stated, then inspected and enforced your intentions to discipline your people against massacres, and to investigate and illuminate massacres as 

quickly and completely as is practicable and beneficial.

Please see sections: 104, Lawfare; 20, Rule-of-Law; 24, Ruthlessness and 

Resolve; 27, ‘Nonviolent’ Action; 86, Shifting Covet-geographies; 97,

Oviedo; 103, Amnesty and Restitution; and 16, Presence.



Sweet song-bird, fly back!

Wheel hither, bald vulture!387 F

388

John Greenleaf Whittier poem,

Le Marais du Cygne

---------------

Swimmer: “People are dying! Do something!”

David Hasselhoff: “First of all, I’m not a lifeguard; never was. 

Secondly, that was what natural selection was all about.”

from the movie,

Piranha 3DD (2012)388F

389

---------------

“...like I was shot with a diamond... a diamond bullet right 

through my forehead. And I thought, my God... the genius of 

that! The genius! The will to do that!”

Colonel Kurtz in the movie,

Apocalypse Now (1979)389F

390

---------------

"I refused to fire...” 390F

391

Silas Soule


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-- Colombia, Various Locations --
434

الجزائریة الثورة: Worst counterinsurgency ever?

Section 107, Guerre d'Algérie

On November 1, 1954, the Front du Liberation Nationale (National 

Liberation Front, FLN), launched the ‘day of insurrection’ against French

sovereignty in Algeria. That day become a fabled milestone in the Algerian resistance and independence movement. Charles de Gaulle 

pronounced Algeria an independent country on July 3, 1962. France lost 

over half of its territory and the lowest estimated death tolls from the war 

claim around 350,000 dead. Otherwise, it was a disaster. The constitution 

of France was replaced, military mutinies mounted, and millions of persons displaced. The post-WWII history of French Algeria is one of 

insurgent victory and near total counterinsurgent failure. Dedicated insurgents and counterinsurgents do well to study French experience in Algeria. 

Here is a woefully brief English-language bibliography on a subject worthy of its own course:

•Alexander and Keiger, France and the Algerian War 1954-1962: Strategy, Operations and Diplomacy;

•Aussaresses, The Battle of the Casbah: Counter-Terrorism and Torture;

•Chaliand, Guerrilla Strategies: An Historical Anthology from the Long 

March to Afghanistan;

•Galula, Pacification in Algeria, 1956-1958;

•Horne, A Savage War of Peace;

•Johnson, “Algeria: Some Problems of Modern History” (Journal of African History, v, 2, (1964), pp. 221-242);

•Lartéguy, The Praetorians;

•O`Ballance, The Algerian Insurrection 1954-1962;

•Shrader, The First Helicopter War: Logistics and Mobility in Algeria, 

1954-1962;

•Stora, Algeria 1830-2000;

•Talbott, The War Without a Name: France in Algiers, 1954-1962;

•Trinquier, Modern Warfare;

•Wall, France, The United States and the Algerian War.

Maybe we can delineate some military operational lessons from the 

civil-political or socio-psychological ones. As for the latter (given French 

objectives, the moral balance, and the abysmal results), the case of French 
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Algeria seems to present all bad examples and only a few (related to operational military matters) are especially positive. Among successful French 

counterinsurgent operational innovations, however, are their use of the helicopter, territorial barriers, detailed census records, and the creation of 

anonymous reporting systems. The use of militias and of propaganda seem 

to have had mixed results.

The French also recognized how central to the conflict questions of 

land-use and ownership equities were, including inequitable relationships 

between ownership rights and tax burdens. Recognizing is not the same 

as doing something, however. The French did not do enough to change the 

basic unfairness of the Algerian social compact, or to change perceptions 

of inequality. Even though it recognized severe inequities, the French government did not make decisions or implement enough changes to quell 

insurgent energy. This central feature of the Algerian case -- that real estate 

ownership and taxation matters were basic issues to be resolved -- serves

as a guiding lesson for many internal conflicts.

The French military had earlier absorbed a defeat in Indochina. 

Their recent failure there had been built on disdain for their North Vietnamese enemy and on disregard for the basic lessons of classic military 

strategy. Dien Bien Phu became a place from which there was no route of 

withdrawal in the face of an enemy who grew to have a four-to-one advantage in firepower.391 F

392 Dien Bien Phu was indeed a historically decisive 

battle, booting French colonial power out of Indochina. The Algeria challenge, however, was geographically closer, much more significant to 

power in Paris and the results for the French were far worse.

The Algerian War naturally draws our attention today, given that the 

principal insurgent identity was Islamic, and the counterinsurgent a Western 

power with an apparent technological, logistical and financial advantage. 

Algerian physical geography also seems similar to Iraq’s in that it features a 

dominant urban area surrounded by a harsh hinterland. Passing these similarities, the differences are considerable. Physically, the aggregate logistical 

distances challenging France in Algeria were one-tenth what the United 

States faced in the Middle East or Southwest Asia. Moreover, the cultural 

barriers to effective French counter-insurgency (especially the language barrier) were not nearly as severe for the French in Algeria.

French objectives were also inherently different than anything the 

United States had or is likely to have anywhere. The French government and 
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people, and most of the people of northern Africa and the world, believed 

Algeria to be part of France proper. The French government’s aim, at least 

at the outset, was to maintain its sovereign territorial status. Today, American goals in whatever theater are unlikely to include the protection of longestablished settlements of Americans inside US borders. Parts of the American Southwest might someday make for an interesting exception.

Because counterinsurgent operational plans should be linked to 

strategic objectives, some significance attaches to differences or commonalities of purpose in overall national strategies. That is to say, because the 

geographic relationships and national strategic objectives were so radically 

different for the French in the 1950s as compared to the Americans in the 

21st century, it would require quite a stretch of logic to apply the Algeria 

experiences to United States overseas operations. Nevertheless, the Algerian war is frequently mentioned in US military curricular materials, 

prompting the following observations:

Torture. The French used systematic torture, which some Frenchmen, 

like Paul Aussaresses, have since justified. The United States manual 

Counterinsurgency is explicit, repetitive, emphatic and unequivocal about 

the illegality and immorality of using torture. A typical sentence on the 

subject in that manual states, “Torture and cruel, inhuman, and degrading 

treatment is never a morally permissible option, even if lives depend on 

gaining information. No exceptional circumstances permit the use of torture and other cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment.” While US manuals 

seem to dote on French operational experiences in Algeria, it is not a ratification of the French officers’ attitudes toward interrogation techniques, 

even if the word ‘torture’ itself remains poorly defined in French and English.

The application of torture and terror is presented by French military 

writers as a factor in whatever success they think they achieved. It is a simple 

fact that within just a few years after the French military withdrew, it became

clear that they had achieved nothing positive on the strategic scale. The link 

between the two (French operational ruthlessness and their strategic failure) is 

not necessarily causal. Several other factors are implicated in the French defeat. Nevertheless, in a final section of Pacification in Algeria, David Galula 

lists what he considers the three principal causes of failure in the execution of 

counterinsurgent strategy in Algeria. One of these three he says was “lack of 

firmness toward the population.”392F

393 In this regard, Galula apparently advises 
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that...“it is necessary to punish in exemplary fashion the rebel criminals we 

have caught...The Rebels’ flagrant crimes must be punished immediately, 

mercilessly, and on the very spot where they took place.”393 F

394 I seriously doubt 

that the spectacular French loss was due to their coddling of the rebels or the 

population, and I believe this remarkable assertion by Galula indicts his mindset. This kind of language, by the way, does not appear in his derivative 

Counterinsurgency Warfare.

Psychological warfare. Some French plans officers stressed psychological operations designed to wrest control of the civilian population from the 

enemy (meaning generally the FLN). According to Jorge Verstrynge (see 

Section 98, Jorge Verstrynge and Pio Moa) many of the French officers 

favoring psychological operations were influenced both by Nazi Joseph

Goebbels and by Soviet doctrine, or by Karl Marx’ writing itself. Verstrynge mentions the 1938 work Viol des foules par la propagande 

politique, (Rape of the Masses through Propaganda) by Serge Tchakhotine. Apparently that book appeared in a new French edition in 1952. Roger Trinquier 

(Modern Warfare) participated in a counterpoint or complementary current to the 

French enthusiasm for psychological operations. Trinquier defined the Algerian 

war as a clash of systems -- political, economic, psychological, and military. Trinquier, like most of the pro-psychological operations thinkers, instructed that the 

support of the civilian population was the sine qua non of victory; that, taking 

from Mao, it was as vital to the combatant as water to fish. For Trinquier, popular 

support had to be spontaneous, terrorism to Trinquier an effective technique for 

inspiring ‘spontaneous’ support.

Population control. The priority placed on organizing the civilian population led Trinquier to criticize exclusively psychological methods. He 

saw it necessary to dismantle the political-administrative structures of the 

enemy, and then to build similar, affinity organizations. Such work could 

take place concurrently with psychological activities, but the overriding 

goal became the control of guerrilla physical movement and infiltration. 

In ratification of his thinking, the French high command authorized Trinquier to deploy the Dispositive du Protection Urbaine (DPU, Urban 

Protection Detail) in the Algerian capital. Jorge Verstrynge writes,

DPU operations were based on a tactic of population classification, using coordinated neighborhood volunteers who contributed information about the 

goings-on of these areas. Within this system, each house was given a number, 
107 Guerre d'Algérie

438

which was the equivalent of a record containing the number of inhabitants, profession, etc., by which it was possible to control any kind of change. To a certain 

extent, the DPU became the French equivalent of the Organisation PolitiqueAdministrative (OPA, Political Administrative Organization) of the FLN, although this organization invented by Trinquier ˗˗ which was commonly referred 

to as the GPU in reference to the Soviet political police ˗˗ did not generate any 

kind of economic funding. Proof of the system's effectiveness came after information provided by DPU members led to the arrest of Ben M'hidi, one of the 

FLN's leaders in the battle of Algiers.394F

395

It seems that operational theories adopted by the French officers, in 

conjunction with disillusionment with Paris politics, emboldened them to 

consider themselves rightful fonts and representatives of political power. 

Perhaps because things political and ideological were woven into the new 

counterinsurgency theory as part-and-parcel of the war effort, it was natural that the officers would begin to assign themselves political and 

ideological roles and responsibilities. It seems these new ‘military’ responsibilities had sprung from the informational and administrative 

requirements of occupation. Some officers considered expropriating large 

colonists' agricultural properties to redistribute them as part of a kind of 

national socialism or national communism. Many officers ended up participating in mutinies or coup attempts against the government of France.

Galula or Trinquier? (Some of this material is lifted from the July-August, 2010 Military Review article ‘Let’s Take the French Algeria 

Experience Out of US Army Doctrine’.) A brief 1965 book review in International Affairs of both Trinquier’s Modern Warfare and Galula’s 

Counterinsurgency Warfare (both were first published in English in 1964) 

favors Galula’s work, asserting that “Mr. Galula has a much wider view of 

the problem, partly no doubt because his professional experience is 

wider.”395 F

396 The reviewer also supposes for his readers that Trinquier, having first 

published his book in French in 1961, may have still held false hope that the war 

offered a positive conclusion for the French. Available biographic information 

about Trinquier and Galula, however, indicates that Trinquier was older, more experienced, a more prolific writer, and much more widely known than Galula. 

Alistair Horne, in his 1977 A Savage War of Peace (widely considered a seminal English-language work on the subject) indexes Trinquier heavily, but 

Galula not at all. Jean Lartéguy apparently modeled characters in his novels after Trinquier, but it is unknown if the life or experiences of Galula 

impressed that author at all. It is hard to believe that Trinquier and Galula 

were not familiar with each other and especially that Lieutenant Colonel 
107 Guerre d'Algérie

439

Galula was not perfectly aware of the existence and influence of Colonel 

Trinquier, the latter at the time a chief of intelligence in Algeria. Still, 

Galula, although he almost undoubtedly read Trinquier’s Modern Warfare

before working on his own 1963 Pacification in Algeria (from which his 

less-revealing Counterinsurgency Warfare was then derived), does not cite 

Trinquier in either of his own works. The curious absence of reference by 

Galula to Roger Trinquier invites us to consider professional jealousy, personal differences, or a rule of silence (in view of possibly feared 

retribution) as reasons.

Regardless of the interpersonal or professional relationship of the 

two Frenchmen, it would be unreasonable to assert that Galula’s writing is 

more reflective of French military thinking about Algeria than Trinquier’s. 

Galula seems to take a less brazen stance about of the use of torture and 

terror for breaking into the cellular organization of the Algerian insurgency, but maybe Galula was just coyer. Note for instance, his comment, 

“Under the pressure of a press campaign against “tortures” (in my 

[Galula’s] view 90 percent nonsense and 10 percent truth), a special unit 

was created in the fall of 1957 under the name of D.O.P.”396F

397

In Pacification, Galula offers some basic laws, or principles, of 

counterinsurgency, to replace the classic ones, as follows:

1) The objective is the population

2) The support of the population is not spontaneous. It can be obtained only 

by a minority among the population that supports the counterinsurgent

3) A pro-counterinsurgent minority among the population will emerge, 

but only if the counterinsurgent is seen as the ultimate victor. An early 

success is necessary

4) Effort must be concentrated area-by-area. “Which side threatens 

the most, and which offers the most protection?”397F

398

Like Trinquier, Galula intones that the counterinsurgent should dominate 

the psychology of fear. Perhaps his advice about the importance of psychological operations is tainted by his uncertainty regarding exactly what 

messages he felt should be sent by those operations. It is not clear from 

the English-language literature what is meant by his principle number 4 in 

the above list. Did Galula imply, as Trinquier made explicit, that the counterinsurgent must present himself to the population as a more palpable and 

certain physical menace than the insurgent?
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The Algerian armed struggle is a nutritious episode for any student of 

irregular war. It should be approached cautiously and from several angles. 

The French did not do well. Either they lost because of something they did, 

or in spite of it. Only a few activities fall clearly into the latter category. These 

include use of the helicopter, careful inventorying of the population, the construction of border barriers, and the organization of neighborhood watch 

organizations. They also used systematic torture, terrorized much of the public, and failed to make real property ownership equitable.

Classic principles of military strategy (operational art) apply mightily in irregular war. In this regard, the French military commanders did 

what they could to lengthen distances to friendly units’ culminating points, 

to confound enemy lines of communication, and to contain the enemy’s 

movement options. The French Army had in fact learned from the debacle 

at Dien Bien Phu. Also, the significance of anonymity is a related highlight

of French adaptability; the French were attentive and industrious to reduce 

insurgent anonymity.

The French may have been overly respectful of international 

boundaries. The following, insightful text comes from Edgar O`Ballance’s 

The Algerian Insurrection:

The barriers on the Algerian frontiers were a far greater success than 

has been realized. Publicity was usually given to the few insurgents and 

small quantities of arms that got through, but less was said about the 

thousands of armed and trained ALN soldiers who were forced to remain in helpless idleness because they were physically unable to enter 

Algeria. ... Although claiming, and at times practicing, a right of pursuit 

over the frontiers, the French stuck to the rules ˗˗ ...Not enough is made 

of French restraint in this matter. Such an action (pursuit of the ALN 

across the national borders) might have caused international repercussions, but it would probably also have destroyed the conventional part 

of the ALN....398F

399

O`Ballance and others also point to Charles de Gaulle’s resolve to 

let Algeria go as an ultimately decisive ingredient in the French loss. 

Therefore, in light of four huge things: the immense operational impact of 

a simple physical innovation like the border barrier; failure to attack the 

enemy army concentrated in its nearby sanctuaries; inattention to land and 

tax inequity; and (perhaps the trump) that the senior political leader resolved to not win the war ˗˗ in light of these huge things, what relative 
107 Guerre d'Algérie

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weight should we assign to arguments about the efficacy of psychological 

operations aimed at parts of the population?

Another issue might be the overall strength of French counterinsurgency forces in-theater. French counterinsurgent troop numbers (It is not 

clear who-all to count, but probably European-France-originated troops, 

French Foreign Legionnaires, Francophone Algerian police, etc.) seem to 

have been at least several hundred thousand.

The Guerre d'Algérie didn’t only leave us positive lessons in military operational art along with negative lessons in overall 

counterinsurgency; it fueled left-leaning resistance philosophies, centered 

in France, that all but formalized late 20th century anti-Americanism.

Please see sections: 72, Land Strategy and Property Strategy; 125, Human Rights; 3, The Domesday Book; 91, Forts and Walls; 48, Grading 

the Social Compact; 105, Genocide Geography; 8, Linearity and The 

Line of Retreat; and 100, What the Foucault?



“You don't understand our mentality ˗˗ the French officer mentality. 

At first, we lose in Second World War. I don't say that you Americans 

win, but we lose. In Dien Bien Phu, we lose. In Algeria, we lose. In 

Indochina, we lose. But here, we don't lose. This piece of earth, we 

keep it. We will never lose it, never!”

Hubert in the movie,

Apocalypse Now (1979)399F

400

---------------

“This must be the place where they empty all the old hourglasses.”

Turkey Jackson in the movie,

Road to Morocco (1942)400F

401

---------------

“If the youngsters are offered an adventure of the same quality, 

of the same brutality, as that of the rebels, they will don the 

camouflage uniform of the paratrooper just as readily as the 

kachabia or the fellagha.”401F

402

Jean Lartéguy

The Praetorians


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442

-- French Algeria circa 1954-1962 --

These two maps were adapted from those found at two Internet sites. 

They were not further cited.402 F

403
443

Tai Shan is a great mountain

Section 108, Common Knowledge

It would be nice to know in which of the tens of thousands of counties in the world conditions exist such that anyone cares enough to send 

weapons or soldiers there. It would be even nicer to know if something 

can actually be done to improve the situation. It would be nicer still to 

know where we can win and where we can’t. Maybe ‘nice’ is the wrong 

word. Picking the right and wrong places to fight has got to be one of the 

essential talents for achieving military victory. To win at irregular war, it 

is good to start early and win fast, if that can be accomplished. Every place 

and every conflict is different, so having a logical way to prioritize the 

most likely places and contestants makes sense. I think that an unclassified, broadly participatory public effort would greatly help governments, 

especially the United States government, decide where in the world it 

should focus attention and preparation for the possible deployment and use 

of coercive force. For a nation drawn out into the world by interests and 

responsibilities, but subject to democratic conscience -- greater transparency about national geopolitical knowledge and ignorance makes both 

practical and philosophical sense, at least to me.

Few pieces of advice on how to win are more obvious than to 

choose the right places to go. Current processes and methods for determining the right and wrong places are not good enough. For one thing, we 

rarely determine which among all the analysts really make the best predictions over time. A public knowledge engine would provide one way to 

code the world according to the likelihood that a given locale will experience the presence of a foreign force or deserves that presence. Such an 

engine would also subject analysts to better evaluation of their descriptive 

and predictive ability.

A couple of decades ago, law enforcement agencies in the United 

States experienced an abrupt increase in accident and crime reporting from 

the general public that coincided with the explosion in cell phone ownership. While helping law enforcement, the phones and cameras have also

empowered the public to hold police more accountable for their behavior. 

How this movement of electronically-armed crowds affects prospects in 

some yet undefined irregular war depends. Like physical terrain, the 

leader who understands and exploits the potential will gain the advantage. 

Crowdsourcing and Neogeography are a couple of terms used for the phenomenon, but whatever we call the seemingly un-ruled part of the 
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444

phenomenon, the side that organizes the knowledge is the side most likely 

to gain a competitive advantage.

In the context of recent conflicts comes the story of the avocational 

descendants of British bird watchers and train watchers who began recording 

aircraft tail numbers. The tail watchers were able to trace aircraft they suspected were being used for rendition flights carrying captured terrorism 

suspects. Now flocks of tourists upload tens of thousands of images to the Internet to map whole cities in ill-matched and patchy detail. The fearful will 

highlight crowdsourcing’s lack of discipline, consistency and quality control -

- and ease of falsification. Valid worries, but for the optimistic the trend promises a massive and revealing new body and way of knowledge.

Neogeography is part of the particularization of power. Individuals

participate of their own volition in the production of public knowledge to 

the extent of their propensity to travel, click and access the Internet. If

anonymity can be preserved in the individual’s use of the Internet, neogeography will deliver new and extensive knowledge about distant places 

and subjects. Neogeography, crowdsourcing, or whatever name survives, 

is a milestone in the history of technological applications related directly 

to transparency.

The National Intelligence Strategy of the United States, at least as 

expressed publicly, is not a national strategy, but rather only a strategy for 

the US Intelligence Community (IC). That exclusivity entails a huge opportunity cost. The United States enjoys a knowledge creation and 

management advantage over most of world, but it is an advantage that exists outside its federal government. Rather than simply entice quality 

minds into collaboration with its intelligence services, the US knowledge 

strategy (about foreign areas and armed struggles) could become truly national. More global knowledge exists within nongovernment heads and 

institutions than it does within the IC. The underlying ethos of the American nation is not averse to supplying its public institutions (to include its 

government) with knowledge of the world, both to avoid the wrong fights 

and to win the right ones. An inclusive knowledge strategy could coax out 

the pent-up exploratory urge among the nation’s scholars; and would not 

require additional government organizational diagrams, formal requests 

for information, or new masonry and glass architecture. It might help create a common agenda of discovery. 

The American government could state a national knowledge vision, 

not just an intelligence community vision. That statement could challenge 

the intellectual complacency that typically grows within a government’s 
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intelligence apparatus by pitting descriptions and predictions made by nongovernment individuals against government employees in open competition. It could create stockholders and accountability outside the IC 

regarding the knowledge on which the government bases decisions about 

foreign aid, foreign conflicts, threats and interventions into foreign lands. 

It could engage huge numbers of scholars, students, tourists and business 

people in collaborative knowledge acquisition efforts.

The United States government especially should develop a national 

system for describing the world that involves volunteers outside of and 

unfettered by intelligence agencies and practices. Such a revolution would 

help the country win its irregular wars.

Please see sections: 110, Knowledge Gaps; 111, Knowledge Cultures; 120, 

Competition Social Media; 49, Territorial Scrutiny; 105, Genocide Geography; 66, GIS; 126, Particularization of Power; and 94, Poop.



Tai Shan is a great mountain because

it does not scorn the merest handful of dirt.

Chinese proverb

---------------

“Keynes’ theory [The General Theory of Employment, Interest and 

Money], in my opinion, was one of those very productive hypotheses 

-- a very ingenious one, a very intelligent one. It just turned out to be 

incompatible with the facts when it was put to the test.”403 F

404

Milton Friedman

---------------

“And new philosophy calls all in doubt,

The element of fire is quite put out;

The sun is lost, and the earth, and no man's wit,

Can well direct him where to look for it.”

John Donne,

Devotions upon Emergent Occasions

(1623)404F

405


446

Want another opinion?

Section 109, Your Staff Work Sucks

Pro tip: When briefing your review of other people’s analysis of a problem, their plans to solve it, or the approach they took toward analyzing and 

solving, avoid giving them the impression that you are thinking the title to this 

section. Not easy advice to implement and, if you’re the person who is supposed 

to give such a brief, this book will not help you solve that social skills test. On 

the other hand, identifying how much others’ staff work indeed sucks can be 

easy, since it often does, and so this section offers a few extra suggestions on that 

score. As it turns out, military staff processes are commonly unresponsive to the 

kinds of struggles this book contemplates. When well-practiced, a standard like 

the US Army’s Military Decision Making Process (MDMP) can suffice, but it 

rarely excels and can be easily abused. You may confront, therefore, an opportunity for improving some commander’s chances for winning. You might 

improve his or her decision-making process or that of the commander’s alterego, the staff. Or maybe that commander is you.

The common culprits of bad staff work in irregular war are:

•Poor mission statements

•Faulty logic

•Inadequate knowledge

•Some obstinate ego with too much influence

• Dilatoriness

•All of the above in a weak sauce

What to do about it: Act ahead of the problem. Create what the University of 

Foreign Military and Cultural Studies (actually it’s not a university, it’s a 

dozen geezers in a small building at Fort Leavenworth, but it’s good nevertheless) calls liberating structures. Liberating structures is hippie-speak for 

something that liberates a problem-solving or decision-making process from 

constraints not related to the problem itself, but rather to tangential factors, like 

our insistence on being idiots. For instance, a member of a staff or other decision support team might see a solution to a problem, but be constrained from 

expressing it out of fear of reprisal or simple lack of opinion space. A relevant 

liberating structure in such a case might be the use of a suggestion box or a 

secret ballot, the secret ballot being one of the most common and archetypically American liberating structures. There are many constraining phenomena 

and many potential liberators. The possibility of landing on a better plan or 
109 Your Staff Work Sucks

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solution to a problem, or avoiding a bad solution, could depend on your identifying the constraints and providing the liberating structures. The first step in 

this therapy is to recognize that a decision-making or planning weakness exists 

(step one -- admission). There almost surely is some little decision-making 

challenge (or you are not in my Army), so the next step is to take explicit, 

active measures to do something about it. At least try something that limits 

the potential for calamitous results(fail-safe mechanism), or add something to 

maybe uncover a propitious option which might otherwise have been missed. 

A few typical liberating structures:

• Add to the problem-solving team people who actually know something. 

Sound cruel? One of the most common barriers to solid decisions is the hubris

of thinking we already know enough. Especially in the military we think that 

if we know gobs about leading men, firing weapons, and talking on radios 

that we are empowered to achieve whatever is necessary in some foreign 

place, even though it is knowledge about the foreign place that is imperative. 

Ah, but you knew that. What are you doing about it?

• It is not just a question of raw knowledge. Add people with completely 

different backgrounds and perspectives. Yes, they are strange, annoying,

and maybe even disloyal because, not being like you, they might not like 

you. But they might see solutions that the commander or staff cannot. It 

may require an outsider to beat back the insidious and universal effects of 

groupthink. Maybe the outsider is a nerd, an artist, a Romanian, or 

even...a confessed philatelist.

• Go over your logic as though it were wrong. Critical thinking works. 

Most people cannot or do not think logically, and even Dr. Spock is illogical once he gets something stuck in his head. Try imagining the worst 

that could happen at decreasing intervals of time. The UFMCS calls this 

the ‘pre-mortem’ analysis. (Get it? Murphy does his pre-mortem analysis 

every day in every way and often moves straight to mortem.) I call it 

DOOM. Test the most basic logic first, like the fact that phenomena are 

not caused by factors that occur later in time. Simple, but it is like plugging the computer back in. No sense worrying over the Boolean logic 

before checking the onesies and twosies.

• Vocalize opportunity costs. Don’t just analyze what resources you might 

assign to accomplish something. Also be sure to consider what else you 

might have done with the same resources.

• Buy time. Lawyers don’t always delay legal process just to increase their 

opponents’ costs. They often want to buy enough time to make better decisions

and sometimes just to allow the fates to provide better opportunities. Medical 

doctors find this much harder to do. They are less fond of delay, sometimes 
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448

having to apply a more brutally liberating structure -- triage. Delay and triage 

are both tied to time, however. As a leader in an irregular war, you might prefer 

delay to triage. Timely, confident decision-making is good, but premature decision-making in the name of decisiveness is not so good. If a decision does not 

yet have to be made and a quick decision does not provide a palpable advantage, 

give yourself or the alter-ego the extra time to learn more. Still, as expressed 

often in this book, the counterinsurgent should act diligently because the insurgent is vulnerable early and decreasingly vulnerable over time. Time and 

distance are kissing cousins. You can buy time if you can shorten your cost 

distances and increase his. (Lengthen your ‘risk-distances’ and shorten his)

• Consider pace along with speed and scale. If the enemy’s decision cycle

takes him from concept through action to recovery within a few days, but 

your cycle leads through too much time-buying and takes three weeks, 

your operations may be necessarily ineffective for that reason alone. Take 

care not just for the quality of the planning contents but also for the pace 

of development of plans.

• Suspend rank. Especially at crunch time when you really really need 

something to work, it may be a good idea to march away from the psychological impositions of rank. The Colombian Army and Police in Medellín 

didn’t determine their winning plan for pacifying the vicious peripheral borough of Comuna 13 until a sergeant was given space to tell the staff how it 

should be done. Some commanders have been known to ask the opinion of 

the most junior member in a meeting first, figuring his or her thinking is 

least likely to have been eroded by the group’s preconceptions or to have 

suffered other impoundments of human relationships.

• Enjoy life. This can be difficult for busy, serious, applied leaders and it 

is a concept that can get out of hand. I’m not promoting dissipation or 

frivolity, but people are often more creative when they are enjoying themselves away from artificial stressors. Admittedly, with some folk it is the 

opposite -- epiphany follows a sharp booting of the ass, but for most of us 

the light goes on when the mind is at ease.

• Eat and drink, but don’t smoke. We are too quick to make our planning 

spaces off-limits to food and drink, often because of some dinky janitorial 

contract or because someone goes Sergeants Major apoplectic over a full 

trashcan. Too bad, because people talk over food. Better it be in front of 

them than them looking for it. Think about it -- if you go visit a civilian 

dignitary or host a foreigner, you consider the occasion valuable enough for 

food. Your staff work is, too. Eat, drink, and be merry. (Don’t overdo it.)

• Make people intellectually uncomfortable. This,too, can free ideasfrom constraints that are unrelated to a problem itself, but rather to the mental state of the 

participants -- perhaps their comfort with current ‘common knowledge’.
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449

There are many other liberating structures, so maybe your most profitable one will be the meta-liberating structure: to educate and train yourself in 

seeking and building them. Your irregular war may require an irregular staff 

approach. Courses in critical thinking, alternative decision processes, and 

geographic enlightenment abound. Find them. It is never too late; don’t be 

the obstinate one. Your staff work will still suck, but it will suck a little less.

Please see sections: 72, Land Strategy and Property Strategy; 76, Gender;

114, R.V. Jones; 68, Scale; 112, DIME and PEMISI; 38, Cultural Study for 

What?; 32, Land-use Planning; and 53, Hohfeldian Grievance Analysis.



“Man reflects before he acts, but not very much; he is still by nature 

intellectually impatient. No sooner does he apprehend, in whole or 

in part, the need of a new world, than, without further plans or estimates, he gets into a state of passionate aggressiveness and 

suspicion and sets about trying to change the present order. There 

and then, he sets about it, with anything that comes handy, violently, 

disastrously, making the discordances worse instead of better, and 

quarrelling bitterly with anyone who is not in complete accordance 

with his particular spasmodic conception of the change needful. He 

is unable to realize that when the time comes to act, that also is the 

time to think fast and hard. He will not think enough.”405 F

406

H. G. Wells in World Brain

---------------

“It is a vessel of fertilizer, and none may abide its strength.”

Fourth in the seven-step process 

that transforms plan into policy

---------------

“We mock what we do not understand.”

Austin Millbarge in the movie,

Spies Like Us (1985)406F

407

---------------

“Professor, everybody here has a very superficial idea of what the reality is”

Matias in the movie,

Elite Squad (2007)407 F

408


450

Testing ignorance, begging exploration

Section 110, Knowledge Gaps

How do you know if you know enough to win, especially about a 

foreign place? What you don’t know can be framed by the following question: Can an ignorant (not dumb, just unknowledgeable) staff person who 

finds him or herself planning a counterinsurgent, stability, humanitarian or 

insurgent operation in or to a foreign land find the requisite knowledge fast

enough? If the requisite knowledge is not contained in some easily retrievable dataset familiar to that person ˗˗ that is to say, their own skull, at their 

keyboard fingertips (public search engines count), in the head of someone 

in the same building, someone who can be readily called or emailed, or in 

a library across the street, then you can presume that the institution is ignorant. We’ll get to what the requisite knowledge is later below.

It is hard to say just what the time-to-knowledge standard should 

be. It can’t be so much time as to harmfully delay or misdirect the planning 

process. Let’s say for argument’s sake that a time-to-knowledge standard 

of fifteen minutes initial investment on the part of the staff officer and no 

more than a 48-hour wait for a key set of facts is acceptable. Obviously 

this supposes some urgency; we might have lots more time if we can guess 

well enough in advance where we might be going in the future.

This section offers a way to test relevant ignorance. It is specifically 

not about the kind of information sought and processed by secret intelligence 

agencies in relation to conventional warfare and international confrontations. In other words, this comment is not about knowledge gained by a 

remote sensor or by activities normally considered the purview of spies. 

That secret knowledge is valuable, but all of the knowledge contemplated 

by this section is public or nearly so. Some of that other, secret knowledge 

might be extremely useful. I’m just not talking about it here. We’ll use a 

few test subjects to see if we (our institution represented in this case by some 

smart but ignorant researcher) know enough about a foreign place so that we 

won’t make so many mistakes at the beginning of an operation that we can’t 

recover from them.

The process of ignorance testing includes making a map (GIS-based, 

of course) that shows the world according to county-level administrative units

and displays relative ignorance about those counties based on our test subjects’

ability to answer a representative set of questions about them. The questions 

are tracking items -- questions considered representative of the kinds of 

knowledge necessary in order to succeed in operations. The list of questions 
110 Knowledge Gaps

451

is not really a list of the most needed things to know about a specific county or 

a comprehensive list of what knowledge to seek. It is not a requirements list.

Since each place and every mission is unique, there exist thousands 

of questions that can and should be answered about a given place. Inability 

of our people to timely answer the tracking questions, however, will warn 

us of an institutional knowledge gap. You can take the test yourself. Inability to answer the questions is the indicator that tells you your institution 

doesn’t know enough about a particular place. It is not that the questions 

on the test are the things you have to know, but rather that if you’re ignorant of these things, you’re probably also ignorant about whatever it is you 

really would need to know.

You will do well to use the county (county, not country) as the level 

of geographic, territorial resolution for your test, but it could be a higher 

resolution, like the township. Almost every country in the world has some 

territorial unit similar in scale to the county. From a base map of a country 

of interest (showing its counties), pick a county for the test. Choose one 

that might be of future security interest, then give the name and location to 

your test subject. Ask him or her to answer all twenty-five of the following 

questions as soon as he or she can and note how long it takes to get a good 

answer. You might want to know the right answers in advance. That might 

make grading the test a little easier, but it is not necessary.

1. Where is the most visited tourist attraction inside the county?

2. What is the residents’ most frequent destination outside their county?

3. What families own the most valuable real estate in the county?

4. What is the name and contact information for a person who would be willing to help us and can fluently speak the language dominant in the county?

5. What three regular open-air public events draw the most attendance 

in the county?

6. On what day of the year is a thirty-year-old man most likely to visit his 

mother if she lives in the county (other than her birthday)?

7. Where is the nearest jail that houses more than fifty prisoners?

8. Where are the most-used morguesin the county?

9. What is the name and contact information for a person willing to help 

you, who has stood in the county and who personally knows three persons 

who live in the county?

10. What are the words to the most common three prayers said in the county?

11. What is the second most popular flag design in the county?

12. What is the second most smuggled thing that goes to, through or 

from the county?

13. From what two health issues would a twelve-year-old boy in the county 

most likely suffer?
110 Knowledge Gaps

452

14. What are the most accessed information media in the county?

15. What are the prices of an egg and of a AA battery in the county?

16.What is the walking distance for a person of modal income between their

most frequently used kitchen and the nearest source of potable water?

17. What groups or persons are the likely butt of jokes in the county?

18. What does a man living in the northeastern quadrant of the county use 

to wipe himself after evacuating his bowels?

19. Where and when might a group of six housewives meet, other than 

at church?

20. Where would a 22-year-old unmarried male resident go to have sex?

21. What is the most common nickname for a pistol in the county?

22. To whom is a forty year-old man with a family likely to owe a financial 

debt or tax?

23. Exactly how many and what size motorcycles are ridden in the county?

24. Exactly how many cell phone towers are there the county, where, to 

whom do they belong, and whose land do they sit on?

25. How does an adult male resident most likely obtain a firearm, and where?

If you had the time and money to repeat this test over and over, 

pretty soon you could make a map showing all the counties of which 

you’re effectively ignorant. More than likely you’ll find out that you don’t 

need to invest much time or money in the ignorance audit. Your institution 

probably can answer only a very few of the questions for very few counties 

anywhere. If you’re an insurgent, you or your friends live there, so you 

not only know the answers to the tracking questions, you know the people 

who have organized around related grievances.

For any counties you, incredibly, seem to know well, you might 

zoom the test down further to the level of townships. Next you might

physically go or send someone to a township or two just to review that the 

answers were right. (This means it would be smart for you to pick touristically sweet foreign places for the test. After all, except for a few places 

in the world, your institution is equally as ignorant of the nice places as it 

is of the not-so-nice-places. So, if there is any tourist attraction of merit, 

at least you’ll be able to stay in a nice hotel.)

If your test subjects can answer the bulk of the twenty-three questions well and quickly, that’s good. The tracking questions, however, are 

mostly geographic inventory questions. They don’t go right at social conflicts -- to the interrelationships, grievances, agents, and objects of desire. 

An idea for that kind of analysis is covered in Section 53, Hohfeldian 

Grievance Analysis. This section assumes that you should not put faith in 
110 Knowledge Gaps

453

an analysis of conflict done by a person or office that can’t answer the most 

basic geographic inventory questions.

Don’t worry about the test subjects or institution getting your list 

in advance and cheating on the test. There are tens of thousands of counties out there and you’ll pick the test county. If your test subjects were to 

build some system that let them quickly derive answers about whatever 

county you throw at them, you’re in great shape. The above text downplays 

the substantive importance of the individual questions a bit. They were 

selected to be representative and not specific, but, depending on the mission, answers to most of them would be operationally useful as to many 

foreign locales. As your map of foreign counties gets filled in, it can be 

correlated directly to maps of counties deemed of strategic importance, or 

that have been spotted as potential foci of human conflict.

Please see sections: 66, GIS; 46, Taxation and Debt; 47, Why the County; 108, 

Common Knowledge; 112, DIME and PEMISI; 38, Cultural Study for What?;

32, Land Use Planning; and 53, Hohfeldian Grievance Analysis.



The society which scorns excellence in plumbing and tolerates shoddiness 

in philosophy will have neither pipes nor theories that hold water.408 F

409

Thucydides

---------------

“My mind is a raging torrent, flooded with rivulets of 

thought cascading into a waterfall of creative alternatives.”

Hedley Lamarr in the movie,

Blazing Saddles409F

410

---------------

The desert is so hot you can collapse, and then the buzzards circle overhead, but no one rescues you because it’s 

real life and not the movies.4 10F

411

Marjorie Weinman Sharmat,

Gila Monsters Meet You at the Airport

---------------

‘Facts are stubborn things.’

John Adams and others41 1F

412


454

Transgressing the boundaries

Section 111, Knowledge Cultures

The kinds of information that people seek, the way they sort through 

and arrange it, and the way they present findings and opinions are all subject 

to big cultural and small institutional habits, rivalries and historical divergences. Limitations in knowledge cultures can get in the way of your 

winning, and breaking out of those cultural constraints might help you win. 

This topic could drag on forever, so in this section are just a few cherrypicked items you might be able to use to inspect the agility of your personal 

and your organization’s thinking about your irregular war.

A 2010 paper titled Fixing Intelligence from the Center for a New 

American Security starts with the unfortunate sentence, “Eight years into the 

war in Afghanistan, the US intelligence community is only marginally relevant to our overall strategy.”412 F

413 There are reasons why this might be true, 

as well as a few fixable habits, as mentioned below.

Secret versus not secret. Because some forms of secret intelligence are so 

valuable and powerful, everything that can earn a secret label takes on a 

degree of respect, even while the document marked as secret may be 

worthless or doesn’t need to be so marked. Along with secret-labeled documents come levels of access and exclusive geographies ˗˗ rooms, 

buildings and bandwidth that are for ‘cleared’ persons only. The abbreviation OSINT stands for Open Source Intelligence and for a while was a 

rallying cry for making available more of the vast body of world 

knowledge onto which nobody had yet stuck a secrecy label. OSINT ultimately became almost synonymous with having secrecy-accredited 

analysts going onto the open Internet to find information. Today, decades 

after recognition of the Internet and GIS knowledge revolutions, the formal, unclassified knowledge function supporting the United States 

military remains in its infancy.

Government versus academe. When the big American intelligence organizations were born in the late 1940s, line and block diagrams (organizational charts) 

with thousands of government positions were created, most requiring some kind 

of secrecy accreditation. The result was a distancing of American scholars from 

government knowledge spaces, conversations, decisions, and consequently and 

worst of all, trust.

Organigrams versus ideas. Inside government buildings, knowledge is often 

constrained by organizational format ˗˗ pay and supervision hierarchies, budget 
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455

flows, and room designs. Maddening or hilarious compartmentalization occurs 

that leaves holes in the known world. For instance, some years ago it was decided 

that the Department of Defense would take the lead in fighting illicit drugs. It 

seemed logical to give the cocaine knowledge portfolio to a team focused on Colombia. The heroin problem went to some Central Asia experts, since that is where 

most of the world’s heroinwas grown. However, because none of the Central Asia 

experts spoke Spanish (and Colombia wasn’t in ‘their’ part of the world) they ignored Colombian heroin poppy production, which at the time satisfied much of the 

US demand). Complete knowledge about the heroin trade going to the US stumbled for a couple of years because of the line and block diagram. The line and 

block diagram, with its compartments and hierarchical levels of authority, is useful 

for organizing military units. It is not so good for organizing knowledge, but because the organizational culture given to ‘intelligence’ was a military inheritance, 

the American government knowledge community got a model that has caused

some thought problems.

Personal loyalty versus intellectual conviction. Imposition of military organizational design on knowledge processing has secondary effects. For 

instance, it is traditional military ethos that subordinates support the decisions of military leaders in the hierarchical structure ˗˗ the chain of 

command. It is an ethic that many of us deem noble and necessary. That 

sense of ‘getting behind the decision’, can become a loyalty test expected 

not just for decisions, but for analyses. This can be an unfortunate ethos 

for a knowledge organization, especially when the best knowledge may 

have little correlation to administrative rank.

‘Strategic’ versus ‘operational’. This book mentions a few higher level 

strategy questions, but it is mostly about movement and placement on the 

battlefield, identifying and getting close to an enemy so that he can be dispatched, and dispatched in such a way as to not create more enemies.

What is the ‘operational art’ gold standard for such knowledge? It 

might be something like placing a sniper at a safe shooting distance from a 

dangerous enemy leader at the moment when that enemy is relieving himself. 

At the not-so-graphic world of ‘strategic intelligence’ the gold standard for an 

analyst might be to have a comment placed in a briefing folder that a senior 

leader might read. Blah. A divergence of knowledge glories drags a lot of 

mental resources away from military operational art and toward an expansive 

frame of subjects and satisfactions that, while often of the highest importance, 

are often irrelevant or even frivolous. Many points can be gained for a strategic analyst who has made a well-argued prediction regarding an upcoming 
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foreign presidential election. Not useless effort, it is the kind of thing that absorbs hundreds of work hours even though a wait of a few days will give the 

definitive answer without any analysis at all. To win at irregular wars, more 

glory needs to be given to those who derive knowledge tied to operational 

equations -- to the essence of strategy -- to the classic military questions. To 

be fair, in the American case, providing the knowledge to kill a top leader of 

al Qaeda does not go unappreciated.

Post-structuralist versus others. A current fashion in academe favors a 

freestyle sorting of underdogs and overdogs, the former being good and the 

latter bad. Assignment of who or what is on the overdog or underdog sides 

of the knowledge virtue ledger is a constantly changing mix of coded reaffirmations. According to what appears to be mainstream academe, the words

worker, resistance, anti-globalist, and progressive fall on one side, and neoliberal, colonialist, realist, or positivist fall on the other. In a current 

fashion of social sciences, thinking must be politically competitive if it is to 

be recognized as scholarly, and research is only ethical if done in service to 

one side of that competition, the progressive side. This competitive reordering of academic life is having a deleterious effect on the production of 

knowledge in general. Although by no means universal, the tendency in 

academic circles has been to reject the whole notion of objectivity in favor 

of competitive intent, a moral infusion that is often no more clearly expressed than as resistance to injustice.

The cultures of academe are subdivided into ‘disciplines’ but the disciplines and discipline clusters vary country to country. Below is a three 

column chart with four academic disciplines in each column.

Medicine Mathematics Philosophy

Law Geography Sociology

Engineering History Anthropology

Accounting Biology Theatre

Agriculture Geology PoliSci

It is unfair to use the above selection as a representative sample of 

the whole universe of disciplines and it is a shame to leave out what are some 

of the most useful -- like languages, racing, physics, etc. But that doesn’t 

matter, because the chart is only intended here to help make a single criticism, in this case directed at the US Army. The criticism is as follows: 

Throughout history and across all continents, armies have given special insignia, extra pay, and designated whole corps in accordance with the 

disciplines listed in the left-hand column. That is because they are so necessary for the efficient and effective conduct of military operations. Those 
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457

disciplines are in turn obsessed with the disciplines in the middle column, 

because the middle column disciplines are the food groups for the meals the 

disciplines in the left-hand column are paid to prepare.

Each academic discipline has its own habits, methods, vocabulary 

and ethic. Like the various professions to which they are matched, they have 

their own cultures. The disciplines on the left-hand side of the chart are 

generally more ‘empirical’ than those on the right, but members of the disciplines in the left column are often enamored of those on the far-right, 

knowing that all knowledge is grist to their mills. A doctor and his lawyer 

wife might go out to the theater, enjoy it immensely and learn something 

useful and enlightening. They would be better off not to suppose that going 

to the theatre is a substitute for continuing professional education in their 

disciplines. That, however, is what the United States Army may be doing in 

its relationship to the various disciplines in American academe. In its approach to insurgent war, Army education dissipated with the disciplines on 

the right-hand side of the chart, perhaps failing to keep up with those toward 

the left. Below is an incomplete list of institutional knowledge sub-cultures,

with descriptions of what may distinguish them in terms of how they approach knowledge of armed groups and armed conflict.

Military. Military intelligence is based on requirements, collection plans and 

templates. Intelligence people the world over are enamored of a thing called the 

Intelligence Cycle, which most of them think is an actual thing spewed full blown 

from the head of Bismarck, but that actually was invented sometime in the early 

20th century as a simplified scientific method that the militarymight follow. It has 

many versions, usually depicted in the shape of a wheel turning clockwise and including planning, collecting, processing, and dissemination. It often has other 

ingredients and flourishes like ‘feedback’ and ‘operational security’. The problem 

of operational security indeed distinguishes the military knowledge method from 

academic in that secrecy tends to reduce the feedback. Unlike police work, the 

military mind usually focuses on a ‘unit’rather than an individual, is not interested 

in proving guilt and is usually forward-looking in time from the occurrence of 

events, rather than backward. The military habit does not look to explain why an 

event happened as much as where the next event will take place.

Police. Police seek and follow clues, collect evidence, pursue suspects and help 

prosecutors build cases. They mostly look backward in time from the commission of a criminal event. That is not to say they don’t try to anticipate a suspect’s 

next moves or try to figure out where he will be, but their investigative timeframe is more about what happened than what is going to happen.
111 Knowledge Cultures

458

Business. Businessmen look for markets, costs, products and prices. They 

keep accounts and measure the success of a knowledge process in profit.

Medicine. Doctors diagnose from the presence and absence of symptoms. 

They seek cures. They seek clusters of medical events and try to correlate the 

clusters to other things, like vectors or habits. They make and keep ‘records’

and individual histories. Most doctors work at the scale of the individual human body, although there are some that are interested in epidemiological facts. 

They measure the success of the knowledge process in cures.

Law. Lawyers create theories about conditions, events, statutes, cases, motivations, and foibles. Everything is digested for the purpose of predicting what a 

judge or jury of some kind might do to their client. They like to write briefs and 

cross-examine witnesses. Their work is constrained by jurisdictions and court 

dates. They measure success of the knowledge process in dollars, victories, settlements, convictions, and so on. Legal professional ethic rests on privileged and 

protected communications with clients and on a duty to represent aggressively. 

They often lie.

Sports Betting. Bookies like to find or create environments in which the outcomes they expect are a little more likely than the outcomes other people expect. 

They depend on the perception of random chance, on someone else’s undeserved 

arrogance regarding the future, and on insider knowledge.

Espionage. Spies look for secrets, so they look in hiding places and try to 

endear themselves to people with special knowledge. They lie and send code.

Greek Math. All dead Greeks knew syllogisms; all Greeks eat souvlaki; 

therefore souvlaki killed logic. OK, not a valid syllogism, but there are a 

number of classical rules for sorting truths from non-truths, and a larger 

number of logical fallacies that are often used purposefully to deceive.

Geek Math. I wish I knew more about what they’re up to. There are some 

promising signs, however. They talk about not ‘polluting the namescape,’ 

which seems to mean not including categories in coding language that cause 

inefficiencies and misdirection. Another, ‘explosion of false,’ is a take on 

the old logic warning that two opposing ideas, if both taken as the truth, can 

cause almost any stupid thing to be provable as true.

Old academe. Scholars form testable hypotheses and worry over induction, deduction, interpolation, extrapolation, and in the transparency and replicability of 

data and results. For them, the universe can be understood and explained. Many, 

especially in the social sciences, don’t bother with any of that.
111 Knowledge Cultures

459

Your efforts will be better served if you do not put too many chips in 

any one of these knowledge culture-baskets, or reject any out-of-hand. A multidiscipline, multi-institutional, multi-profession approach is best. At the heart

of your irregular war thinking, however, put history, geography, engineering 

accounting and law. Fortunately, you are competing against other humans. 

You don’t have to be faster than the bear, just faster than some other proud 

dope. If your enemy contemplates the world principally from within the vocabularies of sociology, anthropology and philosophy, he is uncompetitive.

Please see sections: 68, Scale; 38, Cultural Study for What?; 48, Grading 

the Social Compact; 36, The Denver Broncos; 75, The Price of Real Estate, and Tourism; 33, Engineers and Built Environment; 144, What the 

Pirate Said to Alexander; and 114, R.V. Jones



“The nation that will insist on drawing a broad line of demarcation 

between the fighting man and the thinking man is liable to find its 

fighting done by fools and its thinking done by cowards.”41 3F

414

William Francis Butler

Charles George Gordon

---------------

“I don’t care much for facts, am not much interested in them, 

you can’t stand a fact up, you’ve got to prop it up, and when 

you move to one side a little and look at it from that angle, it’s 

not thick enough to cast a shadow in that direction.”414 F

415

William Faulkner

---------------

“...the public gives more weight to credentials than it should when 

an academic is opining outside of the area of his expertise.”4 15F

416

Richard Posner quoted by Alan Sokal

---------------

Not Sure: What are these electrolytes? Do you even know? 

Secretary of State: They're what they use to make Brawndo! 

Not Sure: But why do they use them to make Brawndo? 

Secretary of Defense: Because Brawndo's got electrolytes.

from the documentary

Idiocracy (2006)416F

417


460

It matters how ideas are organized

Section 112, DIME and PMESII

It matters how knowledge is organized. Naming of relevant aspects of 

the competitive environment is one of the basic elements of strategy-making. 

We need reasons for placing something in a category and a purpose for the category. Maybe we choose categories so that other people can easily find 

information, or in order to make comparisons of attributes. In other words, we 

might classify the shoes we sell as pumps, loafers, high-heels, and oxfords; and 

then subcategorize them according to color and size; and then keep track of the 

number we sell and the net income by month. We can later go back and find out 

what the trends and preferences are, so as to better provide what consumers want 

and thereby make more money. It will be rewarding for us to get our categories 

right or, as a result of not naming things aptly, we won’t make as much money 

as we might have made. In other situations maybe we want to name categories 

to help us keep track of common roots and relationships, like a genealogy, or 

taxonomy of flora. We might pick our categories just because they can help reduce something complicated that we are studying. This can be especially 

dangerous. We can always make simplifying categories of the complex, even if

the complex phenomena being studied really cannot be broken into pieces. That 

is, we can do things with our language that can’t be done in reality. Our categories are a form of imagination. We can easily imagine things as separate that are 

not, to later convince ourselves that they are. (You’ve noticed I tend to put things 

in lists of 3, 7, or 12 parts. I do that because it amuses me. How authoritative 

does my amusement make the categories?)

There are ways to test if we have chosen categories well. For instance, if different shelf stockers independently place the store’s shoes in 

the intended categories, it is a sign that the categories are effective descriptors; that the categories have an efficient relationship to the common 

language and to the culture of shoe styles or at least that the employees 

have been well trained as to the language of the store. Likewise, if sales 

staff can go find what style shoes they’re looking for (just as the shelf 

stockers had intended) it’s a good sign that the shoe categories are reasonable and meeting a purpose. If a sales person can explain the general nature 

of a shoe model to a customer (or the customer to the sales person) without 

the model being in front of them and the sales person can then go retrieve 

something that meets the description, the whole experience verifies a copacetic categorizing.
112 DIME and PMESII

461

Here are twelve ways to organize knowledge:

1. The alphabet. Always a favorite, translations can be troublesome.

2. Google or other google-type engines. PostgreSQL® is a thought.

3. Geographically -- It's simple, understandable, comprehensive, hierarchical 

and categorically unique. This might be called a GIS.

4. Chronologically. This is the way some file systems are done, and can be

especially powerful if embedded in a GIS, as in number 3, above.

5. The system of knowledge established by the disciplines accepted in American universities. There are some historical and practical reasons for separating 

Law from Engineering, for instance.

6. According to Who, What, Where, When, Why, and How.

7. For complicated conflict situations, maybe use something like what issuggested in Section 53, Hohfeldian Grievance Analysis.

8. According to the names of persons associated with an idea, responsible for 

something, or capable of providing something.

9. According to type of knowledge. For instance, you might try:

A. Foundational knowledge (simple facts about places);

B. Events knowledge (things happening in near time);

C. Reasoned knowledge (analyses or observations of correlations, anomalies, 

patterns, trends, systems, complaints, demands, consequences); and,

D. Knowledge about knowledge (metadata?) (How to get knowledge, 

whether or not to use PMESII, how to impart knowledge, the difference 

between epistemology and heuristics, and so on).

10. According to the manner in which the knowledge is gained or to be gained, 

i.e., remote satellite sensors, surreptitious human collectors, public domain 

publications, diplomatic missions, academic expeditions...

11. According to the categories in the CIA World Factbook: Introduction, 

Geography, People and Society, Government, Economy, Energy, Communications, Transportation, Military, Transnational Issues.

12. If the desire is to organize knowledge about a society in order to determine how susceptible it might be to organized coercion, or to expose 

areas for potential improvement, or to gain competitive advantage generally, then I might organize knowledge about a place as suggested by 

Section 48, Grading the Social Compact; or, in more ominous conditions, Section 105, Genocide Geography.

There are others, and any or all of the above can be mixed. The line 

and block diagram can be a real thought killer, but it can also establish hierarchy, responsibility, accountability, or leadership. It can help trace and 

correlate attributes. We know, however, that Max Weber, attributed inventor 
112 DIME and PMESII

462

of the thing, is frying in the same cubicle in hell as that fellow who invented 

the cloth office workspace divider.

Decision-making can suffer when we use buzzwords or acronyms to 

organize knowledge. There exists a thing called PMESII, for instance, which 

stands for Political, Military, Economic, Social, Information, and Infrastructure. PMESII hardly passes any of the tests for good categories suggested at 

the top of this section. Many of the themes covered by other sections of this 

book are hard to place in PMESII, which is oriented toward a nation-state level 

of considerations. If ‘country’ isindeed the appropriate scale for what you are 

trying to do, then why not just use the organization in the World Factbook? 

CIA has famously cornered the market. A lot of data has been fed into their 

categories, which are used by umpty-ump people around the world. Another 

mnemonic, DIME, stands for Diplomatic, Informational, Military and Economic. Maybe it serves to remind senior military officers in charge of the ‘M’ 

to not forget that there are other kinds of power that might be more useful and 

appropriate in a given situation. ‘Who holds a hammer sees nails everywhere’. 

Let’s say you wish to organize and summarize the most consequential 

knowledge for the purposes of briefing decision-makers about a regional irregular 

war. Instead of PMESII, I suggest something more as follows:

1. Identities, organizations and leaders

2. Territories and ranges

3. Covet geography, means of production and wealth

4. Grievances and conflicts

5. Strengths and weaknesses

6. Transportation and distances

7. Symbols and Narration.

8. Communication infrastructure

...or as follows: 

1. What is the foreign behavior that is intolerable to us?

2. What identities perpetrated, perpetrate or might perpetrate the intolerable?

3. What do the perpetrators want?

4. What is the habit of their actions?

5. How much friendly strength can be projected and afforded?

6. What are likely unintended effects of action we might take?

You love laundry lists, but feel bad that neither has just seven entries. Still, both of 

the lists get to what’s consequential faster than PMESII does. Both lists are expanded for better explanation in Appendix Miscellaneous Lists, List F (pages 589 

and 590). They also have a direct relationship to effects-measurement suggestions 

made in sections 69 and 70, which makes sense, eh. 
112 DIME and PMESII

463

Our concerns might focus more sharply on sources of potential power. Instead of 

DIME, I suggest the following categories, which are appropriate to any identity, 

not just countries. Competitive identities draw on some capacity to:

a. Create destructive mass. The capacity to make lead bullets or nuclear 

warheads, or form an army is potential for competitive coercion. 

b. Deliver destructive mass. Having a nuclear warhead (or a trained gang 

or army) are limited or latent competitive advantages unless they can be 

moved. A warhead needs a rocket and an infantry company seventeen 

trucks. Include here the potential to change cost-distances.

c. Create convincing ideas. Include here the capacity, through charisma and 

intellect perhaps, of a person to represent a potential ostensibly belonging to 

others, that is, to be the agent (and especially the exclusive agent) of others’ 

potentials. Also include guile in this category, as well as the capacity to 

learn (to imagine, discover and comprehend what, throughout the environment, weighs upon the competition, competitors and their options).

d. Transmit or disseminate convincing ideas. Ideas communicated 

(those which reach intended audiences) are of greater potential strength 

than ideas that remain in a neuronic bottle. The capacity to deliver ideas 

is a logistical proposition akin to the delivery of mass. Include here the 

ability to change the perception of risk distances.

If you organize your thnking with something like PMESII you are already 

hamstringing your strategy-making. (Imagine your brain had a pulled hamstring.)

Below is a paragraph taken from the Globalsecurity.org website.

There is a debate underway to rescind the use of ASCOPE (area, structure, 

capabilities, organization, people, events) as the methodology to understand 

the civilian considerations, or ‘C’ in METT-TC. Some argue that PMESII-PT 

(political, military, economic, social, information, infrastructure, physical environment and time), is sufficient to explain both operational variables as well 

as mission variables of METT-TC, or at least the civil considerations.

Rather than take a side in that argument, I suggest that the very existence of the 

above paragraph is evidence enough that something is wrong. There are other approaches, as suggested throughout this book. As a minimum, the classifications 

you use to describe a place and problem should be appropriate to the scale of the 

geography, reflect what it is you are trying to achieve, and dovetail with your plan 

to measure progress and victory.

One famous theoretical schema is the trilogy ‘ends, ways, means’ as in, 

‘the objectives, the resources needed, and the ways the resources will be used to 

achieve the objectives’. It’s an appreciable little list, widely accepted as composing 

the elements of strategy-making. As such, however, it is incomplete. For a better 

list of the elements of strategy-making, please see Section 115. 
112 DIME and PMESII

464

Please see sections: 66, GIS; 53, Hohfeldian Grievance Analysis; 69, Measuring Effects of Actions on Enemies; 70, Measuring Effects of Actions on 

Structure; 105, Genocide Geography; 48, Grading the Social Compact; 115, 

Physics of Strategy; and 68, Scale.



Classification is not a matter of identifying “essences,” as is widely believed. It is simply a reflection of social convenience and necessity--and 

different necessities are always producing different classifications.

There are few complexities about classification at the level of dogs and 

cats, but when it comes to classification at high levels of abstraction--for 

example, those describing conduct, social institutions, philosophical and 

moral problems--serious difficulties occur.417 F

418

S.I. Hayakawa

Language in Thought and Action

----------------

[Animal types can be divided into...] “(a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c)trained, (d) suckling piglets, (e) mermaids, (f) mythical, (g) dogs on 

the loose, (h) included in this classification, (i) that twirl around as if they were 

crazy, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camel-hair brush, (1) et cetera, 

(m) that just broke the vase, (n) that from a distance look like flies.” 418 F

419

Jorge Louis Borges

attributing to Franz Kuhn

attributing to the ancient Chinese

----------------

"For the time will come when people will not put up with sound doctrine. 

Instead, to suit their own desires, they will gather around them a great number 

of teachers to say what their itching ears want to hear."

2 Timothy 4:3-4

----------------

“Are we to proceed from things to sensations and thought, or are we to proceed from thought and sensation to things?”

Vlady Lenin419 F

420


465

Six is one/brazilianth of a China

Section 113, Unrestricted Chi Whiz

I filched the vital essence for this section from Tim Thomas’ The 

Dragon’s Quantum Leap, which is a primer on the growth of China’s power as 

illuminated by discussion of the nature (as a cultural as well as strategy matter) 

of the Chinese application of power. Extracting two concepts from Mr. Thomas’ 

work – one being shi or sometimes shih (pronounced like the word ‘sure’, and I 

know what you’re thinking: Why the heck not spell it that way, eh? Call the 

Academy.), and the other being unrestricted warfare.

Mr. Thomas did us orientally uneducated a favor by expounding upon 

shi in an appendix that covers the wide range of meanings, interpretations and 

translations of this central Chinese military concept. Four verbal tones and dozens of calligraphic characters lend mischief to translations, but Mr. Thomas 

tightens our focus to “energy, power, momentum, and strategic advantage.”420 F

421 

Ultimately, the translation we want is strategic advantage. Shi, however, is also 

confusable with the word chi or ch’i, which is a ubiquitous and consummately 

Chinese concept regarding life force or vital energy. Interestingly, chi can also 

mean surprise or the unorthodox. Chinese military strategists seek the generation of shi, that is, advantage, through the proper timing and balancing of chi

actions with the force of more orthodox, cheng, actions. I guess the cheng/chi

balance is like that of the ying/yang, but for the warrior.

Unrestricted warfare, as translated from the Chinese, is a much newer 

thing than either chi or shi, or maybe not. Whereas Western English language 

histories might use the term ‘unrestricted warfare’ to denote exceeded moral 

or legal boundaries, as in ‘unrestricted naval warfare’ (we think you are smuggling war supplies so we are going to sink the Lusitania), Chinese usage has a 

more comprehensive character. By unrestricted warfare (maybe also referring 

to it as cocktail warfare) the Chinese strategist intends a creative and unfettered 

mixture of any possibly contributory methods and occasions, military and nonmilitary, that might help generate strategic advantage in time and space. Unrestricted strategy implies a willingness to combine doctrine with innovation 

for creating strategic advantage -- shi. It is an attitude that supposes some orthodoxy, cheng, but seeks the creative ingredient of the unorthodox, the chi.

氣 chi or ch'i

势 shi or shih

Chi, an ingredient of shih is in the section title because chi can be considered as surprise, creativity, or deception, and anyway is often confused in 
113 Unrestricted Chi Whiz

466

translations with shi or shih. It made more sense to use chi in the title since the 

generation of shi through a strategy of unrestricted warfare presupposes the 

admixture in novel combinations of some measure of chi. And, of course, chi

went better with whiz so as to intimate gee whiz and cheese whiz.

The French say of Chinese strategic philosophy that it has a je ne se quoi, 

but they don’t know what it is. Whatever it is, it is not magic, so why bother 

featuring a section on shi and chi in a book on irregular war?: Because the Chinese tend toward multi-purposed application of diverse activity. Predisposed to 

creating strategic advantage incrementally, and in possession of immense athletic and technical potential, they are well-positioned to counter the efforts of 

other nations’ SOF. China will probably never see its army clutched in glorious, 

diesel-rich tank battle against the Fifth Cavalry, but we can reasonably predict 

quite a few smaller, surreptitious and deadly encounters. Unrestricted and irregular overlap; both embrace the incremental but simultaneous creation of shi.

Let’s recombine the forms of struggle, Comrade.

Please see sections: 6, The Operational Equation; 116, Songs of Chu; 

141, Thirty-six Stratagems; 101, Magical Realism; 17, Keeping Secrets; 

68, Scale; 10, Decisive Battle; and 142, Conflict Geography.



Axe Cop: We are going to need to turn Wexter into a 

dragon so that he can fly us to Zombie World.

Sockarang: But he is already a giant lizard that can fly.

Axe Cop: To get to Zombie World, you need a dragon 

with rocket wings. Plus, dragons are awesome.

from the webcomic

Axe Cop 421F

422

---------------

When all the land is in ruin,

and Burnination has forsaken the countryside,

only one guy will remain....

My money's on 

TROGDOOOR...TROGDOOOR,

and then Trogdor comes in the NIIIIIght.

from the webcomic

Homestar Runner 422F

423


467

If you don’t get the joke, step away from the plans

Section 114, R. V. Jones

Winston Churchill asked young physicist Reginald Victor Jones to 

defeat German radar and to do so fast. Reggie quickly invented chaff, something we now consider commonplace and recieved, rather than something 

that was actually invented by a local nerd. Reggie understood that 

knowledge about aircraft locations went into the radar operator’s head by 

way of a small green tinted screen, and that all it took to ruin the radar was 

to confuse the operator regarding that little image. Reggie was a genius and 

one of the winners of World War II. Besides defeating German radar, he 

convinced the otherwise disbelieving paragons of the British scientific establishment that the Germans had some secret programs ongoing that 

included accurate long-range rocketry. He was a central author of the deception plans protecting the invasion of Europe. He didn’t write much (The 

Wizard War: British Scientific Intelligence, 1939-1945), but in a series of 

brief, obscure lectures from 1957 to 1975, Professor Jones expressed the nature of his strategic thinking. The titles of two of those lectures bespeak the 

odd nature of his message: ‘The theory of practical joking ˗˗ its relevance to 

physics’ and ‘irony as a phenomenon in natural science and human affairs’.

As an incorrigible prankster, Jones thought it therapeutic to trick 

his physicist colleagues into plunging their telephones into buckets of water (ostensibly for security reasons). Jones found in jokes all the patterns 

by which the mind is surprised -- delightfully or tragically. His sense of 

strategy incorporated the idea of creating and anticipating the unexpected. 

Correspondingly, his advice regarding defense policy underscored respect 

for strategic irony, especially in the unintended consequences of defensive 

measures. One of his lecture examples was that of the great pyramids. The 

Pharos, to preserve their honor as well as their remains, built huge edifices 

in which to protect their corpses. The effect was to publicly identify the 

location of their remains and to create a visible promise of great reward to 

the thief. Ultimately, Egyptian planners had to resort to hiding deceased 

royalty in the desert.

Professor Jones taught something else. He believed that his sense 

of humor was linked to his ability to understand, create and anticipate deceptions. His advice was to be wary of those who did not have a sense of 

humor, that they might not get the big military jokes, might not understand 

the deceptions inherent in strategy. Maybe they ought not to be on anyone’s planning staff. Facing irregular armed conflict, they might not be 
114 R.V. Jones

468

able to sift through the Magical Realism or the Songs of Chu. They might, 

as they say, not get it.

Accessory: Thomas Cathcart and Daniel Klein wrote a pair of books with 

a relevant premise, titled: Plato and a Platypus Walk Into a Bar and Aristotle and an Aardvark Go to Washington. Maybe military strategy and 

silly philosophy run on the same mental circuits as well.

Accessory 2: Hedy Lamarr, born just a few years after Reginald, was an Austrian who became an American citizen and Hollywood star. Some considered 

her the most beautiful woman in the world (see page 468). She also dabbled 

in physics, inventing a frequency jumper that makes radar harder to jam. She, 

too, had a sense of humor, but patently was the un-Reginald.

Please see sections: 141, Thirty-six Stratagems; 101, Magical Realism; 

16, Presence; 143, Seven Strategy Strains; 17, Keeping Secrets; 81, What 

a Clergy Wants; 46, Taxation and Debt; and 122, Ulm and Austerlitz.



“As usual, I’m writing slowly because I know you can’t read fast.”

Radar O`Reilly from the TV show

MASH (in a letter to his mother)423F

424

---------------

“Most paranoid delusions are intricate...but this is brilliant.”

Dr. Silberman in the movie,

The Terminator (1984)424F

425

---------------

“The way to gain a liberal view of your subject is not to read something else, but to get to the bottom of the subject itself.”425 F

426

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

---------------

COL Glass: Are you familiar with the EM-50 project we have 

in Italy? 

CPT Stillman: Yes... it's a tank... or something.

COL Glass: It's an URBAN ASSAULT VEHICLE.

from the movie,

Stripes (1981)426F

427


469

Elementary, Watson

Section 115, Physics of Strategy

Can there even be an elemental theory of military strategy? Noted strategy thinker Colin Gray quipped, “The answer, which for strategy is the 

equivalent of E = mc2, is ends, ways, means, and (with caveats) assumptions.”4 27F

428 Gray’s analogy to physics is not so farfetched, at least to the extent 

that individual strategy-making elements are to collapse into a single energy, 

a single effort. Hopefully, an American military strategist would find the single energy into which American strategy-making elements should collapse 

(forgive me overstretching the physics analogy) to be the effort to protect the 

social compact of the United States and the people who adhere to it. But what 

about the set of elements? Here we will improve on ‘ends, ways and means’. 

Of course we will. The elements of strategy-making:

a. Naming of the enemy, the grievance and the desire. This is all one thing 

because there can’t be a grievance without a culprit or vice versa, and there 

is no sense complaining or strategizing if you can’t imagine a result you want 

-- unless of course you just want to fight for the pleasure of it. This is like 

ends in ‘ends, ways, means’, except better because it insists that the foe be 

named and the grievance stated in direct association with that foe. The first 

sentence of the Declaration of Independence did not address life and liberty. 

It spoke of one people dissolving the political bands connecting them with 

another. That mission statement asserted a we and a they, and what was to 

be done to readjust an unacceptable relationship of domination and submission. The declaration then went on to list the particulars of grievance.

b. Recognition of potential. These are the means, resources or capacities that 

pertain to any competitive entity, not just a country. Strategic capacities fall into 

four simple categories, the capacity to: 1, create destructive mass; 2, deliver that 

mass; 3, create compelling ideas; and 4, deliver those ideas. The good strategist 

recognizes not just his own capacities, but those of all the competitors.

c. Selection of effective and suitable actions. These are the waysin ‘ends, ways, 

means’. A few are suggested in Section 143. When a side in a fight can’t find 

strength enough to employ other methods, it will probably resort to guile.428 F

429

d. Careful measurement of strength on predictable contact. It’s not how 

much strength you have, but how much you have left when you get there. 

America’s founding fathers were acutely aware of strength-at-distance. 

The probability of British military overmatch on contact imposed get-inand-get-out strategy on the revolutionaries’ thinking. They knew, however, that on a larger scale oceanic distances promised that, with luck and 

American resolve, the regular British physical advantage might lapse. The 

Americans knew they had nowhere near enough strength to attrite the British Empire, but did have enough, over time, to make the Empire decide its 

army was beyond its culminating point in America, and to take it away.
115 Physics of Strategy

470

e. Semantic initiative. Raphael Lemkin’s portrait is on page 590. He probably would have made a lousy general, but was a good strategist, 

nevertheless. He knowingly, explicitly invented the word ‘genocide’ to describe the operational environment to the strategic advantage of his people. 

The proximate purpose was to reduce perceived costs of crossing international borders with righteousforce. In an oddly diametric vein of initiative, 

someone succeeded in changing the parameter ‘Arab-Israeli’ confrontation into an ‘Israeli-Palestinian’ one, thereby reorienting, protracting, and

popularizing the emotional fuel of violent confrontation.

The elements of strategy are, again: 1, the foe/grievance/desire; 2. the 

capacities; 3, the actions; 4, comparative strength on contact; 5, the guiding 

vocabulary. The order of the elements is not so important since they must 

all be reconciled and cross-referenced in the mind at once and continually.

Please see sections: 143, Seven Strategy Strains; 4, Defining Enemy; 23, Mens 

Rea; 112, DIME and PMESII; 64, Measuring Distance and Comparing 

Power; 71, Jerusalem; 138, Raids; and 119, America’s Revolutionary Strategy.



“I think that, as life is action and passion, it is required 

of a man that he should share the passion and action of 

his time at peril of being judged not to have lived.”429F

430

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

---------------

Louden Swain: Can 800 million Chinamen be wrong?

Tanneran: Frequently.

from the movie,

Vision Quest (1985)430F

431

---------------

“any man who has once acclaimed violence as his method must 

inexorably choose falsehood as his principle.”

Alexandr Solzhenitsyn

Nobel Lecture, 1970

---------------

“We should on all Occasions avoid a general Action, or put 

anything to the Risque, unless compelled by a necessity, into 

which we ought never to be drawn.”431 F

432

George Washington


471

Convincing you to convince yourself

Section 116, Songs of Chu

Legend has it that during the Chu Hang dynasty wars, Liu Bang, 

leader of the Han, besieged Xiang Yu, leader of the Chu, at Gaixia. Liu 

Bang had his men loudly sing the local songs of the Chu people. Hearing 

the songs, Xiang Yu believed his people had joined the Han and that Xiang 

Yu’s support had evaporated.

Liu Bang fed Xiang Yu’s own existing doubts. It is one of the great 

classics of psychological operations, an old tale about the power of suggestion. The legend also ties itself to the physical results emphasized 

throughout this book. In the rest of the story, Xiang Yu tries to make a run 

for it. His escape to sanctuary fails, Liu Bang’s pursuit succeeds and Xiang 

Yu, realizing his fate, commits suicide. When faced with a superior force, 

or what he thought was a superior force, Xiang Yu did not have a secure 

route of withdrawal to sanctuary.

Insurgents or other guerrillas are constrained more than governments 

to the basics of the classic military operational equation and therefore must 

be more obedient to the dictates of physical terrain, perhaps depend more on 

technology and anonymity. I think that without the landmine, the FARC 

would have been beaten long ago. To survive, al Qaeda had to seek the most 

remote area of the Islamic world and live in holes. Being the physically 

weaker parties, guerrillas will attempt sleight of hand and psychological 

ploys to misdirect their enemies. It works. It also works against them.

In this age of socialist revolutions, leftist guerrillas have made two 

generations of US government strategists think that the military operational basics somehow didn’t apply. The guerrillas themselves have rarely 

fallen into that misconception. The guerrilla’s public right hand plays melodies of religion and legitimacy while his armed left hand orchestrates the 

military operational imperative: where on the map to attack and still maintain a secure line of retreat. New Songs of Chu help him survive in a world 

of time, weight, and sudden failure. The FARC guerrilla tromped around 

in uniform for decades telling each other that their goal was to take power 

by the force of arms -- and they were on their way to doing just that. Meanwhile, they convinced many in the public, including many supposed 

military strategists, that a military victory against them was out of the question, impossible, because the conflict was essentially political, or social, or 
116 Songs of Chu

472

economic, or something. According to the song, political compromise was 

the only logical solution. When finally that siren was ignored and FARC 

leaders’ heartbeats made the central question, military defeat and victory 

became real, not just in the public’s eyes, but in the FARCs.

By the way, before he flees Gaixia, Xiang Yu tenderly kisses Yu 

Ji, his favorite hottie concubine, goodbye. This is an obligatory part of the 

story and part of what makes this such a popular legend. In China as in 

America, a perfectly good war story is schmaltzed up with a romantic subplot so your girlfriend will tolerate going to the movie with you.

Please see sections: 122, Ulm and Austerlitz; 102, Negotiations; 38, Cultural Study for What?; 40, Popular Support; 77, Sex; 143, Seven Strategy 

Strains; 79, Suicide; and 114, R.V. Jones.



Young William: What are they doing?

Argyle Wallace: Saying goodbye in their own way, playing 

outlawed tunes on outlawed pipes.

from the movie,

Braveheart (1995)432F

433

---------------

“Crack of dawn

All is gone

Except the will to be”

from the Metalica song,

For Whom the Bell Tolls43 3F

434

---------------

German Army Oath Before 

August 1934

German Army Oath After August 1934

I swear by almighty God this sacred 

oath: I will at all times loyally and honestly serve my people and country and, 

as a brave soldier, I will be ready at any 

time to stake my life for this oath.

I swear by almighty God this sacred 

oath: I will render unconditional obedi- ence to the Fuehrer of the German 

Reich and people, Adolf Hitler, Supreme Commander of the Wehrmacht,

and, as a brave soldier, I will be ready at 

any time to stake my life for this oath.


473

Her hips don’t lie

Section 117,

Strategic Communication

President Álvaro Uribe of Colombia had a pretty good run as a 

counterinsurgent president. There is plenty of evidence to explain why. 

Take, for instance, some of his strategic communication during the summer of 2008. He...

*Gave singer Bosé Colombian citizenship: ‘Spaniards are welcome here’.

*Signed a Defense Treaty with Brazil in Leticia: ‘How about that, Hugo?’

*Hugged Shakira: ‘I’m a guy, she’s hot, and she’s 100% Colombian’.

*Was often seen working late: ‘What good Colombians do’.

*Rode a fine horse and wore a fine hat: ‘Your leader is a Señor’.

*Looked bookish and concerned: ‘A Señor is not a clown, like Chávez’.

*Helped organize a mega-march on national day: ‘We’re in this together’.

*Relieved officers for suspected rights violations: ‘We’re accountable’.

All in all, President Uribe’s argument and argumentation were not 

about fooling the press or hiding sins, although he did some of that, too, 

and there were some things to hide. President Uribe’s strategic communication, however, was solid because he knew what his audiences were ready 

to hear. The messages were not accidental and, imperatively, they enjoyed 

a background of concerted action. The year 2008 was one of military victories over the FARC, something that President Uribe had promised and, 

if slowly, delivered. In March, a cross-border raid (about a mile into Ecuador) killed the senior acting FARC commander and gained a treasure 

trove of valuable new intelligence. In July, a prized group of hostages was 

rescued, including three Americans. Soon it was revealed that the iconic 

leader of the FARC, Manuel Marulanda, had died. The strategic communication was not founded on argument and argumentation, but rather the 

argument and argumentation were effective because they were backed by 

successful acts and accomplishments. The fact that the communication 

was often flashy and entertaining, even while coming from a somewhat 

dour and applied man, made it fit its culture.

For some, strategy implies perfidy, treachery or, at very least, secrecy. Because they might be right, strategic communication may be an 

unfortunate term. To the extent it means the deft use of language, art and 
117 Strategic Communication

474

imagery by senior leaders in order to further worthy objectives, to explain 

to the polity the reasoning and need for action ˗˗ that’s nice. To the extent 

it means how to trick the public media, or how to manage the psychology 

of a public that the leaders dismiss as incapable of intelligent choice ˗˗ that 

might not be so nice. The word ‘spin’, now often used admiringly, used 

to connote more of this latter, not so nice, aspect of strategic communication. A better term would be ‘responsible argument and argumentation’. 

Many leaders fall so in love with spin that spin grows its own ethical justifications and apologies, tied somehow to belief in a mystical realpolitik

blessing. Leaders grow to feel they have a special license for deceptive 

communicating ˗˗ to spin. Deceptive communication then becomes confused as strategy itself. Strategy may require deception, to be sure, but 

strategy is strongest when founded on sustained action, and then only when 

the right audience is being deceived. Whatever deceptions Álvaro Uribe 

might or might not have played on his countrymen, he told them he was 

going to go punch the FARC in the face, and he did.

Please see sections: 101, Magical Realism; 22, Badassoftheweek.com; 16, 

Presence; 108, Common Knowledge; 125, Human Rights; 141, Thirty-six 

Stratagems; 114, R.V. Jones; and 71, Jerusalem.



“I prefer an ugly truth to a pretty lie. If someone is telling me the truth that is when I will give my heart.”434 F

435

Shakira Mebarak

---------------

Somewhere far overseas

There's a place called Kosovo

That's where you don't want to go

If you're Albanian at all

from the song, ‘Kosovo’4 35F

436

---------------

“The Boston Gazette had been telling its readers ever since 1765 that troops 

were coming to ‘dragoon’ the inhabitants into ‘supine submission’.”436F

437

Merrill Jensen, 

The Founding of a Nation


475

Free and fair elections are the small part of peace

Section 118, Democracy

The word democracy is not mentioned in the Constitution of the United 

States. The creation of a democracy was not its purpose. Still, proponents of 

the word use it to mean ‘good’, and people like the idea of elections, especially 

if they haven’t had any. Elections are better than no elections, but they are no 

guarantee of good governance or a peaceful social compact, and holding them 

will not necessarily help anyone win a war. Elections, even if open, egalitarian 

and fairly administered, can be counterproductive. The same characters who 

ran everything before there were elections can hijack the new gift. If popular 

legitimacy is awarded solely on the basis of an initial electoral victory, it might 

be the last election. Liberty is a larger concept than democracy. Freedom of 

speech, a column of liberty, is exactly not democratic. It is an individual freedom that often uncorks expressions of opposition to a majority.

There is a big difference between a cult of the elected and regular elections. The ultimate purpose of electoral democracy should not be peaceful 

selection of leaders, but the peaceful change of leaders. Few historians would

make the claim that all the founding fathers of the United States thought democracy was a great deal. In fact, several of the founders saw in democracy a 

form of tyranny that needed to be constrained. Electoral democracy encourages those elected to believe they have earned a right to rule, instead of having 

been lent a privilege of service. The elected sometimes like to believe that a 

popular preference, measured at an instant in time, transfers to them a mandate 

that lasts forever. The framers of the US Constitution sought a formula that 

could keep the ballot box from creating more problems than it solved.

We overuse the term democracy in discussions about successful counterinsurgency. Reading US field manuals one might get the idea that we think 

it our mission to spread democracy, rather than preserve our liberty. Plenty of 

governments invoke the term democracy, allow little of it and are nevertheless 

good at counterinsurgency. Some insurgent organizations use enclosed forms 

of democracy to pick their leaders, but descriptors of the typical insurgent 

leader do not include modest, restrained, or democratic.

The United States pushes democracy in places where it can, but that 

is because Americans haven’t maintained cultural memory of the less-positive aspects of democracy about which the founders warned. Likewise, 
118 Democracy

476

Americans don’t sufficiently value their political inheritance of formal property and how a just property regime, more than elections, underpins peaceful 

social relations in which individual liberties thrive.

If you are in charge of planning or leading counterinsurgency and cannot escape the word democracy, at least try to delimit the word to mean the 

whole basket of institutional contraptions that limit the concentration of power 

and that allow for the orderly replacement of leaders. Selection of the right 

leaders might have a lot to do with winning a struggle. Admirers of democratically elected Colombian President Álvaro Uribe Vélez thought so. On the 

other hand, the efficacy of American support to Vietnamese leaders Ngo Dinh 

Diem and Nguyen Van Thieu is often noted as an element of the negative outcome there. Regardless, putting the process of selecting civilian political 

leaders at the center of counterinsurgent planning could be a distracting and 

disappointing mistake. Creating an insurgent-resistant society requires an acceptable social compact. As much as vibrant electoral politics, it takes 

efficient, transparent administration. Elections are interesting. A formal property system is not, but it is a more substantial achievement.

At the time this section was being written, a couple of world events occurred to put extra spin on this theme. The President of Honduras, Manuel Zelaya, 

was visited at home by members of the Honduran military who brusquely escorted 

him to an airplane and then dropped him off on the tarmac in neighboring Costa 

Rica. The immediate widespread reaction, including from the US government, 

was to condemn the actions in Honduras as dangerously reminiscent of an earlier 

time in Latin American history that had supposedly passed. Some first impressions 

are hard to reverse, but in this case it shortly became apparent that all the other 

civilian institutions of the Honduran government were in favor of the ouster. The 

military, sworn to obey civilian leadership and law, had found itself between two 

legitimacies: their President and the rest of the government that wanted him arrested for unlawful acts. Although a dilemma, the arrest orders from the Honduran 

Supreme Court were from a unanimous decision, and the whole panoply of government institutions were in agreement, to include almost all the congressional 

members of President Zelaya’s own political party. The Honduran military command agreed afterwards that although the arrest was a legal, constitutionally 

supportable exercise, it had not been legal for them to take President Zelaya out of 

the country.

Some say that whatever the ouster’s constitutionality, it highlighted 

either the underlying undemocratic nature of the constitutional order or the 
118 Democracy

477

confusing math of democracy itself. A broader, ‘post-structural’ attitude observes that institutional scaffolding of legislatures, courts, statutes, and other 

social accoutrements merely serve an entrenched, oppressing, patriarchal, 

cisgender hierarchy of power. Their argument uses logic unlike what most 

of us have come to understand as the math of electoral democracy. They 

argue that numerical majorities from an oligarchic legislature or court are 

inherently insubstantial. According to their new math, President Zelaya genuinely represented the downtrodden; his original election was therefore an 

‘ontologically’ democratic moment that should not be overturned by any 

subsequent majorities that are the product of an elaborate, structural neoliberal trick. Hard to follow? Too bad. At any rate, the Honduran elections, 

which had been previously scheduled and with candidates already chosen, 

went off without a hitch. A relatively liberal new president, Porfirio Lobo, 

took possession in late January of 2010.

One of the interesting details of the Honduras saga was part of an 

effort that got President Zelaya arrested to begin with. It had been a design 

of Zelaya’s to hold a public opinion poll using ballots and counting mechanisms imported from Venezuela and apparently paid for by a nonHonduran fund. The radical international left employed numerous means 

to support Zelaya’s bid to return to power and thereby maintain the Honduran State within their Latin American, ‘Bolivarian’ alliance. Fomenting 

and paying for controlled electoral formalisms while simultaneously creating an image of popular spontaneity and mass support had become a 

standard element of the international leftist energies.

The next presidential elections in Honduras apparently marked an 

apogee in the swing of an ideological pendulum in Latin America, which 

started moving back toward political liberalism and away from leftist personalism. More significant for the purposes of this book, however, is seeing

the power of a vision of democracy that doesn’t just question details of representation, but simply rejects the entire envelope of mathematical concepts 

on which most understandings of electoral democracy are built. Democracy’s mathematical meaning is gutted by this ‘progressive’ understanding. 

In the case of Honduras, it appeared that many governments and international organizations sided with the new understanding, rather than the old.

Love of democracy has not improved our ability to govern overseas

or to win irregular wars. Do what you must with the word. To say you do 

not love democracy is now almost like saying you hate America. The post-
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478

structuralists love democracy, but they love it as embodied -- as in the embodiment of the people’s will in the form of a leader chosen by acclaim --

a Josef or a Fidel. They will fawn if he can simply present a compelling 

emotive narrative of the common mythopoetic vision and destiny. He will 

not only lead them, he will be them. If you are in that camp, OK, but to me 

we are more likely to approach paradise on earth by hewing toward construction of a inky quotidian property system that helps resolve small 

conflicts peaceably, especially regarding the control of land. Property can 

be a more effective concept than democracy if written out in detail.

Please see sections: 135, Borders and Anarchism; 14, Legitimacy; 52,

Sovereignty; 98, Jorge Verstrynge and Pio Moa; 104 Lawfare; 127, Between Liberty and Lawrence; 72, Land Strategy and Property Strategy; 

and 131, Is It an Insurgency?



“’Democracy’ is often used as shorthand for the Western form of government. But the framers of the U.S. Constitution knew that voting is 

far from a sufficient guarantor of good government. Nor does it forestall 

dictatorship. From Azerbaijan to Benin, from Serbia to Sudan, tyrants 

have learned how to get themselves elected. ... In favor of democracy, 

it is true that power is best divided and checked by a popular chamber. 

But democracy should be viewed as a means, not as an end, and voting 

as an official act, not as a universal right.”4 37F

438

Tom Bethel

The Noblest Triumph

---------------

“Hence it is that such democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal 

security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in 

their lives as they have been violent in their deaths.”

James Madison, Federalist #10

---------------

“...government is a broker in pillage, and every election is a 

sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods”438 F

439

H.L Mencken


479

Oppose the concentration of power

Section 119,

America’s Revolutionary Strategy

The American Declaration of Independence is the seminal document of 

modern revolution and insurgency. It asserts that sometimes it is righteous, 

valid, justifiable, honorable behavior to use violence, even to overthrow a

constituted government. Behind and beyond that document and the constitutional formulae that preceded and followed, is the strategic thinking of the 

ideologs and planners whose ideas the documents reflect. As a group, America’s revolutionary leaders were arguably also the greatest strategists in 

modern history, defeating a global power and founding a global power.

America’s revolutionaries barely knew of the imagined spectrum of political identity that runs left-right. The French invented that thing during their 

revolution, after the drafting of the US Constitution. The left-right gamut was 

inspired by depictions of the French royal court and its opposition. Parliamentarians then tied the notion to their seating arrangements. Nurtured by Hegelian 

dialectics, it perfectly fit the polarizing tactics of the communists in the mid19th century. It is a seriously European idea, with not just the left and right 

extremes dedicated to the power of government, but points in the middle of 

the gamut as well. No such left-right vocabulary haunted America’s ideological musing or capsized our understanding of the possibilities. As manifested 

in the documents that their deliberations and compromises left us, the founders 

fixed upon a small handful of analytical observations. They took as the pivotal 

fact that tyranny correlated to the excessive concentration of political power. 

They proposed their balancing, distributing and dividing of power in response 

to that one observation -- that excessive concentration of power went hand in 

glove with despotism. If there had to be some spatial analogy, it would be one 

of concentration versus diffusion, but even that is not explanatory. The better 

pairing is simply of the despotically excessive concentration of power versus 

those ideals, innovations, tendencies, habits, actions and structures that help 

prevent the excessive concentration of power. If today we could somehow 

deny use of the words ‘left’ and ‘right’ to political scientists, those poor 

souls would fall mute and powerless to express anything beyond stammered guttural and hand-waving. With this in mind, the American military 

strategy-maker might do well to set aside (at least as an enlightening mental exercise) the constrictive political paradigm of left versus right.

The American revolutionaries obsessed about liberty. Their dedication to 

that abstraction was tempered by explicit recognition that there existed, even 
119 America’s Revolutionary Strategy

480

within the tight group of revolutionary leaders, a wide variety of preferences regarding the material components of liberty. The current of intellectual effort that

prevailed through the signing of the Constitution did not flow directly to the 

building of liberty. Many of the founders were wary even to enumerate categories of liberty in the constitutional document. Mostly letting liberty define itself 

by practice and exception, many founders turned instead to how to protect liberty, focusing on its nemesis, which is a more geographically specifiable and 

individually assignable quantity. Accordingly, some of the founders opposed the 

Constitution itself as creating too strong a central government.

American military strategiststoday, similarly reasoning, would not purpose 

their plans to create abstractions like democracy, stability, peace, or legitimacy.

They would instead take aim at enemies of liberty. The inimical, the nemesis, 

the target would most often be an abusive wielder of a dangerous concentration 

of power. America’slicence to use weaponsis a destructive licence, a licence to 

check evils, not a licence to impose the shape of good. Still, some structures

might be imposed (formal property, transparent public records, free markets and 

elections, for instance) to stave off abusive concentrations of power. 

Please see sections: 1, Impunity; 4, Defining Enemy; 128, Global Insurgency and 

Global Trespass; 115, Physics of Strategy; 14, Legitimacy; 118, Democracy; 36, 

The Denver Broncos; and 72, Land Strategy and Property Strategy.



“Once vigorous measures appear to be the only means left of bringing 

the Americans to a due submission to the mother country, the colonies 

will submit.”

King George III (attributed)

---------------

“It's a complex fate, being an American, and one of the responsibilities 

it entails is fighting against a superstitious valuation of Europe.” 439F

440

Henry James

---------------

Mac Thompson: I, uh, I got a confession to make. I lied to you.

Theodora: What about?

Mac Thompson: The USA. It ain't a spiritual desert. Say, it's pie a 

la mode, two-pants suits and the home of the brave, Pike's Peak 

and Coney Island.

from the movie,

Comrade X (1940)440 F

441


481

144 characters

Section 120,

Competition Social Media

It’s hard to define social media precisely, but Wikipedia takes a 

pretty good shot at it. (Wikipedia’s article on Social Media includes a diagram you want to look at called the Conversation Prism.) In any case, 

social media is a new sort-of place in our conflict geography that didn’t 

exist until recently. Because of sheer scale and reach (knowing that quantity has a quality all its own) we cannot afford to underrate it as merely 

faster communication. It is a new creature with a heretofore non-existent 

effect on the speed, scope and distances relevant in the discussion of a 

bunch of other sections in this book including ‘nonviolent’ action, particularization of power, globalization, and borders and anarchism. Social 

media is not a place to which physical mass is sent or from which it comes; 

water does not travel over social media. However, social media is used to 

change the time it takes to marshal or convoke mass. It can be used to 

change the probabilities and practicalities of timely sending mass to the 

right places in sufficient quantity -- of being able to get there the fustest 

with the mostest. It also offers a cheap way of finding needles in haystacks 

-- to quickly expose and contact rare coreligionaries, adherents or vulnerable souls to be recruited, convoked or inspired. It also offers new 

opportunities for advantageous stratagems that effect other leaders’ perceptions as to the movement of coercive mass.

One result of the above-noted change (that social media has had on 

the possibilities of amassing physical power at the right time and place) is 

to bring into the competitive arena types of organizations that previously 

could not draw on any of the basic categories of competitive capacity

enough to be feared. (The basic categories being: the capacity to create 

coercive mass; to move it; to create compelling ideas; and to transmit 

them.) The explosion and maturation of social media has increased the 

overall number of contention-worthy entries in competitions of domination and submission.

The competitive opportunity offered by social media is not, however, uniquely or principally available to the previously weak. It can be 

used to advantageous effect by those with existing power advantages, especially to the extent these already capable contenders can efficiently

influence persons who control salient chunks of corporate excellence that 
120 Competition Social Media

482

stick up out of the social media stew. If a government, for instance, can

influence the administrative and mathematical controllers of a Tumblr®-

Baidu Tieba®- or Twitter®-like platform, perhaps by way of regulation or 

statute, social media content could be steered accordingly. Efficiency is 

not a government norm, of course. Other kinds of competitive entities 

might find more affordable ways to influence the same social media corporate leaders. Such leader-targets live in actual physical material space 

and time, not in the Internet. Social media should be seen by the competitor, in other words, as a tool for whomever will use it, not an autonomous 

region in which spontaneous things occur.

Social Media, as a competitive tool, could be viewed as part of the

‘cyberwar’ operational environment, but social media is usefully distinguished from the realm of hackers and their ilk. To be sure, hacking in 

almost every case strives at a rebalancing of domination and submission. 

Still, the difference between competitive use of social media and hackingrelated efforts should be clear. Entirely different preparations are required -

- distinct equipment, education, legalities, even divergent selection of personalities and individual competencies. Hacking tends heavily toward the 

movement of electrons as a weapon, as a way to open a sluice gate, break 

into an account, or cause something to blow up. Although cyberish, hacking 

is still similar to the traditional movement of mass for coercion or arrogation, 

or defense against them. Use of social media, on the other hand, hews more 

toward the creation or recognition and manipulation of human identity, aspiration, cohesion and related quantities. A new term, which will find itself 

at the center of your social media competitive efforts, is technoself. It represents all those human-identity-inside-the-Internet phenomena, and is a 

prompt for their study, especially the dynamically changing nature of identity as it is affected by social media. Be aware that an actual breathing 

human, you, will have a unique and hard to hide social media identity, or 

several. (You could avoid having such, but that would entail abandoning this 

entire battlespace.) Your technoself personal identity will be a composite of 

all the social media you frequent and how often.

There are two broad areas of overlap of the hacker-nerd’s world

and that of the social media wonk. One overlap exists in the initial technical designing of the social media sites themselves -- their reach, features, 

quirks and capacities. The other overlap is bordered by the degree to which 
120 Competition Social Media

483

hackers hack into social media sites for purposes of investigation, intimidation or other forms of control. Many opportunities to create shi exist 

within the scope of these overlaps.

It is worth keeping in mind that, as with the evil nerds discussed in 

Section 129, social media wonks are often marshalled and directed by a 

guy who appreciates their skills, but who does not share them. He is more 

likely the corpus of the ruthless mens rea that provides the resolve and 

compass. A guy like that (probably a guy but these days who knows) is 

likely your real enemy. He is not virtual or cyber or metaphysical. His 

evil coconut bobbles atop a physical mass loafing in some physical sanctuary. Go kick that mass.

Please see sections: 129, Nerd Globe; 2, Anonymity; 17, Keeping Secrets; 16, 

Presence; 59, Spontaneity; 78, Identity; 130, Globalization; and 126, Particularization of Power.



“Here in America we’re descended in blood and in 

spirit from revolutionists and rebels -- men and women 

who dare to dissent from accepted doctrine.”441F

442

Dwight Eisenhower

---------------

Raj: You are so arrogant. If you were a superhero, you 

would be Captain Arrogant. And you know what your superpower would be? Arrogance!

Sheldon: You’re wrong again. If my superpower were arrogance, my name would be Dr. Arroganto.

from the TV show

The Big Bang Theory442F

443

---------------

World’s Greatest Tweet:

hi, grandma? can u come pick me up from my rap battle? 

it's over. no, i lost. he saw u drop me off & did a pretty 

devastating rhyme about it

chuuch @ch000ch 2013


484

Is honor private property?

Section 121, Dignity and Honor

Do not leave the subjects of human dignity and honor at the level of 

a common sense ingredient in plans and programs, or as a checklist item in 

the review of the plans, or as a question of tactical cultural courtesies. Instead, make plans that specifically address and incorporate the broader issues 

of dignity and honor -- and assure that said plans reconcile with other plans. 

Study degradations of and threats to the dignity of human identities, including your fighters, as they are linked to whomever you think you want to 

stabilize, destabilize, subdue, conquer, liberate, own or protect.

We all have a pretty good idea what the words dignity and honor 

mean, at least within the context of our own lives, our own institutions and 

our own society. Like real thirst, however, many of us have not experienced profound lack of dignity or lack of hope. Our empathy can fail us. 

We know that assaults against dignity induce stress, whether the assault is 

a slow, grinding result of established social relationships or a more immediate economic or territorial trespass. In any case, these can be translated 

into grievances and, through agency and leadership, into action.

You can highlight grievances, point out assaults on human dignity 

that have been embedded and hidden in the existing social structure as you 

find it. You can even increase the sense of insult or contrive to exacerbate 

the cause of the grievance in order to bring it to a point of intolerability.

This is part of what is referred to these days as the ‘Alinsky’ method of 

social struggle.443 F

444 Retribution and vindication, although terms of justice, 

underpin policies based on negative emotions that can beget further injustices and more ill-will. A nicer plan will be to engage in transparent efforts

to positively grow dignity, and to be seen doing so. In general, older people are not so impatient as to expect indignities to be undone or debts paid 

with a quick stroke, while younger people may not so docile that they are 

willing to postpone honor for a future generation. Because they constitute 

the vast majority of the fighters, the dignity and honor of young men may 

be of greatest urgency. Their dignity may be tied to that of their parents, 

siblings, friends and romances. You may, however, not always want or be 

able to preserve or respect the dignity of young men. For instance, in some 

societies the dignity of potentially violent young men may be tied to a status quo of submissive indignity for women. It is easy to state the rule, 

‘respect everyone’, but inherent dilemmas abound.
121 Dignity and Honor

485

This book is greatly about lines of supply, lines of retreat; about 

physical position and movement, finding and closing with an enemy in 

order to neutralize and dominate him. It is unapologetically about those 

things, but they need a bigger reason. Over the long haul they cannot defy 

basic truths and one of the basic truths of war is the accounting of dignity. 

On whatever side you find yourself, there one day will be an accounting 

of how you, your subordinates, your leaders, and your ideas related to human dignity and the structure of life.

It is not that honor and dignity play no role in regular warfare. They 

do. In irregular conflict, however, the ultimate objective is often an elusive 

condition of the spirit related somehow to domination and submission. 

Yours may be an existentialist’s war. That is, if you cannot express the relationship of what you are doing to the meaning of life (not just for you), 

review your goals to see if that connection is missing. If you cannot say how 

your goal of closing with and destroying the enemy bears up against your 

people’s sense of righteousness, you especially might want to rethink things. 

If you are a leader and you cannot tell your followers why what they are 

doing is a fine thing, you might not be the leader. That is not to say, however, 

that sometimes, at some scale,somebody’s honor and dignity might not have 

to be sacrificed, abandoned, postponed, relegated, or even abused and diminished for the safety and dignity of some other people. If that is the case, 

maybe it is a truth a leader does not make transparent.

The ‘hearts and minds’ approach to insurgency can be too slow at 

getting to the nub of things. That nub (something probably related to culminating points) in a given tactical situation might be nothing more than 

thirst for water and the opportunity to make that dangerous discomfort go 

away. In urban environments the nub is not usually water, but is more 

likely camouflage, that is, anonymity. An environment that hides the person can also hide the details of his motivation and, while hidden 

whereabouts is touted everywhere in this book as a first problem to solve, 

that solution alone (finding people) is insufficient. What to do with the 

knowledge about identity and whereabouts remains. If you act quickly, 

perhaps you can kill your enemy and go home before having to deal much 

with the question of his dignity. If your answer is not death or imprisonment, then it is probably tied to dignity. A ‘hearts and minds’ campaign 

directed squarely and competently at questions of dignity may be effective, 

but perhaps only with years of application. Paradoxically, with every ineffectual lingering moment, failure to understand your enemies’ dignity 
121 Dignity and Honor

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will burden your capacity to change the balance of anonymity to your favor, e.g., find him.

Even if you only help make it possible for people to evacuate their 

bowels in a decent way, they will figure out the link between your behavior 

and improvement of their dignity. Humans can be grateful. Still, helping 

people is not always the way to honor or respect them. Being respectful 

of all people does not mean to suspend judgment or accept all cultures and

communions as equal, or pardon all trespasses. Respect is a starting place.

Please see sections: 79, Suicide; 94, Poop; 76, Gender; 95, Childhood;

124, Slavery and Underclass; 27, ‘Nonviolent’ Action; 53, Hohfeldian 

Grievance Analysis; and 144, What the Pirate Said to Alexander.



“Whereas the east coast monuments such as the Lincoln Memorial and 

the Statue of Liberty speak specifically to ideals, the Protestant Memorial chapel at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas -- overlooking the Missouri 

River at the edge of the Great Plains, with the rails of the Union Pacific 

visible in the distance -- invokes blood and soil.”444F

445

Robert D. Kaplan

---------------

“Beware how you take away hope from any human being.”445 F

446

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

---------------

“The duelist demands satisfaction. Honor, for him, is an appetite.”

Narrator in the movie,

The Duellists (1977)446F

447

---------------

“It wasn't my war! You asked me, I didn't ask you! And I did what 

I had to do to win! But somebody wouldn't let us win!”

John Rambo in the movie,

First Blood (1982)447F

448

---------------

“Pain heals. Chicks dig scars. Glory...lasts forever.”

Shane Falco in the movie,

The Replacements (2000)448F

449


487

Napoleon’s masterpiece

Section 122, Ulm and Austerlitz

Napoleon’s Ulm and Austerlitz campaign of 1805 is an icon of classic military history and strategy, and the centerpiece of Napoleon’s résumé 

˗˗ this in spite of being Napoleon’s plan B. Plan A was to invade England. 

In July, Napoleon was at Boulogne overseeing preparations for the invasion when information came to him that his navy would not be able to gain 

the necessary control of the English Channel.44 9F

450 The timeline:

*July 23-24, 1805 -- Calder stymies Villeneuve at Cape Finisterre

*August 15 -- Villeneuve sails for Cadiz against Napoleon’s orders 

*September 23 -- Napoleon declares war on Austria; marches on Ulm

*October 16-19 -- Battle of Ulm 

*October 21 -- Naval Battle of Trafalgar (little effect on land actions)

*December 2 -- Battle of Austerlitz

*December 26 -- Treaty of Pressburg

Napoleon soon decided to use his huge, well-drilled force by turning 

it westward, and in late August marched it to the Rhine to meet the armies 

of Austria and Russia before they could join together against the French. 

Austrian General Karl Mack von Leiberich had prematurely begun operations instead of waiting for the Russian army to join him from the east. The 

first week of October, Mack learned of the French vanguard’s presence on 

the Danube. News of Napoleon’s movements came quickly to Mack, but 

the reports were as much the product of Napoleon’s deceptions and feints as 

of trustworthy observations. Mack attempted a series of maneuvers to escape from being encircled, but they were ineffective. By the 16th of October, 

Napoleon had managed to encircle Ulm and most of Mack’s forces. Some 

skirmishes occurred for a few more days as Mack sought to break out across 

the Rhine, but these also were too little, too late. While some parts of his 

force remained outside the encirclement, Mack, without a secure line of supply or retreat, surrendered an entire army, perhaps 30,000 men. Now 

Napoleon, with a much better prospective correlation of force, would seek 

battle with the oncoming Russian-led army.

The consummate battle of Austerlitz was joined December 2nd on 

ground west of the town in what is now the Czech Republic. French organizational excellence and logistic preparations were matched to 

Napoleon’s tactical genius. French soldiers showed their discipline and 

revolutionary élan. The opposing army was soundly defeated and the alliance against Napoleon finished. At the Treaty of Pressburg, the
122 Ulm and Austerlitz

488

Austrians retired from the war and Napoleon’s position on the continent 

became immensely more secure than it had been six months earlier. For 

the Russians, the defeat at Austerlitz was grave, but it was not complete; 

there was a Russian retreat. Russian military leaders, including generals 

Mikhail Kutuzov and Pyotr Bagration, did not let the French encircle their 

forces as had General Mack. Positions on the ground at the time of the 

treaty allowed the Russian army to return home relatively intact.

The defeated Russians would meet Napoleon’s armies several 

times more. Seven years after Austerlitz, the battle of Borodino in early 

September, 1812 (often described as indecisive) set the stage for Russian 

victory over the French Grande Armée. At Borodino, Napoleon failed to 

pursue the beaten Russian army. Bagration was mortally wounded, but 

Kutuzov would evacuate Moscow, retreat and refit. By late October, the 

Grande Armée was itself in retreat and would be harassed to death by Kutuzov and the Russian winter. Of the half million French soldiers who 

marched into Russia, fewer than a hundred thousand returned to France.

Not only do these old battles expose classic lessons, they exposed 

those lessons to at least one leader who would later be credited with the 

invention of revolutionary military strategy. Probably using these same 

battles as examples, the Russians taught Mao Tse-tung about the balance 

of offensive and defensive movement, lengthened and shortened supply 

lines, and retreat into a supportive population. They taught him the effect 

of distance on correlations of force and the difference between aggressive 

pursuit and patient harassment. They may even have taught the wisdom 

of not invading an island without first securing the sea.

There is another side to the maneuver coin. Some peoples, even 

warrior peoples, have been culturally indisposed to maneuver, at least to 

the maneuver of retreat or withdrawal that this book says is central to military operational math.

Free though they are, they are not entirely free -- for the law is their 

master, whom they fear far more than your men fear you. Whatever 

their law commands, that they do; and it commands them always the 

same; they are not allowed to flee in battle from any foe, however 

great the numbers, but rather they are to stay in their ranks and there 

conquer or perish.45 0F

451

The above description of a Spartan cultural grip on military options 

comes from Herodotus. Later Spanish experience gave us the word guerrilla; Iberic culture was no impediment to hit-and-run tactics. Yet, an 

ancient Spanish ‘spirit of Numancia’ demands unbending resolve in the 
122 Ulm and Austerlitz

489

defense of fixed positions, denying Spanish defenders the option of retreat. 

I mention it not because there are many cultures today that impose a similar 

rigidity on operational options in warfare. There aren’t, yet all cultures

lend predispositions that play a part in delimiting the range of possibilities 

for how we approach operational problems. In the American military, it 

seems we somehow convinced ourselves that position and maneuver are 

insignificant features of irregular war. That is a mistake. Irregular warfare 

is subject to most of the rules exposed by the Napoleonic wars or those in 

southern Africa. If you convince your enemy that he cannot withdraw to base 

nor defeat you in battle, he might surrender. If he retreats and you have the 

capacity to pursue but do not, he may regain strength. If he refuses to accept

or missesthe relationship among power, distance, and movement, you hold an 

elemental advantage.

Please see sections: 113, Unrestricted Chi Whiz; 27, ‘Nonviolent’ Action; 

28, Takeovers and Sieges; 117, Strategic Communication; 8, Linearity 

and the Line of Retreat; 143, Seven Strategy Strains; 65, Smuggling; and 

10, Decisive Battle.



“This much is certain; that he that commands the sea is at 

great liberty, and may take as much and as little of the war as 

he will. Whereas these, that be strongest by land, are many 

times nevertheless in great straits.”451 F

452

Sir Francis Bacon,

‘On the True Greatness of Kingdoms and Estates’ (1597)

---------------

“The tactics of uncoordinated charges turned out to be suicidal. When such assaults failed, there were never ordered 

calls for retreat, much less a fighting withdrawal or organized 

covering sorties. Rather, entire impis, as tribal Germans on 

the Roman frontier, collapsed and ran headlong from the enemy. Thousands in the Zulu wars were ridden down by 

British horsemen who lanced, shot, and hacked at will once 

the Impi’s charge was broken and panic set in.”452 F

453

Victor Davis Hanson


122 Ulm and Austerlitz

490

-- Europe circa 1805 --

The above map, from T. Miller Maguire, shows Napoleon’s movement 

from his erstwhile invasion of England to the battlefields of Ulm and 

Austerlitz.453 F

454 The bottom map, cropped from an original from the 

United States Military Academy, shows the spatial relationship of Ulm 

to Austerlitz, northeast of Vienna.45 4F

455
491

The advantage of optional wars

Section 123,

Sea and Aerospace Power

Sir Francis Bacon understood the relationship of Britain’s small 

wars to sea power. The Royal Navy made those land wars optional for the 

British. It made land war on the British Isles an immensely costly proposition for a would-be invader; it provided a heavy lift line of supply to 

distant British armies; and it secured a route of withdrawal for those armies 

in case things went sour. It is never lost on a strategically-minded Brit that 

William had to launch a lot of boats in 1066, or that at Trafalgar in 1805 

Admiral Lord Nelson denied Napoleon any opportunity to do the same. 

On the back of that understanding the British had a pretty good run in terms 

of strategy and empire, dividends still paying.

The bad news that arrived in late July, 1805 at Boulogne (where 

Napoleon was preparing to invade England) was about the sea battle of 

Cape Finisterre. The battle of Cape Finisterre is not one of military history’s milestone events, but maybe it should be. Many of history’s great 

battles were preceded by some nearly forgotten one, but which set the 

stage. The battle of the Corral Sea preceded the battle of Midway, Pantano 

de Vargas preceded Boyacá Bridge, and so on. The Battle of Trafalgar, 

won by Admiral Lord Nelson to establish British supremacy at sea, was 

preceded by the battle of Cape Finisterre.

Actually, at least two pieces of knowledge fed Napoleon’s decision 

to abandon his plans to take England. One was the sorry performance of his 

landing craft, many of which floundered during an invasion rehearsal, in turn 

swamping some of the Emperor’s confidence. More significantly, success 

depended on his fleet being able to control the waters of the English Channel 

for a period of time sufficient for the French army to cross. Napoleon’s plan 

was daring -- or tenuous -- French admiral Pierre Charles Villenueve was to 

break out of the port of Toulon (at the time being blockaded by Admiral 

Horatio Nelson) and sail his fleet to the West Indies where he would meet 

another French fleet under Admiral Honoré Ganteaume.

Ganteaume was to break out of the British blockade of Brest. By 

sailing to the Caribbean, ostensibly to attack British commerce, the French 

would pull a significant part of the British fleet in chase. Both French 

fleets would return quickly and overpower the remaining British ships in 
123 Sea and Aerospace Power

492

the English Channel, thus creating a window of time for Napoleon’s army 

to displace before the main elements of the British fleet could get back 

from the Caribbean. Once Napoleon had invested Britain, he would keep 

the British fleet from returning to port.

Admiral Nelson did in fact chase -- that part of Napoleon’s plan 

worked. Ganteaume, however, had not been able to break out of Brest, 

and so did not meet Villeneuve at Martinique as planned. Although Villeneuve got back to European waters a month ahead of Nelson, he was met 

off Cape Finisterre by a British fleet commanded by Admiral Robert Calder, who had been blockading the ports of Rochefort and Ferrol. The 

ensuing battle was indecisive, or so it seemed, and afterwards Villeneuve 

put into port at Ferrol. Then, although ordered by Napoleon to go north to 

lift the blockade at Brest and proceed on to Boulogne (the invasion plan 

still alive, since Nelson’s fleet was still distant), Villenueve decided instead to retire to Cádiz to the south. When Napoleon heard the news of

the battle of Cape Finisterre and Villeneuve’s irresolute decision, the invasion plan died.

In effect, it was Calder’s action that convinced Napoleon he could 

not carry out a cross channel invasion (rather than Nelson’s victory at Trafalgar, which did not occur until October, two days after Mack’s surrender 

at Ulm). Neither the French nor the British commander pursued his foe 

after the battle and so, in that sense, Cape Finisterre appeared indecisive. 

Each had his reasons, but each was soon condemned for failure to push to 

the limit of his respective culminating point. Calder was reprimanded and 

never commanded at sea again. Napoleon had Villenueve murdered. Calder’s reasons were better than Villenueve’s, and it seems from this 

historical distance that Admiral Lord Nelson’s already immense public 

popularity may have been the main enemy of Calder’s reputation. In retrospect, it may be that Calder’s decisions saved Britain from invasion, not 

Lord Nelson’s.

Aside from a barely plausible Spanish-language insurgent movement based on some form of Mexican retro-nationalism, almost all of US 

participation in irregular wars will continue to be allowed by United States 

sea and air power. United States’ warring is optional, and it is optional 

because sea and air power give the United States global-length lines of 

communication -- secure lines of supply and withdrawal. There is no 

American insurgent or counterinsurgent strategy anywhere outside of 

North America without the US Navy and the US Air Force.
123 Sea and Aerospace Power

493

It may seem that almost all the other sections of this book relate to 

the labors of men and women in government armies or in land-based insurgencies and gangs, and not so much about sailors, pirates, or pilots. 

That is the case. The submarine captain will find this book is less about 

him. Nevertheless, he and his submarine allow continued US presence on 

foreign soil. A single submarine can help win an irregular war. In a given 

situation it can change the math of whose lines of supply and retreat are 

protected and whose are vulnerable.

The ‘global commons’ is a territorial concept that has to be constantly enforced. In part, that’s because the operational equation holds true 

at all scales and, with a common sea the lines of communications to distant 

sources of power are easier to keep open. Like the British, the American 

army officer can presume his global lines of retreat and supply are secure 

-- a security that exists because of the US Navy, Air Force and their allies. 

Xerxes would be a good witness.

Dynamic and creative use of airspace can provide an almost prohibitive advantage in war, an advantage that in insurgent conflicts goes 

more often to the counterinsurgent than it does to the insurgent. The same 

now applies to the upper atmosphere. In the last few decades we have 

witnessed two knowledge revolutions. One is the Internet and the other 

GIS. Both of these revolutions depend for their continued existence on the 

US Air Force. American ground forces still haven’t figured out the real 

consequences of these revolutions to land power and, like many things in 

armed conflict, it is cheaper to break things than to build them. But the 

US Air Force is going to be able to protect the orbiting equipment of the 

knowledge revolution long enough.

Governments and insurgents alike understand the lessons of Sir 

Francis Bacon and Sir Francis Drake perfectly. It is a geostrategic luxury

to be able to go abroad to challenge other peoples’ holes in ground, roadblocks, and other phenomena gracing sections of this book. Today, the 

aircraft carrier is a practical fact but for which many violent groups around 

the world would have little to fear. To many, targeting the USS Cole, 

though not a carrier, made all the sense in the world.

Air, space and sea power are not more tied to technological change 

and to machines than is land power, however. They are all woven together. 

Now, a century from the invention of fighter pilots, their machines are too 

good for them. The machines can turn quicker and acquire targets faster 
123 Sea and Aerospace Power

494

without a pilot. The cost-points for putting something dangerous in the air 

have gone down and the game will soon become cheap enough that poorer 

peoples can play. Governments with smaller budgets and even insurgent 

forces are sending up dangerous machines and sending the issue of local air 

superiority back into doubt. A few Latin drug lords have shown us something 

parallel if not quite as ominous in the water, launching flotillas of cheap semisubmersibles capable of independent navigation on the high seas.

Land power, for any country planning to conduct military operations in lands other than its own, is almost entirely dependent on sea and 

air power. This, historically, has been as true for insurgent or irregular war 

as it has for any other type of armed contest.

Please see sections: 8, Linearity and the Line of Retreat; 63, Roadblocks and 

Checkpoints; 111, Knowledge Cultures; 138, Raids; 128, Global Insurgency and 

Global Trespass; 136, Weapons; 76, Gender; and 6, The Operational Equation.



“I do not say the Frenchmen will not come;

I only say they will not come by sea.”455 F

456

John St. Vincent,

First Lord of the Admiralty (1803)

---------------

Newsreel announcer: Accepting responsibility for 

Klendathu, Sky Marshal Dienes resigns. His successor, 

Sky Marshal Tehat Meru, outlines her new strategy. 

Sky Marshal Tehat Meru: To fight the bug, we must 

understand the bug. We can ill afford another Klendathu. 

Newsreel announcer: Would you like to know more?

from the movie,

Starship Troopers (1997)456F

457

--------------

“However distant we may be in both conditions and dispositions, 

from taking an active part in any commotions in that country, nature 

has placed it too near us to make its movements altogether indifferent to our interests or to our curiosity.”457 F

458

Thomas Jefferson

 (Speaking of revolution in Brazil)


495

May I vote myself into slavery?

Section 124, Slavery and Underclass

Slavery. It is bad press for you to be in favor of slavery, to allow slavery, or get 

anywhere close to slavery. Americans especially are touchy about the subject. If 

you fancy yourself anti-American and, especially if your organization runs a risk 

of inviting the Americans to come visit you, armed, don’t expose yourself as slaveholder, slave trader, slaver, or even as a slave. Slavery is the opposite of liberty, 

but it is difficult to make a useful statement as to where either condition begins or 

ends. This book is about winning irregular conflict, so I must note up-front that 

holding slaves can help you win. Many humans accept being slaves if fed, clothed, 

entertained, and keep more-or-less healthy and physically safe. They may even 

give you their loyalty and fight for you.

On the other end of the spectrum, however, lives a stubborn minority for 

whom no amount of care is sufficient to compensate enslavement. They would 

rather be sick, poor, and ignorant than dominated by you. They can be problematic, too, especially if they can find a leader. For them, a central question arises 

over the need to recruit, organize, and proselytize: Does a people have a right to 

choose slavery for itself or not? It is the one question that forces the theme of slavery to be included as a section in this book. Can a people freely and willingly vote 

itself into a condition of slavery, or must that particular free act be opposed? It is 

one of the main questions of the age. Unfortunately for practical opposition, the 

choice toward slavery is rarely made in one big leap, but rather in a series of comfortable increments. This leads to a closely related question: Can a majority in a 

democratic polity vote away the rights of a minority, slice by slice? Does the fact 

that such slicing results from peaceful, predictable, open, democratic elections 

make the incremental march toward slavery and away from liberty legitimate?

Like legitimacy, democracy, rule-of-law, and sovereignty, the term slavery

does not have an official, commanding definition, nor is there a clear boundary 

between when it exists and when it does not. There are, nevertheless, some conditions about which there is little argument. If you have enough money, but cannot 

leave a place, then you are probably a slave or a prisoner. You might be a debtor. 

Debt servitude gets pretty close to slavery. If you can be corporally punished for 

not paying a debt, or for something you say, then you might be a slave. If you are 

good to your children, but they can be taken from you anyway, you’re probably a 

slave. If you do not have the right to not speak, you’re probably a slave. Study 

your social compact. If you are more part of what can be owned than part of who 

can do the owning, you might be a slave. If you can decide at whim the revealing
124 Slavery and Underclass

496

outlines of other persons’ personal identity, you are tending toward being those 

persons’ owner or at least toward being perceived as such.

In the past, Webster’s defined enthrall as ‘1. To make a slave of; enslave; 

hence, 2. To put or hold under strong influence; captivate; enchant; fascinate.’ The 

words ‘Now rare’ appear before the first meaning in more recent Webster’s, and 

most new American English language dictionaries start with the second denotation 

--that of enchantment. To me, more of the first meaning should be returned to the 

word. Enthrall is what charismatic political leaders do; enthrallment is what charisma allows. Attractive in small doses, its excess is a near constant in today’s 

conflicts. To enthrall rather than to convince distinguishes the intentions of fascists, Bolsheviks, Rasputins, or populists in general. Post-structuralists are 

captivated by populists. Theirs is a voluntary slavery which they often commend 

to or even prescribe for others. The question of slavery, and whether or not a people can choose slavery, may be at the heart of your insurgent war.

Underclass. Underclass is not used here in the way Karl Marx used lumpenproletariat -- a refuse class, but rather as a term for any collective identity that 

suffers an inferior social status compared to the societal norm or even compared to some other minority collective identity. It is a dangerous condition

and, while its mere existence might not cause an irregular armed conflict, it is 

safe to assert that it can contribute.

Perceived relative deprivation has for some time been observed as 

a causal condition for criminal behavior and posited as a motivator of rebellion. Professor Ted Gurr (Why Men Rebel) can be credited with the 

observation, but so can Karl Marx and maybe some long-dead Greeks. 

(The observation can be inferentially tied to egalitarianism, e.g., if everyone is in about the same material condition there will be less discontent 

and less conflict.) The opposite view is that plenty of us are actually not 

content unless we have more than others.

A category of people sharing some cohesive identity and perceiving 

a shared grievance can be a recruiting, financial or leadership source-bed for 

insurgency. It can facilitate the identification or creation of routes and places 

of anonymity and refuge. If there is an underclass, a perception of grievance 

can be created even if one does not already exist.

American national self-assessment draws in part on a current flowing

from the pre-constitutional existence of a Black underclass. The evolutionary erasure of that status continues to encourage and dismay, but is 

nevertheless part of what paints collective attitudes about the fairness and 

stability of the US social compact. Meanwhile, however, the United States 

has allowed the growth of a new underclass, mostly of Mexican and Central 
124 Slavery and Underclass

497

American origin, many of whom are illegally present in US territory. This 

condition may not have been adequately addressed in terms of its potential 

as a cause, kindling, or enabler of irregular conflict in North America.

Whatever the scale of the territory, check for the existence of an 

underclass. This said, you will do better to steer clear of ‘class warfare’ or 

‘class struggle’ as an approach to conflict analysis, except maybe for propaganda purposes if you are so inclined ideologically. Plaintiff’s lawyers 

often invent a class, the word merely a synonym for a human collective or 

category that can be reasonably said to share an actionable grievance. The 

lawyer, like the average Bolshevik, wants to be that class’ exclusive agent. 

So, in a way, all of your analyses will be class analyses if they have anything to do with conflict and competition. One weakness of marxist class 

analyses, however, has always been the contrived and amorphous nature 

of the classes chosen. Still, if some Bolshie-type can convince enough 

people they’re in a ‘proletariat’ or in some other collective that a ‘bourgeoisie’ or an ‘elite’ is abusing, then maybe some of the vocabulary from 

that construct still has some meaning.

Please see sections: 53, Hohfeldian Grievance Analysis; 25, Why Humans 

Don’t Fight; 79, Suicide; 105, Genocide Geography; 72, Land Strategy and 

Property Strategy; 50, US Persons; 127, Between Liberty and Lawrence; 

and 118, Democracy.



“I have come here to chew bubble gum and kick ass...and I’m 

all out of bubblegum”

Nada in the movie,

They Live (1988) 458F

459

---------------

“Perhaps the fact that we have seen millions voting themselves into complete dependence on a tyrant has made our generation understand that to 

choose one's government is not necessarily to secure freedom.”459F

460

Friedrich Hayek

---------------

“The war is over. The rebels are our countrymen again.”460 F

461

U. S. Grant (1865)


498

Civil rights, property rights and global sanctimony

Section 125, Human Rights

When dealing with human rights issues, you stand to gain competitive advantage by being as geographically and temporally specific as 

possible regarding both violations and legal processes.

Basic human rights. In the midst of an active civil war, you will want to 

set, announce, and enforce some minimums of behavior for the protection 

of innocents. Beyond being the right thing to do, it will help you highlight 

the relative wickedness of your enemy. Here is a sample rubric for human 

rights behavior ˗˗ yours, that of your allies, and that of your enemies:

- Children under 15 years of age are a protected category. Involving children 

in armed conflict is proscribed behavior, a violation of human rights and a 

crime to be prosecuted. ‘Involving’ means using children in any capacity, including as shields, spies, hostages, messengers, orderlies, or collateral.

- The use of landmines, booby traps, and other explosive devicesthat cannot discriminate as to their target (that is to say, a child might unwittingly 

detonate and be injured by them) is inherently criminal and a violation of 

human rights.

- The identities of any persons who are detained and deprived of their liberty will be precisely identified, along with the reason for their detention. 

Respect habeas corpus.

- All human deaths will be investigated. All human remains will be precisely identified and the fact of a person’s death publicized along with the 

location of the person’s known remains. Respect habeas corpus.

- Obedience to superior orders is not a credible defense for willfully killing 

another person. Any organization whose member is directly responsible 

for a human killing must publicly express that organization’s grant of immunity to the killer or investigate the killing as a homicide.

- Killers are not released from culpability and liability for crimes solely 

because their higher authorities express a grant of immunity as to their 

actions. The expression of immunity only establishes by admission the 

responsibility of the killers’ organization as a potentially culpable and liable participant in a killing. That is to say, what the organization granted 

might not have been immunity, but rather impunity.

You can always expand the compass of the term ‘human rights’ and 

raise the standards of expected behavior. You might determine that 17 
125 Human Rights

499

years is a better standard for the protection of children, address the subject 

of torture, or even set the tormenting of dogs as an offense.

The above standard leaves open the possibility that a State or an 

insurgent might protect its agents against prosecution, claiming sovereign

prerogative (sovereign immunity) -- with the added flourish that a sovereign need make no legal or moral justification since, under a theory of 

suma potestas, there is no higher authority to which the sovereign State 

must answer. If an insurgent or an established State claims such sovereign 

independence from higher jurisdiction, but does not explain its behavior 

for killing (or other trespass), it nevertheless exposes itself to moral judgment. At some point in an armed conflict, a competing entity will not only 

say it has a monopoly over the granting of impunity, but also a monopoly 

on imposing punishment, as well as a monopoly on allowing forensic investigations. Such a power might say, ‘If you want to punish people in 

this territory for some alleged violation of human rights, you will have to 

force your way past us’.

Some people will argue that a government commits a human rights

violation if it fails to stop a human rights violation directly committed by 

someone else, even itsinsurgent foe. This has been experienced several times 

by the government of Colombia. Such an accusation of secondary responsibility asserts that protection of the citizenry is an essential purpose and 

responsibility of a State. ‘Failure to protect’ has become a useful, parallel theory of State violation of human rights. Government omissions, inaction or 

impotence invite human rights charges against the government, making it easier for an insurgent organization to paint the State as a failure. This twist on 

human rights violation also encourages insurgents to provoke violence.

Expansive Human Rights. People invoke the United Nations Declaration of 

Human Rights for many purposes. It is a cornucopia of desires, used both innocently and cynically. Rarely is it used in a manner that does not selectively judge

the ethical performance of armed competitors and their objectives. The Declaration is of little help in determining where on the ground affected persons might

enjoy a full range of rights without stepping on rights claimed by others. The Declaration of Human Rights is not a social compact; a social compact is not a list of 

desirables. A social compact is an agreement about how to peacefully address the 

distribution of rights and duties. If there is no social compact, then all human rights 

are subject to forfeiture. Social compacts are strongest where the evidence of rights 
125 Human Rights

500

and duties is accurate, comprehensive and transparent; where there are mechanisms to apply the evidence (courts, markets and democratic processes), and the 

basic rules regarding who can own what (how and to whom rights and duties are

distributed) are consonant with the expectations of the population as a whole. Although basic human rights are increasingly recognized on a global scale, there is no 

global social compact. Social compacts seem to require geographic delimitation -

- boundaries.

At some point, human rights, property rights and civil rights amount to the 

same thing. Perhaps the most basic right to property within English-language tradition is a right to safe use and enjoyment of a place. Humans have a right to exist 

safely someplace. That right is proscribed by the logic of physical separation. We can’t all have the same right to peaceful use of the same exact 

place at the same time. Conversely, most of us cannot abide by the idea 

that there exist humans who have no right to peaceful safety anywhere. 

Mention of this obvious spatial logic leads to another -- that land stays put, 

but people can move. New theories of ‘spatial justice’ are at work confounding traditional logic by comparing human material conditions from 

place to place and then calling for redistributions of wealth to the places

of material inferiority. These ‘spatial justice’ notions depend in part on a 

curious invention in human rights theory: that not only do people everywhere have basic rights, their claims to a whole basket of rights should be 

answered without prejudice to their right to stay put (in terms of residence 

or employment, for instance). In other words, human rights are rights in 

situ and, furthermore, according to many proponents of this line of geographic human rights thinking, when people move, their claim of rights is

still not subject to a duty to move.

Such a viewpoint obviously helps the immediate arguments of 

groups such as organized squatters. An opposing view stresses human 

movement and separation as options for conflict resolution and material 

improvement. In other words, this latter view, while it may or may not 

consider economic rights as basic human rights, does not attempt to suggest that a poor environment (a poor place) necessarily needs to be made 

better -- the alternative being to empower individuals to have a wider range 

of location choices that they can make for themselves. Sometimes the best 

of poor alternatives might be forced relocation.

We cannot effectively respect human rights if we express them in 

purely legalistic or moralistic terms. They have to be geographical, pragmatic terms. The founders’ vision of a more equitable world required 
125 Human Rights

501

theory, place, and practicality. They matched the right to life with a proof 

of life (habeas corpus), for instance. ‘Property’, meanwhile, is not just a 

thing or a place; it is a human relationship that addresses the division of 

rights and duties within and about territorially delimited space. Property 

is where law, economics and geography converge. The practical ethic of 

a human rights program first has to be about the human right to peaceful 

existence, but this, as a practical matter... in defined space and time. I 

recommend measuring human rights performance in terms of property.

Please see sections: 53, Hohfeldian Grievance Analysis; 20, Rule-of-Law; 

72, Land Strategy and Property Strategy; 107, Guerre d’Algérie; 23, Mens 

Rea; 71, Jerusalem; 48, Grading the Social Compact; and 7, Sanctuary.



“...in the great majority of cases, human rights and property rights are 

fundamentally and in the long run, identical; but when it clearly appears 

that there is a real conflict between them, human rights must have the 

upper hand; for property belongs to man and not man to property.”461 F

462

Theodore Roosevelt

---------------

Rooster Cogburn: I mean to kill you in one minute, Ned; or see you 

hanged in Fort Smith at Judge Parker's convenience. Which will you have?

‘Lucky’ Ned Pepper: I call that bold talk for a one-eyed fat man.

Rooster Cogburn: Fill your hand, you son-of-a-bitch.

from the movie,

True Grit, 2010462F

463

---------------

“Like all defenders of institutional violence,

their real adversary is the truth.”463F

464

Mike Lee

---------------

“Manifestly, therefore, nothing but confusion of thought can result 

from assuming that the rights of man in a moral sense are equally 

rights in the sense of the Constitution and the law.”464 F

465

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.


502

A cat as good as the king’s

Section 126, Particularization of Power

The number of individuals and groups that can exert their will at global 

distances continues to increase. I call it the particularization of power, as distinguished from the diffusion of property. Both phenomena are tied to globalization. 

The diffusion of property is the constant division and redistribution of rights and 

duties that are recognized within human collectives and tend toward increasing 

formality. The two terms, ‘particularization of power’ and ‘diffusion of property’ 

can be helpful to you in sorting out the nature of and possibilities in irregular war.

Today, many individuals can implement their own foreign policy, visiting 

countries pretty much as they choose, writing Congress, sending money to causes, 

blogging, suing or defending in international courts, or even working for a foreign 

government. An individual can do all kinds of influential things, often with little 

regard for the opinions or preferences of government. If he or she can represent a

powerful group identity or has attained great material wealth, he or she can exert 

influence at global distances. If the individual is nuts and homicidal, he or she can 

randomly ruin someone’s afternoon.

There is a finite amount of attention that can be given by top government 

leaders to any issue and when that attention span is occupied, remaining matters of 

State fall to second then third string bureaucrats. As the rank of the functionary 

drops, other parts of a government and influences outside of it, stand to gain a little 

space. For instance, there is no hope of a unified voice or a summa potestas in 

American foreign dealings; there is more and more of a marketplace for American 

foreign policy in which the federal government is only a major player. The particularization of foreign policy power is not just related to global redistribution of 

wealth or new communication technologies, but to ambivalence, involuntary abnegation of power, and the practical limitations of leaders’ attention.

Banks, because they process the convertible wealth of other identities(clients, shareholders, creditors, debtors), are some of the most powerful and least 

understood non-governmental and semi-governmental entities. Through them, agile leaders can translate the cohesiveness of one kind of group into support for the 

project of another. Banking helps convert money˗˗ hiding the connection between 

manifestations of debt and credit (cash, commercial paper, electronic inputs) and 

the manner of their acquisition or accretion. Banking allows what is perhaps the 

ultimate diffusion of property and, in a way, is a paradox of the power of the capitalist system: its life blood, money, can be so easily converted into projects that 

sicken the system itself. In effect, insurgents can wield unblessed power, translate 

it into representational forms of debt and credit, convert those representations into 

fungible money and then use the newly flexibilized wealth to attack the system. 
126 Particularization of Power

503

Theparticularization of power can be anticipated and managed to a degree. 

When wealth becomes property, for instance, it is a bit easier for a government 

(and maybe a population) to see, but perhapsit is harder to control. In your irregular warfare, someone will probably try to transform un-sanctioned power into 

property. As soon aswhat is perhaps‘illegitimate’wealth is turned into legal property, a form of laundering has been completed and anonymity is no longer needed 

for the exerciseof that power. It is often easier for usto follow property, and harder 

for the establishment to confiscate or deny its use. It is not a black and white world, 

but in your case you are probably either all about laundering your power into either 

property (or into a common medium of more liquid exchange) or you are all about 

trying to keep your enemy from doing the same.

The global particularization of power will continue. If you are of a mind 

to, you can slow it locally using laws that limit access to places, equipment and 

privacy. Limiting the conversion of unrecognized or unauthorized power into 

property, meanwhile, requires careful study of market mechanisms and institutional formalities related the fluid conversion of assets.

Please see sections: 110, Knowledge Gaps; 139, Strategy of Aggregate 

Tactics; 62, Bank Robbery; 72, Land Strategy and Property Strategy; 42,

Brigands; 130, Globalization; 138, Raids; and 108, Common Knowledge.



“I give away something up to $500 million a year throughout 

the world promoting Open Society. My foundations support 

people in the country who care about an open society. It's their 

work that I'm supporting. So it's not me doing it.”4 65F

466

George Soros

---------------

“...the problem in this world is to avoid a concentration of power, to 

have a dispersal of power, that unless we maintain a dispersal of 

power we will not be able to maintain a free society.”466F

467

Milton Friedman

---------------

“Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom.”

Ben Franklin (attributed)


504

Beecher’s Bibles

Section 127,

Between Liberty and Lawrence

The first railroad bridge over the Missouri river at Kansas’ eastern border, a quarter-mile steel trestle on stone pylons, opened at Kansas City in 

1869. Until the rails changed the prevailing pattern of commerce and travel 

from north-south to east-west, Leavenworth had been the prominent transportation node. Locals claim that if Leavenworth had won the competition 

for the 1869 bridge (or even if the bridge laid across the river at Leavenworth 

a decade later had been better constructed), Leavenworth might have regained its place as the region’s dominant urb. In any case, bridges were

needed to move direct rail traffic between Texas and Chicago, to help put Tbone steaks between eastern teeth, and more than steak was at stake. The 

big planners and investors -- the visionaries who were to manifest Manifest 

Destiny and schedule its destinations -- struggled with the slavery question 

and the Indian question. To move the railroad through meant opening the 

land west of Missouri, and ‘opening’ meant formalizing land ownership.

The story being far above my poor power to add or detract, I lifted 

lines wholesale from Lincoln’s second inaugural address, and relevant 

facts from Wikipedia and the following books:

Nicole Etcheson’s Bleeding Kansas: Contested Liberty in the Civil War Era.

Loren Litteer’s “Bleeding Kansas”: The Border War in Douglas and Adjacent Counties.

Tony Mullkis’ Peacekeeping on the Plains: Army Operations in Bleeding Kansas.

Alice Nichols’ Bleeding Kansas.

Thomas Crump’s Abraham Lincoln’s World.

This section treats railroads, borders, towns, property rights, the history 

of the distribution of power, and ideology generally. If you google ‘center 

of the ideological universe’, the interweb will give you the location of the 

first bridge over the Mississippi into Iowa, or over the Missouri river into 

Kansas. Or not, but it might just as well have. Hopefully, the selective timeline that follows and the map on page 508 will help clarify events and maybe

get you to agree.

* September 18, 1850 -- Congress passed The Fugitive Slaves Act as part of 

the “Missouri Compromise.” A legislative contraption, it disallowed slavery 

north of the 36°30′ parallel, but required the return of escaped slaves.
127 Between Liberty and Lawrence

505

* May 30, 1854 -- President Franklin Pierce signs into law the Kansas-Nebraska Act. The law broke the Missouri Compromise in that it allowed for 

‘popular sovereignty’, meaning local settlers would vote to decide if whites 

could own slaves in Kansas and Nebraska.

* August 1, 1854 -- Free-State settlers establish the town of Lawrence, Kansas.

* November 29, 1854 --Kansans elect their first congressional representative (proslavery). Of approximately 1,500 registered voters, nearly 6,000 votes are cast!

* September 1, 1855 --Territorial governor Wilson Shannon (pro-slavery) arrives.

* April 21, 1856 -- The first railroad bridge over the Mississippi River connects Rock Island, Illinois and Davenport, Iowa. The crossing fuels

confrontation between riverboat men and railroaders.

* May 22, 1856 -- South Carolina Democrat Preston Brooks attacks

Massachusetts Republican Charles Sumner in the Senate chambers, 

beating him senseless.

* May 24, 1856 – Abolitionist John Brown leads a murderous rampage 

against pro-slavery settlers at Pottawatomie Creek, killing five.

* July 4, 1856 -- Using two hundred federal troops, Fort Leavenworth commander Colonel Edwin Sumner breaks up a meeting of the unofficial “FreeState Legislature” in Topeka.

* March 6, 1857 -- The US Supreme Court hands down a decision in Dredd 

Scott v. Sandford. The court opines that blacks of African descent are property and not citizens, are not protected by the Constitution, have no right to 

sue, and no right to freedom.

* May 19, 1858 – Thirty men led by pro-slaver Charles Hamilton murder 

eleven unarmed free-staters near the Missouri border in what became known 

as the Marais des Cygnes or Marais de Cygne massacre.

* October 4, 1859 -- Kansas voters approve the Wyandotte (anti-slavery) 

constitution.

* December 2, 1859 --John Brown hangsin Virginia.

* January 29, 1861 -- US President James Buchanan signs the Kansas Statehood Bill, making Kansas a state of the United States.

* April 12, 1861 --Confederate forces fire on Fort Sumter, initiating hostilities 

in the Civil War.

Note that in the middle of our timeline is another railroad crossing --

over the Mississippi. Lieutenant Robert E. Lee had chosen the site of the 

Rock Island Bridge during the national topographical survey back in 1837. 

When the Chicago and Rock Island Railroad and the River Bridge Company put that bridge over the Mississippi, the river boat captains were not 

happy about it. Shortly after the bridge opened, a steamboat ran under then 

into it, blew up and burned down the bridge. Then the riverboat men went 

a step too far, suing the bridge and railroad companies for the loss of their 
127 Between Liberty and Lawrence

506

boat. The railroad men hired the best lawyer in Illinois, one Abraham Lincoln, who, while pointing out the questionable tactical facts surrounding 

the explosion and fire, expressed the strategic meaning of the case. He told 

the jury that the future nation was to be bound east-to-west, and the jury 

agreed. That an east-west vision might accelerate the tear of south from 

north is a geographic curiosity, but one that cannot be itself separated from 

the issues of land ownership and people ownership.

One of the great dramas of human history was rehearsed in eastern Kansas 

in the late 1850s. All thoughts were anxiously directed to an impending civil 

war, and many believed that the wealth piled by the bondman’s two hundred 

and fifty years of unrequited toil would be dissipated, and every drop of blood 

drawn with the lash paid by another drawn with the sword, as had been said 

three thousand years earlier, so it was still that the judgments of the Lord were 

true and righteous altogether. Religion, or at least denomination, was not at 

issue. Both sides read the same Bible and prayed to the same God; and each 

invoked His aid against the other.

The towns of Leavenworth, Topeka, Lawrence, Ft. Scott, Wyandotte, 

Lecompton, Potawatomie, Shawnee and dozens of still smaller places nearby 

tested the dilemmas of democratic math and of being freely able to choose 

against being freely able to choose not to be able to choose. Something was 

exposed about the amount of faith to be invested in elections, the geographic 

scales of democracy, and the power of voting with the feet. Also brought home 

was the question of whether revolutionary change, even the most just, required 

violence -- if viciousness could be not only justifiable but righteous. The immediate roles and interaction of militias and of federal soldiers, and the 

meaning of oaths in the face of flawed fundamental laws, were tested as well. 

NGOs formed. The New England Immigrant Aid Company was one of the 

first to insert itself as a partisan in an armed conflict. It smuggled Sharps carbines to Lawrence Free-Staters in boxes marked as Bibles. Heavy Bibles.

In all, between 1855 and 1860, Kansans voted on four constitutional

drafts -- two pro-slavery and two anti-slavery. Each was subject to rejection or ratification in Washington. Fewer than fifty persons were murdered 

in the timeframe of the state constitutional contest, but most of those murders were absolute political statements, which were taken as such locally, 

nationally, and internationally. The two scales of democracy and constitutionalism barely coincided to definitively abolish slavery in Kansas. 

The close-in-time details of the violence involve land claims, claim 

jumping, inconsistent surveying of property lines and reservation boundaries, and the variously effective serving of variously lawful arrest warrants. 

At one turn of the indignations and reprisals, on the night of April 23, 1856, 

a sniper shot Samuel Jones (who had been postmaster in Westport, Missouri 

until appointed as Douglas County, Kansas Sheriff by the pro-slavery legislature) in the back, in his tent, after he had made some arrests unpopular in 
127 Between Liberty and Lawrence

507

Lawrence. He recovered his health to lead a vengeful May 11th raid on Lawrence to chasten and weaken a growing Free-State organization. The raiders 

burned down the Free-State Hotel, a couple of homes, destroyed printing 

presses, and looted widely. Two of the raiders died, but by mishap.

The proxy war in Kansas Territory was a prelude to an uglier plane of 

border violence perpetrated by Jayhawkers, Redlegs, Ruffians, Bushwhackers, 

and by less-memorable militias and vigilantes. In August, 1863, William 

Clarke Quantrill led a raid on Lawrence, this time razing a quarter of the town 

and killing perhaps two hundred men. Pre-war ‘Bleeding Kansas’ had been a 

relative pin prick, but it was the beginning of the end of a powerful interest. 

All knew that this interest was, somehow, the cause of the war.

Please see sections: 48, Grading the Social Compact; 56, Militias and Gun 

Control; 29, Heavy Machines; 72, Land Strategy and Property Strategy; 

16, Presence; 68, Scale; 135, Borders and Anarchism; and 138, Raids.



Laura Lee: Kansas was all golden and smelled like sunshine.

Josey Wales: Yeah, well, I always heard there were three kinds 

of suns in Kansas, sunshine, sunflowers, and sons-of-bitches.

from the movie,

The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976)467F

468

---------------

James Ewell Brown 'Jeb' Stuart: What do you do on Saturday 

night for fun here? 

Kit Carson Holliday: Well, as I remember, half of Leavenworth 

takes a bath and the other half gets drunk. And since there are only 

two bathtubs in town, things get kind of exciting around midnight.

from the movie,

Santa Fe Trail (1940)468F

469

---------------

Ye soldiers of Freedom, then strike, while strike ye may

The death blow of oppression in a better time and way

William W. Patton, from the song,

John Brown


127 Between Liberty and Lawrence

508

-- Kansas-Missouri Border circa 1858 --

The dotted lines reflect major trunks of the

Santa Fe and Oregon Trails
509

If there’s a global system, there’s a global rebel

Section 128, Global Insurgency

and Global Trespass

A global insurgency has been afoot for some time ˗˗two or three thousand 

years maybe. Somehow, in the confusion of contemporary arguments and translations, people have begun to identify radical Islamists, deep ecologists, neomarxists, and other curious bedfellows with global insurgency. That’s too bad, 

because a liberty-based millennial current of insurgent energy and inspiration had 

for some time been changing the balance of power (between the individual and 

large collectives) toward the individual. Power in this context of coercive competitions means the capacity to determine people’s fate, compose their vision of the 

meaning of life, establish and delimit relationships, create or deny voluntary associations, and determine the limits of material comfort and enjoyments. In other 

words, to affect the balance of domination and submission among people.

The millennial insurgency has clear revolutionary milestones, but has 

hardly been continual or consistent in its progress or expression. Now and then it 

has challenged a State, church or some other organized enterprise, and even destroyed some. It is not inherently against States, churches or other associations, but 

rather presumes that they tend toward tyranny and therefore occasionally need to 

be checked. It is an insurgency because it is about growing and preserving the 

relative power that individuals have within whatever structure of governance, associational preferences, and entrenched advantages they find themselves. It has 

old symbols and code words, like liberty and free will, and its strongest roots have 

geographic paths that seem to make it more ‘Western’ or ‘Judeo-Christian’.

While these latter identifiers may be dependent as much asindependent characteristics, Americans are among the most easily engaged in advancing the

millennial insurgency today. Because America’s physical and cultural reach is 

global, the insurgency is global.

There exists another global current that does not have as deep a set of roots. 

It also challenges the power of States (some states, anyway) and other associational 

structures, and for this reason can be given the adjective ‘insurgent’. It does not 

challenge the idea of dominant State power per se, however. In fact, it prefers 

socialism and other designs for centralized decision-making. It is exactly not insurgent in that it seeks to rebalance power toward the State, arguing that human 

progress can be extended to abandoned and downtrodden humans by the State only

if the State has more and more power. It does not presume that centralized States 

are inherently likely to abuse power.

This second ‘insurgent’ current manifests itself through a variety of 

organizational types, most of which depend on and venerate some form of exclusive agency, like a vanguard or a clergy. Although its adherents may 

describe it using the word ‘resistance’, it is often anathema to those who would 
128 Global Insurgency and Global Trespass

510

defy and resist the creation of tyrannies, since it explicitly yearns and works 

toward the concentration of power in small elites. As a global resistance 

movement, it has taken on a basket of identifiers for what it resists. Accordingly, it describes itself as ‘anti-’ many things, including neoliberalism, 

capitalism, and colonialism. The most specific adjective for what the movement resists, and with greatest consistency, is American, as in anti-American. 

The movement has a number of intellectual call signs, among them post-structuralism. If a person self-identifies as a convinced post-structuralist, it probably 

means he or she has bought in to active anti-Americanism.

The government of the United States does not always proceed in support 

of the millennial insurgency described in the first paragraph above, or does it always oppose the resistance movement described in the second and third 

paragraphs. It is often the opposite. Equally, what Americans do in the world 

outside the auspices or control of the US Government is inconsonant with the immediacies of government policy. America as a nation may promote the millennial 

insurgency when its government does not, or vice versa.

While there might be ‘clashes of cultures’ in the world, that concept is not 

the best foundation for setting the scorecard in the irregular war in which you are 

likely to participate. You will do betterto envision the pair of currents noted above. 

One is a fitful, inconsistent but genuine global insurgency with millennial roots 

which seeks to distribute and balance power, favoring choice at the most personal 

and individual level. The other is a reactionary amalgam that, when successful,

generally creates some new tyranny. When Martin Luther tacked his ninety-five 

theses onto the door of the Church Castle at Wittenberg in 1517, he set one of the 

milestones of the millennial insurgency. He told the exclusive agents called the 

Roman clergy that he wasn’t buying it any more. He would deal with God directly 

and do so in his own language.

In addition to the two sides of global insurgency, there are two sides to 

global trespass, trespass meaning the violation of others’ rights, especially the 

rights we would suppose people to have in the peaceful enjoyment of their own 

space. One of these forms of trespass has a tinge of legality. It is the overreaching 

and abuse of comparative advantage by those with de jurepower, either financially 

or politically. It is what the multinational corporations often do -- or governments, 

unions, churches and so on. In other words, having stated admiration for the millennial insurgency whose torch is most engagingly carried by America, it is 

necessary to insert the disclaimer that everything the second resistance movement 

(the un-insurgency) does and says is not wrong. It feeds on an existing reality of 

trespass and injustice of which even our voluntarily instituted structures are often 

guilty.

Another form of global resistance, perhaps insurgency, but at least an irregular part of a larger war for domination, has grown with globalization. It is the 

transnational enterprise of pure trespass. It is hard to claim that organized crime is 
128 Global Insurgency and Global Trespass

511

more dangerous to civilization (or to the millennial insurgency of liberty) than is 

the offensive, purposed mass migration of persons whose habits and affinities are 

anathema to those of the people into whose territories they move. However we 

label the overall movements, the trespasses can be mapped in space and time and 

culpability assigned to actual men.

Please see sections: 104, Lawfare; 60, War Nouveau; 98, Jorge Verstrynge and 

Pio Moa; 135, Borders and Anarchism; 129, Nerd Globe; 65, Smuggling; 52, 

Sovereignty; and 119, America’s Revolutionary Strategy.



“Do not be narrow-minded, but think in large terms of great spaces, in continents and oceans, and thereby direct your course with that of our Fuhrer.”469F

470

Karl Haushofer

---------------

“One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh: but 

the earth abideth forever.”

Ecclesiastes 1:4 (King James)

---------------

“Perhaps it is a universal truth that the loss of liberty at home is to be charged

against provisions against danger, real or pretended from abroad.”470F

471

James Madison

---------------

Cathy: ...they were attractive as they were incendiary.

Ann: “Revolutionary.”

Cathy: If you will.

Ann: In their ideas.

Cathy: Not in their ideas, no. What were they? Finally? 

They were essentially a sort of chant.

Ann (reading): ‘Words not meant to misdirect are wasted’.

Cathy: Well, there you are...and their absence of meaning 

allowed us, or we understood them, as a celebration of the 

transgressive. Because they had no meaning.

David Mamet from the play

The Anarchist 471F

472


512

Nerds can be bad, too

Section 129, Nerd Globe

These days, losing dominance in higher math for almost any amount of 

time and in any sector of activity can present a grave vulnerability. The one-in-amillion math mind has become a criticalstrategic natural resource, at least in terms 

of national defense or global security. The kinds of things an aggressive one-in-amillion-mind nerd can do on his evil little keyboard can fit into five categories as 

follows:

1. Overload others’ computers so that they don’t work. He takes exception to some website, finding it offensive because it insults his nationality, 

favors someone who does, seems morally dangerous, is a financial competitor, or who knows why. One of his options is to arrange a denial of 

service attack in which he overloads the supposedly offending server with

so much computer traffic that it chokes on trespassing mips and bips.

2. Sabotage computer systems with viruses, worms, trojans and the like. 

This is especially annoying when the computers being attacked control 

things like air-traffic or power stations.

3. Steal valuables...like money and personal identifications, which are 

then used to further their criminal enterprise, like stealing more money. 

4. Spread propaganda, both commercial and political, to appear all over 

the place when the rest of us don’t want to bother with it.

5. Rig elections. Many electoral territories use electronic voting machines, electronic vote counters, or both.

These five can overlap, their effectiveness depending on superior computer skills and ultimately on superior math skills. The techniques, mental 

competencies, and formal education needed to commit digital misdemeanors 

are the same as for digital felonies and digital warfare, so possessors of these 

qualities bear watching. As with other crimes, the greater problems arise when 

bad nerds are organized by leaders with nefarious mens rea. What we should 

not overlook, however, is that the realm of organized math trespass is subject 

to the same principles of strategy that the mundane, muddy-booted warrior is 

obligated to observe.472 F

473

The classic principles of military strategy and its operational equation are ignored at peril, whether you are Erwin Rommel or Booger 

Dawson. The trespasser nerd lives in physical space and his weapons are 

physical, not virtual. He needs a box, keyboard, server, router, cable, or 

satellite. He and his equipment are located somewhere. Distance is as 
129 Nerd Globe

513

relevant a concept for his actions (and for defense against his actions) as it 

would be in any other armed competitive activity. The thing to remember 

from Geography (the academic discipline) is that cost-distance is more 

pertinent than Euclidean distance. The cost-distances for a trespass nerd, 

although he may not realize it, are determined by language, legal protection, and emotive or affective welcome. The Chinese hacker does not have 

to pay much attention to operational security as long as his trespasses are 

against properties outside those of the Chinese and especially the Chinese 

government’s domain of national interest, language, and territory. He is 

not likely to be extradited if he causes a denial of service attack against a 

website in Australia because he thinks the owners of the website are somehow supporting Uighur separatism.

The competent, funded, malicious nerd will raise his game of competitive strategy from latent stages of guerrilla organizing, to attacking vulnerable 

targets of opportunity (rarely venturing from his physical sanctuary) to risking 

extended and external lines of communication in order to establish weapons 

sites and opportunities for attack outside his sanctuary, into the enemy’s geographic depth, attacking enemy lines of communication and even perhaps the 

enemy sanctuaries. The nerd can do this by overtaking enemy computers with 

botnet attacks and by planting timed commands in various parts of the enemy 

physical infrastructure for use at a future date. Concomitantly, the contriving

nerd can seek to recruit and incorporate other nerds who can position themselves physically at distant places in order to provide the maintenance and 

warning necessary without endangering themselves. Know that the supposedly ‘virtual’ world of computers and math is one of human intention, housed 

in human bodies, and manifested using physical gear. The distances/weights 

and timing of the competition is a little different, but it is almost entirely physical, not metaphysical.

Any combination of unfriendly entities -- lone terrorist, brigand, 

felon, government, or simple pleasure seeker -- can seduce, intimidate, or 

otherwise inspire a team of mathematicians to attack files, systems, accounts, and codes. The best mathematicians in the world don’t seem to be 

much brighter than the average Red Wings fan when it comes to identifying the good guys and bad guys in the global insurgency. Loss of math 

superiority can lay a society bare to every terrible manifestation of resentment, disdain, envy, recklessness and other post-structural unworthiness. 

A large-scale math invasion could irreparably change a country’s fortunes.

In other words, some governments will continue building criminal 

and civil law to make hacking and other Internet trespasses more difficult. 
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514

Other governments will protect trespass-nerds. Some countries will increase diplomatic pressure on governments and NGOs to adhere to, 

promote and enforce legal restraints on Internet trespass. Shrinking the 

geography of cybercrime -- easing access to the physical implements of 

potential cyber trespass through international agreements -- might make 

the overall military task more manageable.

Governments, along with nongovernmental partners and allies will 

have to organize math minds not just for the purposes of passive defense, 

but for offensive mathematical counterattack against trespassers. Governments will also prepare military resources for the occasional need to visit 

physical destruction upon some wad of nerds. The United States and many 

other countries have the wherewithal to ensure that the best math minds in 

the world have the opportunity and desire to choose. We could take active 

measures to identify the best science and math minds in the world at an 

early age, and to assure that our own math education does not lag behind. 

The first defense against uncivil nerdity is to be an attractive place for 

beautiful math minds to live. Meanwhile, bad nerds on pathways detrimental to the safety of a nation must be confronted.

The State has three offensive capacities with which to mount winning strategies against nerds who digitally trespass against it and society. 

One is mathematical, another is legal/diplomatic, and the third is physical. 

It will not be enough to build math firewalls and observe safe Internet. 

There has to be an offensive capability so that the appropriate combinations of offense and defense give the State a reasonable chance against 

brilliant cyber guerrillas and criminals. Government’s obligation in the 

social compact (at least the American) is to provide for the common defense. When it does not, the omission engenders self-help and vigilantism. 

Nerd feuds could get ugly.

Special Operating Forces (SOF) will be called upon more and more 

often to attack cells of math nerds or even individual math geniuses. 

Booger (who prefers to be called an ‘IT professional’) might just have to 

go down. Taking him out competently will require observance of the military operational principles which, in turn, will require careful study of the 

physical and human geographies in which counter-nerd operational art will 

play out. Although cyber war happens in a physical world, the cost-distances are admittedly distinct. As a result, abstract concepts like 

spontaneity, collective identity, and democracy can be warped to create 

practical power advantages. Voting in political elections, for instance, can 
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515

be achieved in all sorts of new and convincing ways, cheapening and confusing the whole idea of elections. Unscrupulous nerd-handlers can 

finesse the rules of admissibility, create new scams, and change outcomes. 

For every financial scam we suffer as a globalizing society there may be 

an electoral scam that is harder to detect. Do we trust the power of higher 

math in the hands of the State?

A related problem has been developing for several millennia, is accelerating, and could metastasize. It can be called the presumption to 

godliness. We are sneaking up on the biological secrets of life -- cloning, 

inventing species, promiscuously designing or redesigning this and that

organism. Someone is bound to get scared and angry -- not just at the 

hacker nerd, but at whomever is perceived to be the mad scientist. The 

torch-bearing mob at Dr. Frankenstein’s door may go global.

Please see sections: 16, Presence; 86, Shifting Covet-geographies; 64,

Measuring Distance and Comparing Power; 19, Mercatus; 30, Control 

Technology; 108, Common Knowledge; 2, Anonymity; and 8, Linearity 

and the Line of Retreat.

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“You know...like nunchaku skills, bow hunting skills, computer 

hacking skills...Girls only want boyfriends who have great skills.”

Napoleon in the movie,

Napoleon Dynamite (2004)473F

474

---------------

Rat: How many languages do you speak? 

Dr. Zimsky: Five, actually.

Rat: I speak one: One, zero, one, zero, zero. With that I could 

steal your money, your secrets, your sexual fantasies, your whole 

life; in any country, any time, any place I want. We multitask like 

you breathe. I couldn't think as slow as you if I tried.

from the movie,

The Core (2003)474F

475

---------------

“What is your theologian's ecstasy but Mahomet's houri in the dark?”47 5F

476

H.G. Wells,

The Island of Dr. Moreau

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516

To the chagrin of reactionaries

Section 130, Globalization

The first of two quotations below is from Karl Marx and Frederick 

Engels (1848) and the other from T. Miller Maguire (1910). The first makes 

us pause and wonder why being publicly opposed to globalization is a broach 

of current leftist political fashion. The later comment is more obscure, but 

together they confirm that globalization is not new to our generations. Maybe 

not even the pace of globalization is greater now than in some periods during 

the past. After all, the greatest change in moving weight may have come during the period of rapid railroad network expansions and then again during the 

spread of airline service. It may be that, in terms of moving heavy items to 

some places, we aren’t much better globalized today than we were half a century ago. It is possible that in some ways the world is not as ‘small’ now as it 

was in the first half of the 20th century, given that today there are fewer active 

miles of railroad in many areas.

There is no escaping the breathtaking differences in communication brought by the Internet, cell phones, and GIS, but armed struggle takes 

weight and, while informatics have indirectly changed the potential for optimal geographic leverage of weight (we should be able to decide more 

rapidly and precisely where to deliver things that have mass, whether 

tanks, explosives, food, or arrest warrants), information alone can be unconvincing in armed struggles. We, the intransigent, need to be shown 

something with a little heft or we will continue to defy your insults.

From The Communist Manifesto (1848):

The bourgeoisie has, through its exploitation of the world market, given a cosmopolitan character to production and 

consumption in every country. To the great chagrin of reactionaries, it has drawn from under the feet of industry the 

national ground on which it stood. All old-established national 

industries have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed. 

They are dislodged by new industries, whose introduction becomes a life and death question for all civilized nations, by 

industries that no longer work up indigenous raw material, but 

raw material drawn from the remotest zones; industries whose 

products are consumed, not only at home, but in every quarter 

of the globe. In place of the old wants, satisfied by the production of the country, we find new wants, requiring for their 
130 Globalization

517

satisfaction the products of distant lands and climes. In place 

of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we 

have intercourse in every direction, universal inter-dependence of nations. And as in material, so also in intellectual 

production. The intellectual creations of individual nations become common property.

Considering that Marx and Engle’s observations are over a century 

and a half old, it’s pretty insightful stuff. Note the positive aspects the 

original communists admitted regarding the contribution of the bourgeoisie and the value of globalization. There are some deep ecologists and 

others today who just don’t like globalization, technological progress, or 

even humankind. They present quite a mental and philosophical challenge. But they are a detail in the panorama of global insurgency. Most 

of the rest of the participants in the self-styled anti-American version of 

global insurgency aren’t really focused on or enraged about the processes 

of globalization as such. For some of them, globalization is a tagline for a 

select number of processes they feel work to the benefit of a small minority 

of humans and to the detriment of the vast majority. Identifying one’s self 

as anti-globalization doesn’t necessarily mark opposition to globalization

processes per se, but is rather just a password or entrance badge to communicate solidarity with people who oppose what they think are

dominating identities. (Ironically, Marx would probably have called opponents of globalization, reactionaries.)

Marx did not understand property as a social compact or as a conflict 

resolution mechanism. He did not foresee that the bourgeoisie, if there even 

is such a collective identity, would actually increase and spread property, or 

that vastly greater numbers of people would become and consider themselves owners of property. He did not comprehend the modern corporation

or study America. Today’s marxism, however, is only a little bit about 

Marx. Still, Marx saw injustice, didn’t like it, started to think about it, and 

called for action against it. Some of his original classifications of people 

were too crude and his vision overly stuck to his time and place. People 

progressively distorted his ideas and with the auspices of an evil empire, a 

whole lot of people started adding to and evolving marxism and marxismleninism. When the empire died and it looked like we might say goodbye to 

marxism, a new group of thinkers dug it up so that now it roams the earth 

like a zombie -- with many of the same appetites. Today’s anti-globalization 

movement is not all marxist, but its inspirations and leadership overlaps what 
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518

marxism has become, even while it is barely recognizable as early marxism. 

And from The Gates of Our Empire (1910):

Manifestly the Pacific coast (of North America) is now absorbing 

the attention of the wisest as well as the ablest of mankind, and 

what applies to San Francisco in the event of any international dispute would also apply to Vancouver and Prince Rupert, which are 

a few days journey nearer to Asia than is California. Railways and 

steamships have almost annihilated distance. Napoleon’s men had 

to walk or ride from France or Spain to Moscow. To-day it takes 

less time to reach Washington from the most distant nations than it 

took senators from their respective States seventy years ago, and

less time to reach Vancouver than it used to take to get to Galway, 

and for Dr. Johnson to get to Scotland was a more troublesome task 

than for a Canadian contingent to get to Africa.476 F

477

Maguire was a friend of C.E. Callwell, whose Small Wars, Principles and Practice was an early 20th century bestseller among British 

military thinkers. Callwell pointed out that the small wars of which he 

wrote were those fought by regular against non-regular forces, and that the 

regular forces were almost always dependent on long lines of supply to 

base.477F

478 It was clear to these Britons that the irregular wars in which they 

took interest were only interesting because of the strategies made available 

to a country able to create and exploit the processes of globalization. 

Maguire was broadly read and was aware of communist ideas, but did not 

give them significance as a military matter.

Karl Marx and his friends focused on economic effects of globalization, and especially on land arrogations and their revolutionary 

consequences, but those consequences and the influence of their revolutionary thinking simmered slowly. Fifty years after the publication of the 

manifesto, Maguire and his buddies were teaching the practical effect of 

globalization on imperial military strategy, not oblivious to communist 

theory, but utterly unmoved by it.

Probably the best-known of the globalization measurements is the

‘Globalization Index’ produced by A.T. Kearney/Foreign Policy, which

can be downloaded at atkearny.com. It is a country-by-country ranking 

using four categories of globalization: political engagement, technological 

connectivity, personal contact, and economic integration. Although the 

most globalized technologically, the United States is 71st (out of 72 countries rated) in economic integration. This presents a strange relationship 

to the anti-Americanism of the neo-marxists or post-structuralists. Their 
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519

argument encompasses more than just economics, to be sure, indicting the 

entire structure of Western culture.

We can suppose all four of the globalization index categories are fair 

game for their critical analyses, but economic imperialism is to the anti-capitalists the most consequential sin. Nevertheless, the United States is nowhere 

near the most involved internationally in terms of economic interdependence 

and integration. Also, one of the assertions of the Globalization Index is ‘there 

is no turning back the clock on globalization’. This, to the post-structuralist, 

is an irritating part of what they see as a false truth foisted on the world by a 

capitalist, neoliberal, positivist, sexist, neocolonialist monster. In spite of their 

invective, however, the countries that are apparently benefiting the most, or 

which have best exploited the processes of globalization, are often small and

not ‘Western’. It seems, barring Armageddon, that the creators of the Globalization Index and Karl Marx are right -- globalization is going to proceed.

Arguments about economics might best be placed to the side when

considering globalization. Instead of considering any of the four categories proposed by the Globalization Index or which countries land in the 

index’s ‘winners circle’, go back to what Maguire and Callwell noted

about which countries were prepared to move and maintain military mass 

at distance. This is what really motivates the anti-Americanism of the 

post-structuralists. In spite of having inherited from marxist tradition an 

economics-based conversation, the part of globalization that really galls 

anti-Americans is the fact that the world is smaller, overall, for the United 

States military than for any other armed force. The United States and only 

a few other countries can initiate and sustain military deployments in others’ lands. Some would argue, meanwhile, that this US capability to wage 

war at distance is a fundamental column of the structure that allows the 

rest of globalization to proceed to the benefit of many lands.

So what? Globalization is, in balance, a positive process. Countries are 

far more likely to succeed materially if they can globalize. Development plans 

built on aversion to or denial of globalization (or of market forces) will fail or 

become tyrannical, and this will be so regardless of interest or indifference 

shown by the United States. In particular cases of American military involvement, it is a capability to maintain long lines of communication to base that, for 

better or worse, allows American intervention. Globalization will proceed to the 

benefit of the world so long as a few countries, and especially the United States, 

maintain their capacity to fight around the globe.
130 Globalization

520

Please see sections: 123, Sea and Aerospace Power; 97, Oviedo; 64, 

Measuring Distance and Comparing Power; 128, Global Insurgency and 

Global Trespass; 60, War Nouveau; 95, Childhood; 135, Borders and 

Anarchism; and 100, What the Foucault?



“My dear Nikolas, perhaps you don't realize that it's 

tea that has made the British Empire and Dr. Watson 

what they are today.”

Sherlock Holmes in the movie,

Pursuit to Algiers (1945)478F

479

---------------

“You come here with your laptop computers, your malaria medicine and your little bottles of hand sanitizer 

and think you can change the outcome, huh?”

Danny Archer in the movie,

Blood Diamond (2006)479F

480

---------------

“...globalization, at bottom, is merely the extension across 

national boundaries of the very same economic processes 

that inspire you to trade with the supermarket down the 

street....”480F

481

Donald J. Boudreaux,

Globalization

---------------

“Call Kenny Loggins...'cause you're in the Danger Zone.”

Sterling Archer in the TV series

Archer (2009)481F

482

---------------

“Philosophically, Communism and Anarchism are poles apart. 

Practically—i.e. in the form of society aimed at—the difference 

is mainly one of emphasis, but it is quite irreconcilable. The 

Communist’s emphasis is always on centralism and efficiency, 

the Anarchist’s on liberty and equality.”482 F

483

George Orwell,

Homage to Catalonia

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521

Do you think they may convey immunity?

Section 131, Is It an Insurgency?

Here is a kind of litmus test to help define your irregular war: Do 

you think the enemy leader has a right under international law to convey 

immunity to his armed subordinates for killing your armed subordinates? 

If you say ‘yes’, you’re placing yourself, arguably at least, in a traditional 

State-on-State contest. If you say, “No, the enemy leader is granting impunity to his people in defiance of our authority,” then your enemy might 

still not be an insurgent, but you will want to discern if he is purely criminal or is more politically motivated. That determination is trickier.

You’ll hear it said that ‘insurgency’ relates to a goal while ‘guerrilla’ relates to a method. Sometimes the point is made to argue that more 

must be done within a battlespace than just combat. ‘Guerrilla’ connotes

combat. ‘Insurgency’ seems to invite countering efforts like psychological 

and information operations and civil affairs -- to gain popular support. Try 

not to get caught by the distinction, as accurate as it may be. ‘Guerrilla’ is 

old Spanish for small war. Many English etymologies reach it back to the 

Peninsular Wars of the late 18th century, but the term goes back farther in 

the Spanish and, yes, there can be guerrilla tactics, guerrilla strategies and 

guerrilla all kinds of things within a non-insurgent war. A pair of Chinese 

strategists offered a list of twenty-four methods of warfare, including 

‘guerrilla’, but not’ insurgency’, to be mixed in unrestricted fashion, as 

required in order to gain strategic advantage.4 83F

484

If you get to maneuver a tank brigade against another tank brigade, 

everything in your battlespace is subject to being blown to smithereens. 

When you’re done, you (hopefully) will go back to the motor park to dust 

off. You probably don’t care if the tiff is called a UN Chapter 6 peace 

mission, an insurgency, a police action, a punitive expedition, World War 

III, or whatever. This book imagines conflicts that don’t hold out much 

chance for that big tank battle to occur. Here we imagine separatists, insurgents, brigands, warlords, resistance fighters, crime bosses, and so on. 

If any of them were to have a tank brigade, the contest would start to be a 

different creature than what concerns us here. The more useful determination does not revolve around a conflict’s being or not being an insurgency, 

but around the granting of impunity and how much a group has to depend 

on anonymity to keep defying a State.
131 Is It an Insurgency?

522

For years, many Western analysts preferred to view what they called 

insurgencies through the lens of a marxist-leninist movement with a unifying 

ideology, a well-defined cellular structure and a hierarchical leadership. 

Many such insurgencies had their inspiration and funding from Moscow, 

Beijing, or Cuba as part of the East-West, Cold War competition. We in the 

United States tended to discount and ignore other armed political challenges 

to States. The wide gamut of motivational and organizational formulae is 

now more evident, some ‘insurgencies’ fueled by hate, revenge and stridency; others by gangsterism; and others by the hybrid energies of ideology 

and profit. A common denominator is their capability to grant impunity to 

their people within physical space. They vary to the extent they need to 

maintain anonymity in order to do so. If they need no anonymity and can 

still grant impunity, perhaps they are, to that extent, another State. If some 

foreign government accepts that an armed group has a right to protect its 

members from punishment, that group is getting closer to being a State, and 

if the government being challenged by that group also accepts that the armed 

group has the right to protect its operatives from punishment, then the group 

is looking even more like a separate State.

Typifying, categorizing, defining types of armed defiance can be 

comforting and maybe useful, so here is a comfort list:

Insurgency ˗˗ Insurgentssay the government is illegitimate or otherwise unsatisfactory and justify their use of violence to secure a better state. They challenge 

the government’s claim on exclusive power to grant impunity and attempt to 

protect the people in their organization from being punished by the challenged 

government. The word autochthonous is useful here. We presume an insurgency to be autochthonous(local, indigenous, home grown, aboriginal, native), 

but it might be autochthonous only in part.

Revolution ˗˗ Revolutionaries say that the symbols, vocabulary, bureaucracy, 

institutions, power relationships, legends-- the whole structure of the society --

is built to keep down a particular identity, maybe the proletariat, a race, women, 

or an amalgam of disaffected groups. If they are right, you might want to make 

some changes, negotiate, give up or go over to their side. On the other hand, 

they may be bent on wresting power by force and killing you in the process. If 

it’s an armed revolution, insurgency is a ‘lesser included’. Revolutionaries 

aren’t necessarily ‘leftist’ or ‘statist.’

Occupation and Stability Operations-- All ground operations are occupation 

and stability operations. Otherwise, what are they ˗˗ ‘call-in-by phone-and-
131 Is It an Insurgency?

523

curse-about-the-chaos’ operations? It’s just a matter of how long you need to 

stay and what you want to accomplish.

Separatism -- Separatists don’t plan on throwing the government out of office, 

just throwing it out of a place that they claim belongs to them and not to the 

government or to whomever the government claims to represent. It might or 

might not be revolutionary, but that doesn’t make much difference. There is 

something about the current ownership they obviously don’t like, and that part 

maybe makes them insurgents. If the separatists are successful, the old government will no longer be able to punish their people or grant impunity to the 

government’s people inside the new territory.

Organized Crime ˗˗ Criminals like the government fine if its people will take 

the bribe. If the government won’t take their bribe, the ‘don’ is still betting the 

government can’t convict his wise guys and that it definitely can’t convict the 

don. Criminals often feel the same way toward revolutionaries as they do toward governments. However, crime would be sweeter if they could take over 

a government for themselves, so the concepts might overlap (along with some 

smuggling routes), and it still doesn’t matter.

Armed resistance movement -- They don’t want a stranger there, the place 

probably wasn’t the stranger’s to begin with, and the stranger might not want it 

either when it comes right down to it.

Guerrilla war -- Smart guerrillas aren’t going to confront a stronger force unless they think their line of retreat is secure. They might not have much air 

power to speak of. They take care to protect their anonymity. They probably 

dig holes in the ground. They might or might not wear uniforms (their own or 

someone else’s). They might be insurgents, separatists, revolutionaries, or not.

Irregular War – This is a container for all the terms above. We can distinguish irregular from regular war by the greater degree of five inter-related 

conditions in irregular war. They are:

1. The numbers of civilians in the area of concern whom we cannot or 

don’t wish to just remove -- we deal with them in place;

2. Need to manage anonymity;

3. Incorporeal presence -- that is, emotive or psychological quantities 

like ideological or religious affinity, hate, hope, resentment or fear;

4. Influence of legalities and judicial institutions. Not only the laws of war, 

but military operational law, contract law, migration law, international 

commercial law all affect competitive prospects, and lawfare -- the use of 

law and courts to achieve military and strategic objectives.
131 Is It an Insurgency?

524

5. The contending organizations exercising or supporting coercive 

power come in more forms, sizes and types. They might belong to,

associate with or be sponsored by an existing country or international 

organization of the international system, or they might not.

The five main ingredients that tend to make a war irregular -- more physical 

human presence, more non-physical human presence, increased legalism

and lawfare, greater anonymity, and odd fighting organizations. When exactly is it an irregular and not a regular war? Can’t say. As categories, 

regular and irregular are comfortably distinct only at the extremes.

Whatever folks call you, your enemy or the contest, pretty soon, if you 

control the anonymity, your opponent will have to seek physical sanctuary. If 

he doesn’t need anonymity or sanctuary, that is to say, if he can just get in your

face, do what he wants, and you can’t do anything to stop him from granting

impunity to his people, you’re losing. The various definitions of wars are not 

useless, but don’t let fine distinctions about identity, method and purpose steer 

you away from analysis of a group’s capability to grant impunity to its members.

Please see sections: 45, Police or Military; 16, Presence; 116, Songs of 

Chu; 42, Brigands; 56, Militias and Gun Control; 7, Sanctuary; 53, 

Hohfeldian Grievance Analysis; and 65, Smuggling.



“You learned the dry-mouthed, fear-purged purging ecstasy of 

battle and you fought that summer and that fall for all the poor 

in the world against all tyranny, for all the things you believed 

in and for the new world you had been educated into.”484 F

485

Ernest Hemingway,

For Whom the Bell Tolls

---------------

“Hey, you’re talking to my guy all wrong. It’s the wrong tone.”

Clem in the movie,

Joe Dirt (2001)485F

486

---------------

“...the word is NOT the thing...”486F

487

S.I. Hayakawa,

Language in Thought and Action

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525

One thing stuffed inside another, many things, or something else

Section 132,

Turducken and Postmodern

Turducken. Turducken is a Cajun or faux-Cajun dish prepared by roasting 

or deep frying a turkey stuffed with a duck stuffed with a chicken and maybe

stuffed with spices or sausage. The whole thing might even be covered with 

bacon. Hopefully is. The juices and flavors get all mixed together....mmmm. 

Not a vegetarian dish. Go on up to Yellowknife or Whitehorse and try the 

moosbearbou. If you don’t care for the carnivore analogy, you could use the 

cherpumple, “A Cherry Pie, an Apple Pie and a Pumpkin Pie, Each Cooked 

inside a Separate Cake, and Then All Cooked Together inside Another Cake.” 

Food critics say it represents all that remains good and right in this fallen 

world.4 87F

488 So there it is.

‘Turducken’ might help describe the composite of disparate events of 

some armed conflicts. History is replete with examples wherein major contenders engaged in what looks like more than one kind of warfare 

simultaneously. Lawrence of Arabia was doing something irregular in the 

midst of World War I. General Giap fielded regular armies against French and 

later United States forces, but also mounted a broad guerrilla campaign. During the American Revolutionary War, General Nathanael Greene’s regular 

forces coordinated successfully with the militia units and guerrilla methods of 

the ‘Swamp Fox’, Francis Marion. The Napoleonic Wars, classic by default, 

included the Peninsular Campaigns, which birthed the term guerrilla. These 

and many others could be termed turducken wars. Turducken might be an apt 

term if a front were established along which two contending regular armies 

were pitted in maneuver combat, behind which a guerrilla war raged and inside 

of which international organized crime prospered.

Hybrid and Grey. The terms hybrid, ‘wars in the grey zone’, etc. come into 

fashion to describe irregular-type wars, approaches or strategies in those wars, 

or perhaps the battlespace or theatre. The word hybrid, however, commonly 

denotes a product of two things of fairly stable character -- a male donkey and 

a female horse, for instance. OK to corral them as such, but when used in the 

security context, hybrid can falsely imply contiguity in time and space, concealing developmental stages or unmixed but disparate, orchestrated efforts. 

Leftist revolutionary effort, at least according to the literary protocol, evolves 

from latency through guerrilla operations to regular maneuver war. Mao 

moved purposefully from organizing secret cells toward the vast campaign of 

Huai Hai. That temporal evolution is not connoted by grey or hybrid. Or, if a 
132 Turducken and Postmodern

526

country were waging a pitched tank battle on a foreign battlefield, but also 

contending with a virulent enemy ‘fifth column’ at home, the spatially disparate nature of that challenge might not be illuminated by something akin to 

‘grey zone’ or ‘hybrid’.

Asymmetric. Asymmetric is another fashion term for describing irregular wars. 

A weaker force, perhaps insurgent, is almost always, at least at the beginning of 

a contest, obliged to use stratagems and to stress the run in hit-and-run. Anonymity, patience, deception, surprise and escape are bywords for overcoming 

what appears on the surface to be overall government advantage of size and 

weight. Advantage is what a competitor seeks, however, and the word advantage 

contains within it the notion of asymmetry. One wins by unbalancing advantages. I do not say the word asymmetry is meaningless. Military forces can 

be of equal overall strength, balancing-out on some theoretical power teeter-totter, but still have different internal shapes, types and numbers of elements. 

Observation of that internal asymmetry has caused some fretting as to how differently-built, often smaller opponents are able to achieve superior results at 

given geographical points and times. We should attribute less of the answer to

psychology and theatre, and more to cost and risk distance, and to the advantage 

some geographies lend to one force over another.

There is, however, an area where asymmetry has greater utility as a 

term. Moral asymmetry is a worrisome phenomenon that lends competitive 

advantage to the side less constrained by moral standards of behavior. Tactical 

moral asymmetry has long been encouraged by revolutionary theory holding 

that the moral constructs of the enemy can and should be rejected -- that they 

need not be observed by the morally justified. If you are truly a rebel and not 

just a crook, you don’t just disobey the law, you disdain both the law and the 

invalid moral structure from which that law sprang. The righteous zealot easily 

justifies his nonobservance of his enemies’ moral standards. It is partly because of the danger of moral asymmetry that this book delves into magical 

realismand anarchy -- artistic, philosophical currents that support moral asymmetry. Maybe we are seeing a similar quantity in a renewed romanticizing of 

gangsters and gangsterism, or admiration of jihadist propaganda of the deed.

Postmodern. ‘Postmodern' might be the best adjective for the style of warfare 

that a sophisticated anarchic or terrorist organization might wage these days. 

Postmodern pretty much came to mean ‘better considered than just modern’, 

modern meaning the carrying of a design to the limits of technological possibilities or incorporation of evocative symbolism touching on group identity. It 

also implies combinations of formality and informality, traditional and creative, etc. The term has been applied to a lot of things, including political -- like 
132 Turducken and Postmodern

527

the rejection of imperialism. For the purposes of understanding irregular warfare, however, we can get mileage out of the concept postmodern as follows:

Beyond mere combination. Postmodernism implies a pastiche, mixture, or 

cocktail of styles and themes. Today’s irregular wars might be hybrid or 

turducken affairs. If postmodern, however, they are unspecifiable mixtures

of components and conflict types in varying measure.

More than technical. Related, partly-related or unrelated human identities 

can seize on emotional quantities as weighty as liberty or as flighty as sport. 

Motivations can include long-term financial gain or a moment of schadenfreude. Decisions may seem premeditated in agile yet patient calculation or 

they may look like dumb mistakes that appeal to people anyway. Leaders 

can put together coalitions of groups for temporary purposes using what 

seem to be highly inconsistent and unrelated motivations. 

Spatially aware. Successful leaders in postmodern warfare are cognizant of 

the sense of place identity. They almost invariably connect the legitimacy 

of their leadership to the collective identity they are purporting to lead using

place-association. They are also innately aware of risk distance and the distinct advantages available from understanding it.

Technologically advanced. Although architectural postmodernism rejected

the tendency of modernism to build to the limits of technological possibilities, it was not a rejection of technology. The idea was to combine successful 

styles, accepting technology that did not overly inhibit affective expression. 

Today’s radicals might combine obscure mysticism with cell phones, Twitter, or whatever gizmo and organizational innovation seems to further the 

cause.

Here is a brief description of the 2006 Israel–Hezbollah War provided 

by Karen Kaya, a leading researcher on the Levant. On 12 July 2006; Hezbollah units ambushed an Israeli patrol on the Israeli side of the Lebanon-Israel 

border, killing three Israeli soldiers and kidnapping two others. Thus began a 

month-long war in which Hezbollah used a strategy that was neither wholly 

conventional, nor purely irregular. Hezbollah disposed its forces as an ‘irregular’ force might, yet emphasized holding and defending ground. In the brief 

contest, Hezbollah inflicted more Israeli casualties per Moslem fighter than in 

any of Israel's previous wars. Hezbollah had been purchasing real estate, distributing weapons, and secretly digging extensive underground 

communications and other military facilities. Some heralded this as the model 

for 21st century wars. Hezbollah had been born out of the civil war in Lebanon 

in 1982. After Israel withdrew from Southern Lebanon in 2000, and with the 

help of Syria and Iran, Hezbollah initiated actions to govern Southern Lebanon. These included establishing a political party, developing a 
132 Turducken and Postmodern

528

militia/military and providing social programs to the population. Weakness of 

the central Lebanese government also provided open territory in which the Iranian Quds Force could conduct rigorous paramilitary training in both weapons 

and tactics, and freely rearm Hezbollah. As such, Hezbollah became considered the de-facto government authority in Southern Lebanon. By 2010, 

Hezbollah had evolved well beyond the shadowy terrorist organization it had 

been a decade earlier. By the time of the selection process for Prime Minister 

in early 2011, Hezbollah revealed itself as having considerable influence 

within the regular electoral democratic processes in the country.

Does it matter if we call the 2006 Israel–Hezbollah War turducken, 

hybrid, asymmetric, grey zone or postmodern? No. The challenging phenomena you face in your irregular war will anonymity and risk distance to 

sanctuary. The word ‘asymmetry’ especially begs a question: If our foe is not 

shaped like us, and seems to have a weaker shape at that, how does he compete? His gaining and maintaining advantage in anonymity and movement to 

sanctuary is probably a big part of the answer.

Please see sections: 131, Is It an Insurgency?; 113, Unrestricted Chi 

Whiz; 7, Sanctuary; 56, Militias and Gun Control; 2, Anonymity; 45, Police or Military; 101, Magical Realism; and 112, DIME and PMESII.



“The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed 

ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.”488 F

489

F. Scott Fitzgerald

--------------

“So because thou art lukewarm, and neither hot nor cold,

I will spew thee out of my mouth.”

Revelation 3:16

--------------

“You have a lovely daughter; wouldn’t want any harm come to her.”

--------------

“A noble spirit embiggens the smallest man.”

Jebediah Springfield489 F

490


529

Murderers if no immunity; convicts if no impunity

Section 133, Snipers and Assassins

Sniping has long been a controversial issue in warfare. Sniping combines a sense of elite status, both technologically and athletically, with 

stealth. It also gives an impression of one-sidedness, of ambush or surprise. 

It is so effective and disconcerting that the officers of professional armies 

have, on occasion, distanced themselves from sniping as a dishonorable activity and at other times embraced it. Meanwhile, sniping, sharpshooting 

and regular marksmanship keep closing the gaps among them.

Landmines and snipers are revealing features of irregular war. We 

refer to the sniper rather than the rifle, while we refer to the landmine rather 

than the ‘emplacer’. Sniping is a more personal act and is more personally 

risky since, unless done perfectly, it can reveal the whereabouts of the perpetrator and does so within the effective range of an opposing rifle. 

Snipers have been part of the combat landscape for some time. They are 

costly because the expert sniper is a physical rarity, must be vetted psychologically, and must be exhaustively trained. The sniper participates 

intimately in the distance-time-weight linearity of warfare. Most of his 

activity is movement to the place where he can take a shot, and his art 

consists of being able to take that shot against a superior unit and be able 

to escape. The sniper, even as an individual weapon system, must understand and obey the constraints of the operational equation expressed by 

Maguire. Judging distance is one of the sniper’s staple skills.

Explosions are almost exactly not sniping. Their use does not require 

that the eyes of an emotionally responsive human watch the detonation and 

effect. The user of explosives can treat the mathematic of operational art

differently (being able to begin part of his escape before the detonation), and 

the moral weight of using explosives is distinct as well. The same professional officer who might eschew the use of snipers due to moral sensibilities 

might have to reject the landmine outright. In fact, many armies have all but 

rejected the use of landmines, but still employ snipers.

Because it is such an integral part of a sniper’s art that he blend into 

his surrounding environment, the concepts sniper and spy begin to converge, 

at least in urban settings. When snipers are used by an insurgent force, the 

government might successfully label them simple assassins or murderers.
133 Snipers and Assassins

530

It is an advantage in irregular war to enjoy superiority in effective, 

disciplined shooters. That advantage will grow stronger as armed drones

become cheap if not ubiquitous. Leaders in an irregular war should make 

the status and employment of snipers an issue of direct attention. At some 

point, influenced by law and diplomacy, a sniper becomes an assassin --

immunity becomes impunity. My advice is that you not become a shooter

yourself if you cannot count on your boss to protect you from everyone 

else’s punishments.

Please see sections: 6, The Operational Equation; 35, Comuna 13; 82, 

Conflict Thresholds; 1, Impunity; 18, Best of the Best of the Best; 123, Sea 

and Aerospace Power; 136, Weapons; and 24, Ruthlessness and Resolve.



Vasilli: In the forest, the wolf lives for three years and the 

donkey for nine. 

Tania: That must be a proverb from the Urals, it makes no 

sense to me.

Vasilli: The donkey lives longer because he’s more useful.

Tania: There aren’t any donkeys in the forest, you made it up.

from the movie,

Enemy at the Gates (2001)490F

491

---------------

Ludwig: Tell me, Mr. Papshmir, in all the world, who is the 

most effective assassin?

Papshmir: Well, I would think anyone who manages to conceal his identity as an assassin.

Ludwig: Yes, but there is even a more ideal assassin - one 

who doesn't know he's an assassin.

from the movie,

The Naked Gun: From the Files

of Police Squad! (1988)491F

492

---------------

“I'm willing to meet my Creator and answer for every shot that I took.”

Chris Kyle in the movie,

American Sniper (2014)492F

493


531

No God, no master

Section 134, Luigi Galleani

Luigi Galleani was born in Italy around 1861, became an anarchist in his 

teens and moved to the United States in 1901 still practicing and preaching anarchy. He did not come to America to seek a better life or to pursue the American 

dream. He was a violent communist radical who came to the United States because he could. Other places could repress the vocal anarchist too easily or had 

already kicked him out. A lead character in the history of American terrorism, 

he is an apt biographical focal point for the purposes of this book. Luigi learned 

the physical operational imperatives of rebellion and how ideology could both 

support and offend those imperatives. Always in trouble with the law or a fugitive (he had to escape from an Italian prison in order to emigrate), he was never 

convicted of a serious crime in the United States. The feds exported him back 

to Italy in the wake of the 1919 ‘Red Scare’ bombing spree for having promoted 

the violent overthrow of the United States government.

Luigi was educated, articulate and charismatic. He published a widely 

circulated booklet on how to make bombs, and a newsletter encouraging ‘propaganda by the deed’. One of his mistakes was to let the feds get the mailing 

addresses of his newsletter recipients during a raid, opening up a number of avenues of investigation and thereby compromising quite a few of his followers. 

He also made some technical mistakes that blew up a couple of his bomb-makers. Luigi was smart enough not to do the bombing himself. 

Two of Luigi’s anarchist soldiers, also immigrants, were Nicola Sacco 

and Bartolomeo Vanzetti. Nicola and Bartolomeo were arrested for murder in 

1920 and executed in 1927. Various aspects of their drama are relevant today, 

bearing as they do on the continuing emotional, philosophical, and political controversy about the relationship of America to the meaning of life. Luigi, too, had 

been arrested and tried for incitement to riot, but that jury found the prosecution’s 

case inadequate, acquitted him, and the case never became part of popular lore.

For some people, the story of Sacco and Vanzetti is about American hypocrisy... an emblem of the injustices heaped on immigrants as an outgrowth of 

systemic racism...an epic but woefully common tale of American exceptionalism gone unfulfilled. Galleani’s name graces the title to this section, rather than 

‘Sacco and Vanzetti’, in order to underline operational matters like keeping secrets, impunity, the line of retreat, and the central importance of the guy with the 

mens rea. I also wanted to place the Sacco and Vanzetti saga in a context of 

identity, sovereignty, and legitimacy. Nicola and Bartolomeo were members of 
134 Luigi Galeani

532

Luigi’s violent organization, an organization that funded itself through robbery, 

used explosives to terrorize and project its presence, and sustained itself within 

an ethnic geography.

Unlike ‘normal’ bank robbery or murder defendants, Sacco and Vanzetti 

received high caliber, expensive, and extensive defense counsel. Their status as 

anarchists and leftist radicals attracted support and solidarity not only in emotional or ideological terms, but in funding and publicity. The support was from 

a movement within which the lives of Nicola and Bartolomeo were perhaps valued little more than the victims of their bombings. They may not have 

committed the murders for which they were arrested and tried. The jury may 

have found them guilty for crimes they did commit, but for which they were not 

arrested and tried. Their lawyer, a famed socialist defense attorney, built their 

defense around their being anarchists -- that they were unable to get a fair trial 

because of public prejudice against their political views. The defense also adverted a parallel theme of generalized injustice inherent in the capitalist system. 

That utilization helped vault the case onto the world’s imagination. Making the 

case about political blindness and social justice (rather than about a crime) 

worked, but it might have cost Nicola and Bartolomeo their lives. The probable 

intellectual author, the mens rea guy, died in Italy in 1931 of diabetes or some 

related complication.

A couple of decades later, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg couriered secrets 

from Los Alamos Laboratories to the Soviets, accelerating Russian development 

of their atom bomb. Sacco and Vanzetti had been tried in the shadow of, but not 

under the authority of the 1917 Espionage Act, but the Rosenbergs were the first 

to be executed as spies. Their indictment and trial was for decades a controversial 

cause célèbrewhose ledger of ideological positions and proponents read much like 

those of the Sacco and Vanzetti case. Many commentators the world over would 

reference the Rosenbergs’ fate as an example of a failed social system that had 

responded to unfounded fear and to ethnic prejudice. For decades, the Rosenbergs’ 

innocence was proclaimed and their execution denounced by left-leaning intellectuals. Ideology aside, it is now beyond reasonable doubt that the Rosenbergs 

committed the acts for which they were convicted, although public clarification 

would not come for a half-century after the events ˗˗ after the fall of the Berlin 

Wall. This clarification came with the exposure of the ‘Venona files’.

The ‘Venona files’ is the informal name given to a body of declassified 

or otherwise uncovered Cold War intelligence files from both the United States 

and the former Soviet Union. (Several good book titles cover their contents and 

revelations.) In short, the Venona files not only proved that the Rosenbergs were 

guilty as charged, the files radically changed the historical record regarding the 
134 Luigi Galeani

533

second ‘Red Scare’ of the 1950s. The Venona files are nevertheless ineffable in 

many history and social science departments on campuses today. Few bumps 

in historiography are so discomfiting to the ideological left. The Venona files 

say, indirectly, that using the word ‘McCarthyism’ to mean ‘political witch hunt’ 

is merely a semantic souvenir of a politicized misread of the actual events.

Senator Joe McCarthy, who became obsessed by what he saw as secret 

Communist infiltration into American public life, was a delusional paranoiac, and 

many of his accusations were demagogic and unsubstantiated. Nevertheless, his 

paranoia fed off a basis of facts. The Communist penetration may have been almost as bad as he imagined. There had been an extensive secret Soviet 

Communist penetration into American public life. Having this fact intoned today, 

much less read aloud, is anathema to the post-structuralist worldview currently 

fashionable in US academe. That worldview would have the Rosenbergs(as with

Sacco and Vanzetti) remain iconic victims of an unjust society, rather than what 

they were in deed: small criminal perpetrators.

Rebels and revolutionaries can be founders of nations, but they have to 

win. Often pawns of a more cunning and ruthless leader, their personal retreat 

to sanctuary might not be as well secured as that of their masters. Fortunately or 

not, honor for the rebel soldier, or at least pity for him as a victim, can be preserved for years, even in the face of the best evidence.

Please see sections: 22, Badassoftheweek.com; 8, Linearity and the Line of 

Retreat; 17, Keeping Secrets; 101, Magical Realism; 50, U.S. Persons; 131, 

Is It an Insurgency; 74, Refugees and Displaced Persons; and 23, Mens Rea.



Q. Why do anarchists drink herbal tea?

A. Because proper tea is theft.

from The Daily Cocktail,

Anarchist Lightbulb Jokes493F

494

---------------

“Anarchists, Unite!”

---------------

“Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't after you.”

variously attributed


534

Life inside the lines

Section 135, Borders and Anarchism

If we could map that space in the ideological firmament where anarchism and libertarianism roam about, the resulting image would be finely 

parsed, irregular, with overlapping territories of thought. A Venn diagram 

of anarchism, libertarianism, and individualism must show a tight overlap, 

with violence but a sliver of the whole. But because there are and have 

been violent ‘propagandists by the deed’ who loudly call themselves anarchists; and because these kinds of anarchists are staple characters in 

irregular wars, we are compelled to address anarchy’s unshakable connotation of violence. Due to my laziness in the face of convention, I throw 

violent anarchism in with its more peaceful shades. Most folk who call 

themselves libertarians, at least, are peaceable. The hard-core anarchist 

could have little regard for regular war, since he would have little regard 

for government. He would likewise have little regard for mapped boundaries in general. The libertarian (accepting that there are a hundred flavors, 

few of whom want a label) might like boundaries and still not care much for 

either regular or irregular war.

This year, at least one Kansas school district reconsidered the eternal question pitting at-large against by-territory representation to a school 

board. The president of the board felt that some of the communities’ representatives were obstructionist, and that, those being communities with a 

small percentage of the school-age children, should not have the power to 

block what she felt the majority of the citizens in the district wanted. Indeed, the territorial delineation of constituencies can seem artificial 

(gerrymandered) -- drawn by those who in some inconsequential moment 

hold the power to map out the represented geographical subdivisions. The 

spacing of representation becomes the enemy of pure democracy, allowing 

voters in some spaces to wield what looks to be a more influential vote 

than the one exercised by voters from other spaces. Gerrymandering becomes the rejection of ‘one-man/one-vote’. Place identity and placerepresentation become anathema to pure democracy. It is historically poetic that it be a Kansas school board, since Kansas was born of the same 

phenomenon at a different scale. Pre-Civil War southern states wanted to 

assure that whenever any new free state came into the union, so would a 

slave state, thereby maintaining a balance of representation in the Senate. 

Balance in the Senate meant that no legislative bill outlawing slavery 
135 Borders and Anarchism

535

throughout the United States would pass out of Congress. The population 

in the North was growing more quickly than in the South, and everyone 

could count. The obvious demographic trend made slave-state fears quite 

reasonable. Without the brake of geographic representation, slavery eventually would be voted out.

I mention this American representation-by-space example because all 

federalism versus anti-federalism ideological battle is geography-centric, with 

place identity and locale prominent in the formulation of arguments. Other 

ideological currents can be proselytized without so much as a mention of 

where-the-heck anyone is from. (Workers of the World, Unite!) Our 18th century founding fathers, for whom a vast expanse of coveted new territory 

became an immediate practical concern, could hardly have contemplated a 

scheme for distributing power that did not involve location, space, and distance. In an age before electronics, even their begrudged concessions to 

electoral democracy formed around the amount of time it might take a representative legislator to travel. The founders wanted to translate abstract notions 

of civil and human rights into practical applications and (as with habeas corpus) those practical solutions included territorial specificity. 

If we wish to carry things to their extreme (of course we do) we see 

that perfect geographic specificity could bring us right back to perfect individualism. If we could specify our personal location, our own square foot,

as the basic unit of political geography, we could have a perfect democracy 

in which place and personal identity were one-in-the-same. It seems as 

though we could almost do that today with our cell phones. Our place identity would be exactly the place occupied by just our own body at a moment 

in time. Which brings us back to anarchy. Anarchy tends toward the perfection of individualism and so, for an instant at least, anarchism likes perfect 

democracy because it likes individual identity and individual power. Anarchism has a hard time finding the we in team, however. Anarchism would 

rather not represent or be represented by location. Naturally, it even less

likes anyone telling others what to do, so while it might tactically prefer an 

at-large vote, it would prefer no vote at all, because voting for anything almost always means giving up power.

Anarchism does not play well in the federalism/antifederalism 

sandbox because anarchism does not want to link itself with all those inside any territory, or to pit one territory against another, or to draw 

territories on maps. As an historical tendency, anarchists are tolerant of 
135 Borders and Anarchism

536

being included in a non-territorial collective identity when that identity is 

ample, like ‘workers’, but then the anarchists torque when some nucleus 

of some vanguard claims to be their agent and nanny. Anarchism runs 

afoul of bolshevism, given that the bolshies so enjoy being in charge.

Anarchism, or the intellectual fascination for perfecting power in the 

individual, poorly considers geographic movement of that power. Anytime a 

perfectly empowered individual were to move, he would almost necessarily 

take his power into the space of another, inciting thereby a territorial challenge. 

Anarchy is tantamount to chronic trespass. Pure democracy (perfect individual 

representation) could devolve to anarchy if individuals were allowed to just 

roam about exercising all that represented power.

Recognize the scale and balance of geographic vs non-geographic 

power in your irregular war. You may be able to ameliorate or change one 

set of identities or the other -- changing the territorial boundaries of place 

representation, membership or definition of the collectives, or the details 

of power available through representation. You won’t be able to do this if 

you don’t see the phenomenon. Religion, family, language -- there are 

numerous non-geographical identities that are partially geographical. In 

every case try to know the difference and to nest or overlap place vs nonplace identity where appropriate.

Please see sections: 49, Territorial Scrutiny; 126, Particularization of 

Power; 127, Between Liberty and Lawrence; 53, Hohfeldian Grievance 

Analysis; 104, Lawfare; 118, Democracy; 81, What a Clergy Wants; and

128, Global Insurgency and Global Trespass.



Event: An anarchist throws a bomb into a Paris kitchen.

Outcome: Linoleum Blownaparte.

---------------

“...I admire all nations and hate all governments, and nowhere is my 

natural anarchism more aroused than at national borders.... I have 

never smuggled anything in my life. Why, then, do I feel an uneasy 

sense of guilt on approaching a customs barrier?”494F

495

John Steinbeck,

Travels with Charley: in Search of America


537

60974

Section 136, Weapons

This book is about armed conflict. We do have violent, organized 

competition without weapons, but it’s called rugby. We can every once in a 

while stage a big punch up, monkey-style, but over time humans have continually improved their weapons, and this improvement occasionally changes the 

balance of who is likely to dominate and who is likely to submit.

The cannon is a major historical accomplishment. Its composing innovations accreted over a long time, so maybe it was never revolutionary, but it 

was at least transformational. It is hard to make an arrest with cannon, though, 

and the people who use cannon don’t usually watch their effect in real time. You 

can extort with cannon, however. The use of artillery can mark a usable threshold between what is ‘police’ and what is ‘military’. In military combat we know 

that artillery is fearfully effective against infantrymen (soldiers who can’tfly and 

have no armor worth bragging about). Some soldiers think they are called infantrymen because ‘cannon fodder’ is insensitive. A common mistake in 

irregular conflicts is for infantrymen to think there won’t be artillery or that enemy planes won’t see them.

In terms of accountability and impunity, the most un-artillery firearm is the pistol. A person has to be pretty close to the target to use a 

pistol, so the emotional investment and the quantity of resolve needed to 

use a pistol is much different than for a cannon or an aerial drone. However, another weapon that seems dissimilar to artillery, the landmine (or, 

more broadly, the explosive device or artifact), is closer to artillery on the 

plane of accountability. No one tries to make an arrest with a landmine. 

Explosives are often used for pure intimidation or for making logistics 

more expensive and causing an overall increase in the costs of an enemy’s 

operations due to force- and population-protection concerns. However, 

landmines can also be the backbone weapon for a military operational plan

that adheres to a vision of aggregated tactics as described in Section 139. 

The landmine can be used to change the relative risk distances of pursuers 

and pursued, especially in terrain that offers a number of constrictions to 

movement. If any single weapon or thing has contributed to the longevity 

of the Colombian FARC, for instance, it would be the cottage industry 

landmine. If you, as an insurgent, can make it seem morally unjustifiable 

for the government to use artillery, but still morally justifiable for you to 

use landmines, you gain some operational advantage.
136 Weapons

538

Lately, inventors have been accelerating efforts to develop more effective incapacitating weapons that are intentionally nonlethal. Water cannons 

work, but one has to carry a lot of water. Among the best of the new breed is 

a sound gun from American Technology Corporation. Although it is a bit 

heavy and clumsy, it can make people unbearably uncomfortable and yet do 

them little permanent harm (relatively speaking). Like any weapon, people 

will find ways to neutralize or minimize it, but the sound gun is the kind of 

thing that can change the balance of advantages in situations such as a roadblock, building takeover, or port occupation. One of the key advantages that 

government can have in irregular armed contests is the capacity to invent expensive new weapons. Less-than-lethal choices can change contested 

geographies, and change the utility of using certain classes of participants (like 

small dissent groups populating street barriers). The sound gun or one of its 

relatives might turn out to be as transformational as the armed aerial vehicle. 

Intentionally nonlethal weapons can help make arrests.

Having stated the advantages of new incapacitating weapons, new lethal weapons, like the XM25 airburst shoot-to-behind walls firearm, will likely 

be seen to have delivered an appreciable combat advantage during the conflicts 

in Iraq and Afghanistan. The most transformational weapon to come out of 

the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, however, is the armed aerial drone (in 

some documents called the weaponized UAV). The drones are typically 

equipped with television cameras and electronic sights. Finally, the killer is 

watching the kill at a cold distance. The difference is enormous, even if, like 

many changes, including the indifference, it has not yet been fully felt. The 

armed drone is a big new number in the irregular war map algebra. Think 

about the basic strategy move in Section 63, Roadblocks and Checkpoints and 

how drones could change the game math. Just following the enemy is a good 

deal, but being able to bring fire on him is a whole different thing. The drone 

brings airpower to smaller, messier conflicts. The thing is, the drone is soon 

going to cause a sea change in what it takes to secure aerial dominance. Lots 

of countries can make effective little drones and make them a lot cheaper than 

the ones the US is in love with these days, like the Predator.

Meanwhile, folk who would never think of throwing on a ruck (so 

they can sweat their whatevers off walking sixty miles to kill someone) 

will nevertheless bring death after they set their coffee mugs over to the 

side of the monitor so they can take some time-in to shoot someone in the 

face from two thousand miles away. You can’t help but wonder if the guy 

with the ruck gets the same color medal. No ghillie suits, no crawling into 

a hide, just a couple of spreadsheet entries.
136 Weapons

539

The real problem isn’t the medal, (although the cheapening of valor is 

no weightless matter), it’s the impunity -- who grants it and who gets it. The 

boss is in the room, the machines will tell the forensic investigator who is making the kill decisions, and there is no reason not to keep records, except, of 

course, to provide impunity. If the enter key pusher is not identified, the hierarchy still will be, so leadership will perhaps be increasingly held accountable 

when a drone kills non-soldier-looking types.

The Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum website stated:

The US military began experimenting with unmanned aircraft as early as 

World War I. By World War II, unmanned craft could be controlled by 

radio signals, usually from another aircraft. Vehicles that could return 

from a mission and be recovered appeared in the late 1950s.495 F

496

The US Air Force could have had effective operational drones flying decades 

ago, but doing so would have meant a radical change in the organizational 

culture of the Air Force. The alpha male Air Force officer, the guy who goes 

on to be a general, had, for the most part, to have been a fighter or bomber 

pilot. Seeing a technology that suggested a new and less athletic pathway to 

those prime jobs presented an unwelcome challenge. For decades it was virtual Air Force treason to mention the darned things, much less fund programs 

to develop them. Now the argument is long buried. Solid circuits don’t worry 

about and aren’t limited by the pressure of sharp turns or by fatigue. What we 

don’t yet know is if the preferred path to generalship will someday run through 

the remote fliers’ toggle-of-death. We can rest assured that cognitive dissonance will cause air forces everywhere to make awkward decisions as they try 

to maintain their institutional niches.

Section 6 applies the late nineteenth century observations of a lawyer 

and historian named Maguire. That era and Maguire’s math are relevant partly 

because his synthesis about military strategy was made just before the advent 

of the airplane and the changes the airplane wrought in military thinking and 

practice. The Wright Brothers seemed to make many of the old rules of operational strategy go away and, in fact, the airplane did change the calculus. 

Lines of communication could be threatened from new angles as well as new 

speeds. Moreover, in situations where it was hard to achieve victory by applying the classic methods (to overcome his lines of supply and retreat or 

defeat him in open battle)the airplane made it easier to apply the main strategic 

alternative, extortion. If you didn’t have the patience or wherewithal to beat 

your enemy by position and maneuver, you could perhaps place what was 

most valuable to him in mortal danger.
136 Weapons

540

The armed drone may force a similar if not as grand an adjustment in 

military operational math. In irregular war, airpower has perhaps had its greatest effect through changing relative risk distances (especially the helicopter), 

mostly moving government troops well beyond what would have been the 

limits of their prudent distances. The drone does something similar, enlarging 

the geographies of possible points of contact without the same risk to the attacker, and at a much lower price. The math of risk distances, correlations of 

force and the geometry of lines of retreat is again being adjusted. Furthermore, 

with drones the changes wrought to operational math do not so uniquely benefit government forces as they do with the helicopter.

Considering the new arrays of technology, we can safely assume 

that in some conflictive places the use of armed drones will carry special 

juridical and political consequences. Engagement with an armed drone 

inside many countries will test the limits of impunity that might be granted 

to its operators. Hole diggers, TV cameras and international lawyers will 

be salient features in future irregular wars, but the armed drone is most

special. Meanwhile, the violent anarchist, not persnickety regarding victim classes, need not look to the new technologies. His economies can be 

satisfied by weapons at hand, like blades, vehicles, fire and water.

Please see sections: 54, Extortion; 82, Conflict Thresholds; 123, Sea and 

Aerospace Power; 125, Human Rights; 133, Snipers and Assassins; 139, 

Strategy of Aggregate Tactics; 27, ‘Nonviolent’ Action; and 127, Between 

Liberty and Lawrence.



“The only person who could miss with this gun

is the sucker with the bread to buy it.”

Peter in the movie,

Dawn of the Dead (1978)496F

497

---------------

“Now if there's one thing you can be sure of, it's that nothing 

is more powerful than a young boy's wish. Except an Apache 

helicopter. An Apache helicopter has machine guns and missiles. It is an unbelievably impressive complement of 

weaponry, an absolute death machine.”

Narrator in the movie,

Ted (2012)497F

498


541

Insurgencies are international conflicts

Section 137, Foreign Support and 

Foreign Perspective

Foreign Support:

An insurgent or separatist is more likely to win with foreign support 

than without it. We can go a step farther, however and say that there are no 

wholly internal conflicts. Ok, there are probably a few, but the proposition is 

strong enough to switch the burden of proof onto those who would argue that 

anti-State armed groups (or at least those that last any appreciable amount of 

time) ever succeed without foreign support. So are these, then, not international wars?

Even if a foreign government does not support an insurgency directly 

or openly, it can lend a blind eye to movement into and through its territory, 

allow the issuance of false passports, vote in favor of international recognition, 

block international police investigations, etc. This accessorial behavior is 

probably the most common form of effective support and it relates directly to 

one of the principle themes of this book -- the significance of lines of communication, especially the line of escape to sanctuary. Because the line of retreat 

to sanctuary is a central geographic feature of military strategy, any time those 

lines pass into or through a foreign country, and that country abets or remains 

indifferent, it is effectively an accessory and participant in the war. It behooves 

insurgents to diminish the importance of lines of communication in their public arguments and propaganda, so as to deflect attention from them. Instead, 

they highlight the importance of psychological, political and socioeconomic 

factors. The insurgent rarely wants to have light shined on the classic military 

dimension of the war: his lines of communication.

Foreign countries also often facilitate insurgent finances and fiscal anonymity. Moving, storing and converting money is essential to the longevity 

and success of insurgent and criminal leaders. In the case of the FARC, some 

countries have found it in their best interests to appreciate the FARC as a legitimate social movement in order to perpetuate a lucrative banking service, 

giving the FARC asset liquidity and forensic security for many years. If foreign banks had revealed FARC finances years ago, the damage such 

transparency would have done to FARC logistical strength might have been 

far greater than the damage done by killing coca plants.

In May 2008, the government of Colombia attacked a FARC camp 

across the Colombian border a couple of miles into Ecuadoran territory. Aerial 
137 Foreign Support and Foreign Perspectives

542

bombs not only killed Louis Devia (Raúl Reyes), a principal leader of the 

FARC, they also opened a can of geopolitical worms. It appeared convenient 

to the government of Ecuador, spurred on by Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez to call 

the incident an international invasion of Ecuador by Colombia. Ecuador had 

either been allowing or hosting the presence of FARC camps on its territory 

for some time. Maybe an aggressive diplomatic offensive seemed to the Ecuadoran government the best defense against accusation of being a

surreptitious ally of the FARCand, therefore, complicit in illicit drug trade and 

terrorism. The opportunistic approach of the Ecuadoran and Venezuelan regimes to the armed struggle inside Colombia is typical, but foreign support 

comes in more forms than just direct surreptitious government aid to insurgents. A short list of types of foreign support to supposedly internal conflicts 

might look as follows:

1. from a foreign government to a government suffering some 

challenge from an insurgent, separatist, etc., movement;

2. from IOs to a government or to anti-government forces;

3. from NGOs to a government or to anti-government forces or 

to movement elements;

4. from foreign individual volunteers, whose presence is facilitated/encouraged by a foreign government, IO or NGO;

5. independent voluntary participation by foreign individuals in 

government forces or in anti-government forces;

6. assistance, usually financial, from international corporations 

to government or anti-government forces or movement elements.

7. from international or transnational criminal organizations to 

government or anti-government forces.

Because the consequences of exposing and declaring an international 

conflict seem both unpredictable and vast, governments prefer to maintain diplomatic fictions regarding the international character of armed conflicts that 

are supposed to be ‘not of an international character’. What you don’t want to 

do is fool yourself regarding the geographies of the lines of retreat, supply, 

finance, recruiting and diplomacy. This book is especially about operational 

art and, as such, it focuses on the geography of the lines of communication, 

and especially lines of retreat to sanctuary. If the Mexican government gives 

refuge to Guatemalan insurgents or just gives a blind eye to insurgent presence 

in Mexican territory, it is very unlikely that the Guatemalan government can 

muster enough power to conclude the war entirely on its own terms. If the 

Indian government denies sanctuary to the Tamil Tigers, but instead helps the 
137 Foreign Support and Foreign Perspectives

543

Sri Lankan government prevent their escape, then the Sri Lankan government 

has a chance to win big militarily.

Foreign Perspectives:

Most relevant foreign perspectives are manifested in foreign languages. It is unreasonable to suggest that foreign viewpoints, analyses, 

perspectives, and decision paths can be discovered in one’s own planning and 

decision-making language. Americans especially are notorious for incapacity 

in foreign languages, and weakness in foreign languages makes gathering and 

absorbing foreign perspectives difficult. You are not likely to dominate in an 

irregular armed conflict inside a foreign land (whoever the supposed enemy or 

partners) if the languages of that land are not mastered by a sufficient number 

of key people in your force.

It can be an indicator of a knowledge weakness if your default source 

for gaining knowledge of foreign perspectives is the formal country-to-country diplomatic channels. In a world of varied, massive, instantaneous and 

open information flows, various actors and interests can manipulate the formal diplomatic messaging. Anyway, diplomats are in charge of diplomatic 

fiction. Many strategists believe strategy and deception are synonymous and 

that strategy and stratagem cannot be far apart. As a starting rubric, it is best 

to consider all irregular wars international and that all diplomats will believe 

they have something to hide and something to gain by lying at some point. 

In addition, if you are limited to the use of local interpreters, you will face 

the problem of the interpreters’ tendency to filter and adjust communications 

in accordance with the interpreter’s own agenda, perspectives, goals, fears, 

and foibles.

Matt Stein offers this paragraph about neighborhoods and local cultural 

diplomatic norms. In early 2010, a dispute between Uzbekistan and Tajikistan 

caused rail traffic to be delayed between the two countries. The dispute was 

over the building by the Tajiks of the Roghun Dam on the Vakhsh River in 

central Tajikistan. The dam would interrupt water flow to Uzbek agriculture 

downstream. In southern Uzbekistan, the Uzbeks held up a few thousand rail 

cars destined for Tajikistan, 300 of which were non-lethal cargo bound for 

forces in Afghanistan on NATO’s Northern Distribution Network (NDN). 

Eventually, the train cars were allowed through. NATO had established the 

NDN because of delays and losses of supplies coming via Pakistan. The NDN 

handled an estimated 40 percent of non-lethal supplies for forces in Afghanistan. The Uzbek government, as in the region typically, tends to shut down its 

country’s borders as a first security reaction. Later in 2010, violence broke out 
137 Foreign Support and Foreign Perspectives

544

in Kyrgyzstan, to Uzbekistan’s east, lasting almost a week before Kyrgyz police and security forces restored order. Uzbekistan first allowed 75,000 

refugees to enter but closed and reinforced its border to stop the violence. The 

transnational movement of supplies seemed permanently vulnerable to instinctive government policy reactions.

Among the surest investments you can make in advance of anticipated 

irregular armed challenges is to increase capacity in relevant foreign languages. There are few irrelevant foreign languages. The anthropologists’ 

attitude is valuable in this. They tend to think small. It isn’t enough for them 

to know that in Guatemala they speak Spanish. They recognize that in Purulhá, Guatemala, Spanish may be the second language. If you are planning 

to meddle in the problems of a foreign place and you aren’t sure you even 

know the locale’s principal language, you’re traipsing close to the edge of 

cross-cultural disaster. Start out a campaign profoundly ignorant of cultural basics and you will concede the weight of those key factors to your enemy. Foreign 

support is always at risk of foreign misunderstanding. Another investment to 

make in anticipation of some internal conflict is to study the neighboring countries. It will be the rarest of irregular wars, or at least the rarest of irregular wars 

that anybody in Kansas will worry about, that involves only one country and not 

its whole neighborhood.

Please see sections: 13, Puthukkudiyirippu; 61, The Geography of Dope; 113,

Unrestricted Chi Whiz; 19, Mercatus; 18, Best of the Best of the Best; 52, Sovereignty; 58, Condottieri; and 128, Global Insurgency and Global Trespass.



“I learned that Japan was a weird foreign country that was for some 

reason under almost constant attack by giant mutated creatures. 

Godzilla was the most famous one, of course, but there were also 

hyperthyroid pterodactyls, spiders, etc., all of which regularly 

barged into Tokyo and committed acts of mass destruction.”49 8F

499

Dave Barry

---------------

“[Hugo Chávez] is one of the most important 

forces we have had on this planet...”49 9F

500

Sean Penn


545

Get in and get out

Section 138, Raids

In August 1976, the Rhodesian Selous Scouts raided a large guerrilla 

training camp in Mozambique that belonged to the ZANLA (Zimbabwe National Liberation Army) insurgents, who were trying to replace the 

government of Rhodesia. The Scouts entered the ZANLA camp dressed and 

equipped as ZANLA fighters at a time when the garrison was celebrating 

and many of the ZANLA troops were in parade formation. The raiders killed 

more than 1000 ZANLA fighters and wounded many more. The Scouts 

were then able to return to their base having only suffered four wounded, 

making it the most successful attack of the Rhodesian insurgent war and one 

of the most daring and impressive raids in military history. Although the 

Scouts entered enemy sanctuary and greatly damaged ZANLA morale and 

strength, the raid was decisive of nothing. The Rhodesian military was far 

too small for the territory it had to control; it had almost no operational or 

strategic concept; and the ultimate goal for which it fought (minority apartheid rule) was unsustainable. In 1980, Rhodesia ceased to exist. A ZANLA 

leader, Robert Mugabe, is today the country’s dictator.

During the American Civil War, Union General Ormsby Mitchel 

and Union spy James J. Andrews devised a plan to infiltrate a group of 

volunteer soldiers into Georgia for the purpose of stealing a locomotive in 

Atlanta and driving it northwest toward Chattanooga, destroying track and 

bridges behind it. General Mitchel was planning to move on Huntsville,

Alabama then go east to take Chattanooga. His plan depended on blocking

the Confederates from quickly moving a superior force up from Atlanta. 

The raiders, dressed in civilian clothes and led by Mr. Andrews, took the 

train and proceeded north, followed by an amazingly resolute and resourceful Georgian train conductor. The raid ultimately failed and the 

Confederates hung Andrews in Atlanta as a spy, but a number of the volunteers survived and for their daring were the first to be awarded a new 

medal, the Medal of Honor.

In late 2007 or early 2008, Luis Devia, a senior member of the FARC 

Secretariat and, at the time, commander of military and logistics operations 

in southern Colombia, established a major FARC headquarters about 1,800 

meters inside Ecuadoran territory south of the Putumayo River and east of 

the artificial international boundary traced along the 76 degree 20 minutes 

West longitude. From the FARC headquarters it was a short march south to 
138 Raids

546

roads leading to Nueva Loja (which was the hub of FARC rear area operations inside Ecuador) or to the San Miguel River that traces the ColombianEcuadoran border to the west. By late February, 2008 the Colombian government had unified enough information from technical and human sources 

to pinpoint Devia’s installation. Aside from killing Devia, the raid netted a 

treasure trove of intelligence information found in digital files at the camp. 

About twenty other guerrillas and one soldier, Carlos Hernández León, also 

died during the operation. According to some reports, Devia probably died 

bleeding out after he stepped on a FARC landmine as he ran from the air 

bombardment. The raid into Ecuadoran territory caused a bit of an international row given that the Ecuadoran president was an ally of Venezuelan 

Hugo Chávez and presumptively of the FARC, but the military advantage 

gained by the Colombian government as a result of Operation Fénix was 

immense. Capture of the FARC rosters led to numerous indictments and 

arrests, induced defections and put many of the FARC fronts in southern 

Colombia on their heels.

In February 1942, a joint British army and navy force mounted a 

raid to recover electrical components from a German radar station on the 

French coast at Bruneval. About 120 parachutists from the Scottish Black 

Watch, Cameron Highlanders, King's Own Scottish Borderers, and the 

Seaforths regiments jumped into France a few miles from the German radar site. Amid some confusion and against energetic but tardy resistance, 

the raiders absconded with the radar equipment, were picked up by the 

Royal Navy and made it back to England. Two British soldiers died in the 

operation, but the British gained considerable useful knowledge through 

technical exploitation of the apparatus. An officer named John Dutton 

Frost, then a major, led the raid. He would go on to lead other raids, successful and unsuccessful, most famously taking the ‘bridge too far’ at 

Arnhem. There, although the allies could not hold the bridge, Colonel 

Frost led one of the most gallant and stubborn stands in the gallant and 

stubborn vein of British military history. Out of bullets, surrounded, captured and imprisoned by the Germans, he survived and was freed when the 

US Army arrived. Leading many raids and earning many medals, Colonel 

Frost’s march of achievements had been sparked when R.V. Jones’ team 

of eggheads noticed something they thought to be rare and dangerous on 

some overhead photographs of the coast of France.
138 Raids

547

In 1978, the 31st of December fell on a Sunday. Good time for a 

robbery. That day, having completed an 80-foot tunnel under an adjoining 

street, operatives of the guerrilla group M-19 broke into the arms rooms of 

a military depot in northern Bogotá known as Cantón Norte. The group 

had been planning the action since before their kidnapping of Sears executive Donald Cooper, for which they garnered a substantial ransom. They 

applied the money to the purchase of a legal business and, with the profits 

and liquidity from that, they helped an accomplice buy a house across the 

street from the armory. While the accomplice lived there with his family, 

leading a seemingly normal family life, a platoon of guerrillas began digging -- and dug for almost three months -- sneaking all the dirt out at night 

in plastic bags. It was as though they were trying to escape from a POW 

camp, but no. On the 30th they were ready to break in under the floor of 

the arms room, and on New Year’s Eve took out the first few rifles. On 

New Year’s Day they removed 5,700, the army not becoming aware until 

the next day, January 2nd. If the M-19 can be criticized for any particular

shortcoming in their planning, it is for having failed to plan adequately for 

success. They did not do sufficient planning for getting away with the rifles, didn’t plan an escape with so much weight. The government 

recovered almost all of the rifles within weeks, but even though the guerrillas didn’t get to distribute the weapons to their troops, the propagandistic 

value was huge. The raid sealed the M-19’s reputation as a creative, daring 

foe and made the Colombian army look inept. 

A lot of famous events carry the name ‘raid’. The rescue at Entebbe, the Doolittle Raid on Tokyo, the Son Tay Raid to free POWs in 

Vietnam, Sir Walter Scott’s raid on Carlisle Castle in 1596 to free Kinmont 

Willy Armstrong, the 2008 Colombian Jaque raid to free FARC hostages, 

the 2011 raid on Abbottabad, Pakistan to kill Osama Bin Laden, and so on. 

The five raids summarized above (against the ZANLA, the Confederacy,

the FARC, Fortress Europa, and a Bogotá armory) have almost no common denominator aside from daring and tightly defined missions. Their 

mission definitions were tightened by the absence of any intention to take 

and hold ground. Something was to be achieved, after which the force 

would return home.

Raids rarely unfold just as planned, and many are costly failures. 

The raid ordered by President Jimmy Carter to rescue American hostages 

held in Tehran in 1979 is popularly known as Desert One, after the location 
138 Raids

548

of the disastrous plane crash that ended the mission. In 1993, President 

Bill Clinton’s order to capture Somali warlord Mohamed Farrah Aidid led 

to what we remember as the Battle of Mogadishu, or Blackhawk Down. 

To call such operations high risk is understatement, not hyperbole, and the 

events are often more dramatic than a fiction writer could hope to devise. 

The best planners of the best raids are acutely aware of T. Miller Maguire’s 

equation. They worry over the withdrawal. In this light, the First Gulf 

War was a raid, not an invasion. The US government had no desire or 

intention to take the capital of Iraq, or to stay and occupy anything. The 

point was made and goodbye. There was an exit strategy.

Please see sections: 10, Decisive Battle; 140, Risk Distance and the Pursuit; 5, Vocabulary of Classic Strategy; 114, R.V. Jones; 28, Takeovers and 

Sieges; 89, The Dot Game and Go; 129, Nerd Globe; and 18, Best of the 

Best of the Best.



William Campbell: What do we tell the Johnny Rebs when they 

ask who we are and where we're from?

James J. Andrews: Tell them you’re Kentuckians escaping the rule of 

the Yankees to join a Southern regiment. If they press you closely, tell 

`em you hail from Fleming County, Kentucky. I'm from Flemingsburg 

myself. No man from that county has ever joined the Southern army... 

As for you, Mr. Buffum, it might be wiser if you didn't speak at all. I 

never met a Kentuckian so plainly from Massachusetts.

from the movie,

The Great Locomotive Chase (1956)500F

501

---------------

“Get to ta Choppah!”

Dutch in the movie,

Predator (1987)501F

502

---------------

“Okay. So ve take ze money you haf on you,

und ve calls it eefen.”

A nihilist in the movie,

The Big Lebowski (1998)502F

503


549

A thousand knives for a thousand cuts

Section 139,

Strategy of Aggregate Tactics

There exists a peculiar and influential protocol in today’s military 

strategy teaching. It is a hierarchical concept about ‘levels’ of war formed 

of the terms ‘Tactical’, ‘Operational’ and ‘Strategic’. Generally speaking, 

and with too many exceptions and arguments to bother with here, ‘tactical’ 

refers to the battle or physical engagement of enemies; ‘operational’ (often 

‘operational art’) refers to movement to battle and position; and strategic 

refers to decisions about who the enemy is, how the whole force will be 

generated, and about the distribution of resources among elements of the 

force. The three terms also generally represent a scale of decision consequences. That is to say, according to convention, a solid strategy can survive 

an operational error, sound operational art can survive some failed tactics --

but the reverse is rarely true -- the best tactics rarely survive poor operational 

decisions nor the best operational plans survive incompetent strategy.

Although the conventional logic of hierarchical consequence can 

be stated in sentence form, the three supposed levels of activity and decision are actually intimately interrelated. There is no magic in the 

terminology and, while the usual sequence of importance goes tacticaloperational-strategic, even this is not always so. Some writers hold that 

when a general cannot succeed at tactics he is forced to resort to strategy, 

strategy meaning stratagem or deception. In short, don’t worry over the 

word soup made by this troika; the terms gain their meaning in context. 

Besides, writers will at times combine or hyphenate (like ‘operational 

strategy’) or throw in adjectival wrenches like ‘grand’ strategy or another 

level, like ‘policy’. These usages don’t translate well across historical periods or to other languages, and often have more to do with who is in 

charge of whom and less with what to do where. Some American doctrinaires will insist upon a linguistic discipline holding tactics to be 

everything done below the corps. Webster’s 10th Collegiate does not have 

the same definition of strategy as Webster’s 1st Collegiate, and yet they 

are both valid.

Success in organized armed struggles can depend on decisions that 

improve the likelihood of success of many subordinates and supporters 

during their contacts with the opposition. The decision to use a rifle with 
139 Strategy of Aggregate Tactics

550

a 5.56mm bore rather than one of 7.62mm was clearly a ‘strategic’ decision, even though the rifle is an essentially tactical apparatus, and no 

specific campaign or single decisive battle was envisioned when the decision was taken to choose one caliber over another. The bullet decision 

determined manufacturing processes, the selection of manufacturers, the 

nature of training and training literature, and even affected gendering 

(since the M16 was manageable by a greater percentage of women than 

were the larger caliber rifles). Given the nature of irregular wars, senior 

leaders might never make a decision related to a single strategic event, but 

still make strategic decisions.

Allowing ‘small battles’ to mean ‘insignificant battles’ is part of why 

some military theorists reject classic principles as they might apply to irregular conflict. Even an insurgent might categorize his small attacks as no 

more than harassments intended as deceptions, expressions of presence and 

defiance, or to attrite or disperse a government force. Such small battles 

however, are rarely ancillary to or anticipatory of the war effort -- they are

the war effort. One successful form of master strategy is to recognize the 

aggregate importance of all the little battles and so seek to make the result 

of as many as possible decisively favorable. Certainly national leaders will 

take some diplomatic and informational decisions that influence large identities, like nations or whole populations. Such decisions are clearly 

‘strategic’. Senior leaders will take other decisions regarding specific, critical contacts with the enemy or about campaigns involving series of combat 

actions. Those decisions, too, are strategic in level, scope or import. In an 

irregular war, however, most decisions worthy of the adjective ‘strategic’ 

anticipate, comprehend, and affect the summed results of many little, even 

micro, battles which in the aggregate constitute a major outcome.

Colombian FARC leaders recognized decades ago that the 

landmine was a great leveler of military advantage. Each time a landmine 

shortened a soldier’s leg, it shortened the risk distances of all government 

units trying to pursue FARC guerrilla elements in the aftermath of contact. 

The most effective mine designs, delivery of components, training in their 

manufacture and placement, and arming became matters for strategic discussion. Although the United States despised them as ‘improvised’ 

explosive devices (IED), they are the weapons that have most allowed the 

survival of a guerrilla force. They fit the guerrillas’ understanding of operational art and, viewing military strategy as an aggregate of small 

contacts, the FARC leadership made strategic decisions, hardly improvisational, about explosive devises that would be locally fabricated. As 
139 Strategy of Aggregate Tactics

551

homemade as the individual artifacts may be, nothing could have been less 

improvisational than FARC use of the landmine as a technology for operational art and strategy.

The Colombian military has made many decisions in recent years 

that address priorities of effort at the national level. For instance, it decided that one of the first efforts after the end of the truce in 2002 had to 

be the lifting the FARC’s encirclement of Bogotá, which the FARC had 

achieved in order to mount a progressive siege of that city. Where to concentrate forces nationally, where to take risk with economy of force 

measures, when to take advantage of rare intelligence that involved international risk (such as the later strike into Ecuadoran territory to kill FARC 

leader Louis Devia), and when to commit precious mobility assets -- these 

were not ‘strategy of tactics in the aggregate’ decisions. Nevertheless, 

many other strategic decisions related to equipment, training, disposition 

of units, allocations of air transport, or creation of fortified outposts. The 

Colombian senior leaders made sweeping changes with the understanding 

that there would be few large battles, but that if subordinate units could 

win the majority of little battles decisively, the aggregate effect would be 

more than simple attrition. They sought that, on every occasion practicable, subordinate army units could pursue FARC units successfully when 

the latter attempted escapes to sanctuary.

Please see sections: 10, Decisive Battle; 7, Sanctuary; 5, Vocabulary of 

Classic Strategy; 51, Get Willy; 63, Roadblocks and Checkpoints; 102,

Negotiations; 129, Nerd Globe; and 18, Best of the Best of the Best.



“From Fort Reno to Fort Apache - from Sheridan to Startle - they were 

all the same: men in dirty-shirt blue and only a cold page in the history 

books to mark their passing. But wherever they rode -- and whatever 

they fought for -- that place became the United States.”

Narrator in the movie,

She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949)503F

504

---------------

“Success depended 50% on the air part, so much so that

the troops, without helicopters, did nothing.”504 F

505

Jineth Bedoya Lima


552

Even Clausewitz might agree

Section 140,

Risk Distance and the Pursuit

Risk distance (or perhaps ‘prudent risk distance’) is the distance to 

the culminating point, remembering that the culminating point is that theoretical point in time and space beyond which it would be imprudent to 

proceed (with, say, an initiative, including an offensive, attack or pursuit). 

The term ‘culminating point’ dates back at least to Carl von Clausewitz, 

the Napoleonic era, and classic strategy. Of all the concepts of classic 

strategy that have been dismissed in modern writings about insurgency, 

this may be the one whose absence is most detrimental to clear thinking.

The operational equation counsels aggressive pursuit (because an 

inferior force that cannot escape runs the risk of ruin). However, if the 

pursuing force presses beyond its risk distance, the pursued force may turn 

and counterattack, effect an ambush, or maneuver to cut off the erstwhile 

pursuer from the pursuer’s own line of retreat. Hence, positional, movement warfare revolves in part around the leaders’ analyses and intuitions 

regarding relative strength and risk distances.

As a matter of military critique, generals are often discredited who 

fail to press an opportunity to finish off a weaker force. Some will argue 

that Meade should have pursued Lee after the Battle of Gettysburg, for 

instance. These critiques are always speculative observations of a victory 

that might have been greater. Monday morning quarterbacking. On the 

other hand, it is pretty clear that a commander did in fact pass that point of 

too much risk if he was defeated by a counterattack.

The risk distance for a squad in the pursuit depends in part on the 

amount of water it carries or if it can be easily resupplied with water. Because the human body so needs H2O, a squad’s leader would at some point 

be taking too much risk if he were to make his squad continue to move 

forward beyond the squad’s water supply. In a severely dehydrated state, 

his soldiers might be subject to heatstroke or to an effective counterattack 

from a well-watered enemy. If an enemy were to turn and defeat the squad 

due to its dehydration, we could reasonably say that the defeated leader

had taken the squad beyond its risk distance.

The distance to the squad’s culminating point also depends on 

many other variables. Ammunition and food are other common limiters. 

Military expressions like ‘water discipline’, ‘fire discipline’ and ‘rationing’ attest. The quality of weaponry, training, morale, and leadership are 

also contributors to the amount of time and distance before the squad might 
140 Risk Distance and the Pursuit

553

reach its culminating point. Transportation options also influence the culminating point. The helicopter, for instance, can change the time-distance 

equation like few other machines. 

As previously noted, in many situations landmines can drastically 

shorten the distances to culminating points. If a member of a squad in 

pursuit steps on a mine while moving up a mountain trail, not only will the 

squad be immediately weakened, the leader of that squad along with the 

leaders of future patrols will feel they must take more precautions and perhaps move more slowly. Pursuing squads’ anticipated distances to points

in time and space beyond which it seems too risky to precede are reduced 

just by the threat of the landmine.

Static or initial locations on the ground affect everyone’s risk distances(after all, the line of retreat goes from somewhere to somewhere), and 

getting somewhere is not the same as getting back. Aircraft and bad planning can take a unit well beyond its culminating point. The French garrison 

at Dien Bien Phu is an example of a huge violation of the classic principles. 

The French did not assure, were they to confront an enemy force with greater 

strength, that their route to sanctuary would be secure. In a sense, they 

placed themselves beyond their culminating point ab-initio. This happened 

partly because they measured comparative strength poorly, not correctly calculating the effect of distances. Author Jake Tapper describes a similar, 

smaller, more recent, but perhaps too typical event in The Outpost, about a 

fateful attack on Camp Keating in Afghanistan.

You may ask how risk distance applies to environments in which 

the location of the enemy is unknown. An insurgent modus operandi may 

be to meld into the population in civilian clothes and disappear on the 

metro after an action. In such an urban battlefield, insurgents fear a system 

that checks individual identity when persons enter the train station, or a 

neighborhood full of people willing and able to report the presence of 

strangers. Rebel lines of retreat are made insecure to the extent they cannot 

retain anonymity. Systems that make us all identify ourselves (such as 

counterfeit-resistant ID cards, a conscription registry requirement, motorbike registration, professional licensing and so on) makes insurgent lines 

of retreat less secure. Every action the rebel takes is more likely to push

him beyond his culminating point. That is, beyond the point in time and 

space where it is too risky to prudently proceed – to continue beyond his

risk-distance. If a government does not establish systems that endanger 

rebel anonymity, the insurgent will likely remain at large, rarely having to 

risk beyond his culminating point. If a government has any resources at 

all, however, the insurgent best not talk on the phone or use a credit card.
140 Risk Distance and the Pursuit

554

Why all this about a theoretical point? Because you can design an

overall strategy in such a way that the aggregate of your subunits’ more 

tactically-scaled risk distances is advantageous -- their risk distances extended and the enemy’s shortened. You can also compare the contributions 

of various seemingly disparate inputs. For instance, you can determine if 

the purchase of another helicopter is likely to increase the distances to your 

units’ culminating points to an incrementally greater degree than would 

improving the training of your unit leaders or building a wall somewhere.

Thinking in terms of risk distances can also help determine rough 

measures of relative unit effectiveness, the reasonableness of an operational strategy, or the relative advantage of positions. It can aid in 

understanding why certain places are better for building forts and walls.

Please see sections: 6, The Operational Equation; 8, Linearity and the Line of Retreat; 67, Points, Lines, Spaces; 10, Decisive Battle; 28, Takeovers and Sieges;

16, Presence; 64, Measuring Distance and Comparing Power; and 51, Get Willy.



“Next to victory, the act of pursuit is the most important in war.”505 F

506

Carl von Clausewitz,

Principles of War (1812)

---------------

“To Make a Long Story Short:

‘They got away’”506 F

507

The Adventures of Captain Underpants

---------------

“Get to Fort Grant. Tell 'em where we are. Tell 'em we may still 

be alive if they hurry. Move!”

Captain Yorke in the movie,

Fort Apache (1948)507F

508

---------------

“A strong pursuit, give no time for the enemy to think, take advantage of victory, uproot him, cut off his escape route.”508 F

509

Aleksandr Suvorov


555

Designed to trick, not bludgeon

Section 141, Thirty-six Stratagems

We won’t go over all thirty-six. I’m pretty sure some Chinese general (let’s say Sun Zhu since everyone else does) told his doctrine guy he 

wanted thirty-six stratagems. The guy probably came back and said something like, ‘Well, Sir, we can only really come up with twenty-eight 

distinct stratagems, is that OK?’ and the general got himself a new doctrine 

guy. So there are thirty-six stratagems in Wang Xuanming’s Secret Art of 

War: Thirty-six Stratagems. He has another book titled 100 Strategies of 

War and so, you see, there might be sixty-four of something you can call 

strategy that are beyond stratagem.

To unwrap the mystery that is Chinese strategic thinking, I depend

on Tim Thomas (The Dragon’s Quantum Leap and other dragon books) 

and Scott Henderson (Dark Visitor) whom I have mentioned elsewhere.

Stratagems of the Chinese government should be less of a concern 

for you (or at least a narrower category of concern) than the strategies of 

the Chinese; and strategies of the Chinese as lesser concern than Chinese 

strategic thinking. Regardless, Chinese stratagems are the heart of Chinese 

strategic thought, so much so that strategy without stratagem is hard to 

conceptualize. Make noise in the East and attack in the West is perhaps 

the most basic, but a more encompassing angle is perhaps to say that the 

idea is to get your opponent to want to do what you want him to do. (The 

Russian version of about the same thing has ben called ‘reflexive control’.)

The Chinese strategic method is to conceive of a specific action in time 

and space (the objective dimension), but to influence the opponent’s mind (the 

subjectivity dimension) as the latter might affect the objective world. This is 

what R. V. Jones talks about in the form of practical jokes ˗˗ of playing to what 

people want to think or are programmed to think, but with a purpose: to cause 

action or inaction at a moment in time and place. It is also at the heart of T. 

Miller Maguire’s prompts regarding operational strategy. Miller is all hyped

about the physical security of the physical line of retreat, for instance, but what 

he alludes to as the essence of strategy revolves around the mindset of the 

leaders ˗˗ their perception of the environment, chances of success and level of 

resolve ˗˗ and how to affect those mindsets. Military strategy or operational 

art do not just happen. The strategy and the decision-making of the strategist 

are one. So there is no special Eastern magic in Chinese strategic thinking, 

either traditionally or currently, although it may well be that Western strategic 
141 Thirty-six Stratagems

556

thinkers have lost their sense of the essence of strategy by denying the applicability of the classic operational equation to irregular war.

If you cannot find the enemy or his lines of communication, how 

can you deceive him as to the proper time and place for his actions or 

yours? How can you deceive him as to your relative strengths, the security 

of lines of communication, or levels of resolve? It is not impossible, actually, since you might confuse him into inaction or error regardless of his 

position, condition, or your own knowledge of them. This is probably an 

unrealistic hope, however, since even communicating to him is subject to 

your understanding of the geography.

A few favorites from The Art of War: Thirty-six Stratagems:

Stratagem 28: “Remove the ladder after the ascent. Expose your weak 

points deliberately to entice the enemy to penetrate into your line, then 

ensnare him in a death trap by cutting off his rearguard support...”

Stratagem 22: “Bolt the door to catch a thief. When dealing with a small 

and weak enemy, surround and destroy him. If you let him retreat, you 

will be at a disadvantage pursuing him.”

Stratagem 18: “To catch rebels, nab their leader first. Destroy the enemy 

crack forces and capture their chief, and the enemy will collapse....”

All 36 are pretty good, and so are the rest of the hundred. No, they 

don’t all have to do with the line of retreat.

Please see sections: 114, R.V. Jones; 89, The Dot Game and Go; 113, Unrestricted Chi Whiz; 101, Magical Realism; 123, Sea and Aerospace Power; 117, 

Strategic Communication; 2, Anonymity; and 115, Physics of Strategy.



“The central task and the highest form of revolution is to seize political power by armed force, to settle problems by force.”509 F

510

Mao Tse-tung in

Problems of Strategy... (1936)

---------------

“America is all about speed -- hot, nasty, badass speed.

Eleanor Roosevelt”5 10F

511


557

Victory 101

Section 142, Conflict Geography

Military Geography is well-established as an academic sub-discipline. 

Military geographers have their own specialty group in the Association of 

American Geographers, for instance. Military geography, in its current habits, 

puts great emphasis on how the physical environment affects military operations, conventional mostly. It focuses on trafficability, cover, and 

concealment. It does not propose its own theories regarding the interaction

between people and their environment in the context of irregular war. Because 

irregular war is marked by legal constraints and by the varied development of 

sanctuary and presence on the part of irregular forces, a new Geography for 

irregular armed conflict takes a different azimuth. Without overlooking the 

traditional who, what, where, why, when, and how of other disciplines, Conflict Geography for irregular war addresses at a theoretical level how spatial 

relationships affect competitive prospects. While one could presume to apply 

the principles of Conflict Geography to help avoid or resolve conflict, it is as 

applicable to seeking victory and dominion. Following are methods and principles of Conflict Geography, in no particular order:

Scale. Selection of appropriate scales for time, space, and weight is more 

than a useful exercise, especially for expressing ideas about distance and location across academic and professional disciplines and across means of 

communication other than maps. Scale helps conform thought, exclude distractions and emphasize the relevant. It can also restrict creativity and hide 

what is actually most significant, remain flexible to the constant dynamics 

of scale and to the possibilities of limitless or not-scaled concepts.

Visualizing. Maps, photography, models, verbal and written description, 

poetry, plastic art, and performances all help describe the nature and importance of places. Today, GIS provides the most effective and useful 

inventorying and epistemological framework to combine subjective descriptions with technical specificity as to absolute and relative location, 

time and weight. Some kinds of data can only be drawn appropriately in 

point form, depending on the scale. Many geographically relevant concepts, including cultural affinity, fear, aspiration, economic trends, and the 

like may be better expressed in ways other than the map, or in conjunction 

with maps.
142 Conflict Geography

558

Territory. Territorial boundaries (as drawn on maps and sometimes on the 

ground) represent agreements, desires, impositions, natural phenomena, theoretical phenomena, descriptive categories or perhaps technical limits. They 

come in all sizes shapes and scales, representing things like cell phone tower 

ranges, school catchment areas, sales territories, water easements and historical trends. When these territorial lines overlap, however, the overlap almost 

always betrays a conflict or a potential conflict. Discovery of the two dimensioned overlap of territories is a worthwhile analytical technique, just as

the thoughtful imbrication and tessellation of territories is a useful social 

planning technique.

Networks and flows. While territories can be visualized as areas, networks 

are easier to depict as connected lines. Usually they can be drawn in conjunction with the territories. Networks can also be called flows, which 

generally exist as territories themselves (like bandwidth, an airline route, or 

a gas line easement).

Smuggling. Significantly, the geographic characteristics and extents of contraband territories and flows are distinct from licit territories and flows. 

These smuggling geographies almost always overlap with the lines of communication of irregular warfare military organizations.

Identity. Many human identities can be depicted in two dimensions as 

well. Sometimes territorial ranges and identities match, and sometimes 

they don’t. A mismatch indicates a potential conflict. For instance, you 

could probably make a two-dimensional boundary around where inhabitants who identify themselves as Kurds predominate, but where the tax and 

other boundaries suggested in Section 52, Sovereignty, will not match your 

‘Most of us call ourselves Kurds’ boundary.

GIS. Conflict Geography aspires to precision, completeness, and replicability 

in recording time and location of relevant conditions and events.

Power and distance. Power diminishes with distance, like the light from a 

light bulb. The geography of competing power and influences in a given 

locale is rarely so complex that the major elements cannot be both identified 

and their relative power understood, but distance must be considered as a 

backbone variable. Euclidean distance is the standard baseline, but the determining distances in Conflict Geography are friction or cost-distances. 

More than time, fuel, or money, the measurement and analysis of distances 

should include factors such as fear and extortion, legal constraint, anonymity, public will, and especially impunity.
142 Conflict Geography

559

Risk distance. The distance to the culminating point (or point of too much 

risk), risk distance can be calculated as an inverse form of friction or costdistance that includes the threat of bodily harm or death.

Place identity versus pure democracy. Conflict Geography exposes the 

friction between representation according to place, and representation according to non-geographic categories. An almost ubiquitous phenomenon 

in irregular war, it can be exposed and visualized in detail.

Sanctuary. Sanctuaries -- whether furtive, physical, or governmental --

can be mapped. In the context of irregular war, Sanctuary is the geographic manifestation of impunity. It is where people get away with 

what they are getting away with. A centerpiece of Conflict Geography 

is the effort to map sanctuary.

Presence. As developed in this text, ‘presence activities’ in irregular war are

designed to create non-physical presence, either as residue or anticipation. The 

effort to create non-corporal presence generally includes some amount of actual physical presence. Even the non-corporeal part of the phenomenon can, 

nevertheless, be depicted geographically on visual maps. Along with sanctuary, Conflict Geography attempts to map presence.

Impunity. Impunity is not an amorphous, abstract quantity. Impunity has 

a geographic extent. Conflict Geography for irregular conflict must orient 

itself to identifying those places on the ground that are out of reach for a 

would-be sanctioning authority.

The Underground. Conflict Geography must thoroughly recognize and 

appreciate territories and flows in the underground plane of physical conflict. (Here I am not referring to ‘clandestine’ activities, secretive though 

they might be, but rather to all human activity effected under the surface 

of the ground.

Law. Irregular warfare unfolds in the context of dynamic legal and economic 

relationships. Armed competitors are nevertheless still subject to the classic 

principles of warfare, albeit with adjustments due to a wider gamut of scales 

as to numbers, weight, time, and space. The operational math is always subject 

to the kinds of friction distance mentioned elsewhere.

Property. The propensity of a place to be the venue of irregular armed conflict can be estimated by careful consideration of the social compact, and the 

social compact can be best understood in terms of property relationships, 

especially as regards land and the systems of land ownership. Successful 
142 Conflict Geography

560

strategies for long-term peace will be land-based strategies that are built on 

an understanding of the relative worth of real estate and the relation of places 

and their worth to human identity. Property (as ideological theory) is where 

economics, law, and geography converge. Conflict Geography exploits 

property analysis to understand the distribution of power, and the likelihood 

of conflict resolution.

Linearity. Assuming the linearity of movement in armed conflict, Conflict 

Geography highlights lines of communication. Within the classic rules of 

movement and position, a central geographic feature is the line of retreat, especially that which leads from some sort of target or contact to a sanctuary.

Roadblocks and checkpoints. Recognizing roadblocks and checkpoints as 

common features of irregular war, Conflict Geography supposes the use of 

‘map algebra’ to anticipate and plan advantage.

Crowdsourcing. Conflict Geography leans heavily on open source, broadly 

participatory data collection and opinion.

Technological change. Innovations constantly change the variables of friction distances and, therefore, the power that is lost, gained, or can be exerted 

in a given place.

Extreme natural events. Earthquakes, volcanoes, epidemics, hurricanes 

and similar phenomena can have major predictable and unpredictable influence on the environments in which irregular wars unfold and are, therefore,

a staple consideration of Conflict Geography.

Anonymity. Among those preoccupations from broader human geography, 

those conditions providing anonymity (of person, wealth, and relationships) 

are paramount. For longer-term strategies, the system of land ownership

and, consequently, the transparency of that system, is the preoccupation.

Vulnerability. Conflict Geography is sensitive regarding the existence of 

human collectives that are at-risk to harm or destruction, whether from 

natural or human causes, or a combination of the two. This sensitivity is a 

bi-product of awareness regarding relative power, especially as it is exposed in property systems.

Conflict Geography, like its mother discipline, hyphens easily. It is not

just Geography, but Medical-Geography, Historical-Geography, BusinessGeography, etc. We need, however, to constantly remind ourselves that geography is not ‘human’, ‘physical’ or ‘regional’ (though it may be), but rather 

the study of the whole environment of interrelationship of humans and their 
142 Conflict Geography

561

surroundings, surroundings that include other humans. Conflict Geography

strives (against the disdain of post-structuralists) to be as objective and empirical as possible in its measurement of the world and the battlespace. This is 

not to say it cannot draw on art and spirituality, or cannot take sides in a fight. 

Conflict Geography is Winning 101.

Please see sections: 72, Land Strategy and Property Strategy; 80, Why You 

Should Like Geography; 78, Identity; 86, Shifting Covet-geographies; 125, 

Human Rights; 66, GIS; 7, Sanctuary; and 135, Borders and Anarchism.



“Territory is not the cause of war. It is the cause of war only in the sense 

that it takes two to make an argument. What territory promises is the 

high probability that if intrusion takes place, war will follow.”511 F

512

Robert Ardrey,

Territorial Imperative

---------------

“Wouldn’t you like to get away?

Sometimes you want to go

Where everybody knows your name

And they’re always glad you came.”

Gary Portnoy and Judy Hart Angelo

theme song from the TV Show Cheers

---------------

“If you are not prepared to use force to defend civilization, then be prepared to accept barbarism...If the battle for civilization comes down to 

the wimps versus the barbarians, the barbarians are going to win.”

Thomas Sowell (attributed)

---------------

“If you look at the map you’ll see what I mean. The train and the steamboat 

had forged the links across the continent and up and down, leaving only the 

spaces in between.... It was the land they enclosed that was the trouble...”512F

513

Flashman in

George MacDonald Fraser

Flashman and the Redskins


562

Strains on strategy or strains of strategy?

Section 143, Seven Strategy Strains

Following is a set of seven (uh, eight) categories of ways by which 

competitive strength can be accomplished or given effect, that is, transmitted 

or delivered so as to influence a balance of domination and submission.

a. Position and move mass. A leader can place coercive instruments at times 

and places that can confound, weaken or destroy an opponent. Cognizant of 

the practical effect (on relative strength) of the interrelationship of time, distance, weight and resolve, the strategist places and moves elements (usually 

armed) in order to perplex his enemies regarding their options, thus driving 

them to err, if not to impotence.

b. Extort. A leader can hold at risk something of value to her opponent and 

convinces him that she is willing to destroy it. She offers to protect or relieve 

him from that fate if he bends to her will. This course works best, however, if 

she still pays respect to operational art, which can put elements of coercive mass 

in the optimal position to support the extortion.

c. Deceive. Some strategists feel that the word strategy refers to this option almost 

exclusively, or at least that it is indispensable for the optimal functioning of the 

other options. Some would say if you don’t have the power to win battles headon, that you are relegated to strategy, and by that they usually mean stratagem. 

Perhaps the most challenging of the many complications we are obliged to account 

for in our strategic theorizing is human capacity for ambivalence and perfidy. 

These lovely attributes and all their cousins (fecklessness, guile, hypocrisy, incompetence, negligence...) are applicable not only to every collective human identity 

we might care to imagine, but to each individual as well. They confound our delineations of the ‘we’ and the ‘they’ upon which we find it easiest to constructwhat 

we might do competitively. It is worth mentioning here, however, that this dimension of humanness is seen by many strategists as a trove of opportunities.

d. Negotiate. The leader weighs the costs and benefits of his options and figures 

he can offer something to his foe in exchange, perhaps even a change in his foe’s 

behavior. The exchange might benefit all parties. After all, it is not necessarily 

a zero-sum world. Trade can profit all, create wealth, and solve problems. Perhaps a party to a conflict seeks changes in a government, society or power 

structure that the establishment leadership is willing to concede. Maybe that establishment concedes, but only because it feels obliged to trade time and even 

perhaps some territory until it can develop other strategic potential and options.
143 Seven Strategy Strains

563

e. Explain. Appeal to reason. A leader may not have anything to trade and 

cannot or does not intend to deceive. He simply has moral or practical arguments 

that he believes can effectively dissuade or change the behavior of the foe. This 

option, along with negotiate, do nothing, and deceive, might not directly involve 

the use of coercive force. Nevertheless, while at a given moment a competitor 

might constrain himself to moral and intellectual argument, his opponents might 

not, and sometimes arguments work best when backed by coercive potential.

f. Annihilate. Rather than outmaneuver the enemy physically, threaten, deceive, 

negotiate or argue with him, the foe is simply eliminated completely -- if the 

physical and moral power to do so exist. Carthago Delenda Est.

g. Attrite. If a competitor does not have the power and willpower simply to eliminate a foe, but is capable and willing to do some destruction, it may be an option 

to pick away, slowly reducing the foe’s strength in whatever areas, expecting that 

the balance of strengths may eventually favor other strategic options.

h. Do nothing. Delay and surrender are among the options in this category. 

Surrender is always a possibility, as is suicide. Delay can work; good things 

come to those who wait, if one’s enemies afford the time.

If there is no wish to surrender, arguments will not work fast enough, 

there is insufficient power or stomach to annihilate an enemy, and there exists 

little that competitors are willing to negotiate away, then strategic options reduce to methods a, b, c, perhaps g, and combinations of these. We could tease 

out other categories of ways to apply strength: demonstrate, for instance. 

Please see sections: 6, The Operational Equation; 102, Negotiations; 141, 

Thirty-six Stratagems; 116, Songs of Chu; 65, Smuggling; 99, Seven Metropolitan Lines of Effort; 115, Physics of Strategy; and 10, Decisive Battle.



“To create a formula or a general rule...that would be appropriate 

in all situations is absurd. One must be able to think on one’s feet 

to be able to make sense of each separate case.”5 13F

514

The Most Humane Human

---------------

“We must study this.”

Myamoto Musashi (attributed)


564

By the increase of impunity

Section 144,

What the Pirate Said to Alexander

St. Augustine of Hippo was a cleric and philosopher who lived centuries later than Alexander, but whose keen observations about the nature 

of sovereignty and power still influence us today. St. Augustine addresses 

moral weight in the context of State power. His assertions about the subject revolve around the word impunity. Impunity means exemption or 

protection from punishment.

Alexander the Great got great the old-fashioned way, but that’s not 

what matters here. We turn instead to his need to deal with some less 

powerful contenders, a pirate in this case. St. Augustine tells us the story 

with the pirate as protagonist. Here is the passage:

In the absence of justice, what is sovereignty but organized brigandage? For, what are the bands of brigands but petty kingdoms? 

They also are groups of men, under the rule of a leader, bound 

together by a common agreement, dividing their booty according 

to a settled principle. If this band of criminals, by recruiting more 

criminals, acquires enough power to occupy regions, to capture 

cities, and to subdue whole populations, then it can with fuller 

right assume the title of kingdom, which in the public estimation is 

conferred upon it, not by the renunciation of greed, but by the increase of impunity. The answer which a captured pirate gave to 

Alexander the Great was perfectly accurate and correct. When 

that king asked the man what he meant by infesting the sea, he 

boldly replied: ‘What you mean by warring on the whole world. I 

do my fighting on a tiny ship, and they call me a pirate; you do 

yours with a large fleet, and they call you a Commander’.51 4F

515

St. Augustine, 5th-century Cleric

Man is a territorial creature who, when he gains power, doesn’t like 

anyone else granting impunity in his space. Our captured pirate, unbowed, 

points out that there is little difference between himself and Alexander, 

save that Alexander is honored for the scale of his arrogation.

This book ends with St. Augustine’s pirate story because, as the title 

says, the book is about winning, and the notion of winning needs practical 

form. Here, that form is offered by the assertion that government wins when 

it is the only entity within its territory able to grant impunity. Sometimes a 
144 What the Pirate Said to Alexander

565

pirate, insurgent, separatist, warlord, or mafioso (or a foreign country) can successfully grant impunity in defiance of a State -- and that is the challenge 

addressed by this book. If an entity other than the State can grant impunity to 

people who defy the State’s rules, the State fails to that extent. If no entity can 

defy the State’s monopoly on granting impunity, the State is securely sovereign. Sometimes a leader can successfully defy a State and grant impunity to 

his people because he arms and organizes well. He thus creates a new State.

Please see sections: 1, Impunity; 23, Mens Rea; 42, Brigands; 90, Prisons and

Prisoners; 65, Smuggling; 121, Dignity and Honor; 128, Global Insurgency and 

Global Trespass; and 84, Cultures of Violence.



Fredric: You make it a point of never attacking a weaker party than yourselves, and when you attack a stronger one you invariably get thrashed.

Pirate King: There's some truth in that.

from the movie,

The Pirates of Penzance (1983)515F

516

---------------

Q: What do Kermit The Frog and Alexander The Great have in common?

A: Their middle names.

Miss Piggy (attributed)

--------------

“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may 

be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons 

than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty 

may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but 

those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, 

for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”51 6F

517

C. S. Lewis



St. Augustine spoke through the voice of the pirate, but this book’s protagonist was not a pirate, an Alexander, or even a St. Augustine.

You are this book’s protagonist.
144 What the Pirate Said to Alexander

566

--Hedy Lamarr--

Appreciation to Blazingfur.blogspot.co
567

RESTATEMENT 

There are several conditions and principles likely to reign across all types 

of irregular armed conflict. A good plan for winning one of those conflicts 

will address the following seven fundamentals:

•Pick the right place to fight and the right enemy. It is hard to recover from 

fighting at the wrong place and time against the wrong people. Your enemy has a name and an organization; he is not an amorphous abstraction 

or a spontaneous reaction. Your enemy is not an idea or a network, he is 

a man and his butt squats somewhere. Learn geography. GIS everything.

•Control anonymity. Take it away from your enemy and secure it for yourself. Apply technical and institutional innovations. A regime of accurate, 

comprehensive and transparent public records tops the list for the counterinsurgent. It is hard to maintain impunity without anonymity.

•Work to cross, close, and restrict your enemy’s escape to sanctuary. The 

physical line of retreat to sanctuary should be a central geographic concept 

of your military operational planning. A successful attack on a sanctuary 

means it wasn’t. To win battles decisively, win the pursuits.

•Create property. Property is the social compact, the contract of contracts 

that serves to resolve conflicts before they become violent. Property is 

where economics, law and geography meet. Know who-all owns what-all.

•Respect everyone. Attend to dignity and honor. Your enemy’s line of 

retreat is covered by people, as is yours. Set a baseline of honorable behavior for yourselves, announce and enforce it. Start with the treatment of 

children. Don’t get carried away; some folk don’t deserve your respect.

•Make something. Bridges, walls, tunnels and pipelines do not go out of 

fashion. They will help you if put in the right places. Make something 

that favors your military operational art or is useful to the public, but don’t 

assume your enemies won’t use or destroy them. Don’t assume that ‘if 

you build it they will come’. Invent and produce the right machines, including weapons, to change cost and risk distances to your advantage.

•Seek advisors who have a sense of humor, not because they are funny, but 

because the mental circuits of humor are the same as those of strategy and 

stratagem, and of a positive outlook. Neither believe all your own propaganda nor discard all your enemy’s, but when he most insists there is no 

military solution to your conflict, look harder for it. Wars do not prolong 

themselves any more than they win themselves. Act diligently.
Restatement

568

 

I should therefore prefer to restrict my guidelines to the following:

-- Don't believe that military interventions, no matter

how morally justified, can succeed without clear military goals

-- Don't fall into the trap of imagining that the West can 

remake societies

-- Don't take public opinion for granted -- but don't either underrate the degree to which good people will 

endure sacrifices for a worthwhile cause

-- Don't allow tyrants and aggressors to get away with it

-- And when you fight -- fight to win.

Margaret Thatcher517F

518


569

SYNTHESIS 

Irregular war features a relatively greater amount of five phenomena: 

civilians or non-combatants with whom the contenders must deal in-place; 

challenges of anonymity; consequential psychological factors, especially as 

these relate to the non-fighting population; legalities, juridical systems, and 

lawfare as they influence military outcomes; and varieties of types, compositions, and modus operandi of competing organizations. Success in irregular 

war requires doctrine, organization, training, materiel, education, personnel 

and facilitiesspecific to it. Nevertheless, the basic principles of classic military 

strategy apply and are disregarded at peril. A prudent general, even if he leads 

no more than an insurgent squad, protects his lines of communication and 

makes sure that as he dares to confront a dangerous foe he keeps his options 

for retreat alive. He also knows that victory is often achieved only by successful pursuit after battle.

It is never enough to just win battles, even with successful pursuits. Profitable victory means neutralizing your enemies while not creating too many 

more of them. Profitable victory is a hard feat to pull off, one which can entail

administration, engineering, education and indoctrination ˗˗ efforts for which 

regular military units are only partially and poorly suited. Battle, nevertheless, 

remains the quintessential and imperative military event.

In irregular wars, cultural knowledge is not a luxury or secondary concern. Strategy involves stratagems and deceptions, and when civilian things 

are mixed indistinguishably with military things, clever warriors develop their 

stratagems and deceptions through literature, arts, entertainments, legalities

and all manner of cultural habits and expectations. A warrior ignorant of culture (his own or others’) will be unable to anticipate, recognize and defend 

against elegant stratagems. He will not be able to mount effective deceptions

of his own; not be able to implement anything but the most transparent plans,

not be able to seize the initiative. Some people, although they will admit the 

importance of cultural acuity, are offended by jokes, especially if they play on sensitive elements of human existence like excrement, death, parentage, or sex. Jokes, 

however, are created in the same way as military and political deceptions. To shy 

away from jokes is like shrinking from the subject of deception. If you let your 

enemy dominate the subtleties of cultural expression, he is likely to get to you before you get to him -- and he’ll laugh at you. In irregular wars, communications 

are enmeshed in the cultural gearing. If you are ignorant of the culture, chances 

are better that you won’t get the jokes. How are you, then, for being deceived?

Just as dismissal of cultural knowledge can cause failure in military operations, so too can distancing ideology from military planning. Ideologies are 

sets of ideas and theories about the distribution of power. Since military planning is about the application of coercive force, we would be uncoupling our 
Synthesis

570

objectives from our methods and means if we were to distance ideology from 

military plans. Post-structuralism is one name for a globally radiated ideological

music that includes within it the refrain that American power, waning and unfocused, is the bulwark of an evil system which noble insurgents should resist. Poststructuralists enjoy this music a lot, and push with it bits of contrived reality to help 

perplex the reasoning mind. They often go a step farther to insist that real reality 

doesn’t even exist, and so isn’t worth looking for. America will do well not to 

overvalue the post-structural orchestra. Its concert is rooted in discredited forms 

of marxism, and its conductors are selfish and violent.

Fortunately, American strategy-makers, like America’s armed forces 

themselves, can build from a clear, simple ideological foundation. The republic’s founders observed that the concentration of power correlated with tyranny. 

Through centuriesthis one observation has held up. The results of the founders’ 

practical efforts to respond to that observation -- to protect Americans’ liberty 

from excessive concentrations of power-- has also held up. American strategists 

take an oath to support and defend an ideological formula built on that observation about the inverse relationship of concentrated power to liberty. It is 

especially in the context of irregular war that an appreciation of this exceptional 

American ideological heritage can inspire and guide. 

Activities like building walls and sewers or doing a thorough inventory of 

everything and everyone in a place may not seem to have much connection to vagaries like post-structuralism or liberty. Nevertheless, questions about the control 

and use of spaces -- who will be trusted to decide their use; who will be able to 

determine the division of rights and duties on specific pieces of dirt--are responsive 

to an ongoing intellectual struggle about the correct nature of ownership and leadership, and even about reality itself. This book points admiringly at the great 

conflict resolution innovations of Western civilization, like the writ of habeas corpus, the statute of frauds, or liberal property ownership. But historical admiration 

is not enough. They are worthy of application. 

When dealing with insurgency, there is no way to separate issues of rectitude and legality from military operational movement and position, or to 

separate social responsibility from approaches to knowledge. They are all bollixed up. The categories of our thinking, like geography, operational art, 

economics, strategy, law, culture, tactics, postmodernism, or empiricism are all 

helpful and necessary. As boxes, however, they keep us from freely mixing 

ideas as we should, and they compete in ways that deny the contribution of other 

categories. There is no way to keep that from happening, but there are a few 

things that can speed our thinking in dangerous human competitions. One of the 

most profitable is to respect time, distance, and weight. Whatever the metaphysicians may find to challenge our assumptions about time and space, for our 
Synthesis

571

practical and violent competitive purposes, time flows in one direction, location 

is fixed, and it takes mass to convince the recalcitrant.

Great advantage goes to the competitor who takes careful inventories 

and makes precise and comprehensive maps. In the last few decades, two 

knowledge revolutions have occurred ˗˗ one is the Internet and the other is GIS. 

Victory is more likely for those who master both. Successful strategic thinking 

must reconcile empiricism with solipsism, but you are much more likely to win 

your war if you build your efforts on a foundation of dogged empiricism, and 

GIS is the code word for that devotion. GIS-based empiricism will help you 

close with and destroy your enemy. The ‘close with’ part is aided immensely by 

the control of anonymity. The insurgent especially depends for survival on geographic anonymity of his agents, sanctuaries and wealth. And, by the way, if 

your enemy’s sanctuary is in a foreign land from which you can’t extract or extradite him, then you might not want to fool yourself into thinking yours is a 

merely insurgent war.

If your enemy enjoys a sanctuary, and you don’t know where it is or how 

he gets there, you’re in trouble. Many of the other complexities boil down to 

that one ignorance. Sanctuary is the physical geography of impunity. In the final 

calculations of winners and losers -- in the measurements of success or failure -

- there will be a truth that overcomes all perception management and spin: The 

side that attains or retains control over the ability to grant impunity is the winner. 

It is ultimately not hard to tell if a government is or is not in control of the granting of impunity within its territory. Conversely, if it is a government that is 

getting away with the intolerable, that eventually will be known, too.

The above paragraphs might make it seem as though human conflict, the 

human struggle to dominate or not be submitted, is complicated. Maybe it is, 

but there is no need to let all the trees hide the forest, either. No need to overthink the thing. If you have an enemy, identify him, find him, close with him, 

and neutralize him. If not, build something, train, or go play golf.51 8F

519



“In the immortal words of Jean-Paul Sartre, 'Au revoir, Gopher’.”519 F

520


Synthesis

572

--John Brown--

Appreciation to npr.org
573

APPENDIX: MISCELLANEOUS LISTS

LIST A -- for Section 48, Grading the Social Compact

I. Quality of the evidence delineating rights, duties and owner identities is 

determined by three characteristics:

A. Accuracy (or precision. How accurate technically are the geographic or physical descriptions, and how accurate legally are they 

in terms of owners and rights, and perhaps how accurate in terms of 

market value);

B. Comprehensiveness (what is the coverage of the system both 

geographically and in terms of the percentage of owners and the possible rights involved);

C. Transparency (the visibility and availability of the data and its 

resistance to corruption and fraud).

(A) Accuracy

1. Extent to which ownership registry and cadastral descriptions are unified;

2. Existence of a statute of frauds and related statutory requirements;

3. Availability and use of title insurance;

4. Accuracy of surveying technologies;

5. Monument quality and density;

6. Age of records;

7. Capacity of cadastral and registry bureaucracy;

8. Appraisal cost and availability;

9. Relationship of tax assessments to market value appraisals if applicable.

(B) Comprehensiveness

1. Percentage of the geographic surface represented in cadastral maps;

2. Percentage of owners whose properties are represented in cadastral 

maps;

3. Difficulty of registration;

4. Percentage of properties with tax appraisals;

5. Percentage of properties with market appraisals.

(C) Transparency

1. Access to cadastral information;

2. Access to land-use data online;

3. If paper records are available for public inspection;

4. Where records are kept;

5. If registries and cadastral records are digitized;

6. If cadastral maps are digitized and vectorized;

7. If government development projects are advertised online and GISed;
Miscellaneous Lists

574

8. What records cost.

II. Capacity of owners (or claimants) and the government to act on conclusions 

logically drawn from the evidence (sometimes ‘ease of alienability or security 

from trespass’ depending on the mix of owner rights and government duties 

involved). It also can be reduced to three parts:

A. Marketability;

B. Protection from trespass (usually in the form of property 

courts), and;

C. Protection of the social compact generally (especially the absence of excluded classes of persons).

(A) Marketability

1. Ratio of properties bought and sold to total properties in a given time;

2. Existence of a professional real estate industry and its measures of professionalism;

3. Regulatory limitations on sale commissions, and their effect;

4. Real estate price controls and what is the effect;

5. Where zoning laws exist;

6. If deed restrictions and other controls on alienation are used, where and 

for what;

7. Existence of an electronic market property listing service;

8. What collateral is accepted for loans and what are standard rates across 

types of real estate.

(B) Protection from trespass

1. How long it takes to file a quiet-title claim;

2. If there is a grievance mechanism against real estate professionals;

3. How much it costs to conduct a quiet-title action;

4. If there are established rules for ownership through adverse possession.

(C) Protection of the social compact generally

1. How often the statue of frauds is applied;

2. If agency contracts are used;

3. If sales contracts are used;

4. Whether or not the police use formal records to resolve property disputes;

5. Professional standards of real property sales or appraisal force;

6. Professional standards for appraisals;

7. Prenuptial requirements (is there a statutory requirement, what are the 

choices, what is the intention, how do they limit alienability).

III. Basic rules delimiting the compact participation (liberality). The 

three general determinants of liberality are:

A. Inclusiveness (who can effectively be owners);
Miscellaneous Lists

575

B. Divisibility (how the various rights associated with things can 

be divided);

C. Alienation ˗˗ what rights owners have to dispose of property.

(A) Inclusiveness

1. If women can own property;

2. If foreigners can own property and to what extent, where, etc.;

3. If religious or ethnic identities are excluded.

(B) Divisibility

1. If subsurface rights can be bought and sold;

2. If innovations such as time shares, condominiums, joint, common, partnership, incorporation, etc. are used and is there data on geographic 

distribution and percentage of types;

3. If any studies relate ownership and tenancy forms to violence, migration 

or illicit narcotics production or trafficking.

(C) Alienation

1. If real property can be freely bequeathed by testators;

2. Who can give away real property and to whom;

3. How intestate estate property is disposed by statute or custom;

4. If life estates are used;

5. Standard tenancy patterns (leases, sharecrop arrangements, ejidos, communes, family corporations); 

6. If land is otherwise fully alienable (mortgaged, sold, rented, lent).



“...so I bought the field at Anathoth from my cousin Hanamel and weighed 

out for him seventeen shekelsof silver. I signed and sealed the deed, had it 

witnessed, and weighed out the silver on the scales. I took the deed of purchase -- the sealed copy containing the terms and conditions, as well as the 

unsealed copy -- and I gave this deed to Baruch son of Neriah, the son of 

Mahseiah, in the presence of my cousin Hanamel and of all the Jews who 

had signed the deed and of all those present in the courtyard of the guard. In 

their presence I gave Baruch these instructions: ‘This is what the Lord Almighty, the God of Israel, says: Take these documents, both the sealed and 

unsealed copies of the deed of purchase, and put them in a clay jar so they 

will last a long time.’”

Jeremiah 32: 9-15,

New International Version


Miscellaneous Lists

576

LIST B -- for Section 69, Measuring Effects of Actions on Enemies

(1) Conclusive indices of success:

1. Are elements of an organization able to commit crimes and not get 

caught; get caught, but not be prosecuted; or be prosecuted, but escape 

from jail? If insurgent or criminal leaders are effectively protecting their 

agents from punishment by the State, the State and probably the society 

are failing. If you are a counterinsurgent leader, you are failing.

2. In what territorial space are you confident that your side has monopoly 

over the granting of impunity? This geography may be growing, shrinking 

or changing. If such can be mapped, that map can provide the relative 

measure of success or failure over time.

(These first two measurements are conclusive if extended to their practicable maximum. If there is no geographic extent wherein your enemy can escape your 

sanctions, for instance, you are totally, unequivocally triumphant. You might consider the next measurement conclusive if you can correctly and precisely identify 

your enemy.)

3. How many of the enemy leaders have been neutralized by surrender, 

capture, death, coercion, buy-out, or deception? Either they have been 

neutralized or they have not. If, by the way, an insurgent or criminal 

leader can be timely turned or purchased, and he ceases to provide impunity to his followers, then the logic here is that he or she is thus neutralized.

(2) Indices of success conditioning:

1. How many of the identified enemy leaders have been located? Of 

course, how many is not as good as how many out of the total and how 

significant is each.

2. How many enemy leaders have been identified? If they have been identified, then some of their security is breached. If enemy leaders have not 

been identified, locating them is all the more difficult, as is counting them.

3. How many wounded insurgents are returned to action by the enemy? If 

captured guerrillas have been previously wounded and successfully returned to combat functions, for instance, it is a clear sign that an enemy 

LOC-to-sanctuary was viable. We can suppose that it remains equally viable for the leaders.

4. How far from combat actions are enemy hospitals? Distance from the 

point of injury to medical care is a clear indicator of ability to maintain 

the LOC-to-sanctuary.

5. Do insurgents receive training outside their areas of operation? Similarly, the more it appears that training is conducted remotely, the more 

evident a healthy LOC-to-sanctuary.
Miscellaneous Lists

577

6. Is there evidence of general support maintenance of enemy equipment? 

Some maintenance activities are unlikely to be conducted close to the point 

of operations. Evidence that such maintenance is occurring is again evidence of a healthy LOC-to-sanctuary.

7. Are insurgents recruited from areas distant from their areas of operation? This may not be a strong indicator of LOC-to-sanctuary health, but 

sufficiently varied data can indicate recruit source preferences and 

changes in likely sanctuaries over time.

8. Can insurgent leadership travel abroad legally? If insurgent leaders are showing up in foreign capitals, it is clearly a sign of LOC-to-sanctuary health.

9. How well are the insurgent junior leaders and foot-soldiers trained? This 

may or may not be a sign that the leaders’ LOC-to-sanctuary is healthy or 

their ability to muster resources intact. The insurgent leaders may be 

choosing not to expend or risk resources.

10. How new are insurgent weaponry and other equipment? This may or 

may not be a sign that the leaders’ LOC-to-sanctuary is healthy or the 

ability to muster resources intact. The insurgent leaders may be choosing 

not to expend or risk resources.

11. What is the pattern and pace of visits by leaders to subordinate leaders? 

This may or may not be a sign that the leaders’ LOC-to-sanctuary is 

healthy or the ability to muster resources intact. The insurgent leaders 

may be choosing not to expend or risk resources.

12. What is the number and rate of valid, un-coerced informant reports? 

This may be one of the most revealing indicators of LOC-to-sanctuary 

health because it implies a breakdown of security for the LOC. This, however, is one of the types of indicators that must be closely held, and it may 

only measure an input.

13. How many insurgent supply caches have been found? How large are they?

14. How many persons are killed in individual insurgent attacks?

15. What are the locations and numbers of insurgent landmines and other 

explosives?

16. What category of targets is being chosen by the insurgent?

17. What is the location of the targets chosen by the insurgent?

18. What are the relative sizes of forces engaged in combat actions?

19. What is the condition of captured insurgent weapons and rations?

20. What are the ages of captured enemy soldiers?

21. What is the ability of the insurgent enemy to recover wounded?
Miscellaneous Lists

578

22. What is the relation of friendly casualties to insurgent casualties in 

firefights?

23. What is the extension of illicit crops?

24. What do extortion and other crime statistics indicate?

25. What is happening to the number of un-coerced informant reports?

(To these might be added some advantages that may be given or taken away from 

one of the opposing force. For instance, if a counterinsurgent force has been given 

better rifles, more training, or more mobility, these things might be assumed to 

give a relative counterinsurgent advantage, all else remaining the same. They 

should not be given too much weight, since all else does not remain the same. They 

are useful inputs, means toward the goal, but not the goal itself. Supposed, or 

potential advantages for changing risk distances and correlations of force might be 

misapplied, countered by other loses, or overmatched by enemy adjustments. A 

counterinsurgent force might obtain more helicopters, for instance, but that change 

is not a measure of greater counterinsurgent success.)

(3) Indices of encounter success: 

1. How many enemy soldiers were captured alive or surrendered in an action?

2. How many enemy soldiers were killed in an action?

3. How much materiel was decommissioned in an action?

4. How much insurgent capital inventory was destroyed or taken in an action?

5. Did the local, national and international media pick up the story of an action?

6. How do the above compare with friendly losses and capital expenditure 

in comparison with other encounters?

7. Was contact with the enemy followed with a pursuit of the inferior force 

by the superior force?

8. If pursuit followed a contact, was the inferior force overtaken?

(The last two questions, about pursuit, are especially significant in the aggregate. 

If pursuits are never successful, it almost becomes a conclusive measure of insurgent success and counterinsurgent failure.)

An insurgent leader might measure his enterprise as follows:

1. Is my bank account increasing or decreasing? If it’s beating inflation, I’m OK.

2. Has the government identified any of my lines of communication? (Has it 

found a bank account, broken one of my codes, stopped a shipment of weapons, 

intercepted the visit of a subordinate commander, or prevented out-of-area training?) If it has, it may find more, my sanctuary is tenuous, and I might have to run.

3. Is my family safe? If not, and I care, I’m in trouble.
Miscellaneous Lists

579

4. Can I travel to country X? If not, my sanctuary options decrease, and 

my safe lines of retreat are fewer.

5. Can I meet with subordinates easily? If not, my power to effect things 

on the ground is limited.

6. Are my people being killed or captured? If they are captured, can I get them 

back? If I can fulfill my grant of impunity to my people, I’m doing well. If the 

State can enforce its monopoly on granting impunity, my end is nearing.

7. After contact with government forces, are my subordinate units successful in escaping?

(An insurgent leader’s ultimate questions are. “Am I still able to garner resources 

without being trapped by my counterinsurgent foe?,” and, “Can I still protect my 

followers from punishment by the government?” If the answers are yes, the insurgency is in good shape. The government’s ability to recruit soldiers might be a 

metric by which an insurgent could measure the progress of the insurgency. Ease 

of government recruitment could not be taken as a good sign for the insurgent, but 

it would hardly be conclusive of anything.)



LTC Thursday: What is this scale used for? 

CPT Yorke: Weigh government beef, sir. 

LTC Thursday: Seems I've gained seventy pounds since I've 

been in Arizona.

from the movie,

Fort Apache (1948)520F

521

---------------

1-47. A vulnerable state is a nation either unable or unwilling to provide adequate security and essential services to significant portions of 

the population. In vulnerable states, the legitimacy of the central government is in question. This includes states that are failing or 

recovering from crisis. A crisis state is a nation in which the central 

government does not exert effective control over its own territory. It 

is unable or unwilling to provide security and essential services for 

significant portions of the population.521 F

522

US ARMY FM 3-07 Stability Operations


Miscellaneous Lists

580

--Saul Alinsky--

Appreciation to Roy M. Blaum, The Times-Picayune (New Orleans);

Professor John Kelly; and nola.com
Miscellaneous Lists

581

LIST C -- for Section 70, Measuring Effects of Actions on Structure

Measuring human security:

1. Real estate prices

2. Migration rates

3. Vehicle-miles traveled on selected roads without incident 

(incidents per vehicle mile)

4. Tourist destination bookings and visits

5. Civilian landmine injuries and locations

6. Tip-offs to government regarding criminality

7. Kidnappings reported

8. Number of resolved real property civil court case

9. Transparency of public records

10. Levels of smuggling activity

11. Number of peacefully achieved arrests by warrant for felonies

12. Bond rates

Measuring prosperity:

1. Real estate prices

2. Tax collections to tax rates

3. Percent of formally owned land

4. Bond and insurance rates

5. Vacation patterns

Measuring freedom:

1. Real estate prices

2. Ballot access

3. National tourist origin-destination

4. Immigration rates

5. Registered NGOs

6. Cell phone dispersion and use rates

7. Internet logon rates

Measuring public will to support the social compact and defeat insurgents:

1. Informant tip-offs

2. Voter turn-outs and votes

3. Emigration and immigration

4. Volunteer participation in public forces by youth members of the elite
Miscellaneous Lists

582

LIST D -- for Section 25, Why Humans Don’t Fight

Some conditions favor and some disfavor the germination and coalescence of violent groups. We can predict which places are most likely to 

harbor or grow them, even if the exact mechanisms and processes of group 

formation are not well known.

General Conditions Likely to Stimulate Germination:

A. Availability of a franchise package for violent resistance behavior. 

There may be an attractive strategy-set available (objective, method, resources, ethic), which we can call a franchise package, that provides a 

ready-made theology/ideology; justification (of violence); pride identity/symbols; methodology; resources; objectives; and maybe active 

guidance. Detailed expression of a felt grievance may be significant in 

some contexts. Most people can’t invent these things on their own. Examples include marxism, maoism, fascism, and various forms of religious 

fundamentalism. These do not just arrive as lone ideas; they often come 

in packages that include the elements just noted above. As with a typical 

peaceful business franchise, there is often a buy-in fee, a corporate headquarters, standards, inspections, rents, and even uniforms.

Not all of the above-listed franchise features are necessarily provided by 

each package, or are needed, and, unlike hamburger restaurants, they can 

overlap. One currently recognized and seemingly ascendant package is radical Islam (especially radical Wahhabi Islam). A form of marxism-leninism 

(revamped postmodern or post-structural socialism/communism) has cachet; 

and the Soprano (gangster, FARC, etc.) package is also popular and seems to 

require a lower start-up investment. Bolivarian-liberation is brisk right now 

in Latin America. Not all packages or features are available worldwide and 

there are many variations.

B. Inadequacy of establishment inspiration. The ‘establishment’ may fail 

to garner respect or to motivate. The government may be a violent criminal actor itself, an authoritarian regime or it may be a gentle, liberal, but 

existentially uninspiring democracy. A useful condition for germination 

of violent groups is that the establishment or reigning structure fails to 

inspire or channel the energies of those otherwise disposed to opposition 

violence.

C. Existence of attractive franchise motivational propaganda. If the possibilities of adopting a resistance franchise is made known to those 

disposed to participate in resistance activity, a resistance organization is 

more likely to germinate (it pays to advertise).

D. Existence of successful franchise examples. A person or entity that 

has taken up the franchise, been honored as a result, and (perhaps) not 

effectively repressed by the establishment, is a positive stimulant.
Miscellaneous Lists

583

E. Elements in the cultural environment (legal, political, social) that make 

repression of resistance conduct more difficult.

Local Conditions Likely to Stimulate Germination:

A. Absence of resolute establishment authority. If the local institutions 

supposed by the population to wield physical force are reluctant to do so 

(or simply are not present) then a vacuum of resolve exists that can be 

filled by another, ruthless group. Impunity is quickly sensed, so any reluctance on the part of the establishment to apply force in uncommon 

circumstances (to stop looting after a natural disaster, for example) can 

quickly lead to group creation around ruthless actors.

B. Inadequacy of establishment inspiration. At the local level there may 

be a variety of competing legal and illegal visions for channeling energies 

(especially of young males). If they do not inspire, persons seeking inspiration will find it in an alternative franchise package.

C. Absence of outlets for sexual expression, especially male.

D. Presence of pro-franchise charismatic leadership. Opinion leaders 

stimulate. Leadership counts.

E. Availability of enabling resources. Vision without resources is fantasy. The abject poor, left alone, have rarely posed a violent threat to the 

State.

F. Effective presence of an agent of the franchise package. An expert is 

someone from out of town, especially if the agent offers money and adventure. An agent in command of an armed team of insurgents may be 

still more convincing.

G. Contested wealth, especially real estate, without a functioning conflict 

resolution mechanism.

H. Unaddressed grievances with a definable defendant(s).

I. Successful violent actions (success = accomplished with impunity).

Strategic Conditions Likely to Counter Germination:

A. Existence of a favorable option or leader opposed to violent behavior 

-- Gandhi, M.L.K. Jr., The Peace Corps.

B. Detailed expression of plans to address and redress grievances -- affirmative actions, apologies, monuments, employment opportunities, 

upgraded services.

C. Adequate establishment inspiration: Focusing on a common, outgroup enemy, or on a unifying mission. This includes potential within 
Miscellaneous Lists

584

the system for aspiring leaders to ascend via peaceful mechanisms (elections, education, military rank).

D. Attractive nonviolent motivational propaganda and counter- propaganda and education.

E. Presence of successful nonviolent examples.

F. Elements in the cultural environment that make repression of deviant 

conduct easier. Cadastres, stable addresses, ID cards, complete census 

data, licensing, registries.

Local Conditions Likely to Counter Germination:

A. Resolute local establishment authority. Criminals are captured and 

punished. Impunity is denied. Orderly responses are made to environmental crises.

B. Adequate establishment inspiration. Local government, schools, civil 

society, churches exist to channel aspirations.

C. Existence of outlets for sexual expression, especially male.

D. Presence of charismatic leadership that is not pro-resistance.

E. Absence of contested wealth.

F. Existence of a functioning conflict resolution mechanism for contested wealth.

G. Availability of establishment enabling resources, and capacity to repress violent franchise-enabling resources.

H. Capacity to deny the presence of agents of a resistance franchise 

package. Elements exist in the cultural environment that make repression of resistance easier. Cadastres, addresses, ID cards, complete 

census data, registries.

What to do:

1. Establish a priority of localities requiring more study. Promote outside 

multidiscipline research of select localities.

2. Identify the worst places. Locate the congruence of conditions that 

favor the germination of violent resistance groups as described in the 

above paragraphs, highlighting the qualitative as well as quantitative characteristics of those places.

3. Shape conditions so that information on local conditions is freely available and willingly provided. Promote comprehensive, accurate census, 

personal ID, cadastral, mobile property and other property registry records, as well as inventory systems for dangerous instrumentalities.
Miscellaneous Lists

585

4. Apply control technologies where your resources allow, and establish a continuous reliable information flow. Apply secret resources only where necessary.

5. Study the propaganda environment. Identify ways to diminish elements of the opposition message.

6. Neutralize opposition agents in locales and reduce the delivery of resources to them. Identify their lines of retreat and their sanctuaries. This 

requires comprehensive cultural knowledge.

7. Violent actions, especially those accomplished by impunity, are indicators of favorable conditions for the germination or expansion of violent 

actors. Whether you are a pro-government person or an insurgent, you 

probably want to make details of violent events available to outside researchers in order to establish a favorable public record for later use.

8. Gather knowledge about all groups and institutions, not only of resistance franchise packages and agents, but of the groups and institutions 

they oppose.

9. Identify grievances and contested wealth. Comprehensive conflict analysis identifies grievances and contested wealth, party (claimant) identities 

associated with these grievances or wealth; determines the locations of members of the claimant groups (cognizant that claimant group memberships will 

overlap, and that an individual can belong to numerous claimant identities and 

even belong to competing sides of the same issue); learns what will satisfy 

grievances or wealth claims; and measures the capabilities and capacities of 

the claimant identities. This knowledge is necessary for resolution of conditions likely to stimulate the germination of new violent opposition groups. 

(See Section 53, Hohfeldian Grievance Analysis)

10. Build actor-origin databases. In order to help test hypotheses regarding the details of local conditions conducive and not conducive to the 

germination of violent actors, the database of origins and motivating factors of known violent actors should be expanded, unified, and refined. 

Compare the coincidence of that data to physical geography (origins of 

perpetrators against localities identified as having favorable conditions) 

to improve understanding of the conditions and where they exist.



Nothing in life comes easy,

so why do you expect something out of a quote? 522F

523

Pewdiepie


Miscellaneous Lists

586

--Joseph Bazalgette--

Appreciation to Wikipedia

LIST E -- for Section 105, Geography of Genocide

Public knowledge about genocides can be placed into seven categories, 

each connected to the national and global attention paid to the phenomenon, as follows:

1. Longer-term (years) warnings regarding the likelihood of or heightened 

vulnerability of a people to genocide.

2. Creation of inventories of potential target collectives (the creation of 

which might itself deter mass killings).

3. Forensic geography conducted before events that can support prosecutions after the fact. This category serves both as a deterrent and as a support 

to justice.

4. Midterm (weeks and months) warnings that can mobilize attention and 

pressure against potential perpetrators and in favor of potential victims.

5. Occurrence reporting and recording to inform the world community of 

ongoing genocidal events.

6. Prosecutorial discovery and post-crime forensic mapping.

7. Recovery mapping.
Miscellaneous Lists

587

Below is the start of a little taxonomy of indices of vulnerability or 

murderous intent we can place under the seven categories listed just above:

1. Longer-term warnings

a.) clearly identifiable collective identities, especially

linguistic, national, ethnic, religious, and racial;

b.) high contrast and proximity of collective identities;

c.) inability of a collective identity or members of a 

collective identity to defend itself/themselves.

1.) Improbability of physical escape from the actions of a likely

perpetrating entity due to:

A. physical isolation,

B. lack of material wherewithal,

C. existence of legal prohibitions on personal movement,

D. lack of welcoming destinations;

2.) Lack of representation in executive, administrative, legislative and 

judicial forums;

3.) Lack of reporting and warning capacity due to:

A. lack of journalist presence,

B. lack of academic presence,

C. lack of technical communications means,

D. existence of legal restrictions imposed on A-C,

E. existence of legal restrictions imposed on communications;

4.) Existence of collective cultural disrespect evidenced as follows:

A. explicit insult in educational materials,

B. explicit insult in governmental documents other than above;

5.) Lack of effective weaponry due to the following:

A. Laws monopolizing or restricting the ownership of weapons,

B. Lack of sufficient wealth for armament,

C. Existence of cultural norms deterring ownership and use of suitable 

weaponry;

D. High differentials in tax burdens;

E. General inability to migrate due to the following:

1.) enforced legal restrictions on migration,

2.) physical barriers to migration,

3.) enforced legal restrictions on immigration to best destinations;

F. Proximity of high value physical geography, including the following:

1.) source locations of commercial exportable things,
Miscellaneous Lists

588

2.) best routes of movement of commercial exportable things including 

contraband routes,

3.) chokepoints and nodes in above routes,

4.) properties or terrain with high market value for any other reason.

2. Inventories of potential victim populations

a.) representative (tracking) individuals in victim-likely populations;

b.) property rights pertaining to victim-likely collective identities and/or 

pertaining to tracking individuals in those collective identities;

c.) property rights pertaining to perpetrator-possible identities, both individual and collective;

d.) cultural signatures of victim-likely collectives.

3. Pre-event forensic Geography

a.) geographic forensics baseline preparations;

b.) human-caused physical destruction and obstruction;

c.) mapping of wealth of hate-agents and leaders of perpetrator identities.

4. Mid-term (weeks and months) warning

a.) presence of effective hate agents;

b.) permissive rules of hate speech;

c.) collective sense of loss, especially national, in a potential perpetrator 

identity;

d.) collective sense of impending or threatened loss, 

especially national, in a potential perpetrator identity.

5. Occurrence reporting and recording

a.) mapping communications potential from within a risk geography;

b.) inventory and mapping of reporting networks;

c.) fear mapping;

6. Prosecutorial discovery and post-crime forensic mapping

a.) geographic forensics;

b.) mapping areas of evidence destruction and obstruction;

c.) mapping of wealth of hate-agents and other leaders of potential perpetrator collective identities;

7. Recovery mapping

a.) damage mapping of dwelling places;

b.) defensible terrain mapping;

c.) logistics mapping for temporary sustainment;

d.) line of communications damage mapping;

e.) NGO or government support systems mapping;
Miscellaneous Lists

589

f.) remnant victim-group mapping;

g.) donor and potential donor inventory and mapping;

h.) cultural symbols damage assessment and mapping.

Occurrence reporting (#5) is often the purview and expertise of 

journalists, or of government personnel dealing with classified means, so 

it is only touched on here. As for recovery mapping (#7), that is a question of logistics, humanitarian aid and reconstruction, a function for 

which there already exist massive datasets, preparations, bureaucracies 

and even industries. That said, changes in aspects discussed in the other 

categories may well shape and add to the effectiveness of these functions.

LIST F -- for Section 112, DIME and PMESII

Instead of PMESII, try one of the two lists offered below.

1. Identities, organizations and leaders: Nationalities, ethnicities, political parties, 

teams, gangs, group nicknames, etc. that are or could be involved in any contest of 

wills, ownership or domination. Also the leaders of these identities and organizations.

2. Territories and ranges: Formal, tiered territories such as departments or counties. 

Also team, gang, and association territories, license limits, school districts, congregation range, union representation and so on. Also diffusive ranges of identity, presence 

and influence (ethnicity or animal species presence, for instance). Especially sanctuaries and route control.

3. Covet geography, means of production and wealth: Things and places most likely 

fought-over including targets of predation. A gold mine, a bank, a factory, a crop, 

lovely daughters, hydrocarbon royalties, patents, smuggling routes, etc.

4. Grievances and conflicts: The grievances or conflicts noted in this section related 

to the identities in section 1 and items in section 3.

5. Strengths and weaknesses: Strengths and weakness of those in paragraph 1 to effect grievances in paragraph 4.

6. Transportation and distances: Standard movement infrastructure such as road, rail, 

fluvial. Also distances (including cost distances) between covet geography listed in 

section 3 and sanctuaries of section 2 as it pertains to select entries in section 1.

7. Symbols and Narration. Themes, myths, fashions, cultural habits, preferences to 

the extent they relate to entries in other sections.

8. Communication infrastructure: Standard items like television, radio, telephone, 

but also technical nodes of internet service and use.

1. What is the foreign behavior that is intolerable to us?

*Who does or will the behavior hurt exactly, how much, where and when?

2. What identities perpetrated, perpetrate or might perpetrate the intolerable?

* Who (the mens rea -- violent animus and initiative leadership persons)
Miscellaneous Lists

590

* Where physically is the mens rea?

* What are the strength and resources, including allies, of the mens rea?

* What are the vulnerabilities of the mens rea?

3. What do the perpetrators want?

* What do they say they want?

* What do they, especially the mens rea, really want?

4. What is the habit of their actions?

* How do they perpetrate and fight? How are they likely to react to efforts to 

deter or punish them?

*What anticipatable events might place the mens rea in time and space such that 

we might affordably reach the mens rea?

5. How much friendly strength can be projected and afforded?

* What is immediately available and what do we need to create?

* Who will help?

6. What are likely unintended effects of action we might take?

* Is their also beneficial behavior from the perpetrating identity, and if so, to whom?

* Are allies in disagreement as to the intolerability of the behavior in question?

--Raphael Lemkin--

Appreciation to alchetron.com and Washington Post
591

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--Veteran of Lepanto--

Appreciation to npr.com
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

“There will probably be some simple enough to believe that you have made use 

of them all in this plain, artless story of yours. At any rate, if it answers no 

other purpose, this long catalogue of authors will serve to give a surprising 

look of authority to your book.”

Cervantes’ friend 523F

524


607

ENDNOTES 

1 Saul Alinsky. Rules for Radicals. New York: Random House, 1971, p. xxi.

2 George Orwell. Homage to Catalonia. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 

1952, p. 230.

3 Wiki Quote, citing John Kenneth Galbraith’s Introduction to The Affluent Society

(1977). http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_Steinbeck.

4 Richard A. Posner, ed. The Essential Holmes. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 

1996, p.82; Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. “In Our Youth Our Hearts Were Touched 

with Fire.” Holmes’ 1884 Memorial Day Speech (An address delivered for Memorial 

Day, May 30, 1884, at Keene, NH, before John Sedgwick Post No. 4, Grand Army of 

the Republic), http://people.virginia.edu/~mmd5f/memorial.htm.

5 Robert Louis Stevenson. “An Apology for Idlers(1877)” in Virginibus Puerisque, 

and Other Papers(1881) The full sentence is “Books are good enough in their own 

way, but they are a mighty bloodless substitute for life.” The poem can be found 

online at Pennsylvania State University http://www2.hn.psu.edu/faculty/jmanis/rlsteven/virginibus.pdf.

6 Theodore Roosevelt. The Man In the Arena. Speech given at the Sorbonne, Paris, 

France on Apr 23, 1910. Available at Theodore Roosevelt, http://www.theodore-roosevelt.com/trsorbonnespeech.html.

7 IMDb.com. Sullivan’s Travels(1941) was directed and written by Preston Sturges.

8 IMDb.com. Team America: World Police (2004) was directed by Trey Parker, and 

written by Trey Parker, Matt stone and Pam Brady. Spottswoode’s voice was performed by Daran Norris.

9 Ulysses S. Grant. Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant. New York: Charles L. Webster 

& Company, 1885–86. (at Chapter XVI, Resignation—Private Life—Life at Galena—The Coming Crisis, page 12) Online at Bartleby.com, 

http://www.bartleby.com/1011/16.html.

10 IMDb.com. On theWaterfront (1954) was directed by Elia Kazan, et al, and 

written by Budd Schulberg based on a story by Malcolm Johnson. Truck was 

played by Tony Galento.

11 Border Reivers.com. The Ballad of Kinmont Willie. http://www.borderreivers.co.uk/Border%20Stories/ballad_of_kinmont_willie.htm.

12 IMDb.com. License to Kill (1989) was directed by John Glen, and written by Michael G. Wilson and Richard Maibaum. Franz Sanchez is played by Robert Davi.

13 IMDb.com. Men in Black (1997) was directed by Barry Sonnenfeld, and written by 

Lowell Cunningham and Ed Solomon.

14 IMDB.com. Nineteen Eighty-Four(1984) was directed by Michael Radford, and 

written by George Orwell and Michael Radford.

15 IMDb.com. Red Dawn (1984) was directed by John Milius, and written by Kevin 

Reynolds and John Milius.

 
Endnotes

608

 

16 Richard A. Posner, ed. The Essential Holmes. Chicago: University of Chicago 

Press, 1996, pp. 102-103.

17 The History Place. The Vietnam War: America Commits 1961-1964. 

http://www.historyplace.com/unitedstates/vietnam/index-1961.html.

18 IMDB. “Mayhem of the Mooninites” (2001) is an episode of the animated cartoon 

TV series Aqua Teen Hunger Force, created by Dave Willis and Matt Maiellaro. 

Dave Willis portrays Ignignokt.

19 Álvaro Uribe interview nterview with Cayetana Álvarez de Toledo, “Álvaro Uribe: 

‘Llamaron paz a la democracia sometida’” (Alvaro Uribe: They gave the name peace 

to submitted democracy) El Mundo, Madrid, 6 November 2016, 

http://www.elmundo.es/internacional/2016/11/06/581db89ce2704e6a658b4689.html.

20 Thucydides. History of the Peloponnesian War. Book III, 3.82-[4], online at Wikisource, http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/History_of_the_Peloponnesian_War.

21 Arthur Conan Doyle. The Great Boer War. A Public Domain Book, Kindle Edition 

Loc 7765 of 8794.

22 Antoine Henri de Jomini. The Art of War by Baron De Jomini, Special Edition. 

(Translation by G.H. Mendell and W. P. Craighill) El Paso: El Paso Norte Press, 2005 

(first published in French in 1838 and English translation in 1862), p. 13, online at 

Google Books.

23 T. Miller Maguire. Outlines of Military Geography. London: C.J. Clay & Sons, 

1899, 21-22.

24 Ibid., p. 30.

25 Martha J. Lamb, ed. Magazine of American History with Notes and Queries Illustrated. Unk: Historical Publication Co., 1885, p. 27, online at Google Books, 

http://books.google.com.

26 Bate Felix. “French troops inch north in Mali as Islamists melt away,” Reuters. Jan 

21, 2013. http://uk.reuters.com/article/2013/01/21/uk-mali-idUKBRE90J0D520130121?feedType=RSS&feedName=worldNews.

27 Maxwell Taylor. Report on General Taylor’s Mission to South Vietnam. November 

3, 1961. (Approved for public release June 6, 2005: 

CIARDP86B00269R000200030001-5).

28 Antoine de Saint Exupéry. Terre des Hommes. Paris: Gallimard, 1939, p. 10. English title, Wind, Sand, and Stars. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1992. On line 

in French at http://www-fourier.ujf-grenoble.fr/~marin/une_autre_crypto/Livres/StExupery-terre.pdf.

29 Mao Tse-tung. Selected Military Writings of Mao Tse-tung. United States: Seattle: 

Praetorian Press. Amazon Kindle, generally.

30 Central Intelligence Agency (attributed) Guide to the Analysis of Insurgency. Unknown: Central Intelligence Agency (attributed), undated, p. 2.

31 IMDb.com. Star Wars(1977) was directed and written by George Lucas. Ben Obewan Kenobe was played by Alec Guinness.

32 IMDb.com. Logan’s Run (1976) was directed by Michael Anderson, and written by 

David Zelag Goodman, William E. Nolan, and George Clayton Johnson. Logan 5 

was played by Michael York.
Endnotes

609

 

33 IMDb.com. Fight Club (1999) was directed by David Fincher, and written by 

Chuck Palahniuk and Jim Uhls. Tyler Durden was played by Brad Pitt.

34 Marc Brown and Stephen Krensky, Dinosaurs Beware. New York: Little, Brown 

and Company, 1984, p. 24.

35 IMDb.com. Coneheads (1993) was directed by Steve Barron, and written by Tom 

Davis, Dan Aykroyd, Bonnie Turner and Terry Turner.

36 Peter G. Tsouras, ed. The Greenhouse Dictionary of Military Quotations. London: 

Greenhouse, 2000, p. 422, referencing Nathan Leites, The Soviet Style of War(1982).

37 Roy Gerrard. Sir Francis Drake His Daring Deeds London: Victor Gollancz, 

1988, p. 19.

38 IMDb.com. Black Hawk Down (2001) was directed by Ridley Scott, and written by 

Mark Bowden and Ken Nolan. General Garrison was played by Sam Shepard.

39 A. Hilliard Atteridge. Famous Modern Battles. Cambridge, MA: The University 

Press, 1913, p. 241.

40 IMDb.com. The Outlaw Josey Wales(1976) was directed by Clint Eastwood, and 

written by Forrest Carter, Philip Kaufman, and Sonia Chernus.

41 Russell F. Weigley. The Age of Battles: The Quest for Decisive Warfare from Breitenfeld to Waterloo.Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991, ‘Introduction’, generally.

42 Carl von Clausewitz. On War(Michael Howard and Peter Paret, eds.) Princeton: 

Princeton University Press, 1976, p. 267.

43 QuotationsBook.com. Quotes about Peace. Online at Google Books, 

http://books.google.com.

44 Central Intelligence Agency (attributed) Guide to the Analysis of Insurgency. Unknown: Central Intelligence Agency (attributed), undated, p. 2.

45 A. Hilliard Atteridge. Famous Modern Battles. Cambridge, MA: The University 

Press, 1913, p. 352

46 Aradmin. “Civil War Cavalry Leaders Tribute Henry Rifle.” America Remembers, 

July 26, 2013. http://www.americaremembers.com/page/2/

?taxonomy=product_type&term=simple

47 Alfred Duggan. The Right Line of Cerdic. New York: Pyramid, 1967, p.243.

48 Peter G. Tsouras, ed. The Greenhouse Dictionary of Military Quotations. London: 

Greenhouse, 2000, p. 422, referencing Nathan Leites, The Soviet Style of War(1982), 

p.415.

49 Diana West. “How a 'Surge' Fails Us, Part 1.” TownHall.com. http://townhall.com/columnists/dianawest/2009/12/18/how_a_surge_fails_us,_part_1.

50 Theodore Roosevelt. The Rough Riders/ An Autobiography. New York: Literary 

Classics, 2004, p. 339.

51 Associated Press. “Sri Lanka PM focuses on ending civil war.” China Daily, 2005-

08-30 http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/english/doc/2005-08/30/content_473441.htm.

52 IMDb.com. Conan the Destroyer(1984) was directed by Richard Fleischer, and 

written by Robert E. Howard, Roy Thomas, Gerry Conway, and Stanley Mann. Conan was played by Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Endnotes

610

 

53 Legitimacy, as a north star for counterinsurgent planning, is well-argued by practitioners and theorists. See, for instance, Fishel, John T. and Manwaring, Max G. 

Uncomfortable Wars Revisited. Norman: Oklahoma University Press, 2006.

54 See, for instance, Index of Economic Freedom, Edwin Feulner Jr. et al., The Wall 

Street Journal and the Heritage Foundation, www.heritage.org; Human Development 

Index, United Nations Develpment Programme, www.undp.org; Failed States Index, 

The Fund for Peace and Foreign Policy magazine, www.fundforpeace.org; FAST International Early Warning System, Swiss Peace, www.swisspeace.org and 

International Crisis Group (with other relevant links), www.crisisgroup.org and other 

related data at www.ciaonet.org; The Bertelsmann Transformation Index, Olaf Hillenbrand and Peter Thiery, www.bertelsmann-transformation-index.de/11.0.html; 

Conflict Map, Nobel Prize Organization, http://nobelprize.org; Transparency Index,

Transparency International, www.transparency.org; States at Risk and Failed States, 

Marina Ottaway and Stefan Mair Carnege, Endowment for International Peace, Policy 

Outlook, www.ciaonet.org; All Possible Wars: Toward a Consensus View of the Future Security Environment 2001-2025, Sam J. Tancredi, www.ciaonet.org; Happy 

Planet Index, www.happyplanetindex.org; World Database of Happiness, 

http://www1.eur.nl/fsw/happiness/.

55 IMDb.com. Monty Python and the Holy Grail was directed by Terry Gilliam and 

Terry Jones, and written by Graham Chapman, et al.

56 James P. Cannon. "Trade unionists and revolutionists", speech by James P Cannon, 

1953. Workers Liberty. http://www.workersliberty.org/story/2010/03/ 26/trade-unionists-and-revolutionists.

57 Frédéric Bastiat. The Law (1850) Library of Economics and Liberty, 

http://www.econlib.org/library/Bastiat/basLaw1.html.

58 Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. “III, Trade-Unionist Politics And Social-Democratic Politics” in What Is To Be Done?: Burning Questions of our Movement. Marxists.org. 

http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1901/witbd/iii.htm.

59 Álvaro Garcia Linera. “The Multitude’” in Oscar Olivera and Tom Lewis, Cochabamba!: water war in Bolivia. Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2004) pp. 65-86. In 

this landmark essay, Dr. Garcia examines the trend away from organizing plant or factory labor and toward the necessarily more nimble engagement of disparate social 

groups that have a variety of demands and grievances.

60 Benjamin Dangl. The Price of Fire: Resource Wars and Social Movements in Bolivia. Edinburgh, AK Press, 2007, p. 157.

61 IMDb.com. Caddy Shack (1980) was directed by Harold Ramis, and written by 

Brian Doyle-Murray, Harold Ramis, and Douglas Kenney. Carl Spackler was played 

by Bill Murray.

62 Leon Trotsky. “The Trade Union Movement and the Socialist Workers Party: 

Adopted by the First National convention of the Socialist Workers Party, January, 

1938.” Socialist Appeal, February 5, 12, and 19, 1938. Microfilm, NYU Tamiment Libraries, transcribed & marked up by Andrew Pollack for the Encyclopaedia of 

Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL), http://www.marxists.org/history/etol/document/swpus/swp01.htm.

63 William Shakespeare. The Tragedy of Julius Cesar, Act 2, Scene 1.
Endnotes

611

 

64 As quoted in Walter Millis. American Military Thought. New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 

1966, p. 12.

65 The bottom and upper left-hand images were taken from Google Earth, 

https://maps.google.com/maps?safe=active&hl=en&q=bolivia&ie=UTF8&ei=ewGzUoWjKYmkkQeugIH4Cw&ved=0CAoQ_AUoAg, Screen clipping taken: 

12/19/2013; The outline map of Bolivia was made with ArcGIS.

66 Palacios, Marco. (2012). Violencia pública en Colombia: 1958-2010. Bogotá: Fondo 

de de Cultura Económica, 2012. p. 53.

67 IMDb.com. The Godfather(1972) was directed by Francis Ford Coppola, and written 

by Mario Puzo and Francis Ford Coppola. Peter Clemenza was played by Richard S. 

Castellano.

68 Katerina Wilhelmina. “Kate Upton Quotes,” Chatter Busy, 15 October, 2012. 

http://chatterbusy.blogspot.com/2012/10/kate-upton-quotes.html.

69 Francois de Rochefoucauld. Reflections; or Sentences and Moral Maxims(1665–

1678), Maxim 38 http://www.gutenberg.org/files/9105/9105-h/9105-h.htm.

70 IMDb.com. Airplane II: The Sequel (1982) was directed and written by Ken 

Finkleman.

71 IMDb.com. Office Space (1999) was directed and written by Mike Judge.

72 MAJ Kelly H. Smith Surrogate Warfare for the 21st Century. Fort Leavenworth: 

School of Advanced Military Studies, 2006. p. 24.

73 Bernard Gwertzman interviewing Matthew Levitt, “The Hezbollah Connection in 

Syria and Iran,” Council on Foreign Relations, February 15, 2013, 

http://www.cfr.org/iran/hezbollah-connection-syria-iran/p30005.

74 Dee Brown. The Fetterman Massacre. Lincoln: University of Nebraska 

Press, 1971, p. 49.

75 George Orwell. Homage to Catalonia. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1952, p. 47.

76 Gary Galles, “Washington’s Wisdom on Factions,” Ludwig von Mises Institute, February 15, 2008, online http://archive.mises.org/7789/washingtons-wisdom-on-factions.

77 IMDb.com. The Mechanic (2011) was directed by Simon West, and written by Richard Wenk and Lewis John Carlino.

78 Variously reported statement made December 21, 2012. Wayne LaPierre was the executive vice president of the National Rifle Association.

79 Adam Smith. The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Norderstedt: GRIN Verlag, 2009, p. 

145; London: Kincaid & Bell, 1767, p. 273.

80 Mark Twain. A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. New York: Harper and 

Brothers, 1889, p. 337

81 IMDb.com. Joe Dirt(2001) was directed by Dennie Gordon, and written by David 

spade and Fred Wolf.

82 Anthony Dadlani, “McDonalds Is a Real Estate Company,” Seeking Alpha, 23 April 

2008, http://seekingalpha.com/article/73533-mcdonalds-is-a-real-estate-company.

83 Brainyquote.com. ‘Defiance Quotes’.
Endnotes

612

 

84 Emma Goldman. “Address to the Jury,” delivered 9 July, 1917 in New York. 

See, American Rhetoric http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/emmagoldmanjuryaddress.htm.

85 IMDb.com. Princess Bride (1987) was directed by Rob Reiner, and written 

by William Goldman. Vizzini is played by Wallace Shawn.

86 Mario Payeras. El Trueno en la Ciudad (Thunder in the City). Mexico City: 

Juan Pablos, 1987, p. 89-90.

87 See http://www.envio.org.ni/articulo/3098; http://www.envio.org.ni/articulo/11; see also Colección de Documentos Históricos,

http://www.manfut.org/cronologia/carta1981.html.

88 Allen J. Christenson Popol Vuh: Literal Translation, p. 245; www.mesweb.com.

89 Manuel Francisco Ayau Cordón. Prologue in (Spanish language) edition of 

Frédéric Bastiat, La Ley Centro de Estudios Económico-Sociales CEES, 2003.

90 IMDb.com. Conan the Destroyer (1984) was directed by Richard Fleischer, 

and written by Robert E. Howard, Roy Thomas, Gerry Conway, and Stanley 

Mann. Conan was played by Arnold Schwarzenegger.

91 IMDb.com. Braveheart (1995) was directed by Mel Gibson, and written by 

Randall Wallace.

92 IMDb.com. Powerpuff Girls (2002) was directed by Craig McCracken, and 

written by Charlie Bean, Lauren Faust, and ten others. Roger Jackson played 

Mojo Jojo’s voice.

93 Wikiquote. “Errico Malatesta” (referencing a speech to the International Anarchist Conference of 1907). http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Errico_Malatesta. 

Malatesta was an anarcho-communist.

94 IMDb.com. The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford

(2007) was directed by Andrew Dominik, and written by Andrew Dominik and 

Ron Hansen. Jesse James was played by Brad Pitt.

95 IMDb.com. Animal House (1978) was directed by John Landis, and written by Harold 

Ramis, Douglas Kenney, and Chris Miller. Otter was played by Tim Matheson.

96 IMDb.com. The Three Amigos (1986) was directed by John Landis, and written by Steve Martin, Lorne Michaels and Randy Newman. Lucky Day was 

played by Steve Martin.

97 Robert Lapham and Bernard Norling. Lapham’s Raiders. Lexington: The 

University Press of Kentucky, 1996, p. 76.

98 Dee Brown, The Fetterman Massacre, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1971, p. 

183, citing George B. Grinnell, The Fighting Cheyennes.

99 IMDb.com. Inglourious Basterds (2009) was directed by Quentin Tarantino 

and Eli Roth, and written by Quentin Tarantino. Lieutenant Aldo Raines was 

played by Brad Pitt.

100 See generally, Michael Howard. The Invention of Peace: Reflections on War 

and International Order. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000.

101 John P. Powelson. The Story of Land: A World History of Land Tenure and 

Agrarian Reform. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, 

1988, p. 308.
Endnotes

613

 

102 Brainyquotes.com. ‘American President Quotes, Select Ronald Reagan Quotations’.

103 Richard Saunders (Benjamin Franklin). Poor Richard’s Almanac (January 1756).

104 José Felix Estigarribia. The Epic of the Chaco: Marshal Estigarribia’s Memoirs of the 

Chaco War 1932-1935. New York: Greenwood Press, 1950; Bruce W. Farcau, The 

Chaco War: Bolivia and Paraguay, 1932-1935. Westport: Praefger, 1996; David H. 

Zook, Jr. The Conduct of the Chaco War. New Haven: Bookman Associates, 1960.

105 Zook, ibid, p. 94.

106 Farcau, ibid, p. 40.

107 Zook, ibid, p. 92.

108 Farcau, ibid, p. 231.

109 Zook, ibid, p. 92.

110 Robert Ardrey. The Territorial Imperative; A Personal Inquiry into the Animal Origins of Property and Nations. New York: athenaeum, 1966, p. 236.

111 José Felix Estigarribia, The Epic of the Chaco: Marshal Estigarribia’s Memoirs 

of the Chaco War 1932-1935. New York: Greenwood Press, 1950, p. 43.

112 Gene Sharp. Politics of Nonviolent Action. Boston: Porter Sargent Publishers, 1973, p. 387.

113 Jay Luvass, ed. and translator. Frederick the Great on the Art of War, New 

York: Da Capo. 1999, p. 278.

114 Ibid, p. 142.

115 Saul Alinsky. Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals. New York: Random House, 1971, p. 3.

116 Ibid.

117 Ibid, p. 4.

118 Ibid, p. 133.

119 Henri de Jomini, The Art of War (translated from the French by G.H. Mendel and W.P. Craignill), Westport: Lippincott, 1862, reprinted by Greenwood, 

1971, pp. 79-81.

120 L.A. Now. “Occupy L.A.: More than 200 arrested in peaceful sweep,” November 30, 2011, L.A. Now, Los Angeles Times, 

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2011/11/occupy-la-nonviolent-dismantling-deemed-a-success.html.

121 IMDb.com. “Die, Hippies, Die,” South Park season 9, episode 2, was directed by Trey Parker, and written by Trey Parker and Matt Stone.

122 IMDb.com Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery (1997) was directed by Jay Roach, and written by Mike Myers.

123 IMDb.com. The Three Amigos (1986) was directed by John Landis, and 

written by Steve Martin, Lorne Michaels and Randy Newman. Lucky Day was 

played by Steve Martin.

124 Saul Alinsky. Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals. New York: Random House, 1971, p. 3.

125 Niccolò Machiavelli. ‘The Prince’ in Charles W. Eliot, ed. The Prince, Utopia, 

Ninety-Five Theses. New York: P.F. Collier & Son, 1910, p. 38; Google Book Shelf.
Endnotes

614

 

126 IMDb.com. Khartoum (1966) was directed by Basil Dearden and Eliot Elisofon, and 

written by Robert Ardrey. The Mahdi was played by Lawrence Olivier.

127 Jake Tapper. The Outpost: An Untold Story of American Valor. New York: 

Little, Brown and Company, 2012, p. 7.

128 IMDb.com. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (2005) was directed by 

Garth Jennings, and written by Douglas Adams and Karey Kirkpatrick.

129 Ralph Waldo Emerson. Essays Orations and Lectures. London: William 

Tegg & Company, 1848, p. 152. Google Books. http://books.google.com/.

130 Roald Dahl. New York: Scholastic, 1982, p. 199.

131 IMDb.com. The Matrix (1999) was directed and written by Andy 

Wachowski and Lana Wachowski. Agent Smith was played by Hugo Weaving.

132 IMDB.com. The Manchurian Candidate (1962) was directed by John Frankenheimer, and written by Richard Condon, George Axelrod, and John Frankenheimer.

133 IMDb.com. Tremors (1990) was directed by Ron Underwood, and written 

by S. S. Wilson, et al. Burt Gummer was played by Michael Gross.

134 IMDb.com. Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love 

the Bomb (1964) was directed by Stanley Kubrick, and written by Stanley Kubrick, Terry Southern, and Peter George.

135 IMDb.com. Dune (1984) was directed by David Lynch, and written by 

Frank Herbert (novel) and David Lynch (screenplay). Paul Atreides was played 

by Kyle MacLachlan.

136 Partido Socialista Unido de Venezuela. Documentos Fundamentales: Libro 

Rojo. Venezuela 2010, p. 32.

137 An Ordinance for the Government of the Territory of the United States, North-West 

of the River Ohio, Act of the Congress of the Confederation of the United States, 

passed July 13, 1787, signed by President Washington August 9, 1789.

138 Metrolyrics.com. “First of the Gang to Die,” was written by Morrissey, Steven Patrick/Whyte and Alain Gordon, and published by Warner/Chappell 

Music, Inc., Universal Music Publishing Group.

139 Brian Biggs. Everything Goes: On Land. New York: Harper Collins, 2011, p. 15.

140 Doyle, Arthur Conan. The Adventure of the Copper Beaches. Electronic Text 

Center, University of Virginia Library. http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/, p. 618.

141 IMDb.com. Easy Rider (1969) was directed by Dennis Hopper, and written 

by Peter Fonda, Dennis Hopper, and Terry Southern.

142 IMDb.com. Forrest Gump (1984) was directed by Robert Zemeckis, and 

written by Winston Groom (novel) and Eric Roth (screenplay. Forrest Gump is 

played by Tom Hanks.

143 IMDb.com. West Side Story (1961) was direct by Jerome Robbins and Robert Wise, and written by Ernest Lehman, Arthur Laurents (additional credits to 

William Shakespeare and Jerome Robbins).

144 Ricardo Aricapa. Comuna 13: crónica de una guerra urbana. Medellín: 

Universidad de Antioquia, 2005, p. 4.

145 IMDb.com. Paradise Now (1995) was directed by Hany Abu-Assad, and 

written by Hany Abu-Assad, Bero Beyer.
Endnotes

615

 

146 IMDb.com. Rocky Balboa (2006) was directed by Sylvester Stallone, and 

written by Sylvester Stallone. Rocky Balboa is played by Sylvester Stallone.

147 On February 3, 2014, I am aware of the horrendous thumping the Broncos 

took at the hands of some bunch from the coastal areas. That just happens 

sometimes. Soon, wounds licked, the Broncos will refit for another go at it.

148 Thinkexist.com. ‘Joe Namath Quotes’.

149 Thinkexist.com. ‘Merlin Olsen Quotes’.

150 Thinkexist.com. ‘Dick Butkus Quotes’.

151 IMDb.com. Braveheart (1995) was directed by Mel Gibson, and written by 

Randall Wallace. Longshanks was played by Patrick McGoohan.

152 Theodore Parker. The Collected Works of Theodore Parker. London: M. 

Trübner & CO, 1867, p. 55, at Google Books, http://books.google.com.

153 IMDb.com. Joe Dirt (2001) was directed by Dennie Gordon, and written by 

David spade and Fred Wolf.

154 IMDb.com. Starship Troopers (1997) was directed by Paul Verhoeven, and 

written by Eduard Neumeier and Robert A. Heinlein.

155 Andrew R. Molnar, et al. Human Factors Considerations of Undergrounds 

in Insurgencies. Washington, D. C.: American University Special Operations 

Research Office, 1966, p. 71.

156 Political Instability Task Force. ‘Internal Wars and Failures of Governance, 

1955-Most Recent Year’, State Failure. http://globalpolicy.gmu.edu/pitf/.

157 Jack A. Goldstone, State Failure Task Force Report: Phase III Findings. p. 

v. http://globalpolicy.gmu.edu/pitf/pitfdata.htm.

158 Daniel C. Esty, et al. Working Papers State Failure Task Force Report. p. 

viii. http://globalpolicy.gmu.edu/pitf/pitfdata.htm.

159 Jack A. Goldstone, State Failure Task Force Report: Phase III Findings. p. vi.

160 Mauricio Archila, et al. 25 años de luchas sociales en Colombia 1975-2000

(25 years of social struggles in Colombia 1975-2000). Bogotá: CINEP, 2002.

161 Wikiquote.com. "Excerpts of a Speech by Governor Ronald Reagan, Republican National Convention, Platform Committee Meeting, Miami, Florida," July 

31, 1968, at http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Ronald_Reagan.

162 Julfikar Ali Manik and Geeta Anand, “After Slaughter, Bangladesh Reels at 

Revelations About Attackers,” The New York Times, July 4, 2016, Cautionhttp://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/after-slaughter-bangladesh-reels-at-revelations-about-attackers/ar-AAi3LSa?li=BBnb7Kz&ocid=SL5DDHP.

163 Public Broadcasting Service. “Commanding Heights” Interview with Milton 

Friedman, PBS, http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/commandingheights/ 

shared/minitext/int_miltonfriedman.html.

164 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth. New York: Grove Press, 1963, p.170.

165 Samuel B. Griffith. Mao Tse-tung on Guerrilla Warfare. New York: Praeger, 

1961, p. 85.

166 Ibid, p. 89.

167 Ibid, p. 92.
Endnotes

616

 

168 Richard A. Posner, ed. The Essential Holmes. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996, p.86.

169 IMDb.com. My Cousin Vinny (1992) was directed by Jonathan Lynn, and 

written by Dale Launer.

170 IMDb.com. Forrest Gump (1984) was directed by Robert Zemeckis, and 

written by Winston Groom (novel) and Eric Roth (screenplay. Forrest Gump is 

played by Tom Hanks.

171 Vo Nguyen Giap. How We Won the War. Philadelphia: Recon Publications, 

1976, p. 54.

172 IMDb.com. Full Metal Jacket (1987) was directed by Stanley Kubrick, and 

written by Gustay Hasford and Stanley Kubrick. Animal Mother was played 

by Adam Baldwin.

173 IMDb.com. Zombieland (2009) was directed by Ruben Fleischer, and written by 

Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick.Columbus is played by Jesse Eisenberg.

174 Lyricsfreak.com. ‘Geto Boys: Damn It Feels Good to Be a Gangsta Lyrics’.

175 IMDb.com. Broken Lance (1954) was directed by Edward Dmytryk, and 

written by Richard Murphy (screenplay) and Philip Yordan (story).

176 Brainyquotes.com. ‘American President Quotes, All Ronald Reagan Quotations’.

177 IMDb.com. Princess Bride (1987) was directed by Rob Reiner, and written 

by William Goldman. The grandson is played by Fred Savage.

178 IMDb.com. Snatch (2000) was directed and written by Guy Ritchie. Mickey 

was played by Brad Pitt.

179 IMDb.com. The Maltese Falcon (1941) was directed by John Huston, and 

written by Dashiell Hammett and John Huston.

180 Frfrogspad.com, “The Sayings of Theodore Roosevelt,” http://www.frfrogspad.com/trsaid.htm.

181 IMDb.com. Stripes (1981) was directed by Ivan Reitman, and written by 

Len Blum, Daniel Goldberg and Harold Ramis.

182 Wikiquote. “Ned Kelley,” citing The Age, 8 August, 1879. http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Ned_Kelly.

183 Robert B. Bruce, Army History, Winter 2012, PB 20-12-1 (No. 82) Tethered 

Eagle: Lt. Gen, James A. Van Fleet and the Quest for Military Victory in the 

Korean War April-June 1951, p. 13.

184 IMDb.com. The Wire (2002-2008) television series was created by David 

Simon Jay. The monologue is from Season 1, Episode 4. Landsman is played 

by Delaney Williams.

185 IMDb.com. The Godfather (1972) was directed by Francis Ford Coppola, 

and written by Mario Puzo and Francis Ford Coppola. Don Vito Corleone was 

played by Marlon Brando.

186 See, Anthony Watts. “Most Idiotic Global Warming Headline Ever,” Watts 

Up With That, http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/05/18/most-idiotic-globalwarming-headline-ever/, “Over 4.5 Billion people could die from Global 

Warming-related causes by 2012,” Watts Up With That, http://wattsupwiththat.com/climate-fail-files/over-4-5-billion-people-could-die-from-globalwarming-related-causes-by-2012/; “Over 4.5 Billion people could die from 
Endnotes

617

 

Global Warming-related causes by 2012,” accessed April 25, 2013 (article first 

appearing January 8th, 2007) The Canadian, http://www.agoracosmopolitan.com/home/Frontpage/2007/01/08/01291.html.

187 Gregorio de' Gregoriis da Forli. Inferno. Venice: 1515. University of Notre 

Dame. “Renaissance Dante in Print (1472-1629), Moral Schema of Hell.” 

http://www.italnet.nd.edu/Dante/images/tp1515a/1515a.wc1.150dpi.jpeg.

188 Jeff Harbert. “Architecture of Insanity,” PTAK Science Books. http://thesciencebookstore.com/category/maps-cartography-history-of-mapmaking/page/4/

189 Elizabeth Margaret Kerr. William Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha: A Kind of Keystone in 

the Universe. New York: Fordham University Press, 1983, p. 12; Google Books.

190 IMDb.com. The Dukes of Hazzard (2005) was directed by Jay Chandrasekhar, 

and written by John O`Brien, Jonathan L. Davis and Gy Waldron.

191 IMDb.com Austin Powers in Goldmember (2002) was written by Jay Roach,

and written by Mike Myers, et al. Nigel Powers was played by Michael Caine.

192 mrb1980 (username). “Entertaining Mid-1970s TV Movie.” “Reviews & Ratings for Killdozer” [TV movie 1974]. IMDb.com, review posted 21 July 2005.

193 Thucydides. History of the Peloponnesian War(Book V, 5.105-[2]), translated by 

Richard Crawly. http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/History_of_the_Peloponnesian_War.

194 Alfred Korzybski, "A Non-Aristotelian System and its Necessity for Rigour in 

Mathematics and Physics", a paper to the American Mathematical Society, American 

Association for the Advancement of Science at New Orleans, December 28, 1931, reprinted in Science and Sanity, 1933, p. 747–61. (acknowledgement to Wikipedia, 

“Map–territory relation”)

195 Guntram H. Herb and David H. Kaplan. Nested Identities. New York; Rowman & Littlefield, 1999.

196 Hilliard A. Atteridge. The Wars of the `Nineties: A History of the Warfare of the Last 

Ten Years of the Nineteenth Century. London: Cassel and Company, 1899, p. 437.

197 Quotationsbook.com. ‘Quotations by James, William’; Alice Hegan Rice attributes the saying to Charles Atwood Campbell: My Pillow Book. New York: 

D. Appleton, Century, 1937, p. 103.

198 IMDb.com. The Warriors (1979) was directed by Walter Hill, and written 

by Sol Yurick, David Shaber and Walter Hill.

199 IMdB.com. Chisolm (1970) was directed by Andrew V. McLaglen and written by 

Andrew J. Fenady.

200 See Wikiquotes.com with the following citation: “Said to Hamlin Garland in 

1906 and quoted by Garland in Roadside Meetings (1930; reprinted by Kessinger Publishing, 2005, ISBN 1-417-90788-6), ch. XXXVI”: Henry James at 

Rye (p. 461); also see, Quotationsbook.com., “Alex Barnett. The Quotable 

American. Guilford, CT: Lyons Press, 2003, p. 277.”

201 IMDb.com. Up in Smoke (1978) was directed by Lou Adler and Tommy 

Chong, and written by Tommy Chong and Cheech Marin.

202 Louis L'Amour. The Walking Drum, Kindle Edition Loc 1890.

203 William W. Baldwin, Mau Mau Man-Hunt: The Adventures of the only American 

Who Has Fought the Terrorists in Kenya, New York: E. P. Dutton, 1957, p. 242.
Endnotes

618

 

204 J. L. Brierly. The Law of Nations: An Introduction to the International law 

of Peace (Sixth Edition) (Edited by Sir Humphrey Waldock). Oxford: Oxford 

University Press, 1963, p. 13.

205 See, Don Boudreaux “Who Said It?” citing May 13, 2007 comment in Trade. 

Café Hayek. http://cafehayek.com/2007/05/who_said_it.html.

206 World Muslim Congress, http://www.foundationforpluralism.com/Quraan/Slaythe-idolaters-whereever-you-find-them.asp.

207 See, for instance, military-quotes.com. Roughly translated: ‘I have a catapult. Give 

me all the money or I will fling an enormous boulder onto your head’.

208 IMDb.com. Ned Kelley (2003) was directed by Gregor Jordan, and written by Robert Drewe and John Michael McDonagh. Ned Kelly was played by Heath Ledger.

209 IMDb.com Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery (1997) was directed by 

Jay Roach, and written by Mike Myers.

210 IMDb.com. The Searchers (1940) was directed by John Ford, and written by 

Frank Nugent.

211 IMDb.com. Taken (2008) was directed by Pierre Morel, and written by Luc Bessen 

and Robert Mark Kamen.

212 Associated Press. “Chavez: Civilian Militia Should Be Armed Full-Time.” 

www.foxnews.com. October 04, 2010.

213 IMDb.com. Santa Fe Trail (1940) was directed by Michael Curtiz, and written by 

Robert Buckner.

214 IMDb.com. Tremors(1990) was directed by Ron Underwood, and written by S. S. 

Wilson, et al. Burt Gummer was played by Michael Gross.

215 IMDb.com. The Wizard of Oz(1939) was directed by Victor Fleming, et al, and 

written by Noel Langley, et al. The Wicked Witch was played by Margaret Hamilton.

216 IMDb.com. Up in Smoke (1978) was directed by Lou Adler and Tommy Chong, 

and written by Tommy Chong and Cheech Marin.

217 IMDb.com. The Sandlot (1993) was directed by David M. Evans, and written by 

David M. Evans and Robert Gunter.

218 Niccolò di Bernardo dei Machiavelli. Chapter XII, The Prince. Florence: Antonio 

Blado d'Asola, 1532. http://www.constitution.org/mac/prince12.htm; Radford VA: 

Wilder Publications, 2008, p. 13.

219 Ibid.

220 A. Chimendez, or Mike Chapman, Matt Chapman and, Craig Zobel. “Two part episode part two,” Homestar Runner Cheat Commandos, 

http://www.hrwiki.org/wiki/2_Part_Episode:_Part_2.

221 IMDb.com. Ulzana’s Raid (1972) was directed by Robert Aldrich, and written by 

Alan Sharp.

222 Charles Levinson and Margaret Coker. “The Secret Rally That Sparked an Uprising: Cairo Protest Organizers Describe Ruses Used to Gain Foothold Against Police; 

the Candy-Store Meet That Wasn't on Facebook,” formerly, “Egyptians Share Secrets 

of Uprising,” Wall Street Journal, last accessed 30 March 2013 at 

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB100014240527487041322045 

76135882356532702.html?mod=WSJ_hp_LEFTTopStories.
Endnotes

619

 

223 Mark Twain. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. ‘Chapter XXII’. www.readbookonline.net.

224 See generally, Jean François Revel. The Flight from Truth: The Reign of Deceit in the Age of Information. New York: Random House, 1992.

225 Susan Rice. (US Ambassador to the United Nations) Statement on 16 September 2012 to ABC News This Week Jake Tapper. “Flashback: What Susan 

Rice Said About Benghazi,” The Wall Street Journal.

http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2012/11/16/flashback-what-susan-rice-saidabout-benghazi/ Washington Wire November 16.

226 Leon Trotsky. The History of the Russian Revolution, Volume Two: The Attempted Counter-Revolution. Marxists.org. 

http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1930/hrr/intro23.htm.

227 George Orwell. Homage to Catalonia. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1952, p. 47.

228 L.L. Fordred. “Wireless in the Second Anglo Boer War 1899-1902.” Available from http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.

229 T. Miller Maguire. A Summary of Modern Military History, with comments 

on the leading operations. London: Simpkin, 1887, p. 27.

230 See generally, Hilliard A. Atteridge. The Wars of the `Nineties: A History of 

the Warfare of the Last Ten Years of the Nineteenth Century. London: Cassel 

and Company, 1899.

231 Paul Greenhalgh. “A New Style for a New Age.” National Gallery of Art. 

www.nga.gov; See also, generally, Paul Greenhalgh. The Essence of Art Nouveau. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2000.

232 Theodore Roosevelt. Theodore Roosevelt: an autobiography. New York: 

The MacMillan Company, 1916, p. 340; Google Book Shelf.

233 Arthur Conan Doyle. The Great Boer War. A Public Domain Book, Kindle 

Edition Loc 8777 of 8794.

234 Alfred T. Mahan. The Story of the War in South Africa 1899-1900. London: 

Sampson Low, Marston and Company, 1901, p. 316.

235 IMDb.com. The Wizard of Oz(1939) was directed by Victor Fleming, et al, and written by Noel Langley, et al. The Wicked Witch was played by Margaret Hamilton.

236 IMDb.com. Super Troopers (2001) was directed by Jay Chandrasekhar, and 

written by Jay Chandrasekhar, Kevin Heffernan, Steve Lemme, Paul Soter and 

Erik Stolhanske. Captain O'Hagan was played by Brian Cox.

237 IMDb.com. Fort Apache (1948) was directed by John Ford, and written by Frank S. 

Nugent and James Warner Bellah. Sergeant Mulcahy was played by Victor McLaglen.

238 IMDb.com. Scarface (1983) was directed by Brian De Palma, and written 

by Oliver Stone, et al. Tony Montana is played by Al Pacino.

239 IMDb.com. The Town (2010) was directed by Ben Affleck, and written by 

Peter Craig, Ben Affleck, Aaron Stockard and Chuck Hogan.

240 IMDb.com. Get Smart (1965) The TV series Get Smart was written and directed by Mel Brooks and Buck Henry.
Endnotes

620

 

241 IMDb.com. The Bourne Identity (2002) was directed by Doug Liman, and 

written by Tony Gilroy, W. Blake Herron and Robert Ludlum. Bourne was 

played by Matt Damon.

242 CNN. “FARC rebels wage expensive campaign against Colombian government,” CNN, 1 August, 1999. 

http://cgi.cnn.com/WORLD/americas/9908/01/colombia.rebels/.

243 Imdb.com. White Lightning (1973) was directed by Joseph Sargent, and 

written by William W. Norton.

244 IMDb.com. BlazingSaddles (1974) was directed by Mel Brooks, and written by Mel 

Brooks and Norman Steinberg, et al. Taggart was played by Slim Pickens.

245 Battle of Arnhem Information Centre. Http://www.market-garden.info/arnhem_battle_information_centre.html.

246 Comment # 10 on May 22nd, 2010 at 2:40 pm. Http://michellemalkin.com/2010/05/22/mexico-tourism-promoter-running-threatening-ads-inarizona-newspaper/.

247 Juan Camilo Bohórquez, et al. ‘Common ecology quantifies human insurgency’. Nature 462, 17 December 2009. pp. 911-914; Royal Holloway University 

of London. Department of Economics, Conflict Analysis Resources. ‘Power Laws 

and Armed Conflicts’. http://personal.rhul.ac.uk/pkte/126/Pages/Power_Law_research.htm; Kate Julian. ‘The pattern behind 'random' terrorist attacks’. The 

Washington Post. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wpdyn/content/article/2010/07/23/AR2010072302434.html.

248 George J. Marlin, Richard R. Rabatin, and John L. Swan. The Quotable Chesterton. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1986, p.19, citing Gilbert Kieth Chesteron, 

What I Saw in America. London: Holder and Stoughton, 1922, p. 104.

249 George J. Marlin, Richard R. Rabatin and John L. Swan. The Quotable 

Chesterton. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1986, p. 316, citing Gilbert Kieth 

Chesteron, Robert Browning. London: MacMillan Co., 1914, p. 42.

250 George MacDonald Fraser, Flashman and the Redskins. New York: Alfred A. 

Knopf, 1982, p. 279.

251 See Terrance G. Lichtenwald. “Drug Smuggling Behavior: 

A Developmental Smuggling Model, Part 1” and “Drug Smuggling Behavior: 

A Developmental Smuggling Model, Part 2.” Thefreelibrary.com.

252 NPR. “Indigestion: Mary Roach Explains What Happens to the Food We 

Eat.” On Fresh Air from WHYY, April 1, 2013 (Radio interview with Mary 

Roach on her book, Gulp).http://www.npr.org/player/v2/mediaPlayer.html?action =1&t=1&islist=false&id=175381702&m=175918987.

253 IMDb.com. The Last American Hero (1973) was directed by Lamont Johnson, and written by Tom Wolfe, William Roberts and Tom Kirby. Elroy 

Jackson Sr. was played by Art Lund.

254 Anne Kelly Knowles. ‘Mapping the Past’. Smithsonian, December 2012, p. 90.

255 Joseph Heller w/introduction by Christopher Buckley. Catch 22, 50th Anniversary Edition. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011, p. 257.

256 See, David E. Spencer, Colombia’s Road to Recovery: Security and Governance 

1982-2010 (Washington, D.C.: National Defense University, 2010). “The military 
Endnotes

621

 

strategy developed three lines of strategic action: active area control, sustained offensive operations, and special operations.” Ibid, p. 69.

257 USHistory.org. “The Royal Proclamation of 1763,” U.S. History: Pre-Colombian to the New Millenium, http://www.ushistory.org/us/9a.asp.

258 See, Karl Marx. Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy. London: Penguin, 1993, p. 524, 538, 539.

259 IMDb.com. Dumb and Dumber (1994) was directed by Peter Farrelly and 

Bobby Farrelly, and written by Peter Farrelly, Bennett Yellin and Bobby Farrelly.

260 IMDb.com. Zoolander (2001) was directed by Ben Stiller, and written by Ben 

Stiller and Drake Sather, et al. Derek Zoolander was played by Ben Stiller.

261 John Keegan. A History of Warfare. New York: Alfred Knopf, 1993, p. 301.

262 Rooster Teeth Productions, Episode One, Why Are We Here? Red vs Blue: 

Why Are We Here (2003) was written by Michael Burns.

263 See, Christopher Monckton. “Intelligence and the hockey stick,” Watts Up 

With That? 8 December, 2013 (accessed 9 December, 2013).

264 Philippe Sands, “Climate Change & Rule of Law: Lecture by Philippe Sands

QC chaired by Lord Carnwath, UKSC, 17.09.15” UK Supreme Court, You 

Tube, 18 September 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eef1tK8mtEI.

265 Beer for My Horses(2003) was written by Scotty Emerick and Toby Keith (Poet Laureate of the United States of Merica) and performed by Toby Keith and Willy Nelson.

266 Wikiquote, “Ronald Reagan,” citing a ‘Letter to Lance Corporal Joe 

Hickey’, 23 September, 1983.

267 T.R. Fehrenbach. This Kind of War. New York: Macmillan, 1963, 454.

268 Andro Linklater. Measuring America: How and Untamed Wilderness 

Shaped the United States and Fulfilled the Promise of Democracy. New York: 

Walker & Company, 2002, p. 258. 269 Terry Theise?, Michael Skrunk Wines (Graacher Domprobst Riesling), 

http://www.skurnikwines.com/wines.cgi?rm=view_detail&wine_id=21668

270 Youtube.com. ‘Jerusalem by William Blake lyrics’; Hymns.me.uk. ‘Jerusalem’; The Idle Historian. “About the "English Hymn": Jerusalem,” 13 May, 

2012, http://idlehistorian.blogspot.com/2011/05/about-english-hymn-jerusalem.html; www.cyberhymnal.org. Jerusalem.

271 IMDb.com. Chariots of Fire (1981) was directed by Hugh Hudson, and 

written by Colin Welland.

272 Dwight D. Eisenhower. “Stevenson, Eisenhower Issue Statements on Israel, Silver 

Lauds Both,” JTA, 27 October, 1952, http://www.jta.org/1952/10/27/archive/stevenson-eisenhower-issue-statements-on-israel-silver-lauds-both#ixzz2mihH8YLF.

273 Exodus (1960) was directed by Otto Preminger, and written by Dalton 

Trumbo and Leon Uris. Kitty Fremont was played by Eva Marie Saint.

274 See, Howard M. Sachar. A History of Israel. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1976, p. 128.

275 John P. Powelson. The Story of Land: A World History of Land Tenure and Agrarian 

Reform. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, 1988, p. x.

276 Olson, Gary L. US Foreign Policy and the Third World Peasant: Land Reform in 

Asia and Latin America. New York: Praeger Publishers, 1974, p. 42, citing McCune.
Endnotes

622

 

277 Ibid., p. 24, citing Developing Economies.

278 Peter G. Tsouras, ed. The Greenhouse Dictionary of Military Quotations. 

London: Greenhouse, 2000, p. 422, referencing Nathan Leites, The Soviet Style 

of War (1982), p. 321.

279 Louis L'Amour, Sackett’s Land (The Sacketts). New York: Bantam, Kindle loc 331.

280 Jhon Freddy Ascanio to RCN Radio, 27 de mayo de 2016,

http://www.rcnradio.com/nacional/la-dificil-tarea-los-periodistas-catatumbo/

281 Jomini, Henri, Baron. The Art of War. Westport: Greenwood Press, 1971, p. 186.

282 Thomas R. Phillips, ed. Roots of Strategy. Harrisburg: Stackpole Books, 

1985, p. 299.

283 William Trousdale. “Dr. Brydon's Report of the Kabul Disaster & Documentation of History: Rendered from Remnants of an Army; by Lady Elizabeth 

Butler at the Tate Gallery in London” (Dr. Brydon's arrival at Jalalabad on 13th 

of January 1842). www.kyber.org.

284 Ricardo Puentes Melo, “Zonas de Reserva Campesina: La siniestra realidad” 

(Peasant Reservation Zones: The Sinister Reality), Periodismo sin Fronteras, 7 

August 2013, www.periodismosinfronteras.org.

285 See Geoff Demarest, “Explaining Brexit: and the Crimea, FARC Land, and 

Kansas,” Liberty Bristles, July 4, 2016, Libertbristles.com.

286 See Eric Reeves, “The International Failure to Confront Khartoum,” Sudan Research, Analysis, and Advocacy, March 31, 2005, 

http://sudanreeves.org/2005/03/31/the-international-failure-to-confront-khartoummarch-17-2005/; “‘[Humanitarian assistance to Darfur] could all end tomorrow’—

Jan Egeland, October 1, 2005,” Sudan Research, Analysis, and Advocacy, November 20, 2005, http://sudanreeves.org/2005/11/20/ humanitarian-assistance-to-darfurcould-all-end-tomorrow-jan-egeland-october-1-2005/.

287 IMDb.com. Joe Dirt (2001) was directed by Dennie Gordon, and written by 

David spade and Fred Wolf. Old Cajun Man was played by Blake Clark.

288 IMDb.com. Spies Like Us (1985) was directed by John Landis, and written 

by Dan Aykroyd, Dave Thomas, Lowell Ganz, and Babaloo Mandel.

289 Pearl S. Buck. The Good Earth. New York: John Day, 1931, p. 260

290 IMDb.com. Vacation (1983) was directed Harold Ramis, and written by John Hughes.

291 See, typically, Katherine Aguirre Tobón and Jorge A. Restrepo. ‘Homicidios por 

género y edad. Colombia, 2005’. (Homicides by Gender and Age) using data from the 

Colombian National Statistics Department (DANE). Bogotá: Pontificia Universidad 

Javeriana and The Resource Center for Conflict Analysis (CERAC), 2010; and, International Development Bank. ‘Tasas Estandarizadas de Mortalidad para Homicidios 

por género. Colombia 1980-1995’ (Standard Rates of Mortality for Homicides by 

Gender) in Dimensionamiento de la violencia en Colombia (Dimensioning Violence 

in Colombia). New York: International Development Bank, 1998, p. 7.

292 Richard A. Posner, ed. The Essential Holmes. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996, p.89.

293 Jean Lartéguy. The Wall of Israel. New York: M. Evans, 1969, p. 195.

294 de Riencourt, Amaury. Sex and Power in History. New York: Delta, 1974’
Endnotes

623

 

295 Brainyquote.com. ‘Hedy Lamarr Quotes’.

296 Mike Judge. “Doomsday,” Beavis and Butthead animated TV episode, season 8.

297 IMDb.com. The Golden Girls(1988, Season Four) episode, "The Days and Nights 

of Sophia Petrillo," was directed by Terry Hughes and written by Susan Harris.

298 IMDb.com. Orgazmo (1997) was directed by Trey Parker, and written by 

Trey Parker and Matt Stone. The theme song ‘Now You’re a Man’ was performed by the band DVDA.

299 IMDb.com. The Dirty Dozen (1967) was directed by Robert Aldrich, and 

written by Nunnally Johnson, Lukas Heller, and E. M. Nathanson. PVT 

Pinkley is played by Donald Southerland. 300 IMDb.com. Princess Bride (1987) was directed by Rob Reiner, and written 

by William Goldman.

301 Peter G. Tsouras, ed. The Greenhouse Dictionary of Military Quotations. 

London: Greenhouse, 2000, p. 422, referencing Nathan Leites, The Soviet Style 

of War (1982) p. 458, citing R. M. Johnston, ed. The Corsican.

302 Ibid.

303 Jean Lartéguy. The Praetorians (1963, translated by Xan Fielding). St. Petersburg, FL: Hailer Publishing, 2005, p. 333.

304 IMDb.com. Groundhog Day (1993) was directed by Harold Ramis, and 

written by Danny Rubin and Harold Ramis. Phil was played by Bill Murray.

305 IMDb.com. The Departed (2006) was directed by Martin Scorsese, and written, 

by William Monahan, Alan Mak (2002 screenplay Mou gaan dou) and Felix Chong 

(2002 screenplay Mou gaan dou), Frank Costello was played by Jack Nicholson.

306 Http://greatmindsongodreligionandscience.blogspot.com/2009. ‘Oliver 

Wendell Holmes, Sr’. Great Minds on God, Religion and Science.

307 Wikiquotes, http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Martin_Luther citing, Tischreden

(1569) p. 58.

308 William Wise. Massacre at Mountain Meadows: An American Legend and a 

Monumental Crime. New York: Thomas A. Crowell, 1976, p. 235.

309 Douglass C. North and Robert Paul Thomas. The Rise of the Western World, A New 

Economic History, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973, generally.

310 John Shy. ‘Jomini’ in Peter Paret, et al. Makers of Modern Strategy from Machiavelli to the Nuclear Age. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986, p. 171.

311 IMDb.com. THX 1138 (1971) was directed by George Lucas, and written by 

Walter Murch and George Lucas.

312 IMDb.com. The Blues Brothers (1980) was directed by John Landis, and written 

by Dan Aykroyd and John Landis. Elwood Blues was played by Dan Aykroyd.

313 See, for instance, John R. Umbeck. A Theory of Property Rights: With Application to the California Gold Rush. Ames, Iowa: The Iowa State University 

Press, 1981.

314 From ‘Patriot Games’, an episode of the fourth season of the animated cartoon 

show The Family Guy. ‘Patriot Games’ was written by Mike Henry and directed by 

Peter Shin, Pete Michels and Cyndi Tang; See also, http:// familyguy.onsugar.com. 

‘Stewie Beats Up Brian: Where’s My Money?, Parts 1 and 2’.
Endnotes

624

 

315 From ‘Vatos’, episode 4, season 1 of The Walking Dead. The Walking Dead

is a television series developed by Frank Darabont. ‘Vatos’ was directed by Johan Renck, and written by Frank Darabont and Robert Kirkman.

316 Edwin P. Hoyt. Guerrilla: Colonel Von Lettow-Vorbeck and Germany’s 

East African Empire. New York: MacMillan Publishing, 1981, p. 206.

317 Paul Emil von Lettow-Vorbeck. My Reminiscences of East Africa. London: 

Hurst and Blackett, 1920, p. 33.

318 Thomas P. Ofcansky. “Introduction” in Paul Von Lettow-Vorbeck. My Reminiscences of East Africa. Nashville: Battery Press, 1990, reprinted from 1920 

edition, on the last page of the un-paginated Introduction.

319 Kenneth J. Harvey, The Battle of Tanga, German East Africa, 1914 (Ft. 

Leavenworth: CGSC, 1991), p. 49, citing W. E. Wynn. Ambush. London: 

Hutchinson & Co., 1937, p. 27.

320 Thomas A. Crowson, When Elephants Clash: A Critical Analysis of Major 

General Paul Emil Von Lettow-Vorbeck in the East African Theatre of the Great 

War, Ft. Leavenworth, CGSC, 2003, pp. 13, 14, citing Charles Miller. Battle for the 

Bundu: The First World War in East Africa. New York: MacMillan, 1974, p. 15.

321 IMDb.com. The African Queen (1951) was directed by John Huston, and written by 

C.S. Forester, James Agee, John Huston, John Collier and Peter Viertel.

322 Chief of Staff, Field Service Regulations, Washington, US War Department, 

1905, p. 39.

323 Bob Blaisdell, ed. The Civil War: A Book of Quotations. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2004, p. 67.

324 Paul Emil von Lettow-Vorbeck. My Reminiscences of East Africa. London: 

Hurst and Blackett, 1920, p. 33.

325 IMDb.com. BlazingSaddles (1974) was directed by Mel Brooks, and written by Mel 

Brooks and Norman Steinberg, et al. Hedley Lamarr was played by Harvey Korman.

326 IMDb.com. Zoolander (2001) was directed by Ben Stiller, and written by Ben 

Stiller and Drake Sather, et al. Derek Zoolander was played by Ben Stiller.

327 IMDb.com. Chinatown (1974) was directed by Roman Polanski, and written 

by Robert Towne.

328 www.dmho.org

329 IMDb.com. Idiocracy (2006) was directed by Mike Judge, and written by 

Mike Judge and Etan Cohen. The Attorney general was played by Sara Rue.

330 Joseph Conrad. Heart of Darkness. Kindle edition produced by Judith Boss 

and David Widger, Kindle location 609.

331 Jack London. Call of the Wild. United States: Start Publishing, 2012, Kindle loc 297.

332 IMDb.com. Guys and Dolls (1955) was directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz, and 

written by Jo Swerling, et al. Harry the Horse was played by Sheldon Leonard.

333 Ludwig Von Mises. Human Action: A Treatise on Economics, 1st ed. (Auburn, Ala.: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 1949), p. 116 as cited in The Quotable 

Mises, http://mises.org/quotes.aspx.

334 Carl von Clausewitz. On War. p. 181.
Endnotes

625

 

335 Thanks and apologies to Dr. Jason S. Warner, of the Foreign Military Studies Office, from who this paragraph was stolen almost word for word.

336 IMDb.com. Papillon (1973) was directed by Franklin J. Schaffner, and written 

by Dalton Trumbo, et al. Henri 'Papillon' Charriere was played by Steve McQueen.

337 Inglourious Basterds(2009) was directed by Quentin Tarantino and Eli Roth, and 

written by Quentin Tarantino. Lieutenant Aldo Raine was played by Brad Pitt.

338 IMDb.com. Blow(2001) was directed by Ted Demme, and written by Bruce Porter, 

David McKenna and Nick Cassavetes. George Jung was played by Johnny Depp.

339 T. Miller Maguire. Outlines of Military Geography. London: C.J. Clay & 

Sons, 1899, 184.

340 The Alamo (1960) was directed by John Wayne, and written by James Edward Grant. Davy Crockett was played by John Wayne.

341 Robert M. Carmack. Development and Social Effects of the Guatemalan 

Earthquake. 1978. http://www.crid.or.cr/digitalizacion/pdf/eng/doc3914/doc3914-contenido.pdf. (accessed October 20, 2010).

342 Beau Geste (1939) was directed by William Wellman, and written by Robert 

Carson and Percival Wren.

343 IMDb.com. Leap of Faith (1992) was directed by Richard Pearce, and written by Janus Cercone. Jonas was played by Steve Martin.

344 Apocalypto (2006) was directed by Mel Gibson, and written by Mel Gibson 

and Farhad Safinia. High Priest was played by Fernando Hernandex.

345 Davis, Mike. Planet of Slums. New York: Verso, 2006, p. 137.

346 Ricardo Aricapa. Comuna 13: crónica de una guerra urbana. Medellín: 

Editorial Universidad de Medellín, 2005, p. 10.

347 The Project Gutenburg. Henry James, Essays in Popular Philosophy, The 

Will to Believe, Section VII, http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:JJIui0Y61QsJ:www.gutenberg.org/files/26659/26659

-h/26659-h.htm+&cd=4&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us.

348 Robert Andrews. The Columbia Book of Quotations. New York: Columbia 

University Press, 1993, p. 493.

349 US Army and US Marine Corps. Field Manual 3-24, Marine Corps Warfighting Publication No. 3-33.5 Counterinsurgency. Washington, D. C.: 

Headquarters, Department of the Army and Headquarters Marine Corps Combat Development Command, 2006, A-6.

350 IMDb.com. The Waterboy (1998) was directed by Frank Coraci, and written by 

Tim Herlighy and Adam Sandler. Lawrence Taylor is played by Lawrence Taylor.

351 Lyricsfreak.com. Forever Young Lyrics; See also, WikiAnswers. “Who Really Wrote Forever Young by Rod Stewart?” Wiki.answers.com.

352 IMDb.com. Force 10 from Navaronne (1978) was directed by Guy Hamilton, 

and written by Alistair MacClean, Robin Chapman and Carl Foreman.

353 The principle sources for this section were, in Spanish: Juan Carlos Laviana. La 

Guerra Civil Española Mes a Mes (The Civil War Month-to-Month). ; Ricardo 

Cierva. Historia de España Para Niños (History of Spain for Children); and Pio 

Moa. 1934: Comienza la Guerra Civil Española (1934: The Spanish Civil War 

Begins). The principle English-language sources were: Stanley Payne. The Spanish 
Endnotes

626

 

Revolution; Paul Preston. Revolution and War in Spain 1931-1939; and Gabriel 

Jackson. The Spanish Republic and the Civil War, 1931-1939. The Spanish authors 

just listed are not supportive of the leftist view, and I put no pro-leftist Spanish-language titles in the bibliography, although there exist hundreds of them.

354 See “José Antonio Primo de Rivera – Nationalsyndikalist (1903-1936)” 0

Europeisk historia. Ureuropa.com, http://www.ureuropa.nu/jose-antonioprimo-de-rivera-nationalsyndikalist-1903-1936/.

355 George J. Marlin, Richard R. Rabatin, and John L. Swan. The Quotable Chesterton. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1986, p. 229-230, citing Gilbert Kieth 

Chesteron. The End of the Armistice. New York: Sheed and Ward, 1936, p. 169.

356 Ernest Hemingway. For Whom the Bell Tolls. New York: Charles Scribner 

& Sons, 1940, p. 284. 357 Ricardo de la Cierva. Historia de España Para Niños (History of Spain for 

Children). Madrid: Fénix, 2003, p. 344.

358 The map image is adapted from, “The Revolución de Octubre de 1934”(The 

October Revolution of 1934), Grandes Batallas de la Historia (Great Battles of 

History), 4 November 2013, http://www.batallasdeguerra.com/2013/11/la-revolucion-de-octubre-de-1934.html.

359 Jorge Verstrynge. La Guerra Periférica y el Islam Revolucionario: Orígenes, reglas y ética de la guerra asimétrica. Barcelona: El Viejo Topo, 2005, p. 25.

360 John Donne, Devotions upon Emergent Occasions(1623). Luminarium.org citing 

The Works of John Donne. Vol III., Henry Alford, ed. London: John W. Parker, 1839, 

pp. 574-5. http://www.luminarium.org/sevenlit/donne/meditation17.php.

361 IMDb.com. Conan the Barbarian (1982) was directed by John Milius, and 

written by Robert E. Howard, John Milius, Oliver Stone, and Edward Summer. 

Thulsa Doom was played by James Earl Jones.

362 Scott Adams. Dilbert.com, 5 December, 2011. http://www.dilbert.com/2011-12-05/ (accessed December 6, 2011).

363 IMDb.com. Princess Bride (1987) was directed by Rob Reiner, and written 

by William Goldman.

364 Saul Alinsky. Rules for Radicals. New York: Random House, 1971, p. xxi.

365 Maurice Sendak. Where the Wild Things Are. New York: Scholastic, 1963, p. 22.

366 Ayn Rand and Leonard Piekoff (Introduction). Atlas Shrugged. New York: 

Plume, 1999.

367 David Hume, Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, sec. xii, part iii, 

p. 165, Selby-Bigge, ed. Oxford (1951).

368 About.com. Outrageously Funny Groucho Marx Quotes; See also 

http://simplicius-simplicissimus.blogspot.com/2009/09/21-who-are-ya-gonnabelieve-me-or-yer.html. ‘Who ya gonna believe, me or your lyin` eyes?’

369 William Faulkner. Absalom, Absalom!: the corrected text. New York: Vintage International, 1990, p. 251.

370 Hamid Dabashi. “Fifth column of the postmodern kind.” Aljazeera. 

http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2011/11/20111120132050412430.htm.

371 IMDb.com. Princess Bride (1987) was directed by Rob Reiner, and written 

by William Goldman. Indigo Montoya is played by Mandy Patinkin.
Endnotes

627

 

372 Octavio Paz. The Labrynth of Solitude. New York: Grove Press, 1985, p 236.

373 IMDb.com. Pulp Fiction (1994) was directed by Quentin Tarantino, and written 

by Quentin Tarantino and Roger Avery. Jules was played by Samuel L. Jackson.

374 Or perhaps misattributed. See Wikiquotes, http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Will_Rogers.

375 IMDb.com. The Fifth Element (1997) was directed by Luc Bessen, and written by Luc Bessen and Robert Mark Kamen.

376 Alphonse Gabriel Capone. Wikiquotes citing Forbes 6 Octoner, 1986, 

http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Al_Capone.

377 Barbara W. Tuchman. The Proud Tower. New York: Ballantine, 1962, Kindle edition location 1689.

378 IMDb.com. The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976) was directed by Clint Eastwood, and written by Forrest Carter, Philip Kaufman, and Sonia Chernus. Ten 

Bears was played by Will Sampson.

379 Eliezer Wiesel. Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, Oslo, December 10, 1986. 

http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/1986/wiesel-acceptance.html.

380 Holmes, Oliver Wendell Jr. “The Path of the Law” (1897) in Menand, 

Louis, Pragmatism, New York: Random House, 1997, p. 147.

381 See Charles Dunlap, “Lawfare Today: A Perspective,” Yale Journal of International Affairs, 146-154, Winter 2008

382 United States of America versus Abdulmutallab, United States District 

Court, Eastern District of Michigan, Southern Division, Case: 2:10-cr-20005; 

See also Wikipedia. ‘Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab’. En.wikipedia.org.

383 En.wikipedia.org. Wikipedia, “Fort Hood shooting.” 

384 Wikiquote. “Augusto Pinochet,” http://es.wikiquote.org/wiki/Augusto_Pinochet.

385 Tom Wolfe. The Bonfire of the Vanities. New York: Bantam Books, 1988, p. 629.

386 Sohrab Ahmari. “Leon Kass: The Meaning of the Gosnell Trial,” The Wall 

Street Journal, 19 April, 2013. http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424127887324493704578428843742209304.

387 J. L. Brierly. The Law of Nations: An Introduction to the International law 

of Peace (Sixth Edition) (Edited by Sir Humphrey Waldock). Oxford: Oxford 

University Press, 1963, p. 48.

388 John Greenleaf Whittier. Le Marais du Cygne. Originally published in Atlantic Monthly, May 19, 1858. Online at Blue skyways, 

http://skyways.lib.ks.us/poetry/marais.html.

389 IMDb.com. Piranha 3DD (2012) was directed by John Gulager, and written 

by Patrick Melton, Marcus Dunstan, Joel Soisson, Pete Goldfinger, and Josh 

Stolberg. David Hasselhoff was played by David Hasselhof.

390 IMDb.com. Apocalypse Now (1979) was written by Francis Ford Coppola, and 

written by John Milius, et al. Colonel Walter Kurtz was played by Marlon Brando.

391 As reported by Carol Turner, Enterprise columnist (2010-12-12). "On History: Silas Soule`s heroism officially recognized," Broomfield Enterprise. 

Retrieved 2013-11-15, as reported by Wikipedia in “Silas Soule.”
Endnotes

628

 

392 Fall, Bernard B. Hell in a Very Small Place: The Siege of Dien Bien Phu. 

New York: Lippincott, 1967, p. 127.

393 Galula, David. Pacification in Algeria, 1956-1958. Santa Monica: Rand, 2006, p. 262.

394 Ibid, p. 268.

395 Jorge Verstrynge. La Guerra Periférica y el Islam Revolucionario: Orígenes, reglas y 

ética de la guerra asimétrica. Barcelona: El Viejo Topo, 2005, p. 139 and note 2, p.139.

396 C.M. Woodhouse. International Affairs, Vol. 41 No. 1, 1965, p. 111.

397 Galula. Pacification in Algeria. p. 183.

398 Ibid, p. 246.

399 Edgar O`Ballance, The Algerian Insurrection 1954-1962. Hamden, Connecticut: Archon Books, 1967, p. 214-215.

400 IMDb.com. Apocalypse Now (1979) was written by Francis Ford Coppola,

and written by John Milius, et al. Hubert was played by Christian Marquand.

401 IMDb.com. Road to Morocco (1942) was directed by David Butler, and 

written by Don Hartman. Turkey Jackson was played by Bob Hope. 402 Jean Lartéguy. The Praetorians (1963, translated by Xan Fielding). St. Petersburg, FL: Hailer Publishing, 2005, p.155.

403 Carl Pépin. "La Guerre d'Algérie (1954-1962)," Blogue sur l'histoire et les 

actualités canadiennes et internationales. http://carlpepin.com/2010/12/05/laguerre-dalgerie-1954-1962/; François de Marie des Anges. "Première Phase Du 

Plan Challe," La Guerre D'Algérie. http://www.crc-resurrection.org/642-la-guerre-d-algerie-vii-la-grande-trahis on.html.

404 PBS.org. Commanding Heights: The Battle of Ideas Part 1. “An interview 

with Milton Friedman: America’s best known libertarian economist.” 

www.pbs.org/.../people/pdf/friedman_intv.pdf.

405 John Donne, Devotions upon Emergent Occasions (1623). Virginia Tech 

Digital Library and Archives. Wikisource.org, http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/ 

Author: John_Donne#Devotions_upon_Emergent_Occasions.

406 Herbert G. Wells. World Brain. London: Methuen & Co., 1938, p. xi.

407 IMDb.com. Spies Like Us (1985) was directed by John Landis, and written 

by Dan Aykroyd, Dave Thomas, Lowell Ganz, and Babaloo Mandel. Austin 

Millbarge was played by Dan Aykroyd.

408 IMDb.com. Elite Squad (2007) was directed by José Padilha, and written by 

André Batista, Bráulio Mantovani, José Padilha, Rodrigo Pimentel, and Luiz 

Eduardo Soares. Matias was played by André Ramiro.

409 Or John W. Gardner. See, Wikiquotes, https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/ 

John_W._Gardner

410 IMDb.com. BlazingSaddles (1974) was directed by Mel Brooks, and written by Mel 

Brooks and Norman Steinberg, et al. Hedley Lamarr was played by Harvey Korman.

411 Marjorie Weinman Sharmat. Gila Monsters meet you at the airport. New 

York: Alladin, 1980, p. 11.

412 The others might include Tobias Smollett or Alain-René Lesage. See, Quotation Investigator, http://quoteinvestigator.com/2010/06/18/facts-stubborn/.
Endnotes

629

 

413 Michael Flynn, Matt Pottinger and Paul Batchelor. Fixing Intelligence. 

Washington, D.C.: Center for a New American Security, 2010, p. 7. 414 Butler, William Francis. Charles George Gordon. London: MacMillan, 

1889, p. 85; See also, http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Thucydides.

415 Joseph Blotner, ed. Selected Letters of William Faulkner. New York: Random House, 

1977, p. 222; http://www.mcsr.olemiss.edu/~egjbp/faulkner/quotes.html. 416 Alan Sokal. Preface, http://www.physics.nyu.edu/sokal/BtH_preface.pdf; 

Alan Sokal, http://www.physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/index.html; Ben Goldacre. “The Sokal Affair,” The Guardian, June 6, 2003, online at Bad Science, 

http://www.badscience.net/2003/06/the-sokal-affair/. 417 IMDb.com. Idiocracy (2006) was directed by Mike Judge, and written by 

Mike Judge and Etan Cohen.

418 S. I. Hayakawa. Language in Thought and Action (Second Edition). New 

York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1964, p. 217.

419 Jorge Luis Borges. “El idioma analítico de John Wilkins” (John Wilkins Analytic Dialect), essay, 1942. Ciudad Seva, www.ciudad ceva.com. The 

references to Franz Kuhn and to the Chinese are, as yet, unverified. 420 Jake W. Kipp, “Lenin and Clausewitz: The Militarization of Marxism, 1914-

1921,” Military Affairs, October, 1985, 184-191 citing S. V. Utechin, “Philosophy 

and Society: Alexander Bogdanov,” in Leopold Labedz, ed., Revisionism: Essays 

on the History of Marxist Ideas. London: George Allen and Unwin, 1962, p. 35. 421 Tim Thomas, The Dragon’s Quantum Leap: Transforming from a Mechanized to an 

Informationized Force. Ft. Leavenworth: Foreign Military Studies Office, 2009, 252. 422 Malachai Nicolle and Nathan Nicolle. “The Ultimate Battle,” Chapter 3, 

Part 26, episode # 48, Axe Cop, December 30, 2010. 423 Mike Chapman, Matt Chapman and, Craig Zobel. ‘Trogdor’, ‘Strong Bad’s 

Email’, from computer comfy 386, Homestarrunner, (about) February 14, 2006 

http:// www.homestarrunner.com/sbemail58.html. 424 Tvloop.com. ‘Mash’. 425 IMDb.com. The Terminator (1984) was directed by James Cameron, and 

written by James Cameron, et al. Dr. Silberman was played by Earl Boen. 426 Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. “The Path of the Law,”10 Harvard Law Review 

457 (1897), http://www.constitution.org/lrev/owh/path_law.htm; also Kindle 

edition, location 320. 427 IMDb.com. Stripes (1981) was directed by Ivan Reitman, and written by 

Len Blum, Daniel Goldberg and Harold Ramis.

428 Colin S. Gray, “Concept Failure?: COIN, Counterinsurgency, and Strategic 

Theory,” Prism 3, no. 3 (June 2012): 20. 429 Timothy L. Thomas, “China’s Concept of Military Strategy,” Parameters, 

44(4) Winter 2014-15, 39-46. 430 Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. “In Our Youth Our Hearts Were Touched With 

Fire.” Holmes’ 1884 Memorial Day Speech (An address delivered for Memorial 

Day, May 30, 1884, at Keene, NH, before John Sedgwick Post No. 4, Grand Army 

of the Republic). http://people.virginia.edu/~mmd5f/memorial.htm.

431 IMDb.com. Vision Quest (1985) directed by Harlod Becker, and written by 

Terry Davis and Darryl Ponicsan.
Endnotes

630

 

432 George Washington in a letter, September 8, 1776 to the Continental Congress. 

“Washington’s Strategy: ‘A War of Posts’,” The American Revolution 1763-1783, 

http://www.loc.gov/teachers/classroommaterials/presentationsandactivities/ presentations/timeline/amrev/north/posts.html.

433 IMDb.com. Braveheart (1995) was directed by Mel Gibson, and written by 

Randall Wallace.

434 Maurice Ernest Gibb, Robin Hugh Gibb, and Barry Alan Gibb, “For Whom 

the Bell Tolls,” Metalica, found at Lyrics Freak, http://www.lyricsfreak.com/m/ metalica/for+whom+the+bell+tolls_20092043.html.

435 Quotelicious.com. ‘Shakira Quotes’. 436 Kosovo lyrics written 1999 by Bob Rivers, Kokomo original by the Beach 

Boys (1988), and music video of Kosovo mimed by soldiers of the Norwegian 

Telemark Battalion in 2002. See, www.bobrivers.com;www.youtube.com/watch?v=sD7UREH_ 

rJI;michaeloblogger.blogspot.com/2009/06/kosovo-musical.html. 437 Merrill Jensen. The Founding of a Nation. New York: Oxford University 

Press, 1968, p. 289.

438 Tom Bethel. The Noblest Triumph. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998, p. 336. 439 H. L. Mencken. “Sham Battle” in Malcolm Moos, ed. A Carnival of Buncombe. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1956), p. 323, acknowledgement to 

Quote Investigator, http://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/07/01/election/. 440 En.wikiquote.org. ‘Henry James’; http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Henry_James Citing ‘Letter to Charles Eliot Norton (4 

February 1872)’.

441 IMDb.com. Comrade X (1940) was directed by King Vidor, and written by 

Ben Hecht, Charles Lederer, Walter Reisch, Herman J. Mankiewicz and Gottfried Reinhardt. 442 Dwight D. Eisenhower, Speech at Columbia University's bicentennial, 31 

May 1954, Public papers of the Presidents of the United States: Dwight D. Eisenhower (1961), p. 524; Wikiquote. http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Dissent. 443 Television sitcom The Big Bang Theory episode “Dr Arroganto Sheldon,” 

October 19, 2010. The Big Bang Theory was created by Chuck Lorre and Bill 

Prady, and produced by Chuck Lorre, Bill Prady, and Steven Molaro.

444 See generally, Saul Alinsky. Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for 

Realistic Radicals. New York: Random House, 1971. 445 Robert D. Kaplan. An Empire Wilderness: Travels into America’s Future. 

New York: Random House, 1998, p. 3. 446 Harvard University (10 March 1858), published in The Boston Medical and 

Surgical Journal Vol. LVIII, No. 8 (25 March 1858), p. 158. 447 IMDb.com. The Duellists (1977) was directed by Ridley Scott, Gerald 

Vaughan-Hughes (screenplay) and Joseph Conrad (story). 448 IMDb.com. First Blood (1982) was directed by Ted Kotcheff, and written 

by David Morell, Michael Kozoll, William Sackeim and Sylvester Stallone. 

John Rambo is played by Sylvester Stallone. 449 IMDb.com. The Replacements (2000) was directed by Howard Deutch, and 

written by Vince Mckewin. Shane Falco is played by Keanu Reeves.
Endnotes

631

 

450 The principal reference for this section is Thomas Miller Maguire. The 

Campaign of 1805. London: William Clowes and Sons, 1912. 451 Herodotus as quoted in Victor Davis Hanson. Carnage and Culture. New 

York: Anchor, 2001, p. 279.

452 Francis Bacon. The Works of Lord Bacon: With an Introductory Essay, Volume 1. London: William Ball, 1838, p. 286. Google Books, 

http://books.google.com.

453 Victor Davis Hanson. Carnage and Culture. New York: Anchor, 2001, p. 319. 454 Thomas Miller Maguire. The Campaign of 1805. London: William Clowes 

and Sons, 1912.

455 The Department of History, United States Military Academy. Ulm campaign 

- Engagements around Ulm, 11-14 October 1805, online at Wikimedia, 

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/13/Ulm_campaign_-_Engagements_around_Ulm%2C_11-14_October_1805.jpg. 456 Wikipedia. “British anti-invasion preparations of 1803–1805,” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_anti-invasion_preparations_of_1803%E2%80%931805, 

citing Norman Longmate and Peter A. Lloyd.

457 IMDb.com. Starship Troopers (1997) was directed by Paul Verhoeven, and 

written by Eduard Neumeier and Robert A. Heinlein. 458 William Stern Randall. Thomas Jefferson. New York: HarperPerennial, 1994, 460. 459 IMDb.com. They Live (1988) was directed by John Carpenter, and written 

by Ray Nelson (short story “Eight O’Clock in the Morning”) and John Carpenter. Nada is played by Roddy Piper.

460 Friedrich A. Hayek. The Constitution of Liberty. Chicago: The University of 

Chicago, 1960, p. 14.

461 Bob Blaisdell, ed. The Civil War: A Book of Quotations. Mineola, NY: Dover 

Publications, 2004, p. 169. 462 Theodore Roosevelt. “Citizenship in a Republic,” (address at the Sorbonne, 

Paris, France, April 23, 1910). Online at Design.caltech.edu. http://design.caltech.edu/erik/Misc/Citizenship_in_a_Republic.pdf. 463 IMDb.com. True Grit (2010) was directed by Ethan Coen and Joel Coen, screenplay written by Ethan Coen and Joel Coen from the novel by Charles Portis.

464 US Senate floor speech, August 20, 2015, approximately minute 4:55. 465 Holmes, Oliver Wendell Jr. “The Path of the Law” (1897) in Menand, 

Louis, Pragmatism. New York: Random House, 1997, p. 148. 466 PBS.org. “Transcript - David Brancaccio interviews George Soros,” NOW. 

http://www.pbs.org/now/printable/transcript_soros_print.html.

467 LibertyPen.com. “Milton Friedman, Big Business, Big Government,” presentation 

at Kansas State, 1978. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R_T0WF-uCWg. 468 IMDb.com. The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976) was directed by Clint Eastwood, and written by Forrest Carter, Philip Kaufman, and Sonia Chernus.

469 IMDb.com. Santa Fe Trail (1940) was directed by Michael Curtiz, and written by Robert Buckner.

470 James Trapier Lowe. Geopolitics and War: Mackinder’s Philosophy of Power. 

Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1981, p. 2, citing Edmund A. Walsh. 

Total Power. New York: Doubleday & Company, 1948, pp. 6 and 45.
Endnotes

632

 

471 Letter to Thomas Jefferson, May 13, 1798, http://www.loc.gov/item/mjm013484. 472 David Mamet. The Anarchist. New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2013. 473 Co-relevance of ‘virtual’ and mundane strategic principles is outlined in the 

magazine IOSphere in an article by Scott Henderson titled ‘Mao-e-Guerrilla’. 474 IMDb.com. Napoleon Dynamite (2004) was directed by Jared Hess, and 

written by Jared Hess and Jerusha Hess. Napoleon was played by Jon Heder. 475 IMDb.com. The Core (2003) was directed by Jon Amiel, and written by 

Cooper Layne and John Rogers. 476 H.G. Wells, The Island of Dr. Moreau. New York: Bantam, 1896, reprint 1994, p. 92. 477 T. Miller Maguire, The Gates of Our Empire I: British Colombia. London: 

The Anglo-British Colombian Agency, 1910, p. 54. 478 See Callwell, C.E. ‘Lessons to be Learnt from Small Wars Since 1870’ in 

Lecture given at the Aldershot Military Society, Tuesday, March 26, 1895. London: Gale & Polden, 1895, p. 2. 479 IMDb.com. Pursuit to Algiers (1945) was directed by Roy William Neill,

and written by Leonard Lee. Sherlock Holmes was played by Basil Rathbone. 480 IMDb.com. Blood Diamond (2006) was directed by Eduard Zwick, and written by 

Charles Leavitt and C. Gaby Mitchell. Danny Archer was played by Leonardo DiCaprio.

481 Donald J. Boudreaux. Globalization. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2008, p. 3. 482 IMDB.com. ‘Diversity Hire’ (2009, 2010), episode 1.3 of the animated cartoon series Archer, was created by Adam Reed. Sterling Archer is portrayed by 

H. Jon Benjamin. 

483 George Orwell. Homage to Catalonia. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1952, p. 61.

484 See Timothy L. Thomas. The Dragon’s Quantum Leap. Leavenworth: Foreign 

Military Studies Office, 2009, p 21, citing Qiao Liang and Wang Xiansui, Unrestricted Warfare. The twenty-four methods are: Atomic, diplomatic, financial, 

conventional, network, trade, bio-chemical, intelligence, resource, ecological, psychological, economic aid, space, tactical, regulatory, electronic, smuggling, 

sanction, guerrilla, drug, media, terrorist, virtual, and ideological.

485 Ernest Hemingway. For Whom the Bell Tolls. New York: Charles Scribner 

& Sons, 1940, p. 236. 486 IMDb.com. Joe Dirt (2001) was directed by Dennie Gordon, and written by 

David spade and Fred Wolf. Clem was played by Christopher Walken.

487 S. I. Hayakawa. Language in Thought and Action (Second Edition). New 

York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1949, p. 29.

488 Food & Drink, Living, Nov 22, 2011 at http://www.neatorama.com/ 

2011/11/22/ a-cherry-pie-an-apple-pie-and-a-pumpkin-pie-each-cooked-insidea-separate-cake-and-then-all-cooked-together-inside-another-cake/. 489 Wikiquote. Http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Intelligence, citing "Handle with 

Care", Esquire Magazine (March, 1936); but perhaps ‘The Crack-Up’, Esquire 

Magazine (February, 1936) www.esquire.com/features/the-crack-up. 490 IMDB.com. ‘Lisa the Iconoclast’ (1996), in the animated cartoon series The 

Simpsons, created by Matt Groening, and James L. Brooks, et al. Jebediah 

Springfield is the founder of Springfield.
Endnotes

633

 

491 IMDb.com. Enemy at the Gates (2004) was directed by Jean-Jaques

Annaud, and written by Jean-Jaques Annaud and Alain Goddard. 492 IMDb.com. The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad! (1988) was directed by David Zucker, and written by Jerry Zucker, et al.

493 IMDb.com. American Sniper (2014) was directed by Clint Eastwood, and 

written by Jason Hall, Chris Kyle, Scott McEwen, and James Defelice. Chris 

Kyle was played by Bradley Cooper.

494 Infoshop.org. ‘Anarchist Lightbulb Jokes,’ The Daily Cocktail. http://bibliolibertaire.org. 495 John Steinbeck. Travels with Charley: in search of America. Google Books, p.66. 496 Smithsonian National Air and Space. “Museum Military Unmanned Aerial 

Vehicles (UAV),” http://mobile.nasm.si.edu/exhdetail.cfm?id=69.

497 IMDb.com. Dawn of the Dead (1978) was written and directed by George 

A. Romero. Peter was played by Ken Foree.

498 IMDb.com. Ted (2012) was written by Seth MacFarlane, Alec Sulkin, and 

Wellesley Wild; and directed by Seth MacFarlane. 499 Dave Barry. Dave Barry Does Japan. New York: Ballantine, 1993, p. 7. 500 Erika Ritz. “Hollywood Leftist Sean Penn Praises Hugo Chavez at Candlelight Vigil,” The Blaze, 12 December, 2012, 

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/hollywood-leftist-sean-penn-praises-hugochavez-at-candlelight-vigil-hes-one-of-the-most-important-forces-weve-had/. 501 IMDb.com. The Great Locomotive Chase (1956) was directed by Francis D. 

Lyon, and written by Lawrence Edward Watkin. 502 IMDb.com. Predator (1987) was directed by John McTiernan, and written by 

Jim Thomas and John Thomas. Dutch was played by Arnold Schwarzenegger.

503 IMDb.com. The Big Lebowski (1998) was directed by Joel Coen and Ethan 

Coen, and written by Ethan Coen and Joel Coen. 504 IMDb.com. She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949) was directed by John Ford,

and written by James Warner Bellah, Frank S. Nugent, and Laurence Stallings. 505 Jineth Bedoya Lima.In the Trenches of Plan Colombia. Bogotá: Intermedio, 2008. p. 32. 506 Carl von Clausewitz. On War. Michael Howard and Peter Paret, eds. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976, p. 267.

507 Dav Pilkey. The Adventures of Captain Underpants. New York: Scholastic, 

1997, p. 107.

508 Fort Apache (1948) was directed by John Ford, and written by Frank S. 

Nugent and James Warner Bellah. CPT Kirby Yorke is played by John Wayne. 509 V. Ye. Savkin. The Basic Principles of Operational Art and Tactics (Moscow, 1972). Washington, D.C.: US Air Force, undated, p. 14. 510 “Problems of Strategy in China's Revolutionary War" (December 1936), in 

Selected Military Writings of Chairman Mao, Kindle Edition location 1861. 511 IMDB.com. Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby (2006) was directed 

by Adam McKay, and written by Will Ferrell and Adam McKay. 512 Robert Ardrey. The Territorial Imperative: A Personal Inquiry into the Animal 

Origins of Property and Nations. New York: Antheneum, 1966, p. 244. 513 George MacDonald Fraser, Flashman and the Redskins. New York: Alfred A. 

Knopf, 1982, p. 286.
Endnotes

634

 

514 Peter G. Tsouras, ed. The Greenhouse Dictionary of Military Quotations. 

London: Greenhouse, 2000, p. 377; ‘The Most Humane Human’, or, alternatively, ‘The Most Human Human’ (Ленин - самый человечный человек) is a 

recurrent nickname in Soviet literature for V.I. Lenin.

515 Saint Augustine.The City of God (edited by Vernon J. Bourke and translated by Gerald 

G. Walsh, et al.). Garden City, New York: Doubleday and Company, Inc., 1958. p. 88. 516 IMDb.com. (The Internet Movie Database) The Pirates of Penzance (1983) was 

directed by Wilford Leach, and written by William S. Gilbert and Wilford Leach.

517 C. S. Lewis. God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics. New York: 

Eerdmans, 1970, p. 292.

518 Thatcher, Margaret. Statecraft: Strategies for a Changing World. New 

York: HarperCollins, 2002, p. 39.

519 See also Tin Cup (1996) directed by Ron Shelton, and written by John Norville and Ron Shelton; Happy Gilmore (1996) directed by Dennis Dugan, and 

written by Tim Herlihy and Adam Sandler; The Legend of Bagger Vance

(2000) directed by Robert Redford, and written by Steven Pressfield and Jeremy Leven; Caddy Shack (1980) directed by Harold Ramis, and written by 

Brian Doyle-Murray, Harold Ramis, and Douglas Kenney. 520 Bill Murray as Bill Murray in the movie, Zombieland quoting himself from the movie 

Caddy Shack. IMDb.com. Zombieland (2009) was directed by Ruben Fleischer, and 

written by Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick. See also notes 61 and 514. 521 IMDb.com. Fort Apache (1948) was directed by John Ford, and written by 

Frank S. Nugent and James Warner Bellah. 522 It is unfortunate and saddening to me that this statement came from a US 

Army manual. I believe that the political philosophy that informed this piece of 

doctrine is at the heart and a cause of American failures in irregular wars in recent decades. Don’t look at it; look away. 523 Felix Arvid Ulf Kjellberg (Pewdiepie). This Book Loves You. New York: 

Penguin Random House, Kindle location 19 of 123.

524 Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra. El ingenioso hidalgo don Quijote de la Mancha (The Clever Gentleman Don Quijote of La Mancha). Castile: Juan de la 

Cuesta, 1605, prologue.



“Quotes are the most important things in the universe and you 

should always take them to heart.”

Pewdiepie (attributed)


635

INDEX 

Abdullah Hassan, Mohammed, 239, 242

Absalom, Absalom!, 411

Adams, Scott, 109

Adowa, 34

Afghanistan, 197, 250, 267, 281, 454, 538, 

543, 553

Airplane II: The Sequel, 68

Algeria, 434-443

Alinsky, Saul, 110, 111, 112, 114, 169, 484, 585

ALN, The Army of National Liberation, 

xxv, 440

Al Qaeda, 21, 456, 471

American Sniper, 530

America’s Revolutionary Strategy, Section 

119 (479-480)

Amnesty and Restitution, Section 103 (415-418)

Anarchist Lightbulb Jokes(web comedy), 533

anarchy, ix, 55, 179, 246, 527, 531-536

Angelo, Judy Hart, 561

Animal House, 98

Anonymity, Section 2 (4-5)

anonymity, v, x, xi; def., xxv, 2; 3-5, 8-10, 

18, 22-25, 32, 41, 42, 53, 57, 60, 64-68, 79-

82, 87, 90, 98, 99, 104, 113, 124, 130, 134, 

135, 141-148, 176, 179, 187, 201-203, 213-

218, 222, 223, 236, 237, 260, 283, 323, 

326, 327, 343-347, 370, 377, 423, 431, 435, 

440, 444, 485, 486, 495, 503, 515, 522-528, 

541, 553-560, 567, 571

anthropology, 300, 334, 376, 456, 544

Apocalypse Now, 441

Apocalypto, 378

Aqua Teen Hunger Force (TV series), 158

Archer (TV series), 520

Ardrey, Robert, 340, 427, 561, 585

Aricapa, Ricardo, 145, 379, 585

Armstrong, Louis, 407

arson, 540

Art Nouveau, 242, 243, 245, 400

Askari, xxv, 348-351

Asturias, Ricardo, 90

Asturias, Spain, 386-394

asymmetry, 49,120, 395-398, 526, 527

Atlas Shrugged (book), 407

Atteridge, Hilliard, 34, 43, 197, 243, 585

AUC, Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia, 

xxv, 143, 416, 429-431, 502

Austerlitz, battle of, 487-490

Austin Powers: International Man of 

Mystery, 222

Austin Powers in Goldmember, 194

Axe Cop (web-animated comedy), 466

Ayau, Manuel, 91

Bad Acid Trip, 398

Badassoftheweek.com, Section 22 (93-95)

Bagration, Pyotr, 488

Baldwin, William, 208

Bank Robbery, Section 62 (255-257)

Barry, Dave, 544 

base areas, xxv, 19, 21, 27, 116, 129, 196, 

207, 352, 366, 489, 518, 520, 545, and see 

sanctuaries

Bastiat, Frédéric, 55, 214

battle, importance of, 19-21, 35-39, 268, 

344, 355, 378, 550, 551, 567

Bazalgette, Joseph, 586

Bear’s Paw, surrender of Chief Joseph, 31-33

Beau Geste, 378

Beavis and Butthead (TV show), 325

Bedoya Lima, Jineth, 551

Berra, Yogi, 321

Best of the Best of the Best, Section 18 (69-

72)

Bethel, Tom, 478, 586

Big Brother, 3-10, 26, 67, 176-178, 202, 178

Biggs, Brian, 132

biometrics, 6-8, 121, 202, 376; see also, Big 

Brother

Black Hawk Down, 43

BlazingSaddles, 355, 453

Blood Diamond, 520

Blow, 365

Boer, Boer War, 18, 239-247, 350, 352, 588, 

593, 596

Bolivia, 4, 36, 40, 58-61, 217, 341, 357-358,

403, 587

Bonaparte, Napoleon, 14, 18, 111, 113, 283, 

332, 427, 487-490, 492, 518, 525, 552

Border and Anarchism, Section 135 (534-537)

borders, 13, 127-129, 166, 195-199, 200, 

211, 214, 313-315, 426, 440; see also territoriality and see property

Borges, Jorge Louis, 408, 464

Boudreaux, Donald J., 520

Braveheart, 91, 150, 472

Brierly, J. L., 214, 427, 586

Brigands, Section 42 (170-173)

Buck, Pearl S., 318

bulldozers, 119-120, 194

Burke, Edmund, 352

Butkus, Dick, 150

Butler, William Francis, 459

Caballero, Largo, xxv, 387-392

cadastre, xxv, 6, 107, 190, 311, 586
Index

636

Caddy Shack, 60, 571

cahoots, see conspiracy

Calder, Admiral Robert, 487, 492

Callejas y Callejas, Manuel Antonio, 83-90, 

see also Section 22, Badassoftheweek.com

Call of the Wild (book), 361

Callwell, C.E., 518, 519

cameras, xxv, 120, 122, 154, 174, 445, 540, 542

Cannon, James P., 55

Cape Finisterre, battle of, 487-494

Capone, Al, 414

Carlin, George, 342

catapults, 222

caves, 130; see Section 31 (124-125); see 

also, tunnels.

CEDA, Confederation of the Autonomous 

Right [Parties] (Confederación de 

Derechas Autonomous), 388-390

center of gravity, 15, 88, 159, 160, 162, 208, 

231

Cervantes (de), Miguel de, 599, 600

Chávez Hugo, 62, 102, 161, 212, 230, 385, 

396, 402, 403, 473,542, 544, 546 

Che Guevara, 4, 40, 524

Cheers (TV show), 561

Chesterton, G.K., 267, 393, 427

Chiang Kai-Shek, May-Ling, 39

Chief Joseph, see section 9, (31-34)

Childhood, Section 95 (381-383)

children, 84, 123, 136, 141, 142, 151, 152, 

246, 249, 280, 285, 320, 323, 324, 339, 365, 

381-383, 396, 430, 495, 498, 499, 567

Chinatown, 358

Chisum, 199

Churchill, Winston, 45, 251, 467, 596

city, (the word city appears 223 times) see 

urban warfare

class, class struggle, 58, 235, 496, 497, 535

Clausewitz, Carl von, 14, 39, 111, 177, 363, 

552, 554

Clemens, Samuel, 78, 235, 236

clergy, 1, 101, 131, 186-187, 198, 238, 324, 

336-338, 392, 510

Coase, Ronald, 287

Collins, Phil, 224

Colombia, 41, 65, 75, 93, 124, 126, 130, 133, 

134, 137-146, 152, 155, 156, 159, 170, 171, 

189, 190, 200, 204-209, 212, 223, 228-233, 

239, 243, 250-253, 261, 266, 276, 280-283, 

286, 306-312, 320, 345, 346, 356, 357, 360, 

371-373, 376, 379, 415-417, 428-433, 455, 

473, 474, 499, 542, 545, 546. 

Combatant Status, Section 96 (384-385)

Commitment of the Reserves, Section 12

(44-46)

Commodore George Dewey, 240-242

Common Knowledge, Section 108 (443-445)

Competition Social Media, Section 120

(481-483)

Comuna 13, Section 35 (137-146)

Conan the Barbarian, 398

Conan the Destroyer, 50, 91

Coneheads, 27

Condottieri, Section 58 (233-234)

Conflict Geography, Section 142 (557-561)

Conflict Thresholds, Section 82 (339-342)

Collins, Phil, 224

Conrad, Joseph, 361, 587

conspiracy, see organization

contraband, 205, 207, 249, 270, 281, 558, 

582; and see smuggling

contractors, see Section 58, Condottieri 

(233-234)

Control Technology, Section 30 (121-123)

convocation, xxvi, 59, 60, 113, 237

correlation of force, 15-18, 114, 162, 221, 

258, 267, 283, 487

corruption, x, 2, 5, 7, 26, 52, 79-81, 143, 

170, 193, 221, 249, 260, 284, 288, 303, 

310, 316, 573

county, 8-10, 62, 63, 126, 129, 172, 174, 189-

191, 206-209, 213, 274-280, 306, 324, 379, 

423, 429-431, 450-453, 507, 548

culminating point, 14, 15, 23, 41, 45, 114, 

206, 207, 231, 260-264, 282, 334, 343, 360, 

366, 370, 441, 485, 492, 537, 540, 550, 

554, 559, 578 (see also, risk distance),

Cultural Study for What?, Section 38 (153-154)

Cultures of Violence, Section 84 (345-347)

Dabashi, Hamid, 411

Damn It Feels Good To Be a Gangsta

(song), 173

Davis, Mike, 131, 379, 587

Dawn of the Dead, 540

Dear Westy, Section 41 (163-169)

de la Cierva, Ricardo, 393, 587

Denton, Sally, 507

de Rochefoucauld, Francois, 64

de Saint Exupéry, Antoine, 21, 407

deception, v, 20, 23, 153, 154, 273, 363, 

392, 466-468, 471-474, 487, 526, 543, 

549, 550, 562, 569, 576

Decisive Battle, Section 10 (35-39)

Defining Enemy, Section 4 (11-13)

Democracy, Section 118 (475-478)

Devia, Luis, 67, 261, 542, 551 (Raúl Reyes 

was his non de guerre)
 Index

637

despeje, demilitarized zone, 137, 138

deterrence 12, 182, 183, 396

Diamond Hill, battle of, 240, 243

Dien Bien Phu, 116, 435, 440, 441, 553, 588

Dilbert (cartoon strip), 109

Dignity and Honor, Section 121 (484-486)

dignity, v., 76, 304, 331, 372, 374, 379, 383, 

393, 408, 417, 506, 567

DIME and PMESII, Section 112 (460-464)

Diseases and Disasters, Section 93 (375-378)

distance, v, xi, 14, 17. 18, 23-27, 54, 63, 64, 

87, 126, 130-134, 142, 151, 175, 196, 197, 

205, 207, 223, 231, 232, 246, 258267, 272, 

276-282, 319, 322, 331-335, 343, 344, 351-

363, 366, 379, 384, 390, 398, 430, 435, 440, 

448, 452, 455, 464, 481, 488-492, 502, 513-

520, 527, 529, 535, 538, 540, 552-554, 558-

561, 569, 570, 576 (the word distance appears 269 times)

Dogs and Mules, Section 57 (231-232)

Dollar, Creflo, 169

domination (as in domination-submission),

xxvii, xxix, 94, 102, 314, 321, 403, 485, 

562

Donne, John, 398, 445

Douglass, Frederick, 315

Doyle, Arthur Conan, 18, 136, 246, 520

drones, 119, 124, 182, 228, 319, 340, 530, 

537-540

Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop 

Worrying and Love the Bomb, 125

Duggan, Alfred, 158

Dumb and Dumber, 280

Dune, 125

Dreyfus, Alfred (Dreyfus Affair), 241

Dylan, Bob, 383

economy of force, 15, 44, 363, 551

Easy Rider, 136

Ecclesiastes (book), 330, 511

Edison, Thomas, 240, 241

education, 80-82, 98, 107, 122, 132, 142, 

151-154, 288, 364, 417, 425, 449, 457, 

514, 524, 531, 582

EGP, Guerrilla Army of the Poor, Guatemala, xxvi, 84-90

Eisenhower, Dwight, 82, 298, 401, 483

ejido, xxvi, 575

Elephant Pass, Sri Lanka, 48, 51

ELN, xxvi, 67, 99, 228, 266, 412, 430, see

Colombia

Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 120

Enemy at the Gates, 530

engineers, engineering, v, xi, 49, 119-146, 

356-358, 364-370, 379-380, 399, 440

Engineers and Built Environment, Section 

33 (130-132)

entertainment, 7, 63, 122, 133, 147, 149, 

317, 569

enthrallment, xxvi, 101, 206, 235, 337, 496

envelopment, 15

Escape Geography, Section 88 (359-361)

Estigarribia, José Félix, 399-403, 620 

Everything Goes: On Land (book), 132

exclusive agency, 49, 56-60, 187, 336-338, 510

existential, 23, 63, 76, 145, 330-332, 345, 

379, 396, 399, 403, 405, 408, 485, 582

explosives, 1, 19, 23, 29, 50, 76, 78, 83, 119, 

125, 131, 144, 157, 171, 185, 206, 221, 300, 

319, 381, 384, 406, 420, 431, 498, 536, 542

Extortion, Section 54 (220-222)

extortion, 20, 67, 73, 114, 118, 126, 157, 

186-187, 190, 198, 220-224, 229, 252, 

258, 310, 316, 318, 322, 354, 364, 374, 

539, 559, 562, 578

Falstaff, 74

failed state(s), 1-2, 54, 155-157, 185, 192, 

223, 227, 229, 289, 291-292, 344, 415

family, 11, 12, 65, 187, 195, 200-201, 223-

224, 269, 322, 327, 347, 372, 413, 452, 

536, 547, 575, 579, 

Fanon, Frantz, 158

FARC, xxvii, 8-11, 42, 65, 67, 74, 124, 133-

138, 158-161, 170-171, 189-190, 204-209, 

212, 223, 231-233, 236, 250-251, 266, 

276, 280, 283, 320, 341, 357, 360, 365, 

367, 371-373, 385, 412, 417-418, 429-

433, 471-474, 537, 542, 545-547, 550-

551, see Colombia

fascism, 59, 384, 387-392, 405, 496, 582

see marxism

Faulkner, William, 191, 411, 459

Fehrenbach, T.R., 292

Felix, Bate, 21

Fight Club, 27

First Blood, 226, 487

Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 528

FLN, xxvii, 434-442

Fonseka, Sarath, 48, 93

football, (American football, the good stuff)

xi, 147-150, 338

Force 10 from Navarone, 385

Forever Young (song), 383

For Whom the Bell Tolls (poem, book, 

movie, song), 393, 398, 472, 524

Foreign Support and Foreign Perspective, 

Section 137 (541-544)

Fort Apache, 254, 312, 551, 554

Forts and Walls, Section 91(366-370)
Index

638

France, xxvii, 21, 99, 116, 239, 243, 342, 

404-407, 434-442, 488-494, 525, 546, 553

Franklin, Benjamin, 104, 505

Fraser, George Macdonald, 511, 561

French-Algerian War, 434-442

Friedman, Milton, 158, 445, 503

Frost, Robert, 370

Frunze, Mikhail, 30

Galula, David, 97, 434-440, 589

Ganteaume, Honoré, 491, 492

Gender, Section 76 (319-321)

General Leonard Wood, 244

Genocide Geography, Section 105 (422-427)

Geography (the academic discipline), v, ix, 

xi, 262, 333-335, 422-427, 456, 557-561

George, King of England, 65, 276

Geto Boys, 173

Get Smart, 257

Get Willy, Section 51 (204-209)

Gila Monsters Meet You at the Airport

(book), 453

GIS, xi, xxvii, 10, 60, 119, 121, 128, 142, 

178, 189, 198-199, 271-274, 291, 334, 

347, 374, 450, 453, 454, 461, 493, 516, 

557-558, 570-571

GIS, Section 66 (271-274)

Global Insurgency and Global Trespass, 

Section 128 (509-511)

Globalization, Section 130 (516-520)

globalization, 11, 213, 236, 239-247, 264, 

279, 295, 323, 395, 403, 419, 502-503, 

509-520

global warming, 57, 187, 287, 406

Goldman, Emma, 82

golf, 60, 153, 571

Charles George Gordon (book), 459

Grading the Social Compact, Section 48

(192-194)

Grant, Ulysses S., 3, 281, 464

Grau, Les, 132

Graves Registration, Section 92 (371-374)

Grayson, Private William, 239, 240

Greene, General Nathaniel, 21, 525

Groundhog Day, 411

Guatemala, xxvi, xxviii, xxix, xxx, 83-92, 99, 

155, 172, 227, 320, 375-376, 542-544

Guerre d’Algérie, Section 107 (434-442)

guerrilla war, the word guerrilla appears 

more than 260 times; working definitions 

can be found on pages xxvii and 25

Guevara, Ernesto, 4, 40, 524

Guntram, Herb, 195, 589

Guys and Dolls, 363

habeas corpus, 5, 55, 129, 207, 302, 373, 

374, 498, 501, 535, 570

Hasselhof, David, 432

Hastings, Battle of, 6

Haushofer, Karl, 511

Hayakawa, S.I., 464, 524, 589

Heart of Darkness (book), 361

Heavy Machines, Section 29 (119-120)

helicopter, 45, 87, 360, 367, 434, 435, 440, 

540, 551, 553, 554, 578, 594

Heller, Joseph, 274, 305

Hemingway, Ernest, 393, 524

Hin-mut-too-yah-lat-kekht, 33

Hitler, Adolf, 97, 109, 332, 389, 425, 472

Hohfeldian Grievance Analysis, Section 53

(215-219)

Holes in the Ground, Section 31 (124-125)

holistic, Oh, c’mon, I didn’t use holistic

Holmes, Oliver Wendell, Jr., xii, xiv, 13, 

162, 219, 321, 470, 593,

Holmes, Oliver Wendell, Sr., 338, 486

Holmes, Sherlock, 136, 520

Homage to Catalonia (book), vi, 520

Homestar Runner (animated web comic), 

234, 466

Honduras, 171, 212, 397, 476, 477

honor, v., 11, 32, 46, 56, 65, 76, 83, 93, 101, 

106, 153, 162, 173, 183, 215, 220, 232, 242, 

266, 315, 331-332, 346, 372, 374, 378, 384, 

391, 408, 417, 425, 467, 484-486, 491, 525, 

529, 533, 545, 564, 567

hope and hopelessness, 10, 62, 64, 76, 118, 

135, 298, 330-332, 338, 484, 486

How Violent Groups Form, Miscelaneous Lists, 

List D, 582

Human Rights, Section 125 (498-501)

Humboldt, Alexander von, 335

Hume, David, 407

hybrid war, ix, 223, 399-403, 525-528

Iannaccone, Larry, 75, 76

Identity, Section 78 (326-329)

identity, xxvii, 4, 22, 24, 30, 36, 46, 47, 50, 65, 

74, 76, 111, 128, 133, 147, 149, 184, 193, 

195, 196, 198, 200, 203, 206, 214-218, 227, 

228, 248, 282, 294-296, 306, 313-315, 324, 

326-329, 333, 334, 346, 371-374, 381-383, 

400, 402, 410, 424-425, 435, 485, 496, 502, 

514, 517, 522, 524, 530, 534-536, 558-560, 

581- 583

IED, Improvised Explosive Device, see explosives

Idiocracy, 358, 459

imbrication, xxvii, 127-128, 227, 558
 Index

639

immunity, x, xxv, 1-3, 25, 27, 182, 184, 

218, 226-227, 339, 341, 421, 426, 498-

499, 521, 529-530

Impunity, Section 1 (1-3)

impunity, (The word impunity is used 297 

times in this book, that is, in almost every 

section.) To understand how it is used in 

this book see v, x, xi, xii, xxiv, xxv, xxvi, 

1-3, 22-27, 564

Inglourious Basterds, 100, 365

initiative, 25, 30, 37, 43, 84, 89, 131, 138, 182, 

204, 258, 268, 289, 297, 417, 431, 552, 569

INTERPOL, International Criminal Police 

Organization, xxv, 202

intimidation, xxviii, 67, 172, 220, 260, 289, 

309, 514, 538

inventories,v, 6-10, 81, 108, 178, 204, 261, 

326-327, 333-334, 337, 364, 408, 425, 

440, 453, 462, 557, 570, 581-583 ; see 

also Section 3, The Domesday Book

IPB, Intelligence Preparation of the Battlefield, 271

IPKF, Indian Peacekeeping Force, 49

Iraq, 45, 177, 211, 281, 286, 340, 362, 435, 

538, 548

irregular war (definition), ix, xxx, 311, 399, 

523-524, 571

Is It an Insurgency?, Section 131 (521-524)

I`ve Got a Name (song), 329

Iximché, Section 21 (83-92)

James, Henry, 203, 380, 407

James, William, 169, 199, 219, 380

Jefferson, Thomas, 53,129, 494

Jerusalem, Section 71 (293-298)

Joe Dirt, 78, 152, 315, 524

John Brown (song), 312

Logan’s Run, 27

Johnson, Lyndon, 68

Johnson, Robert Glenn Jr. (Junior Johnson), 

172, 307, 261

Jomini, Antoine-Henri, 14, 112, 113, 342, 589

Jones, R.V., 417, 467-468

Jorge Verstrynge and Pio Moa, Section 98

(395-398)

Kaplan, David, 195, 589

Kaplan, Robert, 486, 590

Kansas, ii, xxvi, 114, 128, 314, 379, 486, 

504-508, 534, 544

Kass, Leon, 325

Keeping Secret, Section 17 (65-68)

Kelly, Ned, 185

Kernkraft 400, 398

Kerr, Elizabeth Margaret, 191

Khartoum, 118

kidnapping, 29, 91, 142, 198, 220-224, 236, 

252, 255, 322, 325, 339, 364, 373-374, 

414-415, 527, 528, 547, 580

Kidnapping, Section 55 (223-224)

Killdozer, 194

Kinmont Willy, 8, 547

Knowledge Cultures, Section 111 (454-459)

Knowledge Gaps, Section 110 (450-453)

Knowles, Anne Kelly, 274

Korzybski, Alfred, 195

Kosovo (song), 474

Kuhn, Franz, 464

Kutuzov, General Mikhail, 488

Lamarr, Hedy, 325, 469, 568

L'Amour, Louis, 208, 305, 591

Language in Thought and Action (book), 

464, 589

land (this is used as a whole word more than 

300 times)

Land Strategy and Property Strategy, Section 72 (300-305)

landmines, see explosives

Land-use Planning, Section 32 (126-129)

Lartéguy, Jean, 338, 438, 441

Lawfare, Section 104 (419-421)

lawfare, ix, xi, 5, 11-12, 79-82, 128, 142, 

180-185, 195-198, 200-203, 215-219, 

225,-230, 306-312, 341, 372, 385, 415-

421, 458, 498-501

Lawrence, Kansas, 114, 504-508; T.E., 348-

349; Taylor, 383

Leap of Faith, 378

Leavenworth, ii, xxiv, 38, 128, 446, 486, 

504-507

Led Zeppelin, 203

Lee, Mike, 501

Legitimacy, Section 14 (52-55)

legitimacy, xi, 25, 40, 52-55, 79, 149, 170-172, 

211, 212, 222, 223, 292, 383, 384, 422, 471, 

475, 476, 495, 511, 530, 539, 549

Lemkin, Raphael, 297, 427, 470, 590

Lenin, Vladimir, i, 58, 112, 236, 464

Lettow-Vorbeck, Paul Emil von, 348-353, 579

Le Marais du Cygne (poem), 432

Lewis, C. S., 72

liberating structures, 446-449

License to Kill, 3

license to kill gophers, 60

Lincoln, Abraham, 92, 342, 486, 504-507

Linearity and the Line of Retreat, Section 8

(28-30)

lines of communication, see LOC
Index

640

line of retreat, xi, 20, 28-30, 35, 42, 60, 94, 

116, 221, 311, 331, 351, 366, 399-403, 411, 

471, 523-524, 531, 541, 552, 555-560, 567

Linklatter, Andro, 312

linoleum, 536

LOC(s), line(s) of communication, xi, 16, 19, 

28-30, 44, 49, 87, 124, 134, 143, 157, 171, 

172, 179, 183, 190, 223, 242, 251, 253, 276, 

278, 301, 343, 349, 351, 366-367, 383, 390, 

423, 440, 492, 493, 513, 520, 539, 541-542, 

556, 558, 560, 562, 569, 579, 583

London, Jack, 361

Lowell, James, 214

LTTE, xxv, 46-51, 376, 543

Luigi Galleani, Section 134 (531-533)

Luther, Martin, 187, 232, 338, 510

Skynyrd, Lynyrd, 179

M-19, xxv, 117-118, 376, 547

Machiavelli, Niccolò, 111, 116, 233-234, 

342, 591

Madison, James, 126, 129, 478, 511

Magical Realism, Section 101 (408-411)

Maguire, T. Miller, 19-21, 98, 227, 241, 

242, 264, 366, 456, 490, 516-519, 529, 

539, 548, 553, 555

Mahan, Alfred T., 246

Majuba Hill, battle of, 241

Mamet, David, 468

Malatesta, Errico, 95

Malkin, Michelle, 265

Mao Tse-tung, Mao Zedong, 24, 37, 38, 43, 

94, 95, 161, 162, 321, 395, 396, 397, 437, 

488, 525, 556, 582

markets, 7, 73-78, 82, 103, 126, 158-159, 

233, 240, 249-256, 270, 279, 295-297, 303-

310, 316-317, 322, 324, 346, 354, 357, 362, 

366, 458, 467, 500-503, 516, 520

Marines, U.S., 76, 292, 366

Martin, Luther, xvi

Martinson, Charles, ii

MASH, (TV show), 468

mass, concentration of military force, 14-18, 

43, 111-115, 162, 267, 280, 516, 519, 

570; political movement, 111, 236, 237, 

477; murder, killing or destruction, 281, 

375, 422-433, 544, 581

Marx, Groucho, 411

marxism, xi, 76, 77, 89, 208, 289, 386, 395, 

404, 567, 517-519, 582, see fascism

Marx, Groucho, 411

Marx, Karl, Marxism-Leninism, Marxists, 

xi, 76, 77, 89, 208, 279, 289, 386, 395,

437, 496-497, 509, 516-519, 522, 570

Massacres, Section 106 (428-433)

Mau Mau Man-Hunt (book), 208

Maxfield Parrish, 243

Measurement (of power, legitimacy, success, victory), 13, 20, 26, 31, 33, 52, 63, 

73, 78, 88, 94, 104, 111, 126, 138, 148-149, 

158, 174, 186-187, 192-194, 197, 217-218, 

223, 256-257, 258, 262-267, 274, 279-292, 

301, 312, 316-318, 333-334, 336, 344, 370, 

388, 408, 424, 458, 475, 519, 527, 553, 

554, 559, 561, 571 

Measuring America (book), 312

Measuring Effects of Actions on Enemies, 

Section 69 (281-287)

Measuring Effects of Actions on Structure, 

Section 70 (288-292)

Measuring Distance and Comparing Power, 

Section 64 (262-267)

Mebarak, Shakira, 473, 474

Meir, Golda, 98, 298, 355

Mencius, xxvi, 72, 381, 383

Mencken, H. L., 478

Mending Wall (poem), 370

Men in Black, 5

Mens Rea, Section 23 (96-98)

mens rea, xxv, 12, 32, 50, 96-98, 102, 207, 

208, 237, 238, 249, 254, 282, 285, 331, 

332, 343, 389, 392, 411, 426, 512, 532

Mercatus, Section 19 (73-78)

mercenaries, 233-234

metrics (see measurement)

Mexico, 87, 90, 92, 172, 190, 200, 223, 248, 

254, 280

Militias and Gun Control, Section 56 (225-230)

Mises, Ludwig von, 363

money (used over 100 times, the word 

money traces many of the book’s themes)

Monty Python and the Holy Grail, 55

motorcycle, 8, 153, 179, 260, 452

mountains, 87, 99, 172, 205, 355, 359-361, 

389-390, 433, 445, 528, 553

Musashi, Myamoto, 563

Mussolini, Benito, 344, 389

Namath, Joe, 150

Napoleon Bonaparte, 14, 18, 111, 113, 283, 

332, 427, 487-490, 492, 518, 525, 552

Napoleon Dynamite, 515

Ned Kelley, 222

Negotiations, Section 102 (412-414)

Nelson, Admiral Horatio, Lord, 487, 491-492

neogeography, 272, 444-445

Nerd Globe, Section 129 (512-515)

nesting, 126, 536

networks, 59, 90, 94, 120, 133, 197, 205, 

346, 367, 516, 543, 558, 567, 583
 Index

641

Nez Percé, 31-35

NGOs, IOs, and Unions, Section 15 (56-61)

Nikola Tesla, 240, 241

Nineteen Eighty-Four, 10

non-lethal weapons, 70, 342, 538, 543

‘Nonviolent’ Action, Section 27 (110-115)

Norris, Chuck, 95

Norwegians, 474, 634

Northwest Ordinance, 129

nunchaku skills, 515

oaths, 472, 506

O`Ballance, Edgar, 434,440,441, 593

objective (as a concept of strategy), x-xii, 

15-18, 25, 27, 43, 48, 52, 89, 92, 122, 138, 

153, 182, 216, 218, 262, 280, 296-298, 

302, 334, 343, 359, 434, 436, 439, 465-

466, 474, 500, 569, 582

offensive (initiative), 14, 30, 84, 87, 88-90,

92, 138, 148, 175, 183, 252,343, 366-370, 

488, 514, 552

Office Space, 68

Olsen, Merlin, 150

On the Waterfront, 5

opportunity cost, 260, 263, 444, 447

organization, the words organize or its derivations are used more than 370 times, and 

in almost every section. See cahoots.

Orgazmo, 162

ORPA, xxv, 83-92

Orwell, George, 10, 109, 520

outposts, 118, 142, 164, 258, 310, 366-369, 

399-402, 551, 553, 597

Oviedo, Section 97 (386-394)

Palonegro, battle of, 239, 243, 244

Papillon, 365

Paradise Now, 145

Parker, Theodore, 152

Particularization of Power, Section 126

(502-503)

Patton, William W., 312

Paul Emil von Lettow-Vorbeck Section 85

(348-353)

Paulus, Friedrich von, 28

Payeras, Mario, 84, 90

peace, defined. xxix

Penn, Sean, 544

Peralonso, battle of, 239, 241, 243

Philippines and Philippine Insurrection, 99, 

239-245, 265, 281 

Physics of Strategy, Section 115 (469-470)

Piggy, Miss, 565

Pilkey, Dav, 554

Pinochet, Augusto, 421

Pirates of Penzance, 565

Pirhana 3DD, 432

place identity, 65, 149, 313, 314-315, 328, 

334, 410, 534-535, 559

Platt Amendment, 240, 245

Points, Lines, Spaces, Section 67 (275-276)

Police or Military, Section 45 (180-185)

Political/Military/Administrative, Section 44

(177-179)

Poop, Section 94 (379-380)

Popol Vuh, 91

Popular Support, Section 40 (159-162) 

Portnoy, Gary, 561

Posner, Richard, 459, 594

postmodernism, ix, 198, 395-410, 570, 582

Post-structuralism, v, xiii, xxv, 58, 77, 96, 

236, 335, 386, 395-398, 456, 477, 478, 

510-511, 527, 561, 569-570

Powelson, John, 103, 302, 594

Prabhakaran, Velupillai, 46-48

Predator, 548

Presence, Section 16 (62-64)

Primo de Rivera, José, 393

Princess Bride, 82, 109, 173, 329, 411

prisons (and prisoners), 2, 123, 183, 207, 

224, 270, 284, 285, 364-365, 373, 384, 

391-392, 413, 423, 451, 486, 495, 531

Prisons and Prisoners, Section 90 (364-365)

Problems of Strategy (book), 556

property, there are 276 instances of the use of the 

word property. Some of them are listed here: definition, 79; v, xi, 192-194, 293-318 

Protraction and Diligence, Section 11 (40-43)

PSOE, Socialist Workers’ Party of Spain, 

xxvi, 387-393

public records, 4-10, 91, 174-174, 183, 193-

194, 202, 218, 317, 567, 580

purgatory, 186-188

pursuit, 14-15, 18, 30, 35-39, 43, 45, 62, 114, 207, 

282, 283, 320, 343, 359, 360, 367, 369, 440, 

471, 488, 552-554, 567, 569, 578

Pursuit to Algiers, 520

Puthukkudiyirippu, Section 13 (46-51)

Raids, Section 138 (545-548)

Rajapaksa, Mehinda, xxvi, 48-50, 93

Ramis, Harold, 60, 98, 179, 318, 411, 468, 572

Raúl Reyes 67, 261, 542, 551 (Luis Devia

was his given name)

Reagan, Ronald, 104, 158, 172, 173, 201, 

292, 453

rear areas, see base areas and sanctuaries

Red Dawn, 10

Red vs Blue: Why Are We Here? (online animation comedy), 352
Index

642

Refugees and Displaced Persons, Section 74

(313-315)

restitution, 102, 219, 285, 315, 347, 372, 

415-418

revenge, 31-32, 103-104, 173, 219-220, 313, 

364, 415-416, 431, 507, 522

Revel, Jean François, 238

Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, 

see FARC

Rice, Susan, 238

Risk Distance and the Pursuit, Section 140

(552-554)

risk distance, 14, 15, 23, 30, 41, 45, 114, 

260-265, 343, 356, 360, 361, 366, 370, 

430, 492, 537, 540, 550, 552-554, 559, 

578 (see also, culminating point)

rivers and riverine operations, 359-361

Rivers, Bob, 474

Roach, Mary, 270

Roadblocks and Checkpoints, Section 63

(258-261)

Road to Morocco, 441

Robert Ardrey, 340, 427, 561, 585

Rocky Balboa, 312

Rogers, Will, 414

Rommel, Erwin, 115, 512

Roosevelt, Theodore, xii, 50, 179, 245, 246, 501

Roosevelt, Eleanor, 556

Rule-of-law, Section 20 (79-82)

rule-of-law, xi, 5 ,12-13, 83-86, 148, 153, 179-180, 

185, 187-192, 208, 223-225, 278, 313, 347, 379, 

380, 382, 424-425, 432, 503

Ruthlessness and Resolve, Section 24 (99-100)

R.V. Jones, Section 114 (467-468)

Sam Spade’s Whereabouts, Section 43 (174-176)

Sanctuary, Section 7 (22-27)

sanctuary, there are 191 instances of the use 

of the word sanctuary. Some of them are 

listed here: x, xxvi, 22-27, 31, 36, 62, 111, 

207, 300, 343, 541

Sands, Phillipe, 287

Santa Fe Trail, 230 

sapper, 124

Sartre, Jean-Paul, 315, 571

Scale, Section 68 (277-280)

scale, there are 158 instances of the use of 

the word scale. Some of them are listed 

here: 8, 45, 217, 277-280

Scarface, 100

School Lunches, Section 37 (151-152)

Sea and Aerospace Power, Section 123

(491-494)

Selous Scouts, 545, 596

Sendak, Maurice, 109

Seven Metropolitan Lines of Effort, Section 99

(399-403)

Seven Strategy Strains, Section 143 (562-563)

Sex, Section 77 (322-325)

Shakespeare, Bill, 60, 74, 145

Shakira, 473, 474

Sharmat, Marjorie Weinman, 453

She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, 551

Sheridan, Phillip, 43

Shifting Covet-geographies, Section 86

(354-355)

Sinnreich, Rick, 287

SLA, see Sri Lanka

Slavery and Underclass, Section 124 (495-497)

slavery, xxiv, 80, 100, 137, 152, 170, 213, 

301, 304, 315, 322-324, 381, 430, 486, 

495-497, 504-507, 534-536

Smuggling, Section 65 (268-270)

smuggling, 87, 134, 171-173, 189, 196, 209, 

213, 220, 250, 260, 264, 268-270, 281, 323, 

424, 452, 465, 506, 523, 536, 558, 580

Snipers and Assassins, Section 133 (529-530)

Snipers, 119, 144, 181-184, 232, 360, 455, 

507, 529-530

Socioeconomic Causation, Section 39 (155-158)

social compact (there are 137 instances of the 

term social compact. A selection is listed 

here), 7, 67, 104, 128, 149-150, 198, 216, 

278, 302, 303, 324, 344, 346, 435, 475, 

496, 500, 514, 560, 567, 573-575

socialists, xxvi, 86, 129, 304, 386-392, 406, 

428, 471, 532

Sokal, Alan, 459

Songs of Chu, Section 116 (471-472)

Sovereignty, Section 52 (210-214)

Sowell, Thomas, 383, 561

Spackler, Carl, 60, 571

Spanish Civil War, 112; Section 97, Oviedo 

(386-394); 613

Spartacus, 93

special operations units, 163, 166-168, 207, 

233, 267, 275, 276, 320, 361, 439, 469, 514

speed, v, 4, 43, 45, 85, 135, 162, 171, 231, 

269, 279, 319, 367, 527, 539, 556

Spies Like Us, 315, 449

Spion Kop, battle of, 239, 242

Spontaneity, Section 59 (235-238)

South Park, 115

Sri Lanka, Army, SLA, 46-50; president of, 

xxvi, 93-94, 170, 376, 543; Section 13, 

Puthukkudiyirippu (46-51)

St. Augustine of Hippo, 564-565, 585

Starship Troopers, 154, 494

statute of frauds, 9, 570, 573, 574
 Index

643

Stewart, Rod, 383

Strategic Communication, Section 117 (473-474)

Strategy of Aggregate Tactics, Section 139

(549-551)

stratagem, 33, 543, 549, 555-556

strategery, 462

strategy, strategy or strategic are used over 

520 times, so...whew, good luck

Suicide, Section 79 (330-332)

suicide, 19, 50, 76, 232, 281, 330-332, 396, 

404, 471

Sullivan’s Travels, vi

Sun Tzu, 43, 342, 556

Super Troopers, 254

surge, 45

Sutton, Willie, 255

Suvorov, Aleksandr, 554

swarm, 59, 113, 237, 260.

Sylvester Stallone, 312, 226, 4

Taken, 224

Takeovers and Sieges, Section 28 (116-118)

Tamil Tigers, Liberation Tigers of Tamil 

Eelam, LTTE, xxv, 46-51, 376, 543

Tapper, Jake, 118, 553, 595

Taxation and Debt, Section 46 (186-188)

taxes, xxv, 1, 12, 23, 25, 27, 49, 53, 57, 60, 

75, 101, 123, 127, 145, 153, 170, 178, 186-

188, 190, 193, 198, 202, 210, 212, 213,216, 

250, 258-261, 268, 272, 278, 303, 317, 

337-338, 346, 354, 357, 380, 424, 430, 435, 

441, 452, 463, 558, 573, 580-582

Taylor, Maxwell, 21

Ted, 540

Territorial Imperative (book), 340, 427, 

561, 585

Territorial Scrutiny, Section 49 (195-199)

territoriality, (there are at least 280 instances 

of the use of the word ‘territory’ or one of 

its derivatives -- so just take a stab)

terrorism, ix, xxvi, 11, 19, 24, 84, 137, 156, 

164, 170, 179, 183, 208, 213, 221, 283, 

341, 436-440, 444, 513, 528, 531, 532-

532, 542

tessellation, xvi, 127-128, 227, 558

Thatcher, Margaret, 568

The Adventure of the Copper Beaches 

(book), 136

The Adventures of Captain Underpants, 554

The Alamo, 370

The Anarchist (theatre production), 468

The Big Lebowski, 548

The Blues Brothers, 344

The Bonfire of the Vanities (book), 421

The Bourne Identity, 257

The Catatumbo, Section 73 (306-312)

The Chaco War, Section 26 (105-109)

The Core, 515

The Denver Broncos, Section 36 (147-150)

The Departed, 335

The Dirty Dozen, 329

The Domesday Book, Section 3 (6-10)

The Dot Game and Go, Section 89 (362-363)

The Duelist, 486

The Dukes of Hazzard, 191

The Family Guy (TV show), 347

The Fetterman Massacre (book), 72, 100

theft, 1, 20, 29, 53, 97, 101, 162, 171, 173, 

186, 220, 233, 250, 255-258, 311, 326, 

418, 512, 515, 532, 533, 545, 547

The Geography of Dope, Section 61 (248-254)

The Godfather, 63, 172-173, 187, 

The Good Earth (book), 318

The Great Locomotive Chase, 548

The Hitchhiker‟s Guide to the Galaxy, 120 

The Last American Hero, 270

The Law of Nations (book), 214

The Maltese Falcon, 176

The Manchurian Candidate, 123

The Matrix, 123

The Mechanic, 72

The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police 

Squad!, 530

The Operational Equation, Section 6 (19-21)

The Outlaw Josey Wales, 34, 418, 507

The Outpost (book), 118

The Pirates of Penzance, 565

The Powerpuff Girls (TV show), 95

The Price of Real Estate, and Tourism, Section 75 (316-318)

The Proud Tower (book), 418

The Reluctant Patriot (song), 528

The Replacements, 565

The Right Line of Cerdic (book), 158, 588

The Rock (nom de rastle of Dwayne Johnson), 409, 410

The Royal Proclamation of 1763, 276

The Sandlot, 232

The Searchers, 224

The Terminator, 511

The Three Amigos, 115, 169

The Town, 257

The Walking Dead (TV series), 347

The Walking Drum (book), 208

The Warriors, 199

The Waterboy, 383

The Wire (TV series), 185

The Wizard of Oz, 232, 254

Thirty-six Stratagems, Section 141 (555-556)
Index

644

Thomas, Tim, 111, 465, 555, 595

Thucydides, 18, 194, 453, 459

THX, 1138, 344

tourism, 7, 88, 290, 316-318, 377, 444-445, 

451, 580

Toynbee, Arnold, 287

Trafalgar, 487, 491-492,

trans-modal places, 261

transparency, 2, 5, 7, 8, 22, 26, 54, 193-194, 

233, 274, 285, 310, 326-327, 443-444, 

541, 560, 573, 580, 599 

transportation, xxiv, 119, 128, 142, 193, 

205, 226-227, 231, 249, 252-253, 260-

263, 295, 333, 346, 354-355, 359, 360, 

368, 376, 423, 461, 551, 553

Tremors, 125, 230

Trinquier, Roger, 99, 434, 437-439, 595

Trogdor, 466

Trotsky, Leon, 60, 238

Tuchman, Barbara, 419

tunnels, see underground

Turducken and Hybrid, Section 132 (525-528)

Twain, Mark, 78, 235, 236

U.S. Persons, Section 50 (200-203)

UAV, Unmanned Aerial Vehicle, see drones

Ulm and Austerlitz, Section 122 (487-490)

Ulzana’s Raid, 234

underground (below the surface of the 

earth), 28, 87, 119, 124-125, 130, 141, 

368, 528, 547, 567

Unrestricted Chi Whiz, Section 113 (465-466)

unrestricted warfare, 110-114, 246, 255, 

395, 428, 465-466, 527-528, 562

Up in Smoke, 203, 232

Upton, Kate, 64

Urban or Rural, Section 34 (133-136)

urban warfare, xxv, 84-91, 118, 119-120, 

122-145, 245, 263, 303, 318, 322, 333, 

356, 357, 361, 362, 366, 362, 366-370, 

379-380, 386-393, 399-403, 431, 435, 

437, 463, 485, 524, 529, 553

Uribe Vélez, Álvaro, 10, 138, 139, 159, 161, 

412, 413, 473-474, 476

URNG, Guatemalan National Revolutionary 

Unity, xxvi, 89, 90

Vacation, 318, 610

Van Fleet, James A., 185

Venezuela, xxv, 40, 129, 155, 200, 204, 212,

212, 260, 283, 307-311, 542, 546, 385, 396, 477

Vietnam, xxv, xxviii, 21, 116, 124, 155, 

163-168., 202, 404, 405, 435, 476, 557

Villeneuve, Pierre-Charles, 487, 492

Vision Quest, 411

Vocabulary of Classic Strategy, Section 5 (14-18)

War Nouveau, Section 60 (239-247)

war, defined, xxx

warriors, 25, 29, 31-35, 91, 199, 351, 418, 

465, 488, 512, 569

Washington, George, 93, 95, 115

Water Wars, Section 87 (356-358)

Wayne, John, 78, 370, 501, 551, 554

Weapons, Section 136 (537-540)

weapons, ix, 10, 17, 18, 23, 25, 34, 36, 50, 63, 81, 

84, 87, 117, 119-120, 130, 137, 144, 157, 168, 

170-172, 176, 181-182, 184, 206, 221, 225-230, 

233, 234, 236, 239, 241, 242, 246, 259, 264, 

267, 281, 298, 302, 316, 318, 319, 327, 331, 

332, 342, 350, 364, 375, 381, 389-392, 396, 

414, 417, 419, 426, 431, 443, 447, 498, 504, 

506, 512, 513, 526, 527, 528-530, 537-540, 547, 

550, 553, 567, 577, 578, 579, 582

Wells, H. G., 449, 515

West, Diana, 45

Westmoreland, William, 163-169

West Side Story, 145

What a Clergy Wants, Section 81 (336-338)

What the Foucault?, Section 100 (404-407)

What the Pirate Said to Alexander, Section 

144 (564-565)

whereabouts, x, 4, 53, 104, 147, 153, 161, 

196, 274, 302, 320, 323, 325, 373, 485-

486, 523, 554

Where the Wild Things Are, 109

White Bird, Section 9 (31-34)

White Lightning, 261

Whittier, John Greenleaf, 432

Why Are Irregular Wars Lost?, Section 83

(343-344)

Why Humans Don’t Fight, Section 25 (101-104)

Why the County, Section 47 (189-191)

Why You Should Like Geography, Section 

80 (333-335)

Wiesel, Eliezer, 418

Wolfe, Tom, 421

WWF, World-Wide Wrestling Federation, 

xxv, 409

Yarborough, William, 163-169

Yoknapatawpha, 191

Your Staff Work Sucks, Section 109, (446-449)

Zombieland, 570, 619

zombies 77, 347, 398, 404, 466, 518

Zombie Nation (song), 398

Zoolander, 280, 358



“Strategize impunity.”

 Anonymous


645
646

 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR 

Geoffrey Demarest holds a JD and a PhD in International Studies 

from the University of Denver, and a PhD in Geography from the University of Kansas. He is a graduate of the US Army War College at 

Carlisle Barracks, Pennsylvania, and of the School of the Americas at 

Fort Benning, Georgia.



Man in Black: You're that smart? 

Vizzini: Let me put it this way: Have you 

ever heard of Plato, Aristotle, Socrates? 

Man in Black: Yes. 

Vizzini: Morons. 



[The author aims to supercede this manuscript with a smoother,

faster, deadlier book version in early 2021. Several sections will 

have been dropped, several new added (probably to include titles 

like Alinski Method, How to Make Money, Coups d’Etat, and Orchestration), and numerous overlooked themes addressed

throughout. It might have better spelling. No time like the present 

for you to make your suggestions known.]