http://attackthesystem.com/how-not-to-do-it/
[GM: Words of Harold Covington, infamous neo-nazi leader (so racist, Ian Smith had him kicked out of Rhodesia) who nonetheless offers a wealth of sound advice. Have to wonder what he'd think of my little interracial Junior Militia Movement here in the North Georgia foothills. In any event, Keith Preston has redacted most of the "Hate the Jooz" rhetoric from this article, which you can find in its original form if your wish]
OUR MOVEMENT HAS ONE GREAT TALENT: we are absolute
aces at demonstrating how NOT to go about resisting tyranny and
genocide. That statement is only about half sarcastic; negative lessons
can be of benefit IF WE CAN LEARN FROM THEM, an ability we don’t seem to
be able to develop. The latest is that some “American militia group”
has been busted in Canada, of all places, “training” out in the north
woods somewhere, with (of course) an arsenal of weapons which has now
been confiscated. Depending on the degree of corruption in the RCMP or
provincial police units involved, the guns will either be destroyed or
sold on the black market to criminals. Certain it is that not one single
round from any of those weapons will ever be fired at the state enemy. I
don’t know many further details, but I don’t need to. We’ve all heard
the story before.
Look, I know none of you militia or survivalist types or McVeigh
wannabes out there are going to listen to me. I have come to accept down
through the years that the gods have afflicted me with the Curse of
Cassandra; I speak the truth and it goes in one ear and out the other.
Nonetheless, it is my duty to speak on. I am going to tell you some
things about guerrilla warfare. I am far more entitled to speak on this
subject that 90% of you. I have served in two armies and two wars, and I
have lived in three countries, (Rhodesia, South Africa, and Ireland)
which were undergoing guerrilla insurgency, plus I study history and
politics and revolutionary movements as a lifelong vocation. Acting on
the highly tenuous proposition that you guys are serious if muddled in
your intentions and are not simply acting out middle-aged Rambo
fantasies, I am going to give you a few pointers on how NOT to wage an insurrection against a powerful and entrenched regime.
Now, do I need to stick in the usual ritual disclaimers here, in
order to advise you what NOT to do? Hmmm… probably not. Okay, we won’t
bother with the semantic fig leaves this time we generally use to try
and pretend we’re not really saying what we’re saying.[1] Now attend:
1. DIRECT ACTION REVOLUTIONARY MOVEMENTS DO NOT HAVE POST OFFICE BOXES.
They do not have newsletters. They do not have web pages. They do not
solicit donations in the mail from right-wing mailing lists. They do not
maintain mailing lists themselves or keep any written records of any
kind for the enemy to seize.
2. DIRECT ACTION REVOLUTIONARY MOVEMENTS *ACT*. THEY DO NOT *TALK*.
I am presently fighting my own fight with words. I do not pretend
otherwise. If I felt that armed revolt was appropriate for the place and
time and for me personally then I would not be talking, I would be
shooting. I would NOT be talking about how I was going to start shooting
just any old time now when the spirit moved me.
Nor would I be sending people threats in the mail or leaving
threatening messages on their answering machines and getting myself a
lengthy prison sentence. This is the act of an idiot. Threatening
someone at all is the act of an idiot. If you genuinely mean to carry
out your threat then you are simply putting your target on his guard.[2] If
you don’t mean to carry out your threat then you are a coward and a
disgrace to the cause you purport to serve who makes us all look
ridiculous. A large part of the lack of respect our point of view
commands in this country is due to the fact that so many of our people
are quite obviously pompous blowhards who dress up in camouflage
uniforms and wave their semi-autos in the air for the television cameras
talking and bragging about all the valiant deeds they’re going to do at
some unspecified time down the pike. PLEASE don’t make fools of
yourself and fools of the rest of us by doing this.
There’s an old saying, “Don’t Talk the Talk if you’re not going to
Walk the Walk”. I disagree. Don’t Talk the Talk at all, under any
circumstances. Either DO IT and KEEP YOUR MOUTH SHUT both before and
after — or just plain keep your mouth shut.
3. DO NOT STOCKPILE WEAPONS. DO NOT STOCKPILE EXPLOSIVES. DO NOT STOCKPILE ANYTHING AT ALL.
Stockpiles are nothing but nice, juicy propaganda plums for the BATF to
seize. If you have a stockpile, given the poor quality of the so-called
“guerrillas” the militias et. al. attract, some pale-skinned scumbag
will eventually rat you out to save his own wretched hide. You will lose
your stockpile and your freedom. There will be NO OTHER RESULT from
stockpiling, because the fact that you stockpile indicates that you are
not serious. Yes, yes, I know the I.R.A. stockpiles guns and explosives.
They also lose whole arsenals every year to the Garda and the R.U.C.,
150 Kalashnikovs at a time still in their original Libyan wrappings,
that kind of thing. The I.R.A. stockpiles because they have a long
ingrained love affair with guns almost as intense as that of the
American right, although theirs is based on the long-standing British
policy of prohibiting all Irish people from carrying weapons of any
kind. They tend to overdo it for psychological reasons. But the Provos
never have more than about FIFTY PEOPLE on “active service” at any given
time in the North and maybe a dozen or so on mainland Britain and in
Europe; their ratios of talkers to doers is almost as bad as ours,
although at least they do have a few fighters. They always have far more
guns than they have men willing to pull the trigger.[3]
Weapons of war in a truly insurrectionary movement do not belong in
stockpiles, they belong in the hands of revolutionaries so the
revolutionaries can use them and will not be caught unarmed. A serious
guerrilla team parcels out the weapons and makes each man responsible
for his own armament.
Leave explosives alone unless you really—REALLY—know what the hell
you’re doing with them. The first explosives to start your people off
with are hand grenades, not big huge truck bombs or strange concoctions
your science nerd whips up in his basement. (Oklahoma City doesn’t
count; it is an exception to all rules until we know exactly who was
responsible and why, which we probably never will.) Grenades are almost
idiot-proof (which recommends them highly to American revolutionaries;
properly used, grenades can be a devastating weapon of urban guerrilla
warfare. Don’t fool around with anything homemade.[4]
4. YOU DO NOT NEED FULLY AUTOMATIC WEAPONS. Do not
buy them. Do not stockpile them. Expel from your group immediately
anyone who offers to procure them for you: he is a police agent. Unless
you are properly trained in their use, machine guns are more dangerous
to you than they are to the enemy. Machine guns are not toys with which
you may play John Wayne on the Sands of Iwo Jima; I once saw a stupid
moron at Fort Jackson come very short because he’d watched too many
movies and thought his M-60 was a toy. Given the mentality of many of
our “freedom fighters”, the urge for them to play with automatic weapons
if you have them will be too great to resist.
Automatic weapons have two specific uses in military tactics. One is
for the defense of established positions. The other is as part of a
highly-trained and properly led fire team, for use in fire-and-maneuver
assaults. You are not going to be engaging in Rambo-like shoot-outs with
police and troops — at least not more than once. A large part of your
guerrilla tactics will consist of striking at the enemy while AVOIDING
such entrapments. You do not have that kind of skill and training level.
(No, you don’t.) You can accomplish anything you need to accomplish to
attain the initial objectives of an insurrectionary movement with other
weapons.
What weapons? Friends, the most devastating personal weapon for hand
to hand combat ever invented is the lowly SHOTGUN, sawed off as short as
possible. When you start accumulating your initial weapons stocks, buy
shotguns and handguns, a FEW good rifles with high-powered scopes and a
FEW good semi-autos. (SKSes are junk; avoid them, but most any other
semi-auto long gun will serve). Buy these weapons LEGALLY and store them
safely, but do not stockpile in barns or anything that hints at illegal
intentions. Do not flourish them, display them, or let anyone know you
have them. Do NOT buy guns in excessive quantity, and do not saw off
your shotguns below the legal limit until the legal line has been
breached and you’re going to jail anyway.
5. THE MEDIA AND THE POLICE SHOULD NOT EVEN KNOW THAT YOU EXIST.
No press conferences, no press releases, no camera crews, no
interviews, nothing that would tip your hand. When the time for direct
action comes, the media are to be considered legitimate military
targets. They are not our friends, not under any circumstances. Do not
try to “use” them; they will use you.
Incredibly, the vast majority of American “revolutionary” groups do
not practice the most basic, rudimentary security precaution of all,
KEEPING THEIR MEMBERSHIP CONCEALED FROM THE ENEMY. The WORST possible
catastrophe a fledgling guerrilla group can have is for one or more of
its members to be identified by the government forces.
6. DO NOT WEAR UNIFORMS OF ANY KIND. If you do not
understand why this is an absolute necessity, then do not attempt any
kind of insurrectionary activity. You don’t have sufficient intelligence
to so do successfully.[5]
7. NEVER DEFEND—ATTACK! The basic “strategy” of most
militia groups, insofar as they have any (which isn’t very far) is
based on static defense of their communities. Against system pigs or
outlaws in a time of total social breakdown, that may be a feasible
goal. Against the Federal government — the most likely attacker of any
radical community — this outlook is absurd and suicidal. (Again, this
assumes with a BIG suspension of disbelief that the present “militias”
would resist at all instead of throwing down their guns and blubbering
to the D.A. for a plea bargain.) Never, never, NEVER allow yourself to
be pinned down in a “compound” of any kind. You are facing the most
overwhelming concentration of military and police power in human
history. To be surrounded is the end. Period.
8. DO NOT ROB BANKS or commit other criminal fund-raising
acts (like writing Freeman-style bad checks) until you have already
established your revolutionary bona fides by several very high-profile
attacks against the ruling class enemy. This appears to be what
happened to the so-called “Aryan Revolutionary Army”; they wanted to be
the Order but so far as is known never struck a blow at the enemy other
than to rob banks containing the hard-earned money of people which was
insured by the FDIC. This is the worst possible publicity they could
have received; the public in the Northwest now views anti-government
people as criminals and bank robbers. Thanks a lot, guys.
How do you raise your initial funds? I’ll tell you how, and I’m not
joking. SELL THE DAMNED COMPOUND! Use the money to buy TRANSPORT, vans,
RVs, trucks, vehicles which can transport men and weapons and supplies
for small fire teams who will MOVE and STRIKE and then escape and evade,
then strike again, etc. You do not need land or anything else which may
lead to your getting surrounded. Land is useless to you. Either you
will (most likely) die and not need it, or you will win and you can then
appropriate all the land you want.[6]
9. ESTABLISH AN ACHIEVABLE POLITICAL GOAL BEFORE YOU BEGIN.
You are supposed to be guerrillas, not Natural Born Killers on some
kind of pointless bloodbath spree. Violence is a MEANS to an END, not an
end in itself. One of the reasons the I.R.A. has failed is they’ve been
taken over by hate-mad psychos who have either forgotten this or never
knew it.
10. THE BEST IDEA YET–FORGET THE WHOLE THING. We
have completely wasted the past thirty years, comrades. That is a fact.
Some of this wastage was due to sincere and hopeful expeditions down
some dead ends which, in retrospect, were pretty obvious. The Duck Club
and electoral politics are two examples which spring to mind. We have
also been plagued with a series of self-appointed leaders who have been
corrupt, incompetent, and dishonest, and we are still plagued with some
of these holdovers from the past. You can yell and scream and moan and
spread rumors that I’m a government agent all you want, but that’s a
fact as well.
Had we not wasted those thirty years, it is possible that we might be
in a position to engage in an armed insurrection against NWO. We are
not, and anyone who tells you otherwise is either a fool or a REAL
police agent. I am telling you to get your heads together and learn. I
am not asking you to die for your race. I am asking you to LIVE for it,
and more difficult, I am asking you to WORK for it.
I know this is a message many don’t want to hear.
Footnotes:
1. lulz
2. It might be worth noting that not a single successful American assassin has ever threatened their target before striking. Clearly, threats are for amateurs.
3. Stockpile food, not guns. What he later says about property could more easily apply to guns: either you'll die and not need them, or you'll find plenty left lying around after the smoke clears.
4. Obviously this doesn't apply in game, as we're all supergeniuses and our HOOAH will save us.
Actually, I've been greatly tempted to have my players suffer an own goal and offer them an option of ending their resistance movement on an even more pathetic note than the Weather Underground (wiped out by a cigarette, stupid hippies) or going back in time and downsizing their strategy a bit.
5. The purpose of a uniform is to be identified as a lawful combatant. Thing is, if you're a serious threat to the government and are fighting for anything that doesn't have a seat on the UN you'll probably be shot on sight no matter how you're dressed. Best not to be identified in the first place.
6. Property is a good thing to have if you're looking to the long-term (generational); having land that can be farmed pre-industially in the aftermath of the war. Don't expect to use it during the fighting (Direct action revolutionary movements do not hold territory) and don't become too reliant on your freehold if you don't want to be like the Boers when the Feds burn it to the ground.
Friday, April 19, 2013
006: Hunt and Seek
Jimmy's Diary
7th of September, 2000
Caleb and I made five carbide/match-head fragmentation grenades
I've made a scavenger's list of things that can potentially go "boom" and I'm going to be sending everyone out to burgle more local businesses later. We're giving a somewhat more circumspect list to the grandkids so they can pick up some of the ingredients on the way home from school.
We told them to grab an AP Chemistry book if they could—bombmaker's primer if there ever was one; less likely to get you killed than what you'll find in TM-31-210, the Improvised Munitions Handbook.
[Maria: Naturally, we won't expose our legals to anything more dangerous or suspicious than sending them to pick up flour and hydrogen peroxide along with grandma's groceries.]
[Steve: Indeed. Though you can get a decent blast with just that.]
Maria and Steve did well enough with the Hendersons. They wanted half the cargo plus a 30% finder's fee, they were talked down to 65% of the cargo on the condition that we all meet in the rock quarries on the ninth to show what we can bring to the table.Steve wanted and received full run of any salvageable components from the train itself, including the fuel.
[Steve: this is going to be a slightly lower grade diesel than what you could buy at the gas station; too thick and dirty to safely use in a standard automobile. So what can we do with bunker fuel? Plenty.]
They also plan on trying to find a truck for us. I suggested going to a neighboring county and stealing one off the DOT parking lot, but Steve wants to tow a junker back here and rebuild it. Seems like a waste of effort, but fair enough.
Caleb brought a small possum home from his hunt, but found no wild edibles. He said that he found the possum treed by a pack of coyotes, and chased them all off before shooting it. I asked him why he didn't shoot the coyotes, and he said that he would never eat dog. And yet, he has no problem eating an oversized rat? I swear, that boy...
Kate did a bit better, having more skill and having spent twice as long on her hunt. She brought back a large basket loaded with three days worth of greens and bagged four coyotes, the same coyotes whom Caleb had passed up earlier. This was accomplished with quite a bit of excitement, which I won't go into just yet.
Kate:
But I will, because "a bit of excitement" doesn't quite cover what I went through to bring a bit of meat home.
I was in this excellent little poacher's holler. High ridges and thick foliage to keep the report of a rifle from traveling, hard to reach by anything but foot, plenty of game trails and a nice creek to follow. The thing about perfect places, though, is that you're seldom the only one to find them. I ran into two other hunting parties in the area. Steered clear of them as instructed, though I noticed one was wearing fatigues and carrying at least one military-style rifle. Fellow partisans, perhaps?
I came upon the aforementioned pack of coyotes, drew a bead with my Winchester Model 70 and fired. One went down, the other six sniffed the air, one more went down, they found my scent and surprisingly bolted towards me, seeking vengence on whomever attacked their friends.
It took seconds for them to close the hundred meters between themselves and I. I fired two more times, killing one more and wounding another. A third shot missed and at this point one of them collided with me, chomping down on my rifle and wresting it from my hand.
I pulled my S&W 1911 and fired twice, I also drew my hatchet and cleaved the animal's skull. Another coyote dove at me but I dodged and fired into it as well. At this point they must have decided I wasn't worth it; I equipped my .243 Browning BLR and opened up on them as they fled, dropping one more.
I finished off the wounded, gutted my kills without delay, left what I couldn't carry hanging in a tree and made Steve go back to get it. Maybe that wasn't such a great hunting spot after all.
[GM Note: I had my niece and nephew roll on a random encounters table to represent the outcome of their hunts. Caleb encountered "3D6 dogs", which the guide said could be interpreted as 2D6 wolves but which I interpreted to be a pack of 2D6 coyotes (coyote-wild dog mixes more likely; they're actually something of a problem in the Eastern United States). He was willing to shoot wolves, but not coyotes. So I gave him a small possum as a consolation prize.
The dice were likewise unfriendly to Kate, so I gave her the same scenario. Naturally, she blasted the biggest meatbags she could get in her crosshairs. Good girl.]
7th of September, 2000
Caleb and I made five carbide/match-head fragmentation grenades
I've made a scavenger's list of things that can potentially go "boom" and I'm going to be sending everyone out to burgle more local businesses later. We're giving a somewhat more circumspect list to the grandkids so they can pick up some of the ingredients on the way home from school.
We told them to grab an AP Chemistry book if they could—bombmaker's primer if there ever was one; less likely to get you killed than what you'll find in TM-31-210, the Improvised Munitions Handbook.
[Maria: Naturally, we won't expose our legals to anything more dangerous or suspicious than sending them to pick up flour and hydrogen peroxide along with grandma's groceries.]
[Steve: Indeed. Though you can get a decent blast with just that.]
Maria and Steve did well enough with the Hendersons. They wanted half the cargo plus a 30% finder's fee, they were talked down to 65% of the cargo on the condition that we all meet in the rock quarries on the ninth to show what we can bring to the table.Steve wanted and received full run of any salvageable components from the train itself, including the fuel.
[Steve: this is going to be a slightly lower grade diesel than what you could buy at the gas station; too thick and dirty to safely use in a standard automobile. So what can we do with bunker fuel? Plenty.]
They also plan on trying to find a truck for us. I suggested going to a neighboring county and stealing one off the DOT parking lot, but Steve wants to tow a junker back here and rebuild it. Seems like a waste of effort, but fair enough.
Caleb brought a small possum home from his hunt, but found no wild edibles. He said that he found the possum treed by a pack of coyotes, and chased them all off before shooting it. I asked him why he didn't shoot the coyotes, and he said that he would never eat dog. And yet, he has no problem eating an oversized rat? I swear, that boy...
Kate did a bit better, having more skill and having spent twice as long on her hunt. She brought back a large basket loaded with three days worth of greens and bagged four coyotes, the same coyotes whom Caleb had passed up earlier. This was accomplished with quite a bit of excitement, which I won't go into just yet.
Kate:
But I will, because "a bit of excitement" doesn't quite cover what I went through to bring a bit of meat home.
I was in this excellent little poacher's holler. High ridges and thick foliage to keep the report of a rifle from traveling, hard to reach by anything but foot, plenty of game trails and a nice creek to follow. The thing about perfect places, though, is that you're seldom the only one to find them. I ran into two other hunting parties in the area. Steered clear of them as instructed, though I noticed one was wearing fatigues and carrying at least one military-style rifle. Fellow partisans, perhaps?
I came upon the aforementioned pack of coyotes, drew a bead with my Winchester Model 70 and fired. One went down, the other six sniffed the air, one more went down, they found my scent and surprisingly bolted towards me, seeking vengence on whomever attacked their friends.
It took seconds for them to close the hundred meters between themselves and I. I fired two more times, killing one more and wounding another. A third shot missed and at this point one of them collided with me, chomping down on my rifle and wresting it from my hand.
I pulled my S&W 1911 and fired twice, I also drew my hatchet and cleaved the animal's skull. Another coyote dove at me but I dodged and fired into it as well. At this point they must have decided I wasn't worth it; I equipped my .243 Browning BLR and opened up on them as they fled, dropping one more.
I finished off the wounded, gutted my kills without delay, left what I couldn't carry hanging in a tree and made Steve go back to get it. Maybe that wasn't such a great hunting spot after all.
[GM Note: I had my niece and nephew roll on a random encounters table to represent the outcome of their hunts. Caleb encountered "3D6 dogs", which the guide said could be interpreted as 2D6 wolves but which I interpreted to be a pack of 2D6 coyotes (coyote-wild dog mixes more likely; they're actually something of a problem in the Eastern United States). He was willing to shoot wolves, but not coyotes. So I gave him a small possum as a consolation prize.
The dice were likewise unfriendly to Kate, so I gave her the same scenario. Naturally, she blasted the biggest meatbags she could get in her crosshairs. Good girl.]
005: Joint Venture
 |
| Yeah, we do watch a few modern shows around here. |
Thomas Armstrong Davis would roll in his grave if he could see what a mess his tweaker grandkids had made of the place. Junked cars and other assorted garbage littered the 42 acres, weeds covered the fields, pets and livestock had often been left to rot where they died, and neither the old home place nor the four trailers were fit for civilized inhabitants.
Doug had appropriated the property by calling in debts on some of the people living there: extrajudicial Fieri Facias[1], so to speak. Fixer-upper though it was, he figured it would make a nice place for him to lay low while plotting his return to power. Made a decent meeting place too, so long as no one thought he actually lived there.
"Interesting group of people." said Henry Marks, Henderson's second-in-command.
"Yeah, to Freud maybe." said Doug
"Maybe to us too." said Henry, watching from the office door as the visitors saddled up and trotted out, kicking up trickles of dust behind them. The turkey poults sharing the office chirped in surprise as he pulled the door shut. "You think they were really Mafya?" he asked.
"Seems they wanted us to think so, doesn't it? That could of been a Mafya soldier with them, or just some Ruskie deserter hitched up with the first band of Americanski she ran into. Who knows...
"Could be one of the Donner Parties, but I ain't heard of them working in this area yet, and they seldom deign to work with others anyway—santimonious, arrogant bunch of psychos.
"Could be local bushwackers, or some independent group transplanted here. They didn't act local and if they're independent they seem to be more skilled than usual—won't know that for sure till we meet again in the quarry.
"Could be cops pulling an entrapment scheme. We'll have to keep that in mind next time we meet, but Williams is too direct to pull off entrapment, not to mention too lazy. And no one higher than him still cares about us."
Henry went back to what he had been doing before the visit, cleaning out the coups.
"That's a little worrying though; if they can find us, what keeps Williams from doing it? Besides, ain't the Russian Mob supposed to be pro-globalist?"
"Williams is preoccupied, not to mention lazy." said Doug, smiling. "As for the mob, they're pro-globalist in the same way that Williams is, so long as it pays." Doug paused, peculating a fresh thought in his head as he thumbed through the roller deck on his desk.
"If these people, whoever they are, are as strong as they claim and see more profit in stealing from the NWO than working for it, then you might be right about this being an opportunity. We become Ivan's men in Pincher, maybe they'll find a way to help us put the the Williams' back in their place.
"I got a girl in Lewisburg, works at the rail depot, I get in touch with her and I'm sure she can get us some suitable timetables and manifests. Still, a train robbery..."
"Aw, come on." Henry nudged him "You remember playing us Train Robbers as kids—haven't you ever wanted to do it for real?"
1. My players start to glaze over when I break out the Latin, so I better define this:
In the past, and even today in some areas, when someone owed a debt but couldn't or wouldn't pay for it, the courts could order the sheriff to relieve them of and auction off something equivelant in value: be it livestock, a portion of their crops or property or a few of their prettiest daughters. It's a rarely issued writ these days (courts prefer to garnish wages now; taking a portion of your income instead), but it could easily return in a world as economically unstable as post-conquest America.
Monday, March 18, 2013
Strategy Notes: Guerrilla Warfare 01
[Obligatory PC disclaimer: Live Free And Die is, of course, just a game and these supplementary notes are being added for the amusement and education of the players. Anyone who attempts to start an insurgent movement in the real world is probably being very silly and will likely die or spend the rest of their life behind bars, having accomplished nothing in the process. Neither I nor my family would officially condone such behavior. Carry on.]
The United States is one the most heavily-armed, militaristic societies the world has ever known, with over 700 military bases in 63 countries worldwide... so naturally we spend a great deal of time worrying about the possibility of an enemy force operating on our soil. This is nothing new; Invasion Literature was quite popular among the English at the height of their empire.
So let's say that, for whatever reason, you feel the need to take up arms against the local authorities: maybe it's an invading army, maybe your government has pushed you too far, or maybe you're fighting something altogether different...
Well, that's a start, but do remember that most of the characters in those movies died.We don't want that to happen to us, so perhaps a little bit more study would be expedient.
What is guerrilla warfare?
The term was first coined to refer to the rebellions of Spanish and Russian citizens who fought against the invading armies of Napoleon, but the concept is much, much older. Ancient Israel saw at least two guerrilla rebellions in the time before and after the life of Christ, one described in the apocryphal Book of Maccabees.
Guerrilla warfare is a favoured strategy of peasant and tribal societies, and in this manner harkens to the very origins of organized warfare. It's also a useful strategy in a situation of power and wealth disparity, and in this manner harkens to the likely future of organized warfare.
A guerrilla fighter must often operate without the benefit of orthodox training, sufficient logistics, heavy weaponry, clear chains of command, modern safety or medical technology or the protections of international law. Willingness to die for their cause is often one of the biggest advantages they have, as much as the more-lauded advantages of mobility, defense, and knowledge of the terrain. It is an anonymous, unheroic form of war more befitting a thief or an assassin than a knight or a hero.
What isn't guerrilla warfare?
Good question, being as the term tends to be as anamorphic as the usual strategies...
It could be defined as war without battles, only raids and ambushes. Mao Zedung, arguably it's most successful strategist, felt that guerrilla warfare in and of itself could not topple an existing regime; guerrillas, in his opinion, must grow into a conventional army before they could win a conventional victory. This is what happened in China and later Vietnam. On the other hand, the Boers and Irish started as conventional armies and eventually transitioned into guerrilla forces.
"War of the Flea" is one definition; "War of the Loser" might be a better one ("underdog" if you want to be charitable, and I don't). Paul Emil von Lettow-Vorbeck and Thomas Edward Lawrence, two highly successful Europeans commanding native troops on opposite sides in the First World War, were both classically trained officers who adapted tactics of "tribal" or raider war upon the realization that they could never follow the Clausewitzian formula and have any hope of winning.
Some would say that there's a difference between guerrilla warfare and terrorism. I would argue that the difference between an Urban Guerrilla and a Terrorist is often sentiment at best.
Interestingly, guerrilla warfare played a relatively minor role in America's two most famous revolutions, the War of Independence and the War Between the States. These were mostly conventional wars involving conventional armies fighting each other in set-piece battles, with guerrilla actions being rare and peripheral.
The Texas Revolution, from what little I know about it, was also less guerrilla and more a war of Fabian maneuver, with the Mexican Army forced to march beyond their ability to supply or coordinate themselves, allowing for their defeat by the numerically-inferior Texans.
Any wars in your backyard and in your lifetime will likely be guerrilla in nature, simply because any military force that can conquer the whole continent is probably far too mighty to be engaged conventionally.
Saturday, March 9, 2013
004: DIY
6th of September, 2000
We burgled our landlady's late husband's tool shed last night. The guy worked as a miner, mechanic, and electrician for most of his life and seems to have been quite the tinkerer. Shame he ain't still with us.
It was a little harder than we thought it would be, but our M1 Carbine is now an M2. The bullets are somewhat underpowered by rifle standards but in my opinion the firepower and the sturdy nature of the gun make up for it.
[Caleb: liberate our minds, by any means necessary!]
[Kate: preach it, brother!]
Remember those arguments they used to have before the gun bans, with the rhetorical questions of why anyone would need an assault rifle? "Respectable" conservatives would always respond half-heartedly, often with appeals to that long-dead document, the Constitution (Laid in State since 1861, at least) but it was obviously a question they could never really answer because, well, they never would have need for military-pattern weapons of any kind. Where are all the respectable conservatives now? Most likely, the ones that ain't working for the occupation forces have all died of radon poisoning from hiding in their basements when the shooting started.
Let's, for a moment, set aside the question of what is and is not an assault rifle, even though the Branch Davidians got themselves and and their children massacred for doing just that, and consider that there is in fact a very good reason why someone might want to own one: they're quite useful for seizing a defended enemy position or for preventing one's own position from being seized.
Beyond that? Guerrillas generally don't hold territory and seldom try to seize it. If all you're doing is the small-scale ambushes that tends to define guerrilla warfare, then an assault rifle might not be the best weapon for you. If, on the other hand, you want to rob a train—which will require you to seize control of at least one bunker, the section of rail that it overlooks and the train itself—then an individual rifle capable of automatic fire would be just what you want and you would be rather displeased to only have two of them.
A decent shotgun is an acceptable substitute. Range is even poorer than a carbine (though similar to a submachine gun), and they also tend to come short in capacity and rate of fire, but their killing power is unparallelled at close range and their simplicity of use lend them well to work in close quarters.
Grenades are also quite handy when it comes to defortifying one's enemy, and unlike assault rifles, I could quite easily produce a few with, as an old friend used to say, a few household chemicals in the proper proportions.
We're going to be working on that instead of silencers at the moment; as our operation will call for firepower over subtlety. We made off with a large can of calcium carbide last night (useful for explosives or chemical weapons), as well as about a thousand match heads and some Grant's Tree Stump Remover (potassium nitrate) and sugar. We'll see what we can do with it.
Steve and Maria saddled up and went to see if they could get in touch with Doug Henderson's people out in Pincherville. Kate's out hunting, and Caleb's going to join her when he's done helping me.
Friday, March 8, 2013
Strategy Notes: The Doctrine of Asymmetrical War - Gary Brecher
http://www.rednecksrevenge.org/?p=3037
[GM: A great deal of my writing borrows heavily from eXile columnist Gary Brecher AKA the War Nerd. He may be an alias for some campus commie poetry professor—the kind of person my players would be called upon to assassinate in this game—but he still seems to understand the real-life conflicts that most closely correlate to our fictional one.
...just try and overlook his odious, seething hatred of the good Jimmy Carter.]
For the eXile’s 250th issue celebration, I’ve decided to step back a bit and take a look at modern warfare, a sort of mid-term summary of everything I’ve been trying to teach you folks over the past hundred or so issues I’ve been writing for this paper.
I’ll give you the bad news first: no 21st century war is “purely military.” The days when countries duked it out on the battlefield are over for the foreseeable future. What we have now is something very strange. It goes by a lot of names, from “terrorism” to “asymmetrical warfare” to “fourth-generation warfare,” depending on whether you’re for it, against it, or just trying to sound cool. But whatever you call it, the key factor is that it never involves WW-II style conventional war between nation-states.
Oh, there’ll be a few good old-school conventional wars from time to time. My favorite is the Ethiopia vs. Eritrea war of the 1980s. And you could include the Iran-Iraq War from that same decade.
But those wars are rare, and going to get rarer. Because there’s a much cheaper, easier way to make war. This way doesn’t require any of the building blocks of conventional war: you don’t need industry, aircraft, armor or massive armies. In fact, this kind of war can be played by any group of wackos that can round up a dozen or so bushwhackers. All you need is small arms and a grudge — and those are the only two commodities most of the world has a surplus of.
It’s a heartbreaker for you hardware freaks, this idea that it just doesn’t matter whether our tanks are better than their tanks (or planes or artillery or whatever). But it’s time you grew up, guys: haven’t you kind of noticed that in most wars, the other side doesn’t even use tanks, or planes, or artillery (except mortars, which are so portable they can be considered small arms)? You guys are stuck in the dream about a classic NATO/Warsaw Pact Sumo match in Central Europe, and you just don’t want to think about all these brush wars. Well, time to wake up. The Warsaw Pact doesn’t exist any more, so that war is never going to happen. The fact is, it never was. If the Soviets had sent the tanks into the Fulda Gap, it would have been a nukefest, not a tank battle like Kursk. Not exactly a wargamer’s dream: before you can even get your corps deployed, the whole playing field would melt down.[1]
So I’m preaching real war here. If you want tank duels, go replay the Kursk Salient or project yourself fifty years into the future, where maybe, just maybe, the Asian powers will have a good all-out war. If you want to know about war now, then you have to jump into the weird world of “asymmetrical war.”
And I’ll tell you: once you make that jump, you find this kind of war is just as interesting, just as satisfying as setpiece battles. I made the jump ten years ago, when I realized my hardware research wasn’t helping me understand the wars that were actually happening in Africa and Asia. And I’m glad I did, because I understand the world way better than most people. I knew Iraq would go bad because I’ve studied this kind of war. I wish more people had. Maybe we wouldn’t have jumped into this mess.
To get your head around this kind of war, you have to delete most of your ideas about warfare. That’s right: get your Black & Decker out of the garage, charge that puppy up, and do some brain surgery on the part of your cortex that stores your favorite ideas about war. Here’s a list of War Myths, so you’ll know where to drill:
1. War involves battles.
Wrong! Most of the “armies” in the world right now avoid battle and focus on killing civilians.[2] This is the hardest thing for Americans to understand: armies that don’t aim at victory and actually avoid battle. So many war buffs who ought to know better just won’t see this. If you read military blogs, you know the type: guys who say “we won every battle in Nam!” as if that proves we should have won. Boneheads! The NVA/Viet Cong strategy was classic irregular warfare stuff, based on outlasting the enemy, not defeating him in battle. When they did go for military victory, like in the Tet Offensive, it was a near-disaster,[3] saved by the other key fact about this sort of war:
2. You win by killing the enemy.
Wrong, wrong, wrong. In this kind of war the enemy wants you to kill a lot of people. A lot of irregular warfare groups start their campaigns with a suicide raid, where they expect to be slaughtered.[4]
3. Hi-tech beats lo-tech.
Not lately it doesn’t. Here again it’s a matter of you hardware freaks facing hard facts. If we take Iraq 2003 as a familiar and painful example, you saw a classic outcome: our hi-tech beat their wanna-be hi-tech in the conventional battles. Then we started getting picked off by low-tech ambushes where the insurgents used homemade IEDs in combination with old, rugged Soviet weapons like the RPG-7 and Kalashnikov. After two years, those simple weapons are still effective — and they’re actually getting lower- and lower-tech! Take IEDs: when the Iraqi insurgents started using them, they’d hook the detonator up to a garage-door opener or cell phone so they could be set off by remote control signals. Our convoys started using jammers to stop those signals from getting through to the detonators. So now the insurgents are using wires or even string to set off the IED. You can’t get much lower-tech than a string. And that’s why it works, because you can’t jam a string either.
4. “Overwhelming force! Hit the insurgents hard enough, and they’ll quit.”
Wrong. Americans are pretty well anti-death, but lots of other tribes are in love with the idea of the martyrdom thing. Like the Shi’ites, whom I’ve written about already, some might say with admiration. People who woof about “hittin’ ‘em hard” haven’t thought cold and hard enough about what they mean. We have a problem with the Iraqi Sunnis. There are about seven million of them. All you need for an effective insurgency is a few hundred urban guerrillas (with a much bigger base of civilian supporters). So they’re never going to run out of young men. And no overwhelming force short of neutron bombs will solve the problem. Which brings us to another very interesting question, the future of genocide and nuclear weapons.[5] But as long as we’re wimping around with this “no nukes” rule, there just ain’t no kind of overwhelming force that can convince every testosterone-poisoned Sunni kid to join the Pepsi Generation. Consult your own experience, remember what young males are like! Remember high school PE! How hard would it have been to get those guys, Beavis and Butthead times 80, to plant a bomb or shoot a sentry if they thought they could get away with it, or better yet, be seen as heroes by their fellow countrymen? Teenage boys are the cannon fodder of any guerrilla war, and teenage boys are nothing but weasels who stand on their hind feet sometimes. Keep that in mind when media types try to hand you our next piece of total crap:
5. People want democracy and peace and all that kind of stuff.
No. In fact, HELL no! Let me repeat your first lesson: consult your own experience instead of believing the talking heads. Do you care about those things — I mean, compared to money and sex and taking revenge on the MR2 that cut you off a couple of blocks back? The only ideology I see around me is God. Most people in Fresno have a bad case of God. It takes up all their brain power trying to read the Bible and mind everybody else’s business. They wouldn’t care if Charles Manson took power as long as he said God and Jesus every few seconds. Out of all the people I’ve met, I can only think of one who cared about democracy: my Social Studies teacher. But he was one of these decent old Minnesota Swedes, goodhearted, too soft for Bakersfield, committed to ignoring reality. His wife, another big Secular Humanist, left him for a dyke, his students called him “Gums” and he admitted once to our class that he’d lost his Faith. That made him Public Enemy #1 with the Christians and he had to transfer to another school district. That’s what believing in that stuff’ll get you.[6]
If this is a democracy, it’s weird how the only people who go in for it are conmen and closet cases like Rove. No normal American would go near it. They know better. We all know local politics belongs to real estate developers at civic level and to the corporations at Federal level. Which is fine with me, and with most Americans, but why call it democracy?
And as for peace, I was always against it. Peace is for people who have satisfying lives. The rest of us want that flood, that real rain. Like the man said, “Bring it on.”
Look around the world and you’ll see that people are divided into ethnic gangs, like the planet’s one big San Quentin. All they want is for their gang to win. If they have any ideology beyond that, it’s more of the God stuff, and you need Thorazine to cure that. Godfearing gangbangers, that’s exactly what we ran into in Somalia, 1993. Half the population of Mogadishu turned on our guys who were trying to provide aid for the starving. They didn’t want peace, democracy or any of that shit. They wanted their clan to win and the other clans to lose. And if stopping the aid convoys from getting food to those enemy clans was the only way to win, they were ready to make it happen, ready to die fighting our best troops backed by attack helicopters and APCs. We killed maybe a thousand of these “civilians” and lost 18 Rangers and Delta operators. And the Somalis made the anniversary of that fight a national holiday. It’s worth giving a moment to let that sink in: these people fought to the death against overwhelmingly superior US forces, because they wanted their clan to win by starving rival clans to death.[7]
Yes, Grasshopper, you must meditate on the fact that People are superstitious tribalists. Democracy comes about 37th, if that. Nobody wants to face that fact: we’re tribal critters. We’ll die for the tribe. More to the point, we’ll kill for it. We don’t care about democracy. And I’m not just talking here about people in tropical hellholes like Somalia, I mean your town, your street. Most Americans are just like me: old-school nationalists. We want America to be Roman, to kick ass. The rest is for Quakers.
Just remember, everything they told you is wrong. Here’s a quick list of the main points. Go and meditate upon them. Memorize them while I whack you with this stick like a good Zen teacher should.
1. Most wars are asymmetrical / irregular.
2. In these wars, the guerrillas / irregulars / insurgents do NOT aim for military victory.
3. You can NOT defeat these groups by killing lots of their members.
In fact, they want you to do that.
4. Hi-tech weaponry is mostly useless in these wars.
5. “Hearts and Minds,” meaning propaganda and morale, are more important than military superiority.
6. Most people are not rational, they are TRIBAL: “my gang yay, your gang boo!” It really is that simple. The rest is cosmetics.
Footnotes:
1. People overestimate the lethality of nuclear weapons. Twilight: 2000 gave us a pretty good picture of how armies would function in a nuclear battlefield. It can be done, even if the tankheads only get a few months before the fuel runs out and their hardware becomes a set of rusty monuments.
That was always a very interesting, underrated RPG, or at least I thought so. It was widely criticized back in the day because All-Killing Nuclear Winter was an article of holy writ to Cold War-era liberals and the idea of a nuclear war being survivable, in any capacity, enrages them...
...and also because one of the background events (Germany re-uniting) was considered unrealistic.
2. This is simply following Sun Tzu's wisdom that the way to avoid what is strong is to strike what is weak. It may not be the nicest way to operate, but it makes tactical sense. A guerrilla warrior operating in North America might have to change his strategies somewhat, as civilians here are more likely to be armed.
3. The conservatives actually get this one right: the Viet Cong was shattered by Tet and lost everywhere except in the minds of the American voters. For the rest of the war, it would be the North Vietnamese Army who did most of the heavy lifting. A lot of guerrilla forces are destroyed because they try to go conventional too early: before the Viet Cong it was the Greek DAG, and afterwards it was the Tamil LTTE.
4. Obviously most people are not overly eager to die, but it can often be advantageous to their still-living fellows when they do. See: Alamo, Easter Uprising. As Soren Kierkegaard said, the tyrant dies and his rule ends, the martyr dies and his rule begins.
5. Genocide is an excellent CI weapon for those who are powerful (Russia vs Chechnya , China vs Tibet) or isolated (Sudan vs Dinka, Indonesia vs Papua) enough to get away with it, but even that ain't foolproof. Nazi Germany certainly had no qualms against brutalizing civilians, and yet were unable to destroy Tito's partisans.
6. Religious fervor can do wonders to compose mortals with immortal fire, to paraphrase WH Auden. What then, of non-religious communists from whom we hear so much of when it comes to revolution (including the occasional atheist suicide bomber)? Perhaps Albet Camus was right when he said the future is the only transcendental value for men without God.
7. That, like pretty much everything Americans know about Somalia, is something of a simplification. Funny thing is, Somalia as an anarchist/fundamentalist "failed state" has seen quite a few improvements in living standards over what existed under the reign of pro-business despot Siad Barre.
[GM: A great deal of my writing borrows heavily from eXile columnist Gary Brecher AKA the War Nerd. He may be an alias for some campus commie poetry professor—the kind of person my players would be called upon to assassinate in this game—but he still seems to understand the real-life conflicts that most closely correlate to our fictional one.
...just try and overlook his odious, seething hatred of the good Jimmy Carter.]
For the eXile’s 250th issue celebration, I’ve decided to step back a bit and take a look at modern warfare, a sort of mid-term summary of everything I’ve been trying to teach you folks over the past hundred or so issues I’ve been writing for this paper.
I’ll give you the bad news first: no 21st century war is “purely military.” The days when countries duked it out on the battlefield are over for the foreseeable future. What we have now is something very strange. It goes by a lot of names, from “terrorism” to “asymmetrical warfare” to “fourth-generation warfare,” depending on whether you’re for it, against it, or just trying to sound cool. But whatever you call it, the key factor is that it never involves WW-II style conventional war between nation-states.
Oh, there’ll be a few good old-school conventional wars from time to time. My favorite is the Ethiopia vs. Eritrea war of the 1980s. And you could include the Iran-Iraq War from that same decade.
But those wars are rare, and going to get rarer. Because there’s a much cheaper, easier way to make war. This way doesn’t require any of the building blocks of conventional war: you don’t need industry, aircraft, armor or massive armies. In fact, this kind of war can be played by any group of wackos that can round up a dozen or so bushwhackers. All you need is small arms and a grudge — and those are the only two commodities most of the world has a surplus of.
It’s a heartbreaker for you hardware freaks, this idea that it just doesn’t matter whether our tanks are better than their tanks (or planes or artillery or whatever). But it’s time you grew up, guys: haven’t you kind of noticed that in most wars, the other side doesn’t even use tanks, or planes, or artillery (except mortars, which are so portable they can be considered small arms)? You guys are stuck in the dream about a classic NATO/Warsaw Pact Sumo match in Central Europe, and you just don’t want to think about all these brush wars. Well, time to wake up. The Warsaw Pact doesn’t exist any more, so that war is never going to happen. The fact is, it never was. If the Soviets had sent the tanks into the Fulda Gap, it would have been a nukefest, not a tank battle like Kursk. Not exactly a wargamer’s dream: before you can even get your corps deployed, the whole playing field would melt down.[1]
So I’m preaching real war here. If you want tank duels, go replay the Kursk Salient or project yourself fifty years into the future, where maybe, just maybe, the Asian powers will have a good all-out war. If you want to know about war now, then you have to jump into the weird world of “asymmetrical war.”
And I’ll tell you: once you make that jump, you find this kind of war is just as interesting, just as satisfying as setpiece battles. I made the jump ten years ago, when I realized my hardware research wasn’t helping me understand the wars that were actually happening in Africa and Asia. And I’m glad I did, because I understand the world way better than most people. I knew Iraq would go bad because I’ve studied this kind of war. I wish more people had. Maybe we wouldn’t have jumped into this mess.
To get your head around this kind of war, you have to delete most of your ideas about warfare. That’s right: get your Black & Decker out of the garage, charge that puppy up, and do some brain surgery on the part of your cortex that stores your favorite ideas about war. Here’s a list of War Myths, so you’ll know where to drill:
1. War involves battles.
Wrong! Most of the “armies” in the world right now avoid battle and focus on killing civilians.[2] This is the hardest thing for Americans to understand: armies that don’t aim at victory and actually avoid battle. So many war buffs who ought to know better just won’t see this. If you read military blogs, you know the type: guys who say “we won every battle in Nam!” as if that proves we should have won. Boneheads! The NVA/Viet Cong strategy was classic irregular warfare stuff, based on outlasting the enemy, not defeating him in battle. When they did go for military victory, like in the Tet Offensive, it was a near-disaster,[3] saved by the other key fact about this sort of war:
2. You win by killing the enemy.
Wrong, wrong, wrong. In this kind of war the enemy wants you to kill a lot of people. A lot of irregular warfare groups start their campaigns with a suicide raid, where they expect to be slaughtered.[4]
3. Hi-tech beats lo-tech.
Not lately it doesn’t. Here again it’s a matter of you hardware freaks facing hard facts. If we take Iraq 2003 as a familiar and painful example, you saw a classic outcome: our hi-tech beat their wanna-be hi-tech in the conventional battles. Then we started getting picked off by low-tech ambushes where the insurgents used homemade IEDs in combination with old, rugged Soviet weapons like the RPG-7 and Kalashnikov. After two years, those simple weapons are still effective — and they’re actually getting lower- and lower-tech! Take IEDs: when the Iraqi insurgents started using them, they’d hook the detonator up to a garage-door opener or cell phone so they could be set off by remote control signals. Our convoys started using jammers to stop those signals from getting through to the detonators. So now the insurgents are using wires or even string to set off the IED. You can’t get much lower-tech than a string. And that’s why it works, because you can’t jam a string either.
4. “Overwhelming force! Hit the insurgents hard enough, and they’ll quit.”
Wrong. Americans are pretty well anti-death, but lots of other tribes are in love with the idea of the martyrdom thing. Like the Shi’ites, whom I’ve written about already, some might say with admiration. People who woof about “hittin’ ‘em hard” haven’t thought cold and hard enough about what they mean. We have a problem with the Iraqi Sunnis. There are about seven million of them. All you need for an effective insurgency is a few hundred urban guerrillas (with a much bigger base of civilian supporters). So they’re never going to run out of young men. And no overwhelming force short of neutron bombs will solve the problem. Which brings us to another very interesting question, the future of genocide and nuclear weapons.[5] But as long as we’re wimping around with this “no nukes” rule, there just ain’t no kind of overwhelming force that can convince every testosterone-poisoned Sunni kid to join the Pepsi Generation. Consult your own experience, remember what young males are like! Remember high school PE! How hard would it have been to get those guys, Beavis and Butthead times 80, to plant a bomb or shoot a sentry if they thought they could get away with it, or better yet, be seen as heroes by their fellow countrymen? Teenage boys are the cannon fodder of any guerrilla war, and teenage boys are nothing but weasels who stand on their hind feet sometimes. Keep that in mind when media types try to hand you our next piece of total crap:
5. People want democracy and peace and all that kind of stuff.
No. In fact, HELL no! Let me repeat your first lesson: consult your own experience instead of believing the talking heads. Do you care about those things — I mean, compared to money and sex and taking revenge on the MR2 that cut you off a couple of blocks back? The only ideology I see around me is God. Most people in Fresno have a bad case of God. It takes up all their brain power trying to read the Bible and mind everybody else’s business. They wouldn’t care if Charles Manson took power as long as he said God and Jesus every few seconds. Out of all the people I’ve met, I can only think of one who cared about democracy: my Social Studies teacher. But he was one of these decent old Minnesota Swedes, goodhearted, too soft for Bakersfield, committed to ignoring reality. His wife, another big Secular Humanist, left him for a dyke, his students called him “Gums” and he admitted once to our class that he’d lost his Faith. That made him Public Enemy #1 with the Christians and he had to transfer to another school district. That’s what believing in that stuff’ll get you.[6]
If this is a democracy, it’s weird how the only people who go in for it are conmen and closet cases like Rove. No normal American would go near it. They know better. We all know local politics belongs to real estate developers at civic level and to the corporations at Federal level. Which is fine with me, and with most Americans, but why call it democracy?
And as for peace, I was always against it. Peace is for people who have satisfying lives. The rest of us want that flood, that real rain. Like the man said, “Bring it on.”
Look around the world and you’ll see that people are divided into ethnic gangs, like the planet’s one big San Quentin. All they want is for their gang to win. If they have any ideology beyond that, it’s more of the God stuff, and you need Thorazine to cure that. Godfearing gangbangers, that’s exactly what we ran into in Somalia, 1993. Half the population of Mogadishu turned on our guys who were trying to provide aid for the starving. They didn’t want peace, democracy or any of that shit. They wanted their clan to win and the other clans to lose. And if stopping the aid convoys from getting food to those enemy clans was the only way to win, they were ready to make it happen, ready to die fighting our best troops backed by attack helicopters and APCs. We killed maybe a thousand of these “civilians” and lost 18 Rangers and Delta operators. And the Somalis made the anniversary of that fight a national holiday. It’s worth giving a moment to let that sink in: these people fought to the death against overwhelmingly superior US forces, because they wanted their clan to win by starving rival clans to death.[7]
Yes, Grasshopper, you must meditate on the fact that People are superstitious tribalists. Democracy comes about 37th, if that. Nobody wants to face that fact: we’re tribal critters. We’ll die for the tribe. More to the point, we’ll kill for it. We don’t care about democracy. And I’m not just talking here about people in tropical hellholes like Somalia, I mean your town, your street. Most Americans are just like me: old-school nationalists. We want America to be Roman, to kick ass. The rest is for Quakers.
Just remember, everything they told you is wrong. Here’s a quick list of the main points. Go and meditate upon them. Memorize them while I whack you with this stick like a good Zen teacher should.
1. Most wars are asymmetrical / irregular.
2. In these wars, the guerrillas / irregulars / insurgents do NOT aim for military victory.
3. You can NOT defeat these groups by killing lots of their members.
In fact, they want you to do that.
4. Hi-tech weaponry is mostly useless in these wars.
5. “Hearts and Minds,” meaning propaganda and morale, are more important than military superiority.
6. Most people are not rational, they are TRIBAL: “my gang yay, your gang boo!” It really is that simple. The rest is cosmetics.
Footnotes:
1. People overestimate the lethality of nuclear weapons. Twilight: 2000 gave us a pretty good picture of how armies would function in a nuclear battlefield. It can be done, even if the tankheads only get a few months before the fuel runs out and their hardware becomes a set of rusty monuments.
That was always a very interesting, underrated RPG, or at least I thought so. It was widely criticized back in the day because All-Killing Nuclear Winter was an article of holy writ to Cold War-era liberals and the idea of a nuclear war being survivable, in any capacity, enrages them...
...and also because one of the background events (Germany re-uniting) was considered unrealistic.
2. This is simply following Sun Tzu's wisdom that the way to avoid what is strong is to strike what is weak. It may not be the nicest way to operate, but it makes tactical sense. A guerrilla warrior operating in North America might have to change his strategies somewhat, as civilians here are more likely to be armed.
3. The conservatives actually get this one right: the Viet Cong was shattered by Tet and lost everywhere except in the minds of the American voters. For the rest of the war, it would be the North Vietnamese Army who did most of the heavy lifting. A lot of guerrilla forces are destroyed because they try to go conventional too early: before the Viet Cong it was the Greek DAG, and afterwards it was the Tamil LTTE.
4. Obviously most people are not overly eager to die, but it can often be advantageous to their still-living fellows when they do. See: Alamo, Easter Uprising. As Soren Kierkegaard said, the tyrant dies and his rule ends, the martyr dies and his rule begins.
5. Genocide is an excellent CI weapon for those who are powerful (Russia vs Chechnya , China vs Tibet) or isolated (Sudan vs Dinka, Indonesia vs Papua) enough to get away with it, but even that ain't foolproof. Nazi Germany certainly had no qualms against brutalizing civilians, and yet were unable to destroy Tito's partisans.
6. Religious fervor can do wonders to compose mortals with immortal fire, to paraphrase WH Auden. What then, of non-religious communists from whom we hear so much of when it comes to revolution (including the occasional atheist suicide bomber)? Perhaps Albet Camus was right when he said the future is the only transcendental value for men without God.
7. That, like pretty much everything Americans know about Somalia, is something of a simplification. Funny thing is, Somalia as an anarchist/fundamentalist "failed state" has seen quite a few improvements in living standards over what existed under the reign of pro-business despot Siad Barre.
Saturday, February 23, 2013
003: Empasse
 |
| Steve and I discussing our opening moves. |
5th of September, 2000
First impressions mean a lot, and we're in a bit of a disagreement as to what ours should be. Personally, I want us to go after Walt Williams and his henchmen:
We start slow, with acts of sabotage, harassment and petty vandalism. This will give us some idea of how they react to opposition. We ramp up our attacks, working our way up to ambushes, bombings and assassinations.
Steve doesn't like this idea. He says that we're not ready for a protracted struggle, and we need to be better armed before trying it. Besides, a bold assault against enemy assets would gain us far more credibility than juvenile shenanigans. He wants to hit the trains:
Tons of military supplies ranging from pistols to artillery roll up and down Rails Valley each day, and it wouldn't be hard for us to find some help and relieve the UN of some of that stuff. Properly armed, we'd have far more choices as to what our subsequent actions could be, and it would give us more anonymity (as the perpetrators a train heist could be either partisans or criminals who may or may not be from Pincher County, whereas only Pincher County partisans would have anything against Pincher County deputies.)
I disputed him on that last point, and also pointed out that hitting a train would almost certainly require the help of a third party (Doug Henderson and his people, probably) who may or may not be trustworthy. Also, where attacks on local cops may bring outside attention, attacks on UN soldiers almost certainly will. He brings up Ethan Allen at Fort Ticonderoga, but I'm more reminded of Daniel Shays at the Springfield Armory.
Either way, Caleb and I are going to be busy in the next few days with our home workshop/munitions plant. I told him he could use the M-1 Carbine if he can convert it to full-auto, and we're thinking of suppressing our pistols and maybe some of the other weapons, just in case we ever need silent death with more reach than our bayonets. We're going to vote on our course of action tomorrow, and if they choose to hit the rails we'll need to work on grenades too.
[GM note: seems we're going with the train heist. Fair enough; it may be more risky, but it's also more thematic and probably more exciting than my War of the Flea strategy]
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