Showing posts with label Paramilitary. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Paramilitary. Show all posts
Thursday, July 21, 2016
Lifting the veil
Video shedding some light on and lifting the veil on militias. What they are, and why militia is not a bad word. The liberal main stream media has tried as hard as they can to demonize the militia and turn it into a negative term. The militia is called out for in the US Constitution, and almost all State Constitutions.
Thursday, June 30, 2016
How Much Ammo?
This information is from Max Velocity's site. I thought it is good information for you guys to read, and to think about when you are deciding how much ammunition you will need.
Some questions answered: Ammo & Rates of Fire
Question via email:
You have written that a fighter can often expect to go through 4 AR magazines in a Break Contact drill (or the real thing) – correct me if my number of mags is incorrect. I am reading guys who carry 6-12 rifle mags on their gear loads – chest rigs, belts, etc. (I suspect they carry more in their rucks?).
From a simple logistical perspective, for a guy like me who has never been .mil, what is the play when a patrol gets caught by OpFor at the far-reaches of a patrol route, breaks contact and burns through ½ or more of the ammo they are carrying on their bodies? They could easily run dry of ammo very quickly if OpFor pursues with any intensity. For the CUTT with little or no support, that could get ugly.
To which I responded:
True.
You may expend that much breaking contact, and on follow ups by the enemy you may expend more, such as putting in a hasty ambush. You have what you carry unless you have means of resupply or QRF. You should have extra in your patrol pack. If you truly cannot break contact, then you are in trouble.
The flip side is this: you may well expend a lot of ammo breaking contact, because you need to put the fire down, even if it is cover shooting. It is not, however a mag dump Beirut unload! After that, if you utilize fire discipline, you can make your shots count more. One round into a pursuing enemy scout/ tracker will slow down the pursuit. Fire discipline is often sadly lacking!
For example sake, if you plan on 4 mags breaking contact (ballpark, it will be what it will be), and you are carrying 8 or 9 ready mags on your gear, then another 4 mags in your patrol pack replenishes that back to full load. Add a couple more, up to maybe 6, and you are good to go.
The above is of course a generalization but I hope I make the point?
A comment on the ‘Citizen Unconventional Tactical Team (CUTT): Order of Battle‘ Post:
My comment is about the info you post regarding ammo consumption during training vs. real combat. Although I can’t argue on it’s credibility (I’m pretty sure you are correct) my understanding is that this has very much to do with the dominance of support/heavy weapons during actual combat.
What I mean is, maybe the rifleman has less opportunities to fire in actual combat because of the fact that his own heavy weapons are doing most of the job anyway or the enemy’s heavy weapons are not letting him a chance to fire (he has to keep cover).
You argue on the less ammo carried by 7,62 riflemen with the fact that this doesn’t really matter because, unlike in training, they’ll not have to shoot so much in combat. But you whole article is based on the fact that they’ll not have support/heavy weapons at hand.
Please, can you explain this part more thoroughly?
Absolutes and how long is a piece of string? It is true that in combat you can fire an extremely high amount of rounds. If you learn your tactics from tacticool YouTube videos, or helmet cam of troops hosing down a hillside in Afghanistan, then you will do that. If you have easy resupply, vehicles, or you just don’t want to hand back in any live rounds at the end of your range day due to quartermaster accounting madness, then that is fine. Or you are Navy SEAL doing a demonstration break contact video for YouTube…..
What is missing are basic rifleman skills, professionalism, and fire discipline. If you want to hose down the hillside while you wait for the aircraft to arrive to fulfill your call for fire, then fine. If your fire is not accurate it will not be effective. If it is not striking at, or close to, an enemy fighter, it will not suppress him. You need to locate the enemy (hardest part) and apply accurate disciplined fire to positively identified enemy/enemy positions. If you do that, you are firing less than if you are firing at static targets on the range. Making accurate shots at a ducking and diving enemy.
Tie that in with the top part, and you have the reality of how much ammunition you are carrying. Ammunition = time when in enemy contact, to allow you to fire and maneuver. So you need to make it count. There are times when ammunition expenditure will be higher, such as in the initial stages of a break contact drill, and at times when you cannot actually see the enemy – but you still need to put fire down in order to move. You may be cover shooting. You may be using rapid fire to initially win the firefight before maneuvering on the enemy. But once the enemy is suppressed, fire control and discipline will reduce the amount of ammunition, striking accurately into the cover, that will keep the enemy suppressed.
You need team leaders to control fire. And team members who will listen. It’s about professionalism.
That is why I tell you that you will fire less in combat than you may on the range. Unless you decide not to, and blow through all your ammunition to little effect.
If you look at the live fire scenario in the video below that I made yesterday, I could easily have lit up the woods with some pew-pew. But I didn’t. It was a mixture of reflexive fire as a reaction to contact, and accurate follow up shots, not to mention follow ups to ensure the enemy was dead. Don’t pass over live enemy.
Regarding the heavy support weapons part, or the lack of, my point is to train rifleman in basic rifle discipline so that their fire is accurate, perhaps supplemented by a mobility support group (MSG)/support gunner, as described in the CUTT article. The idea is to use accurate fire as a replacement for volume of fire by automatic support weapons. In fact, much fire by automatic weapons is ineffective due to accuracy issues. Support weapons are best fired in short disciplined bursts, unless using them for area suppression in a defensive role. A properly outfitted support gunner with a semi-automatic .308 rifle can chew up an enemy position in the same way a 240 gunner firing 7.62 in short bursts can. They both have to be accurate, or it is wasted noise.
If you hear accounts of ‘going cyclic’, however high speed the unit is, then you know they lost discipline. Much of that cyclic fire would have been wasted, and simply expended ammunition.
Although to paraphrase Rommel: ‘There is no substitute for simply plastering the enemy with fire!’ So long as it is accurate! If it is over the top of the enemy, or on the next hillside, then so what?
You can be as tacticool pew-pew as you want, but a disciplined rifleman will take cover, locate the enemy, and put a round or two into him. Job done.
Shoot to kill.
Max
Original Post
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Gear for the American Patriot: The Tactical Patriot Store
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Some questions answered: Ammo & Rates of Fire
Question via email:
You have written that a fighter can often expect to go through 4 AR magazines in a Break Contact drill (or the real thing) – correct me if my number of mags is incorrect. I am reading guys who carry 6-12 rifle mags on their gear loads – chest rigs, belts, etc. (I suspect they carry more in their rucks?).
From a simple logistical perspective, for a guy like me who has never been .mil, what is the play when a patrol gets caught by OpFor at the far-reaches of a patrol route, breaks contact and burns through ½ or more of the ammo they are carrying on their bodies? They could easily run dry of ammo very quickly if OpFor pursues with any intensity. For the CUTT with little or no support, that could get ugly.
To which I responded:
True.
You may expend that much breaking contact, and on follow ups by the enemy you may expend more, such as putting in a hasty ambush. You have what you carry unless you have means of resupply or QRF. You should have extra in your patrol pack. If you truly cannot break contact, then you are in trouble.
The flip side is this: you may well expend a lot of ammo breaking contact, because you need to put the fire down, even if it is cover shooting. It is not, however a mag dump Beirut unload! After that, if you utilize fire discipline, you can make your shots count more. One round into a pursuing enemy scout/ tracker will slow down the pursuit. Fire discipline is often sadly lacking!
For example sake, if you plan on 4 mags breaking contact (ballpark, it will be what it will be), and you are carrying 8 or 9 ready mags on your gear, then another 4 mags in your patrol pack replenishes that back to full load. Add a couple more, up to maybe 6, and you are good to go.
The above is of course a generalization but I hope I make the point?
A comment on the ‘Citizen Unconventional Tactical Team (CUTT): Order of Battle‘ Post:
My comment is about the info you post regarding ammo consumption during training vs. real combat. Although I can’t argue on it’s credibility (I’m pretty sure you are correct) my understanding is that this has very much to do with the dominance of support/heavy weapons during actual combat.
What I mean is, maybe the rifleman has less opportunities to fire in actual combat because of the fact that his own heavy weapons are doing most of the job anyway or the enemy’s heavy weapons are not letting him a chance to fire (he has to keep cover).
You argue on the less ammo carried by 7,62 riflemen with the fact that this doesn’t really matter because, unlike in training, they’ll not have to shoot so much in combat. But you whole article is based on the fact that they’ll not have support/heavy weapons at hand.
Please, can you explain this part more thoroughly?
Absolutes and how long is a piece of string? It is true that in combat you can fire an extremely high amount of rounds. If you learn your tactics from tacticool YouTube videos, or helmet cam of troops hosing down a hillside in Afghanistan, then you will do that. If you have easy resupply, vehicles, or you just don’t want to hand back in any live rounds at the end of your range day due to quartermaster accounting madness, then that is fine. Or you are Navy SEAL doing a demonstration break contact video for YouTube…..
What is missing are basic rifleman skills, professionalism, and fire discipline. If you want to hose down the hillside while you wait for the aircraft to arrive to fulfill your call for fire, then fine. If your fire is not accurate it will not be effective. If it is not striking at, or close to, an enemy fighter, it will not suppress him. You need to locate the enemy (hardest part) and apply accurate disciplined fire to positively identified enemy/enemy positions. If you do that, you are firing less than if you are firing at static targets on the range. Making accurate shots at a ducking and diving enemy.
Tie that in with the top part, and you have the reality of how much ammunition you are carrying. Ammunition = time when in enemy contact, to allow you to fire and maneuver. So you need to make it count. There are times when ammunition expenditure will be higher, such as in the initial stages of a break contact drill, and at times when you cannot actually see the enemy – but you still need to put fire down in order to move. You may be cover shooting. You may be using rapid fire to initially win the firefight before maneuvering on the enemy. But once the enemy is suppressed, fire control and discipline will reduce the amount of ammunition, striking accurately into the cover, that will keep the enemy suppressed.
You need team leaders to control fire. And team members who will listen. It’s about professionalism.
That is why I tell you that you will fire less in combat than you may on the range. Unless you decide not to, and blow through all your ammunition to little effect.
If you look at the live fire scenario in the video below that I made yesterday, I could easily have lit up the woods with some pew-pew. But I didn’t. It was a mixture of reflexive fire as a reaction to contact, and accurate follow up shots, not to mention follow ups to ensure the enemy was dead. Don’t pass over live enemy.
Regarding the heavy support weapons part, or the lack of, my point is to train rifleman in basic rifle discipline so that their fire is accurate, perhaps supplemented by a mobility support group (MSG)/support gunner, as described in the CUTT article. The idea is to use accurate fire as a replacement for volume of fire by automatic support weapons. In fact, much fire by automatic weapons is ineffective due to accuracy issues. Support weapons are best fired in short disciplined bursts, unless using them for area suppression in a defensive role. A properly outfitted support gunner with a semi-automatic .308 rifle can chew up an enemy position in the same way a 240 gunner firing 7.62 in short bursts can. They both have to be accurate, or it is wasted noise.
If you hear accounts of ‘going cyclic’, however high speed the unit is, then you know they lost discipline. Much of that cyclic fire would have been wasted, and simply expended ammunition.
Although to paraphrase Rommel: ‘There is no substitute for simply plastering the enemy with fire!’ So long as it is accurate! If it is over the top of the enemy, or on the next hillside, then so what?
You can be as tacticool pew-pew as you want, but a disciplined rifleman will take cover, locate the enemy, and put a round or two into him. Job done.
Shoot to kill.
Max
Original Post
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Tuesday, June 28, 2016
Guerrilla Warfare Information
I found these sites, and had to share them with you. These sites have tons of great information, and reference material that will help you improve your training, and give you some vital information you will need. Gain as much information from these sites as you can, take full advantage of what is available. Print everything you can so you can have a hard copy for when/if we no longer have access to electronic information.
Rural vs Urban Guerrilla
CIA Guerilla Warfare Manual
Guerilla Warfare Manual
Guerrilla
Guerrilla Warfare
By Ernesto "Che" Guevara
Here is a HOOYAA video for you guys. This is the attitude we all should have!
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Gear for the American Patriot: The Tactical Patriot Store
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Rural vs Urban Guerrilla
CIA Guerilla Warfare Manual
Guerilla Warfare Manual
Guerrilla
Guerrilla Warfare
By Ernesto "Che" Guevara
Here is a HOOYAA video for you guys. This is the attitude we all should have!
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Wednesday, March 23, 2016
Training Plan Part 1
Developing a Practice Plan, Part One, By John Mosby
(One of the most frequent questions I get asked in classes is, “How do we practice this stuff when we go home?” The short, easy answer, of course is simply to follow the appropriate POI course outlines in the appendices of Volumes One and Two of The Reluctant Partisan. They are laid out in a manner that allows you to use each block of instruction as a practice session. If you lay out the fundamental skills needed to complete each block, and use them for dry-fire practice, then when you go to the live-fire range, you can simply shoot the table of fire for that particular block. In a couple of months, you’ve worked through the entire program, and—hopefully—seen some impressive improvements in your skill set.
During the last block of classes however, I was asked at least once, in each individual class, to post an article specifically on how I set up my annual training plan and break it into cycles….This is the first installment of a Five-Part series on the subject. –JM)In short, I divide the year into four quarters of three months each, and then I work through a three-block cycle, with each month dedicated to a particular training block. The quarterly training cycle includes three basic training blocks that, for the sake of convenience, I will label “marksmanship,” “core skills,” and “application skills.” Most of my regular training is my daily training focused on dry-fire training in the marksmanship and core skills blocks. That is because these are the foundation of skill, and if those two blocks are dialed in, the application is cake.
A typical live-fire training session will be composed of shooting 2-3 repetitions each of 2-4 specific drills designed to focus on elements of the current block of emphasis. An efficient training session, of course, should be set up in such a way that requires minimal shifting of the range set-up. A) this saves time, making my training more time efficient, and B) especially on public ranges, the less trips I need to make downrange to change the set-up, the safer I am from some knucklehead trying to show off for his wife or girlfriend shooting me out of stupidity. I’ve got a lot of stuff on my plate, and I want my range trips to be effective, but I also need them to be efficient, so I make a concerted effort, if it’s a “working” range day, to be done in 45-60 minutes, at the outside (A “working” range day is when I’m there focused on my personal skills. A “non-working” range day is when I’m teaching the wife—although I generally try to maintain the same time constraints then—or when I’m at the range with friends and we’re just shooting different drills for fun and to spend time together, building frith (Fellowship/Comradarie/Team)
Every shooter with any length of experience is aware of some famous drills, has likely shot some of them, and probably has a favorite or two. It’s critical to understand however, that it is not this drill or that drill which is important. A properly designed practice drill is not about recreating specific combat situations. Instead, it is designed to achieve a specific training purpose. Generally, this is to measure your current level of skill and test your training progression, or to improve your skill. If a drill—no matter how well-loved—is not achieving that for your particular training focus, it’s pointless for anything beyond ego gratification.
Marksmanship
This block should focus on your ability to make progressively more difficult shots, at progressively faster speeds. Many shooters fall prey to the lazy hubris of believing since they can shoot an “acceptable” group, at a given distance, they are “good enough.” A popular one in “prepper” circles is the 4MOA standard of The Appleseed Project (Meanwhile, at the last rifle course, in AZ, I was publicly berating myself for shooting a 2” group at 50M, from the squatting position…until I realized we were actually shooting at the 100M line for that iteration). That’s just not an acceptable mindset in the real world of gunfighting. You should ALWAYS be striving to improve your accuracy and speed. Speaking objectively, there is no such thing as “accurate enough” or “fast enough.”
The balance between accuracy and speed is always going to be contextually subjective (that’s non-military speak for METT-TC dependent, by the way…).It’s subject to range, target presentation, and—above all—the limits of your personal skill and ability. This is why so much of your training time should emphasize making “impossible” shots in “impossible” times (Miss S, did you catch that?).
Core Skills
Core skills are those fundamental gunhandling and shooting skills that—along with marksmanship—are…wait for it…core to effectively prosecuting a fight with a firearm. This includes things like your drawstroke, or the presentation from ready with your rifle, reloading and other malfunction clearances, target transitions, and the other skills that will allow you to make each shot you fire a conscious action that occurs in a deliberate manner, but fast enough to solve the problem you are confronted with.
Application Skills
Application skills are those skills that allow you to translate your marksmanship and core skills into actual gunfight problem solving skills. This includes things like movement, use of cover and/or concealment, effective communication for working with a partner, safeguarding a principal like a non-combatant bystander or family member, while prosecuting the fight, and—the single most important skill in all of the gunfighting world—discrimination shooting with good, solid, accurate, rapid-fire thinking and decision-making under duress.
Critical Training Concepts
Perhaps the most critical training concept that you need to understand is that you’re going to mess up. That’s WHY we practice! Lots of shooters—and I’ve had a lot of them in classes—have this ridiculous notion that if they mess up in training and practice, that they’re a failure. It’s as if they mess up, such as blowing a shot, or even shooting a “no shoot,” in practice, that they are somehow indelibly imprinting training scars into their neural motor pathways. Incorrect! You ARE going to make mistakes. Even the experts make mistakes. THAT’S WHY WE PRACTICE!!!!!!
Make your mistake. Then, analyze why the mistake happened, and determine how to fix the deficiency, and then move on. That’s the point, people. Seriously. The first two times I fired for qualification in the Army, I failed to qualify and had to shoot it again (actually, the second time was as a private in the Ranger Regiment, and I had to shoot the qualification table FIVE TIMES that day before I finally managed to meet the standard!) Fortunately, I had good mentors who taught me to take the time to analyze the problems, and figure out how to fix them. Over the course of the rest of my career, I managed to never shoot less than Expert, and honestly? I’m ten times or more a better marksman and all-around shooter now than I was when I was a soldier.
Pushing Your Limits
Your dry-fire and live-fire practice should be about getting better. That means you generally have to push yourself to perform any given drill harder than you feel comfortable. If you’re not pushing out of your comfort margins, you’re simply not going to improve. When you push, you’re going to make mistakes. You’re going to blow some shots. You’re going to fumble and drop magazines during reloads. You’re going to trip, fall, and face plant in front of people (don’t ask…). You’re going to shoot “no shoots” as you push to go faster on discrimination shooting drills. The point is to push yourself to your failure point, and then to fix whatever deficiency created the failure. The majority of your training, both dry- and live-fire, should be of this type. It’s critical to understand though, that it’s not just a matter of “go faster!” You’re trying to determine when and how to move faster, but you’re also trying to determine how to modify your techniques to allow you to make the shots you need to make, in the times you need to make them.
It may be about accepting a “good enough” sight picture to get the shot you need to make. It may be a matter of changing where or how your reload magazine is carried to improve the efficiency of your biomechanics.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Gear for the American Patriot: The Tactical Patriot Store
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
(One of the most frequent questions I get asked in classes is, “How do we practice this stuff when we go home?” The short, easy answer, of course is simply to follow the appropriate POI course outlines in the appendices of Volumes One and Two of The Reluctant Partisan. They are laid out in a manner that allows you to use each block of instruction as a practice session. If you lay out the fundamental skills needed to complete each block, and use them for dry-fire practice, then when you go to the live-fire range, you can simply shoot the table of fire for that particular block. In a couple of months, you’ve worked through the entire program, and—hopefully—seen some impressive improvements in your skill set.
During the last block of classes however, I was asked at least once, in each individual class, to post an article specifically on how I set up my annual training plan and break it into cycles….This is the first installment of a Five-Part series on the subject. –JM)In short, I divide the year into four quarters of three months each, and then I work through a three-block cycle, with each month dedicated to a particular training block. The quarterly training cycle includes three basic training blocks that, for the sake of convenience, I will label “marksmanship,” “core skills,” and “application skills.” Most of my regular training is my daily training focused on dry-fire training in the marksmanship and core skills blocks. That is because these are the foundation of skill, and if those two blocks are dialed in, the application is cake.
A typical live-fire training session will be composed of shooting 2-3 repetitions each of 2-4 specific drills designed to focus on elements of the current block of emphasis. An efficient training session, of course, should be set up in such a way that requires minimal shifting of the range set-up. A) this saves time, making my training more time efficient, and B) especially on public ranges, the less trips I need to make downrange to change the set-up, the safer I am from some knucklehead trying to show off for his wife or girlfriend shooting me out of stupidity. I’ve got a lot of stuff on my plate, and I want my range trips to be effective, but I also need them to be efficient, so I make a concerted effort, if it’s a “working” range day, to be done in 45-60 minutes, at the outside (A “working” range day is when I’m there focused on my personal skills. A “non-working” range day is when I’m teaching the wife—although I generally try to maintain the same time constraints then—or when I’m at the range with friends and we’re just shooting different drills for fun and to spend time together, building frith (Fellowship/Comradarie/Team)
Every shooter with any length of experience is aware of some famous drills, has likely shot some of them, and probably has a favorite or two. It’s critical to understand however, that it is not this drill or that drill which is important. A properly designed practice drill is not about recreating specific combat situations. Instead, it is designed to achieve a specific training purpose. Generally, this is to measure your current level of skill and test your training progression, or to improve your skill. If a drill—no matter how well-loved—is not achieving that for your particular training focus, it’s pointless for anything beyond ego gratification.
Marksmanship
This block should focus on your ability to make progressively more difficult shots, at progressively faster speeds. Many shooters fall prey to the lazy hubris of believing since they can shoot an “acceptable” group, at a given distance, they are “good enough.” A popular one in “prepper” circles is the 4MOA standard of The Appleseed Project (Meanwhile, at the last rifle course, in AZ, I was publicly berating myself for shooting a 2” group at 50M, from the squatting position…until I realized we were actually shooting at the 100M line for that iteration). That’s just not an acceptable mindset in the real world of gunfighting. You should ALWAYS be striving to improve your accuracy and speed. Speaking objectively, there is no such thing as “accurate enough” or “fast enough.”
The balance between accuracy and speed is always going to be contextually subjective (that’s non-military speak for METT-TC dependent, by the way…).It’s subject to range, target presentation, and—above all—the limits of your personal skill and ability. This is why so much of your training time should emphasize making “impossible” shots in “impossible” times (Miss S, did you catch that?).
Core Skills
Core skills are those fundamental gunhandling and shooting skills that—along with marksmanship—are…wait for it…core to effectively prosecuting a fight with a firearm. This includes things like your drawstroke, or the presentation from ready with your rifle, reloading and other malfunction clearances, target transitions, and the other skills that will allow you to make each shot you fire a conscious action that occurs in a deliberate manner, but fast enough to solve the problem you are confronted with.
Application Skills
Application skills are those skills that allow you to translate your marksmanship and core skills into actual gunfight problem solving skills. This includes things like movement, use of cover and/or concealment, effective communication for working with a partner, safeguarding a principal like a non-combatant bystander or family member, while prosecuting the fight, and—the single most important skill in all of the gunfighting world—discrimination shooting with good, solid, accurate, rapid-fire thinking and decision-making under duress.
Critical Training Concepts
Perhaps the most critical training concept that you need to understand is that you’re going to mess up. That’s WHY we practice! Lots of shooters—and I’ve had a lot of them in classes—have this ridiculous notion that if they mess up in training and practice, that they’re a failure. It’s as if they mess up, such as blowing a shot, or even shooting a “no shoot,” in practice, that they are somehow indelibly imprinting training scars into their neural motor pathways. Incorrect! You ARE going to make mistakes. Even the experts make mistakes. THAT’S WHY WE PRACTICE!!!!!!
Make your mistake. Then, analyze why the mistake happened, and determine how to fix the deficiency, and then move on. That’s the point, people. Seriously. The first two times I fired for qualification in the Army, I failed to qualify and had to shoot it again (actually, the second time was as a private in the Ranger Regiment, and I had to shoot the qualification table FIVE TIMES that day before I finally managed to meet the standard!) Fortunately, I had good mentors who taught me to take the time to analyze the problems, and figure out how to fix them. Over the course of the rest of my career, I managed to never shoot less than Expert, and honestly? I’m ten times or more a better marksman and all-around shooter now than I was when I was a soldier.
Pushing Your Limits
Your dry-fire and live-fire practice should be about getting better. That means you generally have to push yourself to perform any given drill harder than you feel comfortable. If you’re not pushing out of your comfort margins, you’re simply not going to improve. When you push, you’re going to make mistakes. You’re going to blow some shots. You’re going to fumble and drop magazines during reloads. You’re going to trip, fall, and face plant in front of people (don’t ask…). You’re going to shoot “no shoots” as you push to go faster on discrimination shooting drills. The point is to push yourself to your failure point, and then to fix whatever deficiency created the failure. The majority of your training, both dry- and live-fire, should be of this type. It’s critical to understand though, that it’s not just a matter of “go faster!” You’re trying to determine when and how to move faster, but you’re also trying to determine how to modify your techniques to allow you to make the shots you need to make, in the times you need to make them.
It may be about accepting a “good enough” sight picture to get the shot you need to make. It may be a matter of changing where or how your reload magazine is carried to improve the efficiency of your biomechanics.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Gear for the American Patriot: The Tactical Patriot Store
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Thursday, March 10, 2016
Auxiliary Cells
This article is a vital read, read.... PLEASE READ. This is very important stuff, I know... it is long, but please take the time and fully read it. Print it out, learn it, there is a lot of good stuff here.
By, John Mosby
John Mosby is a former U.S. Army Special Operations soldier. He lives somewhere in the mountains.
Laying Foundations: Building an Auxiliary Cell
From providing logistics, communications, and intelligence collection services, to providing transportation to the underground and the guerrilla force; from developing and running safe house and underground hospital facilities, to acting as a “plug-a-hole” reserve fighting forces for underground and guerrilla operations, there’s a wide variety of possible roles for members of the auxiliary to fulfill.
Within each of those roles, there is also a broad variety of sub-categories for auxiliary personnel to fulfill. Looking at the wide range of “duties” of the auxiliary, it readily becomes obvious that we need an idea of where to start. There’s an old cliché, of course, that says “the best place to begin is the beginning.”
Contrary to the popular misconception of too many in the tough-guy “prepper/survivalist/III%” culture, a guerrilla force or underground “living off the land” does not mean they’re out there gathering roots and berries, and catching rabbits with 550 cord snares. That MAY play a role in logistics, but the guerrilla force that ends up in those dire of straits is pretty well screwed. They’ll spend more time trying to keep from starving than they will in achieving their strategic end goals.
Similarly, “living off the land,” is not simply a matter of stealing chickens and cows from the local civilian populace, and damn the consequences. If you want an idea of how well that works out, I would heartily suggest studying the efforts of Napoleon’s army in the Peninsular War. They weren’t guerrillas, they were foreign invaders, but the principles still apply. All you’re going to do is piss off friend and foe alike.
The purpose of the auxiliary is to provide both logistical an intelligence support to the underground and guerrilla force. They achieve this by coordinating the support efforts, ensuring that the local civilian populace that is supportive of the force is protected, and helping provide support for the guerrilla and underground, while any “let’s steal some cows” efforts are targeted only at those hostile to the efforts, and who cannot be converted to supporting them.
“The auxiliary in traditional Maoist insurgency conducts clandestine support functions by organizing people on a regional, district, or sector basis, depending on the degree to which guerrilla forces are organized.” –US Army FM 3-05.201 Special Forces Unconventional Warfare Operations, APR 2003
Therein lies the crux of the “how do I develop an auxiliary?” question.
Who is the guerrilla force or the underground that you are supporting? It need not be formed and active yet—in fact, it generally should not be—but you need to know who they are, in order to support them. What is their strategic goal, and what tactics will they be using to achieve those goals? Without this knowledge, you’re not part of the auxiliary, you’re just a dude with a bunch of stuff hoarded in your basement, drooling over Internet pictures of fat guys in camouflage.
The problem of course, is that—unless you belong to an organized group, like your local militia—there’s no way to know, for sure, the critical answers.
If you don’t know what unit(s) you’ll be supporting, you don’t know what their strategic goals are going to be. The majority of militia/III% “movement” groups in this country are—sadly—a joke of disjointed, divergent polarities, most of them “led” by somebody on a power trip that wants to be the king, and refuses to even consider working together with nearby groups because they might “take over” or something.
One militia group might have decided that their only purpose is to protect their county, while another is gung-ho to go anywhere within their state that they feel requires their presence. A third group, meanwhile, is running across state borders, completely ignoring their claims of “constitutional authority.” They are, in fact, conducting an armed invasion of a neighboring, sovereign state…
Finally, a fourth group may be trying to position itself for a federal-level power struggle, trying to draw in “true believers” to support its efforts to back a coup of some sort.
I have, since long before I started writing the Mountain Guerrilla blog, posited that “we don’t need a revolution. We ARE a revolution.” So, what does that mean?
It means, you need to ask yourself, “why do I care about ‘survival?’ Why do I care about ‘liberty?’”
“Why do I care about ‘survival?’”
Are you interested in survival, no matter what? I’ll let you in on a secret. It’s not going to work. We’re all going to die. The only choices we have are how we live in the meantime, and—hopefully—how we die (well or poorly, not the mechanism of lethality, necessarily). So, what’s the real reason you stockpile guns, ammunition, and food?
I would argue that, from an evolutionary biology standpoint—and from a moral standpoint for most people—the reason we are interested in “survival,” is because we want to ensure that our children/grandchildren/loved ones survive. We tend to believe the best way to ensure that is by preparing for bad stuff, and surviving ourselves. Right?
That’s a pretty solid reason, actually. It also ties into the “tribal/community autarky” strategic goals I discussed in Volume Two of The Reluctant Partisan (and in even greater detail in the forthcoming third book). That is simply a strategy of not worrying about what the idiots in DC are doing, and focusing on your local community of friends and family. Of course, this also drastically impacts the fund-raising and recruiting efforts of any “national ‘militia’ organizations,” but really, forget them. Local, local, local; always. If every liberty-advocate in the USA would quit worrying about what the federal government is saying/doing/trying, and focus on teaching a dozen of their closest family and friends what living independently means, and convince those 12 people to live that life, and do the same? As the guys at Action Figure Therapy say: “Problem solved. Problem staying solved.”
“But…Liberty!”
Why do you care about ‘liberty?’ What does that word actually mean, to you? The Oxford English Dictionary (and for any thinking person, that is really the authoritative arbiter of word definition in the English language), liberty has two basic definitions that are applicable when most people discuss it.
1) the state of being free within society from oppressive restrictions imposed by authority on one’s way of life, behavior, or political views.
2) the power or scope to act as one pleases.
What if I told you—and brace yourself, this is one of those Matrix-shattering moments in life—that the only people that can have a negative impact on your Liberty, using those two definitions, are members of your local community?
Oh, sure, the federal beast can pass laws. They can tell you “you’re not allowed to do XXX!” They can say, “you MUST do YYY!” But really? They cannot enforce those edicts. Even if they had the physical capability for doing so, it’s someone local to you that would have to tell them you either were or were not doing what you were told. It’s going to take someone local to you to actually come investigate and find out that “Yes, in fact, Mr. Liberty Advocate IS actually daring to do XXX!”
So, if you can either a) keep your local friends, family, and neighbors from knowing that you’re actually daring to do XXX, or you can convince them that you doing XXX is really, not that big a deal, and the federal government overlords are full of crap, then you really have nothing to fear about infringements on your Liberty, do you?
Want a couple of examples?
1) Colorado
2) Washington
3) Alaska
4) Oregon
Every one of those states has legalized recreational marijuana within their states. What has the federal government done? How many arrests and trials of residents of those states, in federal court, have we seen?
Now, that’s one thing. That involved combined efforts from small, local groups, combining to exert their influence on a state government. What about at the local level? What about tribal?
Do you believe that, on the day marijuana was legalized, all those people that are smoking pot in Colorado suddenly decided, “Oh, hey, I’ve ALWAYS wanted to try getting high! I don’t have to worry about going to jail now, so I’m gonna go smoke out!”
There may very well have been a few. The vast majority, however, had been smoking pot, despite it being illegal, prior to that. Yet, they weren’t ALL in jail or prison, were they? They just focused on their local community, buying pot from people they trusted, or who were vetted to them by people they trusted…and for the vast majority of them, they got away with it, for a very lengthy period of time, even though we’ve been in a “War on Drugs!” for decades.
Of course, many readers have their hackles up right now, because I seem to be supportive of marijuana legalization, and that ol’ demon weed is BAD!
A far more useful task would be – instead of worrying about what other people put in their bodies – to look at how they’re getting away with it, in those states that don’t have legalization, and learn from them. Here’s the deal, regardless of what you think about marijuana: there had to be someone growing it. There had to be someone buying it from the people growing it. There had to be others buying it, in turn, from them, and then ingesting it. Despite the fact it was/is ILLEGAL, and has had a concerted effort from federal, state, and local law enforcement, to stop it from being grown, harvested, sold, and ingested. That, ladies and gentlemen, is what you’re trying to do!
Not with marijuana, necessarily—although, can you think of a better way to finance your local tribe’s efforts? Whether you’re focused on short-sighted concerns like guns and the Second Amendment, or invasively high taxation, or any number of other issues that we need to take into consideration, due to undue federal influence.
If you could develop the same types of LOCAL networks that pot-smokers have, you’d have Liberty, in your lifetime…right now. Today.
How?
Let’s look at guns. Everybody loves guns, right? Well, except liberals, and even they love guns, they just don’t love that you have guns. So, how do you start building your networks around guns? Well, how many of your close friends have guns and love to shoot? 4-5? 12-20? It doesn’t matter if they agree with you on religion. It doesn’t matter if they agree with you on taxes. It doesn’t matter if they agree with you on prostitution. We’re focused on ONE aspect now. We’re focused on guns.
So, let’s say you’re like me, and are kind of an a-hole, so you only have 4-5 people you consider “friends.” By that, I mean, they are close enough that you would—literally—step in front of a moving train and die, facing the danger, to save their lives…and vice-versa. Of those, only 3 are serious gun guys. Now, within those 5 people, you have the nucleus of a tribe. Even though the other two aren’t gun guys, they’re loyal to you, unto death. You have frith with them. They may have other close friends who are gun guys too, but let’s focus on the three of your kinsmen that ARE gun guys. You’ve decided that you really, REALLY, REALLY, need a .338 Lapua Mag, but the fed has outlawed them. What are you going to do? You’re going to go to your gun guy friends and ask if they know anyone they trust, who has one they’d part with. In turn, they’ll go to their other gun guy friends, and ask if they know anyone that they trust, who has one. Eventually, down the trail a little bit, someone actually has one, and has decided—for whatever reason—he doesn’t need it anymore. Granted, it’s “only” a Savage 110 BA, but it IS a .338 Lapua Mag. He’ll sell it, but he wants $3500 for it.
Then, the guy down the line of friends of friends, who actually found the .338, well, he wants $500 for a finder’s fee. So, you’re going to pay $4000 for a rifle that originally cost less than $1500. That’s messed up, isn’t it? Guess what….it’s not at all messed up. It’s not a breach of frith, and it’s not an insult to the “cause.” It’s called the real world.
So, you pony up $4000, and hand it to your friend that you trust. He hands it to his friend, etc, all the way down the line. Two weeks later, your friend hands you a beat up Savage 110BA. You inspect it, and realize, the barrel is damned near shot out. Did you get screwed? Nope. Your auxiliary found you what you said you needed. Now, you’re going to have to replace the barrel. You can either restrict that conversation to your gun guy friends, or you can ask any of your friends that you trust, if they know a machinist or old gunsmith that can build you a barrel. It ends up costing you another $2000 to get a barrel built. You’ve now dropped $6000 on a rifle, and you don’t even have ammunition for it yet….
Newsflash, THAT’S how the underground and auxiliary work.
What!?
So, what does THAT have to do with the original question? You want to help the fight for liberty! You’re not worried about how you’re going to buy guns on the black market!
Patience, young Padwan. It has EVERYTHING to do with the auxiliary you want to start building.
Logistics Auxiliary Cell
1) Cellular Construction
Your cell consists of the people you know, personally, and trust—even unto Death. How many people do you know that you would trust to die—or go to Federal Prison for a decade—before they would rat you out? One? Two? Three, if you’re really, really blessed? That’s your cell. In turn, of the two people you trust, who trust you to the same level, they each have another one or two friends. Those people DO NOT need to meet you, or even know about you. They can know their friend has another friend he trusts as implicitly as he trusts them, but nothing else. Now you’ve got—within the network of multiple tribal bonds—the beginning of a network.
2) Supporting the Warfighters
So, within your three-man cell, none of you are “spring chickens,” and you have recognized that you’re not going to be leading any raids or fighting off hordes of Cannibalistic San Franciscans. What you want to be able to do is provide a level of support to those that need it, who CAN fight off those hordes. How do you do that? You ask your tribesmen, “what do your friends that are young enough to fight, need to do so?” They ask their younger, fitter friends, “Hey, buddy, what gear/equipment/supplies are you short on? What do you have, but recognize is perishable/expendable, and WILL need to be replaced/resupplied in the future?”
The reply comes back, through the intermediaries, “Ammo. Gun parts. Body armor. Medical supplies. Food.”
“Great, you knuckle-draggers. What kind of ammo? Parts for what guns? What type of body armor? What medical supplies?”
“Oh. Sorry. Yeah, my guy says he and six of his friends are all running M4 carbines, and SIG Sauer P226 pistols. They’ve got Level III ceramic plates for their body armor, size large, and they’re worried about basic TC3 medical supplies. Can we help?”
“Sure. Now, I know what specifically to stockpile. I’ll get on it.”
Let’s assume for a moment, that you’re an older guy, you grew up with an M14, and .45ACP, and you think 5.56 and 9mm are jokes. You also know though, that you’re beyond an age where you’re interested in looking for trouble. Does it make sense to only stock 7.62×51 and .45 ACP, or would it make more sense, in order to support those guys, for you to stockpile some 5.56 and 9mm, besides?
Yeah…..
But, you’ve never taken a TC3 class, so you don’t know what medical supplies you need. You can either ask, or even better, you can take a TC3 class somewhere, and find out what medical supplies are needed, and why, in order to know what supplies will be in the greatest demand, in relation to the others.
You’ve got AR500 steel plate body armor. It’s cheap, and you’re not planning on running combat missions, so why bother blowing the extra money on ceramics? They can have steel!
Go take a patrolling or SUT class, and wear your steel plates for it, then come talk to me about how steel plates are “just as good.”
Do steel plates have advantages? Arguably. They’ll theoretically survive longer than ceramics. Ceramics are single-use items, right? How much does a steel plate weigh? According to the AR500armor.com website, their Level III plates (which are actually, probably NOT Level III, legally) – I can’t count the number of steel plates I’ve seen tested that M855 zipped straight through – weigh 7.5 pounds. So, 15 pounds for a set.
According to the Shellback Tactical website, my Banshee plate carrier weighs 2lbs, 5oz. So, now, I’m at 17 pounds, before I start adding ammunition.
My personal plate carrier, with my ceramic plates, weighs less than 12#. That’s FIVE loaded magazines I can carry, before the weight even equals the steel plate body armor alone. More importantly, I can run a lot further, faster, than I can with the additional five pounds of marginal protection.
Does it cost more? Of course it does. It’s a better product.
Can I afford six or seven or eight sets of ceramic plates? No. If I’ve got ten people in my “auxiliary” however, who are smart enough to set aside a set of ceramics though, I will be able to replace mine, should I need to, down the line.
Buying up supplies, to support the warfighters, without finding out what they need, and WHY they need it, is retarded. You might think you’re an “expert,” but the dude at the tip of the spear is whose opinion on the subject matters. Ask.
3) But, Money!
As we pointed out above, there’s no necessity that you’ll be “giving stuff away.” You MIGHT. It might turn out to be worthwhile to you, when the wolves are at your door, to say, “Hey, Joey, I know you’re gonna be out there on the line, and I can see you’re lacking body armor. I’ve got a rig set up in my basement. Let me go get it for you!” In return of course, Joey is “paying” you for the armor, by the very minor task of potentially getting shot in the face, to protect your home and life!
Alternatively, if it’s some dude you don’t know, in a cell three towns away, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with telling your trusted friend, who will pass it down the line of friends to the end-user. “Hey, yeah, I’ve got a spare set of ceramic plates stashed away. I need $500 for the set.” The end-user dude, who is not part of your tribe, after all, will either pony up the $500 or he won’t. That’s not your problem.
If it’s GOING to be your problem – if they get over-run and the bad guys are coming to your town next – then maybe you’ll decide to give them away after all, in the hope that he’ll stop them first. Or, maybe your friend will ask you to give them away, as a favor to his kinsman. That’s your decision to make, at the moment, based on circumstances.
In a Nutshell
So, what does it mean, to start a logistics cell? It means identifying who your guerrilla and underground force are—at least in a general sense—and finding out what they need. It means stockpiling the stuff THEY will need, not what you think they will need.
It means asking your friends—whom you trust, even unto Death—to ask THEIR friends, whom they trust, even unto Death, what exactly they feel like they’re going to need. Then, it’s a matter of stockpiling it.
Intelligence Cells
Developing an intelligence cell requires that you begin by defining your area. What area are you going to conduct an IPB (Intelligence Preparation of the Battlefield) for? Your town? The County? The State? Once you’ve one that, you need to look at developing a complete intelligence picture, of that area. Hostile threat groups, potential allies, behavior and beliefs of non-aligned people in the area.
At the risk of sounding self-serving, I’m going to suggest two things, if you believe you want to begin developing an intel cell. 1) Take Sam Culper’s class. 2) Get Volume Two of The Reluctant Partisan, and study the two entire chapters I did on Intel Collection and Intel Analysis. Between those two activities, you’ll have a really, really solid idea on how to start developing an intel picture of your area.
When it comes to actually collecting information, most of your efforts will—necessarily—focus on open-source collection from sources like newspapers, the Internet, etc. There’s no reason however, that you can’t teach your two or three friends how to conduct tactical questioning (NOT the same thing as an interrogation), and have them teach two or three of their friends, and then ask them for specific intel product, to be gained through TQ from others that they might know.
The Role of Responsibility in a Tribe
We had friends over for supper the other night, and we sat around playing a strategy board game. As we were finishing up, the conversation turned to the efforts of the Liberty movement. Our friends are well versed in my views on neo-tribalism as the strategy of choice for survival and restoration of Liberty.
As we were talking, I brought up the fact that most of the “rights” we believe are “natural” or “God-given,” did not originate in antiquity in Greco-Roman culture, but in fact were derived from the cultures of the Celtic and Germanic language-group tribes of Northern Europe. One of those is the “right to bear arms.”
Unfortunately, in today’s world, too many have been brain-washed into the belief that this is a “God-given right,” and thus is subject to nothing. The fact is, in the culture from which the recognition of that right was derived, the “right” to bear arms was more accurately, the “responsibility” to bear arms. No free man could be righteously robbed of his right to bear arms within his tribe. Not even by a chief or a king.
In return however, in order to maintain his status as a free man, and member of the tribe, he knew he was expected, when called upon, to move towards the (extremely metaphorical in this case) sound of the guns, weapon in hand, to protect the tribe. Refusal to do so would result in “outlawry.” This didn’t mean you went to jail. This meant—basically—excommunication from the tribe.
In that time and place in history—well, prehistory, technically—not having a tribe was pretty much the same as a death sentence. You were no longer protected by the reputation and fame of your tribe’s ferocity and honor. You were fair game for any dude with a bow or spear, who decided to kill you and take your stuff. Sure, you might be lucky enough to fight off one attacker. If you were a particular badass, you might manage two or three (of course, if you were that much of a badass, you wouldn’t have been cast out for being a wimp in the first place, right?).
So, what does THIS have to do with being the auxiliary?
A lot of people have taken the discussion of being the auxiliary as having meant they don’t need to do PT, train with their weapons, and learn the basics of small-unit tactics. They’re the support guys, and support guys don’t fight, right?
I call BS. You are still responsible for your own safety, ultimately. You may still be called upon, in extremis, to grab your rifle, and go help protect hearth and home.
You STILL need to learn to fight. You STILL need to do PT. You may not ever be “elite infantry” or “special operations” fit again in your life, but you still need to be as dangerous as you can be, and being fit and well-trained is a critical part of that.
Conclusion
So, how then, do we go about building an auxiliary cell?
1) Do PT and train. It is part of the task, AND it will help you understand what the end-users need.
2) Talk to your closest friends and determine if they will be fighters or not. If so, find out what they and their group of fighters feel they will need. If not, find out if they know anyone, that they trust, who will be a fighter. Somewhere down the line, you will find someone. If they’re out there training, find out what they feel like they will need, or even DO need. There’s nothing saying that, just because your local network isn’t fighting RIGHT NOW, that you can’t be the auxiliary, right now, and equip some young guy with the gear he needs. Even if it’s only loaned out—through friends—when he’s training, it’s supporting their efforts.
Send one of the young studs to a class with someone. So what if you need to finance it? That’s what the auxiliary does. They provide logistical support to the warfighters. Even if the “kid” you send to a class turns out to be a flake, or he ends up moving six states away, so what? You’ll still—through your connections, and with anonymity—built connections of trust and loyalty with the group he was with when you financed it.
3) Start developing an intelligence preparation of the battlefield (IPB) of your local area.
4) Of the friends that you hold closest, maintain those relationships, and do what you can to strengthen them. Not just with the individual friends, but between spouses and children as well. Do things together, as families, even separate from “prepper” activities.
5) If you have some acquaintances or “friends” of a lesser bond, who you think are like-minded, spend the effort and time to make those bonds tighter.
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By, John Mosby
John Mosby is a former U.S. Army Special Operations soldier. He lives somewhere in the mountains.
Laying Foundations: Building an Auxiliary Cell
From providing logistics, communications, and intelligence collection services, to providing transportation to the underground and the guerrilla force; from developing and running safe house and underground hospital facilities, to acting as a “plug-a-hole” reserve fighting forces for underground and guerrilla operations, there’s a wide variety of possible roles for members of the auxiliary to fulfill.
Within each of those roles, there is also a broad variety of sub-categories for auxiliary personnel to fulfill. Looking at the wide range of “duties” of the auxiliary, it readily becomes obvious that we need an idea of where to start. There’s an old cliché, of course, that says “the best place to begin is the beginning.”
Contrary to the popular misconception of too many in the tough-guy “prepper/survivalist/III%” culture, a guerrilla force or underground “living off the land” does not mean they’re out there gathering roots and berries, and catching rabbits with 550 cord snares. That MAY play a role in logistics, but the guerrilla force that ends up in those dire of straits is pretty well screwed. They’ll spend more time trying to keep from starving than they will in achieving their strategic end goals.
Similarly, “living off the land,” is not simply a matter of stealing chickens and cows from the local civilian populace, and damn the consequences. If you want an idea of how well that works out, I would heartily suggest studying the efforts of Napoleon’s army in the Peninsular War. They weren’t guerrillas, they were foreign invaders, but the principles still apply. All you’re going to do is piss off friend and foe alike.
The purpose of the auxiliary is to provide both logistical an intelligence support to the underground and guerrilla force. They achieve this by coordinating the support efforts, ensuring that the local civilian populace that is supportive of the force is protected, and helping provide support for the guerrilla and underground, while any “let’s steal some cows” efforts are targeted only at those hostile to the efforts, and who cannot be converted to supporting them.
“The auxiliary in traditional Maoist insurgency conducts clandestine support functions by organizing people on a regional, district, or sector basis, depending on the degree to which guerrilla forces are organized.” –US Army FM 3-05.201 Special Forces Unconventional Warfare Operations, APR 2003
Therein lies the crux of the “how do I develop an auxiliary?” question.
Who is the guerrilla force or the underground that you are supporting? It need not be formed and active yet—in fact, it generally should not be—but you need to know who they are, in order to support them. What is their strategic goal, and what tactics will they be using to achieve those goals? Without this knowledge, you’re not part of the auxiliary, you’re just a dude with a bunch of stuff hoarded in your basement, drooling over Internet pictures of fat guys in camouflage.
The problem of course, is that—unless you belong to an organized group, like your local militia—there’s no way to know, for sure, the critical answers.
If you don’t know what unit(s) you’ll be supporting, you don’t know what their strategic goals are going to be. The majority of militia/III% “movement” groups in this country are—sadly—a joke of disjointed, divergent polarities, most of them “led” by somebody on a power trip that wants to be the king, and refuses to even consider working together with nearby groups because they might “take over” or something.
One militia group might have decided that their only purpose is to protect their county, while another is gung-ho to go anywhere within their state that they feel requires their presence. A third group, meanwhile, is running across state borders, completely ignoring their claims of “constitutional authority.” They are, in fact, conducting an armed invasion of a neighboring, sovereign state…
Finally, a fourth group may be trying to position itself for a federal-level power struggle, trying to draw in “true believers” to support its efforts to back a coup of some sort.
I have, since long before I started writing the Mountain Guerrilla blog, posited that “we don’t need a revolution. We ARE a revolution.” So, what does that mean?
It means, you need to ask yourself, “why do I care about ‘survival?’ Why do I care about ‘liberty?’”
“Why do I care about ‘survival?’”
Are you interested in survival, no matter what? I’ll let you in on a secret. It’s not going to work. We’re all going to die. The only choices we have are how we live in the meantime, and—hopefully—how we die (well or poorly, not the mechanism of lethality, necessarily). So, what’s the real reason you stockpile guns, ammunition, and food?
I would argue that, from an evolutionary biology standpoint—and from a moral standpoint for most people—the reason we are interested in “survival,” is because we want to ensure that our children/grandchildren/loved ones survive. We tend to believe the best way to ensure that is by preparing for bad stuff, and surviving ourselves. Right?
That’s a pretty solid reason, actually. It also ties into the “tribal/community autarky” strategic goals I discussed in Volume Two of The Reluctant Partisan (and in even greater detail in the forthcoming third book). That is simply a strategy of not worrying about what the idiots in DC are doing, and focusing on your local community of friends and family. Of course, this also drastically impacts the fund-raising and recruiting efforts of any “national ‘militia’ organizations,” but really, forget them. Local, local, local; always. If every liberty-advocate in the USA would quit worrying about what the federal government is saying/doing/trying, and focus on teaching a dozen of their closest family and friends what living independently means, and convince those 12 people to live that life, and do the same? As the guys at Action Figure Therapy say: “Problem solved. Problem staying solved.”
“But…Liberty!”
Why do you care about ‘liberty?’ What does that word actually mean, to you? The Oxford English Dictionary (and for any thinking person, that is really the authoritative arbiter of word definition in the English language), liberty has two basic definitions that are applicable when most people discuss it.
1) the state of being free within society from oppressive restrictions imposed by authority on one’s way of life, behavior, or political views.
2) the power or scope to act as one pleases.
What if I told you—and brace yourself, this is one of those Matrix-shattering moments in life—that the only people that can have a negative impact on your Liberty, using those two definitions, are members of your local community?
Oh, sure, the federal beast can pass laws. They can tell you “you’re not allowed to do XXX!” They can say, “you MUST do YYY!” But really? They cannot enforce those edicts. Even if they had the physical capability for doing so, it’s someone local to you that would have to tell them you either were or were not doing what you were told. It’s going to take someone local to you to actually come investigate and find out that “Yes, in fact, Mr. Liberty Advocate IS actually daring to do XXX!”
So, if you can either a) keep your local friends, family, and neighbors from knowing that you’re actually daring to do XXX, or you can convince them that you doing XXX is really, not that big a deal, and the federal government overlords are full of crap, then you really have nothing to fear about infringements on your Liberty, do you?
Want a couple of examples?
1) Colorado
2) Washington
3) Alaska
4) Oregon
Every one of those states has legalized recreational marijuana within their states. What has the federal government done? How many arrests and trials of residents of those states, in federal court, have we seen?
Now, that’s one thing. That involved combined efforts from small, local groups, combining to exert their influence on a state government. What about at the local level? What about tribal?
Do you believe that, on the day marijuana was legalized, all those people that are smoking pot in Colorado suddenly decided, “Oh, hey, I’ve ALWAYS wanted to try getting high! I don’t have to worry about going to jail now, so I’m gonna go smoke out!”
There may very well have been a few. The vast majority, however, had been smoking pot, despite it being illegal, prior to that. Yet, they weren’t ALL in jail or prison, were they? They just focused on their local community, buying pot from people they trusted, or who were vetted to them by people they trusted…and for the vast majority of them, they got away with it, for a very lengthy period of time, even though we’ve been in a “War on Drugs!” for decades.
Of course, many readers have their hackles up right now, because I seem to be supportive of marijuana legalization, and that ol’ demon weed is BAD!
A far more useful task would be – instead of worrying about what other people put in their bodies – to look at how they’re getting away with it, in those states that don’t have legalization, and learn from them. Here’s the deal, regardless of what you think about marijuana: there had to be someone growing it. There had to be someone buying it from the people growing it. There had to be others buying it, in turn, from them, and then ingesting it. Despite the fact it was/is ILLEGAL, and has had a concerted effort from federal, state, and local law enforcement, to stop it from being grown, harvested, sold, and ingested. That, ladies and gentlemen, is what you’re trying to do!
Not with marijuana, necessarily—although, can you think of a better way to finance your local tribe’s efforts? Whether you’re focused on short-sighted concerns like guns and the Second Amendment, or invasively high taxation, or any number of other issues that we need to take into consideration, due to undue federal influence.
If you could develop the same types of LOCAL networks that pot-smokers have, you’d have Liberty, in your lifetime…right now. Today.
How?
Let’s look at guns. Everybody loves guns, right? Well, except liberals, and even they love guns, they just don’t love that you have guns. So, how do you start building your networks around guns? Well, how many of your close friends have guns and love to shoot? 4-5? 12-20? It doesn’t matter if they agree with you on religion. It doesn’t matter if they agree with you on taxes. It doesn’t matter if they agree with you on prostitution. We’re focused on ONE aspect now. We’re focused on guns.
So, let’s say you’re like me, and are kind of an a-hole, so you only have 4-5 people you consider “friends.” By that, I mean, they are close enough that you would—literally—step in front of a moving train and die, facing the danger, to save their lives…and vice-versa. Of those, only 3 are serious gun guys. Now, within those 5 people, you have the nucleus of a tribe. Even though the other two aren’t gun guys, they’re loyal to you, unto death. You have frith with them. They may have other close friends who are gun guys too, but let’s focus on the three of your kinsmen that ARE gun guys. You’ve decided that you really, REALLY, REALLY, need a .338 Lapua Mag, but the fed has outlawed them. What are you going to do? You’re going to go to your gun guy friends and ask if they know anyone they trust, who has one they’d part with. In turn, they’ll go to their other gun guy friends, and ask if they know anyone that they trust, who has one. Eventually, down the trail a little bit, someone actually has one, and has decided—for whatever reason—he doesn’t need it anymore. Granted, it’s “only” a Savage 110 BA, but it IS a .338 Lapua Mag. He’ll sell it, but he wants $3500 for it.
Then, the guy down the line of friends of friends, who actually found the .338, well, he wants $500 for a finder’s fee. So, you’re going to pay $4000 for a rifle that originally cost less than $1500. That’s messed up, isn’t it? Guess what….it’s not at all messed up. It’s not a breach of frith, and it’s not an insult to the “cause.” It’s called the real world.
So, you pony up $4000, and hand it to your friend that you trust. He hands it to his friend, etc, all the way down the line. Two weeks later, your friend hands you a beat up Savage 110BA. You inspect it, and realize, the barrel is damned near shot out. Did you get screwed? Nope. Your auxiliary found you what you said you needed. Now, you’re going to have to replace the barrel. You can either restrict that conversation to your gun guy friends, or you can ask any of your friends that you trust, if they know a machinist or old gunsmith that can build you a barrel. It ends up costing you another $2000 to get a barrel built. You’ve now dropped $6000 on a rifle, and you don’t even have ammunition for it yet….
Newsflash, THAT’S how the underground and auxiliary work.
What!?
So, what does THAT have to do with the original question? You want to help the fight for liberty! You’re not worried about how you’re going to buy guns on the black market!
Patience, young Padwan. It has EVERYTHING to do with the auxiliary you want to start building.
Logistics Auxiliary Cell
1) Cellular Construction
Your cell consists of the people you know, personally, and trust—even unto Death. How many people do you know that you would trust to die—or go to Federal Prison for a decade—before they would rat you out? One? Two? Three, if you’re really, really blessed? That’s your cell. In turn, of the two people you trust, who trust you to the same level, they each have another one or two friends. Those people DO NOT need to meet you, or even know about you. They can know their friend has another friend he trusts as implicitly as he trusts them, but nothing else. Now you’ve got—within the network of multiple tribal bonds—the beginning of a network.
2) Supporting the Warfighters
So, within your three-man cell, none of you are “spring chickens,” and you have recognized that you’re not going to be leading any raids or fighting off hordes of Cannibalistic San Franciscans. What you want to be able to do is provide a level of support to those that need it, who CAN fight off those hordes. How do you do that? You ask your tribesmen, “what do your friends that are young enough to fight, need to do so?” They ask their younger, fitter friends, “Hey, buddy, what gear/equipment/supplies are you short on? What do you have, but recognize is perishable/expendable, and WILL need to be replaced/resupplied in the future?”
The reply comes back, through the intermediaries, “Ammo. Gun parts. Body armor. Medical supplies. Food.”
“Great, you knuckle-draggers. What kind of ammo? Parts for what guns? What type of body armor? What medical supplies?”
“Oh. Sorry. Yeah, my guy says he and six of his friends are all running M4 carbines, and SIG Sauer P226 pistols. They’ve got Level III ceramic plates for their body armor, size large, and they’re worried about basic TC3 medical supplies. Can we help?”
“Sure. Now, I know what specifically to stockpile. I’ll get on it.”
Let’s assume for a moment, that you’re an older guy, you grew up with an M14, and .45ACP, and you think 5.56 and 9mm are jokes. You also know though, that you’re beyond an age where you’re interested in looking for trouble. Does it make sense to only stock 7.62×51 and .45 ACP, or would it make more sense, in order to support those guys, for you to stockpile some 5.56 and 9mm, besides?
Yeah…..
But, you’ve never taken a TC3 class, so you don’t know what medical supplies you need. You can either ask, or even better, you can take a TC3 class somewhere, and find out what medical supplies are needed, and why, in order to know what supplies will be in the greatest demand, in relation to the others.
You’ve got AR500 steel plate body armor. It’s cheap, and you’re not planning on running combat missions, so why bother blowing the extra money on ceramics? They can have steel!
Go take a patrolling or SUT class, and wear your steel plates for it, then come talk to me about how steel plates are “just as good.”
Do steel plates have advantages? Arguably. They’ll theoretically survive longer than ceramics. Ceramics are single-use items, right? How much does a steel plate weigh? According to the AR500armor.com website, their Level III plates (which are actually, probably NOT Level III, legally) – I can’t count the number of steel plates I’ve seen tested that M855 zipped straight through – weigh 7.5 pounds. So, 15 pounds for a set.
According to the Shellback Tactical website, my Banshee plate carrier weighs 2lbs, 5oz. So, now, I’m at 17 pounds, before I start adding ammunition.
My personal plate carrier, with my ceramic plates, weighs less than 12#. That’s FIVE loaded magazines I can carry, before the weight even equals the steel plate body armor alone. More importantly, I can run a lot further, faster, than I can with the additional five pounds of marginal protection.
Does it cost more? Of course it does. It’s a better product.
Can I afford six or seven or eight sets of ceramic plates? No. If I’ve got ten people in my “auxiliary” however, who are smart enough to set aside a set of ceramics though, I will be able to replace mine, should I need to, down the line.
Buying up supplies, to support the warfighters, without finding out what they need, and WHY they need it, is retarded. You might think you’re an “expert,” but the dude at the tip of the spear is whose opinion on the subject matters. Ask.
3) But, Money!
As we pointed out above, there’s no necessity that you’ll be “giving stuff away.” You MIGHT. It might turn out to be worthwhile to you, when the wolves are at your door, to say, “Hey, Joey, I know you’re gonna be out there on the line, and I can see you’re lacking body armor. I’ve got a rig set up in my basement. Let me go get it for you!” In return of course, Joey is “paying” you for the armor, by the very minor task of potentially getting shot in the face, to protect your home and life!
Alternatively, if it’s some dude you don’t know, in a cell three towns away, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with telling your trusted friend, who will pass it down the line of friends to the end-user. “Hey, yeah, I’ve got a spare set of ceramic plates stashed away. I need $500 for the set.” The end-user dude, who is not part of your tribe, after all, will either pony up the $500 or he won’t. That’s not your problem.
If it’s GOING to be your problem – if they get over-run and the bad guys are coming to your town next – then maybe you’ll decide to give them away after all, in the hope that he’ll stop them first. Or, maybe your friend will ask you to give them away, as a favor to his kinsman. That’s your decision to make, at the moment, based on circumstances.
In a Nutshell
So, what does it mean, to start a logistics cell? It means identifying who your guerrilla and underground force are—at least in a general sense—and finding out what they need. It means stockpiling the stuff THEY will need, not what you think they will need.
It means asking your friends—whom you trust, even unto Death—to ask THEIR friends, whom they trust, even unto Death, what exactly they feel like they’re going to need. Then, it’s a matter of stockpiling it.
Intelligence Cells
Developing an intelligence cell requires that you begin by defining your area. What area are you going to conduct an IPB (Intelligence Preparation of the Battlefield) for? Your town? The County? The State? Once you’ve one that, you need to look at developing a complete intelligence picture, of that area. Hostile threat groups, potential allies, behavior and beliefs of non-aligned people in the area.
At the risk of sounding self-serving, I’m going to suggest two things, if you believe you want to begin developing an intel cell. 1) Take Sam Culper’s class. 2) Get Volume Two of The Reluctant Partisan, and study the two entire chapters I did on Intel Collection and Intel Analysis. Between those two activities, you’ll have a really, really solid idea on how to start developing an intel picture of your area.
When it comes to actually collecting information, most of your efforts will—necessarily—focus on open-source collection from sources like newspapers, the Internet, etc. There’s no reason however, that you can’t teach your two or three friends how to conduct tactical questioning (NOT the same thing as an interrogation), and have them teach two or three of their friends, and then ask them for specific intel product, to be gained through TQ from others that they might know.
The Role of Responsibility in a Tribe
We had friends over for supper the other night, and we sat around playing a strategy board game. As we were finishing up, the conversation turned to the efforts of the Liberty movement. Our friends are well versed in my views on neo-tribalism as the strategy of choice for survival and restoration of Liberty.
As we were talking, I brought up the fact that most of the “rights” we believe are “natural” or “God-given,” did not originate in antiquity in Greco-Roman culture, but in fact were derived from the cultures of the Celtic and Germanic language-group tribes of Northern Europe. One of those is the “right to bear arms.”
Unfortunately, in today’s world, too many have been brain-washed into the belief that this is a “God-given right,” and thus is subject to nothing. The fact is, in the culture from which the recognition of that right was derived, the “right” to bear arms was more accurately, the “responsibility” to bear arms. No free man could be righteously robbed of his right to bear arms within his tribe. Not even by a chief or a king.
In return however, in order to maintain his status as a free man, and member of the tribe, he knew he was expected, when called upon, to move towards the (extremely metaphorical in this case) sound of the guns, weapon in hand, to protect the tribe. Refusal to do so would result in “outlawry.” This didn’t mean you went to jail. This meant—basically—excommunication from the tribe.
In that time and place in history—well, prehistory, technically—not having a tribe was pretty much the same as a death sentence. You were no longer protected by the reputation and fame of your tribe’s ferocity and honor. You were fair game for any dude with a bow or spear, who decided to kill you and take your stuff. Sure, you might be lucky enough to fight off one attacker. If you were a particular badass, you might manage two or three (of course, if you were that much of a badass, you wouldn’t have been cast out for being a wimp in the first place, right?).
So, what does THIS have to do with being the auxiliary?
A lot of people have taken the discussion of being the auxiliary as having meant they don’t need to do PT, train with their weapons, and learn the basics of small-unit tactics. They’re the support guys, and support guys don’t fight, right?
I call BS. You are still responsible for your own safety, ultimately. You may still be called upon, in extremis, to grab your rifle, and go help protect hearth and home.
You STILL need to learn to fight. You STILL need to do PT. You may not ever be “elite infantry” or “special operations” fit again in your life, but you still need to be as dangerous as you can be, and being fit and well-trained is a critical part of that.
Conclusion
So, how then, do we go about building an auxiliary cell?
1) Do PT and train. It is part of the task, AND it will help you understand what the end-users need.
2) Talk to your closest friends and determine if they will be fighters or not. If so, find out what they and their group of fighters feel they will need. If not, find out if they know anyone, that they trust, who will be a fighter. Somewhere down the line, you will find someone. If they’re out there training, find out what they feel like they will need, or even DO need. There’s nothing saying that, just because your local network isn’t fighting RIGHT NOW, that you can’t be the auxiliary, right now, and equip some young guy with the gear he needs. Even if it’s only loaned out—through friends—when he’s training, it’s supporting their efforts.
Send one of the young studs to a class with someone. So what if you need to finance it? That’s what the auxiliary does. They provide logistical support to the warfighters. Even if the “kid” you send to a class turns out to be a flake, or he ends up moving six states away, so what? You’ll still—through your connections, and with anonymity—built connections of trust and loyalty with the group he was with when you financed it.
3) Start developing an intelligence preparation of the battlefield (IPB) of your local area.
4) Of the friends that you hold closest, maintain those relationships, and do what you can to strengthen them. Not just with the individual friends, but between spouses and children as well. Do things together, as families, even separate from “prepper” activities.
5) If you have some acquaintances or “friends” of a lesser bond, who you think are like-minded, spend the effort and time to make those bonds tighter.
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Tuesday, March 8, 2016
Dirty Civil War, Matt Bracken
This is an interview between Matt Bracken and Forward Observer Magazine, take from it what you will. I think it is an important read.
MATTHEW BRACKEN is a former Navy SEAL (BUD/S Class 105), a Constitutionalist, and a self-described “freedomista”.
You might think that the most courageous thing Matt Bracken’s ever done is taking a SEAL team to Beirut, Lebanon in 1983, the same year of the Marine Barracks bombings… but you’d be wrong. Bracken is standing up as a bulwark for Liberty in the face of growing danger to those who speak out against the regime.
FO: What are some of the threats that pro-Liberty Americans will see in the next few years, and what can we expect? More lawfare? Actual conflict? A fight for the Republic?
MB: All Americans face the risk of chaos, anarchy and starvation resulting from the collapse of our electrical grid. Electricity has become our oxygen, necessary to sustain our civilization, and I see at least a dozen ways it could be disrupted with catastrophic results. To the extent that pro-liberty Americans are also “preppers,” they will be better prepared to face the dire consequences.
Absolutely I see “lawfare” by our rogue federal agencies against patriots continually ramping up. With no consequences resulting from scandals such as Fast and Furious and the targeting of patriots by the IRS, Team Tyranny feels emboldened and will only make life harder for those who defy them.
As far as an actual fight for the republic, it could happen, for example, after a hypothetical future Waco incident. In that case, I could envision federal agents being lured into ambushes and so on. The ambushes could be false flag operations or actual attacks by frustrated Americans, but the result could be a shooting war, with patriots being “disappeared” on one side of the ledger, and federal agents and officials being assassinated on the other. This would probably turn into a “dirty civil war” similar to what happened in Northern Ireland or Argentina in the 1970s, but obviously on a far more vast scale.
FO: You mention that there are at least a dozen ways that our electrical grid could be disrupted. What do you see as the most likely causes for grid-down?
Anything from a solar flare to a cyber-war with a national entity could take down the grid. In the event of a civil war, there will be a strong urban vs. rural dynamic, and one way that rural participants will strike at their urban antagonists will be to strike at the grid carrying power to the cities. The Metcalf power station incidents in California last year seem to have been a dry run or proof of concept drill. A dozen teams of riflemen could put our grid at danger with a coordinated attack.
Groups from the former Sendero Luminoso in Peru to the Sinaloa Cartel in Mexico to Al Qaeda in Yemen have attacked major power grids. In America, we have allowed electricity to become our oxygen, and it’s naive to expect that in any type of future war, (civil, international, or terrorist), antagonists will not attempt to cut off that oxygen and kill their enemies en masse. Our power grid is our exposed jugular vein.
FO: What are the best ways Patriots can protect themselves during this time? How long might a “dirty civil war” last?
If [Social Network Analysis] is used to target patriots–and it will be– then there is not much anyone can do for self-protection, other than move to an area where Federal Law Enforcement Agents (FLEA) are afraid to operate, if such places will even exist. Nobody will be able to live a normal life if there is the constant risk of a Soviet KGB- style arrest by plain-clothed teams of anonymous agents. My goal is to remind [law enforcement officers] and especially the FLEAs to think very hard about following orders facilitating secret arrests. The blow-back against all of them and their collaborator for employing Gestapo tactics against Americans will be incredibly ferocious.
Once patriots begin to disappear, Rule 308 will be used against any identifiable FLEA targets, and the dirty civil war will turn into a nightmare that could last for years. There is no way to predict which side would win, or what America might look like at the end. But once a war of secret arrests and assassinations begins, it will be very hard to stop.
My goal with much of my writing is to warn all potential sides that a dirty civil war must be avoided if at all possible. The only thing worse than a dirty civil war would be America turning into a Soviet-style totalitarian dictatorship. Uncounted millions of scoped deer rifles tell me that turning American into a dictatorship would be almost impossible, and I hope that the FLEAs who might study this Q&A also give my short story “What I Saw at The Coup” and my essay “Dear Mr. Security Agent” a very close reading. The shape of the next few years will depend largely on the honor and integrity of our LEOs and FLEAs, and how strongly or weakly they adhere to their oaths to defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic.
FO: What’s your take on the current militarization of the police? Are these police MRAPs just a useful way to re-purpose military vehicles or something worse? What roles do you see the police taking in any Constitutional crisis?
Federal LEAs are attempting to co-opt local law enforcement agencies, turning them into their “grunts” for perimeter security around federal actions and other duties where sufficient armed manpower is required. There are simply not enough federal agents to conduct all of the raids they might envision conducting, and also at the same time provide all-around security for the federal agents from potentially enraged local citizens.
[Mine Resistant Ambush Proof vehicles], latest generation night vision and commo gear and so on are the “gifts” that the feds are be- stowing upon local LEAs in order to make them dependent upon federal largess and beholden to federal masters. In the near term this strategy might be effective, but in the event that an actual dirty civil war is ignited, the loyalty of local LE to their FLEA masters cannot be assured. At the least, some constitutionally-minded local LEOs will warn patriots of planned raids and arrests, resulting in FLEAs being ambushed on the way to their targets, or at their targets.
Look to Mexico today to see what an American dirty civil war will look like. It will be impossible to tell the genuine “on duty” LEOs from “off duty” LEOs in so-called death squads, from criminals posing as LEOs. This would obviously be an extremely dangerous environment for freedomistas, as we see today in Mexico.
CW2 cube
FO: Your Civil War 2 Cube (above) has been immensely popular. We see Suburbia is kind of trapped between Rural and Urban. What do you think the suburban spaces will look like during conflict?
Not all suburbs are alike, obviously. A suburb located between Asheville, NC and the mountains is not the same as a suburb located between megacities in the DC-Boston corridor. In general, I agree with the hypothesis of the book “A Failure of Civility.” A well-located suburban subdivision offers enough manpower to mount a guard force, as well as containing a useful collection of skills from doctors to electricians. During the Dark Ages the walled city or town was the best model for success. Farmers did not live in distant, lonely farm houses; it was simply too dangerous to be that isolated.
FO: What’s your message to those who have no bug-out plan out of urban or suburban areas? What advice can you offer about sheltering in place?
Stocking up on food and water might be critical for surviving a short catastrophe or power outage, so it is something that is well worth doing. If the power stays out for months or longer, “bugging in” won’t work. If the environment is too dangerous to permit safe travel, then all of the food that is consumed must be generated within your own zip code. How many American zip codes generate enough food, right now, to ensure the survival of their inhabitants? What if those food sources are without electricity, fuel, or needed chemicals during the growing season? In any case, if the power goes out, the food will stop moving. Starvation will begin in just a few weeks, while it will take months or years to start new agricultural projects at the local level.
If you must shelter in place in suburbia, I’d recommend following the advice in [A Failure of Civility]. Attempt to interest your neighbors in preparing for various scenarios. No single house in suburbia can become a successful fortress. Suburbs must be defended at their gates, with a quick reaction force ready to respond. Former military buddies in your neighborhood might become the nucleus of the nascent defense force. I cannot recommend the book “A Failure of Civility” highly enough.
FO: Fast-foward: we have a domestic conflict over a Constitutional issue. What happens to the military? What’s your opinion on how they align themselves with the regime or with Freedom Forces?
I cling to the hope that most of the military will not be willing to perform raids upon American homes. However, they will be capable of following most general orders and they will be effective at cordoning towns and cutting off travel options, which can be just as deadly if the cordon means that local inhabitants can neither leave nor bring in food supplies. A pandemic resulting in city-wide quarantines is one easy to imagine scenario. Soldiers don’t need to shoot you to kill you. They can pin you in place until you starve to death. Ask the Ukrainians. For actual raids and assaults upon American citizens, the military and FLEAs will develop units made up of individuals selected for their loyalty to the federal government, and their willingness (or even eagerness) to shoot “enemies of the people.” Social Network Analysis will not only be useful for finding and targeting “enemies of the state,” it will also be extremely useful for locating the sociopathic killers among the wider military, LE, and prison populations (gang members).
These willing killers can then be brought together into very dangerous “hunter-killer teams” to do the dirty “wet work” required by Team Tyranny. In the event of a grid collapse, most members of the military and LE will desert at the first opportunity, in order to take care of their own families. In the event of an economic collapse, they will also desert if they are not paid, or if they are paid in meaningless scrip with no purchasing power.
FO: Many members of the special operations community hear the call to defend Liberty at home. If conflict is inevitable, where do these former leaders fit in?
I believe that the Constitution will remain our most important defensive bulwark. The Constitution will be our most effective litmus test for separating the oath takers from the traitorous oath breakers. Former military and LE leaders should take every opportunity to remind their active duty brothers of their sworn oath to defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic. They should also politely remind them that Team Liberty will have a very long memory when it comes to dealing with traitors. There will be no statute of limitations for traitors, and justice might eventually be dealt out under the well-known Rule 308. Loyalty to the Constitution must be a constant theme, both among friends and on social media. No active member of the military or LE will be permitted to plead ignorance when it comes to upholding the Constitution. We must remind them of that fact as often as possible, until it is ringing in their ears.
FO: What are a few things outside of physically and mentally preparing that Patriots can do to help the fight for Liberty right now?
Unless one’s personal strategy is to remain a “gray man,” or in effect an unknown “stay behind agent,” patriots should be loud voices for liberty both in person and in social media. Don’t cower in fear of Team Tyran- ny. Social Network Analysis means that they already know who you are, where you live, and what your views are. Take every opportunity to stand up for freedom and liberty, and make the Constitution your byword. Take every opportunity to remind active military and LE that we expect them to uphold their sworn oaths to defend the Constitution, and that we are paying very careful attention to the oath breakers among them. The boys and girls down in the fusion centers must be made to understand very clearly that they will be held accountable for their actions, and that “I was just following orders” will not be an acceptable excuse for acting against the Constitution as the minions of Team Tyranny.
FO: You’re a big proponent of hitting the water to escape civil unrest. Why do you prefer that to a rural retreat or a mountain location?
Rural retreats, once located, are too easy to besiege with sniper tactics and other means. FLEAs actually prefer it when patriots move to remote locations: it makes them easy to isolate and eventually they can wind up in a Waco or Ruby Ridge situation.
On the other hand, all of the oceans are connected. A forty-foot sailboat can carry enough food and water to last its crew for months. A sailboat can leave port and wait out a pandemic or social disorder while spending weeks or even months at sea before returning, or a sailboat can voyage non-stop to another country or even to another continent where conditions might be better. Obviously, sailing is not a viable option for everybody. It requires some physical stamina and agility, and a resistance to motion sickness.
FO: What are the most likely threats you’ll face while bugging out on a boat? What are your expectations?
Once at sea and more than 50 or 100 miles from land, the ocean becomes a very low threat environment. Oceans are so vast that the odds of randomly crossing the path of another vessel are astronomically small. Post SHTF, few will be out wasting precious fuel motoring around the oceans looking for random prey. Pirates (including those wearing uniforms with numbers on their bows) always congregate near ports and will transit mainly along coasts. Near land, a speedboat can obviously overtake a sailboat. Get- ting clear of the coasts and gaining the anonymity of the open ocean is always the first priority during dangerous times.
In the event that a motor vessel with superior armaments does spot a sailboat and determine to attack it, the sailboat is going to be in a very tough situation. However, this “worst case” (and very unlikely) ocean scenario is no worse than being besieged on land in a remote rural retreat. The other big risk comes in port, when corrupt officials might decide to take your boat under color of law. But being able to cross oceans means having the flexibility to leave a dangerous or corrupt nation and sail directly to a safer place. Or leave a very dangerous state in America, and sail directly to another one. For example, during a SHTF scenario, a sailboat could easily transit directly from New York to Texas, while that same trip might be impossible by road.
A 40-foot sailboat could leave Florida, gain the safety of the open ocean, and next make port weeks later in Iceland or Argentina. Imagine how far a 40 foot RV, loaded with sup- plies, would make it on the inter- states after the SHTF. Not very far, with road blockages, check points, and ambushes around every curve. A sailboat over the horizon on the open ocean has effectively disappeared from the grid matrix. It can also reappear at the moment and the location of its choosing.
FO: In your book, Domestic Enemies: The Reconquista, you write about a concerted effort by enemies to re-conquer the American Southwest. Although it’s “fictional”, your writing tends to foretell non-fictional events. Where are we right now in the Reconquista conflict and what happens next?
The Southwest is now in a death spiral as far as liberty, freedom and prosperity go. Several generations of anti-American and pro-Aztlan radicals have graduated from universities across the Southwest, and today they are judges, federal attorneys, district attorneys, FLEAs, mayors and police chiefs. This allows them to take leftist “lawfare” to a much higher and very dangerous level. Witness the Reese case in Deming, New Mexico: it is a model for future abuses of official power. Ideologically motivated federal attorneys are able to cherry pick judges who are fellow travelers, with the outcomes of selected cases preordained. This corruption of official power will get worse and worse, until patriots either flee the South- west, surrender, or retaliate in anger, leading to a “dirty civil war.”
The anti-American cabal largely running the Southwest today is fully committed to open borders and amnesty citizenship for illegal aliens. We are well past the demographic tipping points. The Southwest will become more and more like Mexico: extremely dangerous and totally corrupt. As I mentioned above, soon we will see assassinations and ambushes by shadowy groups that might be made up of cartel killers, or “off-duty” policemen, or federal agents, or a very dirty combination of them. Study the Reese case very carefully: it shows the future. Corrupt police shielded drug cartel smuggling routes in Luna County, New Mexico. Corrupt police were blackmailed by ideologically corrupt ATF and FBI agents into providing libelous testimony in order to railroad the Reese family. The false and fabricated case was put forward by corrupt leftist federal attorneys to corrupt leftist judges. Leftist reporters in the media turned a blind eye to the ideological corruption. Justice is effectively dead in New Mexico. What is waiting around the corner ahead of us is a fatally corrupt Southwest that is indistinguishable from the worst of Mexico. There is no turning back from that outcome that I can see.
FO: In our previous issue, we took a look at Balkanization and secession. Where do you see America in another 10 or 20 years? What do the political structures and geographic boundaries look like?
There are many potential outcomes, one being a post-apocalyptic landscape resembling my short story “Alas, Brave New Babylon.” Unfortunately, I see almost every scenario resulting in attacks against the power grid, and the consequences will be hard to imagine if our electricity is cut for even a few weeks. If we somehow manage to avoid a grid- down scenario, I think that America will follow in the footsteps of the Soviet Union in terms of possessing a decrepit nuclear deterrent, with a collapsed economy that will not support superpower-level military operations either abroad or at home. If the troops cannot be paid in a currency of value, they will not follow orders. We may eventually devolve into “Argentina with nukes.”
Something like the scenario in my novel “Foreign Enemies and Traitors” is possible: a regional breakup, with Washington DC only in full control of a rump USA, mainly in the Northeast. The Southwest will resemble Mexico: corrupt to the marrow and far too dangerous for anyone to live a normal life. The Northwest and the South might do better, depending on how the collapse and breakup proceeds. On paper, the United States might still have 50 states, but I don’t think that Washington will be able to dictate terms to all of them. Federal taxes will not be collected, and the remaining federal forces will mainly be situated around Washington DC and the Northeast corridor, to protect the nominal national leadership.
But if at some point the power grid is taken down, our cities will explode, and all bets are off. If people don’t have time to read my long novels, I wish that they would read “Alas, Brave New Babylon,” “What I Saw at the Coup,” and the other short works on the Bracken Anthology. Links to the individual essays and stories are located on my website gratis. I hope this Q&A encourages people to read them. These are extremely dangerous times. Forewarned is forearmed.
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MATTHEW BRACKEN is a former Navy SEAL (BUD/S Class 105), a Constitutionalist, and a self-described “freedomista”.
You might think that the most courageous thing Matt Bracken’s ever done is taking a SEAL team to Beirut, Lebanon in 1983, the same year of the Marine Barracks bombings… but you’d be wrong. Bracken is standing up as a bulwark for Liberty in the face of growing danger to those who speak out against the regime.
FO: What are some of the threats that pro-Liberty Americans will see in the next few years, and what can we expect? More lawfare? Actual conflict? A fight for the Republic?
MB: All Americans face the risk of chaos, anarchy and starvation resulting from the collapse of our electrical grid. Electricity has become our oxygen, necessary to sustain our civilization, and I see at least a dozen ways it could be disrupted with catastrophic results. To the extent that pro-liberty Americans are also “preppers,” they will be better prepared to face the dire consequences.
Absolutely I see “lawfare” by our rogue federal agencies against patriots continually ramping up. With no consequences resulting from scandals such as Fast and Furious and the targeting of patriots by the IRS, Team Tyranny feels emboldened and will only make life harder for those who defy them.
As far as an actual fight for the republic, it could happen, for example, after a hypothetical future Waco incident. In that case, I could envision federal agents being lured into ambushes and so on. The ambushes could be false flag operations or actual attacks by frustrated Americans, but the result could be a shooting war, with patriots being “disappeared” on one side of the ledger, and federal agents and officials being assassinated on the other. This would probably turn into a “dirty civil war” similar to what happened in Northern Ireland or Argentina in the 1970s, but obviously on a far more vast scale.
FO: You mention that there are at least a dozen ways that our electrical grid could be disrupted. What do you see as the most likely causes for grid-down?
Anything from a solar flare to a cyber-war with a national entity could take down the grid. In the event of a civil war, there will be a strong urban vs. rural dynamic, and one way that rural participants will strike at their urban antagonists will be to strike at the grid carrying power to the cities. The Metcalf power station incidents in California last year seem to have been a dry run or proof of concept drill. A dozen teams of riflemen could put our grid at danger with a coordinated attack.
Groups from the former Sendero Luminoso in Peru to the Sinaloa Cartel in Mexico to Al Qaeda in Yemen have attacked major power grids. In America, we have allowed electricity to become our oxygen, and it’s naive to expect that in any type of future war, (civil, international, or terrorist), antagonists will not attempt to cut off that oxygen and kill their enemies en masse. Our power grid is our exposed jugular vein.
FO: What are the best ways Patriots can protect themselves during this time? How long might a “dirty civil war” last?
If [Social Network Analysis] is used to target patriots–and it will be– then there is not much anyone can do for self-protection, other than move to an area where Federal Law Enforcement Agents (FLEA) are afraid to operate, if such places will even exist. Nobody will be able to live a normal life if there is the constant risk of a Soviet KGB- style arrest by plain-clothed teams of anonymous agents. My goal is to remind [law enforcement officers] and especially the FLEAs to think very hard about following orders facilitating secret arrests. The blow-back against all of them and their collaborator for employing Gestapo tactics against Americans will be incredibly ferocious.
Once patriots begin to disappear, Rule 308 will be used against any identifiable FLEA targets, and the dirty civil war will turn into a nightmare that could last for years. There is no way to predict which side would win, or what America might look like at the end. But once a war of secret arrests and assassinations begins, it will be very hard to stop.
My goal with much of my writing is to warn all potential sides that a dirty civil war must be avoided if at all possible. The only thing worse than a dirty civil war would be America turning into a Soviet-style totalitarian dictatorship. Uncounted millions of scoped deer rifles tell me that turning American into a dictatorship would be almost impossible, and I hope that the FLEAs who might study this Q&A also give my short story “What I Saw at The Coup” and my essay “Dear Mr. Security Agent” a very close reading. The shape of the next few years will depend largely on the honor and integrity of our LEOs and FLEAs, and how strongly or weakly they adhere to their oaths to defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic.
FO: What’s your take on the current militarization of the police? Are these police MRAPs just a useful way to re-purpose military vehicles or something worse? What roles do you see the police taking in any Constitutional crisis?
Federal LEAs are attempting to co-opt local law enforcement agencies, turning them into their “grunts” for perimeter security around federal actions and other duties where sufficient armed manpower is required. There are simply not enough federal agents to conduct all of the raids they might envision conducting, and also at the same time provide all-around security for the federal agents from potentially enraged local citizens.
[Mine Resistant Ambush Proof vehicles], latest generation night vision and commo gear and so on are the “gifts” that the feds are be- stowing upon local LEAs in order to make them dependent upon federal largess and beholden to federal masters. In the near term this strategy might be effective, but in the event that an actual dirty civil war is ignited, the loyalty of local LE to their FLEA masters cannot be assured. At the least, some constitutionally-minded local LEOs will warn patriots of planned raids and arrests, resulting in FLEAs being ambushed on the way to their targets, or at their targets.
Look to Mexico today to see what an American dirty civil war will look like. It will be impossible to tell the genuine “on duty” LEOs from “off duty” LEOs in so-called death squads, from criminals posing as LEOs. This would obviously be an extremely dangerous environment for freedomistas, as we see today in Mexico.
CW2 cube
FO: Your Civil War 2 Cube (above) has been immensely popular. We see Suburbia is kind of trapped between Rural and Urban. What do you think the suburban spaces will look like during conflict?
Not all suburbs are alike, obviously. A suburb located between Asheville, NC and the mountains is not the same as a suburb located between megacities in the DC-Boston corridor. In general, I agree with the hypothesis of the book “A Failure of Civility.” A well-located suburban subdivision offers enough manpower to mount a guard force, as well as containing a useful collection of skills from doctors to electricians. During the Dark Ages the walled city or town was the best model for success. Farmers did not live in distant, lonely farm houses; it was simply too dangerous to be that isolated.
FO: What’s your message to those who have no bug-out plan out of urban or suburban areas? What advice can you offer about sheltering in place?
Stocking up on food and water might be critical for surviving a short catastrophe or power outage, so it is something that is well worth doing. If the power stays out for months or longer, “bugging in” won’t work. If the environment is too dangerous to permit safe travel, then all of the food that is consumed must be generated within your own zip code. How many American zip codes generate enough food, right now, to ensure the survival of their inhabitants? What if those food sources are without electricity, fuel, or needed chemicals during the growing season? In any case, if the power goes out, the food will stop moving. Starvation will begin in just a few weeks, while it will take months or years to start new agricultural projects at the local level.
If you must shelter in place in suburbia, I’d recommend following the advice in [A Failure of Civility]. Attempt to interest your neighbors in preparing for various scenarios. No single house in suburbia can become a successful fortress. Suburbs must be defended at their gates, with a quick reaction force ready to respond. Former military buddies in your neighborhood might become the nucleus of the nascent defense force. I cannot recommend the book “A Failure of Civility” highly enough.
FO: Fast-foward: we have a domestic conflict over a Constitutional issue. What happens to the military? What’s your opinion on how they align themselves with the regime or with Freedom Forces?
I cling to the hope that most of the military will not be willing to perform raids upon American homes. However, they will be capable of following most general orders and they will be effective at cordoning towns and cutting off travel options, which can be just as deadly if the cordon means that local inhabitants can neither leave nor bring in food supplies. A pandemic resulting in city-wide quarantines is one easy to imagine scenario. Soldiers don’t need to shoot you to kill you. They can pin you in place until you starve to death. Ask the Ukrainians. For actual raids and assaults upon American citizens, the military and FLEAs will develop units made up of individuals selected for their loyalty to the federal government, and their willingness (or even eagerness) to shoot “enemies of the people.” Social Network Analysis will not only be useful for finding and targeting “enemies of the state,” it will also be extremely useful for locating the sociopathic killers among the wider military, LE, and prison populations (gang members).
These willing killers can then be brought together into very dangerous “hunter-killer teams” to do the dirty “wet work” required by Team Tyranny. In the event of a grid collapse, most members of the military and LE will desert at the first opportunity, in order to take care of their own families. In the event of an economic collapse, they will also desert if they are not paid, or if they are paid in meaningless scrip with no purchasing power.
FO: Many members of the special operations community hear the call to defend Liberty at home. If conflict is inevitable, where do these former leaders fit in?
I believe that the Constitution will remain our most important defensive bulwark. The Constitution will be our most effective litmus test for separating the oath takers from the traitorous oath breakers. Former military and LE leaders should take every opportunity to remind their active duty brothers of their sworn oath to defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic. They should also politely remind them that Team Liberty will have a very long memory when it comes to dealing with traitors. There will be no statute of limitations for traitors, and justice might eventually be dealt out under the well-known Rule 308. Loyalty to the Constitution must be a constant theme, both among friends and on social media. No active member of the military or LE will be permitted to plead ignorance when it comes to upholding the Constitution. We must remind them of that fact as often as possible, until it is ringing in their ears.
FO: What are a few things outside of physically and mentally preparing that Patriots can do to help the fight for Liberty right now?
Unless one’s personal strategy is to remain a “gray man,” or in effect an unknown “stay behind agent,” patriots should be loud voices for liberty both in person and in social media. Don’t cower in fear of Team Tyran- ny. Social Network Analysis means that they already know who you are, where you live, and what your views are. Take every opportunity to stand up for freedom and liberty, and make the Constitution your byword. Take every opportunity to remind active military and LE that we expect them to uphold their sworn oaths to defend the Constitution, and that we are paying very careful attention to the oath breakers among them. The boys and girls down in the fusion centers must be made to understand very clearly that they will be held accountable for their actions, and that “I was just following orders” will not be an acceptable excuse for acting against the Constitution as the minions of Team Tyranny.
FO: You’re a big proponent of hitting the water to escape civil unrest. Why do you prefer that to a rural retreat or a mountain location?
Rural retreats, once located, are too easy to besiege with sniper tactics and other means. FLEAs actually prefer it when patriots move to remote locations: it makes them easy to isolate and eventually they can wind up in a Waco or Ruby Ridge situation.
On the other hand, all of the oceans are connected. A forty-foot sailboat can carry enough food and water to last its crew for months. A sailboat can leave port and wait out a pandemic or social disorder while spending weeks or even months at sea before returning, or a sailboat can voyage non-stop to another country or even to another continent where conditions might be better. Obviously, sailing is not a viable option for everybody. It requires some physical stamina and agility, and a resistance to motion sickness.
FO: What are the most likely threats you’ll face while bugging out on a boat? What are your expectations?
Once at sea and more than 50 or 100 miles from land, the ocean becomes a very low threat environment. Oceans are so vast that the odds of randomly crossing the path of another vessel are astronomically small. Post SHTF, few will be out wasting precious fuel motoring around the oceans looking for random prey. Pirates (including those wearing uniforms with numbers on their bows) always congregate near ports and will transit mainly along coasts. Near land, a speedboat can obviously overtake a sailboat. Get- ting clear of the coasts and gaining the anonymity of the open ocean is always the first priority during dangerous times.
In the event that a motor vessel with superior armaments does spot a sailboat and determine to attack it, the sailboat is going to be in a very tough situation. However, this “worst case” (and very unlikely) ocean scenario is no worse than being besieged on land in a remote rural retreat. The other big risk comes in port, when corrupt officials might decide to take your boat under color of law. But being able to cross oceans means having the flexibility to leave a dangerous or corrupt nation and sail directly to a safer place. Or leave a very dangerous state in America, and sail directly to another one. For example, during a SHTF scenario, a sailboat could easily transit directly from New York to Texas, while that same trip might be impossible by road.
A 40-foot sailboat could leave Florida, gain the safety of the open ocean, and next make port weeks later in Iceland or Argentina. Imagine how far a 40 foot RV, loaded with sup- plies, would make it on the inter- states after the SHTF. Not very far, with road blockages, check points, and ambushes around every curve. A sailboat over the horizon on the open ocean has effectively disappeared from the grid matrix. It can also reappear at the moment and the location of its choosing.
FO: In your book, Domestic Enemies: The Reconquista, you write about a concerted effort by enemies to re-conquer the American Southwest. Although it’s “fictional”, your writing tends to foretell non-fictional events. Where are we right now in the Reconquista conflict and what happens next?
The Southwest is now in a death spiral as far as liberty, freedom and prosperity go. Several generations of anti-American and pro-Aztlan radicals have graduated from universities across the Southwest, and today they are judges, federal attorneys, district attorneys, FLEAs, mayors and police chiefs. This allows them to take leftist “lawfare” to a much higher and very dangerous level. Witness the Reese case in Deming, New Mexico: it is a model for future abuses of official power. Ideologically motivated federal attorneys are able to cherry pick judges who are fellow travelers, with the outcomes of selected cases preordained. This corruption of official power will get worse and worse, until patriots either flee the South- west, surrender, or retaliate in anger, leading to a “dirty civil war.”
The anti-American cabal largely running the Southwest today is fully committed to open borders and amnesty citizenship for illegal aliens. We are well past the demographic tipping points. The Southwest will become more and more like Mexico: extremely dangerous and totally corrupt. As I mentioned above, soon we will see assassinations and ambushes by shadowy groups that might be made up of cartel killers, or “off-duty” policemen, or federal agents, or a very dirty combination of them. Study the Reese case very carefully: it shows the future. Corrupt police shielded drug cartel smuggling routes in Luna County, New Mexico. Corrupt police were blackmailed by ideologically corrupt ATF and FBI agents into providing libelous testimony in order to railroad the Reese family. The false and fabricated case was put forward by corrupt leftist federal attorneys to corrupt leftist judges. Leftist reporters in the media turned a blind eye to the ideological corruption. Justice is effectively dead in New Mexico. What is waiting around the corner ahead of us is a fatally corrupt Southwest that is indistinguishable from the worst of Mexico. There is no turning back from that outcome that I can see.
FO: In our previous issue, we took a look at Balkanization and secession. Where do you see America in another 10 or 20 years? What do the political structures and geographic boundaries look like?
There are many potential outcomes, one being a post-apocalyptic landscape resembling my short story “Alas, Brave New Babylon.” Unfortunately, I see almost every scenario resulting in attacks against the power grid, and the consequences will be hard to imagine if our electricity is cut for even a few weeks. If we somehow manage to avoid a grid- down scenario, I think that America will follow in the footsteps of the Soviet Union in terms of possessing a decrepit nuclear deterrent, with a collapsed economy that will not support superpower-level military operations either abroad or at home. If the troops cannot be paid in a currency of value, they will not follow orders. We may eventually devolve into “Argentina with nukes.”
Something like the scenario in my novel “Foreign Enemies and Traitors” is possible: a regional breakup, with Washington DC only in full control of a rump USA, mainly in the Northeast. The Southwest will resemble Mexico: corrupt to the marrow and far too dangerous for anyone to live a normal life. The Northwest and the South might do better, depending on how the collapse and breakup proceeds. On paper, the United States might still have 50 states, but I don’t think that Washington will be able to dictate terms to all of them. Federal taxes will not be collected, and the remaining federal forces will mainly be situated around Washington DC and the Northeast corridor, to protect the nominal national leadership.
But if at some point the power grid is taken down, our cities will explode, and all bets are off. If people don’t have time to read my long novels, I wish that they would read “Alas, Brave New Babylon,” “What I Saw at the Coup,” and the other short works on the Bracken Anthology. Links to the individual essays and stories are located on my website gratis. I hope this Q&A encourages people to read them. These are extremely dangerous times. Forewarned is forearmed.
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Thursday, January 28, 2016
Wednesday, January 6, 2016
The Formation and Organization of Resistance Movements, Part Two
Here is the second part in the two part series by John Mosby, like I said at the beginning of part one, this is vital information that we need to start performing now. We need to be organized and ready to go before it is too late. We need to be part of the solution, not the problem. If we as patriots do not perform the necessary actions needed to be ready to perform our part this nation will cease to exist as a Constitutional Republic (which it really does not resemble any more).
The Formation and Organization of Resistance Movements, Part Two
John Mosby
This is part two of a two-part series.
There are three necessary components to a successful insurgency. The subversive underground is always present and is the first component of the resistance to form and begin active operations. The strategic goals of the resistance movement will determine the level of development for all three components:
The subversive underground
The support auxiliary
The paramilitary guerrilla force
The subversive underground.
The subversive underground is a cellular organization within the resistance movement that has the ability to conduct operations in areas that are practicably inaccessible to the paramilitary guerrilla force, such as populated areas that are under tight control of the regime’s security forces. The underground maintains the ability to operate in these denied areas because it operates clandestinely, returning to innocuous “day jobs” when not performing missions.
Typical tasks for the subversive underground include, but may not be limited to:
-Gathering intelligence and the development of intelligence networks.
-The development and operation of subversive “pirate” broadcast systems that control the dissemination of propaganda through radio, newspaper and leaflet distribution, and/or internet communications and web page development.
-The fabrication of special materials, such as false identification, weapons, and munitions.
-Black market networks and safe houses for transport of personnel and logistics.
-Sabotage by individuals and/or small units in urban centers.
-Operation of clandestine medical facilities to treat injured/wounded resistance personnel.
Members of the underground are normally active, productive members of their community, and their ability to function as part of the resistance is a product of their daily life and/or position within the community. They operate by maintaining a strict compartmentalization and delegating most risk to their auxiliary workers. The functions of the subversive underground are what allow the resistance to have a noticeable effect within urban or built-up areas.
The underground operational cell should typically be comprised of a leader and a few cell members who operate directly as a unit to conduct direct-action missions for the underground. The intelligence cell is different in that the cell leader should seldom, if ever, be in direct contact with the subordinate members of his cell, and the members of the cell are rarely in contact with one another. All communications of the intelligence cell would typically be conducted through dead-drop and other covert/clandestine methods of tradecraft.
It is imperative for the potential future guerrilla fighter to understand that, until he sees and recognizes these actions being undertaken by unknown parties, there is little point to “going to guns.” Doing so will only accelerate the actions of the regime to hunt down such “extremist” outlaws. Since the security forces will not be forced to deal with hunting down members of the subversive underground at the same time, there will be little to prevent them from focusing extensive assets to hunting down the “bandits hiding out in the woods.” If you have friends, whom you trust enough to discuss these matters and potential future issues with, who are not outspoken and openly critical of the current demise, educate them on the need for future subversives. They need to remain quiet and simply prepare for the day they need to wire a couple cans of ether to some douchebag’s engine manifold…(I’ve actually never tried it, but I’m pretty well convinced that it would be an extremely effective anti-vehicle/anti-personnel device to be utilized by a mechanic who happens to secretly support the resistance. If anyone has a junk vehicle that will still run, they should try it and let me know how it works out…Don’t run out and try it on a local police cruiser, please. I am not saying do it now. I’m saying consider such possible weapons in case they are needed in the future.
The auxiliary.
This term refers to members of the population who provide very limited clandestine support to the subversive underground and/or the paramilitary guerrilla force. Very seldom will they be “active” members of the movement and, as such, offer little intelligence value to the regime if compromised. Functions of the auxiliary may take the form of logistics, labor, or intelligence collection. Auxiliary members may not know any more than how to perform their specific function or service that supports the network. They may not even realize they are actively supporting the resistance. They should certainly never be asked to perform a job by a valuable member of the subversive underground cadre, face-to-face. Even in the modern environment of credit card payments and billing services, there are ways to accomplish such chores remotely. Until they are trusted, they do not learn the names or identities of the resistance.
In many ways however, the auxiliary personnel are at the greatest risk of compromise (thus the importance of their not offering intelligence value to the regime if compromised). Typical functions of the auxiliary include:
-Logistics procurement (either through stealing from a workplace, or purchasing on the black market, or open market, if it can be done without compromising their security or that of the movement.)
-Logistics distribution (transporting goods and dropping them in pre-determined cache locations for later pick-up by resistance forces.)
-Labor for special material fabrication (in some instances, the fabrication will be conducted in assembly-line fashion, to preclude any one group of auxiliaries from recognizing what they are manufacturing).
-Security and early warning for underground facilities and guerrilla bases (obviously, this is a task that must be reserved for well-trusted and very secure members of the auxiliary…cooks in regime mess halls/dining facilities who may overhear conversations regarding upcoming operations, mechanics who notice an increase in the request for pre-mission checks on vehicles, etc…)
-Intelligence collection (intentional or otherwise)
-Recruitment (obviously, in this case, the auxiliary member knows his part, but can still be compartmentalized to reduce risk to the actual underground or guerrilla force).
-Communications networks staff such as couriers and/or messengers.
-Propaganda distribution.
-Safe house management.
-Logistics and personnel transport (if functioning as part of the black market, the auxiliary member may never realize he is actively supporting the resistance).
The paramilitary guerrilla force.
The paramilitary guerrilla force is the overt military arm of the resistance. As individuals who actively engage the conventional military in combat operations, guerrillas have traditionally held a significant disadvantage in terms of training, equipment, and firepower (it should be noted that, in the event of an U.S. resistance movement, these would not necessarily be the case. That’s the purpose, after all, of this blog). For all their disadvantages, however, the guerrilla force has one distinct advantage that can offset any unfavorable balance – the initiative. In any operational planning, the guerrilla leader must strive to maintain and exploit this advantage.
The guerrilla element only attacks when it can develop and maintain a relative, if temporary, state of superiority of force. The element avoids any sort of decisive engagement, thus denying the conventional force military of the regime the opportunity to recover, regain their superiority, and use it against the guerrilla force (the application of conventional small-unit tactics, such as raids and ambushes, in an unconventional manner, such as an IED/EFP-initiated ambush, followed by selective targeting of personnel, then an exfiltration, or a rapid, snatch-and-grab raid to kidnap a key enemy leader, are the definition of guerrilla warfare tactics). The guerrilla element is only capable of generating this type of tactical success in areas where they possess a significant familiarity with the terrain and a connection to the local civilian population that allows them to harness clandestine support for security and intelligence-gathering purposes. Don’t ever allow yourself or your unit to suffer the terminal disease of testosterone poisoning and think you’re going to survive, let alone win, a toe-to-toe slugfest with a conventional force rifle platoon. You might have better riflemen, and even bigger numbers, but they have indirect-fire support, close air support, and a faster Quick Reaction Force (QRF) to call on for reinforcements.
Depending on the degree of control over the local area, a guerrilla force element may range in size from fire-team size all the way up to a brigade-level force. In the initial stages of a resistance, the guerrilla force, regardless of size, will generally be limited to stand-off attacks that we typically think of as “guerrilla warfare.” This may include the aforementioned raids and ambushes, albeit on a slightly larger scale. As the guerrilla force grows, however, so should its ability to engage the regime’s conventional military forces on a larger scale, allowing some degree of parity with the enemy. In these cases, formerly isolated bands of guerrillas may be able to connect and coalesce, forming liberated territory that allows for the development of a larger, more conventional military force to face the regime’s conventional force.
It is critical to delineate the difference between a true resistance guerrilla fighter, and other small-unit, irregular force operatives that may appear similar but in fact, are drastically different, such as militias (although the local militia may operate as a part of the guerrilla force in liberated territories), mercenaries, and criminal/narco-terrorist gangs. The militia’s only intent should be to provide security for the local community and its residents. Mercenaries and criminal/narco-terrorist gangs will seldom hold themselves to any sort of moral construct similar to that of the resistance-force guerrilla. It is critical for the guerrilla force insurgent to recognize that only uniformed personnel of the enemy regime are legitimate targets for the guerrilla force. Key political personnel, civilian population sympathizers and informants, etc, must be dealt with solely by the subversive underground. This is critical to the PSYOP campaign for the resistance, since conduct of assassinations/kidnappings, etc., by the underground can be plausibly blamed on the regime’s security apparatus if it is not conducted by organized paramilitary forces of the guerrilla.
Nous Defion,
John Mosby
Somewhere in the mountains
John Mosby is a former Army Ranger and Green Beret, and the author of the Mountain Guerrilla blog.
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The Formation and Organization of Resistance Movements, Part Two
John Mosby
This is part two of a two-part series.
There are three necessary components to a successful insurgency. The subversive underground is always present and is the first component of the resistance to form and begin active operations. The strategic goals of the resistance movement will determine the level of development for all three components:
The subversive underground
The support auxiliary
The paramilitary guerrilla force
The subversive underground.
The subversive underground is a cellular organization within the resistance movement that has the ability to conduct operations in areas that are practicably inaccessible to the paramilitary guerrilla force, such as populated areas that are under tight control of the regime’s security forces. The underground maintains the ability to operate in these denied areas because it operates clandestinely, returning to innocuous “day jobs” when not performing missions.
Typical tasks for the subversive underground include, but may not be limited to:
-Gathering intelligence and the development of intelligence networks.
-The development and operation of subversive “pirate” broadcast systems that control the dissemination of propaganda through radio, newspaper and leaflet distribution, and/or internet communications and web page development.
-The fabrication of special materials, such as false identification, weapons, and munitions.
-Black market networks and safe houses for transport of personnel and logistics.
-Sabotage by individuals and/or small units in urban centers.
-Operation of clandestine medical facilities to treat injured/wounded resistance personnel.
Members of the underground are normally active, productive members of their community, and their ability to function as part of the resistance is a product of their daily life and/or position within the community. They operate by maintaining a strict compartmentalization and delegating most risk to their auxiliary workers. The functions of the subversive underground are what allow the resistance to have a noticeable effect within urban or built-up areas.
The underground operational cell should typically be comprised of a leader and a few cell members who operate directly as a unit to conduct direct-action missions for the underground. The intelligence cell is different in that the cell leader should seldom, if ever, be in direct contact with the subordinate members of his cell, and the members of the cell are rarely in contact with one another. All communications of the intelligence cell would typically be conducted through dead-drop and other covert/clandestine methods of tradecraft.
It is imperative for the potential future guerrilla fighter to understand that, until he sees and recognizes these actions being undertaken by unknown parties, there is little point to “going to guns.” Doing so will only accelerate the actions of the regime to hunt down such “extremist” outlaws. Since the security forces will not be forced to deal with hunting down members of the subversive underground at the same time, there will be little to prevent them from focusing extensive assets to hunting down the “bandits hiding out in the woods.” If you have friends, whom you trust enough to discuss these matters and potential future issues with, who are not outspoken and openly critical of the current demise, educate them on the need for future subversives. They need to remain quiet and simply prepare for the day they need to wire a couple cans of ether to some douchebag’s engine manifold…(I’ve actually never tried it, but I’m pretty well convinced that it would be an extremely effective anti-vehicle/anti-personnel device to be utilized by a mechanic who happens to secretly support the resistance. If anyone has a junk vehicle that will still run, they should try it and let me know how it works out…Don’t run out and try it on a local police cruiser, please. I am not saying do it now. I’m saying consider such possible weapons in case they are needed in the future.
The auxiliary.
This term refers to members of the population who provide very limited clandestine support to the subversive underground and/or the paramilitary guerrilla force. Very seldom will they be “active” members of the movement and, as such, offer little intelligence value to the regime if compromised. Functions of the auxiliary may take the form of logistics, labor, or intelligence collection. Auxiliary members may not know any more than how to perform their specific function or service that supports the network. They may not even realize they are actively supporting the resistance. They should certainly never be asked to perform a job by a valuable member of the subversive underground cadre, face-to-face. Even in the modern environment of credit card payments and billing services, there are ways to accomplish such chores remotely. Until they are trusted, they do not learn the names or identities of the resistance.
In many ways however, the auxiliary personnel are at the greatest risk of compromise (thus the importance of their not offering intelligence value to the regime if compromised). Typical functions of the auxiliary include:
-Logistics procurement (either through stealing from a workplace, or purchasing on the black market, or open market, if it can be done without compromising their security or that of the movement.)
-Logistics distribution (transporting goods and dropping them in pre-determined cache locations for later pick-up by resistance forces.)
-Labor for special material fabrication (in some instances, the fabrication will be conducted in assembly-line fashion, to preclude any one group of auxiliaries from recognizing what they are manufacturing).
-Security and early warning for underground facilities and guerrilla bases (obviously, this is a task that must be reserved for well-trusted and very secure members of the auxiliary…cooks in regime mess halls/dining facilities who may overhear conversations regarding upcoming operations, mechanics who notice an increase in the request for pre-mission checks on vehicles, etc…)
-Intelligence collection (intentional or otherwise)
-Recruitment (obviously, in this case, the auxiliary member knows his part, but can still be compartmentalized to reduce risk to the actual underground or guerrilla force).
-Communications networks staff such as couriers and/or messengers.
-Propaganda distribution.
-Safe house management.
-Logistics and personnel transport (if functioning as part of the black market, the auxiliary member may never realize he is actively supporting the resistance).
The paramilitary guerrilla force.
The paramilitary guerrilla force is the overt military arm of the resistance. As individuals who actively engage the conventional military in combat operations, guerrillas have traditionally held a significant disadvantage in terms of training, equipment, and firepower (it should be noted that, in the event of an U.S. resistance movement, these would not necessarily be the case. That’s the purpose, after all, of this blog). For all their disadvantages, however, the guerrilla force has one distinct advantage that can offset any unfavorable balance – the initiative. In any operational planning, the guerrilla leader must strive to maintain and exploit this advantage.
The guerrilla element only attacks when it can develop and maintain a relative, if temporary, state of superiority of force. The element avoids any sort of decisive engagement, thus denying the conventional force military of the regime the opportunity to recover, regain their superiority, and use it against the guerrilla force (the application of conventional small-unit tactics, such as raids and ambushes, in an unconventional manner, such as an IED/EFP-initiated ambush, followed by selective targeting of personnel, then an exfiltration, or a rapid, snatch-and-grab raid to kidnap a key enemy leader, are the definition of guerrilla warfare tactics). The guerrilla element is only capable of generating this type of tactical success in areas where they possess a significant familiarity with the terrain and a connection to the local civilian population that allows them to harness clandestine support for security and intelligence-gathering purposes. Don’t ever allow yourself or your unit to suffer the terminal disease of testosterone poisoning and think you’re going to survive, let alone win, a toe-to-toe slugfest with a conventional force rifle platoon. You might have better riflemen, and even bigger numbers, but they have indirect-fire support, close air support, and a faster Quick Reaction Force (QRF) to call on for reinforcements.
Depending on the degree of control over the local area, a guerrilla force element may range in size from fire-team size all the way up to a brigade-level force. In the initial stages of a resistance, the guerrilla force, regardless of size, will generally be limited to stand-off attacks that we typically think of as “guerrilla warfare.” This may include the aforementioned raids and ambushes, albeit on a slightly larger scale. As the guerrilla force grows, however, so should its ability to engage the regime’s conventional military forces on a larger scale, allowing some degree of parity with the enemy. In these cases, formerly isolated bands of guerrillas may be able to connect and coalesce, forming liberated territory that allows for the development of a larger, more conventional military force to face the regime’s conventional force.
It is critical to delineate the difference between a true resistance guerrilla fighter, and other small-unit, irregular force operatives that may appear similar but in fact, are drastically different, such as militias (although the local militia may operate as a part of the guerrilla force in liberated territories), mercenaries, and criminal/narco-terrorist gangs. The militia’s only intent should be to provide security for the local community and its residents. Mercenaries and criminal/narco-terrorist gangs will seldom hold themselves to any sort of moral construct similar to that of the resistance-force guerrilla. It is critical for the guerrilla force insurgent to recognize that only uniformed personnel of the enemy regime are legitimate targets for the guerrilla force. Key political personnel, civilian population sympathizers and informants, etc, must be dealt with solely by the subversive underground. This is critical to the PSYOP campaign for the resistance, since conduct of assassinations/kidnappings, etc., by the underground can be plausibly blamed on the regime’s security apparatus if it is not conducted by organized paramilitary forces of the guerrilla.
Nous Defion,
John Mosby
Somewhere in the mountains
John Mosby is a former Army Ranger and Green Beret, and the author of the Mountain Guerrilla blog.
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Click here for all your prepping/tactical needs: The Tactical Patriot Store
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Formation and Organization of Resistance Movements, Part One
This topic is what it will all be about soon enough. We need to be ready to form and organize units such as this. This is invaluable information, please read and pass on to your team/buddies that are like minded. We need to organize now before it is too late.
The Formation and Organization of Resistance Movements, Part One
John Mosby
This is Part One of a two-part series. Part Two will be posted tomorrow.
Resistance movements generally begin with the desire of individuals or small groups of individuals to remove intolerable conditions imposed by an unpopular regime. Opposition towards the regime and hatred of existing conditions that conflict with the individual’s or the group’s values, interests, and way of life spread from the individual (or group of individuals comprising the group) to family, close friends, and neighbors. This can result in an entire community cohering in an obsessive hatred for an established regime. Generally, this hatred has historically manifested itself as sporadic, spontaneous, nonviolent and violent acts of resistance towards the regime, or available representatives of the regime. As the discontent grows, natural leaders (historically, former military personnel, clergymen, local political leaders, and community organizers- remember most resistance insurgencies in the last century had a basis in communist/socialist ideals…) emerge to channelize the discontent into an organized resistance movement that promotes its own growth. The population must be convinced by this leadership that it has nothing to lose, or at least, more to gain, by resistance, than by maintaining the status quo.
The ultimate key to progressing from increasing discontent to active insurrection is the belief by the populace that they have nothing to lose by revolting, combined with the belief that they have a genuine chance to succeed. Additionally, there must be some sort of catalyzing trigger that ignites popular support against the regime’s power and a dynamic resistance leadership that can exploit the situation when it arises. (Critical Note: this apparent focus on leadership within the resistance should not be construed to invalidate the concept of “leaderless resistance.” The concept of leadership should not be relegated to some shadowy, mythical central controlling party of the resistance, but rather, individual cells should have the ability and willingness to take advantage of any key trigger events to leverage the already present discontent to begin active operations to win the support of the populace.).
Once the resistance begins to act out against the regime, there are two types of initial resistance: Clandestine resistance and overt resistance.
a) Clandestine Resistance is conducted by people who outwardly appear to follow their normal mode of existence. This type of resistance may or may not be controlled by any level of leadership, and may include the following activities by individuals and/or small groups/cells.
– Political action and campaigning
– Propaganda development and dispersal
– Espionage
– Sabotage (see my previous post on the critical differences between sabotage and terrorism. They are NOT the same thing.)
– Black marketeering
– Intelligence gathering
b) Overt Resistance is conducted by individuals trained along paramilitary lines. This is the guerrilla force and provides the military arm of the resistance. These individuals and groups make no secret of their existence or objectives (once hostilities have begun in earnest), although they may use the leaderless cell approach and compartmentalize information closely to prevent compromise of the entire movement. The guerrilla force will generally be comprised of those individuals who have previously been openly disdainful or antagonistic towards the regime, and recognize the probability that they have been targeted by the security forces anyway (as much as he hates sleeping on the ground, especially in cold weather, your author recognizes that he has probably set himself up to be stuck playing this role if the inevitable happens. This really sucks since I have bad arthritis anyway, courtesy of letting Uncle Sugar convince me what a great idea it was to walk out of perfectly functioning aircraft that were in flight….and carrying a 90-130lb rucksack? Why gee, that sounds swell!)
Part Two (notes the subversive underground, the support auxiliary, and the paramilitary guerrilla force) will be posted tomorrow.
Nous Defions,
John Mosby
Somewhere in the mountains
John Mosby is a former Army Ranger and Green Beret, and the author of the Mountain Guerrilla blog.
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Click here for all your prepping/tactical needs: The Tactical Patriot Store
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Formation and Organization of Resistance Movements, Part One
John Mosby
This is Part One of a two-part series. Part Two will be posted tomorrow.
Resistance movements generally begin with the desire of individuals or small groups of individuals to remove intolerable conditions imposed by an unpopular regime. Opposition towards the regime and hatred of existing conditions that conflict with the individual’s or the group’s values, interests, and way of life spread from the individual (or group of individuals comprising the group) to family, close friends, and neighbors. This can result in an entire community cohering in an obsessive hatred for an established regime. Generally, this hatred has historically manifested itself as sporadic, spontaneous, nonviolent and violent acts of resistance towards the regime, or available representatives of the regime. As the discontent grows, natural leaders (historically, former military personnel, clergymen, local political leaders, and community organizers- remember most resistance insurgencies in the last century had a basis in communist/socialist ideals…) emerge to channelize the discontent into an organized resistance movement that promotes its own growth. The population must be convinced by this leadership that it has nothing to lose, or at least, more to gain, by resistance, than by maintaining the status quo.
The ultimate key to progressing from increasing discontent to active insurrection is the belief by the populace that they have nothing to lose by revolting, combined with the belief that they have a genuine chance to succeed. Additionally, there must be some sort of catalyzing trigger that ignites popular support against the regime’s power and a dynamic resistance leadership that can exploit the situation when it arises. (Critical Note: this apparent focus on leadership within the resistance should not be construed to invalidate the concept of “leaderless resistance.” The concept of leadership should not be relegated to some shadowy, mythical central controlling party of the resistance, but rather, individual cells should have the ability and willingness to take advantage of any key trigger events to leverage the already present discontent to begin active operations to win the support of the populace.).
Once the resistance begins to act out against the regime, there are two types of initial resistance: Clandestine resistance and overt resistance.
a) Clandestine Resistance is conducted by people who outwardly appear to follow their normal mode of existence. This type of resistance may or may not be controlled by any level of leadership, and may include the following activities by individuals and/or small groups/cells.
– Political action and campaigning
– Propaganda development and dispersal
– Espionage
– Sabotage (see my previous post on the critical differences between sabotage and terrorism. They are NOT the same thing.)
– Black marketeering
– Intelligence gathering
b) Overt Resistance is conducted by individuals trained along paramilitary lines. This is the guerrilla force and provides the military arm of the resistance. These individuals and groups make no secret of their existence or objectives (once hostilities have begun in earnest), although they may use the leaderless cell approach and compartmentalize information closely to prevent compromise of the entire movement. The guerrilla force will generally be comprised of those individuals who have previously been openly disdainful or antagonistic towards the regime, and recognize the probability that they have been targeted by the security forces anyway (as much as he hates sleeping on the ground, especially in cold weather, your author recognizes that he has probably set himself up to be stuck playing this role if the inevitable happens. This really sucks since I have bad arthritis anyway, courtesy of letting Uncle Sugar convince me what a great idea it was to walk out of perfectly functioning aircraft that were in flight….and carrying a 90-130lb rucksack? Why gee, that sounds swell!)
Part Two (notes the subversive underground, the support auxiliary, and the paramilitary guerrilla force) will be posted tomorrow.
Nous Defions,
John Mosby
Somewhere in the mountains
John Mosby is a former Army Ranger and Green Beret, and the author of the Mountain Guerrilla blog.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Click here for all your prepping/tactical needs: The Tactical Patriot Store
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