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Getting Operational With It: A Discussion with BREACH Digest
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We are at a moment of impasse, a time where political spaces and dynamics are shifting drastically. In the past months we have seen military units deploy to streets, the DOJ get used as an overt weapon of the administration, and terrorism laws being openly utilized to suppress anarchist movements. At the same time, there is a distinct sense in which the state, and this current administration, is breaking the state apart while they are trying to consolidate control over it. We are stuck in a race between administrative authoritarianism and the collapse of the American state as we understand it. The result has been a situation that is kinetic rather than definitive, in which the conditions of politics change into terms that are more material and less clear, which differ from place to place, and in which situational awareness becomes paramount for anyone attempting to act directly and effectively.
At times like this it makes sense to do something anarchists have been doing for decades, delving into operational theory. Operational theory is often described as the space that exists between strategy (large-scale movements over time) and tactics (the immediate techniques of fighting). It is a space in which we focus on dynamics, terrains, logistics, in an attempt not to pin an enemy down to simple categories, but to understand ourselves as acting in an environment that shapes those enemies, and ourselves, in very specific hyper-localized ways.
In this discussion we will be sitting down with an editor for the upcoming publication BREACH Digest to talk a little bit about operational theory. We discuss what operational theory is, the history of anarchists studying the operational arts, and some resources that you can get into if you want to dig deeper.
BREACH Digest is a forthcoming publication with a release scheduled in the coming months. To follow their work go to their website, https://breachdigest.noblogs.org/, for more details.
Further Reading
Carl von Clausewitz On War
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1946/1946-h/1946-h.htm
Antoine-Henri Jomini The Art of War
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/13549/13549-h/13549-h.htm
RAND Corporation on Netwar and Swarming
https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/monograph_reports/MR1382/RAND_MR1382.pdf
https://www.rand.org/pubs/documented_briefings/DB311.html
Institute for the Study of Insurgent Warfare
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/category/author/institute-for-the-study-of-insurgent-warfare
Links to works by Col. John Boyd on organic command and control and the OODA loop
https://www.colonelboyd.com/boydswork
US Military Counterinsurgency Manual
https://irp.fas.org/doddir/army/fm3-24.pdf
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to 'The Beautiful Idea' Podcast
00:00:09
Speaker
Hello. You're listening to The Beautiful Idea, a podcast from a collective of several anarchist and autonomous media producers scattered around the world. We're bringing you interviews and stories from the front lines of autonomous social movements and struggles, as well as original commentary and analysis.
00:00:25
Speaker
Follow us on Mastodon and at thebeautifulidea.show. Thanks for listening.
Current Challenges for Anarchists and Autonomous Movements
00:00:41
Speaker
All right, welcome to the beautiful idea. We're coming to you today after, you know, a bit of a slowdown in our project.
00:00:53
Speaker
I think us, like a lot of you all out there, have been trying to make sense of what's going on trying to figure out how much we need to be concerned with things that are happening, sort of figuring out how to realign ourselves to the current moment, right? Or how much we even need to do so.
00:01:14
Speaker
And these are all really important questions, right? There's a tendency in like anarchist and autonomous circles to always want to push forward. But I know myself and a lot of us around this project and and a lot of people we talk to have, I think, rightly been in a ah mode of sort of trying to read the situation a little bit.
00:01:35
Speaker
I know that you know I've been doing this for a really long time. And the level of trepidation I feel amongst the people I talked to.
00:01:47
Speaker
And I don't know if this matches the reality of the situation. I think that's a very different question that want to talk about in a second. But the level of trepidation that I feel out there is very similar to what we experienced sort of after the Patriot Act got signed.
00:02:05
Speaker
Or I know in kind of in the circles I ran we experienced this kind of fear around the green scare. And we experienced this kind of fear around the infiltration campaigns that happened in the 2005 through 2010 era.
00:02:23
Speaker
um i know a lot of us have experienced this kind of trepidation on a local level, especially dealing with campaigns against the police. I know I have where I live, right? And I know a lot of you have too.
00:02:34
Speaker
So it's really important for us in moments like this, I found, to take a beat and just sort of figure out what's going on.
00:02:48
Speaker
And so that's part of the discussion that I want to have tonight,
Understanding the Political Moment
00:02:52
Speaker
right? Like we're at a particularly... fraught moment right now, that we haven't slid into full fascism, right? That what's happened isn't that definitive.
00:03:08
Speaker
But we find ourselves in some ways at sort of a ah more dangerous moment. We find ourselves at a moment in which a state is trying to rise to a position of primacy, but that doesn't have the resources or support or understanding to really do so.
00:03:27
Speaker
And so it sort of puts us into this position where we're sort of stuck in a bind. On one hand, we're dealing with an adversary that is devoted to concentrating, consolidating power.
00:03:47
Speaker
That they're not interested in the normal means of sort of liberal discourse. right And then on the other hand, we're faced with this kind of social movement politics, which has really been on the rise for the last you know three or four years, which is kind of this revival of the liberal anti-war movement, this sort of attempt to engage in a discourse of conscience with power and trying to like get them to change their position because of like political support.
00:04:20
Speaker
And we're stuck between the sort of attempts at authoritarianism that I think a lot of us understand can't be ultimately successful in the terms that they want it to be and social movements, which are incapable of opposing it.
00:04:37
Speaker
Right. It's a really difficult time. And so what we have to look at in this situation is we have to look at how the terms of conflict have really changed, right?
Liberal Democracy vs. Authoritarianism
00:04:50
Speaker
That, you know, liberal democracy, as we understand it, is grounded in an attempt to contain conflict. it's not trying to eliminate conflict, that what's happening is within liberal democratic structures, the state claims itself as the mechanism through which all conflict gets resolved.
00:05:14
Speaker
So if you have a political demand, you frame it in a policy, you run an electoral campaign, you get someone elected, that person makes the thing happen, so on, so on, right? Like that that's the mythology.
00:05:27
Speaker
And that relies on sort of two groups of people to always play along. First, you need the people that are governed to play along, that they have to be okay with the idea that the state is the context in which all conflict plays itself out.
00:05:45
Speaker
that they have to be okay with the reality that if that context gets threatened, that, you know, the tear gas of the liberal democratic state smells and tastes. And interestingly enough, is often made in the same factory in Pennsylvania as the tear gas of dictators.
00:06:02
Speaker
Right. But on the other hand, the people that work within the state also have to have an interest in keeping that structure intact.
00:06:15
Speaker
What we're watching right now is we're watching a situation in which the state itself doesn't have an interest in that staying intact. But the social movements that are organizing a lot of the demonstrations exist within a context in which that's the only realm of appeal.
00:06:32
Speaker
Right. We've entered a different place. We've entered a sort of state of exceptions. right We've started to enter into a situation in which the norms that we thought had existed don't, in which the limits that we thought had existed don't, and which the terms in which politics occurs have fundamentally shifted.
00:06:57
Speaker
And so...
State's Power Consolidation Efforts
00:06:59
Speaker
What we're facing right now is a time that in a lot of ways is sort of this scary intermediary, right?
00:07:10
Speaker
It's sort of the moment that's dangerous and filled with hazard that we're facing a state that is trying to consolidate power, but in the absence of being able to do so is flailing, is lashing out.
00:07:26
Speaker
is creating conditions in which confrontations become a lot more likely. Right. And so we're entering increasingly into a situation in which all of these niceties of the liberal state, all of these things like free speech rights and the ability to have protests to, you know, leverage your grievances against the political system. And, you know, all of these things, those niceties are going away.
00:07:56
Speaker
All of those things that all of our political categories rely on so we can make sense of the actions that we're taking are going away. And we're starting to enter into a phase in which a lot of our relationships with the state are going to become incredibly material, right? And conflictual, right? And so with that, we want to have a conversation about operational theory, right? We want to discuss sort of a project that is in the offing that is that's coming this winter.
00:08:29
Speaker
we want to discuss what operational theory is, like why and why anarchists should be focused on thinking through things like how states function,
Importance of Operational Theory for Anarchists
00:08:40
Speaker
right? How military operations occur, how military operations fail, right?
00:08:45
Speaker
right as opposed to the sort of simplistic categories that are often used to talk about strategy and tactics within radical circles. So without further ado, after scaring the crap out of everyone, i want to introduce an editor of Breach Digest.
00:09:00
Speaker
If you want to just jump in introduce yourself, and maybe talk a little bit about the project. Hi, an editor of Breach Digest. I guess for these intents and purposes, I'll go by Swarm.
00:09:14
Speaker
And yeah, breach is in part, you know, it's a digest. So it's sort of trying to demystify geopolitics and military theory and like just the inner workings of the military. i think that's like a good thing that could be very helpful, but then also pull from it some of these maybe like strategic and tactical tools and especially like having something that is like sort of a bridge between strategy and tactics and like figuring out like what that looks like and understanding, you know,
00:09:42
Speaker
Communication without like conventional command structures and proliferation of mission objectives without you know conventional command structures and stuff like that. They've been grappling with it. I think that a lot of movements in the contemporary grapple with as well.
00:09:55
Speaker
And also just not saying that we have like the right answer or the correct answer, but just giving people kind of tools and analysis so that when action happens, they can operate better within it.
Shifts in Movement Strategy and Ideology
00:10:04
Speaker
Yeah. And i also, you know, a lot of things that you were saying about kind of our moment where we're in a moment where the state has abandoned soft power, things are going to get more kinetic. but We also have to think kind of bigger picture and like think about when the pendulum so swings back to, you know, positive power, soft power ah in the Imperial core, like what...
00:10:23
Speaker
You know, what what ah position do we want to be in when that happens and how do we operate, you know, even like that far ahead? Like what we can do now to like make ourselves have a better position when that happens. While also taking care of like the kind of urgent things. ah Yeah, like in Go, you know, there's this this saying like urgent moves first, then big moves. And I think a lot of us are feeling that.
00:10:44
Speaker
And yeah, anyway, I guess ah that maybe suffices. so Let's start with the current state of discourse around action.
00:10:59
Speaker
Right. So I, you know, I remember a time when, you know, those of us that were kind of locked in more consistent kinetic situations with the state were studying those things. We're sort of really trying to figure out what the limits of street action were. We're really trying to figure out what happened after that.
00:11:19
Speaker
And there seems to have been this lapse. and I'm not sure entirely why, but there seems to have been... a switch in which most of the conversations that I now hear are based in trying to answer absurd questions like, how do we defend the quote revolution against the quote bourgeoisie, right? Questions that are so laden with assumptions and categories as to only allow for a specific limited series of answers.
00:11:49
Speaker
Questions which are ideology and not actually strategy, right? So where are we? Like, where do you see that discussion now? And how do you see us being able to move into a mode in which we're talking about these things in a significantly more nuanced way?
Challenges in Movement Thinking
00:12:10
Speaker
I think in the contemporary, we're kind of at a moment where people are looking at a lot of the impasses of like past struggles that they've been in. And maybe kind of treating history as like maybe overly pedagogical of like, oh, we must have done something wrong to lose. And also thinking in kind of like harsh terms of winning and losing, like not necessarily seeing the kind of dispositional or like social terrain that has shifted. Yeah.
00:12:34
Speaker
and being like, oh yeah, 2020 was a failure. And just kind of thinking like that. And like the classic solution is like, oh, it failure because we lacked, you know, whatever like specific kind of organization people are advocating for, whether it's like decentralized, you know, armed struggle cells that are clandestine or whatever, or ah you know, like ah ah a central committee or like we need cadre organizing or something like this.
00:12:56
Speaker
Oftentimes it's kind of these like, simple like one-stop shop solutions. And a lot of people are either advocating that or you know, just staying out of the fray entirely. And oftentimes I think it's like lacking in the sort of like, just trying to figure out what the hell is going on kind of thing that I think needs to happen first.
00:13:14
Speaker
And that kind of really humble way of like, if we didn't get close which is probably maybe true to in terms of like social revolution, why? And like, you know, how can we adjust ourselves, you know, to be brave in the next, you know, upheaval or even just like, what is missing in terms of our like critical acumen that we can like spread and,
00:13:36
Speaker
don't know, in a way that can like sort of shift the sort of more ecological equation of like social movements and stuff like this, of not being like, we have the one right answer, but how can we operate better within the social terrain that exists now? And what is the social terrain as opposed to these kind of like,
00:13:51
Speaker
almost like preconceived answer of like, this is the correct solution because this is like what my ideology tells me is the correct solution. And said, and yeah, anyway, I kind of feel like that is oftentimes what people are going for is like, Oh, because I'm of this ideology, I have to like put forth this exact kind of like strategy and that's what's working. And in like, without any sort of like imminent analysis of their social terrain, either locally or nationally.
00:14:17
Speaker
m yeah What I find super ironic about that, what I've always found kind of ironic about that, is it flies in the face entirely of where thought in the actual military is.
Modern Military Thinking vs. Radical Strategy
00:14:31
Speaker
That what we've actually watched happen since, I mean, we were talking before we started recording about Vietnam, but what we have really started, what we've seen happen since Vietnam is we've seen...
00:14:44
Speaker
you know, to use to use these sort of generic historical framing, two schools of thought have broken off since Vietnam. One is the revolution of military affairs and the other is counterinsurgency, blah, blah, right? But essentially what that means is...
00:14:58
Speaker
There has been a push to try and solve the problems that emerged during the war in Vietnam through technology. And there's been a push to solve the questions that emerged from losing in Vietnam through doctrine, right?
00:15:10
Speaker
And through specifically decentralizing understanding and doctrine. So what we've seen emerge... in you know the last decade is actually, interestingly, this kind of convergence point, right? So in modern military thought, the thing that we're seeing is this sort of moment in which the technology has allowed for the decentralization to occur, right?
00:15:37
Speaker
But there's always this kind of limit in the sense that they're trying to maintain force cohesion, right? So this is where modern military thought is. When we think about where radical strategic thought is in comparison to that, I think there's there's a problem of a body of assumptions that we're sort of operating from.
00:15:58
Speaker
And I think the question that we have to ask ourselves, right, or the question that I'm going to ask you is, how does operational theory help us solve for that, right?
00:16:10
Speaker
How does it get us out of this mindset of trying to abstract everything into simple conclusions or get us out of a mindset, which we feel like we always have to have answers that are absolute, right? Or total.
00:16:26
Speaker
Like what does operational theory give us as a lens when we're dealing with, I mean, such a wild divergence in the level of complexity that goes into strategic thought between us and our adversaries a lot of the time.
Operational Theory in Radical Movements
00:16:42
Speaker
mean, that's a really good question. I think, There's so many, like, it can mean a lot of things when we say operational theory. What are we talking about? I think in, you know, in line with, like, you know, previous generations of revolutions, they were, the revolutionaries that were participating in actually did read all of the military theorists, like Mao and, you know, Lenin and all these people were very familiar with a lot of the, like, strategic and tactical analysis that, you know, sort of came about, you know, after the Napoleonic area and the era and the invention of, like, the mass army.
00:17:12
Speaker
So there's this kind of even just huge historical understanding. And like, we're getting kind of a lot of our strategic information, you know, third hand almost in a really like watered down way. And I don't necessarily think we always need to consult, you know, grand histories or like the great men of history to figure out what's going on. But, you know, looking to our contemporaries is is probably helpful and kind of updating and seeing like they're running into a lot of similar problems.
00:17:39
Speaker
But then in terms of just like operational thinking in general, i mean, I think in terms of like situational awareness, it's really helpful for like both micro and macro situational awareness in that, you know, it can take like John Boyd's OODA loop or something like this, where it's just like, what am I even doing in the street? Like trying to like have a sort of metacritical lens about what's happening.
00:18:00
Speaker
And, you know, it gives us basically like cognitive maps to like look at the situation. And then we know these maps aren't perfect. And it can give us sort of like tools and like heuristics for like then challenging our assumptions of like, what is our mission?
00:18:13
Speaker
What are the methods and ways we're trying to accomplish it? And then I think like to be very basic, like it just coherence between means and ends is like this huge focus in operational theory. i think that is actually just also literally what most anarchists would say that like why they're anarchists is because they think there is some sort of connectivity between means and ends.
00:18:32
Speaker
And I think, you know, that's maybe something that, you know, that could be enhanced by, you know, engaging in the operational arts. So let's get into a little bit about what that means,
Development of Operational Theory in Anarchism
00:18:42
Speaker
right? So you and I are both people who who have been engaged with that kind of discussion for a really long time.
00:18:48
Speaker
I know myself, right, just to give you all a little bit of background on on my engagement with this. It started around... so this is this is going back to a time where i I bet some of the people who are listening to this weren't even born.
00:19:02
Speaker
But 2005, October, between... there was a big showdown between anarchists and a bunch of people in the neighborhood on one side and the National Socialist Movement and the Toledo, Ohio police on the other side.
00:19:19
Speaker
And it turned into this wildly kinetic neighborhood wide three day long street riot that like the National Guard got called out to and all of this stuff. And you have to keep in mind in 2005, things like that did not really happen.
00:19:36
Speaker
Right. We weren't in a moment in which there was acute conflict with the police, that the last time things like that had really occurred, you know, there was Seattle in 99, there'd been some confrontations around the anti-war movement, but really the the last time there'd been a full blown neighborhood uprising like that had been in in Ohio, had actually, had been five years before that, the Timothy Thomas riots. And there'd been a small one in Benton Harbor a couple of years before that, but these weren't things that were really common at the time. And so For the first time in a while, we faced down military units in the streets and had to really figure out what was going on.
00:20:13
Speaker
We had come up through social movements in which direct action training largely comprised of a bunch of pacifists telling you to hold peace signs and walk towards a police line so if they brutalized you, you'd get on camera.
00:20:26
Speaker
And so we had to figure out how to... be able to stand in the streets against a a modern police force. Right. And we started with police car control manuals.
00:20:39
Speaker
and started studying from there. Out of that came the you know, because we weren't the only group of people doing that. Like this was happening in other parts of the country. Out of those discussions came things like the shutdown of the RNC in St. Paul in 2008, or the G20 in 2009, these long tactical treatises about street tactics and, and all of these things that were written at the time.
00:21:04
Speaker
Right. And that's sort of how, how, we came into it is we came into it trying to understand how the police functioned and what we could do as a small force on the street, holding on to our decentralized structures to be able to move faster than them.
00:21:19
Speaker
Right. So, yeah, I think maybe getting into like, what is, What does studying operational theory mean? i mean, like in my context, it was studying police tactics manuals and moved into terrain analysis and moved into reading Klausowitz, Jemini, people like this. But what kinds of things are you looking at? What sorts of things are the people around you talking about? And for people listening, what kinds of things could they start scaling up and looking at, looking into?
Military Strategies and Social Power
00:21:48
Speaker
I mean, yeah, there's a lot of answers to this, obviously. I think John Boyd is a great place to start with a lot of this in that he was kind of interested in in what ways like do like blitz warfare, guerrilla warfare and ancient warfare have these sort of, you know, lessons and, you know, doctrinal applications that can actually, you know, give you an advantage against a force that has more people than you, that is better equipped than you.
00:22:12
Speaker
That is always going to be better militarily than you in a lot of ways. And also like, I think we have to constantly remind ourselves we're not actually trying to militarize ourselves. This is maybe like, maybe sounds like oxymoronic to a lot of people, but like the power of an insurrection is still social.
00:22:28
Speaker
And like the militarization of the insurrection is not what is necessary for it to be successful. It's in fact that it's like, if the more you study operational theory in terms of, ah you know, Boyd and, you know, cybernetic warfare, unrestricted warfare, there's a bunch of texts from Rand that come to mind also. And so, you know, some Chinese PLA writings, unrestricted warfare being one of them.
00:22:49
Speaker
that kind of just reveal that we are actually in a sort of state that where we we can out maneuver both literally and metaphorically the state and the the state and its militaries and its security apparatus are actually a lot slower than us.
00:23:03
Speaker
And even though they have like no moral limits, like they're willing to do terrible things, right? there's a sort of like ontological limit that they have. This is sort of like the matrix, like the agents, the matrix always have this limit, like because they have to back up, you know, a military hierarchy because they're fighting to maintain order of like, you know, a nation state. And because they're like, you know, servants of like the capitalist world order, they have these like ontological limits that we don't have that we can operate around that,
00:23:29
Speaker
you know, that we can socially operate around that sort of do give us certain advantages and we're just like not playing into them when we do, you know, whether it's like frontal clashes or
Learning from Military Failures
00:23:38
Speaker
things like this. And I think like these sort of like irregular engagements and like these, this theorizing of like, are we actually accomplishing our goals?
00:23:46
Speaker
I think like Petraeus is one of these people who like, you know, really kind of failed in his actual operations. But when you like look at like what he failed at and like how he tried to correct, you can kind of see that like, oh yeah, you actually constantly need to be learning in order to be like effective. And like, how can we create even just like simple rituals in our own lives and strategies and like have these sort of like, you know, meetings where we're like reflective of like, oh, what are we trying to accomplish? How do we get there?
00:24:14
Speaker
are the messages we're using actually accomplishing them and creating just kind of like practical things. I think that's one of the things that like, at least in my circles, this is what we're talking about, like war gaming and things like this, because I mean, we did this before Trump was elected in terms of like, what does Trump want to do?
Practical Applications of Strategy
00:24:29
Speaker
is like project 2025 want to do and ah in our area? We got together and sort of crafted this war game and played out the different roles. And so when Trump got into office and started doing these things, we had already prepared to kind of, you know,
00:24:42
Speaker
build out rapid response networks and sort of like talk to people about like mutual aid and, you know, respond in certain ways that we knew we kind of like foresaw these things coming. And a lot of people had like kind of the sort of like situational awareness established that they weren't panicking as soon as the news broke.
00:25:00
Speaker
They had kind of like some, at least foresight and also knew that like, you know, we shouldn't also just act without thinking. I mean, that's like kind of rambling and tangential, but, Hopefully that gave some answers to the question of like what we're thinking about what we're doing. I think also like importantly to note, like operational theory, you know, when it really comes into full force, you know, in 1923 with Svechins writing this, he's a Soviet general. He writes this piece called Svartagia.
00:25:25
Speaker
where basically combat operations are not self-contained. And this idea of like kind of a holistic understanding of strategy and tactics that can get kind of nebulous and metaphysical and stuff like that. But like understanding that every little thing actually does like contribute to this sort of like social war that's unfolding and to like, you know, the insurrection that's unfolding and kind of like integrating that into our sort of daily lives and stuff is also, i think at least to me is important.
00:25:51
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, so let's let's actually do a little bit of that,
Threat Modeling and Political Realities
00:25:56
Speaker
right? like Let's actually do a little bit of threat modeling about the situation that we're facing right now. Yeah. You know one of the things I was talking about at the intro is that we're kind of in this in-between space, right?
00:26:08
Speaker
Where... You know, ah okay, so anyone that's been on the street, that was on the streets in the late 2000s, has definitely faced down more than 200 National Guard people, right, on a single street before.
00:26:23
Speaker
Like, it's a thing that that we used to see a lot. So we know that that amount of National Guard troops can't control a city. Yeah, absolutely. Right? We also know that, like, with even a bunch of ICE agents backing them up, they can't control a city.
00:26:39
Speaker
Right. And so what's happening is there, there feels to me like there's this kind of separation going on where the reaction to what is happening is sort of a reaction to the intent or the stated intent and not so much a reaction to the reality that we're actually seeing on the ground.
00:27:00
Speaker
Right. So I guess the question is, if we're going to recognize that, how do we actually see the reality On the ground, right? Like what is going on here right now?
00:27:14
Speaker
Like, how are you reading this situation and where do you think this is going? Right. Because it doesn't feel like military occupation is a viable reality, but it also feels like there is an attempt to convince us that it is. Yeah.
00:27:34
Speaker
Right. How do we parse those separations? Right. And what are the things that you're kind of looking at right now as you're kind of trying to pick apart what's going on?
00:27:47
Speaker
Okay. So, I mean, I think one thing is obviously the generals are way smarter than Trump is in terms
Logistical Coordination in Conflicts
00:27:52
Speaker
of a lot of this stuff. And then the way they, and, you know, the feds and stuff apply this, not that they are, they actually care about people's rights or anything like that, or like don't want to occupy places, but they know they know that there's ways to actually inflame a situation and not.
00:28:08
Speaker
So putting that out there, first of all, is why I think a lot of the time there isn't like really obvious, like aesthetics of military ah occupation happening. But like in terms of what is actually happening, I think we'll take like Portland as an example.
00:28:22
Speaker
There's basically half a city one half of one side of a city block that is the like official battle space. And pretty much everybody involved has accepted that as the official battle space.
00:28:35
Speaker
And of course, Trump can secure that. Of course, the BORTAC units, like the Border Patrol Special Operation Group and all their buddies, and then perhaps 200 National Guard members can secure that.
00:28:47
Speaker
That's obvious. But if that battle space was exploded, if like the front lines were everywhere, right? Every single person that works for, you know, ice has, you know, homes and all these logistics that they like exist in. And then also at the same time, all of the contractors, all of the vehicles, all these other things have like massive logistical things. And that's one of the things I think,
00:29:07
Speaker
you know Just looking at terrain analysis and logistical analysis can help us with is understanding that, oh, like the but the front lines are, in fact, everywhere. like Power is logistical and in so many ways as much as it is also social.
00:29:21
Speaker
And one of the things that like Trump has really has been really good at is like limiting, at least in Portland, limiting the front lines to this one site that they can easily control. That being said, Chicago is more complicated. And that's, I think, why you can see Chicago popping off a little more, right?
00:29:36
Speaker
They're going into neighborhoods. People are hating them. And Trump has no soft power. So like the trajectory of that doesn't seem good for Trump, in my opinion, in terms of like everybody hating the feds, everybody kind of conflating the cops with feds and every single like Fed is now kind of has a target on their back, especially since they've all been doing, you know, part been part of these like secret police ice operations, like drug busts have now been broken up by people kind of autonomously of their own fruition, like kind of just like doing really low intensity tactics to disrupt them.
00:30:07
Speaker
And like that, I think has a lot of potential. And that is something that people aren't necessarily even highlighting. Although there's a strong push, you know, I think socially to proliferate these tactics in a way that I haven't seen before, like you know, thinking of like um on last week tonight, they were like celebrating like a border patrol, like tires getting
Social Tenability and Authoritarianism
00:30:26
Speaker
slashed or something like this. Like there's a lot of popular support for these low intensity tactics and they are spreading in a lot of places.
00:30:34
Speaker
And I don't know if there has been enough like sort of narrative work or like highlighting work to like, kind of like show that these tactics are working or actually the like solution as opposed to like, at least what they say in Portland is like not take the bait or whatever.
00:30:48
Speaker
But that being said, if you actually look at what's going on in Portland, there's the other aspect of is that the feds can't do raids anywhere else in the city. Really? It's just not socially tenable. And this is like,
00:31:00
Speaker
just kind of blowing it up even further. This, like the DHS made after, you know, 2001, the Patriot Act and all these things have a lot of like more intense stuff. They've never actually been able to pull off because it's not socially tenable.
00:31:13
Speaker
I think Trump is trying to push the situation so a lot of this stuff becomes more socially tenable than, you know, if we have a sort of like broad, like long trajectory, we can see that anything that Trump pushes now is like the point at which, you know, the Dems in the future are going to ratchet back from. So it's actually is important to like push back as hard as we can in certain ways in this moment.
00:31:34
Speaker
So that, you know, the new normal that's established ah either now, but also in the future is not as repressive as it could be. But suffice to say, yeah, I mean, we have to we have, let's see, like National Guard that are like mustering in like 200 soldier increments.
Federal Strategies and Local Resistance
00:31:51
Speaker
We have feds that are like more and more and more networked being pulled off of all of their cases pretty much to be this sort of new secret police kind of apparatus that is focused on like xenophobic targeting of people.
00:32:03
Speaker
we're you know, we have a population that is like kind of primed to resist this, who sees this as bad, which is good. And i think a lot more than like in previous iterations, like maybe post nine 11, definitely wasn't, it didn't feel like this. Right.
00:32:17
Speaker
So there is that. And I think also like low intensity stuff, you know, coming off the end of 2020, it's like, you know, pretty something that could be pretty popular as long as it maybe breaks out of the containers that Trump tries to put it in, in terms of like just targeting this one ice building or,
00:32:34
Speaker
you know, just like having a politics of like, look at us. We're not actually dangerous terrorists or whatever. like trying to respond rhetorically in that way. Yeah. As much as I think that it's important to like, do the, we are all anti-fascist move and like have the sort of lowest common denominator of this being like the most tepid and reasonable position fucking possible to be anti-fascist. Right.
00:32:56
Speaker
And like to not make Antifa a distinct category that can then be targeted as like, Oh, obviously it's these people are the terrorists. They don't have a community. They're not like normal people. you know, that's ah that's one way that marginalization works. Right.
Spreading Resistance Tactics
00:33:10
Speaker
Where it's like, if Antifa could be made distinct from the general population, right. then it can be targeted. So like, I guess part of the solution to that would be sort of proliferating these methods, right? That Trump is identifying as Antifa and making like, you know, sort of,
00:33:26
Speaker
the general population sort of take them up as they already have and making is a weird word, but like just kind of helping proliferate them and highlighting that everybody is actually doing these things anyway. Yeah. Yeah. Well, and it leads to this really interesting dynamic that I, a discussion around a really interesting dynamic I notice going on now.
State Dynamics and Resistance Complexity
00:33:46
Speaker
you know We're two and a half, almost three weeks into a government shutdown. They're starting to mass fire government workers. right They already have mass fire government workers. They've already created chaos inside of the bureaucracy. Something like 40% of the line attorneys of the Department of Justice have quit. you know The FBI and their entire incentive structure and the you know prospect of ending your career at the national office, all of that's been disrupted.
00:34:14
Speaker
And at the same time that all of that's happening, it feels like they're trying to speed run all the administrative steps of authoritarianism. That there's this kind of sort of ah effect in which it feels like we're constantly accelerating towards something, but it's hard to see what, right?
00:34:33
Speaker
And that it's hard it's hard to see that this results in anything other than tragedy or collapse. But how do we kind of How do we read that?
00:34:45
Speaker
Right. Because the dynamic feels really hard to understand. Right. On one hand, we have this sense in which government operations are ramping up, that they're ramping up in scale, that they're ramping up in intensity and force.
00:34:58
Speaker
And on the other hand, the state itself is hollowing itself out. Right. Sort of administratively and bureaucratically. How do we sort of read that? and And how do we kind of pay attention to that? Like, what do we track?
Tracking State Actions
00:35:13
Speaker
to kind of keep an eye on that. Yeah. So I would track like, you know, if Trump says he's going to send the national guard, like actually just look at the troop movements and like understand like, you know, from credible news sources, which troops are going where and how many, and that kind of sort of like,
00:35:32
Speaker
undercuts Because he's made a lot of threats to send a lot of people a lot of places, but it doesn't really count until there's boots on the ground. And even then, it doesn't really count until they're actually deployed. So like Trump is going to do a lot of you know bravado to sound tough. That's like what he always does, and half of it's lying.
00:35:48
Speaker
You can pay attention to Trump, I think. in that he will signal what he's like thinking and who he talked to last, which could change. But with like, you know, peace deal stuff or whatever, if he starts to shit talking Netanyahu, it probably means that Netanyahu is like dragging his feet on something and it could easily flip, but just kind of know that as like a temperature check.
00:36:08
Speaker
But look at the actual like material machinations of what's happening and don't rely on you know the them sort of like political narratives to tell you, one, what's happening, and two, like how people are actually feeling about something. I think that even just like social media and a lot of things like this, like if we're talking about like what to actually look at,
00:36:30
Speaker
is like, you know, something like X or Instagram, whatever, like produces this idea of like everything you're seeing on here is like what people in general are actually feeling. And in reality, it's not necessarily that. And I think that like actually going out and getting a temperature check on the ground is a lot more helpful in terms of like what people who are willing to leave their house or whatever are actually feeling.
00:36:51
Speaker
And again, yeah, like actually paying attention to maybe what generals and, you know, lieutenant lieutenant colonels are saying and you know, which task force are being assembled? Like, is it task force 51? Is there like a new task force that's been made by, ah you know, the FBI, DEA and stuff. And like,
00:37:11
Speaker
What's that? What are the other actual raids happening? What is like the actual, like when the national guard had deployed, what are they actually doing? Are they standing around, walking around? Do they have their guns out? Like on our assisting in arrests, like kind of looking for like the actual material implications or like the actual, like things that have happened versus, know, sort of the verbatim. I mean, that's the whole point of Trump's whole thing is maybe not even talking to us, but talking to his base of seeming strong.
00:37:37
Speaker
And that's like kind of all he kind of cares about is like the sort of bravado. So to understand what's really happening, you can't listen to him or his sort of like liberal opposition who are also playing this game of being the more reasonable, you know, wing of capital in the security state who, you know, haven't really actually kicked ice out of anywhere materially who like assist ice in a lot of ways, but like posture, like they don't, I'm thinking specifically of Portland anyway, but yeah. So in terms of what to actually look for, like look for ver verified stuff that has actually happened or is in the works of happening
00:38:17
Speaker
And stuff like that. There's not necessarily a lot you can telegraph from like the sort of political rhetoric because, you know, if you did listen to Trump, you know, Portland would be on fire.
00:38:27
Speaker
Right. And it's certainly just not the case, not even in like half a block anyway. Yeah. So if people want to start to study these things, I think maybe maybe it'll help to to give a bit of a reading list or maybe a bit of a history,
Recommended Reading for Strategic Development
00:38:45
Speaker
right? So you know you'd been mentioning like anarchists have been doing this kind of thinking, writing for really long time. i mean, you can go back to the Paris Commune, right? There's writing like this. I mean, there's really interesting writing about the Drury column, but
00:38:59
Speaker
Yeah, maybe maybe get into some of the things that you know have inspired what you're working on. Some of the thinkers that you've been kind of like working through and some of the stuff that people can check out.
00:39:11
Speaker
Well, we have an anthology out right now called Deceiving the Sky that has you know some of this stuff in it. This is part of why I also wanted to make Breach is because there isn't just a lot of it accumulated in one place.
00:39:25
Speaker
But I certainly would recommend reading John Boyd and the anthology of John Boyd's, you know, Discourse and Winning and Losing. The Rand, you know, corporations, Netwar, anything they're writing about Netwar is usually kind of in this line.
00:39:39
Speaker
Yeah. Sun Tzu, even just like very basic stuff like that. And it it might seem like ridiculous to read someone who's talking about a general, but if you kind of just ignore that and instead of like, Thinking about command, thinking about, like, how do we, like, have cohesion in our ranks?
00:39:53
Speaker
It's really, like, did you think about the weather? Did you think about the terrain? A lot of, you know, simple stuff like that. And, yeah, what else? Yeah, I mean, there's, like, so many. I don't know even know where to, like, start with this. But the FAU, the... fo the Anarchist Federation of Uruguay has this critique of Fokoism that's pretty good, that in terms of like you know subordinating a military line to the social line is pretty good. That can pretty much be found by Googling FAU and a critique of Fokoism.
00:40:26
Speaker
That's one of the pieces that I found really resonant, especially in the contemporary when we're dealing with a lot of like you know anti-imperialisms that don't necessarily consider the social being, you know, more important than sort of like specialization of like sort of military engagement.
00:40:41
Speaker
Yeah. I don't know. There's, I mean, obviously there's like, there's this piece on operational art by Milan Vigo. He wrote for like, I think the Croatian military Academy. That is just, if you want, just like kind of the straight history of what operational theory was from like, you know, Antoine Henri de Jomini to like, you know, the contemporary and like when it got into you know, the American field manuals in the eighties after Vietnam, which is like, maybe it's another like telling thing is that after Vietnam happened, the American generals were like, what the fuck just
Historical Changes in Warfare
00:41:15
Speaker
happened?
00:41:15
Speaker
And really started to deep dive into, you know, what the, the Viet... Vietnamese Northern armies were thinking and like discovered that, you know, operation aren't pretty much there. It wasn't really in English language texts until the eighties until i can't remember what field manual it it was, but until one of the field manuals there anyway, i know you probably have a lot of references in terms of like tactical stuff that like anarchists have written that you should probably list off if, if you want to.
00:41:44
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, so There's, I mean, my, my classic, the one I always go to, one I always um focus on if we're doing reading groups is Klaus Witz is on war.
00:41:58
Speaker
yeah um So one of the things that's really fascinating about that text for those of you that are listening is, and and you touched on this a little bit at the beginning, after the French revolution, there's,
00:42:10
Speaker
there was There were two things that happened that fundamentally changed the way that wars were fought. And that really influenced in a lot of ways the ways that radicals think about conflict, especially in in the kind of European framing.
00:42:25
Speaker
The first was we started having mass politics. right So the French Revolution was you know one of the first kind of modernist political revolutions that was motivated by a series of kind of overlapping ideologies that were against monarchism that were all trying to build a specific kind of world. right And out of that came this idea that you could have an army that was motivated to fight.
00:42:52
Speaker
that weren't mercenaries, that weren't pressed into service, that weren't aristocrats, but that were motivated to fight, that were motivated to like destroy monarchism or something. The second thing you had was you had mass production.
00:43:06
Speaker
And so you had mass production of rifles and you had mass production of ammunition. And what that meant is that that soldiers now by the tens of thousands could do target practice and drill and do things that you couldn't really do to the same degree before, right?
00:43:24
Speaker
Those two things together fundamentally changed warfare.
Napoleonic Warfare and Modern Insurgency
00:43:28
Speaker
And what happened is all of these armies that had existed before this, which were based on mercenaries and aristocrats and professional soldiers who were small, comparatively, very small.
00:43:42
Speaker
While a French army might be 400,000 strong, they might go up against... a foe that was had 30,000 to 60,000 troops under arms, like much smaller, which then forced them to rely on a lot of conscripts, right, to kind of fill their ranks out.
00:43:57
Speaker
And so their structures of regimented movement broke down very, very quickly. But what Clausewitz recognized, and this is what's important about that work, it wasn't because they were outnumbered.
00:44:12
Speaker
That wasn't the thing that did it. Napoleonic warfare was actually based on disorganizing an enemy. Yeah. And, and this is the important lesson from the work. So what, what Klausowitz understood was that Napoleonic warfare, though it did rely on numbers, also relied on things like really good intelligence gathering, yeah sabotaging supply lines.
00:44:38
Speaker
Yeah. having really good intelligence, having really good comms. So like the French had, I forget what they're officially called. I refer to them as flappy arm towers. They were like these very tall, like four story tall towers and they had these like arms on them and they could relay messages across the French countryside from the front in, you know, five hours or something as opposed to a rider on horse taking multiple days.
00:45:02
Speaker
Right. And so they could communicate a lot faster, but they also use snipers. And they took out officers, which was, you know, yeah quote, ungentlemanly, right? But it also completely broke down the command structure of their opponents.
00:45:16
Speaker
And then they refused to ever stop pursuit. So, like, it was very common in warfare at the time to fight... and then have an agreed-upon rest period. yeah And Napoleonic forces were so numerous that they didn't need to rest.
00:45:30
Speaker
They could continue to pursue with different units while giving other units rest time. And those things combined broke apart the command structures of those militaries. It's not that they got annihilated.
00:45:43
Speaker
It's that they got disorganized. Yeah. Right. That is the central premise of all insurgency.
Radical Writings and Insurgency Analysis
00:45:51
Speaker
It's also the central premise of all counterinsurgency.
00:45:54
Speaker
The text is incredibly long. If you're going to go get it, get the like official U.S. Military Academy version, which is unabridged. It's like really huge. And it includes a really cool section on partisan warfare, which is fascinating and incredibly instructive.
00:46:12
Speaker
So I definitely think people should pick that up. But Carlos Maraghello wrote the mini-manual of the Urban Guerrilla in the... late 50s, early 60s. That was a text that was incredibly influential on a lot of radicals in the 70s, a lot of people like me that came up through black blocks in like the early 2000s.
00:46:32
Speaker
Abraham Guillaume was ah a South American anarchist who really wrote a lot about the dynamics of small groups of people trying to fight against military states and how logistics became really important in those struggles.
00:46:47
Speaker
In the modern era, i worked on a journal called Insurgencies back in the day. We put out a couple of issues and like a book full of stuff about analyzing conflict in Syria. There was a journal that came out around the same time called Hostas, which people should really pick up, which is like, if you can still find copies of I'm sure they're online on Anarchist Library. But Hostas was a really interesting journal because it departed from the notion that what we were doing was trying to study hostility, right?
00:47:19
Speaker
That we weren't interested in compromise or negotiation as a basic premise of everything we were doing, right? There also is a writer, i think, from Canada named Zigzag, who wrote some really incredible zines maybe about eight or 10 years ago that I think people should really look up They were amazing kind of on the street tactical analysis of different things that happened.
00:47:47
Speaker
And now there's there's a couple of projects that are are starting to kind of dig into these things again, Breach being one of them. So, yeah, I mean, there's there's a long, there's a laundry list. There's a lot of stuff to read.
00:47:58
Speaker
Yeah. I think, yeah,
Key Elements of Operational Theory
00:48:01
Speaker
it's so funny. Whenever like a record button hits, I feel like it takes me a while to hit my stride again. But, uh, just in terms of like thinking about like, what are the key, some key elements of operational theory? I would be remiss if I like forgot to mention that. Yeah, obviously you mentioned intelligence, you mentioned communication.
00:48:18
Speaker
And then I think there's this other thing, you know, tempo, like who's responding to who and who's in the head of who, like that's something that John Boyd talks about a lot of getting inside the other person's sort of like response.
00:48:31
Speaker
And I think, You know, that's something that people don't necessarily think about a lot, but when you're constantly reacting to the enemy and thinking about them, you're not taking a lot of proactive steps and you're kind of seeding, you're constantly seeding territory to them.
00:48:43
Speaker
So like doing proactive things is one of the like, most important aspects, I think, of, you know, operational theory and like having good intelligence like, you know, kind of do that, like having the correct information about what's going on and like having good information about like your enemy and and you yourself and like knowing yourself and like that kind of thing. And then, you know, in terms of communication, I think a lot of people think like, oh yeah, direct communication is like what mostly people think about like signal or something like that. But There's also, you know, so much indirect communication happening all the time that people kind of discount. I think even like wheat pasting has gone away a lot. And the sort of like work that wheat pasting can do has been sort of replaced by posts. And I don't think any sort of, this is just like maybe me being like a millennial or something like that. But like, I think that any wheat paste that you're going to do is probably going to be seen more than any social media posts you're going to do, unless you belong to kind of a sort of minority of people.
00:49:42
Speaker
social media influencers or something like that. Like, you know, you could put something in a ah key location that will be seen by like thousands of people before it gets taken down. And like putting that all over the city makes, you know, people feel like it's kind of in the air.
00:49:54
Speaker
And yeah, anyway, i just I would be remiss if I didn't mention that kind of sort of like, you know, indirect communication omission objectives, trying to actually get the tempo and acting in a way that makes that forces the authorities to respond to you as opposed to you responding to them, etc, etc. And I think that's, you know, right now, Trump is like kind of the regime of the censor. He is kind of responding to things that and that actually puts him in a disadvantage like.
00:50:19
Speaker
you know, a lot of people may not necessarily understand this, but like, it's actually like power exists in the proliferation of certain kinds of things, not necessarily in the censorship of them. Like control often works by sort of proliferating a very specific kind of thing. Like with capital, it's like, you can do whatever you want as long as you're like,
00:50:38
Speaker
niche subculture, whatever is like contributing to capital or isn't going beyond the pale of like liberal discourse or whatever. and People are actually excited about it, whatever. But in the contemporary, it's like the regime is actually a regime of the censor and we can kind of outmoney over it on that front.
00:50:53
Speaker
Yeah. Anyway.
Non-Ideological Operational Approach
00:50:56
Speaker
Well, and I think the core lesson I always derive from operational theory is that, you know, and this is the same kind of thing that you, you pull from, you know, any, any of you that are like extreme philosophy nerds that really want to get into something like real wild, the Kyoto school writings from like the forties to the sixties really emphasize this, but operational theory always brings me back to basics.
00:51:23
Speaker
yeah That at moments when i feel as if we've lost our way or I feel as if the political horizons that are being that seem to have energy and momentum aren't particularly promising, one of the things that I'll do is I will try and strip away as much of the fluff and the extra considerations that and things as I possibly can and get back to the basic idea that at the end of the day, what we're doing is we are fighting a state so we can have control over our lives and that there's nothing more basic and material than that.
00:52:11
Speaker
Yeah. what it does is it drives me back to my street, my neighborhood. right It gets me to walk around more.
00:52:22
Speaker
It gets me to pay attention more. It gets me to focus on you know what are the dynamics of the politics in the place that live? Who's making calls? right How is that an impediment to things I'm trying to do? What does that mean in the context of national politics?
00:52:39
Speaker
I try and focus on the things that are very immediate. Because one of the things about operational theory that is undeniable is that at the end of the day, it can never function ideologically.
00:52:53
Speaker
Yeah. That it always has to function as a constant analytic process of trying to figure out how to achieve an objective against an adversary.
00:53:04
Speaker
And those terms are very simple in a lot of ways. Right now, it feels like we need a heavy dose of that. It feels like we need to get back and focus on the basics again.
00:53:18
Speaker
Right. Things like wheat pasting are really interesting because, you know, there's this idea that another group of people that was interested in in operational theory of the situation is international.
Transforming Physical Spaces
00:53:29
Speaker
The idea of psychogeography. Yeah, absolutely. Right. We don't transform our spaces in the ways that we used to because we don't inhabit our spaces in the ways that we used to. And one of the things that operational theory drives me back to is inhabiting my space.
00:53:45
Speaker
I always find that incredibly invaluable, especially at a time like this where the center of gravity, you know, is nine hours by car away from here, you know, and it feels like that's sucking all of the oxygen out of the room.
00:54:01
Speaker
But did you have anything else that you wanted to mention?
Revolutionary Dynamics and Action
00:54:05
Speaker
Talk about anything like that? you know There's so much. I think one of the ideas also is like thinking about if you know what is the relationship between sort of like the the movement of revolutionaries and the revolutionary movement. I think it's like something to think about in terms if we are like kind of having this sort of more dispersed model. like like Understanding that can be pretty important in that Also, you know, that discursive interventions aren't actually going to change things necessarily. It's people are changed and created even through action and people like where people are ideologically now is not where they're going to be ideologically after like a wave of action hits. Like i think a lot of anarchists,
00:54:47
Speaker
you know, did come into anarchism through action. And I think if we're thinking about it on an operational level, like it is definitely good to create doctrine, like, you know, maybe in a very loose sense, but at the same time, it's, you know, sort of action in the terrain that dictate what people like are produced and what, like the new kinds of people that come to the forefront.
00:55:07
Speaker
So is there anything else?
Avoiding Sectarianism in Strategies
00:55:09
Speaker
Well, there's this piece, fragmentation, centralization, and the civil war, the Japanese ultra ultra left that came out on ill will. Uh, that's, I think pretty, a pretty good analysis of sort of like an operational, almost analysis of what people were trying to do in Japan after the sixties and how it became sort of like insular and ended up like in this like hyper sectarian moment. And that's maybe something for us to look at now as more and more people are like taking on sort of sectarian forms.
00:55:40
Speaker
Anyway. Yeah. I don't know. There's so much, but. Well, cool. Thanks for joining us. Yeah, I appreciate it.
00:55:55
Speaker
Thanks for listening to today's episode of The Beautiful Idea. News and analysis from the front lines of anarchists and autonomous struggles everywhere. Catch you next time.