Your Friendly Butch Anarchist Live-Tweet Reading: The U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual

Part 2

Find Part 1 here: https://twitter.com/butchanarchy/status/1291559405696106496

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Chapter 1:
Insurgency and Counterinsurgency

This chapter is going to provide background info on insurgency (the first half of the chapter) and counterinsurgency (the second half).

This chapter begins with a definition of warfare. Since this is the State’s definition of warfare, I believe it’s important for us all to be aware of any am including the full definition here:
(p. 1)

More important definitions to pay attention to:

Insurgency: “an organized, protracted politico-military struggle designed to weaken the control and legitimacy of an established government, occupying power, or other political authority while increasing insurgent control.” (p. 2)

Counterinsurgency: “is military, paramilitary, political, economic, psychological, and civic actions taken by a government to defeat insurgency.”

Something important to note from this is that counterinsurgency is innately about people in power maintaining their power.

Manual goes on to emphasize that political power is THE central issue in insurgencies and counterinsurgencies. Insurgency is about the complete overthrow of existing authority, and the counterinsurgent’s goal is to sustain that authority and reestablish its legitimacy.

In goddamn writing. Their goal is to make sure people fall in line with the State’s authority, and this often means “eliminating those extremists whose beliefs prevent them from ever reconciling with the government.” (p. 2)

In our context, btw, this means all abolitionists.

In case you were wondering “hmm I’m surprised we’ve gotten this far and they haven’t mentioned protecting capitalism” worry no more!

The counterinsurgent’s goal is to help a regime provide “security and rule of law” that allow for the “growth of economic activity” (p.2)

The first subsection is titled “Aspects of Insurgency” and starts with the line: “Governments can be overthrown in a number of ways.” And ngl reading that made me feel a bit tingly

Insurgency is an internal war: inside states. not between states. Insurgents either seek to overthrow existing power and create new state power, or break from state control and form an autonomous entity.

They really reduced decades of ML v Anarchist discourse down to a sentence.

They note that the exception to this idea of insurgency being an “internal war” is when indigenous populations rise up to expel colonial powers.

The State is including indigenous revolutionaries in its analysis and you best be doing so too.

Btw, the State puts nonviolent protests in the same category as insurgent tactics: “Although insurgents frequently use nonviolent means like political mobilization and work stoppages (strikes), they do resort to conventional military operations when conditions seem right.” (p. 4)

^^^ this is VITAL for us to understand.

ANY form of resistance makes us an enemy combatant in the eyes of the State. You are not safe because you are nonviolent. You are not different from the “violent” protestors you try to distance yourself from.

Which side are you on?

Lololol god the amount of whining in this manual is cracking my shit up:

“The contest of internal war is not “fair”: many of the “rules” favor insurgents. ” (p.4, crying faces are my own interpretative addition but definitely really happened when this was written.)

One of the biggest difficulties for the state in addressing insurgencies is to realize that it’s actually happening.

Btw this is why the idea that cops were the ones setting fires in Minneapolis in early uprisings or (insert conspiracy theory here) is bullshit.

Even though governments have superior resources, insurgencies find success by “sowing chaos and disorder anywhere” (p.4) and the state fails unless it’s able to maintain order *everywhere*

Proof that riots are def not “exactly what the cops want”

Quite the opposite, actually.

Riots, uprisings, looting, direct action, and resistance are all in direct opposition to what the state needs to project its power and sovereignty. Collective and destructive resistance ruptures it’s ability to maintain order.

Which again, is why we say that spreading conspiracy theories about how “the state is actually behind X militant action” is an act of counterinsurgency.

The good/bad protestor dichotomy is how the state is attempting to keep us from resisting in a way it can’t control.

DAMN. Honestly check this whole section (p.4).

Takeaways: stay motivated, keep being creative with your tools, and OPSEC IS KEY.

We can outlast them.

COIN (Counterinsurgency) operations begin after insurgencies have already taken advantage of the initiative, so have to begin with offensive and defensive operations to regain control.

They write that killing insurgents is “necessary”, but cannot by itself defeat an insurgency.

Pay attention to that. This manual, the one that the militarized people occupying your city are using to guide their operations, sees killing insurgents as a necessity.

If you have been to any protest that has been met with police munitions, you are an insurgent to them.

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Continuing:

Counterinsurgents have to gain the initiative through what they call “stability operations, which seek to secure and control local populations.

Brings to mind all the bridges to downtown Chicago being raised to stop looting today.

The manual then does a few-page recap on how insurgencies have evolved throughout history, which I’m not going to go into much detail about here, but it’s understanding of the current conditions of insurgencies at the end of this subsection are enlightening:

They write that interconnectedness and info technology are an important component of contemporary insurgencies. Using the internet, insurgents can link up with other groups locally, regionally, and internationally.

More important, imo, is that they note that insurgents today most often “join loose organizations with common objectives but with different motivations and no central controlling body, which makes identifying leaders difficult.” (p.8)

My takeaway:
Horizontal, decentralized, leaderless movements are a far bigger threat to state sovereignty and order than ones with leaders or centralized demands. They desperately want someone to bargain with. Or failing that. Someone to kill whose loss will crumble the movement.

Here they list what a counterinsurgent should examine/seek understanding of when building an analysis of an insurgency.

We have seen PPB examining all of these points here in Portland, from what we’ve been able to hear of their internal process.

In contrast, this is how they break up the different types of insurgent approaches: conspiratorial, military-focused, urban, protracted popular way, identity-focused, composite and coalition. (p.9)

Gonna try to sum up each their paragraphs on these types as succinctly as I can:

Conspiratorial: few leaders, military cadre, activist party seizing state power/exploiting a revolutionary situation. Small. Secretive. “Vanguards”. Emerge only when success can be achieved quickly. The Bolsheviks are their example of this.

Military-focused: aim to create revolutionary possibilities primarily through military force. Their ex: the focoist approach (revolution by way of guerrilla warfare) as popularized by Ché Guevara. The assertion that insurrection can create the conditions for state overthrow.

Oh dang, ran out of space on this thread. I’m trying to at least get through the first half of this chapter tonight, so here it is continued:
https://twitter.com/butchanarchy/status/1293027223570485250?s=21 https://twitter.com/butchanarchy/status/1293027223570485250