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Insurgency (non fictional)
Insurgency (Webster)
"a condition of revolt against a government that is less than an organized revolution and that is not recognized as belligerency"
People have all sorts of weird imaginings about what insurgency looks like.
Even those of us who are well read on the topic, and may have worked in related professions, are often in denial about it.
It is the difference between going to a land far away to do something, and finding that thing done to your friend in their living room.
There are a number of sides. There is the 'government' side - and whatever supports, adherents and mercenaries they can scrape up. There are typically several 'rebel' sides, of various qualities with various attributes. Some are more government-supporting than the government itself, and may in fact be made up of government personnel taking on an after-hours hobby as death squads. Others are in reluctant rebellion, or peaceful disobedience. Some are radicalized - living rooms do that. Many are criminal, bandits and/or opportunists. Last but not least, there are some men (and women) who just want to see the world burn.
I deliberately have failed to write much about either insurgency or counter insurgency in the GWOT series. I've written a lot about conflict. But insurgency has all the grace and dignity of a baby bird flying into a plate glass window over and over again.
Counter insurgency is worse.
There are many stories, but I think this one will suffice.
A medical team visited a village and gave the children immunizations, in their right arms as it was convenient.
The guerillas visited the village, warned that the children had been poisoned, and amputated their right arms to save them. Neither children nor parents were given a choice in this.
There are some new things in the world, from time to time.
We've never fought an insurgency in a highly developed democracy.
Insurgencies without outside support are generally doomed to failure. It is not clear who would be willing to step in to supply, arm, and train rebels in America. Yet there is a large base of supplies, arms and highly trained personnel scattered throughout America - the veterans of our many wars.
Weapons of mass destruction have not been used yet in response to insurgency. I am ashamed that American political leaders have already made this threat. (Ref: https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/16223/that-time-eric-swalwell-threatened-to-go-nuclear-on-gun-owners-literally/)
Heinlein pointed out repeatedly that the occupier cannot use nuclear weapons once his troops are mixed with the subject population.
Social media as a tool of psychological warfare and agitprop is in its infancy.
Artificial intelligence - in the sense of large language models and expert systems - is barely a fertilized ovum. Yet AI may make revolution inevitable, or impossible. We don't know.
Technological regimes of social control offer opportunities to control populations that were unthinkable even a decade ago.
One I have hinted at in GWOT is the mandatory phone app.
Street police teams will require you to show your phone.
If your phone does not have "the app" you will be taken away and your friends will not see you again for one to two years. If they do, it is likely that you will be in poor health, have new scars, and are completely unwilling to talk about your time as a guest at government expense.
If you do have the app, your phone is a spying device.
This is not fiction.
This is deployed technology actively in use in Chinese occupied Muslim territory.
This may cause you to view 'Tik Tok' in a new light.
One of the fantasies that I have seen, both from the right and from the left, is that the American insurgency will be fought by the law-abiding against the criminal and corrupt.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
Everyone who takes up arms against a government is a criminal. Such criminals are not protected by the laws of land warfare.
Government personnel who exceed their authority or commit crimes themselves are also criminals. Their excesses are likely to be ignored or overlooked.
Anyone in the middle or who gets in the way, is either a criminal or a traitor - if not to the government, then to the Revolution.
The 1st Amendment of the United States Constitution enshrines the right of the People to peaceably assemble and protest.
Both the Right and the Left feel that they have already exercised this right, and failed.
People don't want to die.
Very few people, presented suddenly with a knife to their child's eye, will do anything other than talk rapidly and at length, saying and doing anything necessary to save their child's remaining eye.
I expect that 2025 will be the year in which mass arrests and deportations take place, in which peaceful protests are answered first by gunfire and later by midnight knocks on doors - or doors kicked down, in which courts and rulings are ignored and power blossoms from the barrels of guns, and last but not least, many people will have to make very serious decisions about life and death for themselves and their families.
I am seeing wealthy people with some choice in the matter look for other countries to flee to.
I am seeing others prepare, in ways small and large.
I did write a story, made of Nightmare Fuel, about what insurgency might look like. I just stripped it from its old home on LiveJournal and reposted it.
'In The Hole, Spectacularly Not Winning'
https://drewkitty.dreamwidth.org/517568.html
The invader in that story is foreign, not domestic. But civil war just makes it all that much worse.
If this gives you a small taste of what insurgency may look like in America, good.
I hope to hell it's not too late already.
Can we please just NOT?!?
PS. I have taken care in writing this to avoid any details that would be useful in an operational sense. I am not presently accepting new consulting clients.
"a condition of revolt against a government that is less than an organized revolution and that is not recognized as belligerency"
People have all sorts of weird imaginings about what insurgency looks like.
Even those of us who are well read on the topic, and may have worked in related professions, are often in denial about it.
It is the difference between going to a land far away to do something, and finding that thing done to your friend in their living room.
There are a number of sides. There is the 'government' side - and whatever supports, adherents and mercenaries they can scrape up. There are typically several 'rebel' sides, of various qualities with various attributes. Some are more government-supporting than the government itself, and may in fact be made up of government personnel taking on an after-hours hobby as death squads. Others are in reluctant rebellion, or peaceful disobedience. Some are radicalized - living rooms do that. Many are criminal, bandits and/or opportunists. Last but not least, there are some men (and women) who just want to see the world burn.
I deliberately have failed to write much about either insurgency or counter insurgency in the GWOT series. I've written a lot about conflict. But insurgency has all the grace and dignity of a baby bird flying into a plate glass window over and over again.
Counter insurgency is worse.
There are many stories, but I think this one will suffice.
A medical team visited a village and gave the children immunizations, in their right arms as it was convenient.
The guerillas visited the village, warned that the children had been poisoned, and amputated their right arms to save them. Neither children nor parents were given a choice in this.
There are some new things in the world, from time to time.
We've never fought an insurgency in a highly developed democracy.
Insurgencies without outside support are generally doomed to failure. It is not clear who would be willing to step in to supply, arm, and train rebels in America. Yet there is a large base of supplies, arms and highly trained personnel scattered throughout America - the veterans of our many wars.
Weapons of mass destruction have not been used yet in response to insurgency. I am ashamed that American political leaders have already made this threat. (Ref: https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/16223/that-time-eric-swalwell-threatened-to-go-nuclear-on-gun-owners-literally/)
Heinlein pointed out repeatedly that the occupier cannot use nuclear weapons once his troops are mixed with the subject population.
Social media as a tool of psychological warfare and agitprop is in its infancy.
Artificial intelligence - in the sense of large language models and expert systems - is barely a fertilized ovum. Yet AI may make revolution inevitable, or impossible. We don't know.
Technological regimes of social control offer opportunities to control populations that were unthinkable even a decade ago.
One I have hinted at in GWOT is the mandatory phone app.
Street police teams will require you to show your phone.
If your phone does not have "the app" you will be taken away and your friends will not see you again for one to two years. If they do, it is likely that you will be in poor health, have new scars, and are completely unwilling to talk about your time as a guest at government expense.
If you do have the app, your phone is a spying device.
This is not fiction.
This is deployed technology actively in use in Chinese occupied Muslim territory.
This may cause you to view 'Tik Tok' in a new light.
One of the fantasies that I have seen, both from the right and from the left, is that the American insurgency will be fought by the law-abiding against the criminal and corrupt.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
Everyone who takes up arms against a government is a criminal. Such criminals are not protected by the laws of land warfare.
Government personnel who exceed their authority or commit crimes themselves are also criminals. Their excesses are likely to be ignored or overlooked.
Anyone in the middle or who gets in the way, is either a criminal or a traitor - if not to the government, then to the Revolution.
The 1st Amendment of the United States Constitution enshrines the right of the People to peaceably assemble and protest.
Both the Right and the Left feel that they have already exercised this right, and failed.
People don't want to die.
Very few people, presented suddenly with a knife to their child's eye, will do anything other than talk rapidly and at length, saying and doing anything necessary to save their child's remaining eye.
I expect that 2025 will be the year in which mass arrests and deportations take place, in which peaceful protests are answered first by gunfire and later by midnight knocks on doors - or doors kicked down, in which courts and rulings are ignored and power blossoms from the barrels of guns, and last but not least, many people will have to make very serious decisions about life and death for themselves and their families.
I am seeing wealthy people with some choice in the matter look for other countries to flee to.
I am seeing others prepare, in ways small and large.
I did write a story, made of Nightmare Fuel, about what insurgency might look like. I just stripped it from its old home on LiveJournal and reposted it.
'In The Hole, Spectacularly Not Winning'
https://drewkitty.dreamwidth.org/517568.html
The invader in that story is foreign, not domestic. But civil war just makes it all that much worse.
If this gives you a small taste of what insurgency may look like in America, good.
I hope to hell it's not too late already.
Can we please just NOT?!?
PS. I have taken care in writing this to avoid any details that would be useful in an operational sense. I am not presently accepting new consulting clients.