Episode Notes This is an episode to examine what cell structures look like and the methodologies of guerrillas and insurgents use to conduct clandestine or covert action. I further discuss traditional, subversive, critical cell and mass-oriented and unconventional...
Episode Notes Everyone and everything has an origin story, while I had a sneaking suspicion early on in my modest career in special operations and irregular warfare (IW) that something was fundamentally wrong with the western way of war in these endeavors, it was...
Episode Notes We discuss the book, guerrilla and insurgency warfare during the American war in 1861-65, the atrocity cycle, guerrilla math and the hopelessness of occupation avoiding the injury of civilians. For those looking for a single author's treatment of the...
Episode Notes That is GEN Stanley McChrystal's dream image of the totality of the COIN problem in Afghanistan. What a mess. It appears the West just can't get counterinsurgency right. I talk about some of the framework ideas that would be good lessons learned for...
Episode Notes One of the peak guerrilla fountainheads in the early twentieth century, TE Lawrence has been in both the popular imagination and a large part of the engine in the Middle East that signed the death knell for foreign colonial powers to leave the region,...
Episode Notes I discuss the French experience in north Africa and the devastating consequences of the double blow of losing Indochina in the same time-frame in Algeria in north Africa. References: Martin Windrow Our Friends Beneath the Sands: The Foreign Legion in...
Episode Notes Despite trillions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of deaths, the West has nothing to show for the counterinsurgency campaigns it has waged. Despite the enormous industry and vast intellectual and historical apologetics combine, the wasteland is...
Episode Notes In this episode, I make the case that insurgencies are antifragile and that counterinsurgencies are fragile for the most part; we discuss the concepts, examine historical and contemporary examples and set the stage for practitioners and scholars to...
Over and over, U.S. government officials and their mainstream media allies called Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine an “unprovoked attack.” The slogan became so overused that people began to ask the obvious question: Why do they protest so much? In Provoked: How...
