How Tactical Tools Adapt or Die

In a few previous posts on this blog, I have pointed out that relying on mass protest marches as the sole tactic of a struggle of strategic nonviolent resistance is as stupid as the British High Command's insistence on constant daily frontal assaults against German positions was in World War 1.  This observation may be disputed by some, yet the observation points out the fact that practitioners of strategic nonviolent resistance have often learned valuable lessons from the study of armed conflict.  In particular, it is possible to notice those commanders of forces who made the most out of limited resources in order to achieve surprising victories.  It is also possible to notice and study those commanders who were inept, hidebound, or who otherwise doomed themselves to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory - even when these commanders started out with overwhelming numerical and material advantages.

And it is possible to trace how tactical tools evolve in their composition and methods of use as they are deployed by wise commanders who are observant, willing to listen to different perspectives, and who otherwise display the characteristics of reflective practitioners.  So let's consider in this post how the experiences of World War 1 influenced the development of infantry as a component of the armed forces of modern nations.  At the outset it must be said that the poor use of infantry by the Allies throughout much of World War 1 led to large losses on the Allied side.  From 1914 to 1916, it was also true that the German military suffered heavy losses as well.  However, the Germans seem to have been the quicker to realize how massed artillery and machine guns had altered the battlefield, and what tactical and strategic adjustments were needed to make their fighting forces more survivable as a result.  On the other hand, the British and French forces continued to use outdated and obsolete tactics in deploying their infantry, with the result that a casual observer might be forgiven for concluding from the British example that dismounted infantry had become obsolete.  But infantry as a tool had definitely not become obsolete.  This was shown by the German development of the concept of defense in depth.  Defense in depth greatly reduced the effectiveness of British and French artillery against German defenders, and enabled the Germans to inflict heavy casualties on British and French attackers while suffering relatively few casualties of their own.  The Germans also developed a more flexible skill in maneuver warfare which made German forces highly dangerous and much more survivable during the German offensive of 1918 than the British and French had been in previous Allied offensives. (To their credit, however, the British army became much more effective toward the very end of the war, when they also began to implement defense in depth.)

After World War 1, those nations which had observant and teachable commanders and generals carefully studied the battles of the war in order to apply lessons to their own armies.  As a result, the militaries of the United States and other powerful nations began to make changes to the tactics of infantry deployment, switching from trench warfare to the use of foxholes in the defense, learning also to deploy elastic defense-in-depth, and beginning to learn new techniques for offensive operations at the small unit level and beyond.  However, the Germans once again proved to be far ahead of their peers in applying these new lessons, as demonstrated by the World War Two deployment of the blitzkrieg method of combined arms offensive warfare.  Learning by observation of enemy tactics, tools, and technologies on the part of both the Allies and the Axis powers led to the continued evolution of infantry by the armies of these nations, including evolution of technologies such as the assault rifle, the armored personnel carrier, and the tools of combined-arms assault, as well as changes to small-unit offensive tactics which resulted in the development of the traveling, traveling overwatch, and bounding overwatch dismounted squad formations.  The result is that a modern army which has incorporated modern tools and techniques for the deployment of its infantry can easily defeat a military which digs long lines of trenches for defense, which is rigid and inflexible in its use of artillery, and which day after day at regular times sends its infantry troops on assault in neat lines of men who move at a slow walk.  (By the way, according to a number of historians, this inflexible style is what characterized the British army in World War 1 under Sir Douglas Haig.)

In other words, by observation, learning from history (and especially from mistakes), and responding to that learning by making the necessary tactical innovations, the infantry as a component of modern militaries has continued to make itself relevant even to the present day as a key component of an effective fighting force.  What lessons can we take from the infantry's continual self-reinvention to apply to the field of strategic nonviolent resistance?  

Well, let's take the methods of protest and persuasion as a key category of the methods of strategic nonviolent resistance.  As I said at the beginning of this post, I have argued that the use of mass protest marches as the sole go-to tactic of resistance is stupid, because this has become the method of resistance which oppressors are most equipped to meet and to counter.  But does this mean that the entire category of methods of protest and persuasion is now obsolete? Not necessarily.  It is true that the methods of protest and persuasion are among the weakest methods of nonviolent action, just as it is true that the squad-level dismounted small infantry unit is the weakest troop unit in warfare.  But just as the squad-level dismounted unit is still relevant in war-fighting, the methods of protest and persuasion still have value in the battlefield of 21st century strategic nonviolent resistance.  What is needed, however, is an evolution of tactics, of tactical thinking, and of methods.  And these tactics and methods must be deployed by wise leaders whose tactical and strategic thinking has evolved with the times in order to remain relevant and effective.

A hypothetical, yet concrete example may be helpful.  Suppose you are a resister against the fascist Trump regime and you want to weaken his pillars of support.  We know that the white American evangelical/Protestant church remains one of the staunchest pillars of support of the Trump regime.  (By the way, that shows just how little white American evangelicals are actually interested in obeying the words of Jesus!)  Let's say that you want to plan a series of operations designed to weaken this church as a pillar of support of Trump.  You could adopt one of two possible approaches.  The first would be to gather as many people as you can by means of Facebook, Reddit, or other social media announcements in order to besiege as many churches as you can with armies of protesters carrying picket signs to show your outrage over the white evangelical support of Trump's fascist policies and imperial overreach.  To make things even more interesting (and stupid), let's say that you want to repeat this same tactic Sunday after Sunday for several weeks in a row.  Let's examine such a tactic through the lens which Peter Ackerman provided us in one of his Fletcher Summer Institute lectures.  In particular, let's ask what is the purpose and what are the risks of such an action, and how likely it is that such an action would achieve its stated goals.  Below is my summary of possible answers to these questions.

• Purpose: To attempt to shame the white American evangelical church by expressing outrage over its hypocrisy, its worship of secular power, and its use of religion to support the oppression of the poor and nonwhite in the U.S. and throughout the world.
• Likelihood of success: very small.  Why? In attempting to shame these people by means of a series of mass protest marches, you are attempting to appeal to their better angels.  But most of them don't have better angels.  They are perfectly willing to do or to say whatever it takes in order to maximize their secular economic and political power and supremacy, regardless of the morality of their actions.

• Risks: Very, very high! Why? Because of the following factors:
• Your protest marches will provoke a violent response from the organs of right-wing power in this country.  In particular, you can count on Trump taking over the local police forces, sending in troops from the regular military (and not just the National Guard), and initiating a massive crackdown on civil liberties.
• To facilitate and legitimize that violent crackdown, the fascist element will inject violence into your protest by means of agents provocateurs.  They will then blame the outbreak of violence on you and your fellow protestors, using such organs of right-wing media as Rupert Murdoch's NewsCorp media empire (including Fox News) to make their case.  On the TV screens in every household there will be scenes of rooms full of stone-faced middle-aged men sporting buzz cuts and wearing blue uniforms who announce that in town X or city Y the police had to "declare a riot" because of the actions of "subversive hooligan elements bent on sowing CHAOS because they HATE AMERICA!!!"
• By your protest marches you will make your opponents look like innocent little lamb martyrs who are being "persecuted solely for the name of Christ" (that is, being persecuted merely for being "innocent and nice people"), thus boosting their standing in society and actually strengthening them as one of Trump's pillars of support.  And you will get yourselves painted as "attackers of the Constitution's guarantee of religious freedom".

So we see that such a direct deployment of mass protest marches would actually not work in weakening the white evangelical church as a pillar of support because it would not persuade the members of that church to abandon Trump, and because Trump and his fellow fascists would easily be able to turn the effects of such protests against the protestors, thus actually boosting the power and prestige of white evangelicalism.

Now let's consider the second approach.  Suppose you have studied the changing battlefield of strategic nonviolent action and you decide to deploy a smarter tactic of protest.  Your goal remains the same: to weaken the white American evangelical/Protestant church as a pillar of support of a fascist regime.  But instead of calling for massive protest marches to picket as many churches as possible, you talk to your physical, flesh-and-blood neighbors and say, "From now on, let's each put out a sign on our lawns every Sunday which says 'THIS SUNDAY, I AM WASHING MY CAR.'" And let's say that you all agree that at the hour in which most churches have their Sunday services, you and your friends start washing your cars.  Moreover, let's say that you video yourselves all washing your cars at 11 am every Sunday and post those videos online.  Let's say that you make it abundantly clear that your choice of 11 am every Sunday for car-washing is an act of protest, your sending of a signal that you will not be attending church on Sunday because the churches have become the corrupt handmaidens of a fascist regime.  What can Trump or his goons or the liars who work for Rupert Murdoch possibly do to counter such an act of protest?  

What I have described in this second approach is what is known as a dilemma action.  (See this also.) And it is a tactic of dispersion, which is much harder to repress than tactics of concentration. It is also an action which has the capacity to produce massive amounts of backfire if the oppressor tries to stop it.  For instance, if ICE or Marine Corps troops violently seize someone and beat him up simply for washing his car on a Sunday morning, how will such an act look in the eyes of witnesses?  Won't such a response produce serious questioning of the Trump regime, as well as serious revulsion toward that regime?  Moreover, as the idea of washing your car on Sunday (or pulling weeds, or cleaning your gutters, or my favorite - sleeping in!) catches on, the revenue and attendance numbers at most evangelical churches will start to show a definite decline.  And there will be very little they can do to stop it! (You can also boost the effectiveness of your tactic by making bumper stickers that say "I AM NOT GOING TO CHURCH THIS SUNDAY" or "I'M SLEEPING IN THIS SUNDAY.")

Thus we see that just as in the use of weapons and tactics in war-fighting, a method or category of methods of nonviolent resistance can remain relevant and effective as long as the practitioners of that method or of those methods continue to evolve their capacity for tactical and strategic thinking.  A key to the evolution of tactics of nonviolent resistance can be found in the methodology which the German army used to re-invent itself on the fly during World War 1:

• Perception of the need for change
• Solicitation of ideas, especially from the front-line units
• Definition of the change
• Dissemination of the change
• Enforcement throughout the army 
• But in this case, since we are dealing with a civilian movement rather than a military operation, the word "enforcement" may be too strong. For the members of civilian movement organizations, a better way to phrase this is the building of a culture of discipline throughout the organization.  This discipline must facilitate adherence to wise strategy.  An essential part of this discipline is the maintaining of strict nonviolent discipline.
• Modification of organization and equipment to accommodate the change
• Thorough training
• Evaluation of effectiveness
• Subsequent refinement

Note: the above outline is quoted from The Dynamics of Doctrine: The Changes in German Tactical Doctrine During the First World War, by Timothy T. Lupfer, published in July 1981.  (I told y'all that y'all need to read some books!)

The Tactical and Strategic Failures of Summer 2020

This post is a continuation of my "study guide" and commentary on Gene Sharp's book From Dictatorship to Democracy (shortened in these posts to From D to D.)  Those who have read previous posts on this subject know that the most recent posts discussed Chapters 6 and 7 of the book.  Those chapters deal with the important subject of the strategy of a nonviolent liberation struggle.  Strategic nonviolent resistance does not rely on the weapons and resources of the holders of oppressive power, and one big reason why is that those who are oppressed do not have access to the weapons and resources of the powerful.  This is why strategy and strategic thinking is so important.  If the strategy of a struggle group is solid, the struggle group can achieve great shifts in the balance of power between the powerful and those without power.  If the strategy of a struggle group is weak, foolish or nonexistent, then that group will lose.

So we come to the events of the late spring and summer of 2020, those events connected with the police murder of George Floyd.  As an African-American, I stand with my brothers and sisters who are involved in the Black Lives Matter organizations, yet I feel the duty to point out some of the serious ways in which they dropped the ball last summer, as well as pointing out some of the political consequences of their failure.  (One consequence of that failure: their mistakes helped re-elect a certain two-faced gentrifying mayor of a supposedly progressive city on the West Coast.)  So here goes.  And I'm going to tell the story from the point of view of an observer who was only rarely near the center of any action.  If any readers have more expert knowledge or analysis, feel free to chime in with corrections as appropriate.

First, let's begin with the immediate consequences of the murder.  The first response seen by myself and most observers was the almost immediate arising of a wave of spontaneous mass protest, both in Minnesota (where George Floyd used to live) and elsewhere.  I would like to suggest that much of that protest originated outside of the Black community and outside any other communities of color in the United States.  I would also like to suggest, based on what I saw in the Pacific Northwest, that much of that protest originated outside of any Black Lives Matter (abbreviated in this post to BLM) organization.  However, the emergence of this protest thrust BLM movement organizations into the limelight, as many protestors who were not officially part of BLM chose to identify their actions as taken in support of BLM.  Thus BLM was offered a unique moment in which to take a leadership role, and BLM organizers initiated their own protests as a result.

But at almost the same time as the emergence of spontaneous mass protest came the almost immediate emergence of "spontaneous" violence.  I know of one white blogger who characterized it as "the emergence of the worst race riots this country has seen in decades."  However, he is exaggerating greatly what actually happened, and his reasons are dishonest.  For he does not want to face the fact that the incidents of violence were perpetrated almost entirely by white people.  (See this  and this also.)  An early case in point is the "Umbrella Man."  There is also Matthew Lee Rupert, as well as members of the Boogaloo Boys and other white groups who vandalized and looted minority businesses and attacked CNN journalism crews.  Moreover, this violence spread in ways that seemed designed to provoke outrage and strengthen the societal "pillars of support" of the police and of the regime of Donald Trump.  For the vandals and the violent targeted iconic statues and other monuments to the cultural heritage of the United States.  (See this, this, and this for instance.)  And in attacking minority businesses, the vandals sought to send a clear message that this is what happens whenever there is mass protest against established authority.

Other ways in which violent infiltrators sought to convey images of dis-order included the setting up of so-called "temporary autonomous zones" in city capitals by people who did not own property or have jobs in these so-called zones.  In essence, the people who set up these zones became squatters of the same sort that emerged in city parks throughout the United States during the "Occupy" protests.  And those who occupied these zones in 2020 were mostly white, just as those who "occupied" various public spaces in 2011.  The 2020 occupations ended just as badly as those in 2011 had, for the occupiers were rightfully seen as squatters.  But these squatters, along with the looters and the vandals of businesses and statues, served a useful purpose for the right-wing fascists running the Federal Government during Trump's last year - namely, that they gave him a convenient platform to portray himself as the sole upholder and defender of "law and order" against a crazed opposition movement who simply wanted to plunge American society into "chaos" and "anarchy."  In other words, they were the convenient foil in the continued re-telling of the myth of redemptive violence - the favorite myth of fascists and oppressors, by the way, and a myth that became part of Donald Trump's re-election campaign strategy.

I would like to suggest that in the violence, vandalism and squatting that took place, people who had no sympathy for the Black struggle in America managed to hijack the protests over the murder of George Floyd and to twist the message of these protests in a direction which has nothing at all to do with the Black struggle.  (As Marshall Ganz has repeatedly said, if you don't intentionally tell your own story, someone else will tell it for you - in ways that you won't like.)  That this could happen is due to the following failures of many in the Black community:

• A failure by the Black community to appropriately define our collective identity and the strategy of our struggle.  For at least four decades, we have been unconsciously following a rather limited "strategy" of the sort first articulated by Martin Luther King, namely, the strategy of trying to build a supposedly colorblind society in which our individual or historical identities are all dissolved in a "melting pot" to produce a so-called all-American alloy.  Thus we have tried to build "beloved communities" with people who ought not to be trusted because they have no good intentions, people who refuse to give up their dreams of total domination.  It is way past time for us to come together as Black people (NOT as part of some "rainbow coalition" alloy!) to decide who we are as a people and how we will struggle as a people.  In other words, it is way past time for us to self-consciously organize ourselves.  When white people who supposedly stand for "diversity" try to bring us as individuals into their "coalition", we need to say, "Not so fast.  We will decide as a group what we choose to support.  We will NOT allow ourselves to be turned into the foot soldiers of someone else's agenda!  Maybe we're not better together!"  Of course, to say such things might provoke the sort of reaction from certain white supposed "allies" that would show their true colors.

• A failure by the Black community to understand the methods by which unarmed people shift the balance of power between the powerful and the powerless.  In short, this is a failure to understand the methods of strategic nonviolent resistance, which has also become known as people power.  We have for too long allowed ourselves stupidly to believe that strategic nonviolent resistance consists of trying to love your enemy or to "rise above" the oppression dealt to you by your enemy (that is, to smile when your enemy serves you a sandwich made of excrement!), or to show how "spiritual" you are in the face of oppression.  Therefore, too many of us have understandably written off strategic nonviolent resistance.  It's time for some of us to start reading some books.

• This ignorance played out in 2020 in a failure to understand the impact of violence on a protest movement.  When violence began to erupt during the protests, I saw it as a clear indication of a lack of organization on our part, as well as a lack of training.  I saw it moreover as a clear sign of tactical and strategic misunderstanding and failure.  But in conversations I had with BLM organizers, both during the 2020 CANVAS Summer Academy and in 2021 with BLM organizers who were part of the Leading Change Network, whenever I pointed out these failures, the BLM organizers got really defensive.  Their response to my criticism was, "We were not the violent ones!  And you can't believe everything the media tells you!  Most of the protests were peaceful!"  In making such criticisms, they missed the point altogether.  That point being this: that if you engage in mass protests, and violent things happen during your protests, your protest movement will suffer, no matter who started the violence.  Erica Chenoweth explains this beautifully as follows: When a mass protest is peaceful, everyone who is an ally or potential ally is likely to show up.  This includes young families with small children and elderly grandmas with nothing better to do.  In such circumstances, it is very hard for the government to justify using violence to shut down your protest.  But as soon as the government is able to provoke or inject violence into the protests, the vulnerable - young families with small children and elderly grandmas - start to disappear until you are left only with athletic young men facing heavily armed cops.  In those circumstances it becomes very easy for the government to justify the use of violent oppression to shut down the protest!

• Having said that, I wonder why the BLM organizers did not shift from tactics of concentration to tactics of dispersion as soon as the violence began to appear!    (Pardon me - I shouldn't wonder.  It's because these fools did not read any books!)  For instance, why didn't one or more leaders immediately issue a statement saying, "We see that evil actors have shown up to inject violence and vandalism into our protests.  Therefore, we are switching to protest tactics that don't involve large groups of people coming together in the streets.  These new tactics will be legal, and will not be able to be hijacked by those who want to cause violence or to paint us as criminals." It shows a fatal lack of brains that not one of these leaders took such a step.  I remember reading the news reports of protest after protest in which a small group of agents provocateurs broke away from a protest march to go off and vandalize while the police "declared a riot", and I was shouting in my living room, "Please, wake up and shift tactics!"  (It felt to me very much like my experience as a kid watching Saturday Night wrestling and screaming at the TV whenever the "hero" made an obvious mistake.  Lot of good that did.)  I agree with BLM that there should have been protests.  Yet there are both smart and stupid tactics of protest, and BLM failed to understand the difference.  (Oh, look!  It's happening again.)

• A failure to see the limitations of mass protest.  Protest is not a viable single strategy of liberation.  At best, it's a single tactic.  A tactic is not a strategy.  And as we have considered strategy in the context of strategic nonviolent resistance, we have learned that the best strategy is a strategy which your opponent is not ready to meet, and for which he has no defenses.  Chapters 6 and 7 of From D to D have drawn heavily from the writings of a British man named Basil Henry Liddell-Hart, who in the aftermath of World War 1 advocated heavily that armies should adopt a strategy of indirect approach as the best means of meeting one's enemy in a place where he is not prepared to meet you.  I suggest that among the tactics of nonviolent action, mass street protest is now the tactic which most governments are most prepared to meet, and that these governments can short-circuit mass protest most effectively simply by injecting violence into the protests.  Once they do that, they can justify raising the cost which ordinary people must pay to participate in protest by using tactics of violent police repression of protest.  Mass protest is therefore not an example of the strategy of indirect approach.  And mass protest carries certain unavoidable costs even when the protestors do not have to face police repression.  I think of some of the BLM websites I saw last year in which organizers vowed to protest every day until their demands were met.  I guess they never heard of "protest fatigue"!  Moreover, as pointed out by Jamila Raqib, protest by itself does not alter the balance of power between the powerful and the powerless.

In their insistence on the same tactic of mass protest day after day, the BLM protest organizers reminded me very much of a Briton who never considered the strategy of indirect approach, namely Sir Douglas Haig.  I hope the man has no partisans, fans, or groupies who are still alive - otherwise, they might come to the USA to hunt me down and slash my tires - er, I mean, "tyres" - or threaten to give me "a bunch of fives."  But Haig is a man worthy of much criticism.  I think of his insistence on costly daily frontal assaults for three months during the Battle of Passchendaele in 1917, and how the Germans played rope-a-dope with him there.  I fear that here in the USA, should another outrage against African-Americans be perpetrated, and should that outrage spark mass protest, our enemies may play rope-a-dope again with us as they did in 2020.