Post by s e pearson on Sept 8, 2011 5:12:47 GMT -5
How can a small group of political dissidents take on a much larger, better resourced and entrenched Establishment?
The failure of any radical group to answer, or even seriously ask, this question over the last century or so has given the British elite a free hand and the luxury to indulge itself in ever greater extremism.
No radical strand is guiltier of thoughtless and futile kamikaze strategies than the radical right over the last forty years. Any objective assessment of the “achievements” of first the NF and the BNP would have to conclude with a sentence in which the words “abject” and “pathetic” figured prominently. In fact the record of both groups was worse than simple failure; their performance was so poor that it actually encouraged the establishment to disregard any potential political threat from the right which it might otherwise have imagined.
The phrase “counter productive” is not adequate to do justice to the extent of the political disaster the radical rights attempts at resistance in the last 20th century wrought.
And so it is that we now survey the wreckage of the BNP and consider the future strategy and tactics of the radical right in the UK. Inevitably there is a chorus demanding the immediate construction of another conventional political party driven on by sheer cultural momentum and the apparently lack of a viable alternative. This essay will seek to offer a viable alternative to repeat of the carnage which the elite so enjoyed on the last two performances and looks forward to repeating over the next ten years.
I draw my inspiration for the ideas laid out here from the development of Asymmetrical warfare techniques in the post war period. Over this period apparently numerical superior better armed better organised and better resourced Western Armies have been systematically and comprehensively defeated in Algeria, Vietnam, Afghanistan (twice), Iraq and Lebanon. Even in Northern Ireland it took over thirty years for the might of the British State to bring an end a tepid insurgency and even then not on entirely satisfactory grounds from their point of view. In the entire period the only really successful counter-insurgency campaign from the perspective of the elites was the Sri Lankan State’s annihilation of the LTTE, and that only came about after an ill judged decision by the later to go to a conventional model of warfare.
How have these disparate rebel movements achieved success against such apparently overwhelming odds? The basic principals of asymmetric conflict are simple; however they are counter intuitive and far removed from our cultural traditions. They require radicals to step outside the historical norms of our society’s conventional thinking.
The first thing you need for an asymmetrical war is some dead people since it isn’t a war unless someone dies. However what is the purpose of killing a few soldiers when the army you face might have several hundreds of thousands? Clearly an attack upon them has no conventional military significance. There are two major objectives when such an attack is launched.
Firstly an attack upon an army is news; it’s hardwired by convention into the media culture that such an event must be prominently covered. This coverage allows the insurgents to communicate to their potential supporters that someone is resisting and that resistance can be (apparently) effective. It also communicates to the opposition’s domestic audience that there is a cost to whatever their state is trying to do in terms of the lives of its soldiers. As a bonus there will usually be some sort of public debate on the insurgents’ goals which communicates the objective of the insurgents to everyone.
Secondly the attack aims to provoke a response from the opposition. This is beneficial for two reasons. Such a response is at the very least likely to annoy and inconvenience potential insurgents and supporters making them more likely to support the insurgents. There is always a group which blames the insurgents for this hassle but strangely it is always outweighed by those who blame the response not the provocation. Additionally this response costs the opposition resources, maybe they need to send reinforcements or make more patrols; whatever the response its going to jack up the cost for the opposition thus affecting the cost/benefit analysis made by them. Ultimately this phenomenon can literally bankrupt the opposition forcing them from the field, as happened in the American Revolution.
Of course this is going to get you nowhere if the opposition’s response succeeds in destroying your insurgent group. In order to prevent the opposition from bringing its superior might to bear insurgents have evolved a simple but effective technique, they don’t wear uniforms. The inability of Western Armies to distinguish between insurgents and the host population has made their vast numerical and technological advantages totally irrelevant. The problem with this is that some of the people insurgents seek to represent end up full of metal as a result of the indistinguishability of combatant from civilian, however this is unavoidable. As compensation this “collateral damage” tends to massively increase support from the insurgents and alienate Western domestic populations; the “wedding party” effect.
In order to maximise this general pattern it is crucial for insurgents to grasp that there is no distinction between a military operation and the media/propaganda aspects of it. The goal of the insurgent is not necessarily to militarily defeat the opposition, but to create a political environment in which their opponents are forced to stop doing whatever it was that the insurgents opposed, this can only be achieved through propaganda and through perception.
At a tactical level the problem would seem to be “how do you conduct any sort of attack on a vast military machine without being utterly defeated”? The answer is very simple. No matter how massive an army is it is still made up of little bits. All that needs to be done is to find one of these little bits which is sufficiently remote from the others to be vulnerable. Additionally it’s a good thing if the selected component is small enough that the insurgents can overwhelm it. This is called local superiority.
Ultimately it doesn’t matter if the US Army has 20,000 MBTs if none of them are in the vicinity of the action. They may as well have none. It doesn’t matter if they have a million soldiers if they’ve only got 20 at the check point you’ve decided to attack. Equally it doesn’t matter if there are only 30 insurgents in your group so long as they are all at the check point in question. As far as the people at the sharp end are concerned the ratio of strength is 3:2 in favour of the insurgents. Moreover the insurgents have the advantage of surprise; the odds of your check point being attacked in a system of 10,000 are so low that it’s only reasonable to take the attitude “its not going to be us”.
Which is great so long as it isn’t, when it is you have a serious problem.
Even in terms of firepower its irrelevant to you as a NATO solider that the USA has 15 nuclear powered aircraft carriers in Norfolk, VA, when insurgents have a couple of mortars and RPGs and all you have in a crappy plastic M-16 and two clips of ammo. Local superiority is the only superiority which matters at the point of contact which is the only place it matters.
For the “superior force” in an asymmetrical conflict the problem of your outposts getting jumped is the least of your problems. The propaganda situation is exactly reversed in that the insurgents have all the advantages. If they kill one of your troops its news, you kill 50 goatherds with guns and its not, unless you do it in one sitting in which case you look like a vicious bully and not Hannibal. Thus you can’t persuade anyone that you’re winning the war no matter how often you win a battle so long as you lose even once. Everyone expects you to win because of the massive “advantages” you have so that when you don’t it looks terrible and when you do no-one cares.
Eventually if the insurgents can inflict enough pain by concentrating attacks in a certain locality they can force their opponents to withdraw from the area creating “no go zones” in which the insurgents (usually) hold sway rather than the “superior force”. In such areas insurgents can and often do take on the role of local authorities supplying services, justice and governance to the local population. Such areas are inevitably fertile recruitment grounds for the insurgents and often supply other resources like money and weapons.
Such “strongholds” represent a considerable risk for insurgents since they are large static and readily identifiable targets. Usually the fact that the insurgent controls nothing gives the “superior force” no strategic targets which to attack and claim victory when successful. However on the flip side such strongholds can make excellent “kill zones” in which insurgents can fight on favourable terms against the “superior force”, a good example of this was the disastrous 2006 Israeli invasion of Lebanon which ended with the Israelis forced to withdraw. They also represent excellent propaganda opportunities since they symbolically demonstrate that the “superior force” can be meaningfully defeated rather than simply tormented and that that there is a viable alternative to the rule of the dominant party.
Such are the simple principles of asymmetric warfare which four generations of West Pointers have yet to come up with a solution to.
So how would these tactical and strategic concepts be applied to political conflict in the UK?
In many cases it is obvious; defeating an outpost of the establishment is news, failing to isn’t. The strategy must therefore be to win the maximum number of engagements and win at frequent intervals. This might sound like a no-brainer but for decades the radical right has operated an alternative strategy in that its main objective has been to fight as often as possible and winning was rarely a concern except for a small elite.
The BNP’s victory in Tower Hamlets 1993 demonstrates this point, that victory made it a household name and had it discussed at every level from Newsnight to the Rose and Crown bar. Before this hundreds of defeats had excited interest only from political nerds. The relatively small efforts of a handful of people outweighed the effect of a lot more over a lot longer because the former won.
It’s also important to note that the objective is not to destroy the establishment by seizing control of its mechanism of power via winning a majority in the House of Commons, that is utterly impossible. That would be the same mistake as for the Taliban to think it could take Washington D.C. by force of arms at some point. The primary objective is to encourage more people to rebel and to encourage more people to support the rebels, simultaneously forcing the opposition to expend ever more resources in an attempt to suppress the rebellion. Thus controlling the media and the agenda is a crucial goal, not an ancillary factor in some other ambition.
At some point if the political insurgency was successful the establishment would find it politically impossible not to give in to the demands of the insurgency, or at least run the risk of an actual military insurgency and/or revolution if it didn’t. At the very least a successful political insurgency would impede the implementation of the elite’s agenda, exposing them to the forces currently eating away at their power long enough for them to collapse the elite’s power mechanisms. Such tactics are well established in political conflict and often associated with the Roman general Fabius (and are thus known as Fabian strategies).
At a tactical level it’s clear that asymmetrical techniques, like none adoption of conventional identifications of opposition (in this case a membership card of a conventional monolithic hierarchical political party), can be adapted to the situation the radical right finds itself in today. Concepts like local superiority can also be adapted, creating small highly mobile teams capable of sustaining a concentrated attack on a single ward target.
It is entirely probable that a team of around four or five could deliver more effort in one week than the local establishment campaigners could in three months. Concentrated closer to polling day the efforts of the mobile team would be more effective than the drawn out low intensity campaign of the opposition. It’s also probable that such a team would rapidly develop a high level of tactical and operational skill which would increase their effectiveness Vs that of their opponents. Backed by specialist support teams operating remotely over the net such mobile teams could deliver overwhelming local superiority over the grunts of the establishment at street level. The result would be crushing local superiority delivered with the element of surprise leaving the opposition with insufficient time to mobilise its greater resources.
Such small symbolic victories in themselves present little threat to the actual power of the elite, losing control of a single ward or even council would not be sufficient to challenge the control of society by the establishment. In order for these to be effective against the elite they must be seen by the population within a narrative of resistance and revolution. The adoption of liberation movement memes and symbols would be one way of encouraging this. As would emphasising the asymmetric character of the engagements. Managing the perception of the struggle is critical to eventual victory.
It is of vital importance then that these “raids” gained media attention, in order to do that the consequences of the engagement must be more than the simple election of a solitary councillor with radical right sympathies. Which is where the DRM 11 system comes in, its implementation is guaranteed to excite massive attention, particularly from the politically conscious class. The combination of revolutionary propaganda and symbology combined with the genuinely revolutionary reality of DRM 11 stands every chance of creating explosive momentum in very short order.
In conclusion, various forces all over the world over the last fifty years have evolved strategies and tactics which have rendered the military advantages of the Western elites either useless or actual liabilities. The principals of these tactics can be applied to any asymmetrical conflict but are particularly relevant to our political struggle against the Western establishments. In particular adopting decentralised and informal models of organisation, making it harder for the elite’s to bring their power to bear, local superiority/swarm tactics, and carful use of symbolism and narrative management can all help us negate the apparently formidable advantages of the elite.