Under a Gibbous Moon

I was reading about the whole hikers wandering into Iran story today when I was reminded of something funny that happened during Basic Training.

My company was out on landnav. This essentially involves spending most of the day wandering around in the woods looking for wooden poles with numbers on them.

My squad was wandering around the woods when we ran into another squad from my platoon and they had the most interesting story to tell.

They had been a klick or so from our current position (I don’t recall the direction) when they had come across one of the many access roads that criss cross the woods. There they had run into a couple of sergeants who were quite surprised to see them.

It turns out that they had wandering onto an artillery range.

It’s times like these when knowing how to calculate a back-azimuth comes in handy.

This is a rather fascinating lecture from the Army Heritage Education Center (located at the U.S. Army War College). It makes an interesting case for looking at the Civil Rights Movement as an insurgency.

This view of divorcing the violence from the what we tend to think of as an insurgency shows how effective insurgencies work in breaking the will of those in power and how and examination of those techniques shows ways in which they can be exploited in an effective counter-insurgency in what is now known as fourth generation warfare.

Just a warning, the lecture is about 90 minutes long.

The abstract for the lecture:

Most Americans fail to appreciate that the Civil Rights movement was about the overthrow of an entrenched political order in each of the Southern states, that the segregationists who controlled this order did not hesitate to employ violence (law enforcement, paramilitary, mob) to preserve it, and that for nearly a century the federal government tacitly or overtly supported the segregationist state governments. That the Civil Rights movement employed nonviolent tactics should fool us no more than it did the segregationists, who correctly saw themselves as being at war. Significant change was never going to occur within the political system: it had to be forced. The aim of the segregationists was to keep the federal government on the sidelines. The aim of the Civil Rights movement was to “capture” the federal government-to get it to apply its weight against the Southern states. As to why it matters: a major reason we were slow to grasp the emergence and extent of the insurgency in Iraq is that it didn’t-and doesn’t-look like a classic insurgency. In fact, the official Department of Defense definition of insurgency still reflects a Vietnam era understanding of the term. Looking at the Civil Rights movement as an insurgency is useful because it assists in thinking more comprehensively about the phenomenon of insurgency and assists in a more complete-and therefore more useful-definition of the term.

Hat Tip: Schneier on Security