Leaderless resistance

From Freepedia

Leaderless Resistance is a strategy in which independent small groups of no more than three or even individuals (covert cells) fight an established, entrenched powerful adversary through independent acts, typically violent. There is no central coordination for the cell structure, the system as a whole is leaderless, there is no need for explicit communication between them, and members of one cell don't even know who else outside their tiny cell is fighting. As a result, the organization is resistant to informants and traitors. The cells share a common program or mindset, reacting in a similar way to external stimuli, without need of being micromanaged centrally. As there is no center that could be attacked, nor links between the cells that could be tracked, it is much more difficult to track down all the organization members, like it is possible with conventional hierarchies.

The concept of leaderless resistance, the so called "phantom cell" structure, was reportedly developed by Col. Ulius Loius Amoss, an alleged U.S. intelligence officer, in the early 1960's as a backup for the possibility of Communists seizing control of the U.S.

To have a chance of success and not just be a nuisance, a leaderless resistance really must reflect the feelings of a high portion of the residents in its area of operation. (This is why the animal-rights activists, though almost impossible for police to suppress because of use of strategies somewhat resembling leaderless resistance, haven't achieved any large aim.) Leaderless resistances don't need active public support as in the Mao concept of guerrilla war to win, but they do need to represent a really substantial share of the public in the area of operations to win.

The violence of leaderless resistance could easily devolve into random violent acts without formal political objectives. It can be dismissed as a work of wannabe terrorists, petty copycat criminals, and angry loners engaging in sympathy attacks - the traditional forms of cultural resistance used by the powerless and/or poor to cause problems to a stronger enemy. However, the leaderless resistance differs by the choice of objectives and targets according to a political goal common for all the cells involved, set by political tracts or other documents produced by other cells. The feedback for the cells is provided by the mass media, who ignore unsuccessful actions and focus on the highly successful ones, repeating them - and their recruiting message - over and over. By communicating exclusively through the media, there is no real possibility of tracing down the links between the cells.

There can be a de-facto leader of the leaderless movement. It can be a public figure or an inspirational author, who picks broad generic families of targets and objectives, but does no micromanaging and has no direct communication with the cells except these statements with an a-la-carte menu of the targets, and then watching their success on TV.

Leaderless systems are functionally similar to insect swarms or schools of piranhas. For the defender, they indeed are the death of a thousand uncoordinated independent cuts.

Leaderless resistances can defeat major governments without any battlefield victories. Indeed, that is their most likely path to victory. Look at the Palestinians's driving Israel out of Gaza as the prototypical example, followed by the Iraqi insurgents's defeat of the U.S.

The required lack of leadership, though, limits the potential of leaderless resistance. It can easily drive out an occupying force by making the cost of occupation way too high, but can it create a substitute government after that victory? The Palestinians were easily able to drive the occupying Israelis out of Gaza when they very largely shifted from classic guerrilla war to leaderless resistance around 2000, but haven't been able to govern it since at all. Iraq's insurgents defeated the American military, but haven't been able to produce anything close to a viable rump government since.

The lack of structure, providing the resilience of the leaderless structure, is however an obstacle in achieving political change - a process requiring organizing and decisionmaking.

While the concept of leaderless resistance is based on resistance by violent means, it does not have to be limited to them. The same structure can be used by nonviolent groups authoring, printing and distributing samizdat literature, using the Internet to create self-propagating boycotts against political opponents, maintaining an alternative electronic currency outside of the reach of the taxing governments and transaction-logging banks, or doing anything else the government, or any other similarly powerful adversary who controls the given area, does not want to happen and is willing to prosecute or exterminate its perpetrators. Leaderless does not automatically mean violent.

Contents

History

The concept was published in an essay published by the anti-government activist Louis Beam in February 12 1992 in the final edition of The Seditionist, as a technique for white nationalists to continue the struggle against the U.S. government, against overwhelming odds.

Beam argued that conventional hierarchical pyramidal organizations are extremely dangerous for their participants, when employed in a resistance movement against government, because of the ease of disclosing the chain of command. A more workable approach would be to convince the like-minded individuals to form independent cells, without close communication between each other, but generally operating in the same direction.

John Ross's popular 1996 novel Unintended Consequences, portraying a (successful) rebellion by the American heartland after decades of bullying by faraway Washington, very accurately depicts a leaderless resistance and is the best book on this subject and largely mirrors the ongoing Iraq insurgency that began years later. Its thesis is that enough bullying of a large, culturally-distinct region long enough by what, rightly or wrongly, is perceived there as a hostile foreign occupier, will inevitably produce a leaderless revolt that the occupier won't be able to suppress.

Present use

The term leaderless resistance is today used for any clandestine organization structured in cells without a command structure ruling them. While it was incorrectly used for more organized systems, the correct usage means systems that lack bidirectional vertical command links - groups without leaders.

The Iraqi insurgency very largely operates as a leaderless resistance, which is the key reason why the U.S. has been unable to suppress it as there just isn't anyone for POWs to be tortured into talking about and nobody for bribed informants to talk about.

Leaderless Resistance is actively employed by several interest groups; Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty, the Earth Liberation Front, White Aryan Resistance, and some islamist terrorists and eco-terrorists are just a few examples. The shift from guerrilla war to (mainly) leaderless resistance by Palestinians in occupied areas since 2000 deserves the credit for driving the Israelis out of Gaza.

al-Qaida likely uses this quasi-organization structure.

Organizing a leaderless resistance movement without leaving traces converting it to a classical centralized hierarchy is a difficult task. It is more likely for it to manifest spontaneously as an emergent behavior in a large group of people.

Countermeasures

Network analysis in classical setting

The social networks based on leaderless resistance are potentially vulnerable to network analysis and its derivative link analysis. Link analysis of social networks is the fundamental reason for the ongoing legislative push in U.S. and the European Union for mandatory retention of telecommunication traffic data and limiting access to anonymous prepaid cellphones, as the stored data contain important network analysis clues. These practices are highly unfriendly to individual privacy.

Network analysis was successfully used by French Colonel Yves Godard to break the Algerian resistance between 1955 and 1957 and force them to cease the bombing campaigns. (However, most French officers who were veterans of the Algerian conflict view it as guerrilla in nature and not leaderless resistance at all. See Modern Warfare by Col. Roger Trinquier, a book extensively showing typical pyramidal command structure of Algerian rebels.) The mapping data was obtained by the use of informants and torture and were used to obtain the identities of important individuals in the resistance; these then were assassinated, disrupting the Algerian resistance networks. The more unique the individual is in the adversary's network, the more difficult is the replacement, and the greater is the damage to the adversary.

Leaderless challenges

Traditional organizations leave behind many clues for their structure - money trails, training, command and control, logistics, recruitment. Leaderless organizations, as they are more ideologies than organizations, lack vast majority of such traces. Often the very effects of their operations, globally reported by the mass media, act as a sort of messaging and recruitment advertising.

The Internet provides the investigators with further challenges. The individual cells (and even a single person can be a cell) can communicate over the Internet, anonymously or semi-anonymously publishing and sharing information online, to be found by other cells by the means of well-known websites or search engines. Even if it would be legally and technically possible to get the complete information of who downloaded what, it would be practically impossible to discern in reasonable timeframe who is a real threat and who is just curious, journalist, or a web crawler.

The classical law enforcement approach of raising the penalties for the crimes to astronomical heights in the hope to create a deterrent effect is counterproductive, as it only leads to further radicalization of the undecided. The same applies to the current political fashion trend of labeling everything as "terrorism", as disproportionate retaliation against members of the general population will radicalize even more members of the general public.

Leaderless resistance is fundamentally unstable. If the actions are not frequent enough or not successful, the stream of public messages - serving as the recruiting, motivation and coordination drives for other cells - diminishes, and if the actions are too successful, the result will be formation of support groups, fan clubs, and other social structures - structures vulnerable to network analysis.

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External links

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