SOME NOTES ON THE MANUAL "GUERRILLA WARFARE" BY CHE GUEVARA, 1960

It is commonly pointed out, correctly, that Che’s efforts at guerrilla warfare in Bolivia came to naught, since he was hunted down and killed by U.S. Special Forces in that country (It is also commonly pointed out, again correctly, that he was a dirtbag communist piece of shit…But that doesn’t mean there aren’t valuable lessons to be learned from his successes). There were numerous reasons for this, most of them not germane to the current conversation. Suffice it to say that 1) the efforts of the Cuban Revolution, in which Che played no small part, were successful, and 2) this manual is still considered required reading by any Special Forces soldier tasked with performing a UW or FID mission. In the interest of this blog, I am currently in the process of re-reading this seminal classic in the field, for somewhere around the eighth time. As I go, I am taking notes, and adding my thoughts and concepts, as to how those noted elements of the work apply, or may apply to possible future actions here.

Many people, even among the Liberty Movement, feel we are well along the way to living under the boot heel of a complete totalitarian regime. Yet, they also hold to the belief that resistance is still futile. Che, like current SF doctrine, held that the civilian populace must consider they have nothing left to lose by open insurrection:

“People must clearly see the futility of maintaining the fight for social goals within the framework of civil debate. When the forces of oppression come to maintain themselves against established law, peace is considered already broken.

In these conditions, popular discontent expresses itself in more active forms. An attitude of resistance finally crystallizes in an outbreak of fighting, provoked initially by the conduct of the authorities.

When a government has come into power through some form of popular vote, fraudulent or not, and maintains at least an appearance of constitutional legality, the guerrilla outbreak cannot be promoted, since the possibilities of peaceful struggle have not yet been exhausted.”

Note the parts I underlined in Che’s text above…There is already fighting occurring, provoked by the conduct of the authorities. The Occupy Wall Street movement (I do NOT agree with most of the stated, overtly socialist goals of OWS, but they DO possess a natural human right to peacefully express their beliefs, however flawed those might be) has had passive protestors pepper-sprayed by law enforcement, been shot at by less-lethal baton rounds, and been beaten by truncheon-wielding thugs in armor, hiding behind their balaclavas and face shields.

Many of us have been indirectly threatened with physical force and illegal rendition as enemy combatants, simply because we hold socio-economic, political, or religious views that are considered “extremist” by the unelected bureaucracies of the federal executive branch, backed up by such obviously un-Constitutional legislative acts as NDAA 2011-2012 and the currently pending “Enemy Extradition Act” by which they claim the privilege of robbing us of our natural-born citizenship of the Republic. So, who can say when the first round of the fight was fired? I’d hazard a guess that it’s already left the chamber of some law enforcement officer’s weapon. While the electoral process is still, theoretically in place, the argument can be made, and often is, that voting holds no benefit, since the electoral process is so warped from its original intent. I am not, for one moment, saying the possibilities of peaceful struggle have been exhausted, but I know there are a lot of people who believe they have been.

On resisting the conventional force counter-insurgency efforts, Che offered the following:

“The guerrilla fighter…must analyze the resources which the enemy has for trying to achieve that outcome (destruction of the resistance): the means in men, in mobility, in popular support, in armaments, in capacity of leadership on which he can count.

There are fundamental aspects to be studied: the armament for example, and the manner of using this armament. The value of a tank, of an airplane in a fight of this type must be weighed. The arms of the enemy, his ammunition, his habits, must be considered…”

I would offer these observations:

However many men in uniform, both military and law enforcement, that would gladly violate their oath to the Constitution (and let’s face it, there are many!), there will always be some who understand what their oath actually means. The regime’s security forces WILL be fighting with a divided force, leading to a decline or decay of morale and unit cohesion. Further, it MAY be reasonable to expect that, in the event of open hostilities, there would be large numbers of diversions, for two primary reasons: A) those who value their honor and integrity, would join the resistance in order to live up to their oath, and B) many who couldn’t care one way or the other, would feel obligated to look after their families. It is hardly reasonable to expect, as hostilities increase in intensity, that the civilian populace of this country, would not form, at some level, an unorganized underground resistance, even if just in the form of mass rioting and looting, that would require untold efforts and resources from the security forces, thus robbing the regime of manpower that would otherwise be used to quell the active resistance.

The use of conventional force armaments has been seen to have limited effect in the alpine regions of the Afghan conflict. Despite billions (trillions!?) of U.S. taxpayer dollars spent on technology to combat the Taliban and AQ in the Hindu Kush, in the form of armor, aircraft, UAVs, electronic signals intercept, etc, the jihadists are still fighting…and succeeding on many levels. One of the greatest benefits of the American Redoubt concept put forth by Jim Rawles of Survivalblog.com, is the inaccessibility of much of the Northern Rockies region to conventional force assets. Yes, helicopters can be used…but they are of limited value, and at high risk of loss, when used in high mountain areas, due to the thinner air, and the necessity to set down on landing zones (LZs) lower than the surrounding terrain. While Hajji has weapons such as the former Soviet anti-aircraft weapons, and select-fire weapons, we Americans have the unprecedented advantage of the relatively common civilian ownership of such weapons as heavy sniper weapons, ranging from .50BMG, .338Lapua, and .408 Chey-Tac, to the ready ability of small, home workshop manufacture of more of these, as well as more advanced weapons, such as mortars, anti-tank rockets, etc, with the plans for all readily available (so far) on the internet (you ARE saving such information in hard copy, suitably cached away, right?). In addition to this, we have the added advantage, not possessed by the Caliphate’s forces in the Hindu Kush, of a large percentage of our future resistance forces, KNOWING exactly how our regime’s conventional forces will counter our threat…Hell, you can buy the current counterinsurgency manual at your local bookstore!

Che provides a succinct description of overall guerrilla strategy:

“At the outset, the essential task of the guerrilla fighter is to keep himself from being destroyed….to make flight and escape from the forces that are on the offensive an easy task, because it is performed daily. When this condition is reached, the guerrilla, having taken up inaccessible positions out of reach of the enemy…ought to proceed to the gradual weakening of the enemy. This will be carried out at first at those points nearest to the points of active warfare against the guerrilla band and later taken deeper into enemy territory, attacking his communications, later attacking or harassing his bases of operations and his central bases, tormenting him on all sides to the full extent of the capabilities of the guerrilla forces.

The blows should be continuous. The enemy soldiers in a zone of operations ought not be allowed to sleep; his outposts ought to be attacked and liquidated systematically.”

Initially during the commencement of open hostilities against a totalitarian regime, especially in this era of UAV, geo-synchronous surveillance satellites, thermal imaging, and police state, “Rat out your neighbor for what he MIGHT be doing illegally,” the ability to evade compromise and capture will be the single most valuable skill of the guerrilla fighter. For this reason, the ability to mingle comfortably with the “outlaw” elements of society will be critical for the urban guerrilla (so, all you suit-wearing doctors and accountants, start hanging out with your social inferiors now….), and the ability to disappear into the mountains or forests will be equally critical for the rural guerrilla. Don’t say it can’t be done. Eric Rudolph pulled it off for years. Claude Dallas broke out of prison and evaded capture for a year and a half, after having killed two law enforcement officers (Idaho Game and Fish wardens are sworn police officers). It can be done. Learn the fieldcraft. Once you have succeeded in evading capture, start hitting back. Even a solo guerrilla can cause damage. Use sniper attacks to take out one member of a patrol, and then disappear again. Set up your hide site overlooking a known travel route and take out a passing vehicle. When the crew exits the vehicle, engage them long enough to kill one or two, then disappear again. Know your fieldcraft! Slip into a built-up area under cover of darkness or disguise, and sabotage their vehicles or communications facilities.

As your guerrilla force grows in size/strength, expand your operations to conduct larger ambushes. If you are already training a group of future resistance fighters, teach them to conduct precision raids now. Capture and interrogate key enemy personnel and leadership…or just raid to assassinate key enemy leaders in their own beds (and scare the ever-loving-shit out of the rest of the enemy leadership cadre!).

Leverage the technology available to you now. If every member of your training group does not own NVGs, purchase them while you still can. Purchase body armor (at least level III stand-alone plates and plate carriers!). Purchase special application sniper systems, such as a .50BMG, .338Lapua, or a .408…Learn to fabricate not only field-expedient suppressors, but commercial-grade suppressors that will stand up to high rates of sustained fire. Get involved with the legal manufacture of fireworks, or getting a blasting permit and learn explosives handling.

On building rapport:

“In order to do all this the absolute cooperation of the people and a perfect knowledge of the ground is necessary. These two necessities affect every minute of the life of the guerrilla fighter….intensive popular work must be undertaken to explain the motives of the revolution, its ends, and to spread the incontrovertible truth that victory of the enemy against the people is finally impossible…

This popular work should at first be aimed at securing secrecy; that is, each peasant, each member of the society in which such action is taking place, will be asked not to mention what he sees and hears; later help will be sought from inhabitants whose loyalty to the revolution offers greater guarantees; still later, use will be made of these persons in missions contact, for transporting goods or arms, as guides in zones familiar to them…

This is, ultimately, the entire purpose and philosophy of guerrilla PSYOPS: To win the support of the civilian populace. I would posit that doing so will be easier in this country than it has ever been for U.S. Special Forces and PSYOPS units to do so in a foreign intervention, since we will be dealing with our own people, whose needs, motivations, and desires we know and can understand.

You should be building the foundations of this auxiliary force NOW, long before it is ever needed. Get to know the people in your community. Become their friendly acquaintance and trusted business associate, if not their actual friend. Join your local volunteer fire department. Volunteer to help with the local Boy Scout troop. Assist the local fund-raiser to help a family in financial trouble. Coach a Little League baseball team, and get to know the parents socially. Discuss political concerns with people, without ever arguing. If there views happen to be statist/socialist, who cares? They have the right to believe whatever they want. Just know that, when the hostilities commence, that is one individual you do not want to waste too much time on building rapport with any longer. Know what the people in your community are capable of providing for support. Know a local machinist with sympathetic views? Who can say that in the future, he won’t be able to surreptitiously turn out a suppressor, or a rifle, or a Liberator pistol for the movement once a week? Know the local vet is tired of all the interference from the DEA? Maybe he can provide medical assistance to a wounded guerrilla at some point in the future. Is the son of the local utility company’s field operations manager on the baseball team you coached? Did you develop a good relationship with him? Maybe he can sabotage the power grid that supports the security forces encampment at a certain time, to facilitate a guerrilla raid to rescue prisoners…

You will build more rapport with kindness and support than with even unspoken threats. Yes, the civilian populace is well aware that you have guns. Don’t ever allow the thought to cross their mind that those guns might be turned on them. Show up in the middle of the night, during haying season, to help the local rancher get his haying in, while some of your guerrilla fighters pull security down the road. Help a family with a sick child, who has been refused treatment at the local clinic, get through to an outside care provider that can save the child’s life. Show up with fresh game meat or stolen enemy provisions, to help feed a family who is short on groceries thanks to piss-poor government rationing programs.

________________________________________________________________

Che wrote that “Acts of sabotage are very important. It is necessary to distinguish clearly between sabotage, a revolutionary and highly effective method of warfare, and terrorism, a measure that is generally ineffective and indiscriminate in its results, since it often makes victims of innocent people and destroys a large number of lives that would be valuable to the revolution…at any rate, well-managed sabotage is always a very effective arm, though it should not be employed to put means of production out of action, leaving a sector of the population paralyzed (and thus without work) unless this paralysis affects the normal life of society…”

It is critically important that the guerrilla fighter understand the difference between sabotage and terrorism, as well as the importance of this distinction, and the application of either, on the PSYOPS campaign to build rapport with the civilian populace.

Planting explosives to destroy vehicles in the security force’s motor pool is sabotage. So is destroying a bridge that they regularly use to pursue guerrilla forces. Even a member of the civilian populace philosophically or politically opposed to the resistance can understand the military purpose behind such actions. Destroying the local food warehouse on the other hand, causes the civilian populace to suffer as much as, if not more than, the security forces (the security forces can after all, simply take food from the civilian populace, or have it transported in). Destroying a power line that leads to the security force FOB has a direct military application in degrading the morale, and possibly the communications ability, of the enemy. Planting toxins in the local water supply causes loss of life to the civilian populace as well.

The difference between sabotage and terror, when operations are conducted by a paramilitary guerrilla force, or subversive underground resistance, is far more than a matter of semantics, as some cynics and critics of unconventional warfare like to dishonestly claim. The difference lies in the fact that sabotage is ALWAYS aimed at causing damage that has a direct bearing on the enemy’s ability to project military force against the resistance and control over the civilian populace. It is never targeted at infrastructure that causes injury solely, or even primarily at the civilian populace. (This is one reason why it is still fair to consider the actions of jihadists in Iraq and Afghanistan as terrorism, despite the intended goal of ending the American occupation…because of the fundamental lack of value on human life in the Muslim faith, the jihadists have no qualms about causing damage and death to the local civilian populace while trying to drive U.S. and Coalition forces out of the theatre of operations.)

Similarly, it should be considered outside the responsibility of the paramilitary guerrilla force to conduct direct-action missions of any sort, against the non-uniformed leadership cadre or support echelons of the regime’s security forces. If such actions are necessary, they should be conducted solely by the subversive underground, as an element of the popular uprising of the civilian populace. The only legitimate targets of the paramilitary guerrilla force are uniformed personnel, or marked vehicles and facilities of the security forces. This is not a matter of claiming the protection of international law, but rather, an element of building rapport with the civilian populace, and earning their trust.

On the defense against the regime’s air assets:

“One of the favorite arms of the enemy army, supposed to be decisive in modern times, is aviation. Nevertheless, this has no use whatsoever during the period that guerrilla warfare is in its first stages, with small concentrations of men in rugged places. The utility of aviation lies in the systematic destruction of visible and organized defenses; and for this there must be large concentrations of men who construct such defenses, something that does not exist in this type of warfare. Planes are also potent against marches by columns through level places or places without cover; however, this latter danger is easily avoided by carrying out the marches by night (remember, when Guevara wrote this manual, night vision technology was still very much in its infancy. There are still mitigating tactics that can be used today though.)

The biggest concern of many in the Liberty Movement is the ability of the regime to use assets such as aircraft and UAVs to conduct surveillance and precision bombing of resistance forces. We’ve seen the application of this in the GWOT against Taliban and AQ forces…yet they are still fighting…hmmmm…maybe it’s not the fail-safe threat that the government wants us to think it is?

AQ is notoriously bad about the use of electronic communications. Guys use cellphones to call subordinates, and then forget to get rid of the cellphone. Get rid of your cellphone when you begin conducting guerrilla operations. If you have to use electronic communications, whether a computer/internet connection, two-way radios, or, God forbid, a cellphone, kill the power immediately after the communication, then move. Use pre-determined communications windows, at apparently random time. Only keep your communications devices on during those windows. Minimize transmissions. Let the sending element transmit, and don’t worry about a response.

“You, this is me. Rendezvous at rally point three at time hack six. Out.” Then turn off the radio, or laptop, and move out. Get away from the transmission site as quickly as possible, and as far away as possible. If “you” is not at rally point three at time hack six, then “me” can transmit a new coordinate and time hack. If “you” knows he cannot make it to the rendezvous, then during the next communications window, he can be the transmitting unit, “Me, this is you, alter last transmission. Four at eight. Out.” Keep it simple. Keep it short. Turn off the communications device and move out. Change your signals operating instructions regularly, to prevent the enemy from deciphering it.

If you have to travel, travel as inconspicuously as possible. Don’t drive a camouflaged Land Rover with a gun mount in the roof. Drive a beat-up Ford Focus, with the guns hidden, well, and everyone wearing civilian clothes (you’re not going to have the benefit of international law protections under the Geneva and Hague Conventions any-fucking-way. Get over it.). Try to merge with normal civilian traffic patterns. Use the auxiliary to transport your forces. Blend in. There are plenty of people in this country. Even with UAVs and satellites, they cannot track every single person. The only way for them to start tracking you is if you stick out. So, don’t stick out.

If you engage the enemy, when you break contact, make sure you merge back into the civilian populace before heading back to your hidey-hole in the mountains…or simply lay up in a safe house for a few days or a week before slipping back out to the mountains. In the mountains, develop your “guerrilla base” in narrow, hidden valleys, where aircraft have limited field-of-view during over-flight. Utilize timber, caves, and natural overhanging terrain to hide the infrastructure of your camp from overhead view. Narrow valleys offer a very limited ability for air-to-ground munitions to cause any damage. We expended thousands of tons of munitions trying to destroy the cave complexes in the Tora Bora region, and we still didn’t succeed.

Spend your summer camping trip with the family discovering and “developing” such locations now, before you need them. Find suitable places. Move some deadfall and boulders around to create potential future shelters. Cache some critical supplies nearby, in a secure place. Learn what approach routes are feasible for dismounted infantry from the security forces to approach. Determine where your security outposts need to be, in the future, to prevent the enemy from getting to you without warning. Remember, it is a key tenet of small-unit military operations, even according to U.S. military doctrine, that mountain terrain limits the use of ground vehicles. Any assault on your base will be by foot-mobile infantry. Even special operations personnel will have to get there by foot. Figure out where likely observation points are, and make sure you have a plan to own that ground. Make sure your security elements understand the realities of guerrilla combat tactics.

During Operation Anaconda, in 2002, one of the Taliban/AQ security outposts, high above the valley floor, was perfectly sited to compromise any assault on the main force encampment, and had ample anti-aircraft armament to down troop-laden Blackhawks and Chinooks entering the Shah-i-Khot Valley. That outpost ended up not serving the enemy one ounce of good, since the security element there was killed by special operations personnel who infiltrated over the ridge, on foot, and caught the enemy unaware, since they were all hiding from the weather in a shelter…Don’t be stupid!

The modern guerrilla CAN leverage the technology available to him to counter the threat of regime technology, if he is intelligent about it and plans appropriately.Think about these issues now, not just what kind of guns and cool-guy, CDI (Chicks Dig It) tactical gear you should buy with your next paycheck. Ultimately, the guerrilla war is a war for and of the people. Without their ultimate support, you end up as nothing more than a brigand in the forest, hated and hunted not just by the security forces of the regime, but by the civilian populace as well.

 

More will follow as I re-collect how appropriate the dead communist dirtbag’s teachings were to the potential future needs of Liberty.

Nous Defions!

John Mosby,

Somewhere in the mountains