The world has recently passed a major historic watershed - more than half of mankind now lives in cities. Thus, Urban Warfare increasingly becomes an essential basis of strategy, where formerly it was to be avoided. At any rate, for any occupation or insurgency to be effective, solid control of urban areas (or at least of their choke-points) will be essential.

"Within a built-up area, a company may defend with mutually supporting fires several buildings prepared for perimeter defense. Each platoon defends one or two buildings within a company strongpoint or a floor of a large building that is defended by a company.

Strongpoints constitute the basis of each defensive position. They are usually prepared in solidly constructed buildings located at intersections, entrances to public squares and parks, or adjacent to bridges, and with observation and prepared fields of fire appropriate to the weapons available. Fires are coordinated between strongpoints. They offer personnel protection against weapons of mass destruction. Communication trenches are prepared within strong-points. In addition, ambushes are set up in the gaps between positions, and wooden structures or other buildings which hinder fields of fire are razed."

"Military Operations on Urbanized Terrain", Chapter 2.5, 'Battalion Defensive Area'.

After a period of infiltration by scouts, some area will be selected to be invested, wholesale if necessary, and converted into a secure yet non-overt strongpoint, probably guarding a chokepoint, called an enclave.

It should be noted that once an enclave has been secured, as FM 90-10 says: "The attack of a built-up area, regardless of its size and the level of command involved, should be considered only as the last resort, and only when major advantage accrues to the attacker through its seizure or control. "

Enclave-Formation:

First, a suitable neighborhood is selected. Ideally, the neighborhood selected will have all of the attributes which make any neighborhood desirable, but insurgency enclaves are usually characterized by at least three of the following attributes:

Passive Access Control. Insurgents prefer neighborhoods which have circumference roads, with mazelike internal topography, and limited points of egress. Insurgents will then attempt to gain control of the residences near these intersections, by whatever means are necessary, adhering of course to the basic sociopathic insurgency dictum: Anything's okay, as long as you don't get caught.

Potential for Active Access Control. Once secured, chokepoint-positioned houses or shopping centers are heavily armed, and secret fortifications are built. An immediate indicator of being an insurgent is the presence of secret subbasements. Whenever possible, insurgents who have managed to fully control an egress point will connect their fortifications by tunnel.

Meeting Places. When insurgents target a neighborhood, they need a place to get together which can be secured against listening devices, or alternatively, allowed to be bugged but shielded from video surveillance; communication will be by sign-language. Insurgents do not usually speak over the telephone, not about business. Speaking in the clear would be an insane risk; and talking in code is a dead giveaway. Insurgents cannot afford to be caught.

Schools which can be controlled.

Shopping Centers, ideally those which are positioned at access-control points for limited-egress neighborhoods.

Post offices which primarily hire from within the local community. Control of the postal service, or at least control of the carriers on selected routes, is absolutely essential as it permits monitoring or diversion of communications. Postal workers, not incidentally, can be considered as a huge intelligence-gathering agency, if they are trained as such.

Real-Estate Agencies are a prime target, as they are essential in the transfer of property from insurgency victims to the insurgents themselves. This can save a lot of money.

I can think of no finer example of all of the above than the enclave at Maryland Route 28 and Bauer Drive, just to the east of Rockville, Maryland.

Enclave-Consolidation.

Once chokepoints have been established, and initial control has been acquired and maintained, a pattern of harassment develops. First, in the case of control of a particular store in a particular shopping center, fairly large amounts of money may have been poured into maintaining a storefront which may have few if any customers. Insurgents from all around may come long distances to do their shopping at this one place, simply to:

Establish and maintain a presence in relatively large numbers.

Harass any persons with no association with the group, ideally creating a subliminal perception that the area is overrun. This psychological-warfare aspect can be very successful and very demoralizing, even when applied in limited scope. For instance, a few persons in a few cars can cruise entire neighborhoods, and in the absence of an ability of those harassed to identify a single common actor in multiple incidences of harassment, as the stories multiply, so do the perceived number of actors. Were the harassed to get together, they'd realize they have only a few uncommonly active enemies, however, another goal is to:

Prevent establishment of effective opposition groups. This is where the insurgents can get really scary.

Elimination of Opposition:

Primary in the matter of elimination of opposition is the prevention of perception of insurgency. This is a mixing of activities with the final stages of Consolidation of Enclave. In the above example, it must be remembered that it is essential to restrict harassment activities to those who will mistake such harassment for simple crime. It is also essential to maintain the spoofery by never, under any circumstances, targeting police, military, and particularly never intelligence or military intelligence personnel for harassment. This last group have routes of communication and investigative resources which cannot always be detected, controlled or eliminated by insurgents.

Detection of Intelligentsia and Community Leadership. This is a simple matter, for the most part. Most intellegentsia are proud of their intellects and display them with great abandon. One need only listen to them speak. Some of them even foolishly assist in their identification by publishing internetworked documents such as this one.

Debilitation of Intelligentsia and Community Leadership. There are a wide variety of techniques for the debilitation of the intelligentsia. Mostly these come under the categories of Sex, Money, Ideology, Contraband, or Ego (SMICE) techniques. In the event of someone being inaccessable or inamenable to SMICE, there are a variety of more active measures which can be used, such as psychoactive chemical dusts or sprays, or simple "pointless" beatings by "random criminals".

Divide the Community. Terrorism in the extreme. First, create monsters to distract attention from the fact that you're the monster. Start witch hunts. If necessary, create witches. Use technology, especially recombinant-genetics-produced hormones to create acromegalics, cretins, and other adult hormonal deformities, and use these afflicted innocents to terrify the remaining population. Resistant intelligentsia or community leaders are the ideal targets for induced deformity.

Replacement of Intelligentsia with "leaders" from within the movement. In times of turmoil, people turn to their leaders. So, in the absence, or failing health, or mental incapacity of the intelligentsia, people will turn to anyone who can provide answers to their problems. The political arms of the insurgency will provide shills who can promise success, and with good reason: they're in charge of causing the troubles, too. The Nazis used this technique very successfully. But eventually it becomes obvious that this is happening. In the meantime, it becomes essential that such troubles as must be manufactured to keep the people aligned with the shills for the movement, should become more vicious, and seemingly random. In fact, this stage of elimination of opposition is designed to target the second-level of community leadership, such as teachers, clergy, and in particular, paramilitary organizations such as Boy Scouts or Boy's Clubs, hunting associations or other groups which can be expected to possibly harbor militial sentiments or store weapons and ammunition. In modern times, it is extremely successful, wherever possible, to polarize the sexes against each other with a pattern of sexual terrorism, combined with an arming of female minors, ideally with weapons which are only fully effective if used in a proactive/paranoid mode. Inducing the desired mass-psychosis is particularly easy in minor females (remember Salem, Massachusetts?), and they will easily spread the deviant mentation among their suitors.

Replacement of all personnel at local stores. This element of consolidation cannot be over-emphasised. Control of the food-distribution outlets is absolutely essential. When people can be forced to stand in line like cattle awaiting the hammer, any troublemakers can be easily handled, and their humiliation can be used to instill fear into others who might be considering resistance. Also, since people generally shop once weekly, this is the ideal place to dull the population with DMSO sprays of long-lasting phenthizaines such as Haldol, which will greatly speed the process of subjugation of the population. It's also a great place to acquire people's bank-card data and PIN numbers. Harassment of particular segments of the population while in line at stores can also be a very valuable adjunct to concurrent efforts to disable essential workers at such facilities as the post office or telephone company, preparatory to a flooding of their personnel offices with applications from insurgents.

Replacement of essential utilities and public services. Public services which should be displaced will of course be such services as trash collection, delivery services, etc., all of which grant considerable "license" to enter private grounds on pretext.

Replacement of Public Servants. This is the final step. Whatever has to be done to replace the postal carriers and the street-level cops will be done. Once this has been accomplished, the occupation cannot be dislodged without the use of surprise attacks with enhanced-radiation devices. In effect, the occupation is the community. There's simply no way, especially once the replacement records clerks have done their work, to tell the bogus from the real. It's safe to assume that any of those who were not with the movement who survive exist as either dupes or chattel, in extreme minority.

Lock Down. All opposition within your small enclave is compromised, co-opted, neutralized or terminated. All residents of the enclave, and all of the employees in the enclave's facilities, are at this time a part of the movement. A new target for enclaving is located, and it too is brought within the grasp of the movement by a repetition of this process.

At this time, since all members of the enclave are members of the movement, the movement can recapitalize by selling the stolen property of victims to outsiders, who can either be gulled into thinking everything's normal, or can be killed, with the property being fraudulently retransferred back into the movement.

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