pro-Choice COIN
In light of recent events I feel that I should point out that the US has spent billions of dollars (that's billions with a B) learning how to get the pro-Choice movement to beat the combined anti-abortion movements. Of course, don't tell them about it; the government for the most part hasn't got a clue that's what they spent the money on, but the US has been spending a lot of money learning how to deal with the sophisticated, multi-level propaganda attack that they got hit with by the Taliban and al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia. And nobody runs a fourth generation insurgency media campaign quite like the religious right. For years, they've been milking the same imagery, the idea of a group of brave, morally concerned freedom fighters doing the right thing, underfunded but with lots of willpower, in the face of determined attacks by the evil establishment. Well, the US has spent a lot of time and effort working a way to deal with that, and maybe the pro-Choice movement should take advantage of it.
What follows is a list of extremely amateurish suggestions that are the matter of personal opinion of a complete amateur, go on for a long 12 pages, and may have no real bearing on reality. Consider yourself warned.
First off, I have to say that I got involved in this only by opening my big mouth. I was struck by the parallels between pro-Choice and counterinsurgency, and responded to a post in flamingchords's LJ about the harassment tactics of the anti-abortion protesters, commenting on how we've learned a lot from getting recursively suicide-bombed in Iraq. lookingforwater pointed out that I should probably tell someone if I had anything useful to say (which I probably don't), which is how I ended up here. I'm not an expert. That being said, there are experts on this. If you want to learn from them, on the internet, I would recommend reading up on the authorlist over at the Small Wars Journal, or from Dr. Nagl's CNAS. Nagl, Thomas P.M. Barnett, Gen. Petraeus, Kilcullen, and their associates professional and amateur represent what is perhaps the largest body of counter-insurgency knowledge in the world, and they are often willing to share it with the world.
I am not an expert. In as much as I focus on western counter-insurgency, my specialties are in economic strategies, restabilization, and grand-strategic concepts. Media warfare, PSYOPS, and Information Operations fall outside of my limited, amateurish purview. I could answer lookingforwater's post with a simple list of tactics, which is pointless because Planned Parenthood already knows them inside and out. When people try and provoke you to violence, either to strike out at someone who hit you or call down air support on a mosque, it's best to ignore them. There's no way that members of the establishment (which is what, for better or worse, the people being protested are) ever come off well in confrontation. For further use, document things very carefully, if you can without the opposition realizing it. That information can be very useful later. But first we have to get to later.
What I have noticed is that the pro-Choice movement sits at a position very similar to the one that the US sat in when we were in Iraq, during the worst of times. Despite having managed to “conquer” a country, making abortion legal everywhere, the pro-Choice side finds itself dispersed across the countryside, trying to defend widely spaced “bases” from constant protest, besieged even though they are the ones with presence everywhere. They have managed to lose a formidable edge in public opinion, have lost control of the narrative describing the conflict, and face a disparate group of opponents who have assembled a rough unity, and in impressive funding level.
I was thinking about the plan that got the US out of that mess and into the much better (for us, at least) mess that we sit in today, and basically managed to distill it down to ten points. This is a matter of opinion, and coming from me, it's amateurish opinion at best. The points are all common sense, and most of them have already been implemented in some fashion by the pro-Choice movement. What it represents is a simple strategic plan for approaching the problem, using what we've learned by playing catch-up to the Taliban's media relations plan. I am almost certainly wrong, and almost certainly asking for too much, but maybe for someone they'll stir some thought that will eventually be of use.
In the beginning insurgency was all about Mao, which is, of course, a tremendous disservice. They were doing insurgency before they were doing writing, which is why we don't know where the start was. But modern insurgency owes its roots to Mao. The thing is that Mao, sixty years since his success, is now outdated. Mao operated under the idea that the insurgents would hide in the countryside, slowly gaining strength while keeping the counter-insurgency (COIN) off balance. This would last potentially for years, with the end goal of eventually erupting into a full-fledged war as the insurgents, having assembled armies, charged out of the woods and farms and wreaked havoc on the government.
But that, like all things, passed into the modern age with the development of fourth and fifth generation warfare. Insurgency itself changed as a reaction to the increasing complexity of modern life. Insurgents discovered that it was easier to overthrow governments not by establishing their own government and engaging in open war, but by kicking down the supports. The new thing was “network disruption”, attacking the networks that keep society operating, and reducing the legitimacy of the government by removing their ability to provide services to the people they technically protect. Modern insurgents arrange themselves in cells, with nationwide command structures that are vague at best, operating almost independently for the most chaotic results possible.
Let me see if this sounds familiar. Network disruption aims to deny a particular service to the people of a particular country or region. Insurgents do this by taking advantage of the widely dispersed nature of a service network, concentrating their efforts on disrupting any of the large number of service centers across the nation, aiming at temporary denial-of-service. Attacks are particularly vicious at centers that are not yet functional, as this is the easiest place to score permanent disruption. They move around the country depending on the support and contributions of a relatively small group among the population. They organize themselves in widely dispersed cells, with no direct authority managing all operations (allowing them plausible deniability for each action), yet with a centralized propaganda line. They launch attacks into the “mainstream” through smart political propaganda directed at the mainstream population, portraying themselves as victims of government policy, and attempting to cultivate a majority approach. For example, read the bullet points starting on page 14 of this article (watch out, it's big). Sound familiar? Just a bit maybe?
Like most insurgencies, the opposition has taken a three-tiered strategy:
Short Term: Disrupt the abortion network through direct action (protests, barricades, and intimidation) to capitalize on the relative weakness of the pro-Choice clinic network.
Medium Term: Both reduce the political ability of the network to respond through political and legal methods, and build up a more robust and widespread support network, while splitting the opponent using wedge tactics and false fronts.
Long Term: Dominate the debate by converting a large portion of young people to their position, taking the argument to them through a multi-level media campaign, and through widespread propaganda dissemination, ending the entire debate in democratic fashion.
But as a counter-insurgency, pro-Choice lacks the usual vast array of options. They have no armies, no air force, no direct method of eliminating their opponents. But despite that massive difference from conventional COIN, the big tool of COIN, what is called Information Operations (but might be better known as Public Relations) is still out there. To get a feel, think about this description of Psychological Operations, from the Small Wars 21st Century Information Operations appendix, from the USMC:
“In Small Wars, PSYOP can be used to:
1. Create dissension, low morale, and subversion within insurgent forces, which may shift the loyalty of adversary units or individuals.
2. Attack the legitimacy or credibility of the adversary to the general population.
3. Counter or negate the effectiveness of the adversary’s propaganda to external audiences and local population.
4. Gain civilian support for the host nation (HN) government.
5. Generate a favorable image of the US. among selected foreign target audiences, and support for U.S. Operations.
6. Reduce support and resources of the adversary’s operations among the HN’s civilian population.
7. Build and maintain the morale of HN military forces and sustain their perception that success is assured.
8. Gaining support of neutral elements (uncommitted groups) to our side.”
This reads like a laundry list of what needs to be done to ensure a pro-Choice victory, which can be rephrased (and added onto) like this:
1) Counter immediate propaganda by tightening up organization, gathering intelligence, and rapidly analyzing and dissecting threats.
2) Develop significant offensive capability geared toward training supporters to actively respond to threats, advertising our position in the public domain, countering opposition movements in contested regions, and splitting the opposition.
3) Launch long-range offensives aimed at permanently consolidating a lead through cementing a hold over young people, attacking sources of support and funding, and building powerful coalitions.
Stage I: Consolidation
The immediate problem stems from an imbalance. The Anti-Abortion crowd runs one of the leanest, meanest, best organized, most widespread, and best political machines in the US, and the world. They are professionals, a corps of motivated, disciplined foot soldiers willing to march on the orders of an elite of leaders who have been conditioned in the fierce battle of political frenzy. The Pro-Choice side runs a lot of clinics. The ability of the Anti-Abortion crowd to assemble a mob for protests, media offensives, or any purpose that they see fit is an ability that cannot be overestimated, while the Pro-Choice side is tied down securing and running a lot of geographically dispersed clinics.
The first step to reversing this is to setup the framework, the organization necessary to direct resources, provide support, and to help train the next generation of activists, while at the same time building the arms that gather intelligence and promote greater communication.
1) Organization, or Knowing Who To Blame:
There are two ways to run a counter-insurgency, organized, in which case you are a legitimate authority projecting power from a central position, or disorganized, in which case you're betting that you're a better guerrilla then the other guy. The Pro-Choice movement doesn't have this option; they have to provide legal abortions, and you can't do that very well with a bunch of yahoos in a basement - organized it is.
If you look at successful internal counter-insurgencies, one of the first things they do is reorganize the military, their fighting arm. In some cases, the most important thing is simply to redo the organizational chart.
An organization needs to be able to respond rapidly and completely to any attack, retaining flexibility at the lower level, but must also be able to implement a strategic approach at the national level. This means building a very difficult chain of command. Every local leader needs to understand the global policy implemented by the powers that be, and be able to respond to local situations secure in the knowledge that, if things start to go south, there is someone who they can go to for help. To see this in practice, simply Google for articles on the “Strategic Corporal” (an issue I refuse to be drawn further into).
This also means that help has to be available when it's needed, which means marshaling volunteers, or at least knowing where to find them, so that theater command can direct reserves to crucial points. From the outside, it's not clear what sort of organizational structure pro-Choice even has, or who even runs it. Planned Parenthood, after all, has providing health care as its main task, not running a massive volunteer network that operates outside of the clinics. They certainly can't be expected to recruit and keep track of the large number of people whose presence could tip the balance in critical issues. I'm not sure if this is any clearer from the inside, but it needs to be because anyone and everyone needs to know who to go for to get help if they're in over their heads.
2) Intelligence, or Our Idiots are Better Then Your Idiots
“Counterinsurgency (COIN) is an intelligence-driven endeavor”
FM 3-24, section 3-1
“Nick: Cops wit' guns! Man! Dat military intell'gence is like one o' dem people who don't get enuff air.
Nick: You know. Like d'ose guys 'jumbo shrimp' and 'reality television'?
Legs: You mean an Oxymoron?
Nick: Yeah. D'ose guys.”
Schlock Mercenary
Intelligence is the key to COIN because it's the only thing that allows you to find your targets. In the case of Iraq and Afghanistan, US missions are absolutely dependent on the ability of intelligence to locate possible threats. In the abortion wars, you already know who the threats are, but intelligence is absolutely necessary to uncover their weak points in which they can be attacked.
Battlefield intelligence is broken into two rough areas, environment and threat. Environment is analyzed by careful on-the-ground surveys of geographic, and more importantly “human” terrain (social, cultural, etc.). Threats deal with an analysis of enemy capabilities and weaknesses through direct analysis (read, being shot at), and the cultivation of contacts in local populations, and turncoats in the enemy camp, as well as observation.
In our situation, Threat Analysis can be carried out by analyzing the protest model, announcements, rhetoric, and behavior of opposition groups. At some level, this incorporates simply collecting the documents they pass out, and sending a copy off to a central repository for analysis. In other situations this means establishing the ability to record protests and counter-protests, and to keep enough of an eye on the opposition to know when their leaders go out on cruises in their “non-profit” yacht with several scantily clad “volunteers”. The central analysis comes out of the organization suggestion naturally, and mostly serves to analyze trends. The eventual goal is for anyone to be able to call up and say “A new anti-abortion group from WTFITA just started setting up in our neighborhood. What can we expect from them?” and receive a comprehensive profile complete with information on possible crazies, tactics, and advance copies of their favorite brochures. This is already done to an extent, but it lacks a certain depth, and a certain level of organization (or possibly is hidden enough that I can't find it).
Environment analysis is probably more important, and should read like a history book. For any given region of the US, there should be a file listing the support, or lack thereof, for abortion over the years, coupled with the various methods and campaigns waged by different organizations, and some attempted evaluation at their success. Every place in the US is different, and the key to understanding those differences is to look at what's happened before and how well it's worked.
3) Horizontal is Better then Vertical, or the Advantages of Doing it Laying Down
“Everyone has a Wikipedia page”
-unreferenced
The strategies and tactics of the Surge were not developed at the same level the Surge itself came from. They came from experimentation on a hundred battlefields, and a careful tabulation of what worked and what only made things worse, which was then hashed out in arguments and discussion between the leaders involved, the guys on the ground. Eventually this slowly filtered its way up the ladder until it was adopted for the Surge in a way that was eventually at least partially successful (for a look at how “New Media” influenced this debate, see the SWJ compilation here.
The military operates on what is usually a vertical information chain. Information about new tactics discovered at the lowest level, the platoon level, percolates its way up to the top where its merit is debated by the powers that be. Should they decide the information is useful, it will slowly make its way back down to the roots. One of the lessons of the New Media was that this doesn't work. Any new tactic in the information realm can be countered with enough time and ingenuity, so platoon leaders need to take advantage of the breakthrough before it gets countered. Every leader on the ground needs to know what every other leader knows, and they need to know it now.
A similar situation may already exist in the pro-Choice movement. There may be a WikiChoice out there that I'm not aware of, where everyone in the movement is already registered and busy discussing what they see every day on the ground. I don't know. But if there's not one there needs to be.
Out of necessity, every confrontation, whether a political campaign or a deliberate protest, is a laboratory in which both sides improvise on the fly to meet whatever comes at them. Most of these improvisations will have less then stellar results. But some will actually work. They need to be disseminated, and disseminated fast. So do counters. Ideally you would end up with a message board listing what posters were most effective, what places were best to set up booths, and an ongoing discussion on ways to counter opposition arguments. But anything is better then nothing, as long as its open source.
Stage II: Build-Up
Stage I exists primarily to set the stage for Stage II. The problem with the pro-Choice movement (at least from the outside), is that it has no Offense, and no method for power projection. In a political battle, your targets are the hearts and minds of the population, and every movement on the chessboard is aiming for more territory. To do this you need to have the capability to launch a major offensive, taking your message to the people through traditional and new media, displays, events, and if it comes down to it, door-to-door.
4)Training, or When In Doubt, Hire Smarter People
If you take a careful look at the battle records of American units in Afghanistan, Iraq, and even Vietnam, you find that American soldiers tend to inflict dramatically more casualties on the enemy then they take, even when subtracting out uninvolved civilians. It's almost expected that this is going to happen, that an American offensive will cause much more in the body count column then it takes. This is due to the superior equipment and training of the US military. The Pro-Choice movement can't afford all the fancy doodads, but they can afford training.
Recently, a pro-life group (some of whom were sane) came to UCSD. In the course of discussion with them, it came to light (in sort of an offhand manner) that all of them had received several days of intense training in how to present and argue their case to others. This is not the first time I've seen such a group with that kind of preparation. Where, I wondered, are the pro-Choice equivalent? The debaters who have taken hours of training from people who know how to present the issues, who have trained to control their tempers, and most of all, how to play the crowd?
This is a key difference from what I've seen of the two groups. The anti-abortion crowd sets up provocative demonstrations because they are confident that they can outmaneuver most questions, hammer most questioners faster then they can respond, and if really pressed, steer the crowd right over the questioner. They don't have to be right; they just have to learn how to run the crowd so that the crowd thinks they're right. Until the pro-Choice groups can reliably hit back in the same way, with a group of their own well-trained and experienced people, they won't stand a chance on equal ground.
The starting point this is self-replication. The pro-Choice movement must be able to create training units that can go out into the world and create replications of themselves by training. The typical US answer to this is through advisors, who go out to Host Nations and teach their units, combining professional training with local knowledge. (For a look at the call for a US Army Advisor Corps, look at this).
Remember, all politics is local. A good portion of training local action groups is getting them to make contact with local social leaders, getting them to know the people at the city permit office, at the police station (who can be really valuable allies), and even among neutral and hostile groups, and most importantly, the media. Having a personal relationship with the media figures, being able to get your message out, and even being able to communicate (under the radar) with the opposition is vital. Especially for point seven.
5) Marketing: Or You Really Should Have It Your Way:
If you don't like the military analogy, here's another one. You're selling a product. You're getting people to buy what you want them to buy, which in this case is an idea.
Modern marketing is as much a religion as it is a science, a devoted worship of fast messages, flashy ads, and the all important thirty-second soundbite, all of which is part of a comprehensive campaign to sell an image as much as it is a product. But it works. And it's what people have come to expect.
Anti-abortion displays come to target audiences with ten meter tall billboards in full color with professional quality photography, with aggressive, full color advertisements, with speeches pre-recorded by camera crews paid million of dollars to put together a quality sound stage environment. By contrast, the pro-Choice groups I see tend to come with homemade banners which they tape to a table using a roll of scotch tape.
This is people bowing to the inevitable problems of budgetary constraint, but it should be no surprise when, if they set up next to the big million-dollar presentation, it doesn't work. The majority of people respond to flashy ads, to slick campaigns, and to gory images. To do otherwise is charming, a display of heart, but it's equivalent to advertising your hamburger joint by paying a guy to stand on the corner in a cowboy outfit waving a sign. It may be cheap, and it may even work, but you're not going to compete with the McDonald's mutli-level marketing strategy.
Fortunately, we don't have to do work. Part of the conclusion of the RAND corporation study I mentioned earlier is that there are businesses who have spent billions of dollars figuring out how to sell things to Americans. The anti-abortion side, which draws heavily on the business experience of megachurches, already knows how to do that, but this doesn't mean that everyone else can't. The production of larger-scale, or at least slicker presentations is part of developing offensive muscle; it gives you the chance to go out in public and compete, or dominate the discussion in a public forum.
Now, I have seen presentations like this. There just aren't enough of them, and you will need them in local circulation to bulk up your firepower.
6) Consolidating Key Regions, or Dropping Oil is Better Then Dropping Acid
The oil drop strategy, which the British first really started talking about back in Malaysia, is the most effective COIN strategy after the other fundamental strategy of the Malaysia campaign, giving people what they want. It's far older then Malaysia; in fact, it's probably far older then recorded history. The general idea is first that you “pacify” one area and then, like a spreading oil stain, spread rapidly to the surrounding regions, until you control the entire region. For an excellent look at how the presence of additional personnel interacted with the development of intelligence capabilities in the Surge in Iraq, read this paper from CNAS.
Part of the key is that pacification does not mean “killing all enemies”; it means neutralizing them by changing the political nature of the region such that they can't function. Eventually even the most stalwart revolutionary is going to get a job, start working, and be unable to lead revolution. In this case, the pacification that you want is going to be one in which the local pro-Choice groups are so strong that any opposition is crushed out of hand.
The first thing to recognize is that this strategy is going to cost you. You cannot be strong everywhere, and this is where the organization from Stage I has to come into play.
This is vitally important. One of the mistakes that amateurs make, like the Americans in Vietnam or the French in Algeria (initially), is to think that because the enemy is everywhere, you have to fight them everywhere. Because the COIN side needs such overwhelming strength to flatten the enemy in a sector, most nations simply cannot afford to be strong enough to protect everything and when everywhere at the same time. You have to choose some regions to concentrate your effort, to win there, while holding on with your fingernails everywhere else.
You can do this with an abortion clinic, because even besieged, they retain some functionality. An ideal strategic control would be deploying teams that have the ability to do long-term service (a rarity in volunteer work, and all the more reason to be prized) to certain regions of the country, as well as bolstering those regions with money, while telling the rest of the nation to fort up. At the same time slow progress in those regions will excite more volunteers, allowing momentum to gather.
This is the most contentious portion of this document. Because this process can take years as opposition is slowly destroyed, this means that large portions of the country are not going to be the recipients of more then subsistence aid. Since you want to start training your long-term volunteers in regions that won't destroy them, you start in mostly friendly locales, which means that regions of the Bible Belt will be hung out to dry for potentially decades. This is a long term plan, slowly sweeping the country, but it leaves millions of women in less then desirable circumstances - which means that this should only be undertaken after Strategic consultation.
7) Splitting the Enemy, or Insurgencies Are Not Thread Safe
In Go, there is something called a splitting attack, where you launch an attack that, positionally, is between two vulnerable enemy groups. In order to respond, the opponent has to make two moves, but more importantly, they are now split in half. Insurgencies are prone to this sort of thing, and one needs little more then a passing knowledge of Africa to recognize the old story, where an insurgency begins to take control of the country, only to fall victim to an internal power struggle as they neared their goal.
This has been done in two examples I wish to bring up. The first is the much ballyhooed Anbar Awakening. If you were asleep during that, let me point out what happened. The Sunnis in Iraq, worried about Shi'a dominance, had long been natural allies of the Sunni al-Qaeda In Mesopotamia. But aQiM, who needed money to continue operations, began to demand a higher price, and at the same time initiated attacks to which the Shi'a began to respond in an increasingly violent manner. They became like the Mafia, although while they demanded protection money, they were unable to provide protection against Shi'a retaliation. So the authorities that aQiM had replaced, the Sunni tribal leaders, with the aid of increasingly angry people, joined up and kicked aQiM out.
There is a second example, which is much more questionable, and which is mostly due to my particular interpretation of events I did not live through. At one point, in what I believe was a completely unintentional incident, the Civil Rights Movement decided to throw down the gauntlet and have a decisive showdown with their opposition. Instead of doing the oil spot strategy from the tamer areas in, they fought it out in the heart of Dixie, the hardest theater they had to face. The press coverage, the allure of the freedom riders, the efforts of the black community; all were directed south. If Birmingham had stood alone, the Civil Rights Movement might have faded right there, but as the struggle went on, something odd began to happen. Bull Connor became the new face of the anti-segregation movement, and the racists lost the war.
As television coverage, journalistic reporting, and all the resources that the CRM could put into action began to record, popular opinion began to fracture. I cannot adequately explain how or why, but what might have been a nation-wide alliance similar to the religious right, between southern manpower long seeped in a deliberate racism, and a nationwide coalition of people who made jokes about black people and refused to hire them fell apart. The most aggressive and most radical factions of the racist group managed to isolate themselves from the biggest source of financial support that they could have found.
This was not a short process. The act of drawing a line between “southern” and “northern” racists had been started before the abolition movement really got started. It took them over a hundred years to do it, but in ten years they managed to do irreparable damage to a force that had governed American politics for over a century.
They did this through courage, but also through concentration of effort, through documentation and monitoring. And then they did it by getting that evidence to the audience that needed it. It was not an easy process, and in some cases it took years.
There are sane pro-Life people, and one of the largest tasks of the pro-Choice movement has always been to split the saner people from the insane people, through the documentation of the atrocities that the radicals do on a regular basis. This may require concentration, years of documentation of filmed incidents, thanks to training up the PR teams who know how to capture the images properly (and discreetly) and then process them professionally, waiting until you have enough to overwhelm opposition. Then again, it might not work.
This is nice in principal, but how does it work in practice? For the most part, such global moments are rare. Very rarely does McCarthy wish to go head to head with the Army on public television. All politics is local, and most of it stays local. This goes back to point 4, where your training involves making connections with local figures of note. In Iraq, evidence of the way that aQiM was aiming at taking over local authority was used as pressure on the tribal leaders, while the evidence of their atrocities was used on the local people. In this case, it may be possible to exert pressure with the same thing, a carefully documented portfolio of local abuses, created and put together by your intelligence and PR teams.
But this has to be tailored locally, and it has to come locally. Ideally, you would be saying “And look, here's a picture of John from down Maple street (you know he's been a bit crazy since his brother hit it rich in the dot-coms) hitting Paul from Broadway (and you know Paul, he's a good man, wouldn't hurt a fly) while he's trying to escort some poor, scared girl, in hi-def from three directions, and you know, you really want to get clear of these people before we release these pictures to Barbara at the paper.” This, of course, is entirely contrived, but you get the idea. The first reaction to pictoral evidence that anti-abortion activists attack people elsewhere is to say “That doesn't happen here”, because people don't want to believe badly of the kind of people they have working relationships with, or have met at social functions. But there are a number of sane pro-life people who really feel uncomfortable with this relationship they have with violent groups, and who might be pushable over the edge.
The two examples I used were national, but the strategy is usually local. Information is deployed on local targets, examples of harassment have to be used on local figures of note in an effort to persuade them not to work with the radical faction. Efforts can be tailored, especially if you've taken the time to build up relationships with authorities in neutral or semi-neutral groups.
Stage III: Confrontation
What I have outlined so far in Stage II is more of a tactical approach then a strategic one. The idea in Stage II is to train up an organizational structure that can be used at the local level. That is, given a target region, you can rapidly deploy a command structure that can organize local groups to systematically approach weak points and other target areas, and reinforce it when necessary with what support units operate on a national level to achieve local dominance.
Now you need to subjugate this to a national strategy. Which regions go first, which congressional districts, whether this is in concert with a certain political campaign are decisions that someone else should make. I, however, wish only to outline a few key points.
8) Concentrating on the next generation, or Never Waste Your Time On Anyone Over Thirty
This is not an outline for a short campaign. You will not walk away in five years, secure in the knowledge that abortion is a guaranteed right for the next century. This is a generational struggle. For comparison, look at how many generations it took for racism against blacks to be pared down to its current level. It took a hundred years after emancipation for them to even get appropriate legal rights, and a lot of that was spent waiting for entire generations to die out.
This then is where you have to take a page from the opposition's book. Like all conservative movements, they are aware that a lot of their strength is time-dependent; the most aggressive members tend to grow old, lose interest, and die out over time. To counter that, they have adopted a strategy of aggressively targeting the nation's youth. The Pro-Choice movement has to follow suit. They have all sorts of advantages here (for the moment), but they can lose the battle. You can lose the battle too - don't ever forget that, but it can also be won.
Flashy marketing techniques, smart ads, and a “guerrilla advertising” movement all appeal to youth. Don't overlook the advantages. You want time to be on your side.
9) Removing Support, or the Robin Hood Tax Relief Plan
“In order for a war to be just, three things are necessary. First, the authority of the sovereign. Secondly, a just cause. Thirdly, a rightful intention.” - Thomas Aquinas
“To carry on war, three things are necessary: money, money, and yet more money.” - Gian Jacopo Trivulzio
-quoted in Medieval II: Total War
Thomas Aquinas may have been a good theologian, but his advice on war has faded as the years have gone by. Trivulzio, however, is still right on.
I'm revealing my bias here. I am, by inclination, a strategist. I think in strategic terms, and strategists think in terms of money. Tacticians need fuel, food, ammunition, land mines, concertina wire, radar arrays, and satellite coverage. Strategists just need money. In a very real sense, the job of grand strategy is macroeconomics; to use money as effectively as possible, creating the force that is best suited and most efficient at accomplishing tasks, while at the same time reinvesting in their country's future. People can be hired, ordinance can be bought, and enemies can even be suborned, as long as the budget holds out.
To give an example, near where I now live, there is a Planned Parenthood clinic, in Aurora, IL. When it first began to go up, there was a very organized protest against it that turned ugly at several points.
In an ideal world, PP would have reacted immediately. They would have rented a floor in an office building in nearby Naperville (playing off the Naperville-Aurora tension), and immediately flown in a command staff of twelve people, a media/PR staff of thirty people with equipment (four three-man camera crews plus editors, graphic artists, and reserve interview subjects), fifty community organizers to canvass the surrounding countryside, and enough support to bring people in and unleash a huge media campaign in all directions. I estimated the cost of this at $40 million over two years.
PP points out that they don't have $40 million to spare, and if they did, they would be spending it on other things. But the opposition does have $40 million. They could have crushed the Aurora clinic. With that level of funding you can bribe police departments and fire departments not to care when the clinic burns to the ground. That they didn't is due to the fact that the money they raised sits in a hundred networks, badly organized, and flying all over the world. Depending on their continued incompetence is not a winning strategy.
The anti-abortion side is literally rolling in money, and a disturbing amount of it is available to the most radical groups. But that same supply is ridiculously vulnerable. This is the entire point of splitting attacks, to split apart financial networks, so that the money from certain sources is continually split away from the more radical factions, splitting them into hundreds of groups.
Other vulnerabilities exist. Many evangelist leaders present themselves as honest people, sacrificing their time and lives for the sake of the poor unborn. But the fact remains that they are multi-millionaire business fat cats by necessity, and this is vulnerability that can be capitalized on, allowing direct attacks against the largest and most organized of the networks simply because of their size. Nobody wants to donate money to a guy who is just going to use it to buy another yacht.
The point is, there's only so much money out there. Your objective is to break apart their funding channels, and through PR recruitment (also through step 1 of this stage) enlarge your own. This is a long, onerous process, but it's a killer. They can survive without legal support, but they can't survive without money.
10) Building coalitions, or if you have enough friends, you don't care that you look dumb.
If I want to find and organization dedicated to opposing gay rights, opposing immigration, and opposing immigration all at once, I know right where to find them. They all exist in one organization. On the other side, it's a bit harder. Pro-Choice groups have natural allies all over the place. Gay rights groups, religious freedom groups, and all sorts of liberal support groups.
The point is that the religious right has a set of fractured command groups, but they all have the same goals. The liberal set has a similar command structure, split on issue and almost independent, but with the same enemies. Sometimes the enemy of my enemy really is my friend, especially when our interests have no conflict.
The point is to enlarge the tent, and reduce the overhead costs. There is no reason that a trained PR supporter, cameraman, graphics artist, or community organizer cannot be retrained rapidly to serve another cause. And most of them would have no objection. Rather then trying to build your own army, dip into the pool. Counter-insurgencies win based on bringing everyone into their tent, not burning down everything outside of it.
Some things I feel inclined to say as warning:
1) Beware, your enemies can be as smart as you are, and at least as clever: Some pro-Choice people I have met suffer from what I usually call the “evolution fallacy”, the idea that we are obviously smarter then our opponents, so we should win debates. It's painful watching people with the right facts and the right know-how getting totally outmaneuvered in the eyes of the crowd until they walk off, thinking they've won, but in actuality losing. Respect your enemies; it makes you keep your knife sharp.
2) When in doubt, don't escalate: Escalation is bad news for these sorts of things. There is no faster way to alienate the huge middle population then to escalate things into fighting in the street. And, let me put it bluntly, I don't think you would win. Only the deployment of the most desperate techniques will allow you to escalate this into the physical realm. The moment the fighting in the streets gets too big for the police to handle, you'll have initiated a whole different set of events, and one that abortion probably won't even matter in.
3) Keep your head up: You've got a lot more problems then the other guy. This is because you have the disadvantage of having won the initial battle. Enough people supported your side to make it legal, and you still enjoy a majority of support, even if it is somewhat tepid. The other guy doesn't have that problem. To expand your base, you have to move into much less friendly territory, which wants you to be much more respectable. But this is because your base is bigger then their base; they've got a ways to go before they start really pushing into the middle. Being the winner isn't easy, but as millions of women are willing to testify, it beats the hell out of the other choice.
Hey, who knows. Maybe someday people will find all this crap I've written useful.
Thanks to mergle for reading this once already.
What follows is a list of extremely amateurish suggestions that are the matter of personal opinion of a complete amateur, go on for a long 12 pages, and may have no real bearing on reality. Consider yourself warned.
First off, I have to say that I got involved in this only by opening my big mouth. I was struck by the parallels between pro-Choice and counterinsurgency, and responded to a post in flamingchords's LJ about the harassment tactics of the anti-abortion protesters, commenting on how we've learned a lot from getting recursively suicide-bombed in Iraq. lookingforwater pointed out that I should probably tell someone if I had anything useful to say (which I probably don't), which is how I ended up here. I'm not an expert. That being said, there are experts on this. If you want to learn from them, on the internet, I would recommend reading up on the authorlist over at the Small Wars Journal, or from Dr. Nagl's CNAS. Nagl, Thomas P.M. Barnett, Gen. Petraeus, Kilcullen, and their associates professional and amateur represent what is perhaps the largest body of counter-insurgency knowledge in the world, and they are often willing to share it with the world.
I am not an expert. In as much as I focus on western counter-insurgency, my specialties are in economic strategies, restabilization, and grand-strategic concepts. Media warfare, PSYOPS, and Information Operations fall outside of my limited, amateurish purview. I could answer lookingforwater's post with a simple list of tactics, which is pointless because Planned Parenthood already knows them inside and out. When people try and provoke you to violence, either to strike out at someone who hit you or call down air support on a mosque, it's best to ignore them. There's no way that members of the establishment (which is what, for better or worse, the people being protested are) ever come off well in confrontation. For further use, document things very carefully, if you can without the opposition realizing it. That information can be very useful later. But first we have to get to later.
What I have noticed is that the pro-Choice movement sits at a position very similar to the one that the US sat in when we were in Iraq, during the worst of times. Despite having managed to “conquer” a country, making abortion legal everywhere, the pro-Choice side finds itself dispersed across the countryside, trying to defend widely spaced “bases” from constant protest, besieged even though they are the ones with presence everywhere. They have managed to lose a formidable edge in public opinion, have lost control of the narrative describing the conflict, and face a disparate group of opponents who have assembled a rough unity, and in impressive funding level.
I was thinking about the plan that got the US out of that mess and into the much better (for us, at least) mess that we sit in today, and basically managed to distill it down to ten points. This is a matter of opinion, and coming from me, it's amateurish opinion at best. The points are all common sense, and most of them have already been implemented in some fashion by the pro-Choice movement. What it represents is a simple strategic plan for approaching the problem, using what we've learned by playing catch-up to the Taliban's media relations plan. I am almost certainly wrong, and almost certainly asking for too much, but maybe for someone they'll stir some thought that will eventually be of use.
In the beginning insurgency was all about Mao, which is, of course, a tremendous disservice. They were doing insurgency before they were doing writing, which is why we don't know where the start was. But modern insurgency owes its roots to Mao. The thing is that Mao, sixty years since his success, is now outdated. Mao operated under the idea that the insurgents would hide in the countryside, slowly gaining strength while keeping the counter-insurgency (COIN) off balance. This would last potentially for years, with the end goal of eventually erupting into a full-fledged war as the insurgents, having assembled armies, charged out of the woods and farms and wreaked havoc on the government.
But that, like all things, passed into the modern age with the development of fourth and fifth generation warfare. Insurgency itself changed as a reaction to the increasing complexity of modern life. Insurgents discovered that it was easier to overthrow governments not by establishing their own government and engaging in open war, but by kicking down the supports. The new thing was “network disruption”, attacking the networks that keep society operating, and reducing the legitimacy of the government by removing their ability to provide services to the people they technically protect. Modern insurgents arrange themselves in cells, with nationwide command structures that are vague at best, operating almost independently for the most chaotic results possible.
Let me see if this sounds familiar. Network disruption aims to deny a particular service to the people of a particular country or region. Insurgents do this by taking advantage of the widely dispersed nature of a service network, concentrating their efforts on disrupting any of the large number of service centers across the nation, aiming at temporary denial-of-service. Attacks are particularly vicious at centers that are not yet functional, as this is the easiest place to score permanent disruption. They move around the country depending on the support and contributions of a relatively small group among the population. They organize themselves in widely dispersed cells, with no direct authority managing all operations (allowing them plausible deniability for each action), yet with a centralized propaganda line. They launch attacks into the “mainstream” through smart political propaganda directed at the mainstream population, portraying themselves as victims of government policy, and attempting to cultivate a majority approach. For example, read the bullet points starting on page 14 of this article (watch out, it's big). Sound familiar? Just a bit maybe?
Like most insurgencies, the opposition has taken a three-tiered strategy:
Short Term: Disrupt the abortion network through direct action (protests, barricades, and intimidation) to capitalize on the relative weakness of the pro-Choice clinic network.
Medium Term: Both reduce the political ability of the network to respond through political and legal methods, and build up a more robust and widespread support network, while splitting the opponent using wedge tactics and false fronts.
Long Term: Dominate the debate by converting a large portion of young people to their position, taking the argument to them through a multi-level media campaign, and through widespread propaganda dissemination, ending the entire debate in democratic fashion.
But as a counter-insurgency, pro-Choice lacks the usual vast array of options. They have no armies, no air force, no direct method of eliminating their opponents. But despite that massive difference from conventional COIN, the big tool of COIN, what is called Information Operations (but might be better known as Public Relations) is still out there. To get a feel, think about this description of Psychological Operations, from the Small Wars 21st Century Information Operations appendix, from the USMC:
“In Small Wars, PSYOP can be used to:
1. Create dissension, low morale, and subversion within insurgent forces, which may shift the loyalty of adversary units or individuals.
2. Attack the legitimacy or credibility of the adversary to the general population.
3. Counter or negate the effectiveness of the adversary’s propaganda to external audiences and local population.
4. Gain civilian support for the host nation (HN) government.
5. Generate a favorable image of the US. among selected foreign target audiences, and support for U.S. Operations.
6. Reduce support and resources of the adversary’s operations among the HN’s civilian population.
7. Build and maintain the morale of HN military forces and sustain their perception that success is assured.
8. Gaining support of neutral elements (uncommitted groups) to our side.”
This reads like a laundry list of what needs to be done to ensure a pro-Choice victory, which can be rephrased (and added onto) like this:
1) Counter immediate propaganda by tightening up organization, gathering intelligence, and rapidly analyzing and dissecting threats.
2) Develop significant offensive capability geared toward training supporters to actively respond to threats, advertising our position in the public domain, countering opposition movements in contested regions, and splitting the opposition.
3) Launch long-range offensives aimed at permanently consolidating a lead through cementing a hold over young people, attacking sources of support and funding, and building powerful coalitions.
Stage I: Consolidation
The immediate problem stems from an imbalance. The Anti-Abortion crowd runs one of the leanest, meanest, best organized, most widespread, and best political machines in the US, and the world. They are professionals, a corps of motivated, disciplined foot soldiers willing to march on the orders of an elite of leaders who have been conditioned in the fierce battle of political frenzy. The Pro-Choice side runs a lot of clinics. The ability of the Anti-Abortion crowd to assemble a mob for protests, media offensives, or any purpose that they see fit is an ability that cannot be overestimated, while the Pro-Choice side is tied down securing and running a lot of geographically dispersed clinics.
The first step to reversing this is to setup the framework, the organization necessary to direct resources, provide support, and to help train the next generation of activists, while at the same time building the arms that gather intelligence and promote greater communication.
1) Organization, or Knowing Who To Blame:
There are two ways to run a counter-insurgency, organized, in which case you are a legitimate authority projecting power from a central position, or disorganized, in which case you're betting that you're a better guerrilla then the other guy. The Pro-Choice movement doesn't have this option; they have to provide legal abortions, and you can't do that very well with a bunch of yahoos in a basement - organized it is.
If you look at successful internal counter-insurgencies, one of the first things they do is reorganize the military, their fighting arm. In some cases, the most important thing is simply to redo the organizational chart.
An organization needs to be able to respond rapidly and completely to any attack, retaining flexibility at the lower level, but must also be able to implement a strategic approach at the national level. This means building a very difficult chain of command. Every local leader needs to understand the global policy implemented by the powers that be, and be able to respond to local situations secure in the knowledge that, if things start to go south, there is someone who they can go to for help. To see this in practice, simply Google for articles on the “Strategic Corporal” (an issue I refuse to be drawn further into).
This also means that help has to be available when it's needed, which means marshaling volunteers, or at least knowing where to find them, so that theater command can direct reserves to crucial points. From the outside, it's not clear what sort of organizational structure pro-Choice even has, or who even runs it. Planned Parenthood, after all, has providing health care as its main task, not running a massive volunteer network that operates outside of the clinics. They certainly can't be expected to recruit and keep track of the large number of people whose presence could tip the balance in critical issues. I'm not sure if this is any clearer from the inside, but it needs to be because anyone and everyone needs to know who to go for to get help if they're in over their heads.
2) Intelligence, or Our Idiots are Better Then Your Idiots
“Counterinsurgency (COIN) is an intelligence-driven endeavor”
FM 3-24, section 3-1
“Nick: Cops wit' guns! Man! Dat military intell'gence is like one o' dem people who don't get enuff air.
Nick: You know. Like d'ose guys 'jumbo shrimp' and 'reality television'?
Legs: You mean an Oxymoron?
Nick: Yeah. D'ose guys.”
Schlock Mercenary
Intelligence is the key to COIN because it's the only thing that allows you to find your targets. In the case of Iraq and Afghanistan, US missions are absolutely dependent on the ability of intelligence to locate possible threats. In the abortion wars, you already know who the threats are, but intelligence is absolutely necessary to uncover their weak points in which they can be attacked.
Battlefield intelligence is broken into two rough areas, environment and threat. Environment is analyzed by careful on-the-ground surveys of geographic, and more importantly “human” terrain (social, cultural, etc.). Threats deal with an analysis of enemy capabilities and weaknesses through direct analysis (read, being shot at), and the cultivation of contacts in local populations, and turncoats in the enemy camp, as well as observation.
In our situation, Threat Analysis can be carried out by analyzing the protest model, announcements, rhetoric, and behavior of opposition groups. At some level, this incorporates simply collecting the documents they pass out, and sending a copy off to a central repository for analysis. In other situations this means establishing the ability to record protests and counter-protests, and to keep enough of an eye on the opposition to know when their leaders go out on cruises in their “non-profit” yacht with several scantily clad “volunteers”. The central analysis comes out of the organization suggestion naturally, and mostly serves to analyze trends. The eventual goal is for anyone to be able to call up and say “A new anti-abortion group from WTFITA just started setting up in our neighborhood. What can we expect from them?” and receive a comprehensive profile complete with information on possible crazies, tactics, and advance copies of their favorite brochures. This is already done to an extent, but it lacks a certain depth, and a certain level of organization (or possibly is hidden enough that I can't find it).
Environment analysis is probably more important, and should read like a history book. For any given region of the US, there should be a file listing the support, or lack thereof, for abortion over the years, coupled with the various methods and campaigns waged by different organizations, and some attempted evaluation at their success. Every place in the US is different, and the key to understanding those differences is to look at what's happened before and how well it's worked.
3) Horizontal is Better then Vertical, or the Advantages of Doing it Laying Down
“Everyone has a Wikipedia page”
-unreferenced
The strategies and tactics of the Surge were not developed at the same level the Surge itself came from. They came from experimentation on a hundred battlefields, and a careful tabulation of what worked and what only made things worse, which was then hashed out in arguments and discussion between the leaders involved, the guys on the ground. Eventually this slowly filtered its way up the ladder until it was adopted for the Surge in a way that was eventually at least partially successful (for a look at how “New Media” influenced this debate, see the SWJ compilation here.
The military operates on what is usually a vertical information chain. Information about new tactics discovered at the lowest level, the platoon level, percolates its way up to the top where its merit is debated by the powers that be. Should they decide the information is useful, it will slowly make its way back down to the roots. One of the lessons of the New Media was that this doesn't work. Any new tactic in the information realm can be countered with enough time and ingenuity, so platoon leaders need to take advantage of the breakthrough before it gets countered. Every leader on the ground needs to know what every other leader knows, and they need to know it now.
A similar situation may already exist in the pro-Choice movement. There may be a WikiChoice out there that I'm not aware of, where everyone in the movement is already registered and busy discussing what they see every day on the ground. I don't know. But if there's not one there needs to be.
Out of necessity, every confrontation, whether a political campaign or a deliberate protest, is a laboratory in which both sides improvise on the fly to meet whatever comes at them. Most of these improvisations will have less then stellar results. But some will actually work. They need to be disseminated, and disseminated fast. So do counters. Ideally you would end up with a message board listing what posters were most effective, what places were best to set up booths, and an ongoing discussion on ways to counter opposition arguments. But anything is better then nothing, as long as its open source.
Stage II: Build-Up
Stage I exists primarily to set the stage for Stage II. The problem with the pro-Choice movement (at least from the outside), is that it has no Offense, and no method for power projection. In a political battle, your targets are the hearts and minds of the population, and every movement on the chessboard is aiming for more territory. To do this you need to have the capability to launch a major offensive, taking your message to the people through traditional and new media, displays, events, and if it comes down to it, door-to-door.
4)Training, or When In Doubt, Hire Smarter People
If you take a careful look at the battle records of American units in Afghanistan, Iraq, and even Vietnam, you find that American soldiers tend to inflict dramatically more casualties on the enemy then they take, even when subtracting out uninvolved civilians. It's almost expected that this is going to happen, that an American offensive will cause much more in the body count column then it takes. This is due to the superior equipment and training of the US military. The Pro-Choice movement can't afford all the fancy doodads, but they can afford training.
Recently, a pro-life group (some of whom were sane) came to UCSD. In the course of discussion with them, it came to light (in sort of an offhand manner) that all of them had received several days of intense training in how to present and argue their case to others. This is not the first time I've seen such a group with that kind of preparation. Where, I wondered, are the pro-Choice equivalent? The debaters who have taken hours of training from people who know how to present the issues, who have trained to control their tempers, and most of all, how to play the crowd?
This is a key difference from what I've seen of the two groups. The anti-abortion crowd sets up provocative demonstrations because they are confident that they can outmaneuver most questions, hammer most questioners faster then they can respond, and if really pressed, steer the crowd right over the questioner. They don't have to be right; they just have to learn how to run the crowd so that the crowd thinks they're right. Until the pro-Choice groups can reliably hit back in the same way, with a group of their own well-trained and experienced people, they won't stand a chance on equal ground.
The starting point this is self-replication. The pro-Choice movement must be able to create training units that can go out into the world and create replications of themselves by training. The typical US answer to this is through advisors, who go out to Host Nations and teach their units, combining professional training with local knowledge. (For a look at the call for a US Army Advisor Corps, look at this).
Remember, all politics is local. A good portion of training local action groups is getting them to make contact with local social leaders, getting them to know the people at the city permit office, at the police station (who can be really valuable allies), and even among neutral and hostile groups, and most importantly, the media. Having a personal relationship with the media figures, being able to get your message out, and even being able to communicate (under the radar) with the opposition is vital. Especially for point seven.
5) Marketing: Or You Really Should Have It Your Way:
If you don't like the military analogy, here's another one. You're selling a product. You're getting people to buy what you want them to buy, which in this case is an idea.
Modern marketing is as much a religion as it is a science, a devoted worship of fast messages, flashy ads, and the all important thirty-second soundbite, all of which is part of a comprehensive campaign to sell an image as much as it is a product. But it works. And it's what people have come to expect.
Anti-abortion displays come to target audiences with ten meter tall billboards in full color with professional quality photography, with aggressive, full color advertisements, with speeches pre-recorded by camera crews paid million of dollars to put together a quality sound stage environment. By contrast, the pro-Choice groups I see tend to come with homemade banners which they tape to a table using a roll of scotch tape.
This is people bowing to the inevitable problems of budgetary constraint, but it should be no surprise when, if they set up next to the big million-dollar presentation, it doesn't work. The majority of people respond to flashy ads, to slick campaigns, and to gory images. To do otherwise is charming, a display of heart, but it's equivalent to advertising your hamburger joint by paying a guy to stand on the corner in a cowboy outfit waving a sign. It may be cheap, and it may even work, but you're not going to compete with the McDonald's mutli-level marketing strategy.
Fortunately, we don't have to do work. Part of the conclusion of the RAND corporation study I mentioned earlier is that there are businesses who have spent billions of dollars figuring out how to sell things to Americans. The anti-abortion side, which draws heavily on the business experience of megachurches, already knows how to do that, but this doesn't mean that everyone else can't. The production of larger-scale, or at least slicker presentations is part of developing offensive muscle; it gives you the chance to go out in public and compete, or dominate the discussion in a public forum.
Now, I have seen presentations like this. There just aren't enough of them, and you will need them in local circulation to bulk up your firepower.
6) Consolidating Key Regions, or Dropping Oil is Better Then Dropping Acid
The oil drop strategy, which the British first really started talking about back in Malaysia, is the most effective COIN strategy after the other fundamental strategy of the Malaysia campaign, giving people what they want. It's far older then Malaysia; in fact, it's probably far older then recorded history. The general idea is first that you “pacify” one area and then, like a spreading oil stain, spread rapidly to the surrounding regions, until you control the entire region. For an excellent look at how the presence of additional personnel interacted with the development of intelligence capabilities in the Surge in Iraq, read this paper from CNAS.
Part of the key is that pacification does not mean “killing all enemies”; it means neutralizing them by changing the political nature of the region such that they can't function. Eventually even the most stalwart revolutionary is going to get a job, start working, and be unable to lead revolution. In this case, the pacification that you want is going to be one in which the local pro-Choice groups are so strong that any opposition is crushed out of hand.
The first thing to recognize is that this strategy is going to cost you. You cannot be strong everywhere, and this is where the organization from Stage I has to come into play.
This is vitally important. One of the mistakes that amateurs make, like the Americans in Vietnam or the French in Algeria (initially), is to think that because the enemy is everywhere, you have to fight them everywhere. Because the COIN side needs such overwhelming strength to flatten the enemy in a sector, most nations simply cannot afford to be strong enough to protect everything and when everywhere at the same time. You have to choose some regions to concentrate your effort, to win there, while holding on with your fingernails everywhere else.
You can do this with an abortion clinic, because even besieged, they retain some functionality. An ideal strategic control would be deploying teams that have the ability to do long-term service (a rarity in volunteer work, and all the more reason to be prized) to certain regions of the country, as well as bolstering those regions with money, while telling the rest of the nation to fort up. At the same time slow progress in those regions will excite more volunteers, allowing momentum to gather.
This is the most contentious portion of this document. Because this process can take years as opposition is slowly destroyed, this means that large portions of the country are not going to be the recipients of more then subsistence aid. Since you want to start training your long-term volunteers in regions that won't destroy them, you start in mostly friendly locales, which means that regions of the Bible Belt will be hung out to dry for potentially decades. This is a long term plan, slowly sweeping the country, but it leaves millions of women in less then desirable circumstances - which means that this should only be undertaken after Strategic consultation.
7) Splitting the Enemy, or Insurgencies Are Not Thread Safe
In Go, there is something called a splitting attack, where you launch an attack that, positionally, is between two vulnerable enemy groups. In order to respond, the opponent has to make two moves, but more importantly, they are now split in half. Insurgencies are prone to this sort of thing, and one needs little more then a passing knowledge of Africa to recognize the old story, where an insurgency begins to take control of the country, only to fall victim to an internal power struggle as they neared their goal.
This has been done in two examples I wish to bring up. The first is the much ballyhooed Anbar Awakening. If you were asleep during that, let me point out what happened. The Sunnis in Iraq, worried about Shi'a dominance, had long been natural allies of the Sunni al-Qaeda In Mesopotamia. But aQiM, who needed money to continue operations, began to demand a higher price, and at the same time initiated attacks to which the Shi'a began to respond in an increasingly violent manner. They became like the Mafia, although while they demanded protection money, they were unable to provide protection against Shi'a retaliation. So the authorities that aQiM had replaced, the Sunni tribal leaders, with the aid of increasingly angry people, joined up and kicked aQiM out.
There is a second example, which is much more questionable, and which is mostly due to my particular interpretation of events I did not live through. At one point, in what I believe was a completely unintentional incident, the Civil Rights Movement decided to throw down the gauntlet and have a decisive showdown with their opposition. Instead of doing the oil spot strategy from the tamer areas in, they fought it out in the heart of Dixie, the hardest theater they had to face. The press coverage, the allure of the freedom riders, the efforts of the black community; all were directed south. If Birmingham had stood alone, the Civil Rights Movement might have faded right there, but as the struggle went on, something odd began to happen. Bull Connor became the new face of the anti-segregation movement, and the racists lost the war.
As television coverage, journalistic reporting, and all the resources that the CRM could put into action began to record, popular opinion began to fracture. I cannot adequately explain how or why, but what might have been a nation-wide alliance similar to the religious right, between southern manpower long seeped in a deliberate racism, and a nationwide coalition of people who made jokes about black people and refused to hire them fell apart. The most aggressive and most radical factions of the racist group managed to isolate themselves from the biggest source of financial support that they could have found.
This was not a short process. The act of drawing a line between “southern” and “northern” racists had been started before the abolition movement really got started. It took them over a hundred years to do it, but in ten years they managed to do irreparable damage to a force that had governed American politics for over a century.
They did this through courage, but also through concentration of effort, through documentation and monitoring. And then they did it by getting that evidence to the audience that needed it. It was not an easy process, and in some cases it took years.
There are sane pro-Life people, and one of the largest tasks of the pro-Choice movement has always been to split the saner people from the insane people, through the documentation of the atrocities that the radicals do on a regular basis. This may require concentration, years of documentation of filmed incidents, thanks to training up the PR teams who know how to capture the images properly (and discreetly) and then process them professionally, waiting until you have enough to overwhelm opposition. Then again, it might not work.
This is nice in principal, but how does it work in practice? For the most part, such global moments are rare. Very rarely does McCarthy wish to go head to head with the Army on public television. All politics is local, and most of it stays local. This goes back to point 4, where your training involves making connections with local figures of note. In Iraq, evidence of the way that aQiM was aiming at taking over local authority was used as pressure on the tribal leaders, while the evidence of their atrocities was used on the local people. In this case, it may be possible to exert pressure with the same thing, a carefully documented portfolio of local abuses, created and put together by your intelligence and PR teams.
But this has to be tailored locally, and it has to come locally. Ideally, you would be saying “And look, here's a picture of John from down Maple street (you know he's been a bit crazy since his brother hit it rich in the dot-coms) hitting Paul from Broadway (and you know Paul, he's a good man, wouldn't hurt a fly) while he's trying to escort some poor, scared girl, in hi-def from three directions, and you know, you really want to get clear of these people before we release these pictures to Barbara at the paper.” This, of course, is entirely contrived, but you get the idea. The first reaction to pictoral evidence that anti-abortion activists attack people elsewhere is to say “That doesn't happen here”, because people don't want to believe badly of the kind of people they have working relationships with, or have met at social functions. But there are a number of sane pro-life people who really feel uncomfortable with this relationship they have with violent groups, and who might be pushable over the edge.
The two examples I used were national, but the strategy is usually local. Information is deployed on local targets, examples of harassment have to be used on local figures of note in an effort to persuade them not to work with the radical faction. Efforts can be tailored, especially if you've taken the time to build up relationships with authorities in neutral or semi-neutral groups.
Stage III: Confrontation
What I have outlined so far in Stage II is more of a tactical approach then a strategic one. The idea in Stage II is to train up an organizational structure that can be used at the local level. That is, given a target region, you can rapidly deploy a command structure that can organize local groups to systematically approach weak points and other target areas, and reinforce it when necessary with what support units operate on a national level to achieve local dominance.
Now you need to subjugate this to a national strategy. Which regions go first, which congressional districts, whether this is in concert with a certain political campaign are decisions that someone else should make. I, however, wish only to outline a few key points.
8) Concentrating on the next generation, or Never Waste Your Time On Anyone Over Thirty
This is not an outline for a short campaign. You will not walk away in five years, secure in the knowledge that abortion is a guaranteed right for the next century. This is a generational struggle. For comparison, look at how many generations it took for racism against blacks to be pared down to its current level. It took a hundred years after emancipation for them to even get appropriate legal rights, and a lot of that was spent waiting for entire generations to die out.
This then is where you have to take a page from the opposition's book. Like all conservative movements, they are aware that a lot of their strength is time-dependent; the most aggressive members tend to grow old, lose interest, and die out over time. To counter that, they have adopted a strategy of aggressively targeting the nation's youth. The Pro-Choice movement has to follow suit. They have all sorts of advantages here (for the moment), but they can lose the battle. You can lose the battle too - don't ever forget that, but it can also be won.
Flashy marketing techniques, smart ads, and a “guerrilla advertising” movement all appeal to youth. Don't overlook the advantages. You want time to be on your side.
9) Removing Support, or the Robin Hood Tax Relief Plan
“In order for a war to be just, three things are necessary. First, the authority of the sovereign. Secondly, a just cause. Thirdly, a rightful intention.” - Thomas Aquinas
“To carry on war, three things are necessary: money, money, and yet more money.” - Gian Jacopo Trivulzio
-quoted in Medieval II: Total War
Thomas Aquinas may have been a good theologian, but his advice on war has faded as the years have gone by. Trivulzio, however, is still right on.
I'm revealing my bias here. I am, by inclination, a strategist. I think in strategic terms, and strategists think in terms of money. Tacticians need fuel, food, ammunition, land mines, concertina wire, radar arrays, and satellite coverage. Strategists just need money. In a very real sense, the job of grand strategy is macroeconomics; to use money as effectively as possible, creating the force that is best suited and most efficient at accomplishing tasks, while at the same time reinvesting in their country's future. People can be hired, ordinance can be bought, and enemies can even be suborned, as long as the budget holds out.
To give an example, near where I now live, there is a Planned Parenthood clinic, in Aurora, IL. When it first began to go up, there was a very organized protest against it that turned ugly at several points.
In an ideal world, PP would have reacted immediately. They would have rented a floor in an office building in nearby Naperville (playing off the Naperville-Aurora tension), and immediately flown in a command staff of twelve people, a media/PR staff of thirty people with equipment (four three-man camera crews plus editors, graphic artists, and reserve interview subjects), fifty community organizers to canvass the surrounding countryside, and enough support to bring people in and unleash a huge media campaign in all directions. I estimated the cost of this at $40 million over two years.
PP points out that they don't have $40 million to spare, and if they did, they would be spending it on other things. But the opposition does have $40 million. They could have crushed the Aurora clinic. With that level of funding you can bribe police departments and fire departments not to care when the clinic burns to the ground. That they didn't is due to the fact that the money they raised sits in a hundred networks, badly organized, and flying all over the world. Depending on their continued incompetence is not a winning strategy.
The anti-abortion side is literally rolling in money, and a disturbing amount of it is available to the most radical groups. But that same supply is ridiculously vulnerable. This is the entire point of splitting attacks, to split apart financial networks, so that the money from certain sources is continually split away from the more radical factions, splitting them into hundreds of groups.
Other vulnerabilities exist. Many evangelist leaders present themselves as honest people, sacrificing their time and lives for the sake of the poor unborn. But the fact remains that they are multi-millionaire business fat cats by necessity, and this is vulnerability that can be capitalized on, allowing direct attacks against the largest and most organized of the networks simply because of their size. Nobody wants to donate money to a guy who is just going to use it to buy another yacht.
The point is, there's only so much money out there. Your objective is to break apart their funding channels, and through PR recruitment (also through step 1 of this stage) enlarge your own. This is a long, onerous process, but it's a killer. They can survive without legal support, but they can't survive without money.
10) Building coalitions, or if you have enough friends, you don't care that you look dumb.
If I want to find and organization dedicated to opposing gay rights, opposing immigration, and opposing immigration all at once, I know right where to find them. They all exist in one organization. On the other side, it's a bit harder. Pro-Choice groups have natural allies all over the place. Gay rights groups, religious freedom groups, and all sorts of liberal support groups.
The point is that the religious right has a set of fractured command groups, but they all have the same goals. The liberal set has a similar command structure, split on issue and almost independent, but with the same enemies. Sometimes the enemy of my enemy really is my friend, especially when our interests have no conflict.
The point is to enlarge the tent, and reduce the overhead costs. There is no reason that a trained PR supporter, cameraman, graphics artist, or community organizer cannot be retrained rapidly to serve another cause. And most of them would have no objection. Rather then trying to build your own army, dip into the pool. Counter-insurgencies win based on bringing everyone into their tent, not burning down everything outside of it.
Some things I feel inclined to say as warning:
1) Beware, your enemies can be as smart as you are, and at least as clever: Some pro-Choice people I have met suffer from what I usually call the “evolution fallacy”, the idea that we are obviously smarter then our opponents, so we should win debates. It's painful watching people with the right facts and the right know-how getting totally outmaneuvered in the eyes of the crowd until they walk off, thinking they've won, but in actuality losing. Respect your enemies; it makes you keep your knife sharp.
2) When in doubt, don't escalate: Escalation is bad news for these sorts of things. There is no faster way to alienate the huge middle population then to escalate things into fighting in the street. And, let me put it bluntly, I don't think you would win. Only the deployment of the most desperate techniques will allow you to escalate this into the physical realm. The moment the fighting in the streets gets too big for the police to handle, you'll have initiated a whole different set of events, and one that abortion probably won't even matter in.
3) Keep your head up: You've got a lot more problems then the other guy. This is because you have the disadvantage of having won the initial battle. Enough people supported your side to make it legal, and you still enjoy a majority of support, even if it is somewhat tepid. The other guy doesn't have that problem. To expand your base, you have to move into much less friendly territory, which wants you to be much more respectable. But this is because your base is bigger then their base; they've got a ways to go before they start really pushing into the middle. Being the winner isn't easy, but as millions of women are willing to testify, it beats the hell out of the other choice.
Hey, who knows. Maybe someday people will find all this crap I've written useful.
Thanks to mergle for reading this once already.