“As a former Special Forces Warrant Officer with multiple rotations running counterinsurgency ops—both hunting insurgents and trying to separate them from sympathetic populations—I’ve seen organized resistance up close.
What’s unfolding in Minneapolis right now isn’t “protest.” It’s low-level insurgency infrastructure, built by people who’ve clearly studied the playbook.
This isn’t spontaneous outrage. This is C2 (command and control) with redundancy, OPSEC hygiene, and task organization that would make a SF team sergeant nod in recognition.
We’re facing a distributed resistance that’s learned the lessons of successful insurgencies: stay below the kinetic threshold most of the time, force over-reaction when possible, maintain popular support through narrative, and never present a single center of gravity.
I spent years training partner forces to dismantle exactly this kind of apparatus. Now pieces of it are standing up in American cities, enabled by elements of local government and civil society.
We either recognize what we’re actually looking at—or we pretend it’s still just “activism” until the structures harden and spread.”