Finding Talent

 

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Former SEAL and author Jock Willink has a podcast. Which should be a regular visit for you.

This one is useful to anyone wondering what you should be looking for from anyone you're considering adding to any little band of Ungentlemen.

It should go without saying that you don't want someone employed by a three-letter agency, and that you do require more than a pulse, a weapon, and some tatty old LBE.

What next?

Watch the video. Take notes. Repeat until it's ingrained in your psyche. Then DO IT. These are the traits you're looking for in the best people. (That assumes that you want the best people. I do.)

Or, ignore what works at the pointiest pointy end of the biggest, baddest spears, half-ass this, and suture self.

Your ball, kids.

Two Road Maps

 

One runs right under your opponents' noses. The other one rubs his nose in it, right in front of him in plain sight. (Born yesterday? Google them, Baby Duck.)

Neither is the wrong choice, and like chocolate or vanilla, or blondes vs. brunettes, the correct answer is liable to be "Both, please", not either/or.

Open your mind that much.

All it takes for the former is one person: Big X.

The fewer people in your organization, however, and the more jobs you delegate right back to yourself.

Operations, training, logistics, strategic and tactical planning, security, supplies, etc.

Conversely, the more like-minded folks you have, the more you can spread the load.

Over a long enough timeline, one person can do almost anything.

For most of its build history, one man was behind Mt. Rushmore. At a certain point, the scheme caught on in the imagination, and everyone, including the government, got into the act. But it happened at all because one guy thought it'd be a good idea.

The latter idea takes, obviously, quite a lot more people. In their case, people tired of communism's boots on their necks, and willing to dare the Soviets, in front of the world, to trample them once again. 1981 in Gdansk was a different world than it had been in Prague in 1968, or Budapest in 1954, and third time proved to be the charm.

So first lesson, for Plan B, is time your moves, and leverage the optics when they favor you, and make sure you have the numbers.

Ruby Ridge had no numbers, and no optics, going in. Game over.

Waco had better numbers, but all the wrong optics. Flame on.

Malheur was thoroughly penetrated with fed CIs, their main support was getting sent a literal bag of dicks to eat, and it was studied and decapitated by TPTB. End of story.

The Capitol Caper was a dumbass idea, just like the rest of the street games, and was conversely so big, the so-called organizers had no control over those participants either salted in to turn it sideways, or those who self-directed to the stupid switch. Had any number of us pointed that out, yet again, with the fateful prognosis "buffalo jump", no one would have listened. (Stupid is like that.) Looking at things at the end of the day, they might have thought differently.

Surprised by it? No; the surprise is that it isn't a once-a-week exercise, going back decades, and that no congressweasels were actually defenestrated in the traditional meaning of that word, i.e. hung out windows by their own entrails, but we can dream. Condemn it? No. Other than that they didn't actually plan to do that the first time. But note that it didn't help anything? Can't really argue against that. It didn't help anything. In historical terms, it was the Makin Island Raid, which mainly served to make sure that the Tarawa Invasion was a bloody mess.

The trouble with small group actions is getting things done.

The trouble with large group actions is not getting them undone.

Understand that, so that if/when you or "someone" you know undertakes either of them, they know what they're biting off. And maybe they use two wandering brain cells to address those contingencies. (Just kidding; they'll never do that, until they have to, or face death. Then, maybe...)

The days of half-assing things, and plainly assing them up, have finally come to a middle. Those who learn the right lessons will have more harmonious outcomes. Those who don't are looking at domestic terrorism labels, arrests, trials, and sentences.

"We killed the stupid ones first." - OIF/OEF Iraq and Afghanistan after-action assessments

Nobody's saying don't do anything.

Nobody wants anyone going out in a blaze of glory.

Just use your heads for more than a hat rack, and stop fucking things up by the numbers because you thought you could pull a thing out of your ass, on the fly.

Ask around: JSOC Ninjas aren't that because they can do the complicated things right. They are that, because they practice so much they can't do the simple things wrong.

Break things down to simple pieces, and get those right a hundred times.

When you have all the pieces right, you can put the whole puzzle together, in any size.

True for Big X Luftstalag III types of things, true for Gdansk shipyard mass protest kinds of things, true for any kinds of things.

If, and only if, you do the headwork, the legwork, and the homework.

And start by deciding: 

How do you make that decision? You pay attention to CARVER:

Criticality?

Accessibility?

Recuperability?

Vulnerability?

Effect?

Recognizability?

It looks like this:

Everything can be evaluated with that matrix.

Pieces on a chessboard.

Your daily to-do list.

Getting your kid into college.

And every potential target in your AO. In fact, TPTB have had decades to assign people to rating everything you can think of (and a lot you've never thought of) a CARVER value, so they already know the high-value targets in every county in the country.

What they can't do is protect them all to the same degree, so obviously, they have to pick what's most important.

When you're Leviathan, size matters, and it means there's not enough armor for the whole beastie. Not enough assets to protect everything. Hell, even tanks have thick armor in the front, and thinner armor on the top and bottom, and that's why we use mines and missiles that exploit the weak spots, rather than trying to duke it out with the frontal plate.

Anyone wanting to take advantage of that would have to see where the important spots are, and how well protected (or not) they are. They would then be able to find targets that offer disproportionate value for disproportionately low risk.

You're now doing a sort of analysis you may have heard of:

It's the weekend. Do some homework: Watch The Great Escape. Watch Moneyball. Not as entertainment, but as training tools. Then do the mental work behind anything else, and do the math. 

Because you'll find all the stupid things you would
have overlooked, and then not do them, assuming
you're not a total moron.

Find the 30-pt. targets. Work backwards from what you might want them to look like, with what it would take to get them that way. And then decide if that works better with a Big X solution, or a Solidarnösc approach. Which one (if either) can you pull off? (And don't go after any 10-pointers if there are still 15- or 20-pointers on the table. Duh.)

Do. The. Math.

Be different than every failed fucktard you've ever seen, who never bothered to do that much, or that little.

And maybe, just maybe, start chalking up some wins one day, instead of going out in a flaming heap of wreckage.

If only for the novelty of the approach.