When I was in the Schoolhouse, we trained against a Soviet-style adversary. This was post-9/11 and Army doctrine was still preparing analysts for intelligence support to conventional force-on-force warfare: tanks, armored vehicles, mechanized infantry and self-propelled artillery. One of the crowning achievements of earning our MOS was being able to analyze the physical terrain and brief the commander on the most likely disposition of enemy forces, to include the unit size and type, command posts, and specific equipment. We studied the enemy doctrine, figured out what the enemy commanders liked to do (or had previously done) on the battlefield, and used that as a guideline to predict how enemy forces were arrayed. Then we could task Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (ISR) assets to confirm the location of the enemy forces and then have them destroyed. (The Army, as they say, is always preparing to fight the last war.)
Somewhere around seven months after graduation, I was on my first deployment in a country where there were virtually zero conventional force-on-force engagements, except at the very basic levels of fire and maneuver against groups of insurgents. There were no T-72s or BMP-3s to find; rather, insurgents in plain clothing who blended into the populace. Finding civilian-soldiers on the battlefield is a far cry from how we’d been trained. And then there was the civilian populace and their tribes and ethnicities and religious sects that also required our attention; a task for which many of us were wholly unprepared. I didn’t even know what a sub-tribe was before my first deployment, now I can recall many of them from memory.
A large part of my job now is teaching Patriots and Preppers how to conduct intelligence in their own areas of operation (AO), i.e, their communities. They don’t have to worry about conventional force-on-force warfare and memorizing the appearance and nomenclature of military equipment ad nauseum. Instead, what students must do is become experts on their own communities, and that’s a much easier task than anything else that could be asked of them. Simply understand how your community works and how it will react to and be affected by any number of SHTF events.
