Patterns of Conflict Slide 69

Patterns of Conflict

Patterns of Conflict Slide 69

Quantico Transcription

Now the nature of blitzkrieg and guerrilla strategy, the idea of infiltration, isolation, or penetration and isolation. You’re going to see me bring those terms up again and again. Penetration and isolation, or infiltration and isolation, and you do it at all levels, moral, mental, and physical. If you can’t penetrate the guy and isolate him, why should he throw the towel in? He’s not going to. No point to it.

Moral and political, economic sense, diplomatic, psychological, et. cetera. They try to use that as they strip away potential allies, thereby isolating their intended victims. To carry out this program, it’s straight Sun Tzu here. Note this, exploit critical differences of opinion. Remember, I said that’s how, you need that propaganda, internal contradictions, frictions, obsessions, et cetera, in that society in order to foment mistrust and sow discord, therefore shape both adversary and allied perception of the world—

Thereby— this is Hitler saying, these are his words, create an atmosphere “of mental confusion, contradiction of feeling, indecisiveness, and panic.” Make it difficult, if not impossible, for allies to come to their aid. [unintelligible] alienate themselves.

And then what you do is, you force capitulation, [45:00] combined with external political, economic, and military pressure. Then you put the pressure on, get them to throw the towel in. If they don’t, then the foe’s weakened. Then you launch the military blow into him and he comes unglued, can’t hold in.

One of those things, remember South Vietnam. Remember, we had them all built up and Christ, goddamn it, after we left, why, the NVA went through there like crap went through a goose. It was over.

Now you might say, well, hey Boyd, you know blitzkrieg and guerrilla is quite different. I’m going to show you they are different. But in this sense, they’re the same. I’m just showing you, in this sense they’re the same. As we go into the details, you’ll find out they’re quite different.

But note what they’re doing here. I want to bring out one other thing. What’s happening here? If you’re exploiting all those differences of opinions, disconnections and that, isn’t that the same thing as we said before, generating those many non-cooperative centers of gravity? Exactly.

And you got non-cooperative center of gravity, they’re isolated segments in a sense, more a mental sense. Therefore, you can scarf them all up and realize your purpose, which is the inverse Clausewitzean thing. In other words, he wanted to go after the center of gravity. That’s bullshit. Generate many non-cooperative centers of gravity. And they can’t function as an organic whole.

[46:24]

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