Apparently some folks from RAND and elsewhere have
been researching movements like Critical Mass (Everything from video tapes & interviews to actually participating in the bike ride) for several years, and the military is adopting some of the same strategies that we use.
http://www.google.com/search?&q=John+Arquilla+%22critical+mass http://www.examiner.com/ex_files/default.jsp?story=X0729KEATSw
Yes, you too can be a military strategist.
The US military is talking alot about their soldiers using "swarm tactics", "smart mobs" and "netwar".
Apparently some folks from RAND and elsewhere have been researching movements like Critical Mass (Everything from video tapes & interviews to actually participating in the bike ride) for several years, and the military is adopting some of the smae strategies that we use.
Here's a quote from a SF Examiner Article:
"Critical Mass is a textbook example of what RAND scholars John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt call a netwar. In a recent report prepared for the U.S. Department of Defense, they make the case that the difficulty the police have had combating that simple act of civil disobedience is akin to our seemingly hopeless struggle against terrorism in America and around the world."
And another quote from the article "WHAT NEXT FOR NETWORKS AND NETWARS?" from the RAND Institution:
An unusually loose netwar design�one that is eminently leaderless yet manages to organize a large crowd for a rather chaotic, linear kind of swarming�is found in the pro-bicycle, anti-car protest movement known as Critical Mass (CM) in the San Francisco Bay area. Since its inception in 1992, CM�s bicycle activists (sometimes numbering 2,000) have converged on the last Friday of every month from around the Bay area to disrupt traffic at peak hours along a chosen route.
They slow and block traffic, while handing out pamphlets about pollution and other detriments of the automobile culture. CM riders are proud of their lack of formal organization and leadership and constitute what they call a �xerocracy,� which amounts to governance by distributing copies of an idea online or on the scene, say for a ride route, and letting a vote by the assembled decide. A key doctrinal tenet is �organized coincidence,� by which �CM rides simply �materialize� every month even though there are no leaders or organizational sponsorships.� This way, �No one need take responsibility but everyone can take credit.�
The aim is to ride en masse. The preference may be for �keeping Mass� (riding in a single, large, spread-out mass), but for safety or other reasons a ride may splinter into �minimasses� (multiple, dense small groups). Group decisionmaking about when and where to alter the route of a ride may occur on the fly, as a function of �dynamic street smarts� among the bicyclists up front. A �buddy system� is used to watch out for each other within a mass. Whistle signals are used for some command and control (e.g., stop, go, turn). �Cell phone contact� is used for communications between minimasses, which is particularly helpful if riders want to regroup splinters into a single mass.
Tactics during a ride may include �corking� an intersection and �swarming� around a lone car. For much of the 1990s, there were tendencies for confrontation�if not by the riders then by police who came to �escort� and �herd� them. But by 1999, CM became �a ride dominated by creative self-governance and celebratory experimentation �with little or no ill will, and an eye out for avoiding confrontation.�
www.google.com/search?&q=John+Arquil...
