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Intensity beats money and numbers
Playing the insurgent
In a counterinsurgency program, students had to pretend to be a terrorist group, because the best way to study what you're fighting is to understand it. Each group had to come up with a mission, a vision, and a manifesto.
Intensity over strength
A good manifesto looks at the world and names what the opponent has: more numbers, more money, more force, and today more legitimacy. Then it commits to beating all of that with more intensity. A quote of uncertain origin holds that one man plus the truth is a majority. A small number of people willing to die for a cause, in an insurgency literally, can overcome incumbency, because no amount of money beats someone who wants it so much more.
The manifesto as magnet
A manifesto paints a vision of what the world could be, so vividly that people will leave their jobs, families, and security to make it happen. Once you see a good one, you can't get it out of your head. The manifesto is the magnet. Without one, a founder has no standing to ask someone to leave a comfortable job and a beautiful family for what is probably a death mission.
Why do students role-play as insurgents?
Red teaming, which means studying a problem by playing the opponent, grew in military education after the Cold War and the 2001 attacks. The US Army opened its Red Team University at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, in 2004 to train officers to challenge plans from an adversary's point of view. The practice has older roots: the Catholic Church's devil's advocate, an official who argued against candidates for sainthood, held the post from 1587 until 1983.
Where does 'a majority of one' come from?
Henry David Thoreau wrote in his 1849 essay Civil Disobedience that any man more right than his neighbors constitutes a majority of one already. The idea is often paraphrased, and similar sayings are attributed to others, including Frederick Douglass and Andrew Jackson. Thoreau's essay was first published under the title Resistance to Civil Government.
How do weaker sides ever win wars?
Political scientist Ivan Arreguín-Toft examined asymmetric conflicts from 1800 to 1998 and found that the weaker side won nearly 30 percent of them. Andrew Mack argued in a 1975 article, Why Big Nations Lose Small Wars, that the weaker side prevails because the stakes are higher for it, so it will bear greater costs than the stronger side will.
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