Bundy Ranch and the new rules of engagement: Send this analysis to your favorite fed
Tuesday, April 15, 2014
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
Editor of NaturalNews.com (See all articles...)
(NaturalNews) In the aftermath of round one of the Bundy Ranch armed siege by the U.S. government, I have decided to offer the federal government an intelligent analysis of the new rules of engagement. People like Daniel P. Love, Special Agent in Charge of BLM Region 3, desperately need to review and learn these rules. Other federal agents also need to understand the tectonic shift of power that has just taken place and how it will impact their operations from here forward.
Why am I doing this? Because the BLM, through its astounding incompetence and arrogance, very nearly initiated a massacre at Bundy Ranch which would have been disastrous for the BLM agents actively engaged there. The incident very nearly came to a shooting war, and it is the outdated, ill-informed government playbook that inflamed the situation and brought it to a flashpoint of violence. At every step, BLM escalated the situation beyond reason: who brings snipers to a tortoise dispute? Who unleashes attack dogs on unarmed pregnant women and cancer survivors? The BLM, that's who!
I know there remain many good agents in many different departments of the federal government. But there are also many incompetent agents who are still living in the 1990's and think they can run an armed ranch siege in 2014 the same way the ATF ran the Waco, Texas siege in 1993. But the rules have changed. As proof of that, consider the now-historical fact that BLM agents publicly surrendered and retreated from hundreds of armed citizens near Bunkerville, Nevada. How did this happen, exactly? To understand that, you must understand the new rules of engagement between the feds, the media and the citizens.
So if you have any friends who are feds in any department -- BLM, ATF, DEA, FBI, etc. -- make sure they get a copy of this article... and we all might spare ourselves some bloodshed in the near future.
Personal context: As far as my own background, I am a long-time supporter of local law enforcement, a fan of certain individuals within the FBI who are still part of "the good guys" pulling for America, and an outspoken critic of overzealous abuse of power in any agency, including the ATF, DEA and of course the BLM. My personal beliefs on current events can best be summarized by the words of Judge Andrew Napolitano in this video interview.
Old rules of engagement? Coercion, intimidation and overwhelming show of force
The reason BLM just got hoodwinked at Bundy Ranch was because they were playing by the old rules of engagement which are based on "might makes right." BLM foolishly thought that if they closed down the air space, threatened citizens with arrest, brought snipers to the scene and ordered the mainstream media to run a total blackout on the story, they would control the situation and easily be able to assert their will (which was to seize control of the land).
They were wrong. As we all now know, BLM Special Agent Daniel P. Love vastly over-estimated the strength of his position and wildly under-estimated the strength of his opposition. How did he make that mistake? He thought this was a war of kinetic action, but it was actually a war of information flow (more discussion below).
Federal agents are intentionally misinformed during their training
Much like Dan Love, most federal agents are still running on playbooks which are wildly outdated. Change is always slow to make its way into government training manuals, operational tactics and rules of engagement. Citizens, patriots and indy media journalists, on the other hand, are incredibly adaptable, technologically savvy and enjoy an ever-growing base of support which has only expanded due to the extreme abuses of liberty and freedom that have taken place under the Obama administration. The harder the feds push, the more they grow the popular resistance to coercion. Thus, the very application of the old rules of engagement automatically leads the feds to inevitable defeat in situations where federal rules conflict with core American values.
Feds are also wildly misinformed by their superiors about the truth of their opposition, and so they are handicapped from the start with disinfo that impedes their operational efficiency. Case in point: if you're a federal agent, nearly all the people who are described to you as "anti-government" are actually pro-Constitutional government people. They are not anarchists, and they are not irrational. They are opponents of criminal corruption and die-hard advocates of honest, limited government.
Most of what you are being told about these people is propaganda, not factual truth. As a result, when you think you are about to go toe-to-toe with what you've been taught are "low IQ, inbred anti-government extremists," the truth is that many of these people are actually far more cognitively accomplished than your own agents. For example, members of the Bundy family possess well-developed philosophical ideas about liberty, personal perseverance and spiritual courage. At the same time, most lower-tier federal agents have never spent any real time pondering ethics, values, courage or philosophy at all. Most federal agents, factually stated, are ignorant of the Bill of Rights and have almost no knowledge of the limitations of federal power. They are not taught, after all, to limit their reach but instead to find ways to work around such limitations and assert their power in any way possible. Such is the nature of every government agency and department. Most young men working as front-line agents in these departments have almost no knowledge of what they are truly facing.
Furthermore, federal agents are almost never instructed that their adversaries might be thoughtful, courageous, honorable people who primarily just want to be left alone. These people are also highly disciplined and principled. As the Bundy Ranch scenario clearly demonstrated, so-called "extremists" are willing and able to hold their fire and act with extraordinary self-discipline, even in the face of extreme escalations of violence perpetrated by government agents. Obviously, then, they are not extremists at all. What's extreme is the BLM's decision to bring snipers and government helicopters to a dispute they claim was about a desert tortoise.
Federal agents are almost never taught these truths about the everyday citizens they are facing in these scenarios. Instead, federal training programs go out of their way to vilify and smear rural white people as, for example, "low-IQ extremists" rather than the thoughtful, principled Americans they truly are. Just because somebody works on a ranch does not make them stupid. I own multiple John Deere tractors and raise chickens, yet my own cognitive function ranks in the top one-tenth of one percent of all Americans. Do not make the mistake of equating rural living with stupidity, and do not think that people only live on farms because they have no other choice. Many of us have gone to great lengths to deliberately pursue rural lifestyles because rural living is more in tune with our well-developed philosophies of happiness and purpose.
Background: The balance of power; weapons, information and decentralization
To understand the new rules of engagement, you need to understand how the American Revolution was won. And to understand that, you need to understand how the invention of interchangeable parts in firearms manufacturing allowed everyday men to attain fairly accurate rifles which could counter rifles held by centralized government personnel (in ANY government, not just the British government).
It was the proliferation of easy-to-make, easy-to-repair rifles -- along with barrel rifling advancements -- that allowed everyday people to rise up against government oppression and tyranny. This is how the United States of America came to be born, of course -- by taking a stand against the tyranny of the King of England. That's also why standing firm against tyranny is something that can never be taken out of the American spirit because it runs in our blood.
The ease of manufacturing and maintaining rifles shifted the balance of power from the hands of the few (government) to the hands of the many (Democracy). This is why the invention of the rifle unleashed a global wave of revolutions and revolt against centralized authority. Grassroots rifle manufacturing was, in fact, the first peer-to-peer offensive weapons manufacturing network of the modern world. If you don't understand this trend in history, you will never understand what's happening in America today.
Today, of course, government has far more advanced weapons than the common man. Government commands Hellfire missiles, Apache attack helicopters and even nuclear weapons. No common citizen's group possesses such weapons, and because of this, government believes it now controls the balance of power. But that's playing the old game from the 1700's. Today, what matters is not so much who has the better weapons, but who has the better ability to share information. Information warfare is the paradigm of 2014 and beyond, not kinetic warfare.
The Pentagon already understands this, of course, which is why journalists are strictly controlled ("embedded") when covering wars in the Middle East. The information war is far more important to shape and control than the kinetic war. Because it doesn't really matter where the bombs land as long as you control which VIDEOS of the bombs get broadcast. Guiding the news coverage is far more important than guiding the ordnance, in other words. (Oops! Did ya just blow up a civilian hospital? Don't worry, CNN will agree not to show it, aren't they awesome?)
Government can no longer control the narrative
Centralized government can no longer control the news narrative for events taking place on U.S. soil. What's happening today in information sharing now mirrors what took place over 200 years ago with rifle manufacturing sharing. When information can be passed from person to person, in a decentralized, peer-to-peer network with no central authority and no central point of control, facts, photos and videos easily bypass the usual firewalls government places upon mainstream media outlets. While it is exceedingly easy to control videos and photos in a foreign country, it is all but impossible to control such information when events are unfolding on U.S. soil (as they did near Bunkerville, Nevada).
The widespread ownership of video recording devices in 2014 mirrors the widespread ownership of rifles in 1775. Nearly every citizen today has a mobile phone recording device, and nearly everyone has an ability to post videos, photos, audio and tweets to the internet in near-real time. This is tactically equivalent to the ability of any citizen in 1775 to own and operate rifles capable of going head-to-head with the rifles carried by British soldiers who occupied the colonies of the Americas.
If you understand this concept of decentralized, readily-available technologies that shape the big trends of history, the you are ready to grasp the following NEW rules of engagement.
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