As a former Special Forces Warrant Officer with multiple rotations running counterinsurgency opsāboth hunting insurgents and trying to separate them from sympathetic populationsāIāve seen organized resistance up close. From Anbar to Helmand, the pattern is familiar: spotters, cutouts, dead drops (or modern equivalents), disciplined comms, role specialization, and a willingness to absorb casualties while bleeding the stronger force slowly.
Whatās unfolding in Minneapolis right now isnāt āprotest.ā Itās low-level insurgency infrastructure, built by people whoāve clearly studied the playbook.
Signal groups at 1,000-member cap per zone. Dedicated roles: mobile chasers, plate checkers logging vehicle data into shared databases, 24/7 dispatch nodes vectoring assets, SALUTE-style reporting (Size, Activity, Location, Unit, Time, Equipment) on suspected federal vehicles. Daily chat rotations and timed deletions to frustrate forensic recovery. Vetting processes for new joiners. Mutual aid from sympathetic locals (teachers providing cover, possible PD tip-offs on license plate lookups). Home-base coordination points. Rapid escalation from observation to physical obstructionāor worse.
This isnāt spontaneous outrage. This is C2 (command and control) with redundancy, OPSEC hygiene, and task organization that would make a SF team sergeant nod in recognition. Replace āICE agentsā with āoccupying coalition forcesā and the structure maps almost 1:1 to early-stage urban cells we hunted in the mid-2000s.
The most sobering part? Itās domestic. Funded, trained (somewhere), and directed by people who live in the same country theyāre trying to paralyze law enforcement in. When your own citizens build and operate this level of parallel intelligence and rapid-response network against federal officersācomplete with doxxing, vehicle pursuits, and harassment thatās already turned lethalāyouāre no longer dealing with civil disobedience. Youāre facing a distributed resistance thatās learned the lessons of successful insurgencies: stay below the kinetic threshold most of the time, force over-reaction when possible, maintain popular support through narrative, and never present a single center of gravity.
I spent years training partner forces to dismantle exactly this kind of apparatus. Now pieces of it are standing up in American cities, enabled by elements of local government and civil society. That should keep every thinking American awake at night.
Not because I want escalation. But because history shows these things donāt de-escalate on their own once the infrastructure exists and the cadre believe theyāre winning the information war.
We either recognize what weāre actually looking atāor we pretend itās still just āactivismā until the structures harden and spread.
Your call, America. But from where I sit, this isnāt January 2026 politics anymore.
Itās phase one of something weāve spent decades trying to keep off our own soil.