“Street Warfare In Portland ... A manual of military strategy ... Historically, anarchists have (rightly) been hostile to and skeptical of formal militaries ... Nevertheless, when engaging in violent struggle, one cannot simply ignore or dispense with military strategy ... The purpose of this brief manual is to lay out the basics of military doctrine and strategy for the benefit of street rebels, and to apply these practically to some events that have occurred recently in the city of Portland ... In war, there are three primary kinds of objectives ... Neutralization of enemy personnel ... Area denial ... Resource denial ... By definition, each of these three offensive objectives also implies an equivalent defensive objective that is the inverse of the offensive objective: preventing the enemy from doing all these things to you ... Due to the low intensity of street warfare in Portland, this manual will focus heavily on the third type of objective, as the most relevant to the Portland context ... Militants whose primary experience of violent struggle consists of minor vandalism, setting small fires, and kicking tear gas canisters back at the police should not imagine that they have the capability to wage an active shooting war with the state. It is also inconceivable that street rebels could capture any cops or National Guard troops as prisoners of war or would even want to ... Cops have occasionally been (lightly) injured with projectiles, laser pointers, Molotovs, or punches to the face ... Plenty of rebels have become demoralized or exhausted and are choosing to stay home rather than continue to fight nightly clashes with the cops; and in a few cases, some rebels have been encouraged or forced to become snitches ... Street rebels sometimes attempt rudimentary formation tactics to prevent arrests, though they usually do not succeed very well. Chants of “stay together, stay tight” are an encouragement of the group to remain as a unitary mass so that the group cannot be scattered or split into multiple pieces, and so that straggling individuals are not as vulnerable to being snatched and arrested. When police charge, however, most people’s instinct to run takes over, and no amount of chanting will keep the crowd disciplined enough to hold a formation. One tactic for holding a formation together is the famous locking arms that one might have seen in old photos of the civil rights movement. A line of people locking their elbows together cannot be so easily scattered ... In the very first days of the Portland unrest, there were some very brief moments when police were in retreat, when the Justice Center was invaded (and righteous fires set), when downtown shops were undefended long enough that they could be looted. But since then, rebels have not posed any serious threat of taking and holding space against the police. Rowdy protests outside police stations and courthouses generally persist at the sufferance of the police, who can—and do—choose to break up and disperse the rebels at basically any time they choose. Once the police make the decision to gather their forces and march to push them away—sometimes pushing them dozens of blocks away—rebels have never been able to do anything other than retreat. This is not a criticism or indictment of the rebels, merely an acknowledgement of the reality: they are too poorly armed, too few in number, and too disorganized to be able to seriously challenge police control of public space, to actually push the cops back when they come to push ... On rare occasion, rebels have dispensed with the mode of mass demonstrations entirely, and have adopted methods of truly covert sabotage. One time recently, while a bloc of two-hundred were facing off outside a police station, managing only to break a few windows before a riot was declared and they were forcibly dispersed, at the same time on the other side of the city one or a few anonymous individuals cut through a chain link fence at a different police station, and slashed the tires and smashed the windows of nearly a dozen parked police cars. Adopting covert guerrilla tactics is historically the method revolutionaries use when they face an enemy too powerful to fight head-on ... Though the disconnected rebels are generally unorganized, there are some crude methods of rallying group cohesion and communicating tactics and strategy. One method of doing that is the classic call-and-response chant of ‘whose streets? Our streets!’ This is not merely an exciting chant or an ideological statement. The point of chanting it is not simply to make noise, nor simply to make a communist ideological statement about the people’s common ownership of the street. The point is to gauge the temperature of the crowd when entering an engagement with the police. When police order the crowd to disperse, starting up a chant of ‘whose streets?!’ is a way of communicating to the police that their orders to disperse will be defied, and rallying the crowd to a collective strategy: ‘no surrender! We will be resisting and not retreating right now.’ If the chant catches on widely and enthusiastically, then the crowd is collectively voting in favor of that strategy. If the chant fails to catch on or fizzles out, that means that morale is low and the crowd is not fired up and prepared for a defiant confrontation at that moment, and prefers to retreat ... The objective of the rebels is to disrupt the orderly conduct of society and to inflict economic damage on its many enemies. Anarchists in particular intend to inflict damage on the state’s facilities and on capitalist corporations in the form of banks, chain restaurants, and retail outlets ... anarchist militants have, as a practical matter, the goal of retaliating destructively against the state for the police murders of black people, as an act of revenge and intimidation, as well as slowing down the orderly administration of government and rendering it less efficient and effective. Wasting the police’s time and doing property damage is a way of doing that: of burning through their budget and exhausting their bureaucrats ... Some rebels appear to view their role primarily in symbolic, discursive, or moralistic terms. They believe there is a spectrum of action one could take against police brutality, starting with the least militant in the form of legal peaceful protests, then escalating to unlawful protests (billed as ‘direct action marches’) defying police orders, escalating further to criminal acts of riot and property destruction, and then perhaps (theoretically) escalating maximally to the most extreme act, which would be to actually hurt or kill people. Many rebels rhetorically advocate this (in the form of painting ‘Kill Cops’ as a slogan), though virtually none appear to own guns or be prepared to actually do it. In the rebel milieu, minor acts of property destruction seem to take on the role of a symbol or a statement, owning the libs who condemn rioting as ‘going too far,’ and perhaps arguing against a mainstream narrative that excessively valorizes the legacy of peaceful protest in the civil rights movement ... Objects are thrown at police without any concern even for whether the projectile actually hits its target—or any target. It is astonishing the number of water bottles or little pieces of assorted garbage that are thrown over rebels’ heads and then land pathetically in the middle of the street, twenty feet away from any cop ... Even if throwers could be forgiven for having bad aim or a weak arm and therefore missing their target, oftentimes very lightweight projectiles (such as water bottles) are thrown uselessly at solid walls or police cars, with zero chance they could have broken anything even if they hit their target dead-on ... Conversely, sometimes extremely heavy objects (for example something heavy enough it needs to be held with both hands) are thrown uselessly from a distance so long that the thrower could not possibly hope for it to reach its target. The result is a pathetic heaving of an object onto the ground only a few feet away ... Many rebels are versed well in the importance of dressing properly in a black bloc, and leaving their cell phones at home—though many other rebels could of course stand to do a better job at this. Shooing away photographers and streamers is another well-known aspect of this, as video being taken of criminal activity has led to criminal charges. Less well-addressed is the matter of surveillance cameras. Many surveillance cameras are highly vulnerable and accessible, though rebels frequently ignore them. Painting over them with spray paint or simply ripping them out of the walls is a tactic that has been seldom utilized. Even when high out of reach, wrapping a rope or chain around the plastic arm that holds up a camera and then pulling it down would not be very difficult ... If one is going to put themselves on the line and in danger, one should do so when there is something worthwhile to be achieved. Many people throw projectiles when it won’t accomplish anything, and many people start fires that will quickly be put out. Some people will throw a punch (or throw a Molotov, apparently), when it serves no tactical purpose in defeating the enemy. There are some quite limited symbolic victories to be gained from these types of things (and sexy riot footage and photos to be captured), but oftentimes it seems that the risk-to- reward ratio is completely lopsided. All risk and no reward ... If the revolution has not yet arrived, it makes little sense to make oneself a revolutionary martyr ... The strategic opening seems to have closed, not only in Portland but across the US, and while the political opening is still open, it has narrowed—people don’t hate the police as much today as they did in June 2020 ... Some anarchists have suggested the redirection of covert sabotage tactics toward other fruitful avenues, such as monkeywrenching in service of ecological struggle; fighting banks and landlords as they try to evict people during the pandemic, and the police when they attempt to enforce evictions; fighting against immigration enforcement and the carceral system more generally; and anti-militarist and anti- imperialist action however it can be carried out. A guerrilla strategy of ecological monkeywrenching often has the most direct and achievable path to success. It is quite easy to inflict economic damage on the property, tools, and facilities of Earth-ravaging corporations, and even to save animals, trees, and land from destruction. It is easy for a loosely-organized anarchist movement in a single city to become focused on its local enemy in the city police, and lose sight of the global struggle that anarchism advocates.“
https://rosecitycounterinfo.noblogs.org/files/2021/10/Street-Warfare-in-Portland-PRINT-1.pdf