The Resistance Hub Podcast

Two hundred and fifty years after the Declaration of Independence, this episode examines the American Revolution the way US Army Special Operations Command does: as an insurgency. The ARIS case study The Patriot Insurgency (1763-1789), written by Robert R. Leonhard and a Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory team, sets aside the commemorative narrative and maps the Patriots against modern insur...

The Assessment of Men: How the OSS Built America's First System for Selecting Spies and Saboteurs In late 1943, William Donovan's Office of Strategic Services was recruiting thousands of personnel for clandestine and irregular warfare work with no uniform screening process. The result was failures in the field that cost the organization time, money, blown operations, and in some cases the...

The OSS Secret Intelligence Field Manual: How America Built Its First Espionage Doctrine In March 1944, William Donovan's Office of Strategic Services codified the operational doctrine that would shape American human intelligence for generations. The Secret Intelligence Field Manual, Strategic Services (Provisional), classified Top Secret and held to deliberately limited distribution, set out...

A British demolition party drops into occupied Greece in 1942 to blow one bridge and cut Rommel's supply line. Two years later they're still there, refereeing a civil war-in-waiting between rival guerrilla factions while trying to keep a Communist-dominated resistance from inheriting the country. Drawing on the ARIS case study Case Study in Guerrilla War: Greece During World War II , this...

What actually makes something a "domain" of warfare? We treat land, sea, air, and space as obvious, yet there has never been a single agreed definition of "domain" in the DoD Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms, in NATO doctrine, or internationally. This episode works through a 2009 paper that set out to fix that gap, and in doing so helped shape the thinking behind the...

Four armed groups. Five decades. Hundreds of thousands dead. The Colombian conflict is the longest-running insurgency in the Western Hemisphere, and the ARIS case study on it is one of the most useful documents in irregular warfare literature precisely because Colombia doesn't fit a clean narrative. The leftist guerrillas didn't win. The state didn't decisively defeat them. Right-wing...

Batista's regime had a 30,000-man army, U.S. backing, and a relatively prosperous economy. Castro's 26th of July Movement started with a failed barracks attack, returned from Mexican exile with about 80 men, and never won a decisive military engagement. So how did this end with Batista on a plane out of Havana? In this episode we walk through USASOC's ARIS case study on the Cuban Revol...

What if the most important battlefield in insurgency isn't a battlefield at all? What if it's a marketplace — one where states and armed challengers compete not over territory, but over who gets to govern? In this episode, we walk through The War Marketplace Framework: Insurgency as Competitive Governance, a contributing article by Moe Gyo that originally appeared on The Resistance Hub as...

Two insurgent groups. Two competing Cold War sponsors. One battlespace. The Rhodesian Bush War offers something rare in the study of irregular warfare — a natural experiment comparing two fundamentally different approaches to unconventional warfare, playing out simultaneously inside the same conflict. In this episode, we walk through the United States Army Special Operations Command case study on...

Some moments in an uprising transcend words — a raised fist on an Olympic podium, a sea of Guy Fawkes masks in a city square, a canopy of umbrellas pushing back tear gas. These aren't decoration. They're doctrine. In this episode, we break down three of the most powerful symbols in modern resistance and why they work, drawing on Gene Sharp's framework from 198 Methods of Nonviolent Act...

Cyber security looks very different depending on which side of an irregular conflict you're on. State security forces can centralize everything — monitoring, training, compliance, background checks. Resistance movements can't, because centralization creates catastrophic single points of failure. In this episode, we break down how cellular organizational structures shape cyber security requ...

What does modern resistance actually look like? In this episode, we examine Understanding Resistance , part of the Assessing Revolutionary and Insurgent Strategies (ARIS) series produced for the United States Army Special Operations Command . This volume explores the foundational mechanics of resistance movements — how they form, evolve, organize, legitimize themselves, and ultimately attempt to g...

This episode explores the Resistance Operating Concept (ROC) , a foundational framework developed through multinational collaboration to address how states can prepare for, withstand, and recover from partial or full loss of sovereignty under foreign pressure or occupation. Drawing on military doctrine, historical case studies, and whole-of-society defense models, the ROC reframes resistance not a...

In this episode, we examine how China’s distant-water fishing fleet has evolved into a tool of economic and paramilitary statecraft. What appears to be commercial fishing increasingly functions as a grey-zone instrument of power projection, resource extraction, and maritime coercion. Drawing on open-source data, satellite analysis, and documented operational patterns from the South Pacific, West A...

This episode examines how national survival depends not only on military power, but on whether an entire society can continue to function under stress. Using the Total Defense framework, the analysis explores how governments, businesses, and citizens are organized into a single system designed to absorb shocks and remain coherent during disruption. The discussion explains how six interlocking doma...

What happens after a government falls is often more important than how it falls. This episode examines the unstable period that follows a successful uprising, coup, or mass political upheaval. Using the analytical framework of The Day After Overthrow , it explains why some post-transition governments stabilize while others descend into renewed violence, repression, or state collapse. The discussio...

The Arctic is no longer a distant frontier. As melting ice opens new shipping routes and exposes vast energy and mineral resources, the High North has become a critical arena of global competition. This episode examines how great powers now compete in the Arctic through irregular and hybrid methods rather than open conflict. Russia uses electronic interference, covert maritime activity, cyber oper...

This episode examines how resistance movements form, grow, and evolve into political forces over time. Drawing on a structured analytical framework, it explains how informal networks become organized movements, how public support and legitimacy are built, and how some groups transition from hidden activity to visible political or governing roles. Rather than focusing on violence, the discussion ce...

In this episode of The Resistance Hub Podcast , we examine why modern conflict is shaped less by weapons and more by political will. Drawing on a detailed analysis of real world flashpoints between nuclear armed powers, this episode explains how decisions made by governments, not hardware on the battlefield, determine whether force is used, restrained, or avoided altogether. The episode explores h...

Modern resistance movements do not appear fully formed. They develop through recognizable stages shaped by pressure, organization, legitimacy, and state response. This episode examines the States of Resistance framework, a model that explains how opposition movements emerge, grow, confront authority, institutionalize, pause, or collapse. Rather than focusing on individual protests or armed groups,...

This episode examines how civilians living inside active conflict zones protect themselves when war destroys formal healthcare, food systems, and basic infrastructure. Using the Civilian Health Defense framework developed in Myanmar’s long-running insurgencies, the analysis shows how health becomes a form of survival, resilience, and resistance under pressure. The episode explains how armed actors...

This episode examines how modern resistance movements, insurgent groups, and state security forces now operate inside the digital and information environment rather than only on physical battlefields. Drawing on research into cyber operations, social media, surveillance, and networked organization, the analysis explains how power is exercised through data, narratives, online mobilization, and digi...

In this episode, The Knight’s Dilemma , we examine why elite military forces throughout history struggle when the context of warfare changes faster than their institutions. From medieval knights at Agincourt to modern special operations forces operating under global sensor coverage, the pattern is consistent: tactical excellence does not guarantee strategic relevance. The episode explores how shif...

This episode of The Resistance Hub Podcast examines The Science of Resistance , a study from the Assessing Revolutionary and Insurgent Strategies series produced by United States Army Special Operations Command in collaboration with the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. The analysis explains how resistance emerges as a political and social process rather than a sudden turn to vi...

This episode of The Resistance Hub Podcast examines Threshold of Violence , a study from the Assessing Revolutionary and Insurgent Strategies series produced by United States Army Special Operations Command in collaboration with the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. The analysis explores how insurgent and resistance movements calibrate the use of violence in order to maintain po...