The best cops know how criminals think, how criminals act, and where criminals go. They have the ability to continuously predict a criminal’s future actions. I am convinced that the best police officers must have been criminals in a past life. A person with a great deal of experience doing a task is more likely to identify someone else doing the same task than a person without that experience. Recognition Primed Decision Making (RPD) is based in this concept, that a person’s ability to recognize patterns of behavior is dependent on the size of their “database” of experiences that is stored in their brain.
Because RPD and accurate intuitive decision making is the goal of police officers seeking to become effective in their field, the question of how can a new officer gain these experiences in the shortest amount of time? This is the same issue that members of the military face when it comes to identifying insurgents hiding amongst the local populace. Of course, it isn’t practical for Marines to actually become insurgents to gain the experience needed to recognize their behavior, but there are experiences that can be gained to further understand how insurgents operate.
If you were to look at an insurgency the way Yousef Badou talks about “exploding” the problem in his article “Demystifying The IED,” you would see that the strength of an insurgency often lies in their ability to create awareness for their cause and spread misinformation about the actions that you are taking. This is one set of experiences and skills that you can gain to help you realize when other people are spreading information against you.
One way you can gain this experience is to build a website. Find a cause or topic that interests you and educate people on the cause to build a following. In essence, become an insurgent and find how they spread their message throughout an entire village. I use a website as an example because that is the quickest way to build an audience. Insurgents thrive on persuasive communication. They gain the support of the local population by out-communicating and out-educating the counter-insurgent. The principles of communication, though, remain the same regardless of the fact if you do it online or in person.
I’m writing about this because since starting a company, learning how to market myself, market the company and systematically growing the readership on this site, I have learned more about the way insurgents tactically operate than I ever did as a Marine. I studied historical insurgencies, looked at counter-insurgencies that succeeded and failed, constantly developing my understanding of this style of warfare from a strategic and theoretical level, but never truly understood how they operated on the ground. When it comes to identifying an insurgent based on their actions, without having this hands-on experience, we were never as effective as we could have been. But that doesn’t mean you have to wait until you are out to learn how to do this and it doesn’t look like small-wars and insurgencies are going anywhere anytime soon.
So that is the challenge for you, do you have the ability to think like an insurgent and gain an online following around a cause? And don’t just choose a charitable cause that already exists and already has an active following, as it might end up being too easy. What will make you a better “insurgent” is first creating a readership of people who passively come to your site to see your content and then transition them from passive readers into active supporters of your cause. Make them buy into your message first, and then turn them into a mobile spokesperson for your site/cause.
This is a grass roots level movement, and is also the way that Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) and the Taliban in Afghanistan have undermined our efforts. They out-communicate us. By building a following, you will go through the same learning process that insurgent leaders go through and will increase your chances of finding them hiding in the villages you patrol. This will build the database of experiences stored in your brain allowing you to recognize it more quickly when you see it. Patterns are the foundation of predictive profiling and what allow us accurately anticipate what a person’s future intentions are.
It was advice I first learned from Colonel B.P. McCoy in his book The Passion Of Command, where he talked about how he used adventure races to develop his ability to make decisions when on the brink of physical exhaustion. He used it as a challenge to broaden his horizons and overcome obstacles he wouldn’t normally encounter as a Marine. He contributes these experiences to his ability to continually adapt when facing a changing enemy during the early days in Operation Iraqi Freedom.
If you are going to accept the challenge, keep us updated on the progress of your experience.