Figure 1.1. Aligning C2 to Group Types. (Source: Author’s own).

There are four basic C2 approaches to consider. The top level is Classic C2. Trusted, disciplined security forces typically use this control approach. This is hierarchical and authoritative; it is responsive to top-down directives. This is the level where legal, lawful, authoritative command conforms most closely to its doctrinal form. The advantage in Classic C2 is that one organizing agency can control and synchronize many parts into one whole. If a group aims to control and synchronize air, ground, cyber, and human elements, then Classic C2, in whole or in part, must be present. This form of C2 is informed by experience and judgement, but also uses a systems approach when coordinating functions such as intelligence, logistics, and maneuver.

The second level, Influence C2, ranges from organizations that simply need guidance and clarity to act to those who have unidentified contributions to make but need a direction, permission, and resources. This type of C2 accounts for the nascent resistance energy that simply needs to be directionally oriented, but not necessarily fully synchronized or controlled. This group might include lone-wolf hackers, combat-skilled veterans, and self-focused groups who have interests aligned with the resistance. In Ukraine in 2022, this category included angry citizens who simply felt compelled to stand their ground and fight for their neighborhood and country (Kossov, 2022).

At level three, Leverage C2 addresses groups with no obligation to resist, but given the right incentives, can and will do so. Level three is the ‘trust but verify’ type resistors; this is often where fence sitters can be found. Some of the Ukrainian militia units that fought Russian separatists and Russian regulars in East Ukraine in 2014 fit into this category. These militias, some privately funded, were not fully accountable to the Ukrainian government, but when provided the right incentives and support, they performed valuable combat roles that served the state well.

The bottom level, Contain C2 addresses groups from capable-but-dubious intent to those whose actions might discredit the resistance movements. This is where we find enthusiasts, looters, foreign fighters, ideologues, profiteers, criminals, or groups that simply operate on a transactional basis (i.e., I help you, you help me). These groups often attract thrill seekers or those more interested in the chaos and violence than political outcomes. These types are a risk to the legitimacy and credibility of the resistance, but they can also provide asymmetric threats to occupying forces. Ukraine’s Azov Battalion, formed in March 2014 following Russia’s annexation of Crimea, is one such example. The Azov Battalion was a privately funded militia. The unit gained notoriety for its neo-Nazi ideology and became equally famous for its successful combat operations against Russian separatist groups. The Ukrainian government both distanced itself from Azov and tacitly supported their much-needed combat power (Mironova, and Sergatskova, 2017). This balancing act explains the ‘contain’ in Contain C2.

These C2 levels can and should be blended. Law enforcement and internal security services operate daily in this blended range. Whereas military forces thrive in the Classic C2 spectrum, law enforcement – and the criminals who they seek to catch – often possess better tools, skills, and methods allowing them to work within these four C2 approaches.

Illustrating a full spectrum command and control scheme, based on these principles, is beyond the scope of this article. Rather, I will offer two examples where we can observe the logic of this triangle model in play, in whole or in parts. These vignettes help us visualize the environment, the organization, and the command scheme and how they worked, or did not.

In 1969, a new faction of the Irish Republican Army (IRA) formed, called the ‘Provisional Irish Republican Army’ or PIRA. This splinter group aimed to bring new ideas, energy, and actions to the relatively dormant Irish independence movement. The PIRA conducted a thirty-year campaign (1969 – 1998) to expel the British from Northern Ireland and to unite all counties and peoples of Ireland under the single government of the Republic of Ireland. They achieved neither goal, though their campaign did achieve concessions and revisions that addressed many of the key grievances that drove the PIRA to violence (McKittrick and McVea, 2012, p. 290). The lessons of the PIRA are instructive because they provide us with an example of thirty years of resistance command and control observations. We can balance these lessons with well-documented observations from the counter-resistance, the United Kingdom military and constabulary forces.

The PIRA campaign reveals an evolution of strategies, organizational structures, and command arrangements during its protracted campaign (Dingley, 2012, p. 105). This was a resistance under pressure; most of the command adaptations occurred because of the persistent and skilled pressure of their opponent. Three observations instruct nations interested in developing resistance command structures that are nested inside larger, total defense strategies and schemes.

The first lesson is that the PIRA command and control scheme that appeared to be hierarchical and classic military-style, did not actually function as its ‘line-and-block’ chart would suggest (Field, 2017, p. 11-23). The organizational scheme did not, and could not, actuate a classic top-to-bottom command and control system. The desire for a clear hierarchical scheme was valid and well-intended. The 1920s IRA formed a military organization that would, in time, become the legitimate armed security force of the independent Irish state. Thus, the IRA adopted a classic brigade, battalion, company system of organizing and fighting. (ARIS, 2013, p. 49). However, the IRA was declared an illegal army, and their military activities were considered crimes. When the PIRA split from the IRA in 1969, they adopted new tactics, but they maintained, in general terms, the IRA’s hierarchical command structure (ARIS, 50, and Dingley, 2012, p. 158). This early PIRA organizational structure (1969-1976) better befitted a fielded army than a clandestine urban-warfare unit. Their military-style organizational structure made their units easier to detect, infiltrate, and dismantle (Dingley, 2012, p. 163, and (McKittrick and McVea, p. 151). This mismatch of organizational structure and operational environment took nearly eight years to rectify. It was not until 1977 that the PIRA adopted a more cellular, underground structure befitting the urban nature of the conflict (Dingley, p. 157).

The second lesson is that hierarchies deliver more sustained violence, over time, than distributed networks (Heger, et. al, 2008). The arc of PIRA field actions conforms to this research finding. The peak of PIRA-inflicted violence was 1972; the fourth year of a thirty-year campaign. In short, the more the PIRA became distributed, the less they were able to sustain violence against the perceived occupying forces. In the modern era, we see the power and reach of distributed, flat networks that lack a central headquarters. This is the central argument of The Spider and the Starfish (Brafman and Beckstrom, 2006). There is great value and utility in decentralized organizations. Yet, when it comes to operationalizing field activities that require the synchronization of materials, skills, operators, safe havens, and reconnaissance, having a hierarchy bolsters its advantages. After UK forces disrupted or dismantled PIRA command and control nodes, PIRA operations became more localized, more random, and less frequent.

The third lesson is that distributed command and control is a breeding ground for poor or misguided tactical actions. Whether distributed C2 is desired by design or required due to external pressures, it risks lower echelons conducting violent actions that work counter to the strategy. One former PIRA operative, Eamon Collins, recounted in his 1997 memoir:

I was seriously alarmed by my cousin Mickey’s degeneration. He seemed to have lost any sense of the wider perspective, and was just obsessively absorbed by the details of the next killing. He hadn’t the slightest interest in a long-term strategy for victory. He was hardly alone in this regard – and that was the problem: no one seemed to be coming up with any clear analyses of where the movement was going and what the next step should be … revolutionary violence now detached from any political strategy (Collins, 1997, p. 177).

Here, the PIRA experienced a common effect of becoming too decentralized. There are a great number of decentralized resistances or fighting groups whose leadership became too detached from certain operational cells and lost any true command or quality control influence. This list includes the Chechens (1990s-2000s), Al Qaeda (2000s), and Boko Haram (2010s). This trend also includes professionalized, accountable security forces: police, military, special operations, and internal security services.

When overlaying the PIRA command and control onto the triangle chart, we can see that the PIRA did move more fluidly between these types of C2 methods. This is to be expected when a resistance is structured around existing social networks that cut across society, geography, industry, and demographics. The members of homegrown resistances might lack an appreciation for following orders (Classic C2) but instead may possess hard skills in negotiating, leveraging, or coercion. Instructive here is to ascertain the essence and tendencies of certain resistance groups (criminals to clergy) and to map a method of C2 that best accounts for their optimal use. The method also must anticipate and account for their negative tendencies. In command parlance, this might be called the trust-but-verify approach.

The PIRA example offers us both good and bad lessons. The PIRA were efficient in that they maintained a hierarchical system with some form of centralized control over their distributed networks. The PIRA did maintain constant pressure on the British government and security forces even when under tremendous stress, alternating between politics and violence. The PIRA C2 design, from strategic guidance to tactical actions, started to break down under over time as the United Kingdom dismantled networks and cells (McGovern, 2019; Bennett, 2009). The lesson is that resistance cells, teams, and individuals who lack adequate control and supervision, can be isolated and destroyed or can drift into a war of their own making, detached from the larger strategic purpose. The outcome of this – violence detached from strategy– works counter to the legitimacy of the resistance.

For any nation seeking to employ national resistance as part of its total defense strategy, the PIRA lessons provide a useful example of how hierarchies might be pressured under occupation. The triangle chart aims to show methods that match well with the type of resistance groups seeking to operate under the watchful eye of an occupier.

As a special forces company commander in Iraq in 2003-2004, my unit witnessed the emerging Iraqi insurgency develop before our eyes. Insurgent actions were widely distributed, and their operating networks largely evaded our detection methods. Their initial targets were local actors and power brokers; this indicated a competitive push to assert their authority in power flows that were invisible to our eyes. Some emerging cells were amateurish or sloppy; we could map and target these with relative success. Increasingly, however, insurgent actions such as roadside bombs, targeted killings, and extortion were cost-imposing enough to isolate us from still-neutral populations. We did not know it at the moment, but we were losing.

The sophistication of the insurgent cells increased in proportion to the amount of the time that they observed our coalition forces operating techniques. To combat these network flows and nodes, we needed the logic and tools at the bottom of the triangle: money, permissions, actionable trigger-points, cultural queues, easy-to-field equipment, the means to attract local influencers. Instead, we were armed with classic C2 methods and tools and with operating practices that conformed to force-on-force warfare. We were also under skilled in understanding cultural, religious, and environmental peculiarities. In line with our tradition as US Army Special Forces, we offset this by partnering with local actors, both official and unofficial. Like all coalition units at that time, we adapted. We innovated or put together the tools that worked best in the influence, leverage, and contain methods. Did we learn, adapt, and apply fast enough? The evidence suggests that we did not, at least not on a scale that mattered (Rayburn and Sobchak 2019).

Typically, in these ambiguous environments, ground units in contact with the enemy understand and adapt first, followed by their higher headquarters. We conformed to this model exactly. I was commanding six, twelve-man special forces operational detachments – alphas, or ‘A-Teams’. In this ecosystem, the A-teams, the lowest unit of action, adapted quickly. Tactical approaches were not dictated from the top down; they were coming from the bottom up. The A-teams were in a battle of wits, tactics, and counter-tactics, with lethal consequences. These adaptations came so fast that neither my company headquarters, nor my battalion headquarters could deliver the right tools fast enough. Even when we, the higher headquarters, understood and agreed with our A-teams, we could not adapt ourselves quickly enough to deliver the required tools to leverage, influence, and contain in this specific environment.

In this situation, two phenomena occurred. First, the ground units (A-teams in this example) simply muddled through and used the tools that were provided and available to them. Second, the ground units improvised using innovation, ingenuity, and at times, illegal means. As an example, this might mean using money allocated for food to purchase tactical equipment for local fighters. One might witness tactical innovations such as providing weapons and training to the team interpreters, all local nationals. These might seem standard tactics now, but in 2004, these were sticky issues that took precious time and energy to resolve. To meet the demand of the mission and the environment – and not be scrutinized or punished – my company headquarters often did not report these activities. This was risky because such behavior begins to build corridors of mistrust between higher and lower command levels. Such mistrust can bleed into a command’s confidence in their field operators, even when those operators are performing exceptionally well in volatile environments.

As a ground commander, I had no mental framework to help me understand this mismatch of our capabilities, systems, and tools, and the environment in which we operated. In retrospect, I could have benefitted from something akin to the above C2 triangle model to understand and explain this tension. Had I been better able to frame this tension, I believe that we – as a top-to-bottom C2 system – would have innovated faster and adapted more rapidly. On reflection, I had very good commanders. They were adaptive, they were not risk averse, and they were open to new approaches. However, they, like me, were constantly reconciling the requirements of the environment against our preconceived mental models for C2. My higher commanders were being asked to underwrite a high volume of unconventional ideas, not all of which they could observe, understand, or process. When this occurs, decision-making systems get sluggish and unresponsive, giving the advantage to the resistance.

This vignette illustrates how we had a mismatch of C2 methods to environmental demands. If resistances can operate in this seam, they can gain and maintain first-mover advantage. We can see reflections of this vignette in the Ukraine-Russia war. The early evidence suggests that the Russian invasion plan executed in late February 2022 did not make proper planning assumptions about the behaviors of Ukrainian regular or citizen-resistance forces (Barnes, et. al, 2022). Thus, Russian tactics, in the first weeks and months of the war, largely failed to achieve their tactical objectives: to decisively seize Kharkiv, Kyiv, and certain Black Sea cities and ports (Institute for the Study of War, 2022). Time, mass, and a brutal campaign of annihilation may well reverse this trend. For the moment, credit is due to the Ukrainian defense and resistance forces that have presented such dilemmas to the Russian field generals. Russian decision-making has become difficult, and the slow tempo of the invasion is evidence of this effect (Cooper, Schmitt, 2022).

When a state calls upon all its able citizenry to defend the nation, how it organizes and controls or influences this resistance energy is critical. Within a whole-of-society resistance, there will be capable groups who are revolutionaries, extremists, anarchists, or profiteers. These can be useful if understood, contained, and controlled. Conversely, there will be resistance energy that is righteous and selfless; these resistors simply need a proper organizational structure to operate within. Both the dark and the light side of national resistance can be productive if pre-planned command and control systems and mechanisms account for these realities.

In preconceiving and prebuilding a national resistance scheme, command and control approaches need to account for all levels of this triangle. By categorizing the complexities of C2 into the triangle framework, a resistor can better visualize himself or herself inside their resistance organization, within their environment, and against their enemy.

If, as we witnessed in Ukraine, a nation’s population does rise up against an invading force, a state that seeks to maintain its governing primacy must be ready to operate across this C2 spectrum. It must do so with speed and clarity. A state must be ready to use a variety of sticks and carrots to exert control and influence on a mass scale. Doing so will help ensure that resistors follow a coherent strategy and maintain governing legitimacy. Performing this efficiently involves the use of incentives that sustain the productive resistance groups and coercive measures that redirect the counterproductive resistance actors.

Ukraine was dealt a mighty blow by a massive invading force. As of this writing, their initial state-sponsored and citizen-initiated resistance mechanisms have proven to be effective. The Ukrainians stymied a swift Russian victory, and the conflict is trending toward a long, grinding war of attrition. Ukraine has maintained an admirable national unity, both spiritually and organizationally. In the coming long war, there lurks potential problems for Ukraine: rule of law breakdown, rogue insurgent groups, extrajudicial killings, and the decaying effects of exhaustion. All these risks are manageable and are worth taking to expel the invaders and restore sovereignty.

Sound command and control schemes cannot deter all threats to the resistance, but sound C2 can assure that resistances remain survivable, viable, and oriented to repelling foreign invaders. If these objectives are met, success probabilities for favorable post-war outcomes increase.

The Russian invasion in Ukraine gives immediacy to this topic. For nations crafting or slow-building national resistance schemes, the time is now to conceptualize, craft, and rehearse resistance command and control.