What is "Political Warfare"

Here, we undertake a use of analogy to teach a lesson on the "what" of political warfare.

You'll come to understand that we're deadly serious, and so should you be.

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“A political warfare analogy:

It isn’t immediately obvious to most what, exactly, “political warfare” is.

That isn’t helped by the fact that any two “experts” in the field are likely to give extremely divergent definitions.

So, allow us to bring you a lesson on the “what” of political warfare using a baseball analogy.

Let’s say that you’re a shortstop and a decent batter – say, a .350 record at the plate. This works well for the analogy because, as the shortstop, there’s action happening both in front of and behind you.

Let’s say you’re on team Cardinals, and the opposition is the Blue Jays. This also fits the analogy well, since you’re in a red jersey and the opposition is in a blue jersey.

At the very first at-bat, the opposition bluejay wearing number 33 accumulates 2 balls and 2 strikes, and on the 5^th pitch hits a popup fly. You begin estimating the location the ball will fall, and, moving in quickly, you call out “got it!” to make sure the second baseman and pitcher don’t collide with you as you make the play. You catch it in the soft web of your glove and give a little underhand toss back to the pitcher just feet in front of you as the home-team audience claps for the umpires shout of “out!”

You feel good, having set the tone of the game with an easy catch. “Easy day,” you think. The rest of the first inning progresses rather uneventfully, as the Bluejays manage to get to first with a walk, but leave the man stranded with the third out on strikes. You don’t come up to bat in the 1^st inning, having been 6^th in the lineup and ending the inning with one on first and one on third.

Coming up to bat in the second you’re the first up, and the Bluejays drove in 2 runs during their at-bat. The first pitch goes by, a curveball just outside the zone, which causes all-the-more irritation when the ump yells “strike!” The second pitch, a fastball, connects sweetly with your bat just as you extend on the upswing, and send the ball sailing into the outfield, and, just barely, it has the legs to make it over the fence at center field. Homerun! You take your time rounding the bases to the celebration of the crowd.

After your homer the pitcher seems to get serious, and the next two batters go out on strikes in only 8 pitches.

This is how the game goes. You trade some runs back and forth. Your personal performance of the day is pretty darned good – better than your average day. However, the top of the ninth comes to an end with the game tied: 10 to 10. It’s going to extra innings.

You’re coming to bat up fifth at the top of the 10^th inning, down one point, with a man on first and second, and two outs. Then, the main lights to the stadium go dark. Moments later the backup lighting switches on.

You can barely see the field, but the stands are slightly better lit. The alarm is sounding, but you see that only about half of the audience is getting up and moving to evacuate. You walk over to your dugout, calmly, and you find that about a third of your team and your entire coaching staff is gone already. None of your teammates seem to know where they went – they just disappeared in the darkness.

You walk back out onto the field and notice that, while about a third of the audience is gone after evacuating, and a bit more still filing out the exits, at least half of the audience is still seated and not moving. Walking toward one of the motionless sections in the stands nearest by you begin to get a sinking feeling. As you approach not a single person moves – they’re all just sitting there, frozen. Now within about 20 feet of the fans you realize that the entire section of the stadium is full of mannequins – nobody here is real.

You rush back to your dugout only to find that the remaining team members are being ushered out by soldiers with guns trained on them. They spot you, and yell at you to get in a single file line with the rest of your team. You comply, and the lot of you are led through the private entrance and out of the stadium where you observe checkpoints have been established outside by more armed soldiers. They lead you around the back to an alley where they demand you kneel against a wall.

It's only now that you remember: “I’m not even a baseball player.”

In political warfare a primary objective is to make you believe that you’re playing a game, as part of a team, complete with an audience cheering you, an opponent, rules of the game, and more that do not actually exist. They will keep up this fiction for as long as necessary – extra innings, even – to maneuver into position to defeat you.

This all worked out for the enemy because you allowed the operators to convince you that you were playing baseball and not, in fact, in an actual war. You saw the blurry, full seats from a distance, and you took for granted that the cheering was coming from them – not piped in artificially. You didn’t consider yourself an expert, so you placed yourself under the authority of the coach to teach you how to play and to call the shots – and you never questioned those strange decisions that kept the game tied and heading to overtime. The other team showed up in their blue jerseys to play by the same rules you did, so you believed that the rules were fundamental somehow, and that the other team would, necessarily, be bound by these rules.

You never questioned whether the entire game was a creative fiction designed to keep you out of the real fight.”