a couple of things occurred to me this afternoon in relation to this exchange.
you say that your post about building up an army and mine about battlefields were unrelated. not so. at present there is only one group or organisation which takes part in riots as an armoured and militarised force, and that is of course the police. what happens in a riot situation is that you get people fighting on a field not necessarily of their choosing, taking on a hierarchical force whose tactics effectively date from the era of the roman empire but which are combined with 21st century communications and surveillance equipment. what is surprising in these circumstances is that unarmed people take them on with makeshift weapons. however, as they operate within a hierarchical framework the police cannot deal effectively with fast-moving situations in streets with which they are unfamiliar when they are not expecting it. the tottenham riot's a prime example of this, when the preparation they have for large demonstrations or that they had for subsequent nights' rioting weren't available. their control room, gt, was not in operation at least at the start of the riot. the rioters had seized the element of surprise and were operating, if not on their own turf, then certainly on ground with which they were familiar.
if you cast your mind back to the student protests of the end of last year, you will have seen police tactics remain quite static while the protestors' tactics changed significantly. in the course of a few short weeks they received a crash course in public order policing, drawing lessons from the police operations to the extent that by the final protest they had largely got the measure of what the police were up to and how to circumvent that. of course not everyone involved learnt at the same pace, and there were a lot of people who don't appear to have reached the same conclusions - or in some cases, any conclusions at all. nonetheless as a group the protestors were much more capable of running the police ragged as time went on.
the trajectory which evolved over the course of the student protests and could be seen over the three days of the recent riots will not lead to the development of an army, now or in the future. individuals and groups will learn various things about what works and what doesn't when confronting the police, and in the aftermath of any riot. as so many people have found out, the police is not an army which following the battle, the riot, simply holds an after action review and incorporates lessons learned into their training and preparation for next time. they also use their considerable resources to track down people who have given them a bloody nose, which is an awful lot of people this time round.organisationally, the creation of an army such as you propose involves a great deal of hard work. it also involves a number of illegal actions, for example drilling. but from the outset it involves conspiracy, which is one reason why you might want to reconsider your proposal. anyone who became involved in an army along the lines you suggest would from the venture's outset be leaving themselves open to a lengthy prison sentence possibly for conspiracy to treason or other equally nasty charges.
even so, there is a lot for people interested in the history, theory and practice of rioting to learn from the military, even if they never intend to put such lessons into practice. obviously there are the riot control methods of various armed forces, which mirror those of the police and which contain more extreme riot control methods than the police, at least in the island of great britain, would be allowed to use. see, for example, the us army fm 3-19.15
www.fas.org/irp/doddir/army/fm3-19-15.pdf (5.4MB pdf). however, affinity groups and friendship networks could learn a considerable amount from small unit tactics. but there seems to me to be a fundamental reconsideration of the relationship of rioters to the police needed. the main thing is, are the police the object of the riot. that is, are they the target? while for some people they will be, for other people they have been an obstacle to get over or get around. if an army is to evolve, it will, in my opinion, be an army of small units with no central command, no central communications, no real shared ethos but shared methods of doing things, shared tactics and perhaps shared targets. this will not come about because i notice a similarity between small groups of organised looters or rioters and eg the sas. it will come about because rioting is a social activity and people like to do social activities with their mates. it will come about because working in small units is what people can do with the people they know. your idea of an army won't happen because you seem rather ignorant of what a public order situation's like. mine's more likely as it depends on what people are like, as people mull over what they did and how it can be done better.
oh - and let's not forget my post was prompted by your effort about armies. the two contributions were linked from the outset.
cheek!
Did Kizmet know you are in Leyton?
