At 05:28 AM 1/6/98 -0500, Ryan Lackey wrote:

I am fairly certain that as an irregular army soldier I could inflict a substantial amount of damage upon an occupying military. With maybe $20k in equipment and several hundred hours of training, you could make life very difficult for any luckless squad that happens your way. Multiply that by 100 million armed citizens and you see that armed civilian resistance *can* defeat an occupying army.

A distributed decentralized terrorist group can trash almost any country's infrastructure as well. The gov't knows this, but if it were to start happening (or their intelligence indicated it might) guards would be sent to the power stations, transformers, water works, radio relays, NAPs, refineries, etc. These guards would be physical, guarding physical resources against physical threats. They would be able to resist smaller threats. As you say, if outnumbered, they're eventually hosed. The recent gov't interest in 'cyber' threats against infrastructure reflects the fact that the government doesn't dominate the digital domain, and can't protect it with troops, and needs it to run civilization and its armies. ------------------------------------------------------------ David Honig Orbit Technology honig@otc.net Intaanetto Jigyoubu "How do you know you are not being deceived?" ---A Compendium of Analytic TradeCraft Notes, Directorate of Intelligence, CIA