Venezuelan far-right politician MarĂa Corina Machado. Photo: EFE.
By MisiĂłn Verdad – Oct 1, 2024
The coordinator of the Vente Venezuela Movement, MarĂa Corina Machado, asked her followers to start using a “new” strategy of destabilization to stimulate social confrontation and thus try to relaunch the operation of regime change in Venezuela. This in the context of waning street demonstrations aimed at maintaining, on the political and media agenda, the narrative of not recognizing the results of the July 28 presidential election.
In Machado’s call, the expectation that there would be arrests allowed us to deduce, at first glance, that it could include violent acts within the “swarming” tactic.
This method was widely disseminated as “novel” on social networks and opposition media outlets. On her X account, Machado said: “This Saturday, September 28, two months after our resounding victory, the Comanditos are activating swarms throughout Venezuela.”
When the “protest” day arrived, the mobilization was meager, although it was reported with the usual enthusiasm by the network of news companies aligned with the coup agenda in Venezuela.
Swarming, a not so new tactic, but with new resources
Machado’s initiative is an adaptation aimed at “civil society.” In a chapter of the book “Unmasking the 21st Century: Between Networks and the State” (2022), focusing to the swarm, King’s College London academics Nicholas Michelsen and Neville Bolt address foquismo as a tactic of chaos and confrontation designed to overthrow governments, supported by the configuration of shock networks and the activation of armed groups.
Swarming, by definition, is an asymmetric warfare tactic that a Rand Corporation study defined in 2000 as “a strategic, coordinated, and seemingly amorphous, yet deliberately structured, way of conducting military attacks from all directions.”
The ultimate goal, according to the authors of the study, Juan Arquilla and David Ronfeldt, is to maximize target saturation and thus overwhelm or outflank its defenses. At the time, they argued that it could emerge “as a definitive doctrine that will encompass and animate both cyberwar and network warfare.”
The central idea of ​​attacking an adversary from all directions simultaneously, with various forms of force, is one of four types of military doctrine that have long existed.
The other types of doctrine are chaotic melee, brute force concentration, and agile maneuvers. Unlike the other doctrines, swarming relies entirely on rapid and robust communications.
Although large armies such as the United States experienced defeats to such approaches in wars such as Vietnam and its incursion into Somalia, they have studied swarming in depth over the past 30 years. They have determined that it is a logical extension of network-centric warfare — mostly tactical, sometimes operational, but rarely strategic.
This is how it is described in another document published by RAND in 2000, entitled “Swarming on the Battlefield: Past, Present, and Future.” Its author, Sean JA Edwards, concludes that its implementation is not new; even in nature, it is deployed by different organisms within the framework of complex adaptive systems.
Street actions rely on text messaging on cell phones and instant file sharing over the Internet, which allows groups of people to receive instructions and move in unison, almost instantly, without planning or forethought. These technologies allow for the manufacturing of confrontation and confusion without a central leader.
A precedent was the protesters at the World Trade Organization meetings in Seattle in 1999, who were able to orchestrate their movement effectively through swarming tactics, although they quickly lost effectiveness.
Edwards discusses in depth the technique surrounding this tactic and its possible future use, covering historical case studies from the Scythian wars against the Macedonians to the battles in Mogadishu (Somalia) depicted in the film Black Hawk Down (2001) with the usual Hollywood propaganda approach.
In addition, it analyzes in detail the tactical, logistical, command and organizational aspects, reaching the technological aspects involved in swarming, including its limitations and key aspects in counterinsurgency scenarios.
The text confirms the validity of the swarming tactic, provided there is greater knowledge of the situation, long distance support operations and the ability to evade or conceal. It also raises the need to resolve technological aspects, to which instant messaging could be the current answer.
In an extension of his research, published in 2005 , Edwards identifies the five most important variables for a successful swarm:
• Superior situational awareness.
• Elusiveness.
• Clashing capacity.
• Siege.
• Simultaneity.
Furthermore, he treats the five variables as binary (either absent or present), deriving 32 possible combinations of them, and composes a “model” that predicts that only six combinations lead to swarm success.
In short, the tactic is not genuinely US, but the escalation of its study and implementation based on the interests of its operations is.
Variations on the same strategies of military fluidity
The documentary Enjambre,  by David Segarra, analyses the new rules of fourth generation warfare through interviews and testimonies from different local actors. It exposes how low-intensity military operations and psychological operations are developed and combined, mainly through the media and NGOs.
Swarming has been part of a broad theoretical military debate framed in the so-called Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA) that emerged in the Soviet Union and the United States between the 1970s and 1980s.
In more recent times, the debate has fluctuated between the “revolutionary adaptations” that military organizations must make to face technological changes and the specific political-economic context of globalization and the end of the Cold War.
The latter involves notions such as Edwards’s, which are based on the decline of the nation-state, the nature of the emerging international order, and the different types of forces that will be needed in the near future.
In this sense, in the midst of the crisis of the capitalist civilizing system, taking control of Venezuela and its energy and mineral resources constitutes a strategic key for the United States, and every war tactic has been valid in terms of achieving that objective.
Machado announced that “the swarm is a mobile, agile, super dynamic organization, without beginning or end, fluid and adaptable, that appears and disappears, that acts in a decentralized way and is coordinated through social media platforms … Our citizen protest evolves so that it has the least risk for people and the maximum impact on our objective.”
This not-so-new attempt seeks to accelerate the conditions for the dismantling of the state, via “humanitarian” intervention, so Machado’s language only attempts to appear novel or to appear to be variations on the same theme.
Attempts at media saturation and projection: Repeating the failure?
The implementation of swarming in Venezuela, apparently, aspires to be an advanced phase of the so-called “guarimbas,” more localized and less massive.
In 2015, violent groups with military experience sought to create hotbeds of violence in the queues caused by the business boycott and the shortages, pivoted through media projection, responsible for constructing a generalized image of conflict.
This is a tactic that is leaving behind the “civic” logic of street demonstrations and entering the realm of armed confrontation, where confusion and the narrative of human rights serve as a limiting factor for the authorities when confronting possible violent actions implemented by supposedly peaceful protesters.
On that occasion, in the context of destabilization in 2014, the attempt to use swarming tactics ended in failure, as usual. The operation was revealed through phone conversations between Lieutenant Colonel (R) JosĂ© de JesĂşs Gámez Bustamante and former Vice Admiral Iván CarratĂş Molina and another with the “student” Franklin Hernández.
Gámez, a graduate of the School of the Americas, had been detained since July 2012, involved in a plot to assassinate then-President Hugo Chávez, and was under house arrest. He was imprisoned again because “he was behind the planning of looting,” according to a statement by President Maduro in January 2015.
In the phone conversation, the former military man suggested that the students would “blend in among the queues so as not to appear as students” and not to raise suspicions. He added that “this will mean that the National Guard will no longer repress small groups of students that they say are led by the oligarchic opposition, but will instead beat up the people themselves, the people who are in line. That is one of the strategies we have.”
More phrases that evidenced the planned media saturation operation:
• “It’s the best thing. A student in prison is not the same as an old lady being shot with a buckshot. We have to do this without any qualms, without that nonsense.”
• “Talking about peace is to show the world that we are peaceful, but we have to face whatever comes.”
“Now they will say that he is a political prisoner, but they were planning to destroy Mercal, Pdval and Bicentenarios,” said President Maduro, referring to the plan to attack food distribution centers.
Venezuela’s Attorney General: MarĂa Corina Machado May Be Charged at Any Time
These centers were vital to combat the destabilization that, between 2011 and 2019, focused on creating conditions of food insecurity in the country.
This revealed a greater degree of sophistication in destabilizing tactics, as well as the – no longer so new – mechanisms of postmodern warfare that have been used against Venezuela.
The fact that Machado includes a military term such as the swarm in her tactical approach denotes the consolidation of a strategy based on the use of force that began with the armed actions of July 29.
A criminal component would not be surprising in this strategy, given the participation of organized crime gangs during the post-election escalation of violence.
Translation: Orinoco Tribune
OT/JRE/DZ
