Forum Post: OWS must stay Leaderless, otherwise they will know where to attack.

I've been seeing some posts stating that the movement needs a leader or a group of leaders. I respond that we do not need a leader. We must strategically observe the situation at hand.

The opponent: They have access to vast monetary, technological, and media resources. They also have an army of minions in the White House, Congress, Supreme Court, and in both political parties, as well as in the financial houses and institutions. They also command the police forces, and large sectors of the military.

Us: We have a mass of citizenry, the internet, decentralized media and alternative media. We are the many and we outnumber them in sheer human numbers.

For us to engage them via conventional methods is suicide. A head to head type of movement, with a charismatic leader but large numbers of followers, armed with no more than cellphones, smartphones, blogs, youtube, facebook, and twitter, despite the technological wonders, does not confer an advantage to us.

However, it makes far more sense to engage the opponent in guerilla style tactics. Just as they try to infiltrate, befriend, seduce, bribe, and troll us, seeking out "leaders" to co-opt or decapitate, we make sure that our key advantage is in decentralization. They are the sharks swimming in a school of angry pirahna. A vast school.

So far as I can tell, we have both the right and left on the defensive. This is good. We have to keep it coming. If we choose to create a leadership, or a committee, we will lose the guerilla advantage. If we keep the overall demands nebulous enough that they keep questioning, but have an overarching theme that the common citizen sympathizes with (and there are a lot of them out there), we will retain the advantage.

If we crystalize clear leaders and a clear agenda, they will already have co-option, decapitation, and bargaining plans ready to execute. The opposition is unbelievably sophisticated. Do not underestimate them. But in their sophistication is their weakness. They are a set of hierarchies. We are not. We are a horizontal network. Hierarchies are complex systems that can be destroyed with cascaded actions. Horizontal networks, like the internet, can only be slowed down, never taken down.

Keep it decentralized Keep it leaderless Keep it nebulous. And they won't know where to attack. They may lurk amongst us, but they will be lost within us. And we will always retain the advantage.

If you want to read more on how to strategize, The Art of War and Brave New War are excellent places to start.

"Don’t get set into one form, adapt it and build your own, and let it grow, be like water. Empty your mind, be formless, shapeless — like water. Now you put water in a cup, it becomes the cup; You put water into a bottle it becomes the bottle; You put it in a teapot it becomes the teapot. Water can flow or it can crash. Be water, my friend.

– Bruce Lee.