Role of Sanctuary in an Insurgency

Insurgency is a time-honored form of warfare that allows a weaker opponent to subvert the power of a stronger foe. At the turn of the nineteenth century, Spanish guerrillas waged an effective insurgency against the premier army of the period-Napoleon's Grand Armee. In the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth century, numerous European colonies around the globe used insurgent strategies to secure their independence. In each case, sanctuary served as a critical ingredient for the insurgent successes and the importance of all forms of sanctuary was acknowledged by insurgents and counterinsurgents alike. The significance of insurgent sanctuary is that it allows the insurgent to preserve and protect limited resources and provides protected access to additional resources. Traditionally, insurgencies relied upon the physical and social sanctuaries provided by geography and social conditions. Advances in technology and globalization provide insurgents with additional forms of refuge unavailable during the eighteenth century--virtual and legal. Individually these modern modes of sanctuary consist of a complex array of nodes and links. Collectively, they form a system of great structural and interactive complexity. The resulting complex, adaptive system forces planners to change the way they analyze and address insurgent sanctuary. Specifically, defeating, mitigating or containing sanctuary requires a holistic, qualitative, and systemic operational approach. SOD/CACD uses systemic framing to gain an appreciation of the entire insurgent system of sanctuary and to understand the behavior of the nodes and links across the entire spectrum of physical, social, virtual, and legal modes. This systemic appreciation facilitates analysis of which nodes and links provide the insurgency with refuge and access to resources. This informed analysis allows operational planners to design a comprehensive campaign to achieve desired effects on these nodes and links. Defeating, mitigating, or