Police and campus officials at colleges across the country are struggling to respond to protests, some of which have resulted in police forcefully removing protesters from encampments or occupied campus buildings.
New York City Mayor Eric Adams, among others, characterized the protests as being influenced by “outside agitators,” while others have countered that the movement is led by students.
Aden Magee, a homeland security consultant and retired military intelligence officer, believes that the unrest is following a pattern identified by the U.S. government decades ago in dealing with (or inciting) insurgencies in foreign countries.
Magee, writing in the online publication Homeland Security Today, pointed to the 1966 U.S. Department of Defense manual “Human Factors Considerations of Undergrounds in Insurgencies,” which studied underground organizations during World War II and in the Cold War decades that followed.
The manual states that protest crowds can be manipulated toward violence or extreme action by “agitators” who use repeated themes and slogans centering on a “martyr” and the make demands on officials that “are usually vague and impossible to meet.” Overreaction by police and security forces play into the hands of such agitators, the manual concludes, by furthering the “emotional excitement” of the crowd while the agitators act as “cheerleaders.”
“The current unrest is developing according to the textbook components for radical exploitation,” Magee wrote. “From the precipitating event that was exploited to enrage the masses by providing an innocent martyr as a symbol of injustice (the Palestinian people), to the mostly peaceful protestors who will increasingly provide crowds that are vulnerable to subversive manipulation, the pieces will continue to fall neatly into place.”
Magee urged those making security decisions to understand there is an element to the protests that is not “ad hoc and chaotic.”
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