Resistance Manual is the ARIS project’s attempt to turn a shelf of research volumes into something a soldier can be taught from. It is marked DRAFT on its cover and on every page, and that is worth saying plainly, because the repository listing does not. It takes the five variables of the ARIS conceptual typology, actors, causes, environment, organisation and actions, and works through each one with discussion questions and a running fictional scenario. This page records what the document is, what it contains, where it came from, and links the full text hosted by The Resistance Hub.
| Full title | Resistance Manual: Assessing Revolutionary and Insurgent Strategies. The cover adds the subtitle “U.S. Army Special Operations Command Reference Manual”. |
| Series | Assessing Revolutionary and Insurgent Strategies (ARIS) |
| Publishing body | The United States Army Special Operations Command, Fort Bragg, North Carolina, with the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, National Security Analysis Department |
| Edition | Draft, First Edition. The word DRAFT appears on the cover, on the title page and in the running header of every page. |
| Date | October 2019, printed in the running footer throughout. The copyright page states 2019. |
| Named staff | Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory contributing authors: Meg Keiley-Listermann, W. Sam Lauber and Christine Martin. The acknowledgments name Melissa Ellison, Grant Sutton, David Nobles, Bruce Milligan and MIDN Justin Rojas. |
| ISBN | None assigned. The copyright page prints unfilled placeholders, “ISBN (print): ###” and “ISBN (electronic): ###”. |
| Pages | 149 pages in the hosted PDF |
| Language | English |
| Suggested citation | Printed on the copyright page: “Lauber, W. Sam, et al. Resistance Manual. Draft. Fort Bragg, NC: US Army Special Operations Command, 2019.” |
| Rights | Printed on the copyright page, verbatim: “Resistance Manual is a work of the United States Government in accordance with Title 17, United States Code, sections 101 and 105.” The same page adds “Copyright © 2019 by the US Army Special Operations Command” and, separately, “Reproduction in whole or in part is permitted for any purpose of the United States government.” |
What this document is
The manual states its audience in the first sentence: the ARSOF soldier, whether attending a first course at the John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School or already deployed. Its premise is that such a soldier must be a student-practitioner of the craft of supporting or countering a resistance movement, and that the ARIS research base is only useful if it can be taught. Every section therefore ends in application-based discussion questions, and the content is mapped to the specific ARIS publications and to the doctrinal paragraphs of ATP 3-05.1 and TC 18-01 that it corresponds to.
The structure follows the ARIS conceptual typology rather than a narrative. After an introduction that sets out the five states of resistance, the manual takes its five variables in turn. Actors covers leadership, membership and the components of a movement. Causes covers grievance, ideology, legitimacy and the economic rationale. Environment covers terrain, urbanisation and the characteristics of the state. Organisation covers structure and internal dynamics. Actions covers what a movement actually does, violent and nonviolent.
The teaching device is a running scenario, and it is used well. A fictional state, Estatu, has a resistance movement, Sarca, and a leader, Bolanieves. The US president has approved unconventional warfare in Estatu because Sarca’s goals align with American ones, USASOC has been tasked with planning and execution, and an Operational Detachment Alpha has been told to support Bolanieves. The manual returns to that situation at intervals, each time asking the reader to apply the section just read. When the text explains transactional and transformational leadership, the exercise is whether the ODA should advise Bolanieves to adopt one, and the manual immediately complicates the question by asking whether the underlying research, conducted on Americans, transfers to Estatu at all.
The intellectual honesty is the reason to read it rather than a doctrine publication. The section on economic causes lays out relative deprivation as a theory of why people rebel, then cites the research finding that supporters and members of terrorist groups are often better educated and more economically advantaged rather than poor, and concludes that the economic factors are diverse and complicated. The section on urban resistance sets out the advantages of the city and then the ways ethnic diversity, election violence and organised crime can fracture a movement inside it. These are not the passages you would write if the goal were a confident answer.
The appendix reproduces a numbered catalogue of methods of nonviolent action, opening with formal statements, public speeches, letters of opposition or support, declarations by organisations and institutions, and mass petitions. Its presence in a manual on supporting resistance is a compact statement of the project’s position, which is that resistance is a spectrum of behaviour and violence is one region of it.
Contents
Seven sections and an appendix. Titles below are the document’s own table of contents.
| Chapter | What it covers |
|---|---|
| Introduction and Background | The purpose and goals of the manual, the ARIS project, the conceptual typology, and the states of resistance drawn from the earlier ARIS phasing study. Introduces the Estatu scenario. |
| Actors | Who takes part and in what role. Leadership, including transactional and transformational styles and the task, relationship and change behaviours identified in organisational research. The components of a movement and the relationship between overt and covert elements. |
| Causes | Why movements form. Grievance and narrative, the contest over government legitimacy, and the economic rationale, including relative deprivation and the evidence that complicates it. |
| Environment | Where movements operate. Physical and human terrain, urbanisation and the specific advantages and fractures of urban resistance, and the characteristics of the state, from weak and unable to control territory to strong and competent. |
| Organization | How movements are structured. Hierarchical against networked relationships, formal against informal, and the resulting four types: formal-centralised, informal-centralised, formal-networked and informal-networked. Sources of division and commonality within a movement. |
| Actions | What movements do. Nonviolent action, nonlethal violent tactics including riots, extortion, kidnapping and sexual violence, and lethal violent tactics from small-arms combat and improvised explosives to targeted killing and terrorism. Escalation, moral disengagement and a staged model of escalating hostility. |
| Conclusion | What the manual has established and what the soldier should do with it. |
| Appendix: Methods of Nonviolent Action | A numbered catalogue of nonviolent methods, beginning with formal statements, public speeches, letters of opposition or support, declarations by organisations and institutions, and group or mass petitions. |
Provenance and lineage
This is a synthesis, not new research, and it says so. It draws on the case studies and topical studies across the ARIS body of work and on the wider academic literature on resistance, and it explicitly leverages the 2018 ARIS study Conceptual Typology of Resistance to identify the variables it is organised around. The five states of resistance it teaches come from the ARIS phasing study published as Understanding States of Resistance. Figure 8 on movement structures is reproduced from the conceptual typology volume with permission, and is credited to work by Jurgen Willems and Marc Jegers.
The draft status is unambiguous and should be recorded in any citation. DRAFT appears on the cover, on the title page, in the running header of every page of the body text, and in the document’s own suggested citation, which reads “Lauber, W. Sam, et al. Resistance Manual. Draft. Fort Bragg, NC: US Army Special Operations Command, 2019.” The ISBN fields are left as unfilled placeholders, consistent with a document that had not completed production.
The Applied Physics Laboratory contributing authors are Meg Keiley-Listermann, W. Sam Lauber and Christine Martin, with Melissa Ellison, Grant Sutton, David Nobles, Bruce Milligan and MIDN Justin Rojas acknowledged. The copyright page names the sponsor as the USASOC G3X Special Programs Division and directs corrections to USASOC G-3X, Sensitive Activities Division, 2929 Desert Storm Drive, Fort Bragg, NC 28310. It is the one volume in this set whose copyright page carries an explicit copyright assertion on top of the Title 17 statement.
How The Resistance Hub uses it
This is the shortest route into the ARIS framework for a reader who does not intend to read eight volumes. It is also the clearest statement of how the US Army teaches the subject, which is a different thing from how the subject is researched, and the gap between the two is often the story. We use it as the bridge between the research volumes and the doctrine, and we read its discussion questions as a guide to what the project considered unsettled in 2019.
The sections on actions map onto our own coverage of sabotage and subversion, and the appendix on nonviolent methods sits behind our writing on nonviolent resistance. The organisational typology should be read against the fuller treatment in Undergrounds in Insurgent, Revolutionary, and Resistance Warfare. Definitions are recorded in the irregular warfare and resistance glossary, the field is indexed in resistance core concepts, and the rest of the series sits in the ARIS archive.
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The document states that all ARIS products are available from USASOC at soc.mil under the ARIS link. For scholarly citation, prefer the official USASOC ARIS index as the canonical source. The copy hosted here is a mirror provided for readers who need the text immediately.
Sources used on this page: the hosted PDF itself, specifically its cover, title page, copyright page, table of contents, introduction, section text and appendix, read directly on 3 August 2026; and the USASOC ARIS publication index at soc.mil.
Every bibliographic field above is transcribed from the document’s own front matter. Where the document prints nothing, this page says so rather than inferring a value. Updated: August 2026.