Undergrounds in Insurgent, Revolutionary, and Resistance Warfare is the flagship volume of the US Army Special Operations Command ARIS series, and the closest thing the field has to a reference anatomy of the clandestine half of an insurgency. 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 | Undergrounds in Insurgent, Revolutionary, and Resistance Warfare |
| 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 | Second Edition |
| Date | 25 January 2013 |
| First edition | Special Operations Research Office, American University, November 1963 |
| Named staff | Paul J. Tompkins Jr., USASOC Project Lead. Robert Leonhard, Editor. |
| ISBN | Not printed on the document |
| Pages | 210 pages in the hosted PDF |
| Language | English |
| Rights | Printed on the copyright page, verbatim: “This publication is a work of the United States Government in accordance with Title 17, United States Code, sections 101 and 105. Reproduction in whole or in part is permitted for any purpose of the United States government.” |
What this document is
The book asks a single question and answers it at length: what does the hidden part of a resistance movement actually do, and how is it built? The 1963 original defined undergrounds as “the clandestine elements of indigenous politico-military revolutionary organizations which attempt to illegally weaken, modify, or replace the government authority, typically through the use or threat of force.” The second edition takes that definition as its starting point and then spends 210 pages testing every clause of it against fifty years of subsequent conflict.
The organising claim survives the test. The underground, not the guerrilla, is the element without which no such movement exists. The original study found that for every guerrilla fighter there are between two and twenty-seven underground members, and the preface to this edition restates that ratio as demonstrably accurate today. Everything else follows from it. If the clandestine network is the load-bearing structure, then counterinsurgency directed only at armed formations is treating symptoms. The preface makes the point through a medical analogy: the doctor does not confine himself to visible symptoms but looks for causality inside the body.
Three things change in this edition. The 1963 model described an insurgency as three components, the underground, the guerrilla element and the auxiliary. This edition adds a fourth, the public component, because modern movements operate in the legal, illegal and quasi-legal domains simultaneously and because power-sharing settlements are now a more common outcome than outright seizure of the state. It uses the term armed component alongside guerrilla component, to allow for movements that build conventional capability as well as irregular capability. And it reverses the original study’s decision to exclude criminal organisations, on the ground that insurgent and criminal networks are now routinely entangled.
Leadership is treated as a function of the underground for the first time in the series. Chapter 1, written by Robert Leonhard and Jerome M. Conley, argues that ideology is not background scenery but a leadership product, cultivated and revised across the life of a movement, and that the goal of the movement determines the shape of the organisation built to pursue it. The chapter sets out three organisational types, mass, elite and elite-front, and the permanent tension between the security that comes from compartmentalisation and the growth that requires exposure.
Method matters here. The primary source material is drawn from the Tier I and Tier II case studies written for the ARIS project, so this is a synthesis of the series rather than fresh field research, and the case studies are intended to be read alongside it. Its companion volume, Human Factors Considerations of Undergrounds in Insurgencies, second edition, covers the same subject from the psychological and sociological side. This volume covers structure and function.
Contents
Ten chapters, a glossary, a letter of introduction and a preface. Chapter descriptions below follow the subsection headings printed in the document’s own table of contents.
| Chapter | What it covers |
|---|---|
| 1. Leadership and Organization | Ideology as a leadership product. Factors that determine organisational structure, including predominant strategy and origins. Mass, elite and elite-front organisation. The conflict between security and expansion. Command and control, centralised administration against decentralised units. |
| 2. Recruiting | Phases of an insurgency. Recruiting leaders against recruiting soldiers. Target populations: rural, urban, elites, the military, private military contractors, women and children. Techniques from ideological appeal and radicalisation to coercion, conscription, deception, personal ties, prison recruiting and subversion. |
| 3. Intelligence | Military intelligence, sabotage intelligence, scientific and technological intelligence, and political intelligence, treated as four distinct collection problems. |
| 4. Financing | External money: foreign governments, non-state actors, local and substitute currency, counterfeiting, online fraud, parallel financial systems. Internal money, split into noncoercive means such as gifts, loans, embezzlement and sales, and coercive means including robbery, kidnapping, hijacking, forced contribution, taxation and the narcotics and black market trade. |
| 5. Logistics | Procurement through black and legal markets, battlefield recovery, theft, secret confiscation and raid. Rural and urban manufacturing. Collections from the populace. External supply through foreign governments, import firms and parachute drops. Transport by vehicle, on foot and by animal. Storage, maintenance and medical support. |
| 6. Training | Characteristics of underground training, training camps, training delivered online, and the conduct of training, with the Provisional Irish Republican Army as the worked example. |
| 7. Communications | Nontechnical and technical communications, and what each costs a clandestine organisation in security terms. |
| 8. Security | Common bonds, compartmentalisation and the use of couriers. Screening of new members, loyalty checks and oaths, communications security, record keeping and underground discipline. Personal security measures, safe havens, and actions in the event of compromise or capture. |
| 9. Shadow Government | The form and function of shadow governments. Government against governance. Shadow governments in the international system, their objectives, war as economics by other means, legitimating authority, governance effectiveness, gaining popular support, variation between movements, the public component, and the post-conflict environment. |
| 10. Subversion and Sabotage | Objectives of subversion: undermining military and security services, economic degradation, removal of dangerous persons, undermining political authority and morale, and organisational subversion. Sabotage split into selective and general, with tactical aspects, tactical operations and sabotage intelligence. |
| Glossary | Defined terms used across the ARIS series. |
Provenance and lineage
This is a revision, not a new work. The copyright page states that the first edition was published by the Special Operations Research Office at American University in November 1963. SORO was the Army-funded social science research centre whose studies of insurgency in the 1950s and 1960s became core reading in Special Forces training. ARIS describes itself as following in that tradition, adding new research to the SORO body of work and in several cases reissuing updated editions of the original studies. Six volumes in the current ARIS catalogue are revisions of SORO work.
The document names its own staff. Paul J. Tompkins Jr. is the USASOC project lead and Robert Leonhard is the editor. In the letter of introduction, Tompkins records that he was handed the original Human Factors in 1979 at the Special Forces Qualification Course, discovered a reference in its preface to a predecessor work called Undergrounds in Insurgent, Revolutionary, and Resistance Warfare, and sought that book out. He credits COL Dave Maxwell, then the USASOC G3, with getting the revision project approved, and Michael McCran with pressing him to keep seeking approval. Leonhard signs the preface. Chapter 1 carries the byline of Leonhard and Jerome M. Conley.
The research was carried out at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory by its National Security Analysis Department, described on the copyright page as a nongovernmental agency operating under the supervision of the USASOC Special Programs Division. The same page carries the standard ARIS disclaimer: “The analysis and the opinions expressed within this document are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the positions of the U.S. Army or The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory.” Corrections are invited by post to USASOC G-3X, Special Programs Division, 2929 Desert Storm Drive, Fort Bragg, NC 28310.
How The Resistance Hub uses it
This volume supplies the structural vocabulary that runs through most of our analysis. When we describe a movement as having an underground, an auxiliary, an armed component and a public face, that four-part model comes from here, and the definitions we use are recorded in our irregular warfare and resistance glossary. Chapter 10 is the doctrinal spine behind our coverage of subversion and sabotage, both of which the document treats as underground functions rather than as guerrilla tactics.
Chapter 9 on shadow government is the reference we return to whenever a movement starts governing territory, a pattern we track in reporting such as insurgent governance and civil affairs in the Karen National Union. For the wider structure of the field, see our resistance core concepts index and the full ARIS archive, which holds all twenty-three hosted studies in the series.
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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 title page, copyright page, letter of introduction, preface and table of contents, 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.