The Resistance Operating Concept sets out how a legitimate government prepares for and coordinates national resistance when its sovereignty comes under threat. It treats resistance as something a state organizes in peacetime, inside its normal defense planning cycle, with the legal instruments, civil structures and allied relationships already in place before they are needed.

Its central move is definitional. The ROC establishes a common lexicon for the parts of a resistance organization, drawing on terms allied forces already recognize: the underground, the auxiliary, the guerrilla force, and the shadow government that preserves civil authority under occupation. Where those terms have been used loosely across national doctrines, the ROC fixes their meaning so that planners in different capitals describe the same structures the same way. Many of them also appear in the Irregular Warfare and Resistance Glossary.

Within that scope, the document is built to:

• Establish a common understanding of national resistance across civil and military domains
• Clarify the roles of government, civil society and security institutions
• Align partner nations and allies on terminology, structures and expectations
• Encourage pre-crisis legal preparation, governance arrangements and resilience building
• Situate resistance planning inside Total Defense and Comprehensive Defense models

The ROC runs to 227 pages in its first edition and is organized into four chapters, followed by ten appendices lettered A through J. The chapters carry the argument. The appendices carry most of the material a planner reaches for repeatedly, which is why the document is longer in practice than its chapter count suggests.

The Appendices

Appendices A through J cover legal considerations, nonviolent resistance methods, hybrid warfare, resilience assessment, population dynamics under occupation, and case studies drawn from the Second World War and the Cold War. The legal appendix is the one most often cited in the secondary literature, because the question of when and how a government can lawfully authorize resistance in advance is the hardest part of the whole framework. Readers approaching that question from the civil side will find related material in International Law and Know the Law.

The ROC describes a resistance organization as four interlocking parts. Separating them matters because each has a different exposure profile, a different recruitment pool and a different relationship to the population. Collapsing them into a single idea of “the resistance” is what produces plans that cannot survive contact with an occupying security service.

Resilience and Resistance Are Different Things

The distinction the ROC works hardest to establish is the one between resilience and resistance. Resilience is the capacity of a society to absorb shock and keep functioning: supply, governance, information, public confidence. Resistance is the organized effort to restore sovereignty once it has been taken. The ROC treats the first as the foundation of the second, which is why its second chapter deals with resilience before its third deals with resistance at all. The five household and community domains that sit underneath national resilience are covered in the Resilience Toolkit.

That ordering is also the part of the framework under the most active challenge. See section 07.

Special Operations Command Europe began the effort in 2013 and ran the first workshops and tabletop exercises with Baltic allies in January 2014. Russia’s seizure of Crimea two months later turned an academic exercise into a planning requirement, and the work continued as a seminar series hosted in part at the Swedish Defence University in Stockholm.

The gap it was written to fill was a real one. Two decades of Western military literature had been oriented toward counterinsurgency, which trains an army to defeat a resistance movement. Very little of that literature helps a small state organize one on its own territory, and the nations most exposed to that scenario had the least written down.

The ROC was created to:

• Provide a coherent national resistance framework spanning civil and military domains
• Strengthen deterrence by making organized resistance a visible, prepared option before a crisis
• Guide governments on the legal, political and societal groundwork that has to be laid in peacetime
• Establish resistance as a standing element of national defense planning
• Clarify how resistance, resilience and allied support relate to one another

The ROC works best when it is folded into planning that already happens, which is to say defense planning cycles, civil preparedness programs and multinational training. Six settings account for most of its practical use. Exercise designers in particular will find the framework easier to apply alongside the campaign material in The Resistance Toolkit.

The Resistance Hub hosts three bodies of doctrine, and they sit in a specific order. Reading them in that order is the fastest way to get from historical evidence to a workable plan.

Put simply: ARIS tells you what has happened, the ROC tells you how to organize, and the OSS manuals show you what the work looked like in practice. A planner who reads only one of the three gets a partial picture. Applied studies of the same structures in contemporary conditions appear in Urban Resistance Tactics and Protecting Critical Infrastructure.

The ROC has been reviewed favorably and criticized substantively, and both are worth reading before a planner leans on it. The most useful single body of commentary is the Journal on Baltic Security special issue of 2022, edited by Asta Maskaliūnaitė and Kevin D. Stringer, which runs nine peer-reviewed articles testing the framework against historical and contemporary cases. Stringer was the original project leader for the ROC’s development, so the issue is a rare case of a doctrinal framework being examined in public by the people who built it alongside people who dispute it.

On the other side, Bayasgalan Lkhagvasuren’s 2021 review for Small Wars Journal makes the case for the document’s practical value, particularly for the leadership of smaller states, and notes that the breadth of its case-study coverage is uncommon in military curricula. Otto Fiala and Ulrica Pettersson’s own summary in PRISM 8:4 is the shortest authoritative account of what the framework is meant to do.

The Resistance Hub covers many of the concepts the ROC defines, in more depth than a framework document can. The following give source-driven treatment of the individual components:

• Sabotage Strategic & Tactical Methods
• Subversion Covert Influence & Underground Organization
• Espionage Human & Technical Collection
• Guerrilla Raids Planning, Execution & Operational Effects
• Ambushes Fundamentals, Variations & Employment
• Reconnaissance Clandestine Observation & Surveillance Tradecraft
• Human Networks How Underground & Auxiliary Structures Hold Together
• ARIS Studies Underground & Auxiliary Network Research

Every factual claim this page makes about the ROC’s origin, authorship, structure and reception maps to a published source. All were verified in July 2026.

• SOCEUR and the Swedish Defence University produced the ROC, announced December 2019 U.S. Department of Defense, DVIDS release: SOCEUR and Swedish Defense University collaborate on academic publication, the Resistance Operating Concept
• First edition: Swedish Defence University, Stockholm 2019, ISBN 978-91-86137-93-9, 227 pages; copyright asserted by SOCEUR Full text, Swedish Defence University institutional repository: Resistance Operating Concept (DiVA)
• Second edition and the file hosted here: JSOU Press, MacDill AFB 2020, ISBN 978-1-941715-43-7 Joint Special Operations University Press publication record: Resistance Operating Concept (ROC)
• Origin in 2013, Baltic workshops from January 2014, and the framework’s purpose in the authors’ own words Otto C. Fiala and Ulrica Pettersson, “ROC(K) Solid Preparedness: Resistance Operations Concept in the Shadow of Russia,” PRISM 8, no. 4, pp. 17 to 27, NDU Press
• Peacetime preparation critique: command and control, legitimacy, recruitment, sustainability, communication Asta Maskaliūnaitė, “Exploring Resistance Operating Concept: promises and pitfalls of (violent) underground resistance,” Journal on Baltic Security 7, no. 1 (2021), pp. 27 to 38
• Nine-article peer-reviewed special issue examining the framework Asta Maskaliūnaitė and Kevin D. Stringer, eds., Special Issue on the Resistance Operating Concept, Journal on Baltic Security 8, no. 1 (2022)
• The resilience, robustness and antifragility objection Maurice Duclos and Chad Machiela, “Beyond Resilience: A Nuanced Framework for Conceptualizing Resistance Networks,” Small Wars Journal, 7 January 2026
• Assessment of the document’s practical value for smaller states Bayasgalan Lkhagvasuren, “Book Review: Resistance Operating Concept,” Small Wars Journal, 21 June 2021