Confidence Target

Yesterday, Western Rifle Shooters Association suggested looking up the definition of "confidence target." I found not only an explanation of the term, but an interesting article to boot. The article should be of interest to you because it is written by someone claiming to be a former Green Beret who is all in for mentoring the Leftists of today. 

       The article is "The Confidence Target — a political metaphor salad" by Stan Goff and published by Medium. Goff begins:

        It’s been 30 years since I went through the Special Forces Qualification Course at the age of 38–9, but it’s a pretty durable memory. Mine lasted about 63 months, and the final phase was a four-week exercise called Robin Sage. That may have changed, no idea now, but the Robin Sage scenario was that we were to train a foreign civilian force to conduct guerrilla operations. In Army-speak this type of mission — in real life — was categorized as Unconventional Warfare, or UW. The idea was that we were to train people — and training foreigners turned out to be a big part of my Special Forces period — who had little to no experience of weapons and tactics. One of the concepts we employed for UW was called “the confidence target.”

       A confidence target is a relatively easy first target taken down with a relatively simple plan, under supervision, but which hopefully starts the new guerrillas’ careers with a win that bolsters their confidence for more challenging targets. Then the force can improve and grow, even with a few setbacks. With a good foundation and a success, they are less likely to break up in the face of challenges later. Like training wheels. We’ll remove them soon after. When they have a sense of their own strength and competence.

He then wanders off into the topic of how important is this upcoming election, but then returns to the topic of the title of his article:

        The election is important for electing people, but it is also valuable for shaking down and tweaking this millennial left as a fighting force. We are practicing and gathering allies for the future. The 2016 election was somewhat like that confidence target. We were doing and learning at the same time. When this began in 2016, it looked like a race to the finish line phenomenon. I didn’t and don’t see it that way.

       The election is one move in the game of Go. Others didn’t see it as a football game either, where when the clock runs out, everybody packs up and leaves. They saw this as a key tactic to conquer key terrain in a larger movement, one that includes colonizing the moribund Democratic Party (understood as the conquest of terrain en route to more primary objectives).

       When Sanders came within striking distance of the pre-coronated Clinton in 2016, the movement — to its credit — did not pack up and go home. They left that field and blasted into local elections, and they started making more and more connections to various on-the-ground initiatives. The Sanderistas did not lose the 2016 election, their forces advanced significantly into the Democratic Party — which has to be seen not merely as an institution, but as hostile terrain which we have to cross to arrive at primary objectives.

        The millennial left gained a sense of its own power, and to its credit, it hasn’t been shaken from its sense of mission. Given that we could see the world start to cook down in less than two decades, I can’t blame them. We need that intransigent mission-focus, and the key thing this movement has accomplished — organization.

He warns his readers, however, that "We may have to take great risks . . . throwing sand in the gears of another four-year stint with the clown fascist government. It could get even worse than that, so we need to be ready. (Study tradecraft, especially non-technical means of communication!)" 

       I've said before that we are seeing a revolution or power struggle within the Democratic party, and that is confirmed by this article. If they achieve political power, that revolution will be turned outward.