Thread by @BretDevereaux

Appreciate this being called a shield wall rather than a phalanx or testudo or some more specific term.

I should note that despite such overlapped, vertically stacked (two rows) shield walls showing up a lot in fiction/movies, that's not how they worked historically. 1/13

https://twitter.com/JoshuaPotash/status/1291962889323020288

A shield like that covers enough of the body that you don't actually need to stack them vertically, so long as you keep a coherent, close-order formation.

That said, I think vertical stacking here actually is a good idea for strategic reasons: it cannot advance. 2/13

And you might say - wait, isn't being able to advance a good thing tactically? And yes, it is!

But remember, whatever the tactics of the moment, *strategically* the protestors are trying to draw attention to police violence, not defeat the police in a street-fight. 3/13

The police, after all, have 'escalation dominance' - they can escalate violence to a level the protesters cannot match. So escalation mostly helps the police, not the protesters.

Win the battle and you'll escalate matters and lose the war. 4/13

Instead, protests like this focus on a strategy of *revealing* police violence for what it is, by creating opportunities for police to overreact and reveal their violence in situations where it can be observed and documented and thus shift public opinion. 5/13

Public opinion and voters, not the streets, is the 'center of gravity' (in the Clausewitzian sense, DRINK!).

This is a *super* common theme of all sorts of asymmetric contests: get the big conventional force to overreact and use its massive violence to spread your message. 6/13

In that context, the fact that this shield wall, unlike historical shield walls, *cannot advance* makes its defensive nature instantly understandable to most observers. It reinforces the contrast between the aggressive, violence-initiating police and the defensive... 7/13

...violence-receiving protesters, while at the same time allowing the protest to engage in what is essentially 'force protection' - keeping its people on the streets, out of jail, and out of a hospital, where they can continue to pursue the protest's agenda. 8/13

Of course on the flip-side, the police could defeat this entire strategy by *not engaging in violence* - if they showed forbearance and restraint, the protests would fail, either because nothing would happen or because protesting hot-heads would initiate... 9/13

...confrontations which might or might not be tactical successes, but would damage the movement's strategy.

Thus as with war, discipline and cohesion here matter the most - not to do violence, but to *restrain* your violence to make the violence of the opponent clear. 10/13

What we've seen so far with the protests in the wake of George Floyd's murder is that both 'sides' - the police and the protesters - initially had discipline and cohesion problems, which created a confused and unclear situation for many observers. 11/13

But subsequently, the protesters showed increasingly *more* discipline than police in restraining their own violence.

Consequently, they are winning, with huge polling shifts in recent months on a number of related issues. 12/13

It remains to be seen if those victories will be consolidated into meaningful police reform. There's a real uphill battle on that issue in the political arena, of course.

But for now, it's not hard to see which side has the strategic initiative. end/13

Addendum: Police should also note: the protest's center of gravity *is police violence.* Reducing violence at protests/in general with better, more careful policing is the best way to reduce the strength of the protests.

Police reform is the best way for the *police* to win too.