text: Chapter 5
  Insurgency Threat Characteristics
  5-1. Threat characteristics involve the composition, disposition, activities, and tactics of an insurgency.
  The composition of an insurgency is covered under the eighth dynamic, organizational and operational
  patterns. Tactics for an insurgency include political activities, criminal actions, and military tactics.
  Counterinsurgents consider how these threat characteristics create strengths and weaknesses for an
  insurgency.
  DISPOSITION AND ACTIVITIES
  5-2. The disposition is the geographic location of insurgent elements and the way they are deployed,
  employed, or located. The dispositions of an insurgency are partially determined by an operational
  environment and the operational variables. For example, if an insurgency has connections to a black
  market, some of its dispositions will normally be to protect that market. Terrain will also affect the
  dispositions of an insurgency. Commanders and staffs must understand an operational environment to
  understand an insurgency’s dispositions. (See chapter 2 for more information on an operational
  environment.)
  5-3. Insurgents who rely solely on violence to achieve their political goals are probably ineffective.
  Instead, effective insurgents conduct a wide range of activities to achieve their goals. Many of these
  activities are not enemy or terrain oriented, but political. Insurgents use a range of activities supporting
  both military and political actions. Insurgent actions can include:
  * Political activities.
  * Population control.
  * Military tactics (including terrorist actions and conventional tactics).
  * Support activities.
  POLITICAL ACTIVITIES
  5-4. Insurgents may use political activities to achieve their goals and enhance their cause’s legitimacy. An
  insurgency’s actions can come from inside the government’s political system or can be used to
  communicate a message to the population. Political actions that happen within a government normally
  happen in a democracy or a semidemocracy. In these systems, an insurgency and related political parties
  can have some political power through elections. This gives groups the ability to launch official
  investigations and a platform to question government actions. This was a technique used by the Irish
  Republican Army and Sinn Fein.
  5-5. Insurgent political actions within the government are limited to an autocratic regime, unless those
  actions are secretive. An authoritarian regime can have members that are either sympathetic to or actual
  members of an insurgency. However, those individuals must remain clandestine if they are to remain inside
  the government. In these cases, insurgencies can use these individuals for intelligence and to influence
  some governmental decisions.
  5-6. The use of political activities to influence a society is another political activity of an insurgency.
  Demonstrations, propaganda, strikes, and civil disobedience can be effective means to undermine the
  legitimacy of a government and to disrupt a host nation. These actions show the level of support for the
  insurgency and transmit the insurgents’ message to the rest of society.
  5-7. Propaganda is one of the most important political tools an insurgency has. Propaganda provides the
  means for the insurgency to communicate a message, often political, to the population. It allows the