Bret Devereaux

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. 1/13https://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