The Assessment of Men: How the OSS Built America's First System for Selecting Spies and Saboteurs

In late 1943, William Donovan's Office of Strategic Services was recruiting thousands of personnel for clandestine and irregular warfare work with no uniform screening process. The result was failures in the field that cost the organization time, money, blown operations, and in some cases the safety of entire networks. The Assessment of Men is the official 1948 report of the OSS Assessment Staff, the account of how a team of psychologists and psychiatrists under Henry A. Murray built the first systematic personnel selection program in American history designed around organismic, whole-person principles.

This episode works through the program as the study itself lays it out. The borrowing from the British War Office Selection Boards and the German military psychologists who came before them. The country-estate setting of Station S forty minutes outside Washington, where candidates lived together for three days under constant observation. The leaderless group situations, the stress tests, the construction of cover stories that candidates had to defend under pressure. The central problem the staff faced, captured in their own definition of the work: the assessment of men is the scientific art of arriving at sufficient conclusions from insufficient data.

We cover the conditions that made the OSS task unique among selection boards. The sheer variety and novelty of OSS missions, from saboteur to script writer to resistance leader to base operator. The absence of usable job descriptions when so many operations were still being planned or were unfolding behind enemy lines. The heterogeneity of the recruits, including foreigners and first-generation Americans recruited for the language and territory of their origin, and the cross-cultural judgment problems that followed. The impossibility of testing every special skill, from Morse code to demolitions to tropical medicine, and what the staff chose to measure instead.

This is a foundational text. The assessment-center methodology pioneered here became the basis for personnel selection across the postwar American intelligence community and now runs throughout government and industry. For anyone studying how clandestine and special operations organizations decide who is fit to serve, this is the source code.

Source document available for download at theresistancehub.com. Follow The Resistance Hub on Spotify so new episodes reach you the day they drop. Built for the defense and security community thinking past the next headline.

A British demolition party drops into occupied Greece in 1942 to blow one bridge and cut Rommel's supply line. Two years later they're still there, refereeing a civil war-in-waiting between rival guerrilla factions while trying to keep a Communist-dominated resistance from inheriting the country. Drawing on the ARIS case study Case Study in Guerrilla War: Greece During World War II, this episode traces how a clean military mission became a tangle of competing military and political needs, why German terror tactics backfired, and how the seeds of the Greek Civil War were sown in the choices made supporting the resistance.

What actually makes something a "domain" of warfare? We treat land, sea, air, and space as obvious, yet there has never been a single agreed definition of "domain" in the DoD Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms, in NATO doctrine, or internationally. This episode works through a 2009 paper that set out to fix that gap, and in doing so helped shape the thinking behind the founding of U.S. Cyber Command.

Written by Dr. Patrick D. Allen and Dennis P. Gilbert, Jr. , the paper proposes a clean definition of a domain, a six-feature test for what qualifies, and a five-stage model for how new domains emerge over time, from first capability, to commonplace use, to institutional and financial support. The authors then apply that framework to the larger Information Sphere: the space defined by the relationships among actors, information, and information systems. In their argument, cyberspace is a subset of the Information Sphere, much as submarine and surface operations are both subsets of the sea domain.

This is a framework-first episode in the tradition the show returns to again and again. It is not a single case study but a piece of analytic theory you can carry across every conflict you study. We unpack why the authors set aside "information environment" and "information domain" as too physical or too narrow, how the Information Sphere can sit separate from yet accessible to all four physical domains, and why effects in this domain are often delayed. A back door planted today, a belief seeded that blossoms years later.

Presented for the analyst, the planner, and the professional thinking seriously about multi-domain operations and the contest over information itself.

Source document available for download at theresistancehub.com. Follow The Resistance Hub on Spotify so new episodes reach you the day they drop. Built for the defense and security community thinking past the next headline.

Four armed groups. Five decades. Hundreds of thousands dead. The Colombian conflict is the longest-running insurgency in the Western Hemisphere, and the ARIS case study on it is one of the most useful documents in irregular warfare literature precisely because Colombia doesn't fit a clean narrative. The leftist guerrillas didn't win. The state didn't decisively defeat them. Right-wing paramilitaries operated in collusion with the security forces. Drug money rewired the original ideological objectives of nearly every armed actor. And one group — M-19 — laid down arms and ended up writing the country's constitution.

In this episode we walk through the USASOC ARIS Colombia case study and pull out what irregular warfare practitioners need: the political and historical conditions that made the conflict possible (La Violencia, the National Front, rural disenfranchisement), the comparative anatomy of the FARC, ELN, M-19, and AUC, the role of narco-finance in extending the conflict, and the Colombian government's long arc of countermeasures — including Plan Colombia and the paramilitary demobilization. Pairs naturally with our Cuba 1953–1959 episode for anyone tracking how the same analytic framework produces very different conclusions in different contexts.

Source material: USASOC ARIS, Case Studies in Insurgency and Revolutionary Warfare: Colombia 1964–2009.

Batista's regime had a 30,000-man army, U.S. backing, and a relatively prosperous economy. Castro's 26th of July Movement started with a failed barracks attack, returned from Mexican exile with about 80 men, and never won a decisive military engagement. So how did this end with Batista on a plane out of Havana?

In this episode we walk through USASOC's ARIS case study on the Cuban Revolution and pull out the parts irregular warfare practitioners actually need: the structural weaknesses that made Cuba combustible despite its prosperity, the division of labor between the Sierra Maestra guerrillas and the urban underground, and the deliberate strategy of provoking the regime into counterterror that gutted its own legitimacy. We also look at what came after — how a movement that recruited on a platform of constitutional restoration consolidated into a one-party Marxist-Leninist state within two years, and what that says about the gap between a revolution's stated program and its operational logic.

Source material: USASOC ARIS, Case Studies in Insurgency and Revolutionary Warfare: Cuba 1953–1959 (revised edition).

What if the most important battlefield in insurgency isn't a battlefield at all? What if it's a marketplace — one where states and armed challengers compete not over territory, but over who gets to govern?

In this episode, we walk through The War Marketplace Framework: Insurgency as Competitive Governance, a contributing article by Moe Gyo that originally appeared on The Resistance Hub as a three-part series. The framework reframes insurgency as competitive governance provision under conditions of institutional failure, arguing that armed groups endure not because they fight well, but because they outcompete the state in delivering security, justice, public goods, and legitimacy to populations operating under coercion and uncertainty.

Part One establishes the core model. Civilians are not spectators — they are constrained consumers allocating compliance based on which provider governs more credibly. Insurgents operate less like rebels and more like disruptive startups entering a stagnant monopoly, bundling violence within a broader governance offering. Part Two applies Porter's Five Forces to the war marketplace, examining how entry barriers, civilian bargaining power, supplier networks, substitute governance providers, and rivalry among armed actors create structural conditions that explain why some insurgencies regenerate endlessly, why others fragment into warlordism, and why certain conflicts resist decisive resolution regardless of military effort. Part Three gets into strategy — how states and insurgents manipulate the same five forces from opposite positions, why fragmentation prevents defeat but rarely produces victory, and why the most durable insurgent groups often face a brutal internal choice between governing well and surviving long.

Whether you work in defense, security, conflict analysis, or policy, this episode challenges conventional thinking about why counterinsurgency campaigns fail and what it actually takes to collapse a rival governance market.

Two insurgent groups. Two competing Cold War sponsors. One battlespace. The Rhodesian Bush War offers something rare in the study of irregular warfare — a natural experiment comparing two fundamentally different approaches to unconventional warfare, playing out simultaneously inside the same conflict.

In this episode, we walk through the United States Army Special Operations Command case study on the Rhodesian insurgency and the role of external support from 1961 to 1979, produced in partnership with the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory as part of the Assessing Revolutionary and Insurgent Strategies series. The study examines how the Soviet Union backed the Zimbabwe African People's Union while China backed the Zimbabwe African National Union, each exporting a distinct model of guerrilla warfare to their respective clients.

We cover the full arc: the colonial roots and road to rebellion, Ian Smith's Unilateral Declaration of Independence and the international sanctions that followed, the organizational structures and strategies of both insurgent movements, and the external support networks that sustained them. At the heart of the analysis is a critical divergence — how the Chinese emphasis on politicizing and mobilizing the rural population through a Maoist people's war strategy ultimately proved decisive, while the Soviet model's military-first approach left its client organizationally weak when it mattered most at the ballot box. We also examine the Rhodesian Security Forces' counterinsurgency campaign, the role of neighboring states as sanctuaries and sponsors, and the pressures that finally brought all parties to Lancaster House in 1979.

Key takeaways include the importance of tailoring external support to the local environment, the criticality of linking military strategy to political objectives, the role of structural conditions in shaping insurgent outcomes, and the cost of failing to achieve unity of effort among resistance movements.

Essential listening for anyone studying unconventional warfare, foreign internal defense, or the mechanics of Cold War proxy conflicts in Africa.