The Assessment of Men

The Assessment of Men

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.

The OSS Secret Intelligence Field Manual

The OSS Secret Intelligence Field Manual: How America Built Its First Espionage Doctrine In March 1944, William Donovan's Office of Strategic Services codified the operational doctrine that would shape American human intelligence for generations. The Secret Intelligence Field Manual, Strategic Services (Provisional), classified Top Secret and held to deliberately limited distribution, set out the principles, methods, and organization of clandestine collection in enemy, enemy-occupied, and neutral territory. This episode unpacks the foundational tradecraft that the OSS taught its operatives and the agents they ran in the field. We walk through the doctrine as the manual itself lays it out: the function of the Secret Intelligence Branch and its source-reliability grading system (A through F for the source, 1 through 5 for the information). The discipline of cover and the four freedoms that define a workable legend: social, financial, movement, and leisure. The cell system of network construction, where compartmentation keeps any single capture from unraveling the whole. The handling of agents, the dangers of the agent provocateur, the calculated risk of the double agent, and the cold logic that the organization always outweighs the individual. Communications security, the assumption that every telephone is tapped and every room wired, and the rule that no one is told more than the job requires. This is the source code for resistance liaison, underground contact, public-opinion collection, and the intelligence-requirement taxonomy (military, naval, economic, political, psychological) that analysts still recognize today. Source document available for download at theresistancehub.com. Follow The Resistance Hub on Spotify for new episodes each week. This show serves analysts, planners, and defense and security professionals studying the craft of intelligence and irregular warfare.

Case Study in Guerrilla Warfare: Greece in World War II

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.

Information As The New Domain

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.

Case Study: Revolutionary Warfare in Columbia

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.