“The guerrilla must move amongst the people as a fish swims in the sea.”

Mao Tse-Tung claimed in On Guerilla Warfare that the guerrilla move seamlessly amongst the people. If the guerrilla are the fish and the people the sea, then police intelligence are the blue fish which live and hunt in that sea alongside them.

All modern counterinsurgency theories rely on separating the people from the insurgent. But Randall Wilson's Blue Fish In A Dark Sea contends that the use of police intelligence will allow for a different approach; of separating the insurgent head from the insurgent body so that the body is seen by people as an infection, ridding it of a protective camouflage.

The existence of police intelligence and its unique, but all too often marginalised capacity for uncovering and destroying the prime movers of an insurgency must be re-examined. It is by no means a panacea for civil strife but, as an integral component of a combined counterinsurgency strategy, it provides a weapon which is more feared by insurgents than any other. Knowing who they are and where they're hiding renders the insurgent visible and touchable.

In Blue Fish In A Dark Sea: Police Intelligence in a Counterinsurgency, Wilson explores and discusses the various elements of police intelligence ubiquitous to the trade, and presents the most efficacious means of employing this skill set in the environment of a counterinsurgency.

Randall Wilson

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