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Cite?

I'm pretty sure we only started winning after a certain Prussian drilled the Continental Army into a professional fighting force.

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The overall mission of a militia squad (and of the militia as a whole) should be to protect their fellow citizens against enemies foreign and domestic, and to preserve or restore the Constitutional order of our Republic. That's kind of vague though so a few intermediate steps are needed before we can figure out the best "composition and makeup" of a militia rifle squad.

Thinking about more specific mission sets for militia units:

• Offense (attacking the enemy kinetically, using tools ranging from empty hands to nonlethal weapons to rifles all the way to armored vehicles and aircraft)
  
• Defense (stopping an enemy's kinetic attack)
  
• Direct support to offense/defense (tactical reconnaissance, combat engineering, tactical comms, forward logistics, forward medical support, etc.)
  
• Indirect support (planning, intelligence, counterintelligence, comms, logistics, and medical support at higher echelons; public affairs and propaganda; recruiting and basic training; etc.)

That means there's a role both for hardcore trigger pullers (to do the trigger pulling), and for little old ladies (who can "do their part" in intel, propaganda, medical/quartermaster support, etc.). However, there will be varying levels of capability (determined mainly by recruiting, training, equipping, experience and leadership), so not every squad will be able to take on every squad-level mission, and most militia members (and thus most squads) will be on the lower end of the capability spectrum.

Another line of thought: since there's a good chance that the militia will form up in an environment dominated by uncertainty (if not chaos) and, in case of resisting foreign invasion or a tyrannical government, will likely face a better-equipped and better-coordinated adversary (at least initially), it is important that militia squads can operate in a decentralized manner, clandestinely, using hit-and-run tactics, and without having to rely on a lot of regular outside support or even communications with higher headquarters. Like others have mentioned, guerilla style rather than "regular" military style. That means having key capabilities (especially on the support side) organic to the squad or at least attached, rather than at higher headquarters or some faraway log base. So too much specialization isn't good; while, for example, there will be a difference between an offense/defense-oriented "rifle squad" and a non-kinetic "propaganda squad", the rifle squad should also be able to produce and disseminate propaganda, and the propaganda squad has to be able to at least defend itself. At the same time, if the enemy has good ISR capabilities, a militia unit should not get too big since that makes it harder to blend into their environment (whether urban or rural). So there is a balance to strike. And requiring militia members to be jacks-of-all-trades is a formidable recruiting challenge...

On the other hand, if the militia is called out to deal with localized issues like unrest, or if enemy capabilities have degraded, militia squads also need to be prepared to act as part of a larger formation, and may even have to tie in to "regular" forces, e.g. to help their city police force put down a riot, or secure the perimeter (outer cordon) during a SWAT/SOF raid.

Finally, on the practical side, the smallest element of a militia unit should probably not be the two-man buddy team as in our current military, but better a three-man team. This way they can do 8 hour shifts for guard/support/sleep, and if one gets hit there are two to carry him. Plus it's better for deliberative decisionmaking since there's never a tie. And a four-man fire team might lead to the squad becoming too large...

All that being said, going back to the militia rifle squad, if we assume something similar in size to a traditional squad, how about 12 or 15 people, divided as follows so that they can do both their main mission (kinetic offense/defense, from assassinations and small-scale raids to joining in larger operations) but also support themselves to a degree, and cover other parts of the militia's mission set:

• Leadership team (all with AR-15): squad leader (also propaganda specialist), deputy squad leader (also intel & counterintel specialist), comms specialist (also assistant squad leader)
  
• Support team (all with basic AR-15 or at least handgun): quartermaster (food/water/shelter), supply specialist (also armorer & assistant quartermaster & assistant medic), medic
  
• 2x rifle team: team leader (AR-15 with optic), senior rifleman (LMG if available, otherwise AR-15 with optic), rifleman (AR-15 with optic)
• Optional: sniper team (1x M107, 2x AR-15), weapons team (1x HMG or mortar, 2x AR-15), or engineer/demolitions team?
  

Ideally, each team would have their own vehicle - another advantage of the three-man concept since most cars will accommodate three people plus a lot of gear.

But as outlined above, a well-regulated militia also needs additional types of squads, including much smaller ones (three geeks producing propaganda videos, a handful of nurses running an aid station, etc.). But that's for another day - this has already gotten much longer than I thought it would be... Thoughts and comments?

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@madcap72

Should we assume that a militia, squad, etc cannot also operate as cells? Are the two truly exclusive of each other?  Units and organizations that effectively conduct asymmetric warfare still typically must have some sort of common operational and organizational understanding if they want to make it to an achievable end state do they not?

This reaches back to the question of whether the mission drives the organization, or vice versa.

There is also the question of whether, being utilized for limited support  of conventional forces, such as a state guard or national guard unit, or regular military, the militia ought to be organized and have some general doctrinal understanding that enables them to be tasked properly.  Ie: guarding a power plant, dam, or other infrastructure as in the world wars.

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Pretty much.

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You're talking about training and tactics, like a guerilla force needs it.

Destruction, fear, and chaos are the tools of a guerrilla force.

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Funny you should bring that up: my partner, who teaches at the JFKSWCS, wrote a book on that very topic which is almost ready for publishing.  It will be his (fourth?)published work on asymmetric warfare and insurgencies.  I think that is a topic for a different thread though.

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This appears to be a solid mission statement.

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IF a militia is ever needed again- either to repel a foreign entity or to resist a tyrannical domestic one- the fighting will not be anything like you see in movies or videogames.  The enemy will have vastly superior technology and weapons to choose from.  The only way to fight an enemy like that is guerilla warfare.  You don't attack a hardened military installation, you follow troops home and slaughter them in their sleep.

Yes its dishonorable.  But thats how you win.  Do you think the Brits thought we were fighting honorably back in the 1770s?  Honor is a useless buzzword that is used by old farts or young dumbasses to romanticize things.  But reality is ugly and uncaring.  But its reality that matters, not how moving of a speech your priest says over your grave when you die.

To steal a line from my favorite book series: You know nothing of war. War is dark. Black as pitch. It is not a God. It does not laugh or weep. It rewards neither skill nor daring. It is not a trial of souls, nor the measure of wills. Even less is it a tool, a means to some womanish end. It is merely the place where the iron bones of the earth meet the hollow bones of men and break them....

.... So long as you continue to wage war with your hearts and not your intellect, you are doomed.  

first part is a direct quote, second part is paraphrased.  Context, this guy is trying to convince a bunch of stick-up-their-ass knights and nobles that their way of fighting (caring bout honor) is gonna get them slaughtered by guys who don't play by the same rules.

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It's one of the primary resources a tyrannical government will use to detect and target people that don't submit, along with cyber, so it should be central to this thread.

If your force structure is based on mid-1900s open warfare, and ignores the primary threat nodes, what are we doing here again?

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You'll be under surveillance the entire time.  They rewind the footage, see where you came from, and SWAT Teams will have high risk warrants for your arrest within hours, to be executed ASAP, as they seal off the area with bearcats and orders for all the well-trained public school serfs to shelter in place while they deal with you.

The guys on the SWAT Teams actually work out and shoot regularly, run through shoot houses, and most full time teams have hundreds of warrants under their belts.

Your dynamic, inflict damage on the enemy with harassment and ambush fantasy will be over within 24 hours.

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One question I have is how to operate within an environment in which the opposition have UAVs for surveillance and targeting.

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How about we don't dispense with it.

We won by not losing.  Which is what all insurgencies do.  We became more of a PITA than we were worth.  We didn't defeat the British Empire.  We defeated what the British Empire was willing to invest in trying to retain control over us.

Even Yorktown was just an abandonment by the Royal Navy after the French Navy spanked them hard enough to say "fuck it"

It wasn't the battle of Yorktown, it was the battle in Parliament.  

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You need surgical strikes to target leadership too. Protracted warfare is good for depletion of the enemies morale and resources but you still need to cut off the head.

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I agree. Washington did a masterful job of his keeping his army on the move and intact. In a score-keeping sense, America lost. But over the last two years of combat in the colonies, Britain found itself over-extended internationally, the Americans were benefiting from significant foreign aid, the British effort to start a counter-insurgency in the south failed, and then Cornwallis found himself in an untenable position at Yorktown. It was indeed time to say "fuck it," which formally happened two years after Yorktown. My point is that the common idea that we won the war by fighting like Indians and what-not is myth. The fighting was mostly conventional, and I don't think guerilla warfare describes the bulk of it well.

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How long did California shoot up everybody who moved looking for Dorner?

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You'll be under surveillance the entire time.  They rewind the footage, see where you came from, and SWAT Teams will have high risk warrants for your arrest within hours, to be executed ASAP, as they seal off the area with bearcats and orders for all the well-trained public school serfs to shelter in place while they deal with you.

The guys on the SWAT Teams actually work out and shoot regularly, run through shoot houses, and most full time teams have hundreds of warrants under their belts.

Your dynamic, inflict damage on the enemy with harassment and ambush fantasy will be over within 24 hours.