By Chris Martin, Martin Group International LLC, July 31, 2026
This article is written from the perspective of an operational practitioner with experience in foreign internal defense, security force assistance, and stability operations. It is not intended as an academic treatment of irregular warfare, but as an assessment of operational patterns observed across multiple conflict environments.
1. The Operational Definition of the "Boogie Man"
In the doctrine of unconventional warfare, a "Boogie Man" is not a chaotic accident; he is a deliberate administrative and informational asset constructed by a failing state, an intervening empire, and international non-governmental organizations (NGOs).
When a government faces systemic instability and completely loses its domestic legitimacy, it must find a mechanism to manufacture public compliance. To achieve this, the state apparatus and its international backed networks identify an influential non-state actor or an asymmetric rival and systematically transform them into the sole repository of all regional evil. By saturating the information space via social media, television, and radio with continuous disinformation, the state shifts the blame for all systemic failures, economic collapses, and insecurity onto a single target. My own operational background managing pipelines and security architectures across highly volatile environments—including Afghanistan, Haiti, Nigeria, and Mali—confirms that this pattern remains completely consistent across different continents and decades. The strategic objective is universal: terrify the populace until they willingly surrender their sovereign rights to an autocratic government and accept foreign stabilization tracks under the illusion of law and order.
2. The Doctrine of the First Broadcast: Lessons from SOTF-South
The baseline public operates under the flawed assumption that media broadcasts are retrospective reports of verified facts. They do not understand that the informational battlefield is an active, pre-emptive line of operation.
In asymmetric warfare, the foundational law of perception management is absolute: what is broadcast first is what the people are going to believe, whether it is true or not.
During my time working as a U.S. Advisor out of the Special Operations Task Force-South (SOTF-S) in Afghanistan, our assigned information operations teams executed this exact doctrine to manipulate the human terrain. The explicit mandate was to turn the battlefield against the Taliban by utilizing targeted radio and television broadcasts to convince the local populace that the United States and the Government of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan (GIROA) were winning the war and restoring stability.
This infrastructure was routinely used to invert tactical reality. There were numerous occasions where the Taliban and the Afghan National Police (ANP) were engaged in active Troops in Contact (TIC) situations, and the Taliban decisively defeated the ANP on the ground. However, through the immediate deployment of informational assets, the narrative was instantly spun. The radio towers broadcasted a highly curated fabrication, announcing that the ANP had routed the Taliban and successfully secured the area. Because the state controlled the first broadcast, the local population accepted the illusion as truth. This operational framework proves that whoever controls the initial transmission controls the perceived stability of the entire region, allowing a failing government to project artificial legitimacy while completely masking its tactical incompetence.
3. The Weaponization of Strategic Cut-Outs and NGO Blindness
While information architectures are used to manufacture artificial state victories, standard Information Operations (IO) are simultaneously deployed to hide state-sanctioned atrocities by blaming them on the designated Boogie Man.
When an information operation requires a shocking catalyst to completely turn a populace against an irregular movement, a corrupt state will routinely deploy its own assets to commit atrocities. Masked operatives, mercenary elements, or state-vetted criminal cut-outs are dispatched into target zones to execute high-visibility crimes—such as entering a neighborhood, executing a family, and abusing the local population.
The public cannot tell the difference. When an armed group invades a neighborhood to execute an innocent family and commit horrific acts, who is to say it is actually Viv Ansanm? Because that is the exact narrative immediately broadcasted to the people via social media, television, and radio, the general public absorbs it as undisputed fact. They have no way of knowing if it was Viv Ansanm or an outside proxy acting as them. The community automatically blames the insurgency because the media framework pre-programmed them to do so, successfully turning the populace against the domestic coalition.
Crucially, international NGOs and foreign intervention forces routinely act as the ultimate narrative shield for this deception. Having served as a U.S. Contingent Commander in Haiti under an international mandate, I know exactly how these reporting channels function from the inside. NGO country teams, foreign commanders, and international observers are structurally funneled to accept the host government's sanitized press releases at face value. They pass these state-engineered fabrications up the bureaucratic ladder to global oversight boards, transforming local state disinformation into official international stabilization policies. This tactical deception allows a corrupt state to bury its own political warfare in the blood of its citizens, using manufactured outrage to legitimize heavy-handed military crackdowns, foreign interventions, and the total foreclosure of political dialogue.
4. The Real-World Parallel: The Gana Precedent in Benue State
This is not a theoretical conspiracy; it is a field-tested historical playbook. During my international operations under official embassy programs in Nigeria, this exact script was executed in Benue State regarding the notorious militia leader Terwase Akwaza, widely known as "Gana."
The official public narrative eventually framed Gana as a one-dimensional, bloodthirsty monster responsible for absolute devastation. His militia was undeniably responsible for horrific slaughters across the region—frequently razing entire villages to the ground, killing every inhabitant, and burning the infrastructure to ash.
But a deep operational dive reveals the hidden transactional architecture behind the bloodletting:
- The State Payroll: Gana did not operate independently. He was directly on the payroll of the Benue State government. High-level state officials hired this militia leader to do their dirty work, weaponizing his raw kinetic capability to execute targeted political hits against the governor’s political opponents.
- The Scorched-Earth Smoke Screen: To hide the true political nature of these liquidations, the militia was ordered to execute scorched-earth operations. By killing everyone in the village and burning it to the ground, the specific political assassinations were completely buried inside the chaos of a seemingly random, savage ethnic or bandit raid.
- The Manufactured Media Shield: The Benue government maintained complete control over the narrative by directly feeding mis- and disinformation to the television, radio, and print media networks. When these villages were wiped out, the news broadcasts would report that an anonymous "gang or rival militia" committed the crimes. Gana’s name was intentionally scrubbed from the press. The local government areas believed the disinformation completely, entirely blind to the fact that the perpetrators were state-vetted cut-outs executing government-sanctioned hits.
- The Operational Flip: The moment Gana’s localized leverage, manpower, and popularity grew too large—threatening the stability and control of his former state sponsors—the narrative flipped overnight. The state apparatus immediately deployed its informational machinery to scrub their own fingerprints from his rise. They transformed him into the ultimate regional Boogie Man, blaming him for atrocities that masked operatives and rival political cut-outs committed. When he finally accepted an official state amnesty offer in September 2020 and came to the bargaining table to seek a diplomatic resolution, the military intercepted his convoy and extrajudicial liquidated him. They killed him not to stop the violence, but to permanently bury the state secrets, transactions, and political cut-out networks he commanded.
- The alleged relationship between Gana and political elites was not merely the subject of rumor. In 2017, the Department of State Services (DSS) filed a counter-affidavit in Federal High Court alleging that former Benue State Governor Gabriel Suswam was affiliated with Gana and that intelligence linked both men to the wave of killings and insecurity across Benue State."
5. The Mirror Image in Port-au-Prince
The global security establishment and international NGOs are running the exact same playbooks on the streets of Haiti today. The U.S. government, foreign stabilization details, and the autocratic local regime utilize weaponized Information Operations to frame the unified coalition Viv Ansanm strictly as an unnuanced, savage "gang" syndicate.
They splash horrific reports of neighborhood slaughters across international broadcasts and NGO security briefings to ensure the public remains in a state of compliant trauma. But as an operational specialist who has trained specialized tactical units and executed advanced Human Behavior Pattern and Recognition Analysis (HBPRA), I ask the unanswerable question: Who is to say that the individuals committing these specific atrocities are not deniable cut-outs working directly on the payroll of corrupt local oligarchs or elements within the unrepresentative government itself?
The Benue case demonstrates that attribution in irregular warfare is not always as straightforward as public reporting suggests. Having observed that operational pattern firsthand, I view similar attribution claims in Haiti through the same analytical lens. Before accepting immediate narratives surrounding atrocities, practitioners should ask a fundamental question: who independently verified the perpetrators, and by what evidentiary standard?"
The public does not know the difference. They see a crime on television or social media and automatically believe the first broadcast. International NGOs validate the deception, using their administrative apparatus to rubber-stamp the narrative and justify the deployment of foreign security missions. The timing tells the real story. The moment Viv Ansanm attempted a diplomatic resolution and announced a transition to a formal political party on January 2, 2025, Washington stepped in with an FTO designation, backed by international compliance metrics. They used an administrative veto to freeze the board. They do not want a political settlement; they need the Boogie Man to remain a monster so they can justify delaying the general elections indefinitely and maintain an autocratic status quo that has zero elected officials today.
The Cold Bottom Line
The theater of modern counterinsurgency relies entirely on the manipulation of human perception. If a corrupt government, an intervening empire, or international NGOs can control the radio towers, the briefing rooms, and the social media algorithms, they can manufacture a monster to hide their own political crimes and justify any level of sovereign subversion.
But when you strip away the propaganda, the math remains absolute. You cannot use information spin, NGO mandates, or state-directed cut-outs to erase the cold reality of territory control on the ground. Readers of my 2024 analysis, "Joumou / Pumpkin Soup 2024, The Taste of Freedom..." recognize that genuine self-determination requires cutting through these manufactured semantic traps. The establishment must either stop the information operations and allow an uncompromised, local diplomatic dialogue to occur, or watch their manufactured illusions completely collapse under the weight of real-world terrain math.
Ultimately, history dictates that in the theater of asymmetric conflict, the terms "bad guy" and "good guy" are entirely relative. When the smoke clears and the state-controlled informational monopoly is dismantled, operational practitioners know the truth: sometimes the perceived "bad guy" is actually the "good guy" trying to secure local survival against an oppressive architecture. These labels are merely tactical assets of convenience utilized by the dominant power structure to manage human terrain.
Posted Sept. 1, 2026