The urban guerrilla functions best in small teams. A fire team is made up of no more than four or five members. Two or more fire teams, separated and sealed off from other fire teams for security reasons, and directed or coordinated by one or two leaders, is known as a fire group.
All members of a fire team must have complete confidence in their fellow fighters. The fire team leader should be the best marksman or the man who knows how to operate the machine gun. The fire team plans and carries out urban guerrilla operations, expropriates and retains their own weapons, and studies and corrects its own tactical errors.
Tasks handed down from the urban guerrilla strategic command take precedence over all other operations. Still each fire team is not a team unless it maintains its own initiative. For this reason rigidity in organization must be avoided so that the independent fire team retains a full measure of initiative. The old forms of organization exemplified by traditional left-wing Communist movements do not exist in our organization.
Therefore, any fire team can decide to attack a bank, to kidnap, or to execute an agent of the dictatorship, a person identified with reaction, or a North American spy, or issue propaganda materials, or conduct a war of nerves against the enemy, without prior consultation with the strategic command. The strategic command only sets the priority of objectives for individual fire teams and fire groups.
The fire team does not remain passive awaiting orders from above. It attacks. Individual urban guerrillas can set up their own fire team and begin independent action as a way to become part of the greater urban guerrilla organization.
This method of action eliminates the need to know who carries out what action, since free initiative is based on the need to increase continuously the volume of guerrilla operations so as to wear down the government and force it onto the defensive.
The fire team is the urban guerrilla's instrument of organized action. It is the fire team that plans, launches, and carries through to real success all guerrilla operations.
Guerrilla leaders rely on fire teams to accomplish strategic objectives, and to carry out its actions throughout the nation. Their role is to provide advice and aid to fire team in difficulty or to help with their needs.
The urban guerrilla organization is composed of an indestructible network of fire teams. The organization coordinates between various fire teams and groups on a simple and practical basis. It may also participate in attacks. The urban guerrilla organization exists solely to engage in pure and simple revolutionary warfare.