Bogart: "If you're the police, where are your badges?"
Bandit (Bedoya): "Badges!? We ain't got no badges. We don't need no badges! I don't have to show you any stinking badges!!" Treasure of the Sierra Madre, 1948.
- Acapulco, Mexico. Drug gangs posed as federal soldiers (including the red berets of special forces) to conduct an inspection of two local police departments in Acapulco. The soldiers disarmed the policemen, transported them to a remote storage area, and then gunned them down. Many local police stations were evacuated in response to these attacks.
- Karbala, Iraq. In January, five US troops were abducted and then later killed by attackers posing as US soldiers complete with US vehicles, uniforms, weapons, and english-speaking drivers. As a follow-on, US troops raided a black market warehouse in Baghdad in late January that contained enough stolen US uniforms and equipment to outfit a battalion.
- Los Angeles, US. 789 TSA (Transportation Security Administration) uniforms and badges have been stolen from LAX since late 2002. The uniforms and badges provide wearers with wide access of airport facilities. "If anyone gets these uniforms and badges they can pretty much walk in and do what they want."
Complexity and Globalization
Of course, this technique is as old as warfare itself. However, the complexity and speed of the current environment make it more effective than ever. In response to the loss of local control caused by globalization, many states have over centralized their control over security. These centralized efforts haven't resulted in a single hierarchy, but rather a plethora of overlapping and often conflicting efforts that routinely trump local authority (an example of how complexification in response to environmental challenges are now providing negative returns on investment). Real-time verification is nearly impossible given the remoteness, obscurity and opacity of these parallel "authorities."
As someone who has used this technique on numerous occasions in the real world, I can vouch that it works exceedingly well for exactly the reasons I list above -- even more so if you count the benefits of public fear and inter-organizational distrust that guerrillas generate by using this tactic.
Organic Security
“Once the legal monopoly of armed force, long claimed by the state, is wrested out of its hands, existing distinctions between war and crime will break down much as is already the case today in . . . Lebanon, Sri Lanka, El Salvador, Peru, or Colombia.” Martin van Creveld.
States may not have an option. The catch is that if the national government doesn't/can't step in to rectify a decline in local control, forms of organic security, exemplified by the AUC in Colombia and the militias/paramilitaries in Brazil's favelas (of which these groups now control 92 out of 600) will replace them.