The Story of the Mini-Manual

On February 24, 2022, Ukraine invaded Russia. Two days later John Spencer tweeted a thread “what my advice would be to civilian resistors in Ukraine, especially Kyiv. Someone with no military training but wanting to resist. Here are a few things…” The tweet went viral with over 20 million views and over 23,000 retweets. That tweet led to a series of tweets with images telling Ukraine civilians how to protect themselves and assist the military in preparing their cities to be defended. The tweets became a manual. By March, the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense placed the manual on their website for resistors. The manual began to be used by Ukrainian civilians and trainers of civilians across the entire country. The manual was seen from Lviv to Mariupol. Messages and photos of the manual being used in Ukraine began to flow in.  

John did not know it, but many of his life and career experience led to him being the right person, at the right moment, with the right information. He joined the army as a teenager, served a unique 25-year army career in assignments like being a Ranger Instructor at the US Army’s elite leadership school to advising the senior general in the entire Army. He served as a commander in two pivotal combat tours in Iraq. One during the invasion of Iraq in 2003 and another at the height of sectarian violence in Baghdad when Iraq was on the brink of a full civil war in 2008. Both tours involved heavy urban combat. Later, John combined his experience with almost a decade of academic research in being one of the only scholars in the world that studied exclusively urban warfare as the Chair of Urban Warfare and instructor at the United States Military Academy. He studied urban warfare from ancient Jerusalem to battles against ISIS in the Middle East. He travelled the world touring recent urban battlefields and advising militaries on how to fight in urban areas.

The book also became an international sensation as many citizens that live in small countries around the world who face bigger threats saw the value to having a ‘how to’ guide to save their countries. Versions of the manual have been translated into Ukrainian, Turkish, Latvian, Japanese, Mandarin, Persian, and Arabic. It is now available in seventeen different languages.