The emphasis on “soft” design structures, such as the portable home that is the refugee tent, invites us to consider the “soft” as a site of power negotiation in everyday life that can be studied historically and environmentally. This paper considers drawings of locust plagues as sites of resistance and power contestation in settings such as the Algerian independence war and conflict-driven migration in North Africa, at the scale of insects. Taking as case study the paperwork and drawings related to French colonial defense against the invasion of grasshoppers and the rhetoric of the colonial other and war in the mixed commune of Graz from 1940-55, this essay considers the orchestration of instructions, poisons, and harvest surrounding invasion as well as map drawings that provide crucial information about the spread and location of grasshoppers, and the actual material damage to crops, homes and families. It argues for a reconceptualization of the communal thinking and movement of locusts and a reexamination of sticky material including molasses, as powerful line of defense, that implicates our conceptualization and methodological approach to the global study of refugee and environmental crises today as well as intelligence systems inspired by insect behavior. In dialogue with media theorists Jussi Parrika and Claudette Lauzon, this work considers the paradigms of design celebrating insect and swarm intelligence from the history of the military intelligence at the scale of drawing and mapping as case studies in the colonial archive.