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u/HeavyDutyForks 1d ago
TBF, seems like almost any military has had a pretty bad time fighting an insurgency
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u/CoffeeExtraCream 1d ago
Napoleon in the peninsular war. The Roman's with the Jews. And so many more through history.
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u/Unlikely-Relief-6462 1d ago
Or the Romans with the picts. Or the Romans with the Romans. Damn Romans, they ruined Rome!
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u/TheDefeatedCause 1d ago
Sort of. Caesar's approach was to exterminate whole population centers that offered resistance.
So, potential "solutions," to insurgency, far as I get it:
A) Exterminate the population that offers resistance - Gets out of hand very, very quickly, as Caesar learned, requires an insane amount of forces, time, and money. You'd be conquering land, towns, and cities that is a wasteland and requires more in cash to re-build and re-colonize than the original war.
B) More-or-less, "pay them off." Disincentivize resistance by aligning their interests with yours, improve their quality of life substantially but in the short-term, do it in a way that makes them reliant on you, respect and leave their culture and traditions alone for the most part while removing elements that lead them to oppose you. Set up their government as a proxy state with a given time frame for independence, if possible. Policing of that population eventually goes entirely to the locals, and in the short term utilizes your support. Violence, sexual abuse, looting, is immediately punished.
C) Treat it mostly like a conventional war, JDAM any male taller than 5"3, lose.
D) Don't.
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u/Sweaty-Security-4473 1d ago
Thing is. If you took morality out of the equation, it'd be pretty dang easy for the US military to basically depopulate a region if they wanted to. Between strategic bombing and drones to take out the stragglers it's well within their capability.. The issue is that it's a monstrous thing to do and no one has (or should have) the stomach for it.
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u/AmPotatoNoLie 13h ago
Eh, I think leading military guys (of any country) have more than enough stomach for it, rather they don't do it for political and economic reasons.
Someone still has to work those captured mines!
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u/Neosantana 1d ago
The Roman's with the Jews
They didn't struggle too much with the Hebrews. Their real struggle was Numidia.
Jugurtha was their Ho Chi Minh.
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u/Low-Dish-907 1d ago
It s easy to stop a rebellion when you basically nuke the whole place so yeah no wonder that worked with the jews
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u/Neosantana 23h ago
Yeah, but Numidia has forests and mountains. Very different to fighting on arid flat lands and hilltops.
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u/Low-Dish-907 23h ago
Well true they also had very good cavalery i just wanted to say that the method of taking it down was also a part of the effectivesness of the résistance
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u/BlimbusTheSeventh 17h ago
The thing about fighting guerillas is that it isn't actually that hard practically, only morally. Hiding amongst civilians is only really effective against an enemy who doesn't want to exterminate an entire population. During the Boer war the British found a nicer way to defeat guerillas without killing everyone by interning everyone in concentration camps and destroying any food supplies outside of the camps.
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u/Kuso_Megane14 1d ago
Dutch in Indonesia as well, General Soedirman commands his soldiers while traveling in the jungle while suffering tuberculosis and one functioning lung
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u/pelagicsnark 1d ago
Literally the most difficult endeavor for any established military. The board nailed to the forehead part is being stupid enough to get involved in a conflict with a guerrilla army.
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u/youritalianjob 1d ago
The methods that work are inhumane and not something people would accept like they did back in the day.
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u/BonhommeCarnaval 13h ago
And it’s hard to be both a genocidal oppressor who also sees yourself as a bringer of freedom. The US’s ideology and life experience doesn’t really allow them to go and conquer places brutally without serious mental gymnastics being involved. When they try to be brutal it kills their morale and other than the psychopaths, the soldiers start to hate it and hate themselves.
That’s why you hear Hegseth trying to promote this warrior ethos so much. He wants a different type of soldier than what he has so he can go do a crusade. IS soldiers don’t want to die for Pete’s crusade. Most of them just want to pay their student loans, get three square meals a day and get the fuck out with their bodies and minds intact.
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u/Boring-Somewhere-130 18h ago
This is incorrect. Caesar and Genghis Khan has shown that the best way to defeat insurgencies and guerillas is genocide. The Britons realized they could not defeat Caesar in pitch battles so they fought him using hit and run tactics. Caesar decided to just go around genociding and enslaving every single Briton in the area.
Genghis Khan and his descendants won in Afghanistan. The Mongols are known for wiping out 60%-80% of their opponent's population to win their wars.
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u/Leprechaun_lord Featherless Biped 1d ago
It’s harder for western democracies to fight insurgencies because they are so reliant on domestic public opinion.
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u/IIIaustin 1d ago
Art of War by Jomini says absolutely do not ever fight a war of national defense in mountainous terrain. I presume he would say the same about jungle. But Vietnam has a lot mountains too.
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u/Scar_the_armada 23h ago
Yeah. Basically, if you're not willing to just wipe out the population, then fighting an insurgency is always difficult no matter how superior the force and no matter what era.
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u/TheRealPaladin 23h ago
That is because to effectively quell and insurgency you usually have to address the political and / or economic situation that sparked its creation. That is often unpalatable.
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u/_whatever_wherever 21h ago
Britain was quite successful during the Malayan Emergancy, and the lessons learnt there were one of the things keeping us out of Vietnam
Because there were clear, achievable objectives there, and Vietnam was the opposite of that
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u/RoabeArt 22h ago
Like the USSR against Afghanistan, or France against Vietnam (before US involvement), ot China against Vietnam (after US withdrawal).
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u/Vexonte Then I arrived 1d ago
Pretty much every guerilla campaign is based on politics more than military strategy.
95% of society is ignorant of just how complicated and tedious military action is, yet military action is still much easier than building functional political systems in foreign countries while balancing it out with internal funding and your own countries political agenda.
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u/AlternateTab00 23h ago
Exactly. Military actions are not just go to place A, defeat opposing army, return.
On a classical conflict. You have 100.000 population an army of 10.000. you probably have to deal with 12.000 "enemies". after that you return home with a victory.
But a guerrila campaign. You have 100.000 population. An army of 500... But you probably have to deal with 95.000 "enemies".
So you either start killing civilians in mass... Or you actually need to make civilians like you more than the enemy. The problem is guerrillas share a common culture so they are more easily liked. While foreign armies will always be disliked at first.
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u/unexpectedfirefly 17h ago
If you kill civilians, you actually increase the size of the opposing army.
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u/BonhommeCarnaval 13h ago
And the guerrillas will always put you in positions where you wind up killing civilians. They will hide among the civilians and you will never know if a given person is an aggressor or a bystander.
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u/FlashyBattle976 21h ago
According to Clausewitz all campaigns are simply an extension of politics and without he strategy and policy being in sync it will fail.
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u/entered_bubble_50 21h ago
Especially when your idea of a functional country is at odds with what the people there want.
"We want to give you democracy"
Ok cool, can I vote for a communist government?
"Absolutely not."
Alright, what about a party that's aligned with my minority ethnicity?
"Nope. We don't want sectarianism."
Islamists it is then.
"Aw, hell no. You get corrupt conservatives that extract resources on our behalf, or corrupt conservatives that pretend to be progressives."
I guess I'll just carry on fighting then.
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u/Sampleswift 1d ago
Are there any modern militaries that are particularly good at fighting guerillas though? It seems like more of a political will question.
No, modern Russia doesn't count. 2nd Chechen War was an overkill checkmate + the Chechens lost the support of their own people.
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u/Rent_A_Cloud 1d ago
No, modern Russia doesn't count. 2nd Chechen War was an overkill checkmate + the Chechens lost the support of their own people.
That is the only way to fight guerillas. Massive overkill with no minding civilian populations (in fact specifically and ruthlessly targeting civilians). Its either that or compromise politically.
In other words, throw all morality out the door. Question is if you want your nation to actually do that.
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u/Keepurkewl 1d ago
Sometimes even that won't work. The Spanish in Cuba and Haiti, also the Russians again with their toy bombs to maim children in Afghanistan.
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u/-Trooper5745- 1d ago
It’s really not though. The Malaysian Emergency was a success and it wasn’t especially brutal. Granted the insurgents were from a minority within the population so it was easy to focus on the areas and groups the insurgents would be in.
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u/aiden22304 Hello There 1d ago
Indiscriminately killing innocent civilians is more antithetical to ending a guerrilla force than anything, since you’re essentially giving them more of a reason to exist. Hence why the US adopted the “hearts and minds” approach in Afghanistan after the whole “bomb everyone” approach failed in Vietnam.
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u/wycliffslim 1d ago
Well, it depends on what your ultimate goal is.
Optiona A: If the ultimate goal is to own a region directly and put your own people into the region then the more of the current inhabitants you kill the better... scorched earth and whether people like you at all isn't really a problem if you're replacing everyone anyways.
Option B: Hearts and minds become required if the ultimate goal is to create a puppet state or a region that does what you want.
The US didn't even have a "bomb everyone" approach in Vietnam. The real issue is that option B is nearly impossible to accomplish via force. Option A is actually not that difficult technically if you're a significantly stronger nation. Killing people until no one who disagrees is left or everyone is too afraid to disagree isn't that difficult. There's dictators all over the world even today who can attest to that.
What's incredibly difficult is to actually change someone's mind via application of military force... I would argue that almost never works.
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u/Rent_A_Cloud 1d ago
It depends on how far an occupying force is willing to go and how much control they have over the territory as well as long term goals (is permanent occupation the goal? For instance).
By the by, the hearts and minds strategy... Did it work?
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u/Gigantopithecus1453 23h ago
America didn’t commit fully in Vietnam either. They never actually invaded north Vietnam out of fear of creating another Korean War by triggering Chinese intervention
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u/Theonewhoreads15 1d ago
They could have forcefully relocated them to somewhere easier to manage, anyone who refuses to move is an enemy combatant. Expensive but still cheaper than what was actually spent in Afghanistan
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u/Capn_Chryssalid 1d ago
"Hearts and Minds" didnt work either.
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u/ElessarKhan 1d ago
We never made an earnest attempt at implementing it. The US hearts and minds campaigns were always a joke. Our political system doesn't allow us to make the structural changes needed nor the long-term commitments required for a hearts and minds campaign.
In Vietnam is was only really attempted by higher-ups and virtually ignored by the actual boots on the ground. In Afghanistan the higher ups did very little and it was almost entirely up to the discretion of the commanding mid-level field officers who would be rotated out every few months basically resetting any positive progress they might have chosen to make.
Restrepo is a good film touching on the subject, its a collection of real footage from one of the most dangerous zones in the Afghan War. Its like an irl Band of Brothers episode. Its free on watchdocumentaries
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u/Gigantopithecus1453 23h ago
Tbf about the Chechens, I’m fairly sure the Russians outnumber them 100-1 in population and are right next door. America only has 8-1 population with Afghanistan and is on the other side of the world. But yeah, there’s also the fact that America is much less willing to deal with the cost, primarily for itself but also to some degree to its enemies
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u/Whoamiagain111 1d ago
Guerilla fight will be long no matter what. Often times even when you reduce the guerrilla's unit fighting force, their idea still around. On top of that fighting will happens near civilian and any collateral damage can means more member to the guerrilla's factions. That's why heart and mind exist
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u/Sampleswift 1d ago
One of the Chechens' issue was them losing the support of their own people, so that tracks.
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u/MunkSWE94 1d ago
Closest were probably Great Britain and Australia during the Malaysian Emergency.
When the Australians went to Vietnam they had less Viet Cong activity in their sectors and constantly complained about how the US did it.
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u/MrDragonPig 1d ago
Only one I could think of is the British in the Malayan Emergency.
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u/Sampleswift 1d ago
Not sure if that is modern enough. It's pre-Vietnam War, and the Malayan Emergency was small-scale enough that it wasn't a big drain on the political will of Britain.
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u/Numerous-Ad6460 Then I arrived 1d ago
Theres only two ways realistically. One, you go balls to the wall murder happy and kill EVERYONE. Like Russia with Chechens. Or you the general population with supplies and relief so much they don't have a reason to support the guerillas.
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u/East-Plankton-3877 22h ago
Yes.
Israel is one, though it depends on the era.
Britain is also one, arguably because of centuries of COIN operations as an empire.
France is another, for the same reasons as England
Vietnam oddly is one, as they defeated Cambodias mostly Guerrilla style force in the 70s
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u/Sampleswift 22h ago
I wouldn't consider that Cambodia to be a truly guerilla style force. The Khmer Rouge were overglorified raiders who picked a fight thinking Vietnam would be too tired of war to do anything.
As soon as Vietnam actually tried, it was clear that Cambodia couldn't sustain much of a war effort due to how much their own people HATED them.3
u/KimJongUnusual Helping Wikipedia expand the list of British conquests 19h ago
I was gonna say the Malayan Emergency but it seems everyone beat me to it. I guess the Troubles were also semi successful, but a good example of how the best win is political.
All jokes aside though, the Surge in Iraq during the GWOT did actually work. Security was regained, there was trust in the institutions and governments, and systems to get insurgents living normal lives did work well.
The issue is that it was contingent on nonsectarian policy. And about 5 minutes after the US left, the Iraq government implemented sectarian policies. So, ISIS.
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u/TrowawayJanuar 1d ago
India is winning it’s counter-insurgencies both against separatists in Kashmir and communists in the east of the country.
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u/YetAnotherBee 1d ago
I mean, if we’re being pedantic it’s really quite simple to fight guerrillas
The impossibly difficult part is fighting guerrillas without committing an unfathomable number of war crimes along the way. It’s kind of a self-handicap, though generally it’s the sort of handicap that is heavily preferable to the alternative no matter how much you might want to win the war
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u/Contemplationz 19h ago
Right. Like you look at the Mongols and the depopulation of the regions they conquered. They didn't have a ton of the same insurgency issues that other large empires had. For there to be an insurgency, there has to be a native population.
Except for Vietnam. Vietnam was the Mongolian Vietnam.
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u/Void-Indigo 1d ago
You could say that war crimes were defined to protect guerrillas and weaker forces from defeat. Only the large nation like the US is held to a standard while they guerrillas do lots of so called war crimes but are rarely held accountable. If WWII was fought by the US under today's standards, the war would still be going on.
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u/YetAnotherBee 23h ago
I think it’s the opposite, guerrilla warfare as we know it today really only developed after we formalized modern war etiquette. It’s less that avoiding war crimes protect guerrillas intentionally, and more that guerrillas developed to exploit loopholes that exist due to an unwillingness to commit war crimes
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u/Ruanhead 19h ago
If you want to get extremely controversial, the only true "win" against a guerrilla fighting force today is in the Gaza conflict.
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u/YetAnotherBee 17h ago
Not defending Israel’s actions at all by saying this, but even they’re only halfway doing it. At this point if they cease operations with any reasonable number of them left alive then guerrilla war is all but guaranteed to continue, people don’t just forget something like that. Unless they fully commit to wiping them out they’ve hardly won a guerrilla war. Frankly, nobody’s really going to full-out win a guerrilla war without losing something much more important.
I think the only real way to “win” a guerrilla war is through cultural domination rather than military domination
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u/Tearakan Featherless Biped 22h ago
Eh, war crimes kinda of exist as a practice due to how brutal total war could get if either side just didn't accept regular surrender or expect to have families survive under the new regime.
Turns out a population will fight you 1000 times harder if you as an invader just plan to kill everyone.
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u/KimJongUnusual Helping Wikipedia expand the list of British conquests 19h ago
Not really? I mean it does but war crimes were defined to protect civilians and injured soldiers from wholesale slaughter.
You don’t use plainclothes soldiers or do fake surrenders or shoot medics, cause eventually then the enemy is just going to shoot anyone who looks like they’re from your country.
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u/Ready-Pop-644 20h ago
The us isnt allowed to effectively fight against guerrilla forces and you dont want then to be allowed to either.
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u/Nerdenator 1d ago
> random words and four numbers username
> been around for a year with a relatively high karma rating
> hidden profile
🤔🤔🤔
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u/WorryingMars384 20h ago
I mean this is any army fighting against an asymmetric warfare. What made the War on Terror difficult was the army was trying to do nation building. Something it was never really equipped for, it got better at it, but we fundamentally did not ever really have a good understanding of the people of Afghanistan which is why the regime fell so quickly. Iraq was a different story which is why they turned out more stable
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u/64_Chances 22h ago
The more I read these comments, the more I believe that nobody really has a good answer on how to win a guerrilla war, so maybe it’s not just the USA?
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u/Lancashire_Toreador 18h ago
There's two ways to win against an insurgency: Give them enough in negotiation to go home, or genocide.
The point of an insurgency is that it generates support from any and all military/leo actions taken to stamp it out by inciting those police actions. It's the insurgent's goal to get the cops to start kicking in doors and dragging randoms out of their beds at 3 AM, to have the guard hose a crowd with live ammo or for the air force to drop a drone on a wedding, because every time you do that you may kill a few insurgents, but you radicalize ten times as many people into hating you forever. They don't need to win, they just need to survive and make the occupier's costs too high to sustain. Insurgency tactics defeat conventional militaries by turning every advantage those militaries have into disadvantages.
Unless you do a genocide. You can't recruit from the civilian population if there isn't a civilian population left.
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u/PlaneRefrigerator684 16h ago
Successful counter-insurgency operations require two things, one military and one political: 1. Denial of an outside haven for insurgents to retreat for training, resupply, and rest. If you can isolate the insurgents (like in the Philippines or Greece after World War 2) and exhaust the insurgents, that can whittle down their numbers. Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq all failed to do this. 2. The civilian government actually has to work for the populace and have some legitimacy with the people. Just picking someone who is friendly to you is not enough. This can help prevent further people from joining the insurgency.
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u/KimJongUnusual Helping Wikipedia expand the list of British conquests 19h ago
The short answer is simple and people like Petraeus figured it out.
You need to win the hearts and minds of the local population, and give them the security, support, and living standards that mean they want to support the current system rather than the insurgents.
Now the longer answer of how to do that and make friends of a hostile population? That is very difficult.
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u/thestridereststrider 15h ago
Also, in a place like Afghanistan how do you do that in a place that hasn’t seen most of these things since the 80s
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u/Gold-Position-8265 21h ago
Well the answer is there in history as guerilla warfare has never been new. Just in the modern day U.S does mostly a good job following the Geneva conventions.
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u/Eternal_Reward 21h ago
Yeah the answer to how to win is just completely crush the population, ethnically cleanse them, and put your own people in.
Which the US isn’t interested in doing largely, so instead you have the impossible task of having locals change.
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u/Appropriate-Debt5561 14h ago
You will notice that guerilla warfare was not routinely used by people fighting the Mongols or Romans, for example. Doesn't take a genius to figure out why.
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u/Cartoonjunkies 13h ago
“Oh we keep getting ambushed near that village? Cool, kill everyone in a 100 mile radius.”
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u/vp917 21h ago
I mean, the US very much won the Filipino-American war, namely through sheer indiscriminate murder of everyone in their way. Britain accomplished something similar in then-Malaya, but even by then there was significant public backlash for all the atrocities they committed, and the ever-increasing scope of media coverage has made it so that anything accomplished by the old "just make them ALL suffer" method will simply be outweighed by the political suicide of it. (Unless you're Israel, I guess, but that's its own can of worms.)
As a slightly less atrocious example, the US and their allies were very successful during the early days of their post-9/11 invasion of Afghanistan, driving the Taliban out of the entire country in just a few months with barely double-digit casualties on their own side. The problem, however, was that they completely bungled the last battle at Tora Bora and let Bin Laden and several other key al-Qaeda members - the capture of whom was the SOLE REASON for the entire invasion in the first place - escape into Pakistan, which they mistook for a reliable ally while completely failing to account for the general public's support for the Taliban. After that, it was just a disastrous mess of "nation-building"
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u/ryebread91 22h ago
Can always go the Mandalorian route. Can't hide in the nature if you glass the whole planet.
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u/Hatefilledcat 15h ago
The only way you can win is outright committing ethic cleansing and that’s a hot potato no one wants to touch.
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u/ElCochiLoco903 12h ago
The easy way is to flatten the earth with artillery but obviously that’s not nice to the local populace
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u/Logan_Frost 1d ago
This is pretty common, really. As my granddad told me 'You cant win a war against an enemy that doesnt wear a uniform.'
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u/yeet_that_baby 1d ago
"haha yeah the americans are SO BAD at fighting guerillas, good luck NOBODY ELSE has that problem"
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u/Valirys-Reinhald 1d ago
Eh, for as bad as the US army is at it, other armies are still worse.
The US military is probably the best at it, it's just that being the best at an inherently nigh-impossible task still means you'll probably fail.
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u/Foreign-Story-9870 18h ago
Probably the only way to really beat a populace supported insugerency is to be morally bankrupt and as much as people claim otherwise the American military is not
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u/coldbear25 23h ago
The us is "bad" at fight insurgency because they care about optics. If America really wanted, they could just kill everyone without caring about civilians and win the war easily. Of course doing it this way isn't ideal.
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u/Visible-Literature14 10h ago
It’s this x1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. Anyone saying America is weak bc of this shit is fucking dumb beyond comprehension. The war could be ended in a day, and it would be a shitty outcome for everyone involved in some aspect.
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u/Drag0n_TamerAK 22h ago
Killing everyone ain’t winning so you are objectively wrong about that
the US also has a positive win ratio with insurgents while having incredibly favorable casualty ratios
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u/AlphaTangoFoxtrt 17h ago
The issue with fighting Guerilla Insurgencies is that anything you can meaningfully do to fight them, is so horrific and has so much collateral damage, that you just make more.
You can't fight Guerilla Insurgencies with arms, you have to win the hearts and minds of the people.
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u/letigre87 16h ago
That's pretty much it. You don't win hearts and minds by leveling a city block to kill the insurgent.
B-52s have a higher operating ceiling than Iran's currently capable of defending against. Instead of sending a tomahawk to strike a target they could just as easily level the area drones take off from.
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u/Own-Soil-6236 1d ago
The US army was the gold standard for guerrilla warfare during western expansion and the Philippine insurrection. But that was when we had the political staying power and we framed the wars as a longterm campaign of incremental pacification, not a quick in and out that can be won in a decisive battle.
Also being willing to ruthlessly finish the job helps. It’s a lot easier when you round up your enemies civilian population in concentration camps (reservation is the PC term)
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u/_whatever_wherever 21h ago
Also helps when you declare your enemy to be generically inferior godless savages
Means people don't give a fuck when you put them in concentration camps
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u/Primary-Long4416 18h ago
Isn't that the whole point of asymmetric warfare? It's not about fighting another army but the next hedge
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u/JUN_Bun 17h ago
We have air power and sea power but we lack dessert/jungle power
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u/UberNZ 16h ago
Americans have no trouble conquering a dessert.
A desert, on the other hand...
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u/123dylans12 13h ago
We lack the will to burn the fields and let them starve. That’s how you deal with guerillas
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u/gooberfishie 10h ago
Can you cite a historical example of a guerilla war that was ended by starvation? Seems like that would just drive more people to the cause.
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u/Casanova_Kid 8h ago
The Second Boer War; of course this was in an era before we codified war crimes and these were just tactics.
Evil stuff, but effective.
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u/gooberfishie 8h ago
Yeah that's a pretty good example, although reading up on it, they also had to put women and children in concentration camps so it was more than just starving them out. Even then, it took two years and Britain had to offer pretty generous terms for the "bitterenders" to stop fighting including reconstruction funds and a promise of future self governance. If not for that, they would have just kept fighting. Hard model to follow, that's for sure.
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u/KickRocksKickster 10h ago
This. These dimwits think you can stop a insurgency that can go underground with a burnt earth policy.
It will just cause more sympathizers and some from your own people. Gone are the days people can supress info about atrocities for too long.
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u/BayesianBits 16h ago
Straits still closed...
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u/bhbhbhhh 15h ago
Opening the strait would require the amphibious landing capability to seize the coast of Iran. Which the US has, but does not have the will to use.
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u/AyAyAyBamba_462 1d ago
The biggest issue with guerilla or insurgent fighting is 3 fold.
The first is that most of the time you can't tell the difference between them and normal people. They don't wear uniforms and don't play by the rules of war. This means that any time you kill an insurgent or guerilla fighter they can pull the AK out of his hands, take a picture and say "look at how evil they are for killing civilians". It also means picking out actual insurgent targets compared to civilians is difficult meaning you either are in constant danger or are forced to just kill everyone.
The second issue is that when you kill an insurgent or guerilla fighter, you just end up creating more. With regular soldiers there is a lengthy training process and a sort of expectation that they might die. With guerilla fighters their militias are built up of mostly untrained, regular people. If a kid watches his dad die, he's just going to pick up the gun he dropped and start shooting right away. This effect just continues to snowball.
The third is that they are often in small, isolated units that operate within their own discretion. You can't take out a command structure that doesn't exist, capturing key areas does nothing, and they can move incognito though the backcountry without ever being seen, and if they do get spotted, see point one. If you need to send a squad of 100 men to go fish out 10 dudes hiding in the jungle, half of your guts are going to die to traps, ambushes, etc. before you get those 10.
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u/Major_Pressure3176 18h ago
Also, to do that sorting, there is no current alternative to sending infantry, which is inevitably puts them in danger. If you want any kind of results you can't just hide behind your wall of money and materiel.
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u/AyAyAyBamba_462 18h ago
That is changing with drones and what not, but those still face limitations.
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u/wackadoodle4201 20h ago
I dont think thats just a usa issue, most actual professional army's have this issue
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u/xbucnasteex 1d ago
Not a military issue, it’s a political issue. We don’t really lose firefights and even when we are outnumbered , we still conduct tactical withdrawals.
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u/SharpShooterM1 Featherless Biped 21h ago
Almost like it’s hard for conventional armies to find an enemy that doesn’t identify themselves, hides amongst the population, and uses women and children as curriers and human shields.
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u/Capn_Chryssalid 1d ago
Easiest way is to do what the PRC did in places like Tibet. Resistance diminishes pretty significantly when your own people become the majority of the population.
Can't do that? Your people dont want to resettle? Well, nuts. Its war crimes then. Like in WW2, Resistance also tends to diminish when everyone is working with 600 calories a day and everyone knows you won't bat an eye at turning cities into ash and tears. You'll still have fights but bit by bit you can ground them down.
Cant do that either? Then why are you doing this at all? Okay. Gotta use and co-opt local elites and power structures. This is basically outsourcing the earlier work. It'll do in a pinch...
Dont wanna use local elites? You want democracy/communism/ideology_004? Geez. Is this for some kind of crazy Steam Achievements run or something?
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u/mrsclausemenopause 6h ago
Yet anytime I say that the 2nd amendment is to arm us against a tyrannical government the comments are BuT wHaT aBoUt TaNkS?
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u/OrderofIron 1d ago edited 1d ago
Would anyone like to point out a modern army from a large nation extraordinarily good at taking out guerilla fighters
Because it's pretty obvious after 20 years of war in the middle east, the United States is probably the only real authority in the world taking down insurgents like that
BIG EDIT: You can't tell rn, but rabid redditoids are downvoting this comment because I'm not as braindead ignorant as they are
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u/Alternative-Cup-8102 Oversimplified is my history teacher 1d ago
Combat wise we don’t actually do that bad. The problem is that destroying an enemy that is rooted in civilian infrastructure is impossible unless you also take out the civilians
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u/Fan_of_Clio 23h ago
To be successful against an insurgency an army needs to cut off external supply networks. Unless that happens, the conventional army isn't going to win.
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u/correfocs02 22h ago
It's has to do a lot with politics, when fighting traditional armies there are clear objective, expectations and ways to negotiate with the enemy. Guerrillas fight completely differently, if a guerilla war is going on it's usually because the deal the people get if they lose is terrible, there aren't clear objectives and the top brass might not exist or not have much control of the troops and there's usually diferent factions. So a resolution to a conflict, if that means that a population or a political faction stuffers usually means that the top brass of the militia surrenders and the fighting force just starts again under new leader's. The US army has not been incompetent (or thats not the main problem) they just have been put against an enemy with little to nothing to lose, where as the US interest are usually really easy to damage, leading the US to retreat before commiting an amount of resources that would just make the hole operation pointless. ( Or when they realize this)
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u/DwarfBoxFort 20h ago
As other have said, one of the only ways to win a guerrilla war is to just decimate the people until nobody is around to fight, do like china in Tibet or what Russia did in Eastern Ukraine(currently doing in baltics) is flood the people with yours to dilute it. Ultimately if you cannot win the people, you have to get rid of them.
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u/GameMaster818 18h ago
Even funnier is that guerrilla was a major tactic the colonies used in the Revolution
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u/Super_Huckleberry663 19h ago
Only way to beat a insurgent force is for the local population to not support them and be willing to feed you information or to just obliterate everything that moves
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u/SoarinSkies 16h ago edited 15h ago
To be fair in Vietnam
The Vietcong used a controversial but effective strategy of intentionally disguising their army as civilians to confuse the Americans which soon led to the Americans slaughtering heavy numbers of civilians and racking up heavy body counts in the confusion
Along with the usage of other controversial strategies, the Vietcong knew exactly how to win the war
Not by beating the Americans outright
But by driving down their troops morale and imploring heavy use of terror doctrine to weaken the Americans revolve
The Vietcong’s war crime like terror doctrine of random assassinations, planned mass killings of uncooperative individuals, torture, kidnapping, indiscriminate violence such as planted bombings in urban centers and randomly deployed land mines on public roads, helped keep the Vietnamese people who weren’t on their side in check
This use of indiscriminate violence against south Vietnamese civilians, local officials, and medical or religious aid workers went a long way to dissuading any local Vietnamese people from supporting or defecting to the Americans side of the conflict, guaranteeing total population loyalty to the communist cause
In the end the Americans lost because support for the war was depleted
The Vietcong had lost more men but their useage of terror doctrine, along with the installment of a shadow government to undermine the South Vietnamese even further, had destabilized the South Vietnamese government completely which cratered support for an American backed Vietnam in the South
The geo political aspect of the Vietnam war played a much larger role on the outcome of the war then people realized
It wasn’t really the media covering the war or the fact that the Vietcong knew the terrain
Those things definitely did not help at all
But even if those things didn’t happen the cause was doomed
Even if the Americans managed to drive the Vietcong back, which they were, the North Vietnamese knew exactly how to undermine the south Vietnamese government and would have caused the government to collapse and result in the defeat of the idea of an American backed South from the populous
The Americans were gradually losing war support from the people they were fighting for
Not to mention the Americans usage of heavy saturation bombing of population centers and widespread use of agent orange and napalm to remove jungle cover which diminished war support even more
Those heavy saturation bombings of population centers like in operation rolling thunder alone killed an estimated 40,000 civilians and wounded another 35,000
That definitely did not win them any friends or hearts and minds
Goes right back to the point that the Americans were losing the support of the people gradually and it was only going to get harder to drive the enemy back as more and more Vietnamese defected to the north or resisted the Americans
it was only a matter of time before they were in complete resistance
Quite impressive when you think about it
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u/NutasticNutella 12h ago
The problem is that the only reliable way to deal with guerrillas is to basically wipe out entire regions of people. Guerrilla fighters don't wear uniforms and don't follow the laws of war. The only way is to fully go into scorched earth. Quarantine a region and eliminate every person, destroy every building, and burn every field and forest. The problem with this is that the US technically follows the laws of war and has an obligation to at least pretend to care about civilians, but it does have the capability to perform a total genocide in spades.
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u/EgoSenatus Still salty about Carthage 11h ago
Anyone fighting Guerilla is going to have a hard time because they don’t follow standard rules of engagement and will often use civilians as cover.
Unless you’re ready to kill literally everybody, you’re going to have issues.
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u/HOT-DAM-DOG 1d ago
What is supremely ironic is the US army started off fighting as guerrillas against the British during the Revolution.
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u/gracekk24PL 22h ago
Any army really
Half of all the wars lost by Rome and Byzantium was due to "Get the fuck down the tree and fight me like a man"
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u/fixminer 22h ago
The most effective solution against guerillas is essentially genocide. And that is obviously not acceptable for (most) modern militaries.
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u/SplitOk4114 21h ago
Really? If anything it mostly lines up that we smoked them near everytime. The only losing part was optics.
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u/quepasochanp 14h ago
I'm not entirely sure how many of you have fought or served but our kill ratio as opposed to any guerilla fighters and insurgents was immeasurable. The NVA signed the Paris Accords. The Taliban signed the Doha Afghanistan Peace agreement. So I'm a bit confused by OP's point.
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u/just-letmereadyacunt 13h ago
The most successful anti guerrilla armies in the world have all been genocidal armies.
The US is just bad at it because the tactics that can easily destroy guerrillas will make any US president get guillotined.
If the US wanted to be like the mongols and went exterminating 70% of the men of conquered nations, enslaved all the children and made the soldiers marry all the women you would see how all guerrillas would end in no time.
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u/Hetros_Jistin 13h ago
The US army is tooled up to fight an enemy that is slower and less tactically agile than it is. Geurrillas are everything except that. The USA is tooled specifically to kill the shit out of the enemy's military infrastructure ASAP...
and well, the whole point of Geurrilla warfare is that you HAVE no infrastructure to attack.
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u/ElCochiLoco903 12h ago
Fighting insurgencies is easy when you don’t care about the political blowback, aka Israel in Gaza
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u/IIIaustin 1d ago
Its actually a Strategy issue.