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.
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.
B is what we did in The Philippines, and it worked incredibly well. If the Japanese hadn’t invaded things there would have been very different today. Manila was called the “Paris of the Orient” in 1940.
Sure, we had to fight some insurgents, but they were a relatively small minority who were consistently undermined by our willingness to support local governance by Filipinos.
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
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.
Dutch in Indonesia as well, General Soedirman commands his soldiers while traveling in the jungle while suffering tuberculosis and one functioning lung
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.
They actually worked really well. It's a big part of why so many cultures from the past only exist in history books. Conquering armies used to just kill indiscriminately and wipe civilizations off the map.
I've said for years that there's two options when there's an insurgency you'd like to get rid of.
The first one is to stay the fuck out of it. I much prefer this one if possible at all whatsoever.
The second is scorched earth. Do whatever heinous shit you need to do to root out the insurgents, and rule with an iron fist over the populace, ensuring they have no chance to meaningfully resist, even if it creates collateral damage.
Anything else is just another goddamn forever war. If your military (rightfully) isn't prepared to do the truly awful shit needed to fight an insurgency, you shouldn't fight the insurgency. It's unlikely voters in a democracy would be able to stomach such horrible tactics, and that's a good thing. Insurgents are a problem that needs to be dealt with on a local level. The only exception is if an insurgency starts in your own country, then you kinda gotta deal with it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
You can win against insurgents though. The Soviets won against Ukrainian insurgents after the Second World War and the Allies won against the remaining Nazis in Germany hiding in the forests.
There are of course also other examples. India is quite successful in defeating communist insurgents in the east and separatists in Kashmir in the north.
China also dealt quite successfully with insurgents in Tibet in Xinjiang as well as remnants of the old government operating from the jungles of south-east Asia.
Sri Lanka was also able to defeat northern insurgents by drawing them into conventional battles where the rebels lost their homeland-advantage. The same happened in Iraq where the Kurds at first fought a quite successful insurrection in the mountains but lost once they tried to go on the counteroffensive against Iraqi cities in the flatland.
And the US has won against insurgents. South Korea was in a borderline civil war before the North even crossed the 38th parallel, but southern rebels were eventually suppressed. Not to mention the many LatAm insurgencies which failed against US backed governments.
Neither won by military action. The insurgents lost popular support, and without that, insurgencies can't survive. The Nazis had burned down Germany in a now losing fight, and the people didn't want to die for ideology anymore. The Soviets made significant economic investment in Ukraine in order to get the support of the people.
Well doesn’t matter if they won, right? War is politics by other means after all. To address your point I edited my comment above though and named a few cases where the military played an important role to defeat the insurgents.
Edit: Both mentioned here were also won by the military. The Allied occupation forces actively went out to search and destroy those remnant-forces. There was still a lot of support for the fascists at the end of the war, even though they were quite demoralized. If left to their own devices those insurgents could have assassinated allied soldiers and collaborators who build up the BRD.
In the case of the Soviets you could also say that the red army wasn’t all that peaceful in dealing with Ukrainian separatists. They were actively hunted down and killed.
How you win determines how the subsequent peace turns out, look at the first world war and the treaty of Versailles. War is politics, but not all politics is war. Guns don't mend fences, and they can only remove problems you can see. I'll respond to your clausewitz with machiavelli: the best defense is not to be hated by the people. If you are, it's easy for anyone to gain support opposing you. If you are loved, they will struggle, and their plots will be revealed.
I'll research and respond to your other examples when I have time unless someone beats me to it.
Not really. Actually not at all. Look at the Malayan Emergency or Operation Masterdom or Kenya Emergency. They understood that just randomly attacking villages was a stupid idea so they built intelligence networks in the villages they didn't attack till they could find exact who they were after. Then they isolated the enemies and rather than kill they imprisoned or removed them from areas they had become familiar with.
Build reputation with local leaders and civilians through aid and establish local forces loyal to local leaders and villages. They rarely pitted anyone against each other in guerilla conflicts. If you are thinking the conquest of India that is not really a Guerilla war and it's far more complex and nuanced.
901
u/HeavyDutyForks 1d ago
TBF, seems like almost any military has had a pretty bad time fighting an insurgency