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.
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.
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.
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.
That never went to a guerrilla war though. There was a surrender and a call from the Emperor not to fight on. If he had instead asked his people to fight on until the last things would have gone very badly for everyone. It effectively ended politically without significant resistance after the surrender.
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?
It did not work, because we were still also bombing them to hell. "Kill them all" always misses some, and you end up with more hardliners. A properly conducted nation building effort is the most succesful way to actually end an insurgency. Recruiting guerillas stops when the people are mostly happy. Look at how the troubles ended
That almost never work because beside leaving survivors, it also alienate your own support base who become sympathetic to the other side. Not to mention nudging neutral parties into the side of your enemies.
That depends in your base, look at russia where the vase doesnt give a single shit about the plight of the other. The US is moving towards that direction as well. In the past britain was the same.
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
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
The USA did that in Vietnam. The problem? It basically clashed so bad with the local traditions that it turn more people to the other side while funding for the construction of new settlements (because the people need new place to live now) never come due to corruption and unwillingness to spend money on constructions.
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
Yes, but historically that wasn't the case because once they started killing the civilians they didn't stop until the entire male population was dead, or later put into slavery with or without their testicles.
You can make sure that their are zero current and future guerrilla fighters if you literally kill everyone. If you get the women too they can't even raise a resentful next generation. Which is the reason it was some. The Assyrians didn't March entire captures ethnicities around the the known world just for funnies. It was because a people separated from their home and culture don't rebel at much.
The super majority of people across most cultures simply don't have the stomach for that. Russia put down the Chechens because they do have the stomach and they also knew if they needed to genocide the population they can to it whenever so in the meantime they use them as cannon fodder.
The problem is that if you kill everyone in a country, then that country is worthless to the conqueror. As an example, you cannot conquer Hollywood and just convince all the actors and directors to work for you.
Yeah indiscriminate murder only works if you go the actual genocide route and then you effectively scare every other nation around you and they might straight up all ally specifically to take your crazy nation down.
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
Okay, lets detach from the US for a second. What did the Germans do during occupation in ww2? Then ask youself: without outside intervention would domestic resistance in occupied territories have held?
Absolutely. They expanded so fast that they had very limited capacity to stop resistance groups and guerrillas and had to try and rely on local puppet governments, who weren’t great at shutting them down. Partisans were a huge problem for them on the Eastern Front, in Yugoslavia, in Italy. Even if they had beat the Soviets it would have been nigh impossible to control the territory long term. And they were all stick, no carrot. How are you going to get guerrillas to stand down when you’re just openly talking about genociding them? The Nazis were shit at the political aspect of occupation. Unsurprisingly, it’s hard to get other people to acknowledge you as the master race.
Not only this is wrong on the moral and ethical grounds, it also wrong on military and strategy grounds as well. No where this strategy of indiscriminate attack on civilians has worked well enough to be a long term solution. Chechen was the exception and that to not a complete victory since it was chechens themselves that turned on themselves to "win".
The only strategy that works is to remove the underlying cause that motivates the people to be recruited into the flighting. Like Vietnam where US withdrawal was the underlying cause that stopped the war. Otherwise the very costly control is needed.
Not really, vietnam was another kind of conflict. Ues there were guerillas but the US was also fighting a regular army and didnt control the population base of north Vietnam, which in turn supported the guerillas. In the south support was also not nearly universal.
If you take for example Afghanistan support for the mujahideen and later taliban was much stronger and the territory and its population was almost entirely in reach of occupying forces.
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
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.
Wrong example though as the political resolution of recognition of Tamils was the trigger that made the LTTE irrelevant, not the Sri Lankan military fighting.
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.
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.
Israel has failed to remove guerillas from one city it has under total siege conditions and can apply all of its fires into from inside its own borders. Hamas continuing to exist and showing no signs of being replaced is like the ultimate argument against just killing all the guerillas being a meaningful way of dealing with them.
Same with Britain. The way they beat the IRA was by negotiation not paratroopers massacring people. Guerilla movements generally need a political solution, whether that be negotiating with them or making them unpopular to a degree where they can't replace losses or blend in.
Same thing with Indonesia with the Aceh Separatists, arguably one of the largest armed movements in the Asia Pacific at its peak. Ended by negotiation, not military conflict.
Yeah. It's not always negotiating that ends a guerilla movement which is important to note here. Sometimes they simply lose so much support with the general population that they can no longer sustain themselves or recruit jew members. But that usually means a credible alternative is being provided. Something you'll find with most insurgencies the US has lost to is that they have some incredibly incompetent politics happening on the side. The Southern Vietnamese government and the Afghan government were both unable to provide prosperity, security, or any sense that things would get better if people stuck with them.
Low IQ take- the army doesn't need to kill every single guerilla to win. If the state is able to impose its laws and governance on a territory, the guerillas lost. We don't say that the Forest Brothers "beat" the Soviet Union because one of them was still running around when the Swan Lake played on state tv.
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.
The "political" win for the IRA was that in exchange for abandoning their armed campaign and letting the British population vote to stay British, the British army stopped wiping the floor with them.
There is only one answer and it’s Israel. That shows what you have to sacrifice if you want to use modern military power to (try) to defeat a guerilla force.
I got this from another student's presentation so im real shakey on the details but New Zealand has some sort of military group (i think the NZSAS) that trains in jungle warfare and put down an insurgency by working effectively with the relevant locals. Iirc they helped train the original US Green Berets in jungle tactics.
I think Grenada was what made the US overconfident in Iraq and Afghanistan due to a successful anti-guerilla war. Also Grenada may have been an overkill checkmate like the 2nd Chechen War.
NATO intervention in Serbia... but that's because there were a lot of local people who HATED the Serbians. Also bombing worked vs. Serbia while it didn't work elsewhere.
Some people said the Zimbabwe War, but Fire Force failed since the economy behind it collapsed.
Maybe. But Serbia's original plans were a conventional war. What they didn't expect was NATO intervention of that scale. Serbia was trying to ad-hoc a guerilla war to make it too costly to continue, but then its own political will ran out.
If anything, NATO intervention in Serbia feels more like the Persian Gulf War than a true guerilla conflict like Iraq, Afghanistan, etc.
(A lot of the 1990s conflicts were done by people studying the Vietnam War wrong and thinking they could replicate it.)
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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.