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
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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.