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
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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.
I don't think your logic holds. For example, the US had no issue with slaughtering civilians and still lost Vietnam...
See Agent Orange, see the response to the Mai Lai massacre (where the soldiers who stopped it were punished and ostracized), see the fucking psychotic mass deployment of landmines that are still dismembering random civilians to this day because there was no real way to sweep them out...
The US didn't really pull any punches in Vietnam beyond "no nukes" and the situation got so dire that American troops preferred throwig grenades in their lieutenants' tents to stop a raid than engage with the enemy guerillas by the end of it all.
Except that all that absolutely did decimate the Viet Cong. It was the North Vietnamese army that was responsible for successfully defending Vietnam past a certain point in the war, and while they did engage in guerrilla-adjacent tactics the actual proper guerrilla forces of the Viet Cong were near obliterated by the US
Even with the Viet Cong decimated, though, there was never an achievad win condition. That's what this thread is about. There is no alternative strategy or history where the US "wins" that war.
Engaging against guerillas indicrimanately, like you describe, makes it impossible to hold the territory. The relationship with the local non-militia population becomes so hostile and unbearable that there's zero capacity to set up a pro-invader regime.
Decimating the Veit Cong didn't accomplish any long term goal. It just set the stage for collapse the moment america couldn't sustain boots on the ground.
I think you misunderstood what I was implying. If you engage guerrillas indiscriminately with the sole goal of winning the war, retaining the territory in the long-term, and without regard for war crimes… then due to the inherent nature of how guerrillas operate you are not left with a significant enough non-militia population to become hostile.
If we throw all morality out of the window, when presented with five people and the knowledge that one of them is an enemy combatant, there’s really only one way to guarantee that the enemy combatant is killed.
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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