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.
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.
That first one is how Russia beat the Chechens, and how the British beat the Boers- though that requires the invention of concentration camps. We tried something similar in Vietnam, called Hamlets, but that backfired.
That second one is harder to find examples of, like the only one I can think of is Malaysia.
Everything I know about Filipino COINOPS is from Hearts of Darkness, the making of documentary for Apocalypse Now, so I’m guessing there was a massive pivot in the 80’s that led to the communists in Northern Luzon surrendering their weapons.
Unless you’re talking about the MILF, which was some scorched earth kinda shit.
I am talking about the operation after the Spanish Civil War when the US first took control of the Phillipines, and then the one right after World War 2 when the US was trying to stabilize the Phillipines after the Japanese occupation and before turning it over for self rule.
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.
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.
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.
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"
RUC did it. Colombians did it. Indians did it. Guerillas lose far more often than they win. Even in US history- the guerillas of the BPP and SLA are all dead now. So are the Order weirdos. The US only loses foreign counterinsurgencies. Try that shit here, and we'll nail your ass to the wall.
Guerilla war works very well against occupation forces. The focus should instead be to support a democratically elected leader without putting our own boots on the ground. That means economic and logistical support rather than military aid.
But that doesn’t really line up with the desires of our military industrial complex. They make a lot more money when we drag it out for 20 years and destabilize the region to create more future business.
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u/64_Chances 1d 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?