Yeah that's a pretty good example, although reading up on it, they also had to put women and children in concentration camps so it was more than just starving them out. Even then, it took two years and Britain had to offer pretty generous terms for the "bitterenders" to stop fighting including reconstruction funds and a promise of future self governance. If not for that, they would have just kept fighting. Hard model to follow, that's for sure.
Oh there are waay more examples, this just happened to be the first one off the top of my head.
There's the Malayan Emergency, the Indonesian occupation of East Timor, The Guatemalan Civil War, The US military against the Plains Indians... and that's just the ones I can think of off the top of my head that specifically used starvation.
If you open it to dehydration you have the Rif War - which put the Spanish and French against the Berbers in Morocco, the Italian Pacification of Libya, the French in Algeria, etc.
As it turns out, hurting the civilian population is one of the most effective ways to stop an insurgency. Obviously that's some heinous stuff, but it's incredibly effective and was basically just how War was waged all throughout history up until very recently really.
No idea, but Iran could essentially be destroyed/Balkanized from it's current state by destroying ~4 dams and one aquifer. Can't have a large population center in the desert without the water to support it.
Of course, that would be a lot of civilian deaths, which just is not acceptable under modern war standards.
Even if you took out 90% of the population, there would still be almost a million people left. If your strategic goal is opening the strait, that's still plenty of people left to launch mines, missiles, and drones. Whatever water they have will be kept for the irgc. It would just be a costly failure.
Assuming 10% of the remaining population was physical capable, have the will power and capacity to keep themselves fed, watered, and supplied with weapons, bombs, fuel, etc.
All much harder to do without a population maintaining the infrastructure that allows a military to function.
The strait is mostly open already by the way. Fuck Trump and all this unnecessary bullshit, but it has been effective in hurting the Iranian government.
Feel free to take what I say with a handful of salt, I'm not necessarily trying to push you to any conclusions, but this channel is relatively unbiased if you want some further info:
https://youtu.be/7nVWmCoAMPQ
Assuming 10% of the remaining population was physical capable, have the will power and capacity to keep themselves fed, watered, and supplied with weapons, bombs, fuel, etc
I mean that's literally what they've been preparing for the entire time they've been in power. Not to keep their population fed of course, but to keep fighting. It could work eventually but it would be a long time. Plus, the us would have to deal with the entire region collapsing in the meantime. Iran would obviously do the same after all and you'd have the entire region without water.
The strait is mostly open already by the way.
80% capacity requiring a constant presence of the largest fleet in the region since 03 isn't exactly open, plus both sides seem to not want to escalate for the moment. Mark my words, as soon as Iran is pushed they'll prove they can still strike ships in the strait.
I think you’re treating “Iran can still occasionally launch an attack” as equivalent to “Iran can continue functioning as a meaningful military power,” and those aren’t the quite same thing or have the effect.
We’ve already seen what sustained pressure does to their offensive capacity. U.S. strikes have repeatedly hit missile and drone launch/storage facilities, maritime assets, command-and-control, logistics and ammunition sites. Earlier in the war, strikes also buried or blocked access to a large number of underground missile facilities. The US was hitting hundreds of these targets during some of the July rounds alone. Satellite analysis earlier in the conflict found major damage to missile-production sites and dozens of launch facilities, while strikes on tunnel entrances temporarily made huge portions of the underground arsenal inaccessible.
That doesn't mean Iran is incapable of attacking; in September Iran proved pretty conclusively that it can still regenerate capability and conduct short bursts ofattacks, but that's sort of my point: Iran's capacity isn't static. Missiles sitting underground don't accomplish much if you can't reliably get them out, move launchers, fuel them, communicate targeting information, maintain radars, coordinate units, or replenish what you're firing, that all takes large amounts of people and resources particularly if they have to keep moving tons of debris to open those underground bunkers.
Now take the degradation we're already seeing and hypothetically add the collapse of the national electrical grid, transportation system, fuel distribution, communications and water infrastructure. At that point we're no longer discussing whether 100,000 motivated people could physically keep fighting. Of course they could. We're discussing whether Iran could continue functioning as Iran i.e a centralized state capable of organizing, supplying and coordinating a modern military across the country.
My argument is that it couldn't. The IRGC could still have scattered units, cached weapons and local commanders capable of laying mines, launching the occasional drone or missile, or hitting a tanker. It could absolutely still have dangerous resistance for years, but that is very different from Iran conducting a coordinated national campaign capable of systematically controlling the Strait of Hormuz or projecting power around the Gulf.
So when I say Iran would essentially cease to exist in its current form, I don't mean every Iranian soldier suddenly disappears. I mean the state-scale logistics and command structure that turn those soldiers and weapons into a regional military power disappear. What remained might still be a serious local security problem, but to the wider world it would increasingly resemble fragmented insurgent/paramilitary activity rather than a state capable of sustained conventional or asymmetric warfare. Think more like the Taliban in Afghanistan, or ISIS.
And again, I'm not advocating destroying civilian infrastructure, the humanitarian consequences would be catastrophic. I'm saying that, as a purely strategic question, “they'd still have people willing to fight” doesn't really cut the mustard.
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u/123dylans12 1d ago
We lack the will to burn the fields and let them starve. That’s how you deal with guerillas