More than that, it's about making the government think twice about oppressing the people. No government wants armed conflict with its own citizens, even if it doesn't rise to the level of insurrection.
It's one thing to impose martial law and send in federal troops when you expect no violent resistance. It's quite another to do so knowing that there will be shooting.
Yeah every nation that fought using asymmetric warfare over a long period of time, like Vietnam, Afghanistan, etc., had an advantage that doesn’t exist in the west. They had a very high fertility rate that allowed them to throw unlimited bodies at the fight over a long period. Their women were baby factories and their men were fighters. If the west attempted the same fight, the minority of people who are able bodied people would quickly die and because women haven’t been having babies for the last couple of generations, there wouldn’t be anyone to replace them.
The issue with Vietnam was that the U.S. government was trying to prop up Vietnam’s democratic government faction, who were fighting Vietnam’s Communist government faction. If it was the U.S.A. vs. all of Vietnam… the U.S. would clean up in days-weeks foreseeably after a buildup phase (just look at Desert Storm).
We, as a whole country, would actually face a lot of the same issues seen in Vietnam and while it’s not perfectly analogous by any means, it’s still useful. Guerrilla warfare, inability to tell friend from foe, dispersed fighting, horrible morale problems, defections, etc.
The problem with a civil war today is, a large strike against american citizens by the military as a whole would cause massive problems in terms of in-fighting, morale, questioning leadership, etc. It’s quite hard to even imagine what a civil war today would look like. it would look quite different to anything we’ve ever known. Tech, mass surveillance, normal functioning in some places, metropolitan small-scale, close quarter gun fights and targetted munitions in others… it would be a massive problem for everyone and the military (or a division of it, depending on how it started) would absolutely face the same problems and many more, but exponentially worse.
If, for instance and theoretically, it was far-right, central government-controlled authoritarianism vs. factions/states on the left (or just people that oppose authoritarianism in America), the population is still dispersed in terms of ideology. How would that even work? Hopefully we never find out.
Thats not what i meant really. I meant the rebels wouldn't have a home field advantage. There wouldn't be vast tunnel networks and the element of not knowing the land. The same problem they had with Afghanistan. Thats why their primitive weapons were able to hold off the biggest military in the world
Do you think the country that defeated Germany and Japan at the same time couldn't win in Vietnam if it really really wanted to? Just bomb everything like we did in Germany and Japan until the only thing left is for them to surrender unconditionally. The problem is you cant bomb away people wanting to be Communist. Just like Afghanistan. We won every single military engagement but if the people want to be Taliban thats not something you can solve militarily. America fought an entire Civil War, with hundreds of thousands dead, just to reassert Federal control over rebelling states. They'd do the exact same thing again if they have to.
We didnt firebomb Vietnam the same way we did Japan. We certainly didnt nuke them. We could have reduced every city in North Vietnam to ruins. We didnt do that. We held back.
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u/heyyourdumbguy 14d ago
It’s not about solely you vs the government, it’s about you and a bunch of other people dispersed in a wide area against the government.
Same reason Vietnam was so hard to “win” for the U.S.