The US military hasn’t ever won an asymmetrical guerrilla war, so it’s not as absurd as you think. In that Instance, millions of people would likely die, but it’s still more likely that guerrillas survive for decades than it is the US wins.
It’s also unlikely the US Military, being citizens of the United States themselves, would have a high degree of adherence to such orders to bomb and destroy their fellow man.
That anyone thinks such is realistic is indicative of the depth of delusion.
And this fact would be true regardless if their populations had guns or not, which means once again, the guns dont factor in all that much at success of resistance of government
I mean the US has a history of bombing city blocks from helicopters, commiting unethical human experimentation, both on individual people and by releasing poisonous agents into the air around their own cities and generally not being particular human rights focused with their own citizens.
Believing that the US army is above turning on their “fellow man” seems a bit optimistic to me.
The naivety there isn’t so much that soldiers would be incapable of fighting the US citizenry in a large scale war, but more that the framing of the question is false to begin with. It’s way easier for soldiers to commit small scale acts of terror than large scale genocides, and it’s always easier to commit acts of terror on minorities or the “other” rather than on the gen pop. If we were to see any domestic american guerilla warfare (I find this kind of unlikely compared to the rising amount of lone wolf, stochastic incidents), then it’s likely that even the regular population would get fed a ton of bullshit about the opposition being subhuman, or something to that effect. Larger scale versions of how, every time a black guy gets shot by the police, everyone trots out every encounter he’s ever had with the police within like 12 hours of the incident. Character assassination, but at a group level, instead of on the individual level.
In the context of the Ukraine war i’ve read something akin to “once someone close to you, a fellow friend and comrade is killed, it is less about the original how and why, but just about revenge.”
Using cult of personality, the in-group mentality that is strongly advanced in the military, dehumanising of the enemy and other tactics have shown very effective time and time again in human history. There is many countries in history and today, where the military is turned against its own population and i fail to see any moral highground the US could claim to protect against that. The US society is too hungry, too injust, too tribalist and too violent, for there to be effective safeguards. Heck we all saw what happened January 6
Hollywood powered violence desensitization baby. The US army has bombed civilian cities in US soil. They were against black communities, but it has happened. No one in the chain of command even protested the order.
I think it’s also more likely that the cops would be the main problem
HighElfMage@lemmy.world 11 months ago
The US has won against guerrillas before. They won in the Philippines and had mostly won in Iraq before the Iraqi government pissed off their Sunni minority and ISIS spilled over from Syria. The US also crushed the Viet Cong during the Tet Offensive and most of the war after that was fought by regular North Vietnamese Army units not VC guerrillas.
Most insurgencies fail Max Boot wrote a book called Invisible Armies where he analyzed insurgencies throughout the 20th century and determined that only about a quarter of them succeeded and more than half failed outright. Not only that, many of the successful ones took place in the context of colonization and the Cold Warz where they had weak imperial opponents, super power backers, or both.
BartsBigBugBag@lemmy.tf 11 months ago
Appreciate the book, I’ll give it a read, thank you!!