With Ukraine’s tensions going on I’m wondering if the following tactic actually works.
Give automatic rifles, ammunition and a few weeks training to pretty much every adult in the country. That way if an invasion force comes, the citizens can randomly attack the invaders and make invasion more costly for them.
In practice, does this actually work though? I know nations have ‘stay behind’ forces whose jobs it is to commit sabotage, assassination, kidnappings, etc after the enemy takes over the country. But those are professional soldiers who are highly trained and highly motivated.
Does giving small arms to average citizens and giving them a few weeks training actually work in the real world? I thought in Japan they were training the public to resist an invasion in WW2, but then the public gave up when the government asked them to.
Also wasn’t much of the insurgency in Iraq and Afghanistan done by a small number of highly motivated and trained operatives? Thats more like the ‘stay behind’ forces I spoke of above, not average civilians killing the invaders.
The Ukraine also has a the second largest military force in the region (after Russia).
I’m not an expert on insurgencies or anything, but I would suspect that a civilian militia being trained and led by Ukraine Special Forces with support from NATO would have the potential to create long-term problems for a Russian occupation. Unfortunately, history has also shown that while such insurgencies can ultimately be successful, they can also take years, even decades.
True, but Iraq had something like the 3rd largest military in the world and it was decimated pretty fast when up against a more technologically advanced military. however I’m assuming/hoping the Ukranian military is better trained, better equipped and better motivated than the Iraqi military.
What I’m wondering is does a mass insurgency work, or is it more a tiny number of people who actually make up the backbone of an insurgency? I thought in Afghanistan and Iraq it was maybe a few thousand people who made up the insurgency, and I thought a lot of them were ex-military.
Off the top of my head I can’t think of any case in which mass insurgency of the type you suggest has achieved anything.
Effective guerrilla campaigns rely on very small numbers of active fighters, operating within a sympathetic population that provides some degree of support or, at least, is not co-operative with the attempts of the authorities to suppress the insurgency.
Japan was preparing the public to commit national suicide, quite literally. They weren’t being armed with small arms; they were being armed with bamboo spears. The propaganda slogan ichioku gyokusai
(figuratively 100 million die together) had been being hammered into their heads since early 1944
As a matter of fact, more than a year before the U.S. decided to send its soldiers into Iwo Jima, that is, in February 1944, Prime Minister Tojo Hideki, in his “emergency declaration,” had made the sweeping call: ichioku gyokusai , “100 million gyokusai .” It was a demand that the entire Japanese population be prepared to die. Japan’s mainland population at the time was 70 million, so he was also ordering Taiwanese and Koreans to meet the same fate.
Civilians had been told, and in many cases forced to commit suicide by the Japanese military both on Saipan and Okinawa.
If there are weapons enough to arm a large part of the adult population and the political will to provide several weeks training to them, there is a far more effective way to go about it. It’s called universal conscription, where military service is compulsory, and upon completion of active service everyone becomes part of the reserves and upon mobilization are recalled to organized military formations; not just handed a gun and told to go make trouble.
It’s slightly off-topic, but I’m pretty sure that that was the real world inspiration for “Contingency” by Kris Straub, a short film on Youtube that depicts the accidental airing of an Emergency Broadcast intended for the event of the US surrendering to an enemy force.
I think taking 5-10% of the best qualified of this group and giving them proper training would be far more useful than giving limited training to everyone. A 40 year old, overweight accountant that has never fired a gun won’t become useful with 2 weeks of training.
I think you could encourage the non-fighting portion of the country to be useful by performing non-violent non-compliance with the invading military. Russia will need Ukrainians for all sorts of tasks. If they don’t cooperate or actively work to hinder them, combined with an insurgency, it could make the invasion very costly for Russia.
A whole bunch of those adults would be Russian sympathizers and Ukrainians with political agendas that have nothing to do with the threat of Russian invasion. Arming civilians like that is like forming a circular firing squad.
I dunno, why would handing out large numbers of firearms with minimal training necessarily result in an organized or prolonged resistance? There are historic precedents we can look at in determining the efficacy of this kind of thing.
The biggest problem with this idea is that modern militaries don’t fight fair. When faced with a city full of civilians with rifles who swear to die fighting, modern armies will simply hang back a few kilometers, and shell the shit out of the city* until the civilians decide that dying for your country isn’t as fun as it sounds.
*Or, you know, bomb them with airplanes, hit them with drone strikes, hit them with cruise missiles, hit them with regular missiles, shit like that.
The 1991 Iraqi military was decimated due to two factors. One there was an entire 30 day air strike campaign that basically destroyed everything worth destroying piece by piece. Second was their complete tactical inflexibility once the Allied forces moved in as they were quickly and completely out-flanked as Allied forces went into Iraq as opposed to invading through Kuwait like they expected.
The Russians have neither of these options with the Ukraine.
Mass arming of the population is not the strategy that terrorists (or guerrillas) pursue. So, this strategy doesn’t work for them.
Plus, the strategies they do follow don’t have a great record of working for them either. I don’t think there is any case of a guerrilla campaign having defeated a regular army. The best you can hope for is that a guerrilla campaign can be sustained until political factors, or the intervention of another country’s regular army, make a solution possible.
At this point Ukraine organizing mass civilian resistance is a last-ditch threat to Russia* that it can’t expect to steamroll Ukraine’s regular army and be done. How credible that is is debatable but possibly the best they can do on short notice. Really they need a standing system of universal training like Israel or Switzerland.
More than small arms, what Ukraine really needs is lots and lots of anti-tank and portable SAMs, which I hope NATO/USA is providing them. Virtually no number of Russian soldiers the Ukrainians could kill would be any deterrent, but losing armor and aircraft hurts.
