“Even a blind squirrel finds an occasional acorn. Or an APC.”
I could teach to how to consistently hit an 8" target from 100 feet away with a rifle in a matter of hours and you would probably feel comfortable with the rifle by the end of the second day. And I suspect many gun owners could do the same.
It takes a lot longer to instill the discipline that you need to get them to act them to act in concert so that they can achieve something other than a random shootout.
That sort of discipline takes a couple of months and actual experts to train them.
A number of years ago my wife and I finally got around to watching “Purge.” “Purge” is what one might call a siege action movie, where people in a home, business or other edifice and under assault by antagonists outside the edifice. In “Purge,” the protagonists are Ethan Hawke and Cersei Lannister and some other actors facing criminals who wish to kill them basically for the hell of it.
The instant the first antagonist was shot, and the other antagonists continued the siege, I could no longer suspend my disbelief. I never can when criminals and henchmen keep attacking after some of their number are slain. “Assault on Precinct 13” was the same bullshit. If 15 rich college students (that’s what they seemed to be in Purge) attacked your house bent on murder but one or two were blown away with a shotgun, the others would not keep attacking. They would shit their pants and run for the hills. Criminal henchmen in movies have an absolutely impossible dedication to offensive combat; they kinda have to to make the movie fun, but you just aren’t going to do that in real life for some criminal motivation after seeing your buddy’s head blown into crimson mist and bone chips.
This, basically, is what military training is for. Well, half of it; there really is a lot of technical skill to be learned, but aiming a rifle (which, as damuri points out, is shockingly easy) is one of the least important things you learn. Working together, now, THAT is the important thing. A hundred disciplined, cooperating soldiers are a vastly more formidable force than a thousand oafs with guns.
We see in Ukraine the difference between an army that is effectively working together and an army that is clearly suffering from a high level of organizational shock, and therefore is beginning to act like individuals.
So would arming the population help resist an invasion? Not int he sense of conventional warfare, not at all. What it can do though is cause a high degree of frictional effort and loss on the part of the invader. A Russian army plowing through territory full of hostile and armed civilians isn’t going to outright LOSE any battles to them, but it will suffer a high degree of frictional loss. That loss causes material and manpower losses, scrapes away at the invader’s morale, and forces them to dedicate more resources and attention to rearguard action. This is understandably an appealing prospect to the defending belligerent; it might only slow the invader down 2%, or 5%, or 10%, but damage is damage.
The drawback to the defending power, of course, is that its civilians will likely take extremely high losses.
One US combat vet said the real value of civilians is getting them to be the eyes and ears for the insurgency or the special forces. They can monitor the movements of the occupying forces without attracting attention, and then the insurgency or special forces can come in to set bombs or whatever.
The government would do much better using the population as eyes and ears, rather than cannon fodder. The way in which civilian populations best work synergistically with conventional forces, is they can be invaluable for providing accurate and timely intel. Some 14 year old boy with a cell phone or 76 year old babushka walking past the headquarters on her way to the market is going to be able to observe and document things a military is doing (or not doing) in a way that draws little attention or suspicion. Civilian populations can take note of military behavior patterns - e.g. When are the gates locked? What time does the guard change? Where are the trucks stored on base at night? etc. When these sorts of things gets reported through channels to conventional military forces, it becomes actionable intel.
Given a scenario where a majority of the local population has access to a firearm, the invaders have to be lucky every time whereas the locals only have to be lucky once.
Quantity has a quality all its own. - Joseph Stalin
Drastic reprisals against the civilian population (if they are drastic enough) usually make them lose their taste for doing this sort of stuff.
On the other hand, many of the civilians will die.
Civilians fighting an army will die in huge numbers. That’s bad. If the entire point of resisting an invader is to preserve the country’s freedom for the benefit of its people, having the people die is an obvious loss.
I believe in the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, they’d retaliate for attacks on soldiers by killing women and children in apartment buildings. So a single soldier being shot loses its appeal when 50 women and children get killed in retaliation.
There is no denying the effectiveness of, say, partisans fighting Nazi occupation in WW2. But on the other hand, the Nazis in WW2 were far, far, far, far, far, […] far, far, far more stretched out than the Russians today. The Germans decided to essentially invade and occupy all of Europe. The Russians are only occupying a relatively small country on their immediate border.
The Russians in WW2 both had this done to them (as Germany rapidly conquered Russian land) and later did this to others (as they swung the pendulum back and conquered German lands). Both sides were brutally efficient and horrifically bloody about these reprisals.
One would hope that Russia wouldn’t be able to get away with public executions of dozens of civilians in today’s day and age, but… who knows…
In a gruesomely ironic reversal, we’re seeing the exact opposite of the OP’s question in Ukraine now, with the Russians sending hastily trained soldiers into combat because of staggering losses versus the Ukrainian Army. They don’t seem to be doing much other than causing the Ukrainians to expend more ammunition.
Russia’s Draft Sends Barely Trained Men to War in Ukraine - The New York Times (nytimes.com)
Russia Sends Army Recruits to Fight in Ukraine After Just Days of Training - The Moscow Times
Just an FYI. But Stalin is not likely to have actually said that (or at least not so directly in that form). The earliest quotation that can be found in English is from 1978 by Ruth Davis, and she says it was Lenin. However, nobody has ever been able to find it as a direct quote (despite her saying he wrote it). It seems to be tied to the Marxist idea that “Quantity is Quality” or “Quantity becomes Quality”, which Lenin did write about and is not strictly military in context.
Armed civilian resistance is not for fighting an invading army, but instead an occupying army.
Interesting. Thanks.
Though now I’m not sure how to attribute it. But that’s a problem for another day.
I am big believer in the 2nd amendment but the whole “defense against tyranny” argument is overstated. With that said, if you have a civilian population that is willing to die for freedom, you can make an effective irregular militia out of a civilian with an ak47 and about 6 weeks training.
And by all accounts, Ukraine is also doing a great job of this. Every movement the Russians make, every ruse they attempt, every vulnerability discovered, is all over social media within the hour.
Hey now, let’s not shortchange how great of a job Russian social media is doing in providing intel to Ukraine.
Russian TV Shows Off Rare 2S4 Mega Mortar-Then Ukraine Blows It Up
Russian warship destroyed in occupied port of Berdyansk, says Ukraine
Russian Soldiers Have the Worst Opsec - YouTube - You would think the Russian army would put their phones on airplane mode before invading Ukraine, but apparently not.
There actually kind of is. In most areas partisan activity didn’t have much impact at all.
Effective guerrilla movements tend to be fairly small, so far as actual fighting men and women are concerned. What you need is a large pool of people who will provide some degree of support, or simply turn a blind eye. But, actual fighters, a very few, with proper leadership, can make a significant iimpact and are much easier to organise, direct and protect.
(And, of course, having wide civilian access to weapons is not necessary, or especially useful, when it comes to recruiting, training, equipping and organising a guerrilla force.)
Isn’t the purpose of partisans to force an occupier to waste resources guarding captured areas instead of sending them to the front where they are most needed?