I’m not sure what your question is. For the assumption of the OP, I was talking about active military. There’s probably a lot of overlap between gun owners and ex-military people - but I wouldn’t really consider people in the military, with issue weapon, as ‘gun owners’ as it pertains to this discussion.
We’re not talking about a hand full… we’re talking about millions of highly motivated resisters. Of course, the numbers I chose are arbitrary and you could argue that you’d never see any significant numbers of people to resist in any circumstance, but from my experience, I doubt that very much.
There are a lot of people who take their freedom very seriously, even in this day and age, and are willing to fight for it.
Possibly, but the rebels would have the initiative. Critical points would need to be patrolled. Given the number of troops and the number of places that would need to be guarded, it wouldn’t be hard for a small force of organized resisters to eliminate a patrol or check point. It wouldn’t need to be a big, grandiose battle - just a constant pecking away by people who could live among the populace most of the time.
This is largely true - but how many populations had the arms to truly resist?
Millions of highly motivated gun owners still isn’t enough to threaten the current goverment. The millions of highly motivated gun owners would need an intelligence and communications network that could not be decoded by the goverment. Very unlikely, so unlikely in fact I would assign an impossiblity to it.
Take into account that after the first wave of military personel die (because some will die obviously the goverment is not impervious to losses), the goverment will no doubt declare martial law and siezing weapons and working with the police department on traking those registered with weapons. They have your address and all the information on all the guns you own for a reason…
Not to mention Tyrannical Government’s control of food and fuel distribution networks.
Say that Wyoming goes over en masse and declares independence. I hope they like eating those sheep they’re famous for because that’s all they’re going to get. Starvation follows.
And without gasoline coming in? Good luck turning those F150 pick ups into APCs.
How about ‘shoot the police’? It seems to me that for most, it would never come to open war. There would just be a bunch of people with guns picking off police, politicians, and anyone thought to be a servant of the new regime? In this scenario, there wouldn’t be enough soldiers to act as a police force. The government couldn’t use retribution to dissuade shooters, as history shows.
Of course, most likely the US would crystallize into two factions and spend the rest of our lifespan (e.g., until a radical on either side takes over the nuke bases) in a state of perpetual war. So, don’t vote Big Brother into office, because this scenario will suck, okay?
I doubt that the government would be altogether that discouraged from using any force at its disposal to fight what it would regard as treason. By far the worst war that the US fought in terms of US casualties was fought with itself in the US Civil War. Civil wars tend to get very nasty very fast. Overreaction by government forces would doubtless alienate some of the population and drive them to side with the resistance, but that is true of all guerilla wars. The guerillas themselves would no doubt conduct such traditional revolutionary tactics as firing on government forces from towns and villages and them taking off, leaving the civilians to bear the brunt of the governments troop’s anger and possible atrocities.
One other major problem facing these millions of resistors, at least initially, is the complete lack of organization or cohesion. There is a world of difference between armed men and armed men in a combat unit. To quote du Picq’s Battle Studies “Four brave men who do not know each other will not dare to attack a lion. Four less brave, but knowing each other well, sure of their reliability and consequently of mutual aid, will attack resolutely. There is the science of the organization of armies in a nutshell.” Various militia groups would have some degree of cohesion, but not on the level of the army. A large number of gun owners also have military experience of some form, but at least initially would have no organization.
I can only see the Tyranny of the Evil US Government™ ending in one of two ways, though. According to the Patriot movement handbook this scenario ends with the tyranny of the oppressive US government being overthrown by valiant militia groups. Various interludes with black helicopters and secret concentration camps ensue. Then in the end they save the US from being handed over to the NWO’s world government after which they make America what it once was by restoring the constitution as written by the founding fathers. In the White Aryan Resistance/Christian Identity handbook, this scenario ends like The Turner Diaries with the US saved from ZOG and America made safe for all God fearing white people by means of genocide against anyone who isn’t.
The end of Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six has a scenario which I think would be an example of what would happen if civilians took on trained soldiers. Basically, the soldeirs have better weapons, better technology and better training. The bad guys lose, and quickly, and with minimal injury to the soldiers. The rest of the book sucked and this scene was particulary cold-blooded on the soldiers’ part (although the bad guys did try to kill the whole world), but I think that’s the way it would happen.
As I realize this isn’t a very citable case, your guess is as good as mine. Because you wouldn’t be willing to use lethal force to defend your rights and those of your fellow citizens doesn’t mean that no one will. Revolutions can be fought and won with a small fraction of a population, so long as that fraction is heavily motivated. Do you seriously think a tiny fraction (we’re talking about 3% of the population here) wouldn’t resist tyranny?
The civil war isn’t really comparable to this situation in a military way. Our civil war was essentially a conventional war with two mini-countries, rather than a popular, widespread rebellion fought mostly by people who only take action when the opportunity arises. Not two seperate, organized armies facing - but a dispersed resistance force that’s hard to identify against an organized army.
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Yes, but the fear of alienating large parts of the populace when they’ve already got a rather tenuous position to start with would frighten them enough to avoid such things as much as possible.
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I see your point, but I’m not so sure that it’s a disadvantage at all. The fact that they’re largely unorganized means that there is no central command - no master plans to intercept, no headquarters to bomb. While it prevents large-scale, coordinated actions from being taken on, this is exactly the sort of thing the rebels would want to avoid anyway, because this is what the US army has trained to do.
Acting alone and in small groups, they’d be very hard for the army to fight. They could, of course, kill individual resisters and groups of resisters - but no large, decisive battle could be won. And all along, individual actors, and small groups of them, having the initiative over a spread out military force would inflict small but steady numbers of casualties on that force.
Disorganization, it would seem, would probably be an advantage.
So long as everyone involved has the basic goal of slowly bleeding the military force.
Well, I hope you’re not implying I belong to either the black helicopter or the aryan resistance camp. It’s not as though I’m advocating any of this - I’m just challenging the assumption that a modern military force would easily wipe out any civilian resistance.
It is worse than that SenorBeef, the military wouldn’t even need to wipe out an unorganized, uncentralized force. The police would. The FBI would. The NSA would. The SWAT teams would. The military is for the actual threats.
Acting in small groups without plan or reason is a suicide for a revolutionary movement. Otherwise you won’t kill but a few military men, and will only bring retribution down on your men. An uprising takes more than just a few isolated pockets of angry discontents looking to blow stuff up. Especially if it expects to be sucessful. How can you imagine anything other?
Nah, the police would call in reinforcements. The city in question would get locked down, police would hunker down and wait for the National Guard. With tanks. With IR sensors. With snipers. With trained crowd control. With dogs. With helicoptors. Like I said, a force of angry gun toting discontents wouldn’t pose much a problem at all. The problem would lie with an organized rebellion group that plans on hitting several key locations at precisely the right time to knock out communications of the goverments and hope they can build up a force before they are aware of what is going on.
That would fall under intelligence. CIA, FBI and such. Things like this just don’t happen in a vaccum. Supplies are bought, people are moved around, information is passed. Things like this are beacons for the intelligence community. It would not go unmissed.
I’m not talking about an isolated group of 1-4 people taking out a few soldiers and that’s all that happens. I’m talking about a disorganized movement of thousands of groups of 1-4 people acting in whatever small way they can on a daily basis. You can’t cordon off anyone if there are thousands of small strikes all across the country. Especially with the relative manpower resources involved.
SenorBeef, I apologize to you took my black helicopter comment to imply that you were in such a camp, it was an attempt to inject some levity since they are the only groups that seem to seriously worry about the US government going completely gaga (or in the case of WAR/CI, they already think the government is gaga, but well, pot, kettle, black and all that).
Organization at some level would be needed by such a resistance group in order for it to stand any chance of success, otherwise all it would be doing is conducting sporadic terrorist attacks in the fashion of the Weather Underground in the 1960’s and 70’s. In the event of a full scale guerilla war, such organization would develop naturally during the course of the conflict, but they would be starting out at a severe disadvantage to the government in this respect, as the government already has a highly organized military. The fighting might not have much in common with the US Civil War at first, but virtually all successful guerilla wars pass from a phase where the guerillas conduct hit and run attacks in organized military units to the point where the government forces have been so weakened that the guerillas are eventually able to stand up to the government in conventional operations and ultimately defeat the government forces in the field. Otherwise they either remain ‘terrorist’ groups or guerilla forces until the movement eventually peters out or they come to some accommodation with the existing government.
With regards to the resistance forces not wanting to upset their tenuous position by exposing the civilians to overreaction and atrocity at the hands of the government, I’d only point out that virtually all revolutionary groups have used such tactics for the simple reason that they work. The essence of a revolutionary philosophy is that if you’re not with us you’re against us. Allowing a middle ground is as good as surrendering, as most people, left to their own devices, would rather not get involved in violence. At the risk of a sweeping generalization, the family and friends of someone killed by government forces aren’t going to remember that he was shot by mistake or feel sympathy for the troops that killed him or her because the guerillas egged them on. All that they are going to remember is that the government killed their loved one.
In the scenario that is given, a rogue government that does not have the support of the population and is opposed by a popular armed uprising of millions, what is it’s incentive to restrain its use of firepower? In those circumstances I would think the gloves would come off and intimidation through mass destruction would be employed.
If the government has any popular support itself, it will replace its losses and expand its armed forces so your assumption that it will be worn down through being plinked at by rednecks seems to me dubious. Also your contention that the armed forces will be outnumbered several times, its more probable that the army will have numerical superiority wherever it chooses to, after all it has armour, artillery and airpower and can move in concentrations which can only be matched if the militants also mass in which case their formations are exposed to destruction by overwhelming firepower to which they have no antidote other then dispersion again
And if the government does not have any popular support what makes you think it would retain the loyalty of the military? Soldiers are citizens too.
It seems to me in this scenario you want the resisters to win and stack the scenario accordingly. But lets not forget where the strength lies here, guerillas do not fight guerilla wars because they are strong, they fight them because they are weak and harassing tactics are their only option in the face of enemy training, discipline and firepower. Great armies are not destroyed by rednecks running through the woods, not even multitudes of them.
