GRE scores? Penis size? Fastest car? Choose your weapon, sirrah, and I shall incontrovertably demonstrate the folly of your position.
But a force of potential assassins, who look like every other citizen until they put a knife into your kidney, and go back to looking like every other citizen once they’ve done what they’re trying to do would be a problem, if only because it’s hard to run a country when a large percentage of your populace considers itself at risk. I submit the recent (well, fairly recent) sniper scare here on the west coast. If that has happening with lots of people at once, all across America, there wouldn’t be the resources to put things in order. In Militia vs. Army, the Army wins every time. But I’m not so sure about Militia vs. Government that Commands Army.
SenorBeef, I think there are some conflicting ideas in your post. Yes, if the US government as it exists now was fighting a bunch of gun-toting rednecks/militiamen/whatever, it would make every effort not to “blow up downtown Miami with a MOAB” or anything of the sort. However, if the government has “gone rogue” or become tyrannical, I don’t think that decorum would persist. That part of your example seems to deal with a government that is holding onto power due primarily - or solely - to superior manpower and the threat of violence. I don’t think a government like that would worry about the aftereffects of killing large numbers of civilians.
If you provoke a government in that situation, I’d expect them to respond in kind and not worry about loss of innocent life. If it is no longer attempting to maintain power through democratic means, or even put up the facade that it is doing so - which I think would be my definition of “going rogue” - I think blasting a major city to eliminate rebels is a possibility.
I think about 99% percent of those imagining that an armed public rebellion might fly have ignored one thing (besides my repeated mention of C³). There’s an old saying:
“Come the revolution, guns will litter the streets and ammunition will be like gold.”
Think if every single gun store was closed down overnight. How many home reloaders are there? How many of them have stockpiled brass and powder? Do the math. This debate is nearly as relevant as Major Kong’s thread about legalizing bombs.
May I suggest commentators look to actual examples in the real world?
Let me point to Algeria and Iraq.
Algeria, because there is a civil war for over a decade, and where an army clique , through brutality and cunning use of propaganda, has managed to more or less stay in control.
Iraq, because there was a state awash in weapons, but the secret intelligence agencies kept a lid on things.
Merely two examples.
In the end, given modern state capacities for command and control, an “armed population” that is unable to peel off parts of the army to join an insurrection (implying state security apparat and some useful % of the population remains loyal) fails.
In short, the guns are meaningless - mere tools of incidental usage. The politics and social structure is what counts.
So thousands of unorganized groups will just up and at the same time strike at different places? With no communication, with no strategy? I am supposed to believe that they are all just going to do the right thing, not fall into any traps, not be seen coming and win because there is lots of em? Yeah…
And how would that be different than how forces of assasins are delt with now? Would these assasins break into military compounds and kill the “helpless” soldiers as they sleep? Sneak up on them? Yeah, thats going to happen. Sneak up on a trained soldier close enough to slip a knife in his kidney. :rolleyes:
Not to mention have thousands of other assassins working alone all the the same thing at nearly the same time without organization or communication amongst themselves. If it happend once, that is the most it would happen.
Again, the police would deal with it. How do the police find murderers? After all, they just slip back in to society and look just like a normal man.
The sniper scare was with some nutjob killing CIVILIANS, not military personel. Big difference.
The shooters I know keep amunition on hand. Any where from a box or two, to thousands of rounds.
Arg. My point is that Soldier vs. Insurrectionist is irrelavent, as any insurrectionist with half a brain will be disrupting civil order through terrorism, not killing random and replacable soldiers.
The police have enough trouble investigating and dealing with ‘normal’ murders, when they aren’t being targeted as opressive tools of the state. (Or, a lid preventing things from getting so bad that people revolt, depending on your cynicism). If people providing essential services (food transportation, fire departments, etc.) are targeted, then it’s only a matter of time before the army must be called in, and the army cannot be everywhere. Insurrectionists can.
I might point out that we are experiencing the OP’s scenario right now…in Iraq. The populace is fundamentally unfriendly, although certainly most aren’t willing to actually fight US troops. A small minority does that…but the only way to tell the difference between a person who sullenly accepts the occupation and one who is violently opposed to it is when the person pulls out a weapon and starts shooting, or drives a car bomb into a checkpoint.
The big problem with the OP is that in order to tell what might happen in a Redneck vs Army scenario is that everything depends on the scenario. Set up the scenario one way and the heroic rednecks defeat the soldiers. Set it up another way and the stormtroopers crush the rednecks. Rebellions succeed, or are defeated not because of military operations but because of political operations. Do soldiers obey or resist when ordered to commit atrocities? How many people support the fascists, how many support the rebels? How bad are the rebel groups themselves…if the rebels are homegrown versions of the Shining Path then no matter how bad the government forces are people will prefer law and order. How is the economy? A fascist group couldn’t take over the country without some sort of crisis. Usually fascist movements are pretty incompatent, how organized and effective are the fascists? How exactly did the fascists sieze power, and how much of our existing power structure is co-opted?
The point is you can’t just say that alien space bats have hypnotized every soldier, cop and government official and turned them into fascists. It doesn’t work that way…people support tyranny for many reasons…they are afraid, they feel tyranny gives them opportunities, they are psychopaths, they follow the crowd, etc. But they don’t just wake up one day and decide to turn fascist.
And how does terrorism count as defeating the military? How would it hinder it?
I have two words for you, since describing it to you didn’t seem to work:
A quote I remember seeing somewhere:
“If you resort to violence, remember that the government is much better at it than you are.”
So it all comes down to which side Biotop is on…
Thank you for playing, please try again.
So what? A thousand rounds can be capped off in a single fire fight. Your point is meaningless. Very few gun owners have more than a few boxes of ammunition. Rounds go bad and keeping thousands of them at hand represents a substantial investment.
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No problem - I wasn’t sure if you were throwing in me in those camps or not, so I just said that I hoped you weren’t.
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The “sporadic” part is where we disagree. I think the US has a unique culture that’s generally distrustful of government and more self-reliant and willing to fight for their rights than other cultures. Although this is getting more washed out as time goes on.
As such, if the government were ever to go rogue, and, say, declare martial law, I think there would be a far greater number of active resisters in this country than you’d find in any other western culture. I say western culture because I’m not familiar enough with non-western culture to make a judgement call.
As such, I’m envisioning a large number of active resisters - people who actively go out and seek to do damage to any tyranical force.
Given the number of active, armed resisters you could expect (and I realize this depends on circumstances, and perhaps I’m being overly optimistic… optimistic in terms of people willing to defend their rights with force) constant attacks of opportunity. Not a few isolated attacks per week, but hundreds of daily attacks scattered across the country.
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This could be true, but it would depend on the nature of the conflict. A lot depends on that… but I didn’t want to envision a specific scenario in the OP because if I did so this would immeadiately degenerate into the likeliness of that specific scenario rather than the main point I wanted to address - the faulty assumption that heavy weapons would render civilian resisters useless.
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I think you misunderstood me - I meant to say that the government forces, not the rebel forces, would be extremely hesistant to take action that would result in heavy civilian casualties because they wouldn’t want to alienate any sort of support base.
Indeed, and that’s why I said it would be in the government’s interest to restrict their collateral damage.
Regarding the ‘if you’re not with us, you’re against us’ philosophy - it would seem that the primary motive of resisters in this case would be defense of the rights of themselves and their fellow citizens. As such, I don’t think most would adopt such a philosophy. They might take action against people who directly support a tyranical regime - but I don’t think there would necesarily be bad blood with neutrals.
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Well, in any revolution, the bulk of the population is either neutral or not commited enough to either side to actively participate. Most people won’t stick their necks out into danger if they don’t already perceive enough danger coming their way to be significant.
As such, there would be a large portion of people who didn’t have enough personal interest or sense of danger to participate actively against the government. However, if the government started killing random people on a regular basis, their perception of the situation would change and many would go from neutral to anti-government.
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Possibly. Again, it depends on the specific scenario, which I didn’t want to define, for reasons I gave in my last post.
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This is true, and this is what would prevent large, organized forces from fighting like a regular army. Regarding local superiority - that’s true, but not a huge factor. A dispersed, unorganized force with the same goal has the initiative - they choose where to attack, at weak points. A numerically inferior force, across the board, would have an extremely hard time trying to combat a larger group of dispersed rebels.
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Well, I’m assuming it has at least some popular support. There’s a good chance the army might be fractionalized, as I detailed in the OP.
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Well, my intent was to challenge the idea that a hunter with a sniper rifle has no chance against a stealth bomber, more or less. My point was that because of the nature of such a conflict in this country, heavy weapons are largely negated.
I don’t think there’s ever been a situation like the one we’re hypothesizing about in history, as such, it’s hard to apply a rule of thumb like that.
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Well, I’m conceding that only a minority of people would actively resist in any way. As described in my other post, others would be neutral or pro-government. But the government being careless and blasting the hell out of innocents would certainly change that.
If the only thing the government had was the military, and no popular support whatsoever, then yes, they could use firepower as they wished. But in that case, almost everyone is a resister, not just a small minority.
Maybe, but then again, they just went from a 10% to 80% resistance rate.
I don’t see this as being a huge problem. Many, many people keep a sizable stock of ammo. I’m not even a very avid shooter, and I have around 2500 rounds sitting around here in various calibers.
You don’t need that much, anyway. A conventional army fighting conventional ammo needs lots of ammo - but snipers and small-unit ambushers don’t. Besides, all those kooks that have been stockpiling for this scenario can share :).
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I’m not very familiar with this - does Algeria have a well armed populace with a tradition and culture supportive of throwing down a tyranical government?
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Was Iraq really ‘awash’ in weapons among the civilian populace? I honestly don’t know.
In any case, it’s a different situation. Iraq has been a country under brutal regimes and monarchies for quite a long while. They haven’t developed a spirit similiar to what we have in the US.
It’s not a good government suddenly going rogue, in their case, but systematic oppression for as long as they can remember.
The guns aren’t meaningless - although I admit they’re not the primary factor. The will to resist is - but the will to resist is severely weakened when the tools to resist aren’t there.
I’m imagining a scenario of a government that’s been increasing tyranical and clamping down on people in the name of security - from terrorism, or whatever the boogey man of the day is - and reaching a point, say, the declaration of martial law at which be where a lot of people draw the line.
Seeing that others have begun to resist, people who’ve been considering it would join in.