Post
by Smitty-48 » Wed Oct 11, 2017 12:37 am
Counterinsurgency now is far more sophisticated in terms of supression, it's extremely difficult to achieve a decisive victory in a war amongst the people, but it's not so hard to render insurgents from a threat to a nuisance, essentially make them irrelevant, maybe you can't fully win in a counterinsurgency, but you can damn well make sure the insurgents don't win, and you can make it a truly miserable slog for them along the way.
It's like Northern Ireland, the Insurgents didn't win, the British didn't withdraw, the six counties did not join the republic, and the Unionists still run the province, the British simply waited the PIRA out, rendered them irrelevant in the end.
If you look at what the piss n' vinegar PIRA thought they were going to achieve in 1970, and what they actually achieved after thirty years of misery? They achieved nothing, all they got for their Troubles, was a mouthful of rocks, on a street without joy.
The story of insurgencies, is a story of failure, because most of them fail miserably; FARC, Shining Path, Tamil Tigers, the Contras, the Huk, the Indian Maoists, Kashmiris, and Sikhs, the Moro, the MEK, Malaya, Kenya, Dhofar, Aden, Oman, Ulster, Kurdistan, Bahrain, Palestine, etcetera, etcetera.
People who fantasize about insurgency tend to focus of the tiny exceptions to the rule, while ignoring the vast ocean of failure which is insurgency. Americans fantasize about it because all they know is the American Revolution, but the American revolutionaries called that victory "the Miracle", and with good reason, because it was a tiny exception, not the rule.
Meanwhile, the biggest insurgency in the history of America? Actually the Native Americans, and whatever happened to them? Oh yeah, that's right, they were wiped out.
The Prepper Bubbas fantasize about it, because they assume that they would be the Minutemen, when in reality, much more likely that they would be the Sioux. What? You say youse as hard as an Apache warrior? That's pretty hard, no doubt, but then again, how'd that work out for them?
Nec Aspera Terrent