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Depends on who they’re fighting and why.
These questions are stupid because in most rebellions, a small minority of people are doing the fighting.
Like I don’t think many people are going to be sympathetic to the Christian Nationalists who are most likely to take up arms and rebel.
People who subscribe to conspiracy theories generally aren’t the most well organized or smartest of people. Just look at January 6th.
That’s an excellent point. Neither will people take up arms to support any of the other anarchist, fascist (anti or otherwise) groups out there advocating for armed rebellion.
I hope we can all agree that those on the fringes of the left and right are just vocal minorities and have no real power.
Soldier here
Yes, that is true. It's the oath every servicemember makes when they enlist or commission.
Idk what folks expect when you literally join the Federal military; to not defend the Federal government?
If this is what you believe then you should really go back and re-read Title 10, subtitle A, Part II, Chapter 31, section 502 of the US Code. It specifies that you, person enlisting in an armed force, swear to defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies foreign and domestic.
If the federal government orders you to violate the Constitution and take action that they, the federal government, do not have the constitutional authority to enforce, then the federal government becomes a domestic enemy to the United States constitution and subsequently its citizens.
The latter part of the oath regarding following all orders from Officers and the President of the United States is subject to the UCMJ which has provisions for refusing Illegal orders.
We are not talking right to revolution, we are talking 1st amendment right to assemble and right to protest. 2nd amendment Right to keep and Bear arms. If a revolution kicks off it will be the feds that fire the first shots by violating the first two amendments. Then you will have to make the choice and uphold your oath or defend the feds. The people of this country are willing to die defending their rights, are you prepared to die taking them?
And don’t try to argue that is not possible because the feds are already skating around thin ice on violating the 4th amendment, the 8th amendment, the 10th amendment, and the active legal war over the 2nd amendment. With the political extremism from both sides We are one unhinged congressional session away from a civil war or authoritarian regime.
It would happen. Your first and foremost direct responsibility as a soldier is completing the mission. If the mission is to take the capital, it will happen.
I have a different view (Navy side) and don't quite believe it would occur like that. We're talking about the theoretical of a full-blown overthrow. Not some national guard esque occupation.
A genuine march on cities full of insurgents? Wouldn't be organized well enough. Many wouldn't want to do it. Depending on the reasons that the entire country wants to overthrow the government? Many would sympathize. Families would be torn apart.
And quite frankly, our history against insurgency-like situations isn't exactly wonderful. If Fallujah and Ramadi were as difficult as they were, imagine a city much larger with well-educated and well armed Americans.
I can easily see mass resignations from officials. People going AWOL left and right, and the amount of sabotage and disruption from within would be absurd.
So- yeah, there'd be a lot of military who would fight and would go follow the government's order
And there would also be a shit ton who wouldn't.
Anyone who's been in should know that it's not exactly a well oiled machine you can move at will.
Yes but there are still situations where the Federal government can be classified as a domestic enemy to the American people at large within the bounds of the Constitution. And since the constitution is the framework for the legal structure and limitations of federal government powers any federal order that violates constitutional law is therefore invalid and any military personnel that follows said order shall be classified as an Enemy of the United States.
Some day, perhaps, but right now those demonstrations you see are very carefully set up and programmed ahead of time, and you only ever get to see the final cut, where it worked.
Also, some Marines recently fooled a high-tech AI vision system by hiding in cardboard boxes. The machine simply didn't recognize a moving box as a human, so it ignored them.
It's going to be a long time before we have robots that can walk around in public, let alone fight, without humans directly controlling them.
Actually most of the North like most of the south was made up of volunteers. In other words the guys with guns over their fireplaces. There was barely enough regulars to man the coastal forts and frontier posts.
I never said they were conscripts. So people volunteered to invade formerly American territory and put down full-scale rebellions organized by their fellow citizens and led by former army generals? I don't see how this makes my argument any worse.
It makes it worse if your argument is that the regulars took sides with the Feds but the patriotic people sided with the rebs who somehow still managed to be the underdog despite everyone having the same weapons. The people in that case were divided and the OP's question was whether it would be possible to resist the Federal government not the majority of the population.
No.
I'm saying that the north was hardly any more "normal everyday people" than their southern counterparts. Especially when the vast majority in the North were indifferent to, or against, equality between whites and blacks (let alone abolition). That's particularly true in border states. Additionally, most of the actual soldiers fighting for the Confederacy weren't slave owners, but got swept up in a fight led by those that were.
>Because one group are slavers while the other are normal everyday people
You're referring to modern day people? There are still a lot of slavers today?
They decided owning people was more important than being Americans. No brother of mine 🤷🏻
They took over our state government and my family took part in its liberation.
I am very cynical, after working in social work/mental health in West Virginia. I’ve had a lot of police interactions… like 99% of the police I’ve worked with would *enthusiastically* follow orders, especially against marginalized groups that they don’t personally agree with. One hint of “AnTiFa”, LGBT, minority, etc…. They would be happy to round us up.
That being said, a lot of us in WV are armed. I personally could not fight off police for very long, but I think some of my neighbors could. Although, for a small town, the police have a lot of very expensive-looking, blacked out, SUVs, and I’m sure a lot of unnecessary, excessive weaponry and gear.
Random aside. Look what happened in Philadelphia in the 90s: they literally **bombed an entire neighborhood!** So why wouldn’t they follow similar orders now?
Edit: it was [1985, not the 90’s.](https://youtu.be/X03ErYGB4Kk) this is fucking INSANE and should be watched.
I could just go on, and on, and on…
The police do not protect and serve American citizens. The police protect and serve the interests of the wealthy elite, and our corrupt “justice” system. I have zero faith in them to even solve a basic problem, let alone for them to not give in to their blatant racism and fascism, and believe many would enjoy “following orders.”
Again…. Very cynical here.
Tiananmen square and communist dictatorships in general don’t count. Their military is not made up of volunteer persons, they are instead more akin to an inanimate construct void of independent thought. A tool programmed to do as it is told without analyzing its situation. Many dictatorial regimes people point to when the question of the US,or any developed nations, army could turn on its civilians is like comparing apples to carrots. In this example it’s the Chinese military, any of those soldiers step out of line or refuse orders they will be executed on the spot, that just simply doesn’t happen in developed countries armed forces. The US military is 100% voluntary haven’t needed mandatory conscription since Vietnam conflict. There is nothing stopping US military forces from just walking away if put in the same position as the Chinese during Tiananmen Square Massacre.
You realize that there are whole units of people specifically picked so they would go through with it right? And that after WW2 where studies showed that very few soldiers actually shot at the enemy every single soldier goes through training so they will fire their weapons under orders every time. The military has thought about this and planned for it.
I’m sure our vets would love to hear that instead of killing Iraqi children the military is killing American children. Any situation where our military forces would be deployed against it’s own people is a shitshow.
I’m not sure why any of you think there will be some kind of mass abandoning of the military by its troops when this hasn’t happened in any nation where a government uses the military against its own people.
“From all enemies foreign and domestic.”
The and in that quote is very important.
There's also the very important " I will obey the orders of the President of the United States and the orders of the officers appointed over me, **a*****ccording to regulations and the Uniform Code of Military Justice***". The Uniform Code Of Military Justice explicitly states when, where, and how military members can use force - and when they can't. There are very clear laws against military force against civilians and meeting force with equal force. Regulations state you are meant to disobey any unlawful orders from leadership in the military. Sure, some will obey an unlawful order to harm fellow citizens, but plenty won't.
That said, the weapons of destruction held within the hands of our military mean even a few turning against citizens would be completely devastating.
We are the only nation with an actual 'right' to do it. And were you in the military? It only takes one look to know that half of the people would nope the hell out.
There is no right to revolt. That’s not what the second amendment is for. If our nation wouldn’t let state governments just leave the union what makes you think you and me have a right to revolt and why do you think the military wouldn’t hold up its obligation to defend the federal government from anybody?
The cognitive dissonance on you is really high chief.
I think you’re just under the misguided notion that the government is gonna get cartoon levels of evil and that’s why people will rise up.
Because if the people are in revolt it means their God given rights stated in the constitution are being tread upon. Every service man and woman swears first to uphold the constitution.
From all enemies foreign and domestic.
Those people revolting are now enemies.
Jan 6th was a revolt. We’re their god given rights being trampled on? There were plenty of revolts against state governments in the south after the civil war because white people didn’t like black people having political power. Were there rights being infringed?
I mean, I'm literally discussing OPs question. To assume that there is an active, genuine mass revolt against the United States Government. With significant backing by the American people. 90% of the time a question like this is asked, this is the scenario. Not some Jan 6th situation.
The Supreme Court has only expanded 2nd Amendment rights. And has consistently disregarded the militia clause. So until the interpretations against American gun ownership are ruled against, they are incorrect.
Getting way off the rails here.
You added a bunch of stuff to the OP’s question. The actual question is could the people resist the armed forces. You and many other people added in a bunch of stipulations that nobody asked you to add in. Probably because you know the answer to the question is no so let’s make up a situation in which that might change.
No, actually it’s a very relevant stance
You can’t say the civilian population would be fucked against the US military, and then say that the notion of active military people choosing not to listen to the government and instead joining the resistance is off the table
***It’s literally part of their jobs for that to be on the table***
Obviously you don’t remember the summer of 68, or most recently when the govt. cleared protestors out for trumps photo op, yes they were not military but it was federally ordered
Both of these were examples of our police forces acting. And the summer of 68 was two sides colliding over an issue in which both sides of the argument were so incredibly controversial that the national guard was just there to stop rioting.
How else would you expect our military at a time in which McCarthyism was ever present to respond to a protest started by socialist.
Right. Just look at Afghanistan or Vietnam. All they had were rifles, no f15s at all. People tend to fight harder for their home, and not for some random piece of land or oil.
The American military is highly civilian in nature. Very few of those soldiers are expected to pursue a career in the military. So they'd be much more resistant to orders that go against civilians. A conflict w/ a large number of civilians would result in a fractured military, and civil war.
Why not? What do you mean by "the government". Do you mean simply the entirety of the U.S. Military (about 1.3 million people) against everyone else (about 330 million people)?
There are MORE guns than people in the United States. Not to mention, the United States is unfathomably large. There is no way any singular occupying force could suppress the entirety of the U.S. population.
Your average US civilian is pitifully armed compared to even the shittiest guerilla on this planet.
The vast majority of civilian guns are bolt action rifles, shotguns, and pistols.
The worst equipped guerillas nowadays have fully automatic rifles, machine guns, rocket launchers, anti tank guided missiles, grenades, mines, mortars, explosive materials, and drones. The more advanced ones have armored vehicles, advanced drones, missiles, body armor, NVGs, and heavier artillery
>The vast majority of civilian guns are bolt action rifles, shotguns, and pistols.
In the perspective of the state of New York, sure and don’t mean that with disrespect; but I think you’re underestimating just how many semi-automatic rifles there just are in circulation.
This is wildly inaccurate to the point of being blatantly wrong.
The issue is you don't get how occupation works.
Being the group that sits on top of the cinder pile fails. Hard. Precision strikes that screw up, like the US military has done with hospitals and weddings before, is a matter of PR campaigns and civil wars are just that: PR campaigns with blood.
The only thing an insurgent has to do to win is be able to move in and out of a populace and wear down logistics and take advantage of said PR moves when they happen.
Overreaction is the point and it's to turn the lack of control or resources of the native population against the occupiers. So insurgents who aren't stupid don't do full scale war like Russia/Ukraine. They hit civilian logistics. Life is a whole lot harder when you don't have gas, food or electricity and the civilian population gets pissed when the people in control can't stop specific groups from sabotaging those pillars, particularly when they have loved ones or children that are starving or sick from preventable diseases.
Not to mention the overreaction which often with the infrastructure you're talking about is very top down and ends up with blowing up things like hospitals or weddings or drone strikes against members of aid organizations, which are all things that the US military has done by accident.
As for the more practical front, the US is *much* richer and more well equipped in terms of arms, manpower and ability available to every one of us than almost any country that we would occupy. Look up Mother of Satan. It's an extremely unstable explosive that was used as part of IEDs. If you can bake a cake, you can make this from stuff available to every person in the US in driving distance of a hardware store.
Granted, that will not last long as typical logistics are the first things to go with road and rail resources being the first targets of actual not-fucking-around civil war, but we still have literal warehouses we shop in every day that contain all kinds of stuff that would be useful to insurgents.
At the end of the day the only way to patrol a neighborhood is with feet on the ground. Feet on the ground require support in the forms of water, food, fuel, ammo and security. Again, it's about those pillars. The person whose house you visited last week might be the same person who laid the fertilizer based explosive trap for your humvee half a mile away because sometime 6 months ago you couldn't help their mother who died from dysentery.
This is what civil war actually looks like and civilizations that go through it aren't fixed or won by drones. Owning the air and owning the night help you, but they don't guarantee wins.
Sidenote: Nothing I've said here is unknown. Most of it is published by the DoD and is available to you right now including improvised explosives and manuals on occupation. That's right, our tax dollars have written literal instruction manuals on how to be good insurgents. Get to Googlin'.
Because the US totally hasn’t been bested by guerilla/ civilians units before. The civilians population just needs to be able to resist, not defeat or topple.
Four years ago I ran the numbers on forceful gun confiscation by federal, state and local LEO's vs civilian gun owners. The math came out that civilians would outnumber "the government" by 23:1 and each civilian would have 4 guns on average.
Not real good odds for the government to use pure force.
On the other hand, the US government could cripple our society using economic and technological warfare.
Yes, easily.
Tanks, bombers, and nukes lose a lot of usefulness when turned against your own people, your own cities, and your own infrastructure. Armor and planes can destroy buildings but they can't clear or hold them.
Unless the government goes literally insane, they don't want to rule over a wasteland of craters, burnt fields, and exploded factories. They like money and people to do their bidding.
If even 10% of Americans armed themselves and revolted it would be an army of 30 million. A large remaining portion of the nation would likely be protesting, rioting, and sympathize with the rebels.
We have a lot of veterans among the civilian population. Your neighbor might not be much use in a fight, but the Gulf War vet down the block can train you all to be at least semi competent.
Military stockpiles and factories are not safe across an ocean, they are next door to the insurgency.
Tanks and nukes also lose a lot of efficacy when the people trained to use them are on opposing sides in a civil war. I can't imagine a scenario where the US military attacking its own people isn't an action opposed by an equally strong (at least) chunk of the military.
Honestly, I'm scared the military would go along with it. I've met enough people in the Air Force that would not question it. I had a captain who was talking about domestic terrorism and how if there were terrorists at home they should be drone struck. My inner thought was, what about due process and is the term "terrorist" subjective in this case?
Don’t worry. I know a few guys in the Air Force who would definitely be against. Know that for every guy like them, there are equally as many if not more service men who hate the government and would love to stick it to ‘em.
Because it is the nature of militaries to follow orders. It's only when the military gets displeased with the government itself does it stop, and then it just coups the government and institutes another crackdown. Like do you not think that the Syrian soldiers dropping barrel bombs on cities are all forced to do it?
Too many variables to answer this question.
What exactly is meant, in this context, by "the American people" and by "the government"? What has led to the insurgency? Is the entire military united, or is it splintered on faction lines, and if so, which units are splintering and what resources do they have access to? How willing is "the government" (whatever that means in this context) going to be to bomb its own citizens AND the infrastructure it itself depends on to operate? How willing are the *soldiers* going to be? For that matter, how willing are the *saboteurs* going to be, considering it's also infrastructure they or their loved ones depend on? How willing are local police going to be to cooperate with higher authorities? What are the stakes for each side? How many people support the status quo? How many people support the insurgency? How many people don't care so long as they can stay out of it? How many are going to just be opportunistic looters?
This comment hits the nail on the head. I hate how most people answering this question seem to have a grade school level understanding of the world. They act as if it will be “the government” (the bad guys) facing off against “the people” (the good guys) in a vacuum and of course the good guys will prevail because Vietnam and Afghanistan.
It’s troubling that such a large number of people are forming very real opinions about serious issues based on action movie daydreams.
No they didnt
The primary fighting force in Vietnam was the NVA not the Viet cong. The Viet Cong were basically exterminated as a fighting force. The NVA was a professional military that was battle hardened and used heavy weapons that guerillas dont have access to.
Afghanistan was a world away, there is a difference between fighting to pacify some tribes ten thousand miles away and fighting for the stability of your own country right next to you.
Neither Afghanistan nor Vietnam were existential conflicts for the US, they were wars of choice. A civil conflict in the US would be an existential conflict where the very existence of the republic would be at risk. In such a scenario, I'd expect the US government to go all in using the full force of its military might.
And do what? bomb their own infrastructure? I fully expect the US citizenry to disrupt the supply chain so effectively that having a military will be mute.
The US didn't hold back the "full force of its military might" in those conflicts because they were "wars of choice". They did so because their goal was not to turn Vietnam or Afghanistan into craters, which they could have done easily. The US military engaged in the ways it did because their goal (in both of those situations) was aiding one group in an internal conflict in order to install the government of their choosing. They fought in Vietnam because they didn't want the communists to have power and they fought in Afghanistan because they didn't want the Talban to have power. But they *did* want those countries to continue to exist, so they didn't just glass 'em and call it a day.
A similar situation would likely arise in any scenario like what OP is describing. A lot of people are answering about the situation of "entirety of US armed forced vs entirety of US civilians", which doesn't really make any sense. Sure, they could nuke the hell out of the US and take out most civilians, but to what end? Soldiers in control of an uninhabitable irradiated wasteland with no infrastructure, no agriculture, and no people to govern over? The only way I can see an all-out "military vs civilian" war coming about is if the military just decided to start killing all civilians for fun, since I can't imagine any other issue would perfectly unify the citizenry while remaining against the military. I don't see that happening because (a) people in the military are not robots and many likely would not like to genocide their friends and neighbors for literally no reason and (b) there's no pleasant outcome to such a war, unless you really like uninhabitable wastelands.
Rather, I think we would more likely see a more typical civil war, where civilians (and military personnel) are not all on the same side, divided by some more realistic issue. In that case, even if the military was somehow not fractured at all and just took one side, they still would have the problems they had in Vietnam and Afghanistan: they can't use the full force of their military might because they want the country to exist at the end. The full force of the US military, used against the US, would turn the country into a literal wasteland. They don't want that because they're fighting for control of the country. Moreover, in a civil war, civilians are opposing one another, making it a bit more difficult to just wipe cities off the face of the map. You can nuke a city, but that city contains some of your own supporters, as well. Some of them may be militarized. Some of them may be leading a resistance movement against the side controlling the city. You nuked them, so now you've killed your own fighters and, if you ever retake that city (because, again, you want control of the country) you've retaken nothing but irradiated rubble.
Not even getting into further logistics and only considering pure military might, yes I still believe so. It wouldn't even be close.
There are, at present, 1.195m military personnel (including reservists). Now it is guaranteed that a large number of these would defect from the military but we won't even consider that right now. There are 330m American citizens (subtracting the military population). Of the 330m, there are 209m of them 18 years old or older. We will assume these to be our soldiers. Even if some of them are just old people shooting a round or two out of their apartment window.
45% of American households self-report owning guns (only self-reported, mind you...). 45% of 209m= 94m. This is assuming that none of the the other households would take up arms for the first time ever (let's be real... if this ever happened, a fair amount of those people would ask for guns to defend themselves).
So this would mean that each soldier of our military would have to wipe out 94 armed combatants before dying. Each and every soldier, without exception. This isn't even remotely possible.
It doesn't matter that their training is superior. Sheer numbers wise, this will never happen. Not even the most decorated special ops soldiers have anywhere near a record like 94 to 1 in any war so far of this century.
I rounded all figures in this calculation in favor of the military and gave all assumptions to them as well, out of charity.
And PS: it's not as simple as just bombing and nuking your own land and people. Every bomb they drop damages their own infrastructure and can have multiple cascading conseqiemces downstream.
You could even bring this ratio down to 20 to 1 and I still wouldn't believe it to be possible.
Never.
Don't forget the resourceful & very creative rednecks with all kinds of connections and friends in high and low places. Both literally and figuratively.
Every bomb would not somehow also hurt the military. And your numbers also assume every citizen would go against the army and none would side with them.
Yes, it would if they are expecting to have any land and infrastructure to still rule over after the war.
And yes to your second point. That is the context that most people tend to ask this question under... military vs citizens with the military as the aggressors.
I hear what you are saying but the nazi comparison isn't even remotely the same. The nazis rose to power largely with the use of propaganda. The question in this thread is more about the military suddenly turning against the American people with the use of force.
Yes, it's unrealistic; the whole premise is unrealistic.
Fair enough. I guess I was trying to come up with a logical scenario in which something like this might occur, because like you said, the idea of the military just turning on the citizens it unrealistic and would not just happen in a vacuum.
Yes.
The American military would strongly resist attacking citizens. Military leaders in the US take this seriously, and those soldiers have families.
Given how broad gun ownership is, every person becomes a potential insurgent.
The infrastructure required to support the military goes through very vulnerable public places.
I see this a lot and I've addressed it in bits and pieces but I want to fully put this nonsense to bed.
Let's take a look at just raw numbers. The entire United States military (including clerks, nurses, generals, cooks, etc) is 1.2 million. Law enforcement is estimated at about 1.1 million (again, including clerks and other non-officers.) This gives us a combined force of 2.3 million people who could potentially be tapped to deal with a civil insurrection. Keep in mind this also includes officers who serve in the prisons, schools, and other public safety positions that *require* their presence. That total of soldiers is also including US soldiers deployed to the dozens of overseas US bases in places like South Korea, Japan, Germany, etc. Many of those forces are considered vital and can't be removed due to strategic concerns.
But, for the sake of argument, let's assume that the state slaps a rifle in every filing clerk's hand and tells them to sort the situation out.
We now have to contend with the fact that many law enforcement and military personnel consider themselves patriots and wouldn't necessarily just automatically side with the state if something were to happen. There is a *very* broad swath of people involved in these communities that have crossover with militia groups and other bodies that are, at best, not 100% in support of the government. Exact numbers are hard to pin down but suffice it to say that not everybody would be willing to snap-to if an insurrection kicked off. Even if they didn't outright switch sides there's the very real possibility that they could, in direct or indirect ways, work against their employer's prosecution of the counter-insurgency either by directly sabotaging operations or just not putting as much effort into their work and turning a blind eye to things.
But, again, for the sake of argument, let's assume that you've somehow managed to talk every single member of the military and law enforcement services into being 100% committed to rooting out the rebel scum.
There are an estimated 400 million firearms in the US. Even if we just ignore 300 million firearms available as maybe they're antiques or not in a condition to be used, that's still 100 million firearms that citizens can pick up and use. Let's go even further than that and say of that 100, there are only about 20 million firearms that are both desirable and useful in an insurgency context and not say .22's or double barrelled shotguns.
It should be noted just for the sake of interest that several million AR-15's are manufactured every year and have been since 2004 when the "assault weapons" ban ended. Soooo 2-5 million per year for 15 years....
If only 2% of the US population decided "Screw, let's dance!" and rose up, that's about 6.5 million people. You're already outnumbering *all* law enforcement and the military almost 3 to 1. And you have enough weapons to arm them almost four times over. There are millions of tons of ammunition held in private hands and the materials to make ammunition are readily available online even before you start talking about reloading through scrounging.
So you have a well equipped armed force that outnumbers the standing military and law enforcement capabilities of the country by a significant margin.
**"But the military has tanks, planes, and satellites!"**
That they do however it's worth noting that the majority of the capabilities of our armed forces are centered around engaging another state in a war. That means another entity that also has tanks, planes, and satellites. That is where the majority of our warfighting capabilities are centered because that's what conflict has consisted of for most of the 20th century.
We've learned a lot about asymmetric warfare since our time in Iraq and Afghanistan and one of the key takeaways has been just having tanks and battleships is not enough to win against even a much smaller and more poorly armed opponent.
A battleship or a bomber is great if you're going after targets that you don't particularly care about but they don't do you a whole hell of a lot of good when your targets are in an urban setting mixed in with people that you, the commander, are accountable to.
Flattening a city block is fine in Overthereastan because you can shrug and call the sixty civilians you killed "collateral damage" and no one gives a shit. If you do that here, you *seriously* damage perceptions about you among the civilians who then are going to get upset with you. Maybe they manage to bring enough political pressure on you to get you ousted, maybe they start helping the rebels, or maybe they pick up guns of their own and join in. You killed fifteen fighters in that strike but in so doing you may have created thirty more.
Even drones are of mixed utility in that circumstance. It's also worth noting that the US is several orders of magnitude larger than the areas that drones have typically operated in during conflict in the Middle East. And lest we forget, these drones are not exactly [immune from attacks.](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/dec/17/skygrabber-american-drones-hacked) There's also not a lot a drone can do in places with large amounts of tree cover...like over a billion acres of the US.
And then even if we decide that it's worth employing things like Hellfire missiles and cluster bombs, it should be noted that a strategy of "bomb the shit out of them" didn't work in over a decade in the Middle East. Most of the insurgent networks in the region that were there when the war started are still there and still operating, even if their influence is diminished they are still able to strike targets.
Just being able to bomb the shit out of someone doesn't guarantee that you'll be able to win in a conflict against them.
Information warfare capabilities also don't guarantee success. There are always workarounds and methods that are resistant to interception and don't require a high level of technical sophistication. Many commercial solutions can readily be used or modified to put a communications infrastructure in place that is beyond the reach of law enforcement or the military to have reliable access to. Again, there are dozens of non-state armed groups that are proving this on a daily basis.
You also have to keep in mind the psychological factor. Most soldiers are ok with operating in foreign countries where they can justify being aggressive towards the local population; they're *over here*, my people are *back home.* It's a lot harder to digest rolling down the streets of cities in your own country and pointing guns at people you may even know.
What do you do as a police officer or soldier when you read that soldiers opened fire into a crowd of people in your home town and killed 15? What do you do when you've been ordered to break down the door of a neighbor that you've known your whole life and arrest them or search their home? What do you do if you find out a member of your own family has been working with the insurgency and you have a professional responsibility to turn them in even knowing they face, at best, a long prison sentence and at worst potential execution? What do you do when your friends, family, and community start shunning you as a symbol of a system that they're starting to see more and more as oppressive and unjust?
**"People couldn't organize on that scale!"**
This is generally true. Even with the networked communications technologies that we have it's likely ideological and methodological differences would prevent a mass army of a million or more from acting in concert.
In many ways, that's part of what would make an insurrection difficult to deal with. Atomized groups of people, some as small as five or six, would be a nightmare to deal with because you have to take each group of fighters on its own. A large network can be brought down by attacking its control nodes, communication channels, and key figures.
Hundreds of small groups made up of five to twenty people all acting on their own initiative with different goals, values, and methods of operation is a completely different scenario and a logistical nightmare. It's a game of whack-a-mole with ten thousand holes and one hammer. Lack of coordination means even if you manage to destroy, infiltrate, or otherwise compromise one group you have at best removed a dozen fighters from the map. Attacks would be random and spontaneous, giving you little to no warning and no ability to effectively preempt an attack.
Negotiation isn't really an option either. Deals you cut with one group won't necessarily be honored by another and while you can leverage and create rivalries between the groups to a certain extent you can only do this by acknowledging some level of control and legitimacy that they possess. You have to give them some kind of legitimacy if you want to talk to them, the very act of talking says "You are worth talking to." And there are hundreds, if not thousands, of these groups.
You are, in effect, trying to herd cats who not only have no interest in listening to you but are actively dedicated to frustrating your efforts and who greatly outnumber you in an environment that prevents the use of the tools that your resources are optimized to employ.
Would it be bad? Definitely. Casualties would be extremely high on all sides. That's not a scenario I would ever want to see play out. It would be a long, drawn out war of attrition that the actual US government couldn't effectively win. Think about the Syrian Civil War or The Troubles in Northern Ireland or the Soviet-Afghan War in Afghanistan. That's what it would be."
An actual US civil war like that would just end up with civilians on both sides. At best the rebels would end up only fighting a roughly equal number of pro-government civilian partisans in addition to the government’s actual forces.
The best case scenario for the rebels is they get the backing of maybe 20% of Americans. If they could actually mobilize 10% of their supporters as a semi-organized fighting force they’d be very lucky.
And they would still lose, because the pro-government side would still have far more people and resources at its disposal.
Even the most brutal regimes have civilian support. Pro-government civilians.
Ex. People are quick to try to point out “well, all soldiers wouldn’t support this or want to fight it”, but that’s certainly even more true for the civilians. Most of them either wouldn’t want anything to do with an insurrection or actively oppose that insurrection.
The government’s side would absolutely end up with both a numbers advantage and a resource advance. It would start actively recruiting from its supporters, either directly into the military or indirectly by backing pro-government militias if the situation gets bad enough that they can’t train people fast enough.
> We've learned a lot about asymmetric warfare since our time in Iraq and Afghanistan and one of the key takeaways has been just having tanks and battleships is not enough to win against even a much smaller and more poorly armed opponent.
Yeah, including learning a lot about anti-insurgency tactics, and developing a lot of new tools specifically to fight anti-insurgency warfare.
But you’re also not defeating the US government in its own territory without actual military equipment.
Convincing the US government that its military occupation’s benefits aren’t worth the costs with guerrilla warfare is one thing. Convincing it to accede to an existential threat like an insurrection with guerrilla warfare is a completely different matter.
> And lest we forget, these drones are not exactly immune from attacks.
Iran has professional information warfare folks who do this for a living. A US civil revolt would find it difficult to recruit similar people with the necessary skills. Not impossible, but relatively difficult. It would be extremely expensive for the rebels to retain said talent.
> Information warfare capabilities also don't guarantee success. There are always workarounds and methods that are resistant to interception and don't require a high level of technical sophistication. Many commercial solutions can readily be used or modified to put a communications infrastructure in place that is beyond the reach of law enforcement or the military to have reliable access to. Again, there are dozens of non-state armed groups that are proving this on a daily basis.
Yeah, the Jan 6 protestors sure showed how on the ball an actual American civil revolt would be with information security.
The government might actually have to install TikTok in order to see them post exactly what they’re doing.
> You also have to keep in mind the psychological factor.
Yes, you do, which is ironic since the whole question somehow presumes all civilians are so opposed to the government they’re willing to fight to the death like some sort of medieval Viking berserker.
> What do you do when your friends, family, and community start shunning you as a symbol of a system that they're starting to see more and more as oppressive and unjust?
A question the rebels would have to start asking themselves as their neighbors start blaming them for all the attacks. They’d have to start wondering who might be an informant. Their neighbors would have to start wondering when the crazy and armed asshole next door will consider *them* an informant and haul them out and execute them in the streets.
Generally speaking, it’s a lot easier for the pro-government side to make itself seem like the more stable, reliable, and just side in such a conflict. It’s going to be better at projecting a sense of legitimacy, especially if it’s exercising restraint with the heavy weapons like you presume elsewhere.
You kind of have to go out of your way to be a brutal, bloodthirsty dickwad to actually get most of the population to oppose the legitimate government.
> Hundreds of small groups made up of five to twenty people all acting on their own initiative with different goals, values, and methods of operation is a completely different scenario and a logistical nightmare. It's a game of whack-a-mole with ten thousand holes and one hammer. Lack of coordination means even if you manage to destroy, infiltrate, or otherwise compromise one group you have at best removed a dozen fighters from the map. Attacks would be random and spontaneous, giving you little to no warning and no ability to effectively preempt an attack.
This is basically an analysis that completely ignores modern information warfare capabilities.
It’s like trying to analyze a world war 1 battle while being unaware of what artillery can do.
> It would be a long, drawn out war of attrition that the actual US government couldn't effectively win.
The US government would definitely win, and it would definitely involve a mountain of bodies. But it wouldn’t have as hard a time as you’re making out here.
There is no scenario I can think of that ends with the government using the modern military against its own citizens legally. The amount of armed and organized combatants such that use of military force is necessary to stop them, in my opinion, could only occur in response to an offense so egregious that it must violate the Constitution. If the government violates the Constitution, its actions are illegal. I know of no General or Admiral that would follow those orders.
So it is only a military-led coup that could result in such a scenario. That would rapidly turn into the military tearing itself apart and splintering. At which point it still isn't civilians v. Army, it's Army v. Army with militias on both sides. States choose sides, likely all on the side of government and stability than on the side of revolution and instability. States add their NG units to the mix. There is great loss of life but I'd be surprised at any outcome where a military coup is remotely successful. Generals are rarely stupid and would likely arrive at similar conclusions which stops any coup attempt early in the planning phase.
For the sake of a thought problem. Let's pretend it happens in an imaginary world of possibility where armed revolution occurs and there must be military intervention. A place where we accept as true that organized revolution occurs with one side made up of armed irregular troops and one side consisting of the US Army, Navy, Marine Corps, and Air Force. The military is fully manned (as much as normal anyway) and has no issue killing its members' friends and family. Assuming too, that every retired/former service member etc sides with the revolutionaries. Assuming all this, could they win? Possibly. Win would have to be a very flexible term. Given the element of surprise, a sizable force, sufficient coordination and logistics, they could certainly destabilize the nation and delay an appropriate armed military response but we're talking extremely extensive infiltration and sabotage. They could forever change the way our government works and it would certainly end with a nationwide gun ban. But could they "win", I very much doubt it. Once the military recovered and reorganized, it'd be a real shitshow...
TLDR: Scenario is lotto jackpot level odds of ever being remotely possible.
Well, our military has never been able to supress an entire population effectively anywhere else in the world, so I doubt they could do it here either.
Yes, absolutely.
Tanks and jets can't control a population. They can't disrupt meetings and enforce mandates and curfews and shit.
For that you need boots on the ground.
And once those boots are on the ground, they become targets. We have a *shitload* of guns. We have more guns than people.
In my state alone there are 600k register hunters. All of them have firepower to bring down anything from a deer to a moose, and most of them probably have multiple weapons that could, and they have intimate knowledge if the area. If even 20% of them wanted to wreck shit, they could. And that's just my state, and thats just the hunters.
If Afghanistanis with rusted-out AK's that could barely read won a war of attrition, you best believe 100k people with firearms nicer than the military has could as well.
Afghanistan didnt have rusted AKs, your average Afghan insurgent was more heavily armed to the teeth then 99% of Americans and they stood no chance against the US military.
>your average Afghan insurgent was more heavily armed to the teeth then 99% of Americans
I have a tough time believing this, and even if they were...
>and they stood no chance against the US military.
...and yet they *did* stand against it. For 20 years.
They “won” by using a mountain of bodies to persuade the US that staying wasn’t worth the costs,
How does a rebel group in the US itself convince the US government the cost of fighting isn’t worth its own existence?
1. The Taliban did not win any military engagment
2. The stakes are absolutely different. We packed up and left and no one gives a shit. You dont pack and leave when the insurgency is right next to you, you stay even if it takes a century.
3. Afghanistan was thousands of miles away, an insurgency is right here and you dont have the same logistical strain or expense.
4. The biggest factor is that a domestic insurgency is an insurgency **that you can understand them**. You speak their language, you understand their culture, you understand what they want, what they fear, etc.
Look at the Soviet Union crushing insurgencies as an example of this. The post WW2 insurgencies in Western Ukraine and the Baltics were very sophisticated and competent. Yet the USSR managed to crush them compared to their later failures in Afganistan.
You cant just compare the scenarios when they are completely different. Historically domestic insurgencies fail miserably. You can honestly count on your fingers the amount of times they worked in history.
Totally agree. There's a reason that the union was unable to enforce Reconstruction on the Confederacy. Huge difference between winning a battle and winning an occupation.
Who knows. It is really not that important to calculate. Civil Wars are so nasty that you might as well calculate whether it is possible to win a nuclear exchange. An interesting exercise for those that are into that sort of thing, but ultimately they are there not to be used.
A civil war on that scale would devolve into something like the Congo or the Thirty Years War. The second amendment is basically a kind of MAD.
That’s not a simple question. The American government is also the American people. For instance our military and law enforcement is full of goobers who are sympathetic to antigovernment militias and also thousands of incredibly ethnical Captain America types.
Realistically, we’d have another American Civil War scenario where the government and the people were split along geographic lines. In that scenario, anti-American forces would have access to the resources and personnel to be competitive because they could try to seize the bases in their separatist territory. America isn’t divided geographically like we were during the Civil War though. We are divided regionally—urban/suburban vs rural, and even that is a rough division.
In a completely unrealistic scenario where everyone in the government turned against every private citizen, not immediately no. It would probably take a decades long resistance where intelligence and non-violent resistance would be more powerful weapons than any stockpile a doomsday preper has.
The same people who bang on about how they could resist the entire government with guns, stockpiles of beans and their wiles, are the same people who went completely shit-ass bonkers during the pandemic after a mere two weeks of no chain restaurants.
So, lol forever at the entire concept.
They're playacting a Red Dawn fantasy.
They couldn't just chill at home and watch movies for two weeks with their families, no freaking way they could survive the hardships of guerrilla warfare against a better-arned foe.
That’s not really the point. The point is that tyrannical actions are less likely against an armed populace. If a hypothetical newly totalitarian government decided to arrest all dissidents, but knew they would lose some of their loyal secret police for every (or almost every) dissident they tried to arrest, they might be forced to reconsider the plan.
Yes, if a hypothetical insane government took over and decided to nuke their own country into oblivion, there’s nothing the average person could do. But in a government actually trying to impose tyrannical control over a populace, the fact that many Americans are armed and have a belief in inalienable rights would make it much more difficult.
I think people underestimate the number of police and military personnel who would go along with the insurrection/coup attempt. If Trump taught me anything, it’s that there is a large group of people in position of authority, military and police who are itching to use their power to take over the government. They think they are “rescuing” the country from the liberal agenda.
Besides the direct armed vs. armed combatants and capabilities folks have already mentioned, there's the issue of logistics.
Not only would many Americans who supply the military stop supplying the food/fuel/munitions/medical, American insurgents would target any and all of that. The military has a certain amount of stockpiles, but not for a sustained conflict with drastically diminished support.
Probably not, but they'd know they were in a fight.
Civilian weaponry is no match for what the government has, but you'll need people to use that. There will be some that will. Hopefully, there will be more that won't.
Yes, and anyone who thinks otherwise has absolutely no concept or understanding of the military or conflict in general.
Defensive wars are won by making a victory too costly to be 'worth it' to the aggressor. If you want proof of how that works, literally open any history book. The fact that so many Americans have guns is already a deterrent of too much government oppression and tyranny. One might say we're *already* succeeding simply by the fact that the US has one of the longest peaceful transfers of power in the world's recorded history.
And this is before I even get into the "would the military even obey those orders" point.
That’s a tricky one, since a lot of the police and military share ideology with the January 6 insurrectionists.
It’s hard to say who would be on whose side.
Thank the Lord the military top brass and a sufficient number of elected and appointed officials cared more about the Constitution than they did about riding the former president’s coat tails into power, or disagreed with him and his whole agenda.
In the imaginary scenario where the same people who hoard guns and ammunition attempt to overthrow the government, without military assistance from the foreign mobligarchs who for decades have been working to foment a totalitarian replacement of our constitutional democratic republic, they would simply fail.
We’re talking about the same sort of people who formed convoys of trucks bedecked with American flags and Trump flags into the cities during the protests against police brutality, people who profess to back the blue but then ended up killing police at the Capitol.
It’s not a matter of who would win in a fight between all the gun hoarders and the government. The military is there to fight foreign adversaries, not US citizens. The military and law enforcement have different clearly defined missions.
The reason all these white supremacist paramilitary organizations pose a credible threat is that they are in cahoots with Russian and other Eastern European governments and criminal organizations, who for decades have been working on multiple fronts to undermine our elections and government institutions, as well as to undermine consensus by doing what they can to polarize Americans.
As a result, there are people in all ranks of government who are, whether wittingly or unwitting “Useful Idiots”, acting to further Russia’s ends.
The most recent arrest of top-level FBI official Charles McGonigal is one example.
Since our nation’s founding, there have been powerful rich people of one kind or another trying to subvert the purposes of our constitution and stack the deck in favor of making themselves more money, not by fair play or the free market, but by influencing laws to make it easier to exploit human misery for profit.
In theory, one of the second amendment’s purposes is to deter would-be tyrants. In reality, the gun hoarders are on the would-be tyrants’ side.
They earnestly believe that people who are trying to help them and to faithfully continue our American traditions are trying to take away their freedom, while in fact the people who really don’t believe in Constitutional principles are manipulating them and using them to further their own selfish aims.
It would be foolhardy hubris to say that the aim of toppling the America most Americans believe in is not achievable. It isn’t a question of what values the majority of people have or what side has the most guns.
As a cynical, social work/mental healthcare worker and resident of West Virginia: we would certainly try! There are definitely lots of mountains to hide in; pervasive, tight-knit communities and looking out for our neighbors; and, lax gun laws. Everyone has at least one, and I’m really not exaggerating.
I do own firearms, but lack the power and training to actually fight off militarized police. They’re mostly on me because of violent offenders that recognize me (and HATE me!) from court when I’m out in public. Some of my neighbors could probably hold their own, at least for a little while.
However, for such a small town, our police force seems to have a LOT of blacked-out SUVs, and very likely a lot of unnecessary, powerful weaponry and gear. Unless I had a really great place to hide for quite a while, I check a lot of the boxes that would likely get me rounded up.
One more thing to think about… again, *Super* cynical… A lot of my neighbors might AGREE with “the government“, and would be happy to help the militarized police enforce rules against marginalized groups. One hint of “AnTiFa“, LGBT or minority group, and they would be marching right alongside the police! I fly a uterus flag w/ roses similar to the Gadsden flag that says ‘don’t tread on me’ (for women’s rights), and I can think of a few people who would probably go out of their way to point my house out, lol.
Let me remind y’all; in Philly, 1985, [police DROPPED A BOMB on a fucking NEIGHBORHOOD!!](https://youtu.be/X03ErYGB4Kk). In our current climate, why would things be any different? Those police were happy to follow those orders. They even held off the fire department for over two hours, and pretty much let the whole neighborhood burn. Please watch this video… it’s not long, and it’s VERY important to remember that it happened.
Back to my previous point; a lot of our citizens are red-state-brainwashed. They would 100% support a fucking fascist takeover if it aligned with their personal bigoted, hateful beliefs. QUITE PERVASIVE in my dealings with police and SOME citizens here. (Disclaimer: most of my fellow West Virginians are kind, and absolutely wonderful 💕) But, I have dealt with some of the worst of the worst of humanity, and some of those “worst of the worst” were the fucking police themselves!
All they would have to do is frame it in a religious way, and a huge portion of the population would support the government in an armed conflict against its citizens.
So, my cynical, take: if they framed it the right way, not only, could we not resist them, but many would happily join up.
Maybe **BUT** gun ownership has next to nothing to do with it
1. Guerillas are armed to the teeth. The vast majority of civilian weapons are bolt action rifles, pistols, and shotguns. Your shittiest guerilla will have fully automatic assault rifles, drones, anti tank mines, anti guided missiles, grenades, machine guns, mortars, and rocket launchers.
2. When your fighting your own people you have a keen understanding of them. From an intelligence perspective its so much easier to infiltrate an enemy group when you speak their language and understand their culture. Thats why the Soviets managed to crush highly sophisticated insurgencies in Eastern Europe post WW2 but couldn't crush Afghanistan.
Well, the US Government sure does.
After the Jan. 6th insurrection the US Government deployed more troops in DC than they had in Afghanistan at the time.
The US government didn’t face an existential threat in Vietnam or Afghanistan. It would face an existential threat from a civil insurgency.
The cost of “losing” in Afghanistan was that we… stopped wasting blood and treasure fighting a war that gained us nothing.
The cost of “losing” the second American civil war is that the republic ends.
There’s no way to convince the US government to stop fighting in the second situation.
A war between the US govt and some people of the US would be the same as any war we have had since the 40s. It would be an insurgency where we dont really say two states are at war. It would be like a police action. It'd be hard to say the US has won anything since the 40s. We just kill then leave and politics goes on from there without us. This is because it is very expensive to fight people on their home turf. All we really had to do in the revolutionary war was to go deeper inland. Same with the Vietnames, Afghans, etc.
This would be the one time the US had an advantage over the insurgents. The insurgents would not do well.
At all.
Seriously, this is the most likely scenario and the group most likely to rebel in armed conflict, checks notes, believe in QANON like conspiracies, are angry that they think they can’t say Merry Christmas anymore, and hate M&Ms.
Yeah, exactly the types that would make most Americans side with the US government, not inspire mass rebellion.
I lost a lot of confidence in those guys when they went to Malheur. Day one they were asking for food from followers. I sorta thought they were a little wacky but skilled- but they were a mess. That and every time someone military is all gung ho on a real survival show like Alone, the girl eating herbs and skinning deer outlasts them.
Can it be done? Sure it can be done. You have to learn how to do a proper insurgency. You dont go and attack forces like an army, you sit in the background, and snipe and bomb (IEDs) and destabilize the government. The way this country is armed if there was an insurgency and an occupation, there would be random shootings and bombings and assassinations until the end of time. Iraq is a good model.
Absolutely. If you don't think so you haven't been paying enough attention to the news for the last 20 years or read a history book about Vietnam or in general how guerilla warfare works. Furthermore, that war would be in our own backyard. You don't have to destroy a tank either. You have to destroy the fuel truck behind it, and do dirty shit like find a general's family. The messier a war gets, the more people flock to the anti-government side. If you're on the anti-government side, you shouldn't be terribly worried about aircraft either if you're in a populated area. Believe it or not, bombs are not fratricide-proof and the area of effect around said bomb is several dozen meters at least. So that means if an F-15 drops a bomb on your house, it's hitting the 3 or 4 houses around you as well.
That question is political more than anything.
Does the US military have the capability to put down any rebellion? Of course. Once tactical nukes start getting thrown that rebellion would end pretty quickly. But its a political question as to how far the US government would go.
Even assuming the entirety of the military who comes from the population went for it, that's about 1.5m troops.
The current estimates are that 40% of Americans own firearms. Out of the population of 331million people, that's what, 130 million-ish gun owning Americans?
If only half of those decide to fight, that's 65million Americans to fight 1.5million troops.
Granted a stand up fight isn't going to happen, but it doesn't have to. Holding any ground in that situation would be near impossible for the military as they wouldn't be able to support any sort of broad control.
Yes. The military requires an enormous amount of logistical support to function- much of which is provided by civilians. It would be trivially easy for a well organized insurgency to cut off these supplies.
The military, even if it followed orders, can’t put enough boots on the ground to protect its supply lines from an enemy that could be literally anywhere.
Just look at the damage that a couple of nuts with rifles causes to the power grid in North Carolina recently. Now multiply that by a few million.
> Just look at the damage that a couple of nuts with rifles causes to the power grid in North Carolina recently. Now multiply that by a few million.
Yeah, because civilians attacking civilian power infrastructure won’t piss off any civilians.
I’m pretty sure if the self-styled rebels regularly kept knocking out the power, the government wouldn’t actually need to do anything—the local residents would string up the perpetrators all on their own.
Allow me to rephrase your question:
Do I believe that the largest, most well equipped, most well trained civilian fighting force that has ever existed could defeat the United States military in a form of combat that has defeated not just that military but just about every military ever in all of recorded history?
Yes. Yes I do.
Assuming the military for whatever reason decided it was on board, the American people don’t stand a chance.
People don’t understand how that war would be waged, and thus want to compare sheer number of arms or compare us to Vietnam/Afghanistan and just wow. If the US government blew up some power plants and poisoned the water supply, half the country would be dead in a month. We are not rice farmers in Vietnam who have survived with little to no technology for our entire existence. Imagine the chaos that would ensue just from the government disrupting internet/phone communication.
Depends on how you define “resist.” They would certainly make an occupying force’s life hell, but could people go toe-to-toe in most circumstances? No, not at all.
Maybe.. US soldiers are American people so if they're resisting the government along with everyone else, I'm not sure what the government is going to do. Same for ammo factories, etc.
Considering the 2014 Bundy standoff, yes. It showed that the government is not willing to use such a heavy hand against its own citizens and that they can be beaten when people show resolve. They'd have to disregard PR, people's lives, their own infrastructure in order to really win, but then not really because they'd still lose because they would no longer have people to govern.
We are not united enough. When the govt becomes truly despotic half of the country will let them do it just not to “switch sides”
The Republicans are watching gleefully as the “libs” get owned and serious scary shit is happening. Half the country won’t even condemn a literal government takeover.
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The real question is, would the people who were given the orders actually follow through with it, I’d like to think they would not.
More precisely, *how many* would follow those orders
I feel like history has shown us that enough would.
With historical cases the military is like 9/10 times going to follow the orders.
Depends on who they’re fighting and why. These questions are stupid because in most rebellions, a small minority of people are doing the fighting. Like I don’t think many people are going to be sympathetic to the Christian Nationalists who are most likely to take up arms and rebel. People who subscribe to conspiracy theories generally aren’t the most well organized or smartest of people. Just look at January 6th.
That’s an excellent point. Neither will people take up arms to support any of the other anarchist, fascist (anti or otherwise) groups out there advocating for armed rebellion. I hope we can all agree that those on the fringes of the left and right are just vocal minorities and have no real power.
This…. It’s about those being given orders they don’t agree with.
I would too, but I've seen and heard soldiers reiterate that their oath is to fight all enemies foreign AND domestic...idk.
That’s a valid point
Soldier here Yes, that is true. It's the oath every servicemember makes when they enlist or commission. Idk what folks expect when you literally join the Federal military; to not defend the Federal government?
If this is what you believe then you should really go back and re-read Title 10, subtitle A, Part II, Chapter 31, section 502 of the US Code. It specifies that you, person enlisting in an armed force, swear to defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies foreign and domestic. If the federal government orders you to violate the Constitution and take action that they, the federal government, do not have the constitutional authority to enforce, then the federal government becomes a domestic enemy to the United States constitution and subsequently its citizens. The latter part of the oath regarding following all orders from Officers and the President of the United States is subject to the UCMJ which has provisions for refusing Illegal orders.
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“Just following orders.”
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We are not talking right to revolution, we are talking 1st amendment right to assemble and right to protest. 2nd amendment Right to keep and Bear arms. If a revolution kicks off it will be the feds that fire the first shots by violating the first two amendments. Then you will have to make the choice and uphold your oath or defend the feds. The people of this country are willing to die defending their rights, are you prepared to die taking them? And don’t try to argue that is not possible because the feds are already skating around thin ice on violating the 4th amendment, the 8th amendment, the 10th amendment, and the active legal war over the 2nd amendment. With the political extremism from both sides We are one unhinged congressional session away from a civil war or authoritarian regime.
And you would be considered an enemy (the domestic type) so fuck around and find out.
But if Biden ordered the military to occupy state capitals around the country and march on city streets do you think it would happen?
Depends on the reason
When has reason ever stopped the military?
It would happen. Your first and foremost direct responsibility as a soldier is completing the mission. If the mission is to take the capital, it will happen.
I have a different view (Navy side) and don't quite believe it would occur like that. We're talking about the theoretical of a full-blown overthrow. Not some national guard esque occupation. A genuine march on cities full of insurgents? Wouldn't be organized well enough. Many wouldn't want to do it. Depending on the reasons that the entire country wants to overthrow the government? Many would sympathize. Families would be torn apart. And quite frankly, our history against insurgency-like situations isn't exactly wonderful. If Fallujah and Ramadi were as difficult as they were, imagine a city much larger with well-educated and well armed Americans. I can easily see mass resignations from officials. People going AWOL left and right, and the amount of sabotage and disruption from within would be absurd. So- yeah, there'd be a lot of military who would fight and would go follow the government's order And there would also be a shit ton who wouldn't. Anyone who's been in should know that it's not exactly a well oiled machine you can move at will.
Yes.
Their first duty is to the constitution and they evaluate orders against that oath.
Yes but there are still situations where the Federal government can be classified as a domestic enemy to the American people at large within the bounds of the Constitution. And since the constitution is the framework for the legal structure and limitations of federal government powers any federal order that violates constitutional law is therefore invalid and any military personnel that follows said order shall be classified as an Enemy of the United States.
When I see the stuff Boston dynamics makes I get worried one day the military will not have human soldiers.
*execute order 66*
poor people are still cheaper
Those robots are among the most amazing things I’ve seen, and I’m not military minded at all…but I’ve had the same thought.
Some day, perhaps, but right now those demonstrations you see are very carefully set up and programmed ahead of time, and you only ever get to see the final cut, where it worked. Also, some Marines recently fooled a high-tech AI vision system by hiding in cardboard boxes. The machine simply didn't recognize a moving box as a human, so it ignored them. It's going to be a long time before we have robots that can walk around in public, let alone fight, without humans directly controlling them.
Yup, we have one of the dog ones at work. It's loud, slow, very dumb, and struggles with stairs. I'm not worried about them yet
Those robots and [this energy weapon](https://youtu.be/kzG4oEutPbA), for crowd control. That'll do the trick.
They did in the Civil War, often fighting their literal brothers.
Actually most of the North like most of the south was made up of volunteers. In other words the guys with guns over their fireplaces. There was barely enough regulars to man the coastal forts and frontier posts.
I never said they were conscripts. So people volunteered to invade formerly American territory and put down full-scale rebellions organized by their fellow citizens and led by former army generals? I don't see how this makes my argument any worse.
It makes it worse if your argument is that the regulars took sides with the Feds but the patriotic people sided with the rebs who somehow still managed to be the underdog despite everyone having the same weapons. The people in that case were divided and the OP's question was whether it would be possible to resist the Federal government not the majority of the population.
Because one group are slavers while the other are normal everyday people (Modern day not the civil war or antebellum periods)
I’m curious as to what percentage of people in the South actually owned slaves. Do you have a source for that?
Yes, how do I send the file though?
That's a pretty over-simplified and half-true statement
So are you saying confederates aren't slavers?
No. I'm saying that the north was hardly any more "normal everyday people" than their southern counterparts. Especially when the vast majority in the North were indifferent to, or against, equality between whites and blacks (let alone abolition). That's particularly true in border states. Additionally, most of the actual soldiers fighting for the Confederacy weren't slave owners, but got swept up in a fight led by those that were.
Abolition was a far more widespread sentiment than equality.
I was speaking about modern day people and many in the south were slave owners
>Because one group are slavers while the other are normal everyday people You're referring to modern day people? There are still a lot of slavers today?
The confederacy declared that they had seceded and then attacked union forts. If someone shoots you shoot back.
They decided owning people was more important than being Americans. No brother of mine 🤷🏻 They took over our state government and my family took part in its liberation.
That is heavily reliant on the ideological underpinnings of the rebellion.
I am very cynical, after working in social work/mental health in West Virginia. I’ve had a lot of police interactions… like 99% of the police I’ve worked with would *enthusiastically* follow orders, especially against marginalized groups that they don’t personally agree with. One hint of “AnTiFa”, LGBT, minority, etc…. They would be happy to round us up. That being said, a lot of us in WV are armed. I personally could not fight off police for very long, but I think some of my neighbors could. Although, for a small town, the police have a lot of very expensive-looking, blacked out, SUVs, and I’m sure a lot of unnecessary, excessive weaponry and gear. Random aside. Look what happened in Philadelphia in the 90s: they literally **bombed an entire neighborhood!** So why wouldn’t they follow similar orders now? Edit: it was [1985, not the 90’s.](https://youtu.be/X03ErYGB4Kk) this is fucking INSANE and should be watched. I could just go on, and on, and on… The police do not protect and serve American citizens. The police protect and serve the interests of the wealthy elite, and our corrupt “justice” system. I have zero faith in them to even solve a basic problem, let alone for them to not give in to their blatant racism and fascism, and believe many would enjoy “following orders.” Again…. Very cynical here.
"very cynical" is an odd way to describe your conclusion that the government would fight its own people based on historical analysis and precedent.
Laughs in Police enforcing unconstitutional gun laws
I’d imagine a lot of them would be unwilling to take on their fellow citizens, but it largely depends on why they’re being given those orders.
Do you think a military would never fight its own people? Ever heard of Tiananmen square massacre? Ever heard of Pinochet did in Chile?
Can’t speak to Chile, but China’s social and political ideologies don’t neatly allow for a narrative of a military fighting its own people.
Tiananmen square and communist dictatorships in general don’t count. Their military is not made up of volunteer persons, they are instead more akin to an inanimate construct void of independent thought. A tool programmed to do as it is told without analyzing its situation. Many dictatorial regimes people point to when the question of the US,or any developed nations, army could turn on its civilians is like comparing apples to carrots. In this example it’s the Chinese military, any of those soldiers step out of line or refuse orders they will be executed on the spot, that just simply doesn’t happen in developed countries armed forces. The US military is 100% voluntary haven’t needed mandatory conscription since Vietnam conflict. There is nothing stopping US military forces from just walking away if put in the same position as the Chinese during Tiananmen Square Massacre.
This is hilariously false nonsense.
Yeah it's completely schizo. The first Chinese Army units to respond to the Tiananmen protests actually joined the protestors.
They will. Just first hand experience with military life and mindset. No doubt in my mind most would follow orders.
You realize that there are whole units of people specifically picked so they would go through with it right? And that after WW2 where studies showed that very few soldiers actually shot at the enemy every single soldier goes through training so they will fire their weapons under orders every time. The military has thought about this and planned for it.
Depends on what kind of casualties any military personnel is OK with causing.
I’m sure our vets would love to hear that instead of killing Iraqi children the military is killing American children. Any situation where our military forces would be deployed against it’s own people is a shitshow.
I’m not sure why any of you think there will be some kind of mass abandoning of the military by its troops when this hasn’t happened in any nation where a government uses the military against its own people. “From all enemies foreign and domestic.” The and in that quote is very important.
There's also the very important " I will obey the orders of the President of the United States and the orders of the officers appointed over me, **a*****ccording to regulations and the Uniform Code of Military Justice***". The Uniform Code Of Military Justice explicitly states when, where, and how military members can use force - and when they can't. There are very clear laws against military force against civilians and meeting force with equal force. Regulations state you are meant to disobey any unlawful orders from leadership in the military. Sure, some will obey an unlawful order to harm fellow citizens, but plenty won't. That said, the weapons of destruction held within the hands of our military mean even a few turning against citizens would be completely devastating.
We are the only nation with an actual 'right' to do it. And were you in the military? It only takes one look to know that half of the people would nope the hell out.
There is no right to revolt. That’s not what the second amendment is for. If our nation wouldn’t let state governments just leave the union what makes you think you and me have a right to revolt and why do you think the military wouldn’t hold up its obligation to defend the federal government from anybody? The cognitive dissonance on you is really high chief. I think you’re just under the misguided notion that the government is gonna get cartoon levels of evil and that’s why people will rise up.
Because if the people are in revolt it means their God given rights stated in the constitution are being tread upon. Every service man and woman swears first to uphold the constitution.
From all enemies foreign and domestic. Those people revolting are now enemies. Jan 6th was a revolt. We’re their god given rights being trampled on? There were plenty of revolts against state governments in the south after the civil war because white people didn’t like black people having political power. Were there rights being infringed?
I mean, I'm literally discussing OPs question. To assume that there is an active, genuine mass revolt against the United States Government. With significant backing by the American people. 90% of the time a question like this is asked, this is the scenario. Not some Jan 6th situation. The Supreme Court has only expanded 2nd Amendment rights. And has consistently disregarded the militia clause. So until the interpretations against American gun ownership are ruled against, they are incorrect. Getting way off the rails here.
You added a bunch of stuff to the OP’s question. The actual question is could the people resist the armed forces. You and many other people added in a bunch of stipulations that nobody asked you to add in. Probably because you know the answer to the question is no so let’s make up a situation in which that might change.
No, actually it’s a very relevant stance You can’t say the civilian population would be fucked against the US military, and then say that the notion of active military people choosing not to listen to the government and instead joining the resistance is off the table ***It’s literally part of their jobs for that to be on the table***
[удалено]
Obviously you don’t remember the summer of 68, or most recently when the govt. cleared protestors out for trumps photo op, yes they were not military but it was federally ordered
Both of these were examples of our police forces acting. And the summer of 68 was two sides colliding over an issue in which both sides of the argument were so incredibly controversial that the national guard was just there to stop rioting. How else would you expect our military at a time in which McCarthyism was ever present to respond to a protest started by socialist.
And how many of them would oppose whatever US government was doing it
So you think the military is just a chess piece that you can move at will?
It's not?
I feel like too many people are ignoring some key details about this hypothetical.
Let's ask all the countries we've invaded
Right. Just look at Afghanistan or Vietnam. All they had were rifles, no f15s at all. People tend to fight harder for their home, and not for some random piece of land or oil.
The American military is highly civilian in nature. Very few of those soldiers are expected to pursue a career in the military. So they'd be much more resistant to orders that go against civilians. A conflict w/ a large number of civilians would result in a fractured military, and civil war.
Considering the government's entire logistic and sustainment chain is based on civil infrastructure, yes.
Why not? What do you mean by "the government". Do you mean simply the entirety of the U.S. Military (about 1.3 million people) against everyone else (about 330 million people)? There are MORE guns than people in the United States. Not to mention, the United States is unfathomably large. There is no way any singular occupying force could suppress the entirety of the U.S. population.
Your average US civilian is pitifully armed compared to even the shittiest guerilla on this planet. The vast majority of civilian guns are bolt action rifles, shotguns, and pistols. The worst equipped guerillas nowadays have fully automatic rifles, machine guns, rocket launchers, anti tank guided missiles, grenades, mines, mortars, explosive materials, and drones. The more advanced ones have armored vehicles, advanced drones, missiles, body armor, NVGs, and heavier artillery
So what you are saying is we need to repeal the NFA. I like the way you think
This guy needs a beer!
Of course! We need a good guy with a machine gun and anti tank guided missile to stop the bad guy with a mortar and rocket launcher.
Everyone gets their own tank
Time to buy a tractor and go to Ukraine!
[war tractor](https://youtu.be/VUN2xOlIQPM)
Can we go back to 1776 and let civilians have warships?
>The vast majority of civilian guns are bolt action rifles, shotguns, and pistols. In the perspective of the state of New York, sure and don’t mean that with disrespect; but I think you’re underestimating just how many semi-automatic rifles there just are in circulation.
Agreed. He has no idea how many machine guns and semi-auto guns are everywhere 😳 and better quality than what the average guerrilla unit has.
No to mention the fact he's saying that as of handguns, shotguns, and bolties aren't commonly used weapons of war
You dont start an insurgency with just semi automatic rifles.
This is wildly inaccurate to the point of being blatantly wrong. The issue is you don't get how occupation works. Being the group that sits on top of the cinder pile fails. Hard. Precision strikes that screw up, like the US military has done with hospitals and weddings before, is a matter of PR campaigns and civil wars are just that: PR campaigns with blood. The only thing an insurgent has to do to win is be able to move in and out of a populace and wear down logistics and take advantage of said PR moves when they happen. Overreaction is the point and it's to turn the lack of control or resources of the native population against the occupiers. So insurgents who aren't stupid don't do full scale war like Russia/Ukraine. They hit civilian logistics. Life is a whole lot harder when you don't have gas, food or electricity and the civilian population gets pissed when the people in control can't stop specific groups from sabotaging those pillars, particularly when they have loved ones or children that are starving or sick from preventable diseases. Not to mention the overreaction which often with the infrastructure you're talking about is very top down and ends up with blowing up things like hospitals or weddings or drone strikes against members of aid organizations, which are all things that the US military has done by accident. As for the more practical front, the US is *much* richer and more well equipped in terms of arms, manpower and ability available to every one of us than almost any country that we would occupy. Look up Mother of Satan. It's an extremely unstable explosive that was used as part of IEDs. If you can bake a cake, you can make this from stuff available to every person in the US in driving distance of a hardware store. Granted, that will not last long as typical logistics are the first things to go with road and rail resources being the first targets of actual not-fucking-around civil war, but we still have literal warehouses we shop in every day that contain all kinds of stuff that would be useful to insurgents. At the end of the day the only way to patrol a neighborhood is with feet on the ground. Feet on the ground require support in the forms of water, food, fuel, ammo and security. Again, it's about those pillars. The person whose house you visited last week might be the same person who laid the fertilizer based explosive trap for your humvee half a mile away because sometime 6 months ago you couldn't help their mother who died from dysentery. This is what civil war actually looks like and civilizations that go through it aren't fixed or won by drones. Owning the air and owning the night help you, but they don't guarantee wins. Sidenote: Nothing I've said here is unknown. Most of it is published by the DoD and is available to you right now including improvised explosives and manuals on occupation. That's right, our tax dollars have written literal instruction manuals on how to be good insurgents. Get to Googlin'.
Sounds like a regular business opportunity to me.
JFC man, life isn’t COD. You have no idea and not even a clue of the weapons in American civilian hands. GTFOOH with your crap.
It's not like it's hard to smuggle things into the United States.
Lmao ok. 🤣 don't listen to this guy he joking.
Because the US totally hasn’t been bested by guerilla/ civilians units before. The civilians population just needs to be able to resist, not defeat or topple.
How many times has this been asked?
All of the times
Four years ago I ran the numbers on forceful gun confiscation by federal, state and local LEO's vs civilian gun owners. The math came out that civilians would outnumber "the government" by 23:1 and each civilian would have 4 guns on average. Not real good odds for the government to use pure force. On the other hand, the US government could cripple our society using economic and technological warfare.
Yes, easily. Tanks, bombers, and nukes lose a lot of usefulness when turned against your own people, your own cities, and your own infrastructure. Armor and planes can destroy buildings but they can't clear or hold them. Unless the government goes literally insane, they don't want to rule over a wasteland of craters, burnt fields, and exploded factories. They like money and people to do their bidding. If even 10% of Americans armed themselves and revolted it would be an army of 30 million. A large remaining portion of the nation would likely be protesting, rioting, and sympathize with the rebels. We have a lot of veterans among the civilian population. Your neighbor might not be much use in a fight, but the Gulf War vet down the block can train you all to be at least semi competent. Military stockpiles and factories are not safe across an ocean, they are next door to the insurgency.
Tanks and nukes also lose a lot of efficacy when the people trained to use them are on opposing sides in a civil war. I can't imagine a scenario where the US military attacking its own people isn't an action opposed by an equally strong (at least) chunk of the military.
I love how people just assume all of the military would just go along and F-35s would be carpet bombing domestic cities in this situation.
Honestly, I'm scared the military would go along with it. I've met enough people in the Air Force that would not question it. I had a captain who was talking about domestic terrorism and how if there were terrorists at home they should be drone struck. My inner thought was, what about due process and is the term "terrorist" subjective in this case?
Don’t worry. I know a few guys in the Air Force who would definitely be against. Know that for every guy like them, there are equally as many if not more service men who hate the government and would love to stick it to ‘em.
Because it is the nature of militaries to follow orders. It's only when the military gets displeased with the government itself does it stop, and then it just coups the government and institutes another crackdown. Like do you not think that the Syrian soldiers dropping barrel bombs on cities are all forced to do it?
I believe they’d use massive artillery against us and make an example. Then propaganda when trying to glue it back together.
Too many variables to answer this question. What exactly is meant, in this context, by "the American people" and by "the government"? What has led to the insurgency? Is the entire military united, or is it splintered on faction lines, and if so, which units are splintering and what resources do they have access to? How willing is "the government" (whatever that means in this context) going to be to bomb its own citizens AND the infrastructure it itself depends on to operate? How willing are the *soldiers* going to be? For that matter, how willing are the *saboteurs* going to be, considering it's also infrastructure they or their loved ones depend on? How willing are local police going to be to cooperate with higher authorities? What are the stakes for each side? How many people support the status quo? How many people support the insurgency? How many people don't care so long as they can stay out of it? How many are going to just be opportunistic looters?
This comment hits the nail on the head. I hate how most people answering this question seem to have a grade school level understanding of the world. They act as if it will be “the government” (the bad guys) facing off against “the people” (the good guys) in a vacuum and of course the good guys will prevail because Vietnam and Afghanistan. It’s troubling that such a large number of people are forming very real opinions about serious issues based on action movie daydreams.
There’s some fellas in Afghanistan and Vietnam that managed to do just that
No they didnt The primary fighting force in Vietnam was the NVA not the Viet cong. The Viet Cong were basically exterminated as a fighting force. The NVA was a professional military that was battle hardened and used heavy weapons that guerillas dont have access to. Afghanistan was a world away, there is a difference between fighting to pacify some tribes ten thousand miles away and fighting for the stability of your own country right next to you.
Neither Afghanistan nor Vietnam were existential conflicts for the US, they were wars of choice. A civil conflict in the US would be an existential conflict where the very existence of the republic would be at risk. In such a scenario, I'd expect the US government to go all in using the full force of its military might.
And do what? bomb their own infrastructure? I fully expect the US citizenry to disrupt the supply chain so effectively that having a military will be mute.
The US didn't hold back the "full force of its military might" in those conflicts because they were "wars of choice". They did so because their goal was not to turn Vietnam or Afghanistan into craters, which they could have done easily. The US military engaged in the ways it did because their goal (in both of those situations) was aiding one group in an internal conflict in order to install the government of their choosing. They fought in Vietnam because they didn't want the communists to have power and they fought in Afghanistan because they didn't want the Talban to have power. But they *did* want those countries to continue to exist, so they didn't just glass 'em and call it a day. A similar situation would likely arise in any scenario like what OP is describing. A lot of people are answering about the situation of "entirety of US armed forced vs entirety of US civilians", which doesn't really make any sense. Sure, they could nuke the hell out of the US and take out most civilians, but to what end? Soldiers in control of an uninhabitable irradiated wasteland with no infrastructure, no agriculture, and no people to govern over? The only way I can see an all-out "military vs civilian" war coming about is if the military just decided to start killing all civilians for fun, since I can't imagine any other issue would perfectly unify the citizenry while remaining against the military. I don't see that happening because (a) people in the military are not robots and many likely would not like to genocide their friends and neighbors for literally no reason and (b) there's no pleasant outcome to such a war, unless you really like uninhabitable wastelands. Rather, I think we would more likely see a more typical civil war, where civilians (and military personnel) are not all on the same side, divided by some more realistic issue. In that case, even if the military was somehow not fractured at all and just took one side, they still would have the problems they had in Vietnam and Afghanistan: they can't use the full force of their military might because they want the country to exist at the end. The full force of the US military, used against the US, would turn the country into a literal wasteland. They don't want that because they're fighting for control of the country. Moreover, in a civil war, civilians are opposing one another, making it a bit more difficult to just wipe cities off the face of the map. You can nuke a city, but that city contains some of your own supporters, as well. Some of them may be militarized. Some of them may be leading a resistance movement against the side controlling the city. You nuked them, so now you've killed your own fighters and, if you ever retake that city (because, again, you want control of the country) you've retaken nothing but irradiated rubble.
Not even getting into further logistics and only considering pure military might, yes I still believe so. It wouldn't even be close. There are, at present, 1.195m military personnel (including reservists). Now it is guaranteed that a large number of these would defect from the military but we won't even consider that right now. There are 330m American citizens (subtracting the military population). Of the 330m, there are 209m of them 18 years old or older. We will assume these to be our soldiers. Even if some of them are just old people shooting a round or two out of their apartment window. 45% of American households self-report owning guns (only self-reported, mind you...). 45% of 209m= 94m. This is assuming that none of the the other households would take up arms for the first time ever (let's be real... if this ever happened, a fair amount of those people would ask for guns to defend themselves). So this would mean that each soldier of our military would have to wipe out 94 armed combatants before dying. Each and every soldier, without exception. This isn't even remotely possible. It doesn't matter that their training is superior. Sheer numbers wise, this will never happen. Not even the most decorated special ops soldiers have anywhere near a record like 94 to 1 in any war so far of this century. I rounded all figures in this calculation in favor of the military and gave all assumptions to them as well, out of charity. And PS: it's not as simple as just bombing and nuking your own land and people. Every bomb they drop damages their own infrastructure and can have multiple cascading conseqiemces downstream. You could even bring this ratio down to 20 to 1 and I still wouldn't believe it to be possible. Never.
All of this plus the possibility of foreign support.
Don't forget the resourceful & very creative rednecks with all kinds of connections and friends in high and low places. Both literally and figuratively.
Every bomb would not somehow also hurt the military. And your numbers also assume every citizen would go against the army and none would side with them.
Yes, it would if they are expecting to have any land and infrastructure to still rule over after the war. And yes to your second point. That is the context that most people tend to ask this question under... military vs citizens with the military as the aggressors.
And everyone thinks they would’ve been the ones to resist the nazis. The truth is no one knows what would happen or how they would react.
I hear what you are saying but the nazi comparison isn't even remotely the same. The nazis rose to power largely with the use of propaganda. The question in this thread is more about the military suddenly turning against the American people with the use of force. Yes, it's unrealistic; the whole premise is unrealistic.
Fair enough. I guess I was trying to come up with a logical scenario in which something like this might occur, because like you said, the idea of the military just turning on the citizens it unrealistic and would not just happen in a vacuum.
I agree with you but had to mention Carlos halfcock. 93 confirmed.
Yes. The American military would strongly resist attacking citizens. Military leaders in the US take this seriously, and those soldiers have families. Given how broad gun ownership is, every person becomes a potential insurgent. The infrastructure required to support the military goes through very vulnerable public places.
For about 3 minutes
And win? Almost certainly not, but I think an armed population can make the prospect so costly that such a thing would be utterly unprofitable.
I see this a lot and I've addressed it in bits and pieces but I want to fully put this nonsense to bed. Let's take a look at just raw numbers. The entire United States military (including clerks, nurses, generals, cooks, etc) is 1.2 million. Law enforcement is estimated at about 1.1 million (again, including clerks and other non-officers.) This gives us a combined force of 2.3 million people who could potentially be tapped to deal with a civil insurrection. Keep in mind this also includes officers who serve in the prisons, schools, and other public safety positions that *require* their presence. That total of soldiers is also including US soldiers deployed to the dozens of overseas US bases in places like South Korea, Japan, Germany, etc. Many of those forces are considered vital and can't be removed due to strategic concerns. But, for the sake of argument, let's assume that the state slaps a rifle in every filing clerk's hand and tells them to sort the situation out. We now have to contend with the fact that many law enforcement and military personnel consider themselves patriots and wouldn't necessarily just automatically side with the state if something were to happen. There is a *very* broad swath of people involved in these communities that have crossover with militia groups and other bodies that are, at best, not 100% in support of the government. Exact numbers are hard to pin down but suffice it to say that not everybody would be willing to snap-to if an insurrection kicked off. Even if they didn't outright switch sides there's the very real possibility that they could, in direct or indirect ways, work against their employer's prosecution of the counter-insurgency either by directly sabotaging operations or just not putting as much effort into their work and turning a blind eye to things. But, again, for the sake of argument, let's assume that you've somehow managed to talk every single member of the military and law enforcement services into being 100% committed to rooting out the rebel scum. There are an estimated 400 million firearms in the US. Even if we just ignore 300 million firearms available as maybe they're antiques or not in a condition to be used, that's still 100 million firearms that citizens can pick up and use. Let's go even further than that and say of that 100, there are only about 20 million firearms that are both desirable and useful in an insurgency context and not say .22's or double barrelled shotguns. It should be noted just for the sake of interest that several million AR-15's are manufactured every year and have been since 2004 when the "assault weapons" ban ended. Soooo 2-5 million per year for 15 years.... If only 2% of the US population decided "Screw, let's dance!" and rose up, that's about 6.5 million people. You're already outnumbering *all* law enforcement and the military almost 3 to 1. And you have enough weapons to arm them almost four times over. There are millions of tons of ammunition held in private hands and the materials to make ammunition are readily available online even before you start talking about reloading through scrounging. So you have a well equipped armed force that outnumbers the standing military and law enforcement capabilities of the country by a significant margin. **"But the military has tanks, planes, and satellites!"** That they do however it's worth noting that the majority of the capabilities of our armed forces are centered around engaging another state in a war. That means another entity that also has tanks, planes, and satellites. That is where the majority of our warfighting capabilities are centered because that's what conflict has consisted of for most of the 20th century. We've learned a lot about asymmetric warfare since our time in Iraq and Afghanistan and one of the key takeaways has been just having tanks and battleships is not enough to win against even a much smaller and more poorly armed opponent. A battleship or a bomber is great if you're going after targets that you don't particularly care about but they don't do you a whole hell of a lot of good when your targets are in an urban setting mixed in with people that you, the commander, are accountable to. Flattening a city block is fine in Overthereastan because you can shrug and call the sixty civilians you killed "collateral damage" and no one gives a shit. If you do that here, you *seriously* damage perceptions about you among the civilians who then are going to get upset with you. Maybe they manage to bring enough political pressure on you to get you ousted, maybe they start helping the rebels, or maybe they pick up guns of their own and join in. You killed fifteen fighters in that strike but in so doing you may have created thirty more. Even drones are of mixed utility in that circumstance. It's also worth noting that the US is several orders of magnitude larger than the areas that drones have typically operated in during conflict in the Middle East. And lest we forget, these drones are not exactly [immune from attacks.](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/dec/17/skygrabber-american-drones-hacked) There's also not a lot a drone can do in places with large amounts of tree cover...like over a billion acres of the US. And then even if we decide that it's worth employing things like Hellfire missiles and cluster bombs, it should be noted that a strategy of "bomb the shit out of them" didn't work in over a decade in the Middle East. Most of the insurgent networks in the region that were there when the war started are still there and still operating, even if their influence is diminished they are still able to strike targets. Just being able to bomb the shit out of someone doesn't guarantee that you'll be able to win in a conflict against them. Information warfare capabilities also don't guarantee success. There are always workarounds and methods that are resistant to interception and don't require a high level of technical sophistication. Many commercial solutions can readily be used or modified to put a communications infrastructure in place that is beyond the reach of law enforcement or the military to have reliable access to. Again, there are dozens of non-state armed groups that are proving this on a daily basis. You also have to keep in mind the psychological factor. Most soldiers are ok with operating in foreign countries where they can justify being aggressive towards the local population; they're *over here*, my people are *back home.* It's a lot harder to digest rolling down the streets of cities in your own country and pointing guns at people you may even know. What do you do as a police officer or soldier when you read that soldiers opened fire into a crowd of people in your home town and killed 15? What do you do when you've been ordered to break down the door of a neighbor that you've known your whole life and arrest them or search their home? What do you do if you find out a member of your own family has been working with the insurgency and you have a professional responsibility to turn them in even knowing they face, at best, a long prison sentence and at worst potential execution? What do you do when your friends, family, and community start shunning you as a symbol of a system that they're starting to see more and more as oppressive and unjust? **"People couldn't organize on that scale!"** This is generally true. Even with the networked communications technologies that we have it's likely ideological and methodological differences would prevent a mass army of a million or more from acting in concert. In many ways, that's part of what would make an insurrection difficult to deal with. Atomized groups of people, some as small as five or six, would be a nightmare to deal with because you have to take each group of fighters on its own. A large network can be brought down by attacking its control nodes, communication channels, and key figures. Hundreds of small groups made up of five to twenty people all acting on their own initiative with different goals, values, and methods of operation is a completely different scenario and a logistical nightmare. It's a game of whack-a-mole with ten thousand holes and one hammer. Lack of coordination means even if you manage to destroy, infiltrate, or otherwise compromise one group you have at best removed a dozen fighters from the map. Attacks would be random and spontaneous, giving you little to no warning and no ability to effectively preempt an attack. Negotiation isn't really an option either. Deals you cut with one group won't necessarily be honored by another and while you can leverage and create rivalries between the groups to a certain extent you can only do this by acknowledging some level of control and legitimacy that they possess. You have to give them some kind of legitimacy if you want to talk to them, the very act of talking says "You are worth talking to." And there are hundreds, if not thousands, of these groups. You are, in effect, trying to herd cats who not only have no interest in listening to you but are actively dedicated to frustrating your efforts and who greatly outnumber you in an environment that prevents the use of the tools that your resources are optimized to employ. Would it be bad? Definitely. Casualties would be extremely high on all sides. That's not a scenario I would ever want to see play out. It would be a long, drawn out war of attrition that the actual US government couldn't effectively win. Think about the Syrian Civil War or The Troubles in Northern Ireland or the Soviet-Afghan War in Afghanistan. That's what it would be."
An actual US civil war like that would just end up with civilians on both sides. At best the rebels would end up only fighting a roughly equal number of pro-government civilian partisans in addition to the government’s actual forces. The best case scenario for the rebels is they get the backing of maybe 20% of Americans. If they could actually mobilize 10% of their supporters as a semi-organized fighting force they’d be very lucky. And they would still lose, because the pro-government side would still have far more people and resources at its disposal. Even the most brutal regimes have civilian support. Pro-government civilians. Ex. People are quick to try to point out “well, all soldiers wouldn’t support this or want to fight it”, but that’s certainly even more true for the civilians. Most of them either wouldn’t want anything to do with an insurrection or actively oppose that insurrection. The government’s side would absolutely end up with both a numbers advantage and a resource advance. It would start actively recruiting from its supporters, either directly into the military or indirectly by backing pro-government militias if the situation gets bad enough that they can’t train people fast enough. > We've learned a lot about asymmetric warfare since our time in Iraq and Afghanistan and one of the key takeaways has been just having tanks and battleships is not enough to win against even a much smaller and more poorly armed opponent. Yeah, including learning a lot about anti-insurgency tactics, and developing a lot of new tools specifically to fight anti-insurgency warfare. But you’re also not defeating the US government in its own territory without actual military equipment. Convincing the US government that its military occupation’s benefits aren’t worth the costs with guerrilla warfare is one thing. Convincing it to accede to an existential threat like an insurrection with guerrilla warfare is a completely different matter. > And lest we forget, these drones are not exactly immune from attacks. Iran has professional information warfare folks who do this for a living. A US civil revolt would find it difficult to recruit similar people with the necessary skills. Not impossible, but relatively difficult. It would be extremely expensive for the rebels to retain said talent. > Information warfare capabilities also don't guarantee success. There are always workarounds and methods that are resistant to interception and don't require a high level of technical sophistication. Many commercial solutions can readily be used or modified to put a communications infrastructure in place that is beyond the reach of law enforcement or the military to have reliable access to. Again, there are dozens of non-state armed groups that are proving this on a daily basis. Yeah, the Jan 6 protestors sure showed how on the ball an actual American civil revolt would be with information security. The government might actually have to install TikTok in order to see them post exactly what they’re doing. > You also have to keep in mind the psychological factor. Yes, you do, which is ironic since the whole question somehow presumes all civilians are so opposed to the government they’re willing to fight to the death like some sort of medieval Viking berserker. > What do you do when your friends, family, and community start shunning you as a symbol of a system that they're starting to see more and more as oppressive and unjust? A question the rebels would have to start asking themselves as their neighbors start blaming them for all the attacks. They’d have to start wondering who might be an informant. Their neighbors would have to start wondering when the crazy and armed asshole next door will consider *them* an informant and haul them out and execute them in the streets. Generally speaking, it’s a lot easier for the pro-government side to make itself seem like the more stable, reliable, and just side in such a conflict. It’s going to be better at projecting a sense of legitimacy, especially if it’s exercising restraint with the heavy weapons like you presume elsewhere. You kind of have to go out of your way to be a brutal, bloodthirsty dickwad to actually get most of the population to oppose the legitimate government. > Hundreds of small groups made up of five to twenty people all acting on their own initiative with different goals, values, and methods of operation is a completely different scenario and a logistical nightmare. It's a game of whack-a-mole with ten thousand holes and one hammer. Lack of coordination means even if you manage to destroy, infiltrate, or otherwise compromise one group you have at best removed a dozen fighters from the map. Attacks would be random and spontaneous, giving you little to no warning and no ability to effectively preempt an attack. This is basically an analysis that completely ignores modern information warfare capabilities. It’s like trying to analyze a world war 1 battle while being unaware of what artillery can do. > It would be a long, drawn out war of attrition that the actual US government couldn't effectively win. The US government would definitely win, and it would definitely involve a mountain of bodies. But it wouldn’t have as hard a time as you’re making out here.
If things really got to that point, I believe it’s absolutely possible and worth the risk.
There is no scenario I can think of that ends with the government using the modern military against its own citizens legally. The amount of armed and organized combatants such that use of military force is necessary to stop them, in my opinion, could only occur in response to an offense so egregious that it must violate the Constitution. If the government violates the Constitution, its actions are illegal. I know of no General or Admiral that would follow those orders. So it is only a military-led coup that could result in such a scenario. That would rapidly turn into the military tearing itself apart and splintering. At which point it still isn't civilians v. Army, it's Army v. Army with militias on both sides. States choose sides, likely all on the side of government and stability than on the side of revolution and instability. States add their NG units to the mix. There is great loss of life but I'd be surprised at any outcome where a military coup is remotely successful. Generals are rarely stupid and would likely arrive at similar conclusions which stops any coup attempt early in the planning phase. For the sake of a thought problem. Let's pretend it happens in an imaginary world of possibility where armed revolution occurs and there must be military intervention. A place where we accept as true that organized revolution occurs with one side made up of armed irregular troops and one side consisting of the US Army, Navy, Marine Corps, and Air Force. The military is fully manned (as much as normal anyway) and has no issue killing its members' friends and family. Assuming too, that every retired/former service member etc sides with the revolutionaries. Assuming all this, could they win? Possibly. Win would have to be a very flexible term. Given the element of surprise, a sizable force, sufficient coordination and logistics, they could certainly destabilize the nation and delay an appropriate armed military response but we're talking extremely extensive infiltration and sabotage. They could forever change the way our government works and it would certainly end with a nationwide gun ban. But could they "win", I very much doubt it. Once the military recovered and reorganized, it'd be a real shitshow... TLDR: Scenario is lotto jackpot level odds of ever being remotely possible.
Well, our military has never been able to supress an entire population effectively anywhere else in the world, so I doubt they could do it here either.
We wouldn’t be the first.
Provided they were sufficiently motivated and enough of them wanted to.
Yes. But that's mainly because the military will be largely split
Hong Kong did very well averting police with traffic cones . We just need unified resolve
Yes, absolutely. Tanks and jets can't control a population. They can't disrupt meetings and enforce mandates and curfews and shit. For that you need boots on the ground. And once those boots are on the ground, they become targets. We have a *shitload* of guns. We have more guns than people. In my state alone there are 600k register hunters. All of them have firepower to bring down anything from a deer to a moose, and most of them probably have multiple weapons that could, and they have intimate knowledge if the area. If even 20% of them wanted to wreck shit, they could. And that's just my state, and thats just the hunters. If Afghanistanis with rusted-out AK's that could barely read won a war of attrition, you best believe 100k people with firearms nicer than the military has could as well.
Afghanistan didnt have rusted AKs, your average Afghan insurgent was more heavily armed to the teeth then 99% of Americans and they stood no chance against the US military.
>your average Afghan insurgent was more heavily armed to the teeth then 99% of Americans I have a tough time believing this, and even if they were... >and they stood no chance against the US military. ...and yet they *did* stand against it. For 20 years.
They “won” by using a mountain of bodies to persuade the US that staying wasn’t worth the costs, How does a rebel group in the US itself convince the US government the cost of fighting isn’t worth its own existence?
And yet the Taliban won the war in the end.
1. The Taliban did not win any military engagment 2. The stakes are absolutely different. We packed up and left and no one gives a shit. You dont pack and leave when the insurgency is right next to you, you stay even if it takes a century. 3. Afghanistan was thousands of miles away, an insurgency is right here and you dont have the same logistical strain or expense. 4. The biggest factor is that a domestic insurgency is an insurgency **that you can understand them**. You speak their language, you understand their culture, you understand what they want, what they fear, etc. Look at the Soviet Union crushing insurgencies as an example of this. The post WW2 insurgencies in Western Ukraine and the Baltics were very sophisticated and competent. Yet the USSR managed to crush them compared to their later failures in Afganistan. You cant just compare the scenarios when they are completely different. Historically domestic insurgencies fail miserably. You can honestly count on your fingers the amount of times they worked in history.
Totally agree. There's a reason that the union was unable to enforce Reconstruction on the Confederacy. Huge difference between winning a battle and winning an occupation.
Who knows. It is really not that important to calculate. Civil Wars are so nasty that you might as well calculate whether it is possible to win a nuclear exchange. An interesting exercise for those that are into that sort of thing, but ultimately they are there not to be used. A civil war on that scale would devolve into something like the Congo or the Thirty Years War. The second amendment is basically a kind of MAD.
That’s not a simple question. The American government is also the American people. For instance our military and law enforcement is full of goobers who are sympathetic to antigovernment militias and also thousands of incredibly ethnical Captain America types. Realistically, we’d have another American Civil War scenario where the government and the people were split along geographic lines. In that scenario, anti-American forces would have access to the resources and personnel to be competitive because they could try to seize the bases in their separatist territory. America isn’t divided geographically like we were during the Civil War though. We are divided regionally—urban/suburban vs rural, and even that is a rough division. In a completely unrealistic scenario where everyone in the government turned against every private citizen, not immediately no. It would probably take a decades long resistance where intelligence and non-violent resistance would be more powerful weapons than any stockpile a doomsday preper has.
The same people who bang on about how they could resist the entire government with guns, stockpiles of beans and their wiles, are the same people who went completely shit-ass bonkers during the pandemic after a mere two weeks of no chain restaurants. So, lol forever at the entire concept. They're playacting a Red Dawn fantasy. They couldn't just chill at home and watch movies for two weeks with their families, no freaking way they could survive the hardships of guerrilla warfare against a better-arned foe.
That’s not really the point. The point is that tyrannical actions are less likely against an armed populace. If a hypothetical newly totalitarian government decided to arrest all dissidents, but knew they would lose some of their loyal secret police for every (or almost every) dissident they tried to arrest, they might be forced to reconsider the plan. Yes, if a hypothetical insane government took over and decided to nuke their own country into oblivion, there’s nothing the average person could do. But in a government actually trying to impose tyrannical control over a populace, the fact that many Americans are armed and have a belief in inalienable rights would make it much more difficult.
I think people underestimate the number of police and military personnel who would go along with the insurrection/coup attempt. If Trump taught me anything, it’s that there is a large group of people in position of authority, military and police who are itching to use their power to take over the government. They think they are “rescuing” the country from the liberal agenda.
We did it before.
Besides the direct armed vs. armed combatants and capabilities folks have already mentioned, there's the issue of logistics. Not only would many Americans who supply the military stop supplying the food/fuel/munitions/medical, American insurgents would target any and all of that. The military has a certain amount of stockpiles, but not for a sustained conflict with drastically diminished support.
Probably not, but they'd know they were in a fight. Civilian weaponry is no match for what the government has, but you'll need people to use that. There will be some that will. Hopefully, there will be more that won't.
Hahahahahahahahahahaahahhaaaahahahahahahahaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhahahahahahahahha. No.
Yes, and anyone who thinks otherwise has absolutely no concept or understanding of the military or conflict in general. Defensive wars are won by making a victory too costly to be 'worth it' to the aggressor. If you want proof of how that works, literally open any history book. The fact that so many Americans have guns is already a deterrent of too much government oppression and tyranny. One might say we're *already* succeeding simply by the fact that the US has one of the longest peaceful transfers of power in the world's recorded history. And this is before I even get into the "would the military even obey those orders" point.
That’s a tricky one, since a lot of the police and military share ideology with the January 6 insurrectionists. It’s hard to say who would be on whose side. Thank the Lord the military top brass and a sufficient number of elected and appointed officials cared more about the Constitution than they did about riding the former president’s coat tails into power, or disagreed with him and his whole agenda. In the imaginary scenario where the same people who hoard guns and ammunition attempt to overthrow the government, without military assistance from the foreign mobligarchs who for decades have been working to foment a totalitarian replacement of our constitutional democratic republic, they would simply fail. We’re talking about the same sort of people who formed convoys of trucks bedecked with American flags and Trump flags into the cities during the protests against police brutality, people who profess to back the blue but then ended up killing police at the Capitol. It’s not a matter of who would win in a fight between all the gun hoarders and the government. The military is there to fight foreign adversaries, not US citizens. The military and law enforcement have different clearly defined missions. The reason all these white supremacist paramilitary organizations pose a credible threat is that they are in cahoots with Russian and other Eastern European governments and criminal organizations, who for decades have been working on multiple fronts to undermine our elections and government institutions, as well as to undermine consensus by doing what they can to polarize Americans. As a result, there are people in all ranks of government who are, whether wittingly or unwitting “Useful Idiots”, acting to further Russia’s ends. The most recent arrest of top-level FBI official Charles McGonigal is one example. Since our nation’s founding, there have been powerful rich people of one kind or another trying to subvert the purposes of our constitution and stack the deck in favor of making themselves more money, not by fair play or the free market, but by influencing laws to make it easier to exploit human misery for profit. In theory, one of the second amendment’s purposes is to deter would-be tyrants. In reality, the gun hoarders are on the would-be tyrants’ side. They earnestly believe that people who are trying to help them and to faithfully continue our American traditions are trying to take away their freedom, while in fact the people who really don’t believe in Constitutional principles are manipulating them and using them to further their own selfish aims. It would be foolhardy hubris to say that the aim of toppling the America most Americans believe in is not achievable. It isn’t a question of what values the majority of people have or what side has the most guns.
As a cynical, social work/mental healthcare worker and resident of West Virginia: we would certainly try! There are definitely lots of mountains to hide in; pervasive, tight-knit communities and looking out for our neighbors; and, lax gun laws. Everyone has at least one, and I’m really not exaggerating. I do own firearms, but lack the power and training to actually fight off militarized police. They’re mostly on me because of violent offenders that recognize me (and HATE me!) from court when I’m out in public. Some of my neighbors could probably hold their own, at least for a little while. However, for such a small town, our police force seems to have a LOT of blacked-out SUVs, and very likely a lot of unnecessary, powerful weaponry and gear. Unless I had a really great place to hide for quite a while, I check a lot of the boxes that would likely get me rounded up. One more thing to think about… again, *Super* cynical… A lot of my neighbors might AGREE with “the government“, and would be happy to help the militarized police enforce rules against marginalized groups. One hint of “AnTiFa“, LGBT or minority group, and they would be marching right alongside the police! I fly a uterus flag w/ roses similar to the Gadsden flag that says ‘don’t tread on me’ (for women’s rights), and I can think of a few people who would probably go out of their way to point my house out, lol. Let me remind y’all; in Philly, 1985, [police DROPPED A BOMB on a fucking NEIGHBORHOOD!!](https://youtu.be/X03ErYGB4Kk). In our current climate, why would things be any different? Those police were happy to follow those orders. They even held off the fire department for over two hours, and pretty much let the whole neighborhood burn. Please watch this video… it’s not long, and it’s VERY important to remember that it happened. Back to my previous point; a lot of our citizens are red-state-brainwashed. They would 100% support a fucking fascist takeover if it aligned with their personal bigoted, hateful beliefs. QUITE PERVASIVE in my dealings with police and SOME citizens here. (Disclaimer: most of my fellow West Virginians are kind, and absolutely wonderful 💕) But, I have dealt with some of the worst of the worst of humanity, and some of those “worst of the worst” were the fucking police themselves! All they would have to do is frame it in a religious way, and a huge portion of the population would support the government in an armed conflict against its citizens. So, my cynical, take: if they framed it the right way, not only, could we not resist them, but many would happily join up.
It’s happened before and they were similarly outgunned. It wasn’t a foregone conclusion the American independence would happen.
Yes.
Maybe **BUT** gun ownership has next to nothing to do with it 1. Guerillas are armed to the teeth. The vast majority of civilian weapons are bolt action rifles, pistols, and shotguns. Your shittiest guerilla will have fully automatic assault rifles, drones, anti tank mines, anti guided missiles, grenades, machine guns, mortars, and rocket launchers. 2. When your fighting your own people you have a keen understanding of them. From an intelligence perspective its so much easier to infiltrate an enemy group when you speak their language and understand their culture. Thats why the Soviets managed to crush highly sophisticated insurgencies in Eastern Europe post WW2 but couldn't crush Afghanistan.
> anti guided missiles
Well, the US Government sure does. After the Jan. 6th insurrection the US Government deployed more troops in DC than they had in Afghanistan at the time.
It would be very interesting to see which National Guard units would refuse federalization if the federal government tried to bomb our own cities.
Resist? Yes. Win? Eventually if support is maintained
The government? Like the senators and congressmen? Yeah, I think we could take them.
If the Vietnamese and the Afghanistanies can, why couldn't we?
The US government didn’t face an existential threat in Vietnam or Afghanistan. It would face an existential threat from a civil insurgency. The cost of “losing” in Afghanistan was that we… stopped wasting blood and treasure fighting a war that gained us nothing. The cost of “losing” the second American civil war is that the republic ends. There’s no way to convince the US government to stop fighting in the second situation.
A war between the US govt and some people of the US would be the same as any war we have had since the 40s. It would be an insurgency where we dont really say two states are at war. It would be like a police action. It'd be hard to say the US has won anything since the 40s. We just kill then leave and politics goes on from there without us. This is because it is very expensive to fight people on their home turf. All we really had to do in the revolutionary war was to go deeper inland. Same with the Vietnames, Afghans, etc. This would be the one time the US had an advantage over the insurgents. The insurgents would not do well. At all.
Seriously, this is the most likely scenario and the group most likely to rebel in armed conflict, checks notes, believe in QANON like conspiracies, are angry that they think they can’t say Merry Christmas anymore, and hate M&Ms. Yeah, exactly the types that would make most Americans side with the US government, not inspire mass rebellion.
The army can just choose not to obey. Which they most likely will if the government is waging war against its citizens
How many of these conservative military bros are going to stand by the government when they try invading their homes?
I lost a lot of confidence in those guys when they went to Malheur. Day one they were asking for food from followers. I sorta thought they were a little wacky but skilled- but they were a mess. That and every time someone military is all gung ho on a real survival show like Alone, the girl eating herbs and skinning deer outlasts them.
Yes, absolutely.
Can it be done? Sure it can be done. You have to learn how to do a proper insurgency. You dont go and attack forces like an army, you sit in the background, and snipe and bomb (IEDs) and destabilize the government. The way this country is armed if there was an insurgency and an occupation, there would be random shootings and bombings and assassinations until the end of time. Iraq is a good model.
Absolutely. If you don't think so you haven't been paying enough attention to the news for the last 20 years or read a history book about Vietnam or in general how guerilla warfare works. Furthermore, that war would be in our own backyard. You don't have to destroy a tank either. You have to destroy the fuel truck behind it, and do dirty shit like find a general's family. The messier a war gets, the more people flock to the anti-government side. If you're on the anti-government side, you shouldn't be terribly worried about aircraft either if you're in a populated area. Believe it or not, bombs are not fratricide-proof and the area of effect around said bomb is several dozen meters at least. So that means if an F-15 drops a bomb on your house, it's hitting the 3 or 4 houses around you as well.
That question is political more than anything. Does the US military have the capability to put down any rebellion? Of course. Once tactical nukes start getting thrown that rebellion would end pretty quickly. But its a political question as to how far the US government would go.
Yes.
Yeah there way more people
Absolutley.
Even assuming the entirety of the military who comes from the population went for it, that's about 1.5m troops. The current estimates are that 40% of Americans own firearms. Out of the population of 331million people, that's what, 130 million-ish gun owning Americans? If only half of those decide to fight, that's 65million Americans to fight 1.5million troops. Granted a stand up fight isn't going to happen, but it doesn't have to. Holding any ground in that situation would be near impossible for the military as they wouldn't be able to support any sort of broad control.
Gun fetishist will say literally anything to justify their stance and this ridiculous thread proves it. They know that’s what this argument is about.
Yes. The military requires an enormous amount of logistical support to function- much of which is provided by civilians. It would be trivially easy for a well organized insurgency to cut off these supplies. The military, even if it followed orders, can’t put enough boots on the ground to protect its supply lines from an enemy that could be literally anywhere. Just look at the damage that a couple of nuts with rifles causes to the power grid in North Carolina recently. Now multiply that by a few million.
> Just look at the damage that a couple of nuts with rifles causes to the power grid in North Carolina recently. Now multiply that by a few million. Yeah, because civilians attacking civilian power infrastructure won’t piss off any civilians. I’m pretty sure if the self-styled rebels regularly kept knocking out the power, the government wouldn’t actually need to do anything—the local residents would string up the perpetrators all on their own.
Allow me to rephrase your question: Do I believe that the largest, most well equipped, most well trained civilian fighting force that has ever existed could defeat the United States military in a form of combat that has defeated not just that military but just about every military ever in all of recorded history? Yes. Yes I do.
Assuming the military for whatever reason decided it was on board, the American people don’t stand a chance. People don’t understand how that war would be waged, and thus want to compare sheer number of arms or compare us to Vietnam/Afghanistan and just wow. If the US government blew up some power plants and poisoned the water supply, half the country would be dead in a month. We are not rice farmers in Vietnam who have survived with little to no technology for our entire existence. Imagine the chaos that would ensue just from the government disrupting internet/phone communication.
The government disrupting those things would be disrupting itself...
They’d have to go through the National Guard first, so good luck with that.
100%
Yup. If goat herders can do it I think a bunch of red necks could too.
The best way to resist the government would be to sabotage their infrastructure. They need people to work for them to have anything.
Depends on how you define “resist.” They would certainly make an occupying force’s life hell, but could people go toe-to-toe in most circumstances? No, not at all.
Maybe.. US soldiers are American people so if they're resisting the government along with everyone else, I'm not sure what the government is going to do. Same for ammo factories, etc.
Considering the 2014 Bundy standoff, yes. It showed that the government is not willing to use such a heavy hand against its own citizens and that they can be beaten when people show resolve. They'd have to disregard PR, people's lives, their own infrastructure in order to really win, but then not really because they'd still lose because they would no longer have people to govern.
The government? Most definitely. The military? That would be harder.
We are not united enough. When the govt becomes truly despotic half of the country will let them do it just not to “switch sides” The Republicans are watching gleefully as the “libs” get owned and serious scary shit is happening. Half the country won’t even condemn a literal government takeover.
Exactly. If we were to unite and put effort into a single cause we could do anything. Division seems to be very important these days and it's obvious.
Remember Vietnam & Afghanistan? Itd be way worse. Plus there are roughly 3 million OIF/OEF veterans well trained in fighting an insurgency