...The NLF (Viet Cong) and the Taliban would like a word with you. You don’t go toe to toe with the US military, you bleed them dry in a people’s protracted war if necessary. In such a situation time is on the side of the guerillas, as their very existence is a continuous threat to the government’s legitimatcy and a humiliation. Each flight of a jet plane or drone, every laser guided missile, every day a ground force has to remain mobilized costs millions of not billions of dollars.
For example, the Taliban would pay some villager $3 to go on top of hill by a military base, unload a mag from a AK47 in the general direction of the base and then immediately leave. The base would then be placed on high alert, search and response teams would have to be mobilized, maybe they’d fly up a helicopter to look around. Of course they’d always find nothing, as the villager had already went home and had dinner while the American soldiers were trampling through the mountains looking for a Taliban strike team that didn’t exist. The Americans would then return back to base tired and demoralized.
Once the base had been declared safe again and all the soldiers had settled in to rest, another villager would come and shoot off another mag at them, forcing them to go through the whole process over again because if it was a strike team they’d be fucked if they ignored it. And they’d do this everyday, week after week, month after month, year after year. Cost for the Taliban? $20 and some 50 year old Soviet military surplus. Cost for the Americans? Hundreds of gallons of fuel, the soldier’s morale, disruption to the base’s function, national pride. Hell if the locals were feeling ambitious maybe they’d leave a few IEDs around a blow up a truck or a guys right leg. That’s another news story back in the states, another asset lost to the quagmire with nothing to show for it. And if some fustrated “operator” decides to take it out on a local Afghan?? Well he’s just made all their male relatives and friends Taliban sympathizers if not fighters. That’s asymmetric warfare in a nutshell right there, done by the best in the business.
Now look at the state of Afghanistan. The Taliban control like 75% of the country, the president has been basically reduced to being the mayor of Kabul, despite the US dumping trillions of dollars and thousands of troops into this conflict. Just in February the American Empire was forced to the negotiation table with the Taliban and is straight up about to run away with it’s tail between its legs.
NOTE: I don't endorse the Taliban or anything like that, they're fundamentalist fascists, but they've kicked the asses of two superpowers and you just gotta hand it to them, they're effective.
(This was initially a response to a comment but I got into the writing move and cranked this out so I think it's worthy of its own post.)
I'm not telling people to go pick up their AR and head down to their local national guard depot tomorrow. This is basically the worst case scenario anyway for a revolution, a protracted insurgency is fucking brutal for both sides and would only emerge in dire conditions. Still, it's definitely possible for the guerillas to win, that's what I'm getting at.
But this sort of military struggle needs to also be matched by a political struggle. Winning over the population is the key to victory always in asymmetric warfare. The other stuff comes along with that.
You will need foreign support, the only way I see any revolution succeeding is if a foreign country is already invading, or the US has split up into multiple countries
I think you could potentially gain some ground if the tactics leaned more heavily on economic warfare and propaganda, opposed to just direct confrontation. In other words, economic sabotage, organizing and propagandizing MIC workers and soldiers, prioritizing targeting business/civilian leadership, and activities designed to create a wedge between the government and the general public.
Fighting on their home turf presents unique challenges, but also some unique advantages. The biggest advantage, imo, is that we’d potentially have much more influence over the economic levers and social structures that they would absolutely need in order to win a war. Not saying lessons can’t be learned from other conflicts, but I think this would be quite different in most respects.
What if you have revolutionary sympathizers in Canada, Mexico, China... all of South and Central America able to form an underground network? And able to finance via control of drug cartels...?
Don’t be too pessimistic!