...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.)
The Vietnamese spent two generations fighting a protracted guerilla war against the French colonists, and then the Japanese Imperialists, and then the French again, and then the Americans, with a healthy amount of civil war thrown in.
Millions perished to win independence over decades. They did it with expert military leadership, Machiavellian political manuevering, and a dogged determination fit for legends.
Americans haven't even begun to fight. We show up in major municipalities and get tear gassed and bean bagged until the Feds go home. Our leadership sucks. Our politics sucks. And our commitment can barely survive a news cycle.
We're not the Vietnamese. We're not the Taliban. We're Americans. We suck.
Thank you for saying this. No one here has the intestinal fortitude for guerilla warfare. It's as cringy as those gamers who think they can wage combat because of COD.
okay but to be honest, it wouldnt be too hard for me to walk out someday in a videogame and just empty a mag at a building
i do more than that getting my mail every week.
id especially do it for like $40.
this type of fighting really doesnt require much thinking, just throw your gun in a ditch once your finished and walk home and you're all good. not much risk, especially if you're emotionally invested in a revolution
dont wanna sound r/iamverybadass but it really wouldnt be that hard, even with how lazy you libs can be smh
you can even fuckin' do it if you're a pacifist, you can buy 22. blanks for like $15 for a pack of 50
Sir....sir... you're at waffle house
serve me motherfucker and ill stop talking about dumb shit
aight
back to my regularly schedules hornyposting then
We show up to major municipalities, and when we get too uppity, half the country goes: "look at those savages, look how violence!" The rest makes some posts on facebook and twitter and goes back to sleep. It's a big thing for about a month and a half before inevitably fizzling out. We have a disorganized group of angry people, a small minority of which have explicit leftist tendencies. Most people are liberals and boy does it show. Whatever leadership we do have are SocDems at best. We are decades away from anything even remotely resembling 1905.
We are totally, and I cannot emphasize this enough, fucked.
I think we are in a situation of transition where enough of Americans are still benifit from bourgoise oppresion, that they aren't going to support its overthrow. Someone had a map the other day and it showed that the top 40% of American's still own a lot in the the U.S. I don't think we are going to see major change in the west until the petit bourgois see their share of the pie decrease dramatically.
And that is just within the U.S., Even the opprsed classes in the U.S. are realteively well off compared to the oppressed people in the rest of the world, so that is going to fuel fascism.
I think what we are going to see in the next decade or so, though, is a fairly rapid decline in the U.S. empire (or nuclear war...) which is going to force the bourgoise to extract more value from the petit bourgois, which will in turn heighting class antagomism and radicalize them.
I think the only counter to this would be a more extreme form of facism where the leftist elements in society are murdered and terrorized sufficently enough that they are no longer a threat, and then the U.S. could just transition into some form of military dictatorship that can pour the vast majority of its wealth into maintaining its imperial holdings.
Of course, if that happens, the third world will be far more radicalized to fight against the U.S. and will probably fuck it up reallllly hard.
You are absolutely right. This sort of protracted insurgency is basically the late stage, worse case scenario for a revolution. Honestly this sort of conflict would probably destroy the country or take place in an already balkanized USA. We are at like the "scattered protests/rare riot" stage, which is really fucking far from anything like I was describing. But still, it's farther along then where we were 5 years ago. But we just got to keep marching forward somehow, and I don't want people to think it is futile and there's no hope because the imperial machine is invincible, because it's not. Big empires like ours have fallen before.
I would never suggest that America is hopeless (although history suggests we're a nation of painfully slow learners).
I just get tired of the "Revolution can work, just look at <revolting indigenous population>". History's footnotes are littered with failed revolutions. Nobody writes ballads about the Whiskey Rebellion or makes movie epics about Blair Mountain. And we never seem to recognize that these things play out over decades - centuries even. The folks fighting in the Boxer Rebellion were old men by the time China was colonialist-free.
And after all that fighting Vietnam is still crippled. America achieved what it wanted to - a show of force against true democracy. No one else in region even bothered putting up a fight throughout the period, and if they did they received the same treatment.