Yeah this is similar to what I always tell these idiots. "You all know the government has tanks right. How many tanks y’all got? Three Broncos, an F-1f0, and a tractor? I’m sure those will hold up just fine to 120 mm cannon.
To play devil’s advocate, the US is enormous with over 330 million people. The current military strength is roughly a few million, including civilians and contractors. Additionally, there are roughly about 4,000 main battle tanks in service. There’s maybe a couple thousand fighter jets and bombers combined. Keep in mind, a lot of the US military is abroad, especially our combat ready equipment.
Now, try to spread all of that out over roughly 4 million square miles. Hell, LA itself is around 470 square miles with almost 10 million people. The military would be idiotic to just blindly carpet bomb everything, since y’know, soldiers have families living all over the US, too. Not great for morale. Not to mention, the economy is pretty essential to keeping the machines of war going. Also food. And fuel. And infrastructure for logistics. And medicine. Etc, etc.
A civil war would not be cut and dry, regardless of how well armed and trained the formal military is. It’s why China tries to keep an iron tight grip on its mass surveillance program to squash uprisings before/as soon as they start (and they periodically have them, think there’s been one or two in the last decade). That’s what the US is also trying to do. They call it antiterrorism precautions and other bullshit, but it’s to keep all of us underfoot so no one is able to start an effective movement against the State.
What number of those people are of military age, though, fit, able, willing to upend their lives and would support whatever cause? A lot less than 330 million, I’d guess.
They don’t have to be fighters for it to be a headache. During a civil war you have to deal with feeding, securing, housing, etc. all of those people when areas inevitably collapse or are taken over for military operations and people evacuate (i.e. refugees).
Then there are people who do support whichever side and do small acts of sabotage, espionage, etc.
Try running tanks or planes without fuel, parts or ammo production. Covid was a little inconvenience compared to the supply chain nightmare a war could bring. It takes a TON of upkeep to keep a military rolling.
And to be fair the taliban never had conventional air support either. And Ukraine has proven that commercial drones can be just as lethal.
Try running tanks or planes without fuel, parts or ammo production. Covid was a little inconvenience compared to the supply chain nightmare a war could bring. It takes a TON of upkeep to keep a military rolling.
What does this even mean? That a private citizen is going to have better access to fuel, parts and ammo than the government?!?
No, but the US military has never had their homeland logistics fucked with in recent history. Sure you can’t easily destroy a Bradley APC, but it needs fuel that happens to be stored and transported in ways that are not as resistant to attack. And when the fuel runs out many vehicles are no longer useful in combat.
Or spare parts. Germany got their industries bombed like crazy in WW2. Even though their stuff was better on paper they didn’t have the parts to keep combat effective. Ask any veteran how reliable military vehicles are without constant maintenance.
This is hypothetical and all, but it’s not that big of a stretch of the imagination to see any American insurgency becoming a real pain in the ass for the military over months and years. And unlike Afghanistan they can’t simply withdraw when they’ve had enough.
So MAGA is not the side I would take in a civil war, even if I were an American, however: “Experience has shown that attacks against tanks with close combat weapons by a sufficiently determined man will basically always succeed.”
Look at the early stages of the Ukraine war Russia had in many heavy equipment categories a 5:1 superiority, Ukraine had comparitively few Tanks/AFVs/Aircrafts/Artillery/etc… yet still held it’s own in no small part due to trenchlines of conventional boot-on-floor infantry men, mines, cheap drones, shoulder launched atgms and good motivation/organisation.
You’re right, but bubba the gravy seal is not a sufficiently determined enemy. They tend to either bunker down and go out fighting or just get caught.
Because there had never been a coup with a country that has an air force
What was the Arab Spring?
Tunisa has 150+ aircraft
Libya 100+
Egypt 1000+
Yemen 175+All 4 countries deposed their rulers
edit: it appears I have been whooshed
The actual government
Just realized that looks more like a teabag than a bandage.
This shows ignorance in history but also understanding of warfare. There are too many examples of this: Vietnam as a historical example and Afghanistan as a recent one. Let’s not forget what’s going on in Israel rn vs all the proxies. It’s not necessary to have advanced weaponry to fight a war.
Vietnam had field artillery and Soviet fighter jets. They were a real army.
Sure, but a large portion of their fighting against the French and Americans was through guerilla warfare and tactics.
Vietnam as a historical example and Afghanistan as a recent one.
The biggest asset these countries had in their favor was distance from the American industrial core. First Nations people employed many of the same techniques used in Vietnam and Afghanistan but were ruthlessly slaughtered. Guerrilla movements in Latin America - the FARK in Columbia and socialists in Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador got massacred by American military power. These countries are wholly within the US sphere of influence now.
Let’s not forget what’s going on in Israel rn vs all the proxies.
Israel is a textbook case of advanced weaponry tilting the playing field. Air superiority, naval support from the US, and a high tech anti-missile/anti-personal system along with one of the most advanced spy networks in the world all allow this relatively tiny nation to punch far outside its weight class. By contrast, less developed countries like Egypt, Iraq, Libya, and Sudan routinely serve as punching bags for more advanced states.
Are those conformal fuel tanks?
*Googling, looks like it.
Every time this fucking meme is made I’m reminded that the US military is currently being embarrassed in the red sea by a non-state actor with zero air superiority, which began itself with a thousand-or-so civilians with AK47s.
That or how Israel is currently struggling to achieve any kind of military victory against two groups of lightly-armed militias which rely on scavenged and hand-made explosives to defeat state-of-the-art tanks.
Let’s not even remind ourselves about the Taliban.
People who drop these kinds of memes still think warfare is carried out and progresses like it did in the Napoleonic era: two orderly opposed fronts clashing head-to-head in theaters with well-defined boundaries - where the adversary with more guns/people/resources win. Because more guns/people directly equates to military power, right?
These folks would do well to spend even the slightest amount of time learning about fourth generational, guerilla war.
Let’s take this meme back a couple hundred years and cast OP as a counter revolutonary American at the onset of the revolutonary war.
/*Wants to have muskets to fend off british empire
/*british empire:
Starts to seem silly when you realize even our founding fathers were doing guerilla warfare not long ago.
I’m reminded that the US military is currently being embarrassed in the red sea by a non-state actor with zero air superiority
Houthi rebels in Yemen are leveraging the mathematics of actuarial accounting to shut down the Red Sea. The cost of sending a ship into a free-fire zone skyrockets, compared to the cost of simply sailing around the Horn of Africa.
If the Americans were doing the flotilla strategy of the WW2 era - where FDR realized he could build cheap concrete shipping vessels faster than the Germans could sink them - then the Houthis would be an ugly nuisance rather than an insurmountable stopgap.
But international shipping has a zero-margin for losing ships. They’re not sending these things out on the ocean with the expectation of some attrition.
Yeah I guess if we’re doing hypotheticals then perhaps the US could suddenly overhaul its naval shipbuilding capacity, recruit thousands more sailors, and march through North Yemen within a week.
More that we could switch to a smaller and more disposable shipping fleet, where any damage to a ship was negligible to the volume of trade
So long as you have an endless stream of brain washed kids who are happy to die, as they paradise at the end of a barrel, and are happy the kinds of losses they do you’ll be fine
Whether you see it as brainwashing or principles is irrelevant when they’re still capable of effective military resistance against superior nation-states.
If anything, you’re right; people who are ideologically driven for their cause are the bane of a professional army; ideology is much cheaper and much more motivating than a paycheck and promise of a cushy pension.
Ultimately, it was their resistance and their lives that were irrelevant. America got their oil and the CIA got their opium fields. It was no longer worth the cost of keeping American troops there. So, they pass on the burden of protecting their stolen assets on to the native people. Its textbook neo colonialism.
Call that a loss if you like. Some people won big.
I would have went with a predator drone.
A-10 go BRRRRRRRRRRRRRT
That was the Framers’ intention. It was not for a hunting permit. Do you have a better idea about how to enforce the self-preservation of liberty and freedom from tyranny when the tyrannical government is armed and disposed to use force against a subjugated population? How would you prevent another King George? Say you don’t like Trump and he has all the top guns as the next POTUS and decided to declare a military dictatorship? Sure, they have the most powerful weapons but lawyers aren’t going to help. Wouldn’t you rather fight for freedom than lay down and die in the camps?
No one said you wouldn’t die lmao this ain’t call of duty.
It’ll be a whole different thing for the government to send military against the population. An armed population should be plenty to keep the cops respectful, and cops are the real problem.
Making them shoot an unarmed group of protesters is much harder than making them shoot an armed one.
Lol, well they had no problems seriously wounding the unarmed BLM protesters by shooting them with “rubber” bullets.
They wouldn’t touch the right wingnuts showed up at protests with guns.
They also wouldn’t touch an armed group distributing food to homeless and needy
They didn’t touch the Bundy’s when they took over the wildlife refuge offices in an armed standoff.
So cops are fine shooting at unarmed people, but if they’re going to face well armed threats they play nice.
Yep. Doesn’t even have to be a group of armed people doing “maybe illegal” things. It can be a single person doing absolutely illegal and horrific things…like Uvalde.
