this post was submitted on 17 Sep 2024
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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.
In fairness Israel isn't struggling to beat Hamas. They could quite handily just carpet bomb the place to oblivion and kill 2 million people. It's not really any bigger than Grozny, and we saw what even the Russians managed to do to that.
But that doesn't tend to sit well with anyone, not even the US. Better to commit genocide by making the survivors leave and stealing their land, rather than going full holocaust on them.
Still, they've killed 2% of Gaza in a year. Give them 50 more and there won't be a Gaza Strip.
And all those you named are suffering heavy losses. Good luck bro, I ain't fighting the US government.
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 mean, if you park your navy outside of the enemy's ports and bombard their cities from the air, it's gonna make it very difficult for them to hit YOU, but that won't necessarily break their resistance. Here we're talking about a civil war tho, that would entail the country bombing itself... which happens, mind you, but it's not super effective.
It is much easier to push through extreme actions like that against your own population though if some idiots with guns give you a good excuse to fear monger.
Or, y'know, Vietnam.
Vietnam was as much a modern war than an insurgency. The Chinese/Soviet govts supplied the PAVN with modern weapons including air defence, armour, and an air force. The Viet Cong were the irregular militia forces that supplemented that. At least by the time of US deployment.
Though then again, that started with a unit of 23 people equipped with a machine gun and two revolvers. It really doesn't take long for any militia to achieve some serious weaponry if it can get the attention of sympathetic states.
Lmao. Murican gun nuts are not tough bastards like Afghanis or Vietnamese. Do you know what kind of life those people were living before USA invaded?
Most US Yeehawdis will come to their senses without access to Wi-Fi and Walmart for a week.
And that's an overwhelmingly good thing. The nut jobs and extremists are looking for an excuse to start shit but (as you correctly stated) lack the resolve to finish shit. They want to do a little political violence to feel enfranchised and like they have some control, but they're not ready to give up everything for a cause. This makes them particularly dangerous.
The real bulwark against government fuckery is the people you don't hear about: normal folks who happen to have guns. It would take actual, serious grievances against large swathes of the population to make them do something. Because that much larger (and more ideologically diverse) cohort isn't champing at the but for a fight they haven't lied to themselves about being able to maintain a normal life and therefore wouldn't start one lightly. That's pretty boring, so you only hear about the weirdos.
I never said who would be fighting the US military. But there's more than a few groups who are more ideologically driven (and more dangerous) than the typical NRA member.
eh, they could die and let tougher mfs have their guns
Pretty much. The US military can take on any other nation state (China is trying to change this, but it's not there yet). The initial fight against the organized militaries of both Afghanistan and Iraq didn't last long, and was as much of a one sided curb stomp as you'll ever see in history. It was the insurgency later on that was the problem.
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.