Can insurgencies win?
In reaction to the armed protests against quarantine orders during the current COVID-19 pandemic, several supporters of gun control offered the cliché claim that the United States military — a force in possession of smart weapons, drones, and nuclear bombs — would make short work of gun-owning Americans, specifically those of us in possession of AR-15s. This leads advocates of curtailing rights into fantasies of insufficiently submissive people being vaporized, removing the cold dead hands obstruction — a fantasy that they rapidly label a joke when their bloodthirsty natures are called out. But the proposed scenario of dropping ordnance on gun owners from high altitude does raise the question of whether insurgencies can defeat technologically sophisticated national armed forces.
The subject of this discussion is asymmetrical warfare, a state of conflict between — or among — sides that are not identical in available technology or material resources. These conflicts thereby do not take place on classical battlefields on which uniformed armies face off and shoot at each other. There is typically no front line, since the national military is often occupying the territory in which the conflict is fought.
This sort of warfare is bloody in ways that traditional fighting is not supposed to be. During the Second World War, the Allied powers leveled cities with high explosives…
