Hi geode00; Re: "Why is it exactly that neither the US or Israel, or I suppose, any country with a big military, can fight an urban guerilla war successfully?"
We have 140,000 troops in Iraq, a country with maybe 6 million Sunnis, most of who hate us. Most of our troops are there in support roles, leaving 15,000 or 20,000 of them as real combat troops.
These are big numbers, kind of hard to understand. Let's reduce them by a factor of 10,000. Suppose we have 2 combat troops and they are trying to keep 600 Sunnis pacified.
You can make this test at home. Find a small town, one with a population of 600. You and your spouse show up, and inform the locals that they can no longer do business the way they did before, but instead now have to do what you tell them to. Tell them you're the new law of the land and that their old ways of life are done for.
Here are the rules: (a) You get to wave your guns around, but you don't actually get to shoot at anyone unless they shoot back at you first. (b) They get to hide and wait for you. (c) You get better guns then they get, but they get huge numbers of them. (d) You have to sleep some time.
Tell me how it turns out. If you don't like my numbers for the combat troops, then take all 140,000 US soldiers to be combat troops and reduce the neighborhood size to 100. Just how big of a neighborhood do you think you and your spouse could patrol against the wishes of the locals?
-- Carl |
