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Republicans: "We'd win a 2nd civil war, we have all the guns!"
Bitch, do you think your civilian small-arms could stand against the full military might of the federal government!? Not even saying it's a good thing...
Historically yes, an uprising of civilians has a great chance at asymmetrical warfare on their own turf.
You can’t destroy your own infrastructure like you can someone else’s.
Will they win? Almost certainly not.
Can they force some concessions? Probably
If they secdee it is not "your own infrastructure" for the main country anymore.
It is though, they will still want to just reconquer and reconcile
They'd pull punches but lets not kid ourselves, Texas is not going to last very long against checks notes the entire United States military
The Taliban did ok, Texans can probably do better than them
The Taliban didn't have their home base on American soil. They were a significant distance overseas which created a lot of logistical barriers.
It's the difference between walking next door to kill your neighbor and catching a flight to kill him while he's on vacation.
If you think Texans can't mount an insurgency that would turn extraordinarily bloody for both sides, you're crazy. A significant part of the military would switch sides too, and we'd have a full blown civil war on our hands.
"A significant part of the military would switch sides too" So you think a large portion of the military would casually commit treason? The Military is built on following orders even when you don't like them. Especially when you don't like them. A bunch of hics LARPing as guerrilla fighters on American soil are not going to stand very long, at all. The red hats are a good target from 30,000 feet.
So you think a large portion of the military would casually commit treason?
I wouldn't have thought that many civilians would either but they did.
Civilians haven't been put through bootcamp to obey even if it's uncomfortable. To serve the country against enemies foreign and domestic.
Give them a little credit.
Yes because a substantial portion of them are red hats.
Living in Virginia and seeing bumper stickers talking about "The Biden Crime family" and other nutjob bullshit, yes. They don't really hide their retardation. In fact, they go out of their way to advertise it.
Honestly though, gutting the infra and starting from scratch would likely be the better choice in the end.
They wouldn't stand a chance. They're power grid is so brittle. The US military would destroy it probably within minutes of an actual war being started. The people who can't stand the heat or the cold (depending on the time of year) would turn on them so quickly.
Just like the south in the civil war, they don't have the infrastructure for the logistics needed to fight a war.
You know unless the struggle is within the us military or the military wont get involved
These aren't the Taliban. These are a bunch of obese losers with handguns. They have nothing once McDonalds pull out.
It wouldn't happen like that. We would have an insurgency and lots of terrorist attacks. You would have towns and areas that are under insurgent control, with reprisal killings at night. Shit like that. I can't tell you to take it seriously, but you ought to at least consider how it would actually look if it happened.
- It's not going to happen
- If it did, they would lose
That doesn't mean I don't take it seriously. We already have electrical substations getting shot by "Y'all-Qaeda"...
Well even if they lose, I'm sure that won't be much comfort to the good people they kill along the way. I just don't think we should be glib at the thought of open civil conflict. Looking at it this way convinced me that I don't want to be without the means to defend myself and my loved ones in the event our "cold" civil war suddenly becomes "hot".
It really depends on what would be happening in the military and intelligence services.
I don't think people really understand just how much a civil conflict would be a war of information as opposed to a war of arms.
If things got bad enough domestically that laws like the Patriot Act were expanded and agencies that haven't been supposed to operate domestically suddenly could, and those agencies were still 100% under government control, you'd have vans (or simply drones) taking out domestic terrorists in the middle of the night right before the day they were supposed to organize to kill and terrorize their neighbors.
The US could become an almost unthinkable police state under the control of a government like China's or if we had a Stalin-esque administration.
This is the part that Y'all Queda don't fully grasp. They aren't hiding out in caves in Afghanistan or air gapped in Pakistan. The only thing keeping them safe from the monsters under their bed that they largely don't realize are there is the very government they think would be such a bright idea to try to overthrow. And if that government saw them as enough of an existential threat to unleash the monsters on them, well, they'd have quickly succeeded in overthrowing the US government in a sense, but wouldn't be around to see it.
"The government" isn't a monolith. It is made up of human beings with differing political opinions. US military assets are spread all around the country. US intelligence agencies are full of people that would prefer the far right to the far left. I think you are also overestimating the power of intelligence agencies.
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Same argument was made about Jan 6, but when they called in the national guard they showed right the fuck up. Military aren't to be fucked with, they know the chain of command. They know if they step out of line in that way their entire military career (and most likely civilian career and livelihood) is over. It would take several people high up disobeying commands, knowing they'll probably get court martialed, and everyone underneath them for that to happen.
Stop fear mongering. Military knows who is in charge and where their paychecks come from. I'm more worried about who controls the military because that super loyal knife cuts both ways.
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The Taliban would like a word.
On their own turf the USA has all the maps of everything including of what's underground, they already have records of who are the potential insurrectionists, where they live, what they drive, who their families are and they also have the support of a huge part of the population.
Oh and good luck to the guys who own machine guns and hunting rifles when facing drones flying high enough that you can't see them with your naked eye.
It would have nothing to do with Afghanistan.
The guys half way across the world from the US army, where the only thing at stake was a country they’d bombed to shit previously?
Which is exactly why the US isn't going to carpet bomb their own territory. One, ruling over a rubble-laden wasteland isn't very appealing. Destroying your own infrastructure isn't good for GDP. Two, soldiers are going to have a lot harder time bombing their own homeland, regardless of how well trained they are.
That’s like saying the US wouldn’t fight the confederacy because it would damage their land…
Yeah, we literally had an era labeled "reconstruction" because we figured fuck it, we'll just destroy all this stuff and build it back later. We didn't really build it back later, which is a big part of the modern problem, but the point stands that the US is not and has never been particularly reluctant to destroy enemy infrastructure inside its own borders. The civil war isn't even the only example if you count events like the Tulsa race massacre.
Reconstruction was mostly social, not infrastructure. It was reconstructing social order in place of what was removed (plantation farming a slave labor), not buildings/roads/railways really.
Well that became the narrative when it became clear that we weren't going to rebuild all the buildings we burned down.
And things have changed quite a bit since the civil war. We have a very interconnected country and world. Airplanes exist now. Nuclear submarines and cruise missiles. The destructive power of our weapons has increased ten fold. And we have instant access to 24/7 new media. I don't think we have the appetite for such a thing in this day and age. Not to mention how any number of hostile nations would be foaming at the mouth looking forward to us having our guard down.
I'm not saying anything like that would happen in regards to Texas. The bigger issue is that, at a guess, somewhere between 50-70% of Texans do not truly want to secede and start a war with the federal government, so an actual secession would never play out, and this would never be in question. But in a scenario where the US Government had to fight an internal enemy with a target-rich environment, they would destroy what they needed to destroy.
Anything is possible I guess, even if I personally wouldn't bet money on it. Then again I'm just a guy and no one in power is gonna ask my opinion. They very well may surprise me and bomb Jethrow's compound or downtown Houston.
My original flippant response was triggered from the ease with which people think the US military is some unstoppable force and the Republicans that do this nonsense would easily be put down. I think it is a lot more complicated than that and no course of action would be easy and painless. That's wishful thinking on behalf of us lefties.
So then the citizenry and army would be fighting on equal footing then and the "we have all the guns here in Texas" argument goes back to making sense. Either the US uses their overwhelming military power or not, you can't choose both.
No?
Why would you assume it works that way.
I'm saying that if you rely on having F-16 fighter jets and drones dropping bombs, you're arguing for wholesale destruction. If you don't rely on fighter jets and bombing raids, that means you're fighting a ground war against insurgents that are more or less equally armed, assuming they have weapons like AR-15s.
My point is that cruise missiles don't solve every problem; namely armed local insurgencies. What kind of third use-of-force scenario are you imagining?
We don't carpet bomb anymore. We hit critical targets. They would destroy the power grid, oil depots, ammo supplies, etc. They wouldn't do "wholesale destruction". That hasn't been a thing for a while now in warframe, except for in Gaza and Ukraine.
You're probably right, and I used overly broad language. I'm sure there would be targeted strikes. But any strike against infrastructure would be what I would consider a Big Deal™. Everything is so interconnected now that taking out the power grid, for example, would wreak havoc on all the innocent civilians in the area. Just look at how shit hit the fan when Texas lost power in the winter.
I just think it would be a much more complicated situation than either argument of "we have all the guns, libruls" or "we have Predator drones, conservatard". I'm used to conservatives making stupid arguments. It bothers me more when I see my side do it.
But hey, maybe I'm the idiot and it would all work out with targeted strikes. That's why I'm just some guy on the internet and not a general in the Army or whatever.
You're not an idiot, but you're sure limiting the scope of your concerns. Many would die on both sides. But "Many" has a lot of room for nuance inside it.
Let's take out the big arms and leave it at small arms and infantry assistance technology. The actual, newer than the mothballs police departments get gifted.
Do you actually figure that the remainder of the military which doesn't turn traitor is gonna be outnumbered by the seceding traitors in this civil war scenario?
Did you also account for the metric fuckton of able bodied people who would enlist during an open war to stomp out Fascism at home in the open like that? The largest regressive ideology spewing for the entire history of the Union state?
The far right isn't even remotely sized large enough to outsize the non-crazies in the military and those who would run to go join for the resources to defend their country.
It would absolutely lead to much blood shed on both sides. But the losses on New Texas? would at minimum be a whole ass order of magnitude higher. At minimum.
I really would rather not have to pick up arms, and I hope most would too.
But rest assured, the US military would shock and awe the fuck out of Texas to dissuade any in the other 49 from fucking around and finding out, if legit Civil War broke out at Texas' provocation.
The Taliban had the advantage of logistics. Which we all know is important in war according to Sun Tzu.
It will be a whole lot different when they can fight on their own home turf, which they have been fortifying since whenever they arrived.
Jan 6 insurgents got pretty close to overthrowing the government. Imagine if they were armed.
Taliban tied up the US for 20 years in Afghanistan, look who is in charge now.
Your Federal Army isn’t going to do as well as you think it is.
Jan 6 insurgents got pretty close to overthrowing the government. Imagine if they were armed.
Lol. I understand its symbolism, but let's be real: they overwhelmed a building and barely clashed with poorly-staffed local police. In no reality were they in any way "close to overthrowing the government".
Taliban tied up the US for 20 years in Afghanistan, look who is in charge now.
There's a pretty big difference between wanting to conquer/occupy a region and helping a local population police it. Plus, once government and social support for US presence in Afghanistan dropped, someone was going to control it.
Your Federal Army isn’t going to do as well as you think it is.
It's not "my" federal military, and I'm not supporting them. But anyone who thinks they can win a war against the US military on US soil is out of their mind.
Who said you have to fight the US Military on US soil to win? A civil war would not be a set piece battle in an open field. Far easier to focus on soft targets and avoid direct confrontation. Cut off production and supplies and make an area ungovernable. Bonus points if you can coordinate and gain funding from a foreign power.
The US population also has a large number of people who have served and have been trained by the US Military. You don’t think some of that experience would make it over to the other side in a civil war?
The US military is also mostly composed of people who are also US citizens, I wonder how many sympathizers it would take to degrade its effectiveness or even just warn the other side of its battle plans…
Civil Wars are nasty, I’d rather not go through one. But people who think the US military would easily trounce a home grown insurrection are just as delusional as those who wish for Civil War 2.0.
I highly doubt much of the US military would defect, they generally love the country more than any particular political ideology. So you'd have a likely highly motivated military with more than half of the public on their side.
Then again, if this was a coup situation, I'm guessing it would be a bit more difficult, since some of the military would be on the side of the challenger. But that wasn't what happened on Jan 6, Trump wasn't calling on the military to keep him in office, he merely refused to call in reinforcements to deal with the insurrectionists.
I'm not saying it couldn't happen here, I just think it would be incredibly difficult barring some kind of popular movement. And secession/insurrection isn't popular.
Tell me how eager and motivated would you be to bomb your home town?
If it was the difference between keeping the union together and falling into anarchy/fascism, pretty motivated.
Bomb the Republic to save it. Your logic is interesting…
You provided the hypothetical. If my hometown was a hotbed of insurgents or something and it would be a strategic blow that would bring a swift conclusion to the Civil War, I wouldn't think too hard on it. I'd certainly need to know why though (I'm not interested in being involved in war crimes).
But I'll never be in that position. I'm past draft age, so I'd likely be defending my house, not bombing targets. But if somehow I was involved, I'd press the button if I was convinced it would target belligerents and end a lot of the fighting, hometown or not.
They were armed. Not all of them but they did have guns.
Imagine if all of them had guns then.
Interesting. If the rioters shot at the police, law enforcement would respond with deadly force. A lot of y'alqadas would also get shot by other rioters. It would be a one sided blood bath.
Eh, I'm guessing the VP would've stepped in if Trump didn't and we'd get the National Guard deployed.
You have quite the imagination.