No, they'd just need to drop a few nukes on any logistical hubs that they lose control of or that act as rallying points of any effective opposition, and it'd send a big message about who is top dog.
I mean, am I the only one who remembers Swalwell threating the same shit a while back, and not seeming to play around. Any group that want to have a hope of taking control of meaningful territory and holding it in such a way they are more than an annoyance would also be enough of a threat to justify breaking out nukes.
This entire post shows that you are completely detached from any understanding of how armed conflict
actually works.
First off, if you think that
either side ordering a nuke to be deployed in US territory would be a power move rather than complete suicide, you're nuts. It might scare some people into acquiescence, but every person who was wavering that was on your side has instantly left it, you might be killed for issuing the order, the order will
probably be refused, and if it
is carried out you have permanently ended any chance whatsoever of peaceful resolution to the conflict that doesn't have your death personally as a prerequisite.
There are tens to hundreds of thousands of people who might have otherwise avoided taking sides in a civil war, who will instead get in a truck and ride to wherever you are, with the sole purpose of killing you and everyone else involved in that order being carried out. Further, any political or cultural legitimacy your faction has whatsoever is completely destroyed. There is no longer any illusion that you will do anything except rule through raw, naked force.
Using WMDs in a civil war in America, is the surest way to guarantee that you can
never win it.
Second off, 'backwoods insurgency' can mean very different things, and yes it
can be exactly what ultimately topples a government. As others have pointed out, in order to
effectively rule, you need not just tanks, APCs, jet craft and drones, you need soldiers and police men on the ground, keeping checkpoints, breaking into people's homes to drag them away in the night, and securing government buildings and infrastructure.
Those people are exposed. The technology does not
exist to make common infantrymen bulletproof, and the closer to it you try to get with things like advanced bulletproof vests, the more expensive it is. Ten skilled woodsmen with rifles they've been shooting with for decades can make ninety percent of a rural county unrulable, inflict dozens to hundreds of losses, and force you to commit hundreds of troops
just to keep the problem contained to that area.
You've heard of Simo Hayek? The USA has
tens of thousands of shooters with perhaps half his skill,
and a willingness to fight to the death to overthrow tyranny. It has
hundreds of thousands of people with more mundane rifle skills who are willing to hide out in a cornfield or forest and pick off hostiles every now and then.
And when fighting in their native terrain, these people are very,
very hard to find and kill. There are forest trails that do not appear on any map, and cannot be seen in aerial overflights because they aren't
visible from anywhere but ground level. These are people that buy and wear camouflage colors that are
damned effective at making you blend in
literally because they just like the way it looks.
They already have forest cabins, insulated deer blinds, intimate knowledge of terrain, the ability to
literally live off the land in any weather, and are friends or at least acquaintances with most other people in the area who have the same skills and abilities.
The 'shit's going down' to 'I'm in the forest ready to fight a near-perpetual war with only the stockpiles I already have on hand' time for people like this isn't measured in days or weeks, it's measured in
minutes. If someone tried to become Dictator of Wisconsin when I was visiting my father up there, we could be out the door with enough equipment and supplies to last months in
minutes.
And that's before you get into the fact that until you ID
who is picking off your soldiers and police, these people can literally just keep living in their homes. They don't even need to disappear into the forest until you know who they are, and even if you manage to catch them somewhat by surprise at home, you're
still looking at a serious gunfight while you lose people to try and take them down and out.
This was a serious problem for the Nazis to deal with during WWII. The uprising in the Warsaw ghetto was so bad it took major army formations to besiege and put down, and that was a legally oppressed minority that had been
disarmed was trying to fight for freedom. Most hunters own between two and a dozen guns, and will happily pass them out to family and friends if shit goes down.
There's a numbers problem. There are somewhere over two hundred million adults in America, and less than two million soldiers. About 42% of households in America own guns as of 2020, which means you're looking at roughly
eighty million armed civilians. Even
if the entire US military went to the left (which it wouldn't), it would still be outnumbered by more than 40:1. Also, the
majority of those military personnel are
not line combatants, they're support personnel. They'll generally be trained for basic firearms use anyways, but they have no exceptional combat ability.
And even if the numbers were
equal that might not be good enough. If you take a small rural town of a few hundred people, and send a few hundred infantry in to try to pacify/occupy it, between familiarity with terrain, prepared positions, and the red team vs blue team doctrinal advantages, here in America I'd bet against those few hundred infantry. The only real way they'd stand any kind of chance is if they start holding children hostage, and at that point, you're going to lose the war for other reasons.
So what will you do, bomb the town? If there's no warning, you'll probably kill most of the inhabitants; now what do you think the survivors are going to do? Most of them are going to fight you to the death for killing their family and friends. And unlike when fighting in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Vietnam, your airbases and military factories
are within walking distance, and making bathtub-bombs is not actually very difficult.
The bottom line is that if you cannot break the enemy's
will to fight by rolling in the tanks and bombing the center's of government with your superior air power, the battle is going to come down to infantry vs infantry. And
the entire point of the Second Amendment is that when your population is heavily armed, a would-be dictator
cannot win that infantry vs infantry fight.
A backwoods insurgency will not save anything, will justify even more tyrannical shit, and won't have the power to accomplish anything long term. Only open, standing, formal units and gov structures could offer a legit alternative, and the second one of those becomes a real threat, the gloves will come off.
This isn't 1776 or 1860, just having small arms and survival skills doesn't mean much if you want to the efforts to be more than a backwood insurgency and actually restore the Republic. Do not count of the military splitting in such a way that hardware is even close to even on both sides, and do not count on the AF or Space Force to be likely have many members side with the reds, and do not count on boomer crews to take orders from anyone other than DC.
You are completely wrong here. It's one thing if a backwoods insurgency in 5-6 places is picking off a few men every week.
It's another thing if
hundreds of counties across
forty different states are having backwoods insurgencies, and you're losing
thousands of men every week.
You
cannot sustain those kinds of losses. And in the modern day, you can't
hide those kinds of losses either. You do not understand the sheer
scale of the difficulty involved in trying to subjugate the US, and you further do not understand the scale of the
morale problem involved in trying to force the military and police to do so.
There are 'no go zones' in some cities in Europe, where the police aren't willing to try to enforce the law. These are in nations where gun ownership is either very difficult or outright illegal, but yet crime there is still
so bad that the police have
given up. What do you think is going to happen when
the majority of your nation's territory is populated by angry civilians who literally have ten times as many guns as you do?
If a County Sheriff decides to knuckle under to tyrannical state authorities, and try to enforce their will, what does he do when every other arrest he sends deputies out on is shot dead? When there's periodic snipings of officers
walking out of the sherrif's headquarters?
This is not a problem that having tanks can solve. Tankers have to get in and out of their tanks, and all a sniper has to do is wait. This is not a problem that jet fighters or bombers can solve, because they can't
find the bloody target. This is a problem that top-end extremely-expensive satellite surveillance can solve...
if the terrain is open
and it isn't cloudy. This is a problem that drones can't solve, because drones are a
lot bigger and more expensive than skeet, just as fragile, and easier to hit.
All of those measures can help make things more
difficult for bushwhackers, but they can't
stop them, and every time that a patrol of infantry or police is completely killed, the state loses all their equipment, and the insurgents gain all those resources.
How long does it take before the Sheriff calls it quits? Before the chief of police calls it quits? Before the State National Guard members decide they'd rather sit things out than be added to the steadily-growing list of casualties and dead? Before the army decides the same?
If a
tenth of the political right pitted itself against the
entirety of the US military and police establishment, it would probably win. Something you need to keep in mind here, is that those who will resist violently, are going to
by the nature of who they are also be those most likely to be military veterans, lifelong hunters, and other people who have experience in combat, outdoorsmanship, or both.
Whereas on the political left,
who are the fanatics driving the conflict? People who don't just not own guns, but think it's
immoral to own them. Who think that the police should be
dissolved. Who have contempt for the military.
You claim that the military would split mostly left, but you fail to understand that while there's a lot of flag officers with political ambitions,
the institution as a whole skews more conservative, and the combat arms in
particular skew drastically conservative, for the simple reason that
most leftists don't want to be in the military.
Among the left, those who
are likely to own guns, are those the least likely to be politically radical enough to take up arms to try to oppress the rest of the country. The very fact that they are gun owners means they've broken out of at least part of the leftist bubble. Sure, some still will, but whereas on the right gun owners are the most likely to be willing to fight and die for their cultural and political cause, on the left those owning guns are the
least likely to be willing to kill others for a tyrannical state.