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Comment by cbanek | Hacker News Reader

While I feel unrest could start there, I doubt it would persist. The army and national guard are just too well equipped and organized to deal with the problem. I'd put my money on 1,000 national guard troops vs 10,000 random Texans with guns. This doesn't even get into larger military hardware, such as planes and drones with missiles. Sure, people will die, and it would be a tragedy. It may move the political needle, but I doubt it would be some kind of meaningful uprising.

As a larger point, I think this diminishes the chances of a "french revolution" style revolution in general, where the huge masses of poor people revolt against the rich. The poor are not well equipped or organized in general, and military technology is increasingly becoming more powerful and longer range. Just think if the richest people were protected by working ED-209's that responded to their command. Even if we had the other 99% fighting them, could they really win?

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Love all the arm chair generals.

I would rather be one of 10,000 random Texans with guns than 1,000 national guard.

10:1 are horrible odds in an urban environment against well resourced, well equipped, intelligent insurgents.

Houston for instance is full of chemical engineers, tradesmen, software engineers, and all around handy outdoorsy people. You clearly have no concept of how hard it would be to occupy and hold such a place against such an enemy. I tried to hold territory in Baghdad amongst people who couldn't even shoot straight and we were regular army not weekend warriors and it sucked. It was unpredictable and constantly dangerous.

Nope.

If 10k Texans organized to start some sort of rebellion we'd certainly put forth more resources to address that. Nobody needs combat experience in Baghdad or first-hand economic knowledge of Houston to know that Texas would have no chance of succeeding in their civil unrest if it did happen under your feared scenario.

On a side note, I've hunted with Texans before and they put up deer feeders that make noises when they spit out food to draw in the game for easy shots. They also import exotic animals from Africa and stuff them on fenced private property. I don't call that hunting.

>Nobody needs combat experience in Baghdad or first-hand economic knowledge of Houston to know that Texas would have no chance of succeeding in their civil unrest if it did happen under your feared scenario.

Uhhh. I'd check the confidence at the door, here. Places in Iraq (and Afghanistan, where I was) were full of folks who were basically peasants and they utterly baffled us in their commitment and ability to make war. I would absolutely dread fighting an insurgency against a bunch of well armed, well educated, well trained, and freakishly devoted Texans.

Are you saying Texans would succeed? You didn't argue my notion that they wouldn't, just stated that it wouldn't be pleasant.

EDIT: @remarkEon that's ridiculous. We have ~ 1.5M active troops. Drones, aircraft, firepower and heavy surveillance which these Texans don't have. This is not Baghdad or Afghanistan geographically or politically; it's our turf and everyone would rally around crushing any rogue Texans. Some of you are worried about 10k Texans in some crazy hypothetical situation where they get disgruntled due to lack of job prospects like its the first time that ever happened to the south. Then someone says North Korea is not a threat. I yield.

@remarkEon's history of the US: Scrappily defeats the Redcoats and turns a country into a superpower in a mere 150 years. Survives a Great Depression. Takes down Hitler, the Axis of Evil, Osama Bin Laden. Helps overthrow several dictatorships. Builds the most powerful military in history. Avoids nuclear war with North Korea and other dictatorships. Does not fall due to over extension like most great empires. Ultimate demise: 10k Texans with deer rifles.

You'd have to be okay with a pretty dark, Mirror Universe, version of COIN to prevent them from succeeding, yes.

To be fair, there are ~28 million Texans, many whom are not sympathetic to the government and carry arms. I'd also reckon there are a number of Texans in the military that could possibly defect.

Anyways this is a fun exercise, not in anyway an exhaustive argument.

On the flipside - I'd propose in this simulation that there would be inner city civil unrest and the bulk of Texans, most of them armed, would join the force to squash that unrest or hunker down at home and mind their own property. I've spent a lot of time with Texans. Yes they have a ton of pride and many are more aggressive and have a distrust of the federal government. But they'd be more likely IMO to be against any movements terrorizing their cities, especially those that come from the city dwellers who have shown to be more violent historically in dire economic situations. Regardless of what happened, Texas is our #2 largest economy and we'd protect it federally with any means necessary.

The interesting part of your scenario is where you assume the 10k insurgency happens in a vacuum. The insurgency in Iraq only involved some tens of thousands of fighters but many hundreds of thousands or millions more were sympathetic.

Right, but what about all those people who like a stable government and life as usual in the U.S.?

If I see a bunch of gun nuts out there shooting at cops and troops, it's, frankly speaking, an easy call to make whose side I'm on. I trust the government we've got over the one those guys want to install by force.

Okay...I can detect the snark. Got it. I'd submit that you're seriously oversimplifying things, and given the poor track-record of "defeating" insurgencies in the past...like I noted earlier we'd have to engage in some pretty awful tactics. If you can stomach that, great. Not really sure that was the argument.

Yes, we'd engage in awful tactics against a home grown insurgency. Of course I can stomach that; any administration would respond in whatever ways necessary to crush the hypothetical Texans. They certainly wouldn't win as you suggested and were bring stubborn about.

Counter-insurgency is really easy. That's why Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria are now stable and prosperous democracies. /s

A small and highly motivated group of insurgents can completely destabilise a region, rendering it ungovernable. No amount of resources can effectively manage such an insurgency, as we have seen in the quagmires of Iraq and Afghanistan. IS and the Taliban aren't very numerous, but they don't have to be. They aren't very skilled, but they don't have to be. They're never going to win by any meaningful definition of the word, but they're not going to lose either. At this stage, an uneasy truce would be a minor miracle.

That's the risk - not a sudden uprising followed by an Independent State of Texas, but a grinding low-intensity war of attrition that drags on indefinitely. Look at the Troubles in Northern Ireland for how such a scenario can play out in a western democracy. The Troubles lasted for thirty dispiriting years. A whole generation grew up knowing nothing but soldiers on the streets, snipers in tower blocks, "peace barriers" and wanton bombing. The vast majority of people in Northern Ireland wanted peace, but a cycle of tit-for-tat is incredibly difficult to break. With enough pent-up resentment and an inciting incident, it could happen in Texas.

> Counter-insurgency is really easy. That's why Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria are now stable and prosperous democracies. /s

It's a lot easier to play a home game than it is to play an away game halfway across the world.

The US could bring a million soldiers to bear in Texas with very little difficulty. With those numbers, they could walk into every part of the countryside with rocks and beat the shit out of any insurgents. More importantly, they could occupy the territory with ease. It's much easier to occupy home turf than it is to occupy people of a different culture, ethnicity, language, and background.

Regarding the Troubles, I don't think that applies here. The Troubles were, at their root, a sectarian conflict. That doesn't exist in the US; it's not like there's a religious minority in Texas that feels oppressed by a government that will never, ever listen to their grievances.

> It's a lot easier to play a home game than it is to play an away game halfway across the world.

I think it would be much harder. It would be very difficult for the US to keep soldiers committed if they were deployed to Texas. There would be a lot of internal conflict for the military in a civil war situation.

I see your point. Have you thought about how such a militia would communicate, if they were working together? They would have to come up with new communication channels, seeing as how the government has it's hands in all telecommunications today. I think that would prove a great barrier, and perhaps it's insurmountable.

Knowing insurgencies these days, it would probably be so low-tech the government wouldn't be able to tap it.

Couriers on horses seemed to work for U.S. militias in the past.

Shut off the water, power, sewerage, fuel, and food supplies.

It'll sort out pretty quickly.

Most of the population will want out. The remnants won't have much by effective resistance.

As the French tankers learned in WWII, superior armour & firepower without coordination and communications as well as force unity doesn't buy you much.

Guess which communities the national guard and the army recruited those troops from. If it ever comes to that, you're expecting soldiers to shoot and kill people just like them, people whose friends and family they may well have served with, people who - if things had gone a little differently - could have been them or their friends and family. This would likely not end well.

Hey would do it. Soldiers are not trained to think about how they are similiar to their enemies.

They're also not trained to fight their neighbors.

It's true, it wouldn't start well or end well. But using military equipment at a long range, like a drone, does add a dehumanizing component. And killing people that are just like you is really the nastiest part of any civil war (since both sides are very culturally similar), but it doesn't seem to stop the killing.

This seems naive. People will happily fight others just like them and from similar backgrounds for all sorts of reasons. Civil Wars are infamous for it. "Brother against brother".

Are we talking about the same national guard that mowed down unarmed students in the Kent State massacre? You'd be surprised what strong structure can cause a person to do.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kent_State_shootings

Well, more the National Guard that's literally the same people as the armed rednecks in rural Texas. Keep in mind the National Guard are the "weekend warriors", only now many of them have months/years in actual combat zones and have returned to their home communities with those skills.

Not to mention this whole argument assumes the government isn't siding with the insurrection. Sounds like an odd point to make, but if there was a substantial redneck revolution, which side is Trump's government on? Who will be labeled the rebels?

It's incredibly risky to assume who is on which side of an actual civil war scale uprising. The chances of being wrong are very high, and the consequences are literally life and death.

Liberal students are them. A group of angry patriots, many of whom are likely to be veterans themselves, are much more likely to be considered us.

What do you think these guys are going to do, line up and wait to be carpet bombed? Guys who are essentially illiterate farmers have managed to keep insurgencies going against the US military for around 15 years in Iraq/Afghanistan. There's not an unreasonable chance that the dumb rednecks of Texas could do as well. But, these guys aren't all dumb rednecks - they're going to have support from a decent amount of people with US military, national guard, police, etc. experience. No one is claiming that they're going to march on DC and take over the country, but they could certainly turn sections of the US into something akin to the Syria/Iraq civil war situation.

I'm not saying they're dumb, you're right many people will have law enforcement and military experience. But they simply won't be equipped and supplied like normal forces, and I think that's the key difference. And yes, I agree that there could be a strong resistance movement to whatever happens by armed citizens, since guns are everywhere.

Viet Cong, French Indian War, George Washington, County Jones, and Benjamin Martin are just a few times in American History where a lack of arms or training did not result as you're expecting.

It's amazing how quickly you can teach someone how to handle themselves in a combat situation when their life depends on it. We're talking days.

Yea, I can tell you its already happening in PA.

A lot of those are poor examples because the gap between s peasant and a professional soldier has become much larger over time, particularly over the last century.

Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria.

I'd bet on 1,000 national guard troops refusing to mobilize, and military refusing to follow civilian leadership.

You should read up on your French Revolution. It wasn't the poorest who revolted the most.

It's not about defeating the national guard or whoever outright, it's about being able to resist them long enough to attract defectors from the military and start a civil war.

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