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Comment by Nomentatus | Hacker News Reader

It's a maxim that guerrilla wars succeed with a lot of external help and supply, if they succeed at all, throughout history. That's fact. The French were financial supporters from before the shooting began; and supplied high tech gunpowder that meant that from the start the colonists' muskets had significantly more range, no small thing. Without France, nothing. The French ended up bankrupting the state due to extreme overspending on the Americans' war, and sliding into revolution themselves. (Although weather wrecking crops after the eruption of an Icelandic volcano was a large factor as well.) The Americans deserve great credit, but they owe tremendous debts of gratitude, too.

Washington had to keep British costs high while not losing, he couldn't just sit.

Mass conscription is difficult if you can't pay or properly feed or clothe the army you have and a big portion of your own population opposed to you.

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The American Revolution was not a Guerilla war. It was primarily fought with pitched battles between opposing armies. This was the case from the first shots (at Lexington, and subsequently Concord and Bunker Hill) to the last at Yorktown.

It did not begin as a guerrilla war, true; but the abject failure of that initial effort made it clear to Washington that the war had to continue as an irregular war without set front lines or attempts to directly take back New York or Boston. Guerrilla wars can have large battles, but do not have established, continuing and continuous front lines. Mao's troops now and then held large battles with the Japanese (and KMT), once by choice - but his armies nearly always fought as guerillas and were far more successful in that role.

Perhaps the American revolution isn't as obvious a case because the Brits tended to turtle a lot; not trying to demonstrate that they were in control of nearly the whole place and so providing a plethora of targets (unlike the Japanese, say.)

I think the notion of "established, continuing, and continuous front line" is anachronistic to the Revolutionary War in any case. As late as the American Civil War, an army could freely roam through the enemy countryside with relative impunity until a defending army caught up with them, as happened at Antietam and Gettysburg; there was no "front line" to punch through.

The US is large, true. More a matter of control points, such as Harper's Ferry. That's where Lee had to punch through to get to Antietam, in 1862, for example. https://www.nps.gov/hafe/learn/historyculture/1862-battle-of...

But I haven't asserted that all regular wars have front lines all the time. Just that guerrilla wars don't.

I don’t think this phenomenon is specific to the US, but to the era. I’m just not quite as familiar with e.g. the Napoleonic Wars.

> It's a maxim that guerrilla wars succeed with a lot of external help and supply, if they succeed at all,

Not true. Show me where in "On Guerrilla Warfare" Zedong - an expert on the American and French Revolutions - claims that guerrilla warfare requires external support.

Guerrilla warfare requires the support of the population (pretty much all US IW joint doctrine highlights this).

Economic power facilitates guerrilla warfare, along with the transition to traditional warfare, but it isn't a requirement.

> Washington had to keep British costs high while not losing, he couldn't just sit.

The only thing Washington had to do was survive.

Mao received oodles of support from the USSR, the Long March was the Reds fleeing northward to where they could still get that support, and then being able to punch further East.

The KMT was also a revolutionary force (against foreign domination), and initially preferred by Moscow for practical reasons - the USSR would at that time only support a joint command.

Mao became leader of the Reds because the Chinese Red's intelligence officer who was their contact with the USSR and held the codes for that defected to Mao from the previous leader (who wasn't going to admit to defeat by the KMT.) After that, the money etc could only to go to Mao, since he was the only point of contact the USSR then had with the Reds.

Post WWII Soviet support, esp military material support became very large indeed, allowing the Reds to crush the KMT.

But it wasn't helpful for either side to reveal the connections; better to portray the revolution as a mass movement of the peasants and workers than show all the gears and wheels.

Mao spent plenty of time and effort downplaying everything the USSR had done for him and in massive spats with the USSR, for his own political reasons. Just as Lenin didn't credit the massive support the Germans had given him, to undermine the Czar.

Considering how much suppory the Chinese gave to North Vietnam, I assume he knew how important support from third parties is.

Indeed, he'd had plenty himself from the USSR.

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