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Comment by os2warpman | Hacker News Reader

Guns are useless.

Everyone who believes guns are some kind of savior or last-ditch protector is fucking stupid.

There is a reason why, during westward expansion, the first thing towns did when they got two nickels to rub together to buy bricks to build a church was ban guns.

There are so many real-world examples of guns being useless that it defies logic and belief that people cling to the myth.

There are so few examples of guns being useful that those examples are the irrelevant exceptions to the norm.

Every single valley in Afghanistan has a small village along the valley stream where every household has at least one automatic rifle. That is what a society saturated with weaponry looks like: paranoid, tribal, and rapey.

In the US, the second "the good guys" show up with their AR and wish.com tacticool gear and start to pose any actual threat, the bad guys will retreat behind fortified walls and fences and start dropping JDAMs.

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The United States Military is the most terrifying institution of force in the history of the human race (history of the universe as far as we know). It achieves a level of training, discipline, organization, morale, combat effectiveness and general formidavlbility that makes the median Marine among the best soldiers on the planet anywhere, all backed by a logistical apparatus unrivaled by any conceivable combination of private sector actors working together. Unrivaled now, maybe ever.

And it got its ass kicked in Afghanistan. Trillions of dollars and countless lives later and a bunch of Pashtun tribesmen with AK-47s and RPG-7s have the country back, and a bunch of our materiel for our trouble.

Because the only thing on the planet more dangerous than a United States Special Forces operator is a man with nothing to lose.

Nah, that's only true because the US fought in accordance with the Geneva Convention. It could have easily turned the entire country to glass if it wanted to.

Would American soldiers do so? If you think they all would, you have no understanding of history.

History seems to indicate enough would. And with modern weapons, that can be a low number.

After the firsr few years, most soldiers were either mad enough or terrified enough of IEDs that they would have willingly accepted alternative options.

Sure, but that would have been pointless because none of the objectives would have been achieved. All those tribesmen would now be in Iran, and the US would have abandoned the world two decades earlier.

Instead... Billions were spent and none of the objectives were achieved anyway. Actually I'm not sure what the objectives even were.

The objectives changed all the time for domestic political reasons. If you want a great podcast series on this checkout Blowback. Season 1 does Iraq and they go back to Afghanistan in season 4.

https://open.spotify.com/show/2pibBnPuHqKr07hxEMZE41

Yes, you could have nuked the whole of Afghanistan. But for what gain?

(And what loss)

https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/2022/08/what-do-we-owe-a...

I mean sure but also very few of Talibs who first faced the US military had lived to see its withdrawal.

That's the whole point. They were willing to die for it forever and at some point we weren't anymore.

That's how war works now. It's always been true to some extent but conflict is just getting more and more asymmetrical with no obvious upper limit.

At some point the Houthi in a cave with a five hundred dollar DJI drone and rage in his heart is king in that world: the only way to lose is to care about something that hasn't already been taken from you. You'll never kill all of them. Not with a nuclear bomb.

Yes but you have plenty to lose. You'll be the one doing the dying.

Whereas the Houthis are a sufficient non-issue that shipping traffic treats them as an insurance cost, the US Navy's biggest problem is they'd really like laser rather then missile to cut that drone out of the sky (which is to say: they enjoyed Iranian backing meaning they were smuggled surprisingly capable antiship missiles, and they won't be getting many more of those now).

That's not true at all. Afghanistan was occupied for 20 years until the US decided to pull out, because nation building didn't work there. That's not a military failure.

Substitute Vietnam then, if the point makes you feel better.

Same story. The problem was the US wasn't going to invade the North, and China supplying the NVA added a long tail supply chain that wasnt being touched.

What you might do better to note is both of those conflicts consisted of the US invading someone else's home soil to effect change and being outlasted in terms of public interest - a public who at home were living peaceful, first world lifestyles.

Everyones little civil war fantasy is when the fight is happening on your home turf to start with.

I don't really agree - a dedicated populous with light arms in both cases was able to ward off a full victory on their home turf, and the US caved to losses and other pressures (60k dead americans in 'nam, hundreds of thousands wounded physically, notorious trauma uncounted etc).

I don't have any sort of civil war fantasy, but I think that holding out against a military deployment in-country until it became socially and politically untenable would be pretty reasonable.

Sure...in 20 years. The US stayed in Afghanistan for long enough a whole new generation grew up after the occupation had started.

There's many dictatorships which are considerably older then that, yet weapons are easily available or common - Iraqis didn't lack for small arms during Saddam's rule.

Iraqis didn't view Saddam as an invading force. Some even liked him!

I’m sure they could have made it work given 50 or 75 years. Need a few generations that haven’t known anything else.

It didn't get its ass kicked in Afghanistan, it ran off with its tail between its legs, never having been clear why it had been there in the first place.

What exactly are you saying here? Are you saying that guns can't defeat a modern military, or that it would be better if we just always let those in power do what they will? Because you're mixing the two, here and in the comments. You accept multiple times that guns can be used with success to throw off a modern military, but each time you do you pivot to trying to argue that the revolt was pointless anyways. Are you saying that no matter what the government does, no matter what it takes from you, no matter what crimes they commit -- it would always be preferable to just lie down and take it?

Because I can tell you, most of your countrymen do not agree. Most of humanity doesn't agree. And as long as there are so many examples -- from the French Revolution to Vietnam -- of people rising up against their oppressors, people will hope that should times become hard enough, they could do the same.

The idea is that guns are useful because it makes pacifying the population more difficult.

If it's the coup or something your own army may not be willing to trade fire with civilian groups but may still be willing to engage in.softer subduing efforts like arrests, water cannons, etc.

It's rich to call people stupid when you're missing the obvious point while engaging in a fantasy of all out war between civilians with guns and an army trying to exterminate them.

I am not engaging in fantasy.

“But we have guns” is fantasy.

Like with the Viet Cong and the Afghanistan people who were conquered and absorbed into the American or Russian systems, right?

And now let's imagine what might happen if the US military tried to occupy a country full of guerillas who look like them, dress like them, speak the same language, and share a cultural background.

The US wins on logistics because it has a lot of stuff already built, and anything we need we can build in the US and get it out of the US quickly.

This quickly falls apart in the US if we go civil war on each other. We are technologically fragile. If just a small portion of the people of the US went around shooting electrical distribution, fuel refining and NG compression facilities the US would have one of the worst humanitarian disasters of the last 50 years, maybe longer.

This said, there are a number of countries that would love to see us do this to each other.

The Vietnam war killed close to a million Vietnamese between North and South Vietnamese civilians and the Vietcong [1]

The Afghanistan war killed about 3500 U.S. & allied soldiers, and about 300,000 Afghans. [2]

The Iraq war killed about 5000 U.S. & allied soldiers, and about 1 million Iraqis. [3]

U.S. military power since WW2 can basically be summed up by "We can't win, but we can still kill you." If you end up dead, your side may win, but that's cold comfort (literally) for you.

The root of the discrepancy is the difference between winning as in annihilating your opponent and winning as in getting them to do what you want. Oftentimes, military force and lots of deaths actually just entrenches opposing ideology. Nothing like a common enemy that's trying to kill you to get people to band together. But you can still end up with a lot of dead people that are ideologically victorious. Always more people where they came from, and people may switch over to your cause.

Also, the huge irony of the Vietnam war is that by 1989, 15 years after the North Vietnamese "won", Vietnam was one of the most intensely capitalist countries on Earth. Because they realized that communism didn't work, and they'd all be better off with free trade and markets. Given the US's stated goal of preventing the spread of communism in southeast Asia, they would've been far more effective just letting the communists win and run the country for a few years and then dealing with the consequences of that.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnam_War_casualties

[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20241203211818/https://ucdp.uu.s...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Iraq_War

Yeah but they're still independent.

> U.S. military power since WW2 can basically be summed up by "We can't win, but we can still kill you." If you end up dead, your side may win, but that's cold comfort (literally) for you.

Some of them, yes. But even for those who do die: haven't you heard "give me liberty or give me death"? Many people do feel this way.

> Also, the huge irony of the Vietnam war is that by 1989, 15 years after the North Vietnamese "won", Vietnam was one of the most intensely capitalist countries on Earth.

Yet where is the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie? Why do Vietnamese billionaires not run the government like they do that of America, and why does their government not have to kowtow to American business interests like Taiwan, Japan, and South Korea do? Because despite opening up their economy, their political system is far from a liberal democracy. You're making a false equivalence to try and pretend that the Vietnamese war was a no-op, that they should have just rolled over and accepted defeat like you're suggesting all the peoples of the world do.

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