The outcome of such simulations isn't repeatable by definition since it's path-dependent on various decisions and risky outcomes, and of course even the information coming out of the simulation affects the decisions and thus outcomes of future runs of the simulation. That's even with perfect information, which already is an unrealistic assumption.

At best, a very accurate simulation could tell you "in the case of war, here is the expected distribution of outcomes, here are the probabilities of various levels of "winning", here are the estimated levels of civilian casualties.

And quite a few political leaders in such situations have or would have chosen to take e.g. a 5% chance of victory instead of surrender, or simply as a deterring tactic - yes, we know that we will surely lose, but in the process you'll lose many men as well, so we'll bet that the result is not that important to you and you won't pay this price.

And there's no telling whether the enemy will do something batshit crazy that you could have never predicted.

If Herodotus is to believed, a Persian siege against Babylon was met with the Babylonians strangling all the women except for a few to make bread as to stretch fighting resources as long as possible.

During the Sono-Soviet border conflict of the late 1960s, Mao threatened to overwhelm the Russian border with millions of Chinese as a part of his "man over weapons" strategy. Even with nuclear weapons, the Soviets were terrified of the sheer number of people that China could throw at them.

How do you predict that? How do you put a number to it?

Even when a military of outrageously greater power wins, people will still fight, even if they know they are fighting to the death and couldn't make a dent in the fighting strength of the superior occupying forces.

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

I'm not sure the Iraqi resistance against the US was in that hopeless a position. They were outgunned conventionally, but that didn't matter in a guerilla war against a foreign occupier.

For a guerilla war to be successful, the foreign occupier has to lose the will to win. Such resistance is hopeless in general terms of warfare, to be won it has to be considered as much a political war as it is a conventional one.

> Such resistance is hopeless in general terms of warfare, to be won it has to be considered as much a political war as it is a conventional one.

War is always political.

I agree.

I was meaning more that a conventional war is more violence then politics. There are various aspects to war, each type has its own balance of these aspects. I just feel that in a guerilla war the politics has as much a part as violence.

That may have been the case in Iraq, but that was not at all the case in WWII. The Germans by no means lost the will to win in Yugoslavia or Poland.

True, they did not lose the will to win as they were simply defeated by an organized force. I believe the Germans were involved in more than just fighting underground resistance in multiple countries. Such resistance alone did not defeat the Germans, but did assist with the final outcome.

Tito's partisans drove out their occupiers without outside assistance.

Now, Germany was obviously occupied on multiple fronts.

While I can't contest that if a nation of 330 million were to devote its full human and industrial capacity for the purpose of destroying all resistance in a nation of 33 million, it would succeed...

I wouldn't call the richest country in the world failing to convert to a war economy to overcome an enemy ten times smaller then they are to be 'lack of will to win.'

Yes, drove them out but did not defeat them in context of the war.

The richest nation in the world should not have to convert to a war economy to defeat an enemy ten times smaller. If it could not; then it didn't want to be there in the first place, it didn't want to do what was necessary to win, or their internal politics is screwed up. Possibly more than one of those.

It's clear now that there was no "Iraqi resistance against the US," or else the would have stopped "resisting" after the US left.

It was clear then too, but it obvious now that the proto-ISIS "freedom fighter" narrative was completely divorced from reality.

The group that became ISIS wasn't the only group fighting the US occupation. (And the fact that a group has goals beyond resisting the occupation doesn't mean its not resisting the occupation; just like the fact that it had goals beyond opposing Saddam's regime doesn't mean that the same group wasn't opposed to Saddam's regime -- which had contained it far more effectively than the US occupation did.)

Already have this scenario. Nuclear powers are unwilling to go to war since we already know the outcome.