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Re:How We Learned to Love the Bill of Rights by rgbrenner on Tuesday February 27, 2018 @06:05AM (#16472485)
Afghanistan. 16 years, still haven't won.

And us citizens have more weapons than the taliban; longer harder to protect borders than Afghanistan; and a population that would be sympathetic to the cause. I wouldn’t be so sure the us military would win.

According to current military doctrine[0], counterinsurgency requires a minimum of 1 counterinsurgent per 50 people in the population. If you assume ALL us military personnel can serve in combat simultaneously (ie: no troops required for supply lines, paperwork, management, etc), and you included all police forces in the US, you would only get to 1 per 100.

So you say they would "win so laughably easily".. but according to the military itself, it does not have enough troops to handle an insurgency in the US.

0. As written in the Army and Marine Corps field manual (and this doctrine was based on research of past (us and non-us) conflicts)

Re:How We Learned to Love the Bill of Rights by rvo on Tuesday February 27, 2018 @06:48AM (#16472652)
Also, 99 percent of the US military will defect to protect their own country against a rogue federal government. These are normal, good people who signed up to protect us.
Re:How We Learned to Love the Bill of Rights by ionised on Tuesday February 27, 2018 @09:58AM (#16473826)
Are you sure about that?

History shows us that typically, soldiers will fight for whoever guarantees their pay.

Combined with this;

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment

it shows that money, orders and chain of command are powerful motivators.

These are normal, good people who signed up to protect us.

I wouldn't put that number anywhere near 99%. Probably closer to 50%. Maybe even lower.

I'm sure the people in any given totalitarian regime once thought the same way about their armed forces.