It's a common political move for a country to back the insurgencies against their enemies. As examples, the United States had the backing of France during the revolutionary war, North Vietnam had the backing of both China, and Russia, and Afghanistan had the backing of the United States during the Soviet invasion. None of these insurgencies would have been successful without the intervention and assistence of the major nation states.

So in truth, these never ending "insurgent resistance" situations we've found ourselves in are actually proxy wars against at least Iran, Pakistan, and Russia. Countries like China and Saudi Arabia are also certainly involved to some extent. These countries provide funding, equipment, training, and refuge to these groups, providing the insurgents with the capability to continue operating indefinitely.

As long as these countries continuing to support the insurgencies we're fighting, there is no viable way to actually end the insurgencies.

In the 1980s, the US and the USSR were fighting numerous proxy wars in countries like Nicaragua.

When the USSR collapsed, you had thousands of trained soldiers who stopped receiving a paycheck. If you've spent the last ten years fighting in a war, you're not just going to put down the AK47 and go work on a farm.

What past are you referring to? Armed insurrection is essentially endemic throughout human history. If you look during the Middle Age's, there's pretty much a peasant revolt going on somewhere, sometime. Of course, you don't hear much about it because such insurrection was rarely effective. The general populace was incapable of mounting a threat to well-trained armies.

That changed with the introduction of the arquebus, which is essentially the first effective gun. Training someone to wield a warbow took a lifetime; training someone to use an arquebus took a few weeks. Serious revolts no longer meant having to sack an unpopular lord; they meant having to flee the country for fear of your life. With the rise of European colonization giving large groups of people motivation to maintain resistance for a long time, it took determined application of overwhelming force to actually dislodge them. The Mapuche, for example, resisted Spanish (and later Chilean/Argentinian) colonization attempts for 350 years. The US took 4 months to wrest the Philippines from Spanish control, and spent the next 14 years trying to put down independence rebellions.

What has changed in the past 30-ish years is that wars have diminished. Especially in the big, neat, "clean" wars you think of, such as the Crimean War. That means that the messy, interminable low-level war that's been with us for 500 years is largely the only wars you hear about, whereas the retrospective look at historical wars, both within and outside of the military, focuses fairly exclusively on the big wars of history.

It's not that they're new, or more effective; it's that they're simply much, much more visible.

Total war is part of it, but militarily guerrilla warfare is mostly meaningless. Compare all US military dead from Iraq vs. one day of the battle of the bulge. These tactics generally extend the fighting, but don’t accomplish that much.

Also, a lot more people where involved than you might think. “From June 2003, through September 30, 2011, there have been 26,320-27,000+ Iraqi insurgents killed based on several estimates.” Yet, “4,424 total deaths (including both killed in action and non-hostile) and 31,952 wounded in action (WIA) as a result of the Iraq War.”

Vietnam had more US dead, 58,220 including disease and suiside. But, again individual battles in other wars killed more Americans. https://www.archives.gov/research/military/vietnam-war/casua...

Maybe not in the conventional sense, but financially it's costing the US hundreds of billions that could have been invested elsewhere.

I'm pretty sure the cost of the war in the middle east is what helped sink the Soviets

We destabilized Iraq as an excuse to spend all that money on war. It was a fantastic stimulus package for northeast Virginia.

The major cost was not the fighting, it was having that many people in a foreign nation without any national gain.

Or maybe because we did stuff like that, and it lead to more resistance.

You can't murder your way to peace. Killing for peace just leads to everyone being dead.

(Assuming “everyone” includes the attacker here.)

The Mongolians did. You just had to be willing to thoroughly finish the job. Fear of guaranteed annihilation kept the rest in check.

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mongol_Empire#Disintegration_i...

Part of human nature is the near-universal paradoxical behavior of digging one's own grave at gunpoint. It is breathtakingly easy to subjugate people through brute force. In 1860, there were large stretches of the American South where the majority of the population were enslaved. How do you think that order was maintained? How do you think the SS--an organization that at no point had as many as a million men--was able to murder tens of millions of people in the Holocaust (of which the well-known six million Jews were, at most, slightly more than half)?

Neither of these subjugations were stopped by the valiant resistance of oppressed people inspired by the unquenchable thirst for human freedom--they were stopped by some other group applying even more brute force to the oppressors for largely unrelated reasons.

The problem empires face today is that this behavior is not acceptable anymore and the empires have to act like they are there for the local people. So conquering, but not calling it like that and pretending to be nice while doing it. Hypocrite. And does not work so effective in terms of control. Because if you kill only those who indeed fight against you, than yes, their relatives are your next enemies etc.

Related: What Ghandi achieved in India he probably could not have done if the Nazis would have been the enemy empire as the british empire allready was bound by human rights. The Nazi Empire was not.

One form invoked killing all military age males then selling of the woman and children as slaves scattering them.

Pretty common back in the day from what I read. Very low chance of revolt.

Yes, but then you have to build up everything yourself. So to have a working province that can be milked soon, quite often local structures were also left intact. Important is to crush their culture/religion if you want to crush their spirit to revolt. Thats why the romans killed the druids of the gaulls and took away children of the nobles to make little romans out of them.

Many reasons, but certainly one of them is the asymetry in the cost of materiel. For the $30 it costs[0] to make an IED, you can put at risk anything from an APC costing $300,000 [1], to a tank costing over $6,000,000 [2] i.e. a difference of 10,000 to 200,000 times.

Further to this, one can factor in the cost to the US of maintaining security with "boots on the ground", where those soldiers can cost anywhere from $400,000/year to over $2,000,000/year [3] (depending on who you ask).

Finally, the insurgents have a very different aim to the US troops. An analogy might be useful here. Consider the result to an elephant of stirring up an ants' nest [4] (no spoilers - go read it).

(EDITED to fix formatting)

[0] https://www.npr.org/2011/12/18/143902421/in-iraq-fighting-an...

[1] http://www.military-today.com/apc/m113a3.htm

[2] https://www.therichest.com/rich-list/the-biggest/top-10-most...

[3] https://www.yahoo.com/news/it-costs--2-1-million-per-year-fo...

[4] https://www.voanews.com/a/ants-take-on-elephants-in-african-...

Today if you lose 10 soldiers in a day the President is on TV.

It's difficult to compare exact figures though since the Iraq war, the the "war on terror" (i.e., Afghanistan, Africa, etc.), and the post-war occupation costs are usually consolidated together. Currently that number stands at roughly $2.2 trillion (and Vietnam at roughly $700 billion, inflation-adjusted).

Home field advantage and the ability to use guerrilla tactics have always been a tremendous advantage, and often it's enough to make it prohibitively expensive to conquer or subjugate a given population rather than just leaving them alone. This, combined with terrain, is what makes Afghanistan in particular so defensible in parts.

For the US in particular, there are also levels of brutality that we're not willing to resort to, which only helps to tip the scale towards "too expensive to be worth it". Russia had much better luck with their counterinsurgency efforts in Chechnya, but then again, Russia is willing to resort to measures that the US is not. Though even then, the desire to maintain Russian territorial integrity probably justified higher costs than the desire, in the 70's and 80's, to maintain communist domination of Afghanistan.

The traditional solution to annoying resistance forces has been genocide. But we're too civilized to do that these days.

That was an Iraqi and Kurdish forces offensive against ISIS in Mosul, which they heavily occupied. We did assist that offensive with missile strikes. The satellite photos your article shows are located in a specific region of the city. Did they bomb the rest of the city? War is terrible, but I am not sure your example is a good one.

This style of bombing continues to this day. There are numerous citites in the middle east that have been reduced to rubble in the 21st century by aerial area bombing.