Hacker News Reader

Comment by ryanmarsh | Hacker News Reader

Love all the arm chair generals.

I would rather be one of 10,000 random Texans with guns than 1,000 national guard.

10:1 are horrible odds in an urban environment against well resourced, well equipped, intelligent insurgents.

Houston for instance is full of chemical engineers, tradesmen, software engineers, and all around handy outdoorsy people. You clearly have no concept of how hard it would be to occupy and hold such a place against such an enemy. I tried to hold territory in Baghdad amongst people who couldn't even shoot straight and we were regular army not weekend warriors and it sucked. It was unpredictable and constantly dangerous.

Nope.

View on HN

Shut off the water, power, sewerage, fuel, and food supplies.

It'll sort out pretty quickly.

Most of the population will want out. The remnants won't have much by effective resistance.

As the French tankers learned in WWII, superior armour & firepower without coordination and communications as well as force unity doesn't buy you much.

I see your point. Have you thought about how such a militia would communicate, if they were working together? They would have to come up with new communication channels, seeing as how the government has it's hands in all telecommunications today. I think that would prove a great barrier, and perhaps it's insurmountable.

Knowing insurgencies these days, it would probably be so low-tech the government wouldn't be able to tap it.

Couriers on horses seemed to work for U.S. militias in the past.

If 10k Texans organized to start some sort of rebellion we'd certainly put forth more resources to address that. Nobody needs combat experience in Baghdad or first-hand economic knowledge of Houston to know that Texas would have no chance of succeeding in their civil unrest if it did happen under your feared scenario.

On a side note, I've hunted with Texans before and they put up deer feeders that make noises when they spit out food to draw in the game for easy shots. They also import exotic animals from Africa and stuff them on fenced private property. I don't call that hunting.

>Nobody needs combat experience in Baghdad or first-hand economic knowledge of Houston to know that Texas would have no chance of succeeding in their civil unrest if it did happen under your feared scenario.

Uhhh. I'd check the confidence at the door, here. Places in Iraq (and Afghanistan, where I was) were full of folks who were basically peasants and they utterly baffled us in their commitment and ability to make war. I would absolutely dread fighting an insurgency against a bunch of well armed, well educated, well trained, and freakishly devoted Texans.

Are you saying Texans would succeed? You didn't argue my notion that they wouldn't, just stated that it wouldn't be pleasant.

EDIT: @remarkEon that's ridiculous. We have ~ 1.5M active troops. Drones, aircraft, firepower and heavy surveillance which these Texans don't have. This is not Baghdad or Afghanistan geographically or politically; it's our turf and everyone would rally around crushing any rogue Texans. Some of you are worried about 10k Texans in some crazy hypothetical situation where they get disgruntled due to lack of job prospects like its the first time that ever happened to the south. Then someone says North Korea is not a threat. I yield.

@remarkEon's history of the US: Scrappily defeats the Redcoats and turns a country into a superpower in a mere 150 years. Survives a Great Depression. Takes down Hitler, the Axis of Evil, Osama Bin Laden. Helps overthrow several dictatorships. Builds the most powerful military in history. Avoids nuclear war with North Korea and other dictatorships. Does not fall due to over extension like most great empires. Ultimate demise: 10k Texans with deer rifles.

You'd have to be okay with a pretty dark, Mirror Universe, version of COIN to prevent them from succeeding, yes.

To be fair, there are ~28 million Texans, many whom are not sympathetic to the government and carry arms. I'd also reckon there are a number of Texans in the military that could possibly defect.

Anyways this is a fun exercise, not in anyway an exhaustive argument.

On the flipside - I'd propose in this simulation that there would be inner city civil unrest and the bulk of Texans, most of them armed, would join the force to squash that unrest or hunker down at home and mind their own property. I've spent a lot of time with Texans. Yes they have a ton of pride and many are more aggressive and have a distrust of the federal government. But they'd be more likely IMO to be against any movements terrorizing their cities, especially those that come from the city dwellers who have shown to be more violent historically in dire economic situations. Regardless of what happened, Texas is our #2 largest economy and we'd protect it federally with any means necessary.

The interesting part of your scenario is where you assume the 10k insurgency happens in a vacuum. The insurgency in Iraq only involved some tens of thousands of fighters but many hundreds of thousands or millions more were sympathetic.

Right, but what about all those people who like a stable government and life as usual in the U.S.?

If I see a bunch of gun nuts out there shooting at cops and troops, it's, frankly speaking, an easy call to make whose side I'm on. I trust the government we've got over the one those guys want to install by force.

Okay...I can detect the snark. Got it. I'd submit that you're seriously oversimplifying things, and given the poor track-record of "defeating" insurgencies in the past...like I noted earlier we'd have to engage in some pretty awful tactics. If you can stomach that, great. Not really sure that was the argument.

Yes, we'd engage in awful tactics against a home grown insurgency. Of course I can stomach that; any administration would respond in whatever ways necessary to crush the hypothetical Texans. They certainly wouldn't win as you suggested and were bring stubborn about.

Counter-insurgency is really easy. That's why Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria are now stable and prosperous democracies. /s

A small and highly motivated group of insurgents can completely destabilise a region, rendering it ungovernable. No amount of resources can effectively manage such an insurgency, as we have seen in the quagmires of Iraq and Afghanistan. IS and the Taliban aren't very numerous, but they don't have to be. They aren't very skilled, but they don't have to be. They're never going to win by any meaningful definition of the word, but they're not going to lose either. At this stage, an uneasy truce would be a minor miracle.

That's the risk - not a sudden uprising followed by an Independent State of Texas, but a grinding low-intensity war of attrition that drags on indefinitely. Look at the Troubles in Northern Ireland for how such a scenario can play out in a western democracy. The Troubles lasted for thirty dispiriting years. A whole generation grew up knowing nothing but soldiers on the streets, snipers in tower blocks, "peace barriers" and wanton bombing. The vast majority of people in Northern Ireland wanted peace, but a cycle of tit-for-tat is incredibly difficult to break. With enough pent-up resentment and an inciting incident, it could happen in Texas.

> Counter-insurgency is really easy. That's why Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria are now stable and prosperous democracies. /s

It's a lot easier to play a home game than it is to play an away game halfway across the world.

The US could bring a million soldiers to bear in Texas with very little difficulty. With those numbers, they could walk into every part of the countryside with rocks and beat the shit out of any insurgents. More importantly, they could occupy the territory with ease. It's much easier to occupy home turf than it is to occupy people of a different culture, ethnicity, language, and background.

Regarding the Troubles, I don't think that applies here. The Troubles were, at their root, a sectarian conflict. That doesn't exist in the US; it's not like there's a religious minority in Texas that feels oppressed by a government that will never, ever listen to their grievances.

> It's a lot easier to play a home game than it is to play an away game halfway across the world.

I think it would be much harder. It would be very difficult for the US to keep soldiers committed if they were deployed to Texas. There would be a lot of internal conflict for the military in a civil war situation.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com