Why do conventional armies struggle against guerrilla and insurgency fighters?

Tell that to the Philippines and Orange free state. Those wars were both fought over sea but it was null from the public mind and the invaders won both conflicts.

Either way, Germany would've had to devote a huge amount of force to stop a tiny guerrilla force.

Additionally, they'd have to wipe out basically the entire population, which would be like burning your entire garden because of some weeds, when your garden will be your only source of food for a few years.

Which is why Hitler was doomed to fail anyway. Genocide on the scale hitler envisioned would've taken at least 100 years to recover from before the region started producing a surplus again.

...yes?

That was because the US had a history of involvement in the Philippines, and the Philippine population did not want to resist the Americans.

You don't get successful guerrillas unless people want to fight. The Vietnamese weren't watching ABC news.

>Philippine population did not want to resist the Americans.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philippine–American_War

>Why do conventional armies struggle against guerrilla and insurgency fighters?
>Is there any effective strategy to use against them?

Guerillas are unbeatable as long as they have the support of the local population. To beat guerillas you have to:

1. Drive a wedge between them and civilians either by goodwill or absolute terror, or
2. Get rid of the civilian population either by killing them off or resettling them.

this is it
geurillas can only survive through local support
once that support is gone, either because the locals prefer the invaders, or there are no more locals around, geurrillas can be starved into defeat.
this is what happened to the tamil tigers, iirc

Yep let's just ignore the tens of thousands of dead Americans and hundreds of thousands of wounded, $600 billion dollars of spending, and immense constant fear of an even larger WW3 that the war generated.

>That was because the US had a history of involvement in the Philippines,

A minor history before 1898

>and the Philippine population did not want to resist the Americans.

This is some nice meme history

All wrong.

None of you know have any idea what you are talking about.

Enlighten us then

The british defeat of the Malaysian communist gerilla 1948-60 are the most famous modern defeat of an guerilla. Other exempels are the Algerian civil war in the 90ies.

...

Alright Mr. expert please correct us.

Don't reply to him. He obviously just wants (You)s

>word spreads quickly through media which will be sent back home and shame the war effort
Exactly this.

The problem with guerilla forces is that you have to go total war to effectively do it. Kill villages and cut down the ground and bomb the mountains.

Modern nations arn't willing to do that because it stains their name.

drone strikes

Which is why the Soviets won in Afghanistan.

Oh. Wait.....

"Scorched earth" does not equal "total war" you nincompoop.

Picture this:
>rugged terrain, no vehicles can reach the place
>three to five guerrillamen put separately with some decent firepower and using good camo
>platoon aproaching
what's the outcome?

Some good points are already posted. Theres also the fact that guerillas are usually defensive, defending side always has the advantage in conflicts.

Total war is a situation wherein an entire nation's populace must contribute in some way to the war effort. Every available man, woman and child are affected and involved by the necessary industrialization, mobilization, rationing and propaganda effort to succeed. You mean "scorched earth" where everything in the targeted area is decimated to the point nothing left is useful to anyone. Total war policies may incorporate scorched earth, but they're not necessarily mutually incorporated into the other.

They can go offensive when their opposing army runs out of moral, discipline or does not have good tacticians

Likely outcome

>guerillas open fire
>Platoon scatters, marks where fire is coming from.
>Surround and eliminate guerillas
>have maybe 0-2 dead, 2-4 wounded.
>Gets marked up in someone's log as a skirmish.
>news might or might not get hold of it.
>In another two weeks another platoon approaches the same area and the same thing happens.

Right. Napalming and agent orangeing the shit out of Vietnam was a scorched earth campaign, but the USA was not in a state of total war, as it was in 1941 to 1945.

guerrillas move and fire in echelons, the do not fire at will and keep standing where they start. If 5 men can stop a platoon they are already winning

the finns took guerrilla warfare to another level

10 outta fucking 10

All of these happened on some level in successful military campaigns before the advent of mass media (with more than just Newspapers). See Napoleonic Wars and WW1 to some extent. Yes, my country is spending billions of dollars and thousands of my countrymen are dying, but I am not constantly reminded of this fact every time I sit down and watch the news every night.

>Drive a wedge between them and civilians either by goodwill or absolute terror.
How does one accomplish the "absolute terror" part? What could America have done to achieve the Vietnam war if they employed the "absolute terror" route you're proposing?

So much this
No other reason why my country still has an armed conflict with guerrillas

Winter war was not a guerilla war. It was a war between nation states.

guerillas very often are not trained soldiers in any sense of the word. They can and often do make a shitton of dumb tactical decisions, and attacking at close to 1:10 odds is likely to end badly however you maneuver.

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_in_Afghanistan_(2015–present)

What is the Gulf War for 500

hey you know whats a good idea? using these guerillas trained in hit and run tactics in a large scale conventional assault against US and ARVN positions.

t. giap

See? If you have to have a whole multinational army such as NATO to quell a guerrilla formed by goat shepherds then you're failing miserabily

>A war that lasted 6 fucking months with 292 coalition casualties is a fucking example.

>if you have allies you're failing miserably
por que

The British experience during the Malayan Emergency is probably one of the best examples of a successful counter-insurgency strategy. The biggest fear of a guerilla fighter is getting caught out in the open.

The British relocated entire villages of Malayan Chinese (who made up the bulk of communist insurgents) into British-run safe zones where they would be fed and sheltered behind walls. Insurgents had relied on being able to gather food from villages so when these villages were suddenly placed behind razor wire they could no longer acquire food without having to sneak into these camps and expose themselves.

Separating the peasantry from the guerillas also impinges on their ability to recruit new fighters and distribute propaganda. Eventually the guerilla cells would run out of food, make a desperate raid on some food supply and get flushed into the open, where British conventional superiority could annihilate them.

If you compare NATO's budget, logistics, manpower, weapon tech and know how to Taliban's then you'd suppose NATO would wip the floor with the taliban, but no. Time has passed and it did not happen

Lack of coordination, language barrier, confusion over jurisdiction, etc etc.

How is General X going to dictate the direction of the campaign when he can't even order a sizable portion of the fighting force? It's as if the Centurions in a Roman Army had the option of following Caesar's orders. It just doesn't work.

However, there were a couple of factors which gave Britain an advantage. Firstly, most insurgents were ethnically Chinese (who were somewhat loathed by the majority native Malay) and were therefore easier to isolate and focus on. Secondly the insurgents had quite limited outside support. They didn't have much money or weapons coming in from China and these made them weaker. Americans get a lot of flack for Vietnam but their situation was far more difficult. The Vietcong were supported by a conventional army in the form of the NVA, Vietcong were not from a small, isolated ethnic minority, and they received considerable support from the Communist powers.

Counter-insurgency is difficult. It has a profound psychological effect on soldiers. There is no clear, uniformed enemy to fight against. Instead one has to be suspicious of almost every native who might leave a bomb at a bar or attack an isolated checkpoint. This can lead to resentment and distrust of the native population and worse relations between locals and an occupying force, as the occupiers grow indiscriminate in their violence in order to root out insurgents. I don't know about the historical accuracy of the film 'Platoon' by Olivr Stone but the scene where the GIs burn a Vietnamese village is a good representation of this effect. A GI is found murdered near a village and anyone could be a suspect. Even a little old lady might be hiding a guerilla or a stack of rifles under her hut. No one wants to co-operate and the GIs get the sense that everyone is in on it so they go nuts and start wasting people. This of course leads to even greater resentment against an occupying force and leads to more guerillas taking up arms, and so the cycle continues.

The best way to fight guerrilla tactics is with guerrilla tactics. Not carpet bomb the place like the Americans seem to think works

Yes, to kill the population that is supporting them.
Guerrillas cant raise their own food

Fun fact: Conventional Militaries of the world know this.

You know whos tasked to do this? Some special forces units and military advisors

It's a lot harder to wage a guerilla war in a hostile country compared to a friendly one, though.

Because they were absolutely ruthless and didn't care about the collateral damage to the entire population

When the British army came to N.Ireland to fight the IRA they couldn't understand why people were so angry that they were wantonly murdering innocent civilians, they felt one hand tied behind their back

So concentration camps? Remove the populace to a controlled area and kill everyone else.

The same way terrorism will never go away.

It's impossible to simultaneously remove all threat of terrorist attacks, and at the same time live in a free and open society.

Guerillas are supplied by the local populace. To destroy Guerillas completely you must win over or exterminate the local population.

Modern countries are unwilling to the latter, and social media has made it impossible to do the former.

Lock down a secure region and make it really fucking rad, just make local life better and the people will follow

Once guerrilla warfare has been going on long enough, you'll do enough damage to the surrounds that you'll turn a large percentage of the general populous against you.

If your objective is to get the general populous to do a specific thing (such as abandon communism), rather than simply genocide said general populous, at that point, you've lost the war.

It doesn't matter how much determination or power you have, more force is only going to exacerbate the problem at that point. There's no longer a military solution.

So the trick to dealing with them is to either nip them in the bud, hard and fast, before that happens, or turn the general populous against them via propaganda and infiltration.

Better than half the folks shooting at us had no affiliation with V-C by the end of Vietnam. Blood simply cries out for blood. We lost that war years before it ended, and had long past the point where there was anything we could do. (Hell, given what the French were doing, we kinda lost it before it started.)

Only really works when you can physically distinguish between insurgents and friendly civilians, or when there's some immediately obvious cultural difference (like language). ...or you've stuck yellow stars on everyone ahead of time.

There's also the option of placating a sufficient number of the guerrilla's leadership through negotiated compromise and bribery.

But yeah, that also only works if the war hasn't been going on too long. Once you kill enough folks, there's just no going back.

You can arm and train the guerrilla's opposition and try to let them work it out themselves, but that rarely works. Tends to be that the bulk of the population prone to determined fighting has already joined the guerrillas, or you wouldn't have the problem to begin with.

well you could always try and do this

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix_Program

fuck i dont even think you want to know what this entails, wikipedia tends to be awfully vauge when it comes to war crimes

Well, obviously, that didn't work - really, it seems almost designed to make things worse. Much like GITMO and the current "extraordinary rendition" torture programs.

They tried the absolute terror path, it dident work

"The Phoenix Program has been referenced a number of times in past chapters,
and its relevance to this discussion cannot be overstated. Phoenix was, by design,
a psychological warfare operation. Its goal was, quite literally, to scare the hell out
of the Vietnamese people—to such an extent that their will would be broken and
they would accede to the demands of their would-be oppressors. The techniques
employed were barbaric. Victims of the program were not merely assassinated;
they were frequently raped, tortured, mutilated, dismembered and left posed in
grotesque displays for their fellow villagers and family members to find."

...draftees (into the phoenix program) were made to kill dogs and vultures by biting their throats and twisting off their heads, and had to watch as soldiers tortured and killed suspected dissidents tearing out their fingernails, cutting off their heads, chopping their bodies to pieces and playing
with the dismembered arms for fun"

this next part is from from salvadoran death squads, but you could expect the same things to happen in vietnam, since you know both things where the work of CIA

"People are not just killed by death squads in El Salvador—they are
decapitated and then their heads are placed on pikes and used to dot
the landscape. Men are not just disemboweled by the Salvadoran
Treasury Police; their severed genitalia are stuffed into their mouths.
Salvadoran women are not just raped by the National Guard; their
wombs are cut from their bodies and used to cover their faces. It is not
enough to kill children; they are dragged over barbed wire until their
flesh falls from their bones, while parents are forced to watch."

Well it did do one thing, it created alot of serial killers in back in the U.S

i cant give you any names of the top of my head but numerous serial killers in the states where assassins in the phoneix program

And then be ripped apart by internal conflict like any other empire.

Because they're limp wristed.

Scorched Earth.

The Mongols never a had a problem with insurgency I'll tell you that much. The only effective way to deal with a foe that looks like a civilian is to kill all the civilians. It's barbaric, cruel, and will never fly in western society, forcing us to fight inefficiently and stupidly.

To defeat a militia you have to be evil and cruel as shit

Read stuff about these nigger

fuck your thread, there is no such thing as evil

>

kys