Lets talk about repression

I feel like in debate we end up talking a fair bit about government construction, invasions, and that kind of stuff. So, in the spirit of that, lets talk about some practical lessons in applying military force.

First off, I guess we should talk a little bit about insurgencies. These things are also called "fourth generation" forces, though it doesn't really matter. Basically, we're talking about pissed off people with guns. The big problem here is that technologically we're now at a point where weapons are much more powerful than armor. A M1A1 Abrams is not all that difficult to blow up with access to the proper hardware. In this case being armor piercing RPGs. Not that it's easy, but it's doable. For the record, the M1A1 has the most advanced armor on the planet. Even body armor with SAPI plates or whatever they're using these days is only going to save you under a limited set of circumstances. Basically, any jackass with an AK-47 (and there are a lot of those) has a decent chance of killing you. Partisan/guerilla/insurgencies whatever you want to call them are thus effective at repelling invasions for the following reasons:

1) Since they're all locals, they don't have any kind of logistics worries (they all have their own source of food... or not and that's why they're shooting to begin with) and they know the local terrain.

2) Since they're all locals, killing them off tends to spur rather than dampen morale.

3) They recruit very easily, since they're local. With a few suitcases of cash (Generally provided by foreign intelligence agencies) and a willing weapons dealer you can raise an army.

So this makes these armies insanely hard to fight. At best, you get them to shut up for a bit. This is the kind of army that kicked us out of Veitnam, kicked the Soviets out of Afghanistan, ETC. The best way we've found to fight them so far involves take and hold tactics but they're very manpower intensive. You can't just strategically bomb this kind of army out of operation the way you would a conventional army.

The good news is, for the perspective repressor, that you can prevent these from forming. The best historical example is countries such as Chile, Argentina and Uruguay. The key is that you need to start killing people BEFORE they take up arms. You need to kill a whole lot of them. The purpose is a mass ideological cleansing, and then to make people so panicked that by the time you step in they're happy for any law and order. For this reason, this stuff works best if done as kind of a false flag. At the very least, you need to be vehemently dishonest about who you are fighting. Don't say "we're cleansing leftists or rightists", say "we're fighting terrorists."

I need to do some research into how to stop these groups from forming for foreign invasions, but in case of a Junta, here's how you keep things quiet.