Insurgencies

This is exactly what I was looking for. It seems that modern examples get retroactively applied to past circumstances. I can't for the life of me remember what the threads were and they are long since dead, but I saw it several times in which some form of the United States manages to conquer Canada at some point before the civil war. The consensus seemed to be that the United States couldn't possibly hold that territory because "all my wilderness and guerrillas!" and such nonsense, conveniently ignoring important facts like the guerillas somehow surviving a year without starving, freezing, or being slaughtered by hostile native tribes before they can actually amount to anything, or that maybe every nation in the americas is very experienced in fighting what we would call guerilla warfare, especially sinced they gained all that experience in their frontier regions. It just bugged me that people thought this without considering how dangerous the wilderness of the Americas could be if you do not know what you are doing and/or are unprepared.
 
This is exactly what I was looking for. It seems that modern examples get retroactively applied to past circumstances. I can't for the life of me remember what the threads were and they are long since dead, but I saw it several times in which some form of the United States manages to conquer Canada at some point before the civil war. The consensus seemed to be that the United States couldn't possibly hold that territory because "all my wilderness and guerrillas!" and such nonsense, conveniently ignoring important facts like the guerillas somehow surviving a year without starving, freezing, or being slaughtered by hostile native tribes before they can actually amount to anything, or that maybe every nation in the americas is very experienced in fighting what we would call guerilla warfare, especially sinced they gained all that experience in their frontier regions. It just bugged me that people thought this without considering how dangerous the wilderness of the Americas could be if you do not know what you are doing and/or are unprepared.

The United States is a weird case simply because it's a democracy. The political pressure is a way bigger thing than military pressure.
 
There are a number of factors that allows any insurgencies to achieve success, here the most important:

1 - Time and distance - you have to move fast to be prepared for suppression if you have a ocean between you and the enemy, it helps a lot.

2 - leadership - do not give the opportunity of "divide and conquer."

3 - Resources - if you are confronting a great empire like Chinese or Russian, you must control the richest areas and get lucky and foreign aid or have others insurgencies to serve as a distraction while you consolidate and expand the area that you control.
 
But that's kind of the point.

Assymetrical warfare always results in more casualties to the guerillas than the occupying army.

But if resistance is widespread enough those guerillas can gather conventional armies. The great advantage of insurgency fighting of that kind is that it keeps fighting alive. It keeps occupying armies in the field and taking losses (and have to be maintained, it's expensive to fight an insurgency) and it prevents the civilians being reconciled with the occupying rule and keeps the possiblity of foreign intervention alive.

The dutch revolt is a perfect example of how succesful guerillas turned into conventional armies with controlled territory once they'd gathered enough strength. The scottish wars of independence are another.

The question asked by this thread was if a more powerful country occupied territory pre 1900 but were incredibly unpopular among the natvie populations would the insurgencies they'd inevitably face have any chance of being successful.

And the answer is, not by themselves no. But insurgencies can quickly turn into conventional wars, which can be lost if the other side is weak enough.

Which is what I said roughly in the next line after your quote of my text; insurgencies on their own are ineffective, they require a field army and conventional fighting to make them a success. A bunch of rebels messing around in the countryside can have some impact, but unless if they have an enemy who is extremely overextended, operating under moral or political elements which prevent them from bringing overwhelming force to bear, or far away and without the capacity to bring troops to bear, they will eventually be exterminated and crushed. Most of the times this is what happens in insurgencies against developed and/or powerful states. The man on the street's view of insurgency is that it is a miracle weapon, which cannot be defeated, and which will bring victory to even the weakest against the strongest, and the citations provided will be Iraq (which I forget about, but falls under problems of sanctuary and moral/political incapacity to apply overwhelming force), Afghanistan, and Vietnam. But in all of these circumstances the insurgents could win because the enemies they were fighting had limitations morally and politically on their operations, limited troops they could deploy (Afghanistan), sanctuary in surrounding states, and support from surrounding states. Most of the time revolts are crushed.

The Dutch revolt was in some ways an example of a successful insurgency, but they also fell into most of the strengths of insurgencies and most of the weaknesses of the main state. The Hapsburgs were over-extended in wars against a lot of foreign states, their main possessions were far away, the Dutch had sanctuary in surrounding states like England, and they received support from surrounding states. The first major success, the turning point in the war, the Capture of Brielle, was done by Dutch forces in England who were expelled and captured the city, in effectively conventional style warfare, this despite the war being almost lost elsewhere.
 
This is exactly what I was looking for. It seems that modern examples get retroactively applied to past circumstances. I can't for the life of me remember what the threads were and they are long since dead, but I saw it several times in which some form of the United States manages to conquer Canada at some point before the civil war. The consensus seemed to be that the United States couldn't possibly hold that territory because "all my wilderness and guerrillas!" and such nonsense,

Well the big problem for the US in conquering Canada is that it is a long way away from its centres of population...even if we ignore the British support factor there is the rather inconvenient fact that British North America failed to conquer French Canada despite a forty something to one population advantage...yes it would seem all that wilderness and voyageurs (really useful guys to have in Canada) count for something.

conveniently ignoring important facts like the guerillas somehow surviving a year without starving, freezing, or being slaughtered by hostile native tribes before they can actually amount to anything,

Seriously? First of all you need to get to the Canadians' food production centres and then most folks can manage about a year but yeah even finding a lot of communities without the help of the locals would be a tall order...hell both the US and various incarnations of Canada misplaced folks from time to time. Then we have the fact that the local tribes were less hostile to either the French or the Canadians than they were to first the British (which remember included the Americans until 1776) and later the Americans of the United States. Begging the question as to who again has to worry about hostile natives?

or that maybe every nation in the americas is very experienced in fighting what we would call guerilla warfare, especially sinced they gained all that experience in their frontier regions. It just bugged me that people thought this without considering how dangerous the wilderness of the Americas could be if you do not know what you are doing and/or are unprepared.

Actually yes and no. The problem you see is that they fought colonial wars against native tribes while being able to feed their garrisons from the surpluses of nearby friendly settler communities. The issue in Canada is that you can do the whole Tacitus thing and make a desert and call it peace but then you cannot feed your garrisons without long range supply...which before the American Civil War is rather hard overland and given the particular case of Canada was also hard by sea unless you had the Royal Navy onside which is one of the many reasons why it never happened OTL

The idea of fighting a guerilla war in Canada was ugly and expensive which is one of the reasons why the British and Anglo-Canadians made such serious efforts to get at least some of the Canadien community onside and keep them there.

The thing to realise though about conquering Canada is that it is not guerilla operations that are hard to conduct there but for most of its history offensive conventional ones which tends to give the defender, be it the French or British or Canadians a distinct advantage.
 
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The problem doesn't seem to be getting into Canada, both the British and later Americans achieved this on multiple occasions. The problem seems to be actually taking the necessary fortresses. Outside of a few key points, any position in Canada becomes vunerable and difficult to maintain if you do not control them. Also to be considered is the generally poor strategy employed by the Americans in their attempts that seemed to be more like zerg rushing the fortresses at the start of a conflict and hoping for the best than an actual plan of conquest. When I look at it, conquering all of Canada is just plainly unnecessary and a waste of resources. But that's not the point of this example. My point was that the asymmetrical warfare that was proposed would be nothing that the Americans haven't dealt with before and have proven quite capable of dealing with.
 
I think that I remember on of the scenarios. For whatever reason the United States was more invested in its military and managed to acquire Canada during the war of 1812. I think they captured Montreal and Halifax, razed York, then went on to take Quebec City. Not sure how things were going in Europe at the time. For the next couple of decades, Canada required a large garrison and bled the US forces white.

Meanwhile, the premise of the timeline was that the the area of present day Minnesota became more settled earlier and due to various transgressions by the federal government, declared its independence. What followed was the forces at their disposal fought a guerilla war across modern day Wisconsin to slow the American forces down long enough for an army (only a few regiments) to be raised and trained. Foreign aid came in the form of a few thousand muskets/rifles (2-3 thousand and munitions), I think maybe a couple of cannon, and foreign advisors (French and British) to help in training and they came overland from the Hudson Bay (was skeptical about this, but the fur trade proved that you could haul literal tons of goods to/from the interior of the continent, so I let it slide).

Long story short, the guerilla campaign was extraordinarily successful (literally managed to wipe out pretty much anything smaller than an actual regiment to a man. These were only like maybe 2-300 riflemen mind you) and the only conventional battle that took place was at a bridge across the Mississippi and ended in favor of the new republic. Don't get me wrong, I immensely enjoyed this timeline as it's not everyday that my home state gets to be it's own nation after all, but it just seemed like anytime guerrilla warfare was used, it was super effective.
 
The problem doesn't seem to be getting into Canada, both the British and later Americans achieved this on multiple occasions.

I am going to suggest that getting into Canada and getting about anywhere in Canada was precisely the problem as there were lots of chokepoints a defender could man with militia and expect to stand off regulars while those with local guides could find their around by back routes always placing invaders at a distinct disadvantage.

The problem seems to be actually taking the necessary fortresses. Outside of a few key points, any position in Canada becomes vunerable and difficult to maintain if you do not control them. Also to be considered is the generally poor strategy employed by the Americans in their attempts that seemed to be more like zerg rushing the fortresses at the start of a conflict and hoping for the best than an actual plan of conquest. When I look at it, conquering all of Canada is just plainly unnecessary and a waste of resources. But that's not the point of this example. My point was that the asymmetrical warfare that was proposed would be nothing that the Americans haven't dealt with before and have proven quite capable of dealing with.

Because of the above situation the value of fortresses was thus much multiplied but they merely enhanced rather than were essential to a defence of Canada. During the British era of naval dominance the zerg rush was not so much of an optional strategy either. The British were going to send out large (by contemporary US standards) regular forces to counter any invasion and take any occupied bits of Canada back. The reason taking all of Canada becomes necessary is to stop the British gaining access to a sea coast at least in summer to land forces and that is why the US were never going to be confident of their ability to hold Canada.

As to the kind of asymmetrical warfare under discussion I would point out that in fact it is very different to the problems previously encountered by the US. One the population to be controlled in many times larger, tens or hundreds of thousands depending on the exact region and period compared with hundreds or at most low thousands when engaging individual Native American tribes or confederations. In addition as I pointed the US would have to support its garrisons away from friendly settler populations rather than being able to simply strike from well supplied bases at the means of food production of their opponents as they could resort to in the their wars against native tribes on or within their own frontiers. Additionally the Canadians could look to an external power for support which was very rarely the case for Native Americans and finally this external power controlled access to capital and trade of great significance to the US meaning there were many factions in US politics opposed to long drawn out confrontations against it and the whole point of insurgency style warfare is try and out last your foe.

Asymetrical warfare is in general a gamble as it exposes the civilian population to retaliation and even if it does not occur it enables the enemy to potentially exploit local infrastructure and resources for his own support. However it can be fairly costly to counter and worse it draws out that cost over a long time which is why it can be in the right circumstances a viable strategy. People are correct in much of what they to say about the overall ineffectiveness of insurgents historically at outright winning wars but Canada has exactly the mix of ingredients in the 18-19th Century that make it a likely ground for success;

1: Relative inaccessibility to an invader without sea control
2: A powerful external protector (France against Britain and later Britain against anyone else)
3: Fairly substantial regional populations
4: Lots of space for defenders to fall back on, hide in and create safe areas for training and supply purposes.
5: Lots of access to a external power with sea control who might resent the occupation and do something about it.
 
You do make valid points, but in this scenario, the Great Lakes would be solely under the control of the United States, making the logistical situation of supplying garrisons in Canada much easier, and more importantly, secure from the royal navy. The great lakes are more important for controlling Canada than the Atlantic is, as they offer greater access to the better parts of Canada, and this is why places like Montreal, Detroit, and Quebec City are so important, they are chokepoints on a water route to the interior of the continent. Not to mention that outside of the major cities (not many of those), garrisons for most forts ranged from a few dozen to a few hundred and they were more than enough to secure large swaths of territory. I guess the point that I am trying to get at is that places like Canada with very low population densities and large areas of wilderness (pretty much true for every country in the new world for the most part) are very difficult to take, but much less so to hold (like you said, the advantage goes to the defender). Hostile populations certainly make life difficult, but then, when have conquered populations generally not been hostile?
 
Typically rebellions as insurgencies are resoundingly defeated. A incredible example is the Umayyad and Abbasid caliphates who fought numerous rebellions and insurgencies with limited supply lines, whilst often at war within foreign nations, especially the Khazar and Byzantines.

Rebellions in the periods of the caliphates were of four basic types:

1. Caliphal revolts and political fractures: These are revolts were a Sunni Muslim (or so called) of Arab descent who takes the title Caliph and rebels against the state. This rarely is seen as an insurgency but more as a revolution. As well, there is little political change offered by the rebels, only that they are rightful in rule. The most famous of these are the Saffarids, Tulunids, Umayyad revolts and the Abbasid revolution.

2. Heroical revolt: Revolts where a single person or group is given permission by an area and often a single or more army of volunteers to join them. This sort of revolt was extremely common in the Abbasid and Umayyad periods especially among Shi'i who would proclaim a Mahdi and march in Makkah or Baghdad or Karbala, etc... These rebellions almost never succeeded except in the case of the Almohads and to some extent, the Fatimids. A famous yet failed version is the rebellion by Yahya ibn Umar, whose execution after capture led to more concerted revolts as was often the case with these types, hence the name, the leader becomes a hero and nearly worshipped for their charisma.

3. Contagious: Rebellions spread usually by dissimulation (Taqiyyah), concealment for benefit (kitman), spying and treachery (Hiyal). These are rebellions unique to the early Islamic Mid East era (as far as I know) where a party of individuals would infiltrate areas at the same time and attempt to incite revolution and rebellion with the meaning to bring it together into a single force. This is somewhat similar to the vanguard revolutions of communists in later times but employed a certain level of religion and deception I do not see in conmunist revolts. This was the mode of operation which created the Khawarij revolts of the Berbers and later the Zanj.

4. Insurgent revolts: One that are at the village to village level and rarely raise large armies for battle. This was the Mid of warfare common in the Zanjan heights where the Khuramiyyah resisted the Abbasid or the Bukhara resistance against the Abbasid and later Tulunid and Fatimid rule in Egypt/Sudan. Another famous example is the Hashashin who resisted numerous states through unconventional tactics in their fortresses in Iran and Syria which included assasinations, Taqiyyah and small scale resistance and civil disobedience.

This is not counting coups.
 
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