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Some soldiers are going to have more sympathy for the people they're being told to bomb and shell than they would for Durka Durkas. This will cause reliability issues, of the sort where they don't want to fight, may sympathize with the enemy, and may even defect. Some soldiers are going to have less sympathy, because Y'all Qaeda/Soros-Funded Pedo Antifa killed their kids. This will also cause reliability issues, of the sort where they commit uncontrolled atrocities, which in turn remove the ability to control the intensity of the war. Both sorts of reliability issues make it very hard to return to a state of peace.
I do not think it really matters if a Tyrant tries to go full first-strike Vernichtungskrieg or if they play it like Platonic Lincoln and scrupulously attempt to maintain rule of law. People look at those two scenarios, and they imagine that there's a clear difference in the scale and character of the initial inputs, so obviously there should be a difference in the outputs, but the mistake they're making is in the assumption that the inputs are driving the process. If you have a forest dried out by six months of drought, it makes approximately zero difference if you start a fire with a cigarette butt or a flamethrower; two hours later, you will not be able to tell the difference between the resulting fires, because the exponential growth of energy-release will utterly eclipse any variance in the initiating inputs.
However it starts, whichever winner comes out the other side might possibly still call itself "the United States of America", maybe, but the likely scenario is a dirt-poor, fanatically-paranoid military dictatorship populated by heavily-armed, criminally-inclined murderers with severe PTSD, huddled in the dark, dreaming of electricity and clean water. And sure, "there are levels of survival we are willing to accept", but people should at least be clear-sighted about what they're walking into. It will not be clean. It will not be quick. It will in fact be the worst thing that ever happened to you and everyone you know and love, by far, and it will neither reverse itself nor end for the forseeable future.
I'm defining small arms as weapons you can build in your home and pack on your back. Mortars are absurdly easy to manufacture out of ubiquitous materials, and I think even the people nodding along with that sentence are still overestimating what "easy to manufacture" and "ubiquitous materials" requires; you do not even need metal. And again, our armed forces were united against the Taliban to a degree that is unlikely in a civil war here. It still wasn't enough.
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