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Yes, but even if they don't, they don't have to. Like I said, the US proved it could hold though not pacify Afghanistan more or less with its little finger for decades. The Feds merely need to do the same to any ungovernable areas of the US until the people die off.
They'll still have most of what was once Red on their side, because they're the Legitimate Government and that matters.
As we have seen in Vietnam, in Iraq, and in Afghanistan the people who are on your side when the issue is purely theoretical, and when the risk is immediate and material, are not always the same people.
The people who take material action to assist outsiders are usually corrupt. They do not care about the outsiders, or their community. They care about the money. This pattern repeated itself in Vietnam, in Iraq, and in Afghanistan. Our allies took every dollar they could get and then did as little as possible (on average, there were of course exceptions). They exerted minimal effort and took as few risks as possible.
In all three cases the leadership of the boots on the ground trended toward telling their superiors what they believed their superiors wanted to hear. Those superiors then told Washington, and the public, that the situation was trending in a positive direction.
It was not. The Afghan security forces were not improving by the month. Our Iraqi partners in democracy were not developing robust systems of administration and government. The Vietnamese military was not rooting out corruption.
We have lost the same type of war three times in a row. Our performance in Afghanistan showed no meaningful improvement in outcomes relative to our performance in Vietnam. In fact, it was even worse.
I have no doubt red tribe areas would have some elements who side against their red tribe fellows. But all arguments I have observed as to why the US military would be successful this time are "cope", as the kids say. Lessons have not been learned. Material conditions on the ground are less favorable. The dynamics between recruitment, battlefield performance, and population demographics are a nightmare for a blue tribe domestic counter insurgency force. Surface area exposed to domestic enemy action is orders of magnitude greater. The force-to-space ratio for an occupying force is nightmarish. And this does not begin to cover the potential threat of geopolitical considerations.
I've read your comments for many years. You're one of the smartest people on the motte. But you are smoothing over the nuance of an incredibly complex dynamic with many externalities and permutations of neigh impossible to predict events interacting across interconnected domains.
You are arriving at a conclusion and stitching together facts to create a narrative that supports it. I am sorry to be so blunt. I have a lot of respect for your powers of intellect. But neither you, nor anyone else, can say what would happen in a large scale domestic insurgency without investing FAR more work.
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Are you serious? The US spent over 2 trillion dollars on the Afghanistan war! How exactly do you propose that the US government maintains an occupation that's going to have to last at least twice as long, over a geographical area many times the size, targeting the same population that most of their most effective troops come from, at the same time as an economic collapse (what, are the red state rebels just going to avoid targeting economic infrastructure because that would be unfair or hurt the people in cities?). The rules of engagement are going to be substantially more difficult and onerous due to taking place in the US itself, there are multiple massive and empowered enemies (it isn't like Russia or China would cease to exist when this civil war happened) who would do their best to exacerbate the conflict and the population being repressed itself is going to be filled with experts and people who know exactly how the US military works. The US government would not be able to afford the costs of occupying the red areas of the country (ever seen a map that breaks down political affiliation and voting results by country rather than state?) for the amount of time that you're describing, and it would create such a crisis of legitimacy that balkanisation is a substantially more realistic proposal. I don't think you're aware of just how vulnerable critical US infrastructure is.
The moment the federal government institutes actual harsh repression against Team Red in the way that you're talking about a substantial portion of Team Red will no longer recognise them as the legitimate government. I really, really don't think you have an accurate understanding of conservatives or what they believe if this is how you think they'll act.
The US is RIGHT HERE, which obviates many of those factors. And as I said, plenty of Red will remain with the Feds. They'll do the usual empire stuff of using troops from one area in another to avoid excessive sympathy.
No, the rules of engagement will be substantially less constraining. The Feds can be much more brutal suppressing insurrection than in foreign wars. Also those in charge hate Red Tribe and have far less sympathy for them than they ever did the Taliban. "Bitter clingers" and "deplorables", and that's just what they said in public before there was an open break.
Any who do will get the scorched earth treatment.
No, what the reaction to the takeover of the institutions and the lawfare against Red Tribe have shown is that normie conservatives will accept the institutions because they are the institutions. As long as the Feds act under the color of authority, most will fall in line.
How much do you know about the demographics of the US military? This is a far bigger ask than you think it is when you consider the size of the territory involved and the populations that live in it... and good luck getting all the conservative troops out while still maintaining an effective fighting force.
Absolutely incorrect. Large portions of the reds in government will absolutely leave and switch when the government pulls a stunt like this, and the moment they start committing atrocities against red tribers the loyalty of any remaining conservative troops will evaporate. I think the US military has significant recruiting issues at the moment (so does the US military for that matter), and I don't think replacing the majority of existing troops with diversity hires is going to make it perform better.
Congratulations, you have scorched your most productive farmland and infrastructure. They wipe out vitally important economic targets and your response is to cause more damage and make it harder to recover? This is one of the victory conditions for the insurrectionists - a government that cannot provide prosperity, security or safety to the populace who give it legitimacy.
I strenuously disagree - I think that one of the things an open civil war would do is at the very least clear up a bunch of co-ordination problems. I think you have far too low an estimation of people and far too high an estimation of government capabilities, especially in the context of a domestic insurrection, i.e. the kind of fight that the US military has done nothing but expensively fail at fighting.
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