On Sat, May 10, 2008 at 8:59 PM, John Atkinson <
johnmatkinson@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Sat, May 10, 2008 at 4:41 PM, Richard Bell <
rlbell.nsuid@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Hypothetical invasion of Canada by the US. As the canadians are incapable
> of symmetrically opposing the US military, a campaign of guerrilla warfare
> begins. Unlike radical muslims, Canada goes the Mandela route and attacks
> infrastructure. Hunters with .50 BMG sport rifles start dropping powerlines
> and, if the opportunity presents itself, put holes in transformers. Shaped
> charges are used to blow open pipelines. Explosives are smuggled into
> underground utility spaces.
Unlikely.
And so far-fetched as to be difficult to discuss reasonably. I was
actually requesting a historical instance. And I don't mean the
Italian invasion of Ethiopia either--since you've got possibly the
most incompetent army on historical record as the "high tech" force.
The North Vietnamese were not precisely low tech, nor ill-trained, and the americans did seem to do everything in their power to negate their own advantages, but the americans were very high tech for the time. They failed for many reasons but high among them was failure to occuppy where they had searched and destroyed.
You also must realize that this scenario is likely to end up with a
LOT of dead Canadians--and most at the hands of other Canadians who
like being able to heat their homes in the winter. American forces
will have heat. Blowing transformers just means a lot of Canadians
freeze solid--urban Canadians are probably no more in touch with their
pioneer roots than their American counterparts.
The canadian guerrillas are not blowing up infastructure in Canada, except for the powerlines from Quebec and the transborder pipelines. That is part of the contrived nature of the example-- most asymmetrical wars cannot strike the high tech power where it lives.
> American regulars do not bleed to death, they are seldom even shot at, but
> the US economy bleeds profusely.
You're making a lot of strange assumptions. For a US invasion of
Canada to be concievable, economic realities would have to have
changed to the point that Canada is (for whatever reason) no longer a
major trading partner.
It is actually wierder than that. If the US is no longer Canada's major trading partner, but still wants what we have, it can only be that someone else was willing to pay more for it. The US economy would have to tank to the point that canadian raw materials are all going to China for prices that the US cannot afford to pay, yet still be healthy enough to mount the invasion.
>> And even when it does work out, it's damned hard on your thousands of
>> unarmored untrained militia boogers. We tend to stack them up like
>> cordwood at ratios of 10 or 20 to one, or better. Which may or may
>> not be a commitment a frontier colony can make.
>
> If the unarmored, untrained militia boogers are meeting the advanced
> technotroopers in a pitched battle, it is not asymmerical warfare. A
> frontier colony engages in asymmetrical warfare by destroying what the
> invaders have come to take. If they do not know what it is, they just
> destroy everything not needed for survival.
You kind of assume that the high-tech troops are static popup targets.
We tend to do a lot of very careful work looking for Bad Guys. Folks
who aren't as clever as they think they are tend to end up very, very
dead when playing this game.
I have spent too much time thinking in Hard SF terms which do not allow for dropships disgorging space marines in a surprise attack. Human colonies with reasonable fear of invasion from other humans may have the potential targets of an invading force pre-wired. Depending on what sort of terraforming needed to be done for the colony, they may still have some landscaping devices in the high fractional megaton range.
In an interstellar setting, the low tech colonial militias are not going to be that low tech. A truly low tech colony will have nothing worth taking. If interstellar freight is cheap enough for the export of raw materials, frontier colony only refers to location, not tech level.