Guerrilla Warfare

Hi guys I'm posting this because I think guerrilla warfare extremely interesting.
Its effective at slower armies, and it looks like it beat bigger powers (Communist Vietnamese powers against USA, which i think was a terrible war or Russian invasion of Afghanistan)... and its not a war of attrition, meaning one side completely routs the other, like line infantry battles with muskets, etc.
What does everyone else think about it?

Based on hit-and run tactics,hit where it hurts the enemy,gather support of the local populace, fight on the political level also. The idea of the guerilla warfare is not to destroy the enemy, but to disrupt and keep their attention to the guerilla cell at hand.

Guerilla warfare hasn't interested me as much as the European wars of the 18th and early 19th century, but I still think that guerilla warfare is hard to combat, and I don't think there has even been army to successfully combat guerilla warfare.

Do you mean by "combat": successive battles or do you mean that no army has ever won against a opponent that uses guerilla warfare

I mean by like a industrial country has never won against an enemy who used guerilla warfare. There is no specific way to fight it.

Well I don't know if this matches your definition. But ancient Romans won against an opponent that used guerilla warfare, in modern day Portugal

I don't think any of the posts here speak of history past the 20th century. Guerilla warfare wouldn't work as well when everybody was using swords, spears and bows. But with modern firearms, and a political climate to consider, guerilla warfare can severely damage an industrialized military.

I beg the differ. This a definition of guerilla warfare:

"Guerrilla warfare is a form of irregular warfare and refers to conflicts in which a small group of combatants including, but not limited to, armed civilians (or "irregulars") use military tactics, such as ambushes, sabotage, raids, the element of surprise, and extraordinary mobility to harass a larger and less-mobile traditional army, or strike a vulnerable target, and withdraw almost immediately."


So yes guerilla warfare does work and did work before modern firearms. And also this guerilla warfare against the Romans was hot political issue at the time, as one can imagine.

The creator of guerilla warfare was Sun Tzu. He lived around 500 BC. Of course, guerrilla warfare now and guerrilla warfare then is a little different because of modern weaponry etc, but guerrilla warfare has almost always been an effective way of warfare for outmatched armies. And the Lusitani used guerrilla warfare expertly against the Romans in Iberia. Many times, the Romans nearly lost their foothold in Iberia. Iberia was a bloody and dirty war, and it was just by sheer power that the Romans managed to overcome the Lusitanni.

Another example of a good use of guerilla warfare is, Jugurtha. He was a Numidian leader who fought the Romans. (not gonna go into detail about it because I don't know a lot). And yet another example is Spartacus.

Guerrilla warfare, even in classical times, was an effective form of fighting.

The only way to combat guerrilla warfare is to either get the support of the local population or completely decimate it (against rules of warfare).

Lets see about that: the greek civil war (1946-1949), the huk rebellion (1946-1954), malaya (1948-1960), the mau mau uprising, all the post world war II insurgencies against the military governements in South America, the PIRA in northern Ireland, the Irish civil war 1922-1923, UNITA in Angola...etc.

It is definately possible, but only if the military is prepared to massacre everyone that is a rebel or supports the rebels in some way. The Dutch did something like that in the Aceh War during the late 19th century.

I think the Rif War in Morocco during the 1920's is a good example of industrial nations defeating an enemy that uses guerrilla tactics.

It's fucking easy to beat guerillas. You just kill everyone and shit like the Colonial Wars of old. The problem is that people don't really want their governments committing mass genocide anymore.

The Vietnam war, USA used carpet bombing yet they lost badly. So even the strategy of killing everyone, civillian and soldiers doesn't work.

The idea of carpet bombing is not necessarily to kill everyone.

Google definition: an extensive and systematic bombing intended to devastate a large target.

No it was to burn down the forests.... Thus killing everyone.

Burning down forests =/= killing everyone.

Well it often kills everyone in the forest and because Vietnam is/was a giant forest.