Let's see... military drones; satellite surveillance; comms surveillance; giant network of flock cameras vacuuming up facial, descriptive vehicular, and license plate movement data; small-scale tactical nuclear weapons; a huge fleet of hypersonic aircraft and extremely maneuverable helicopters; decades of urban combat experience; militarized law enforcement; the largest military in the world by orders of magnitude fighting on its own turf; complete control of utilities infrastructure, centralized resource creation for food, fuel and weapons; large stockpiles of modern chemical weapons that they wouldn't hesitate to use for a second if it was an existential threat... the world is a very very different place than it was in the 40s, and the modern US military is very very very very very different than any military was back then. Even if you can argue that our power has grown linearly with more access to guns or whatever, the US military's power has grown at a much much faster rate.
Would you consider the US military presence in Afghanistan comparable to it's presence in the US? How about knowledge of the landscape, ability to understand local cultures, having local contacts, having working transportation routes, resources in place, and the fact that none of the people fighting back are going to be backed by foreign governments? These two scenarios are incomparable.
They're absolutely comparable, notwithstanding their being different. One could just as well argue that it was a lot easier for the military to do drone strikes or call in CAS on the Taliban with zero risk of political blowback. You remind me of someone who was seriously arguing with me in 2004, telling me the Iraq war would not turn into a quagmire because Iraq was arid desert whereas Vietnam was semi-tropical and forested.
Something you didn't say, something significant, is the US military is made up of US soldiers.
A good many of those soldiers will have "Patriot Sympathies" (of many kinds).
This will lead to a great deal of information leakage, "lost" equipment going to militias, sabotage, etc.
Regardless of oaths to US military, an innate sense of duty to some personal ideal of USA will over weigh for a significant number, and a good percentage of those will remain embedded, organized, and difficult to root out.
They will also exist in various numbers from the lowliest boot to the highest general.
Sure, that could be a factor. Didn’t really seem to stop soldiers from steamrolling through American cities during the civil war, doesn’t seem to stop cops from messing people up during protests, and doesn’t stop genocide in other countries. We, as a species, are pathetically easy to manipulate through in-group, out-group thinking, which honestly is much of the basis for patriotism anyway.
True, but it goes the other way around as well - the Taliban had absolutely no way to infiltrate the ranks and do damage to the military operations from within.
The Taliban lost immediately and was suppressed indefinitely until the US decided to leave. It's a good demonstration of how well the US military can suppress even decentralized and suicidally fanatical movements for as long as it wants.
Suppressing them didn't cause them to stop fighting, though. In every guerrilla war the conventional army is nominally in charge, and generally never loses any sort of pitched battle. The whole military theory of guerilla warfare is to avoid shootouts in favor of hitting the enemy and running away.
You're admitting you're wrong? You're now agreeing that the US army could suppress an insurrection indefinitely and could only be stopped by a split within the military itself. A scenario that has nothing in common with what happened in Afghanistan.
Except this violence will absolutely be preceded extensive operations by the giant existing police and national guard presence that knows the neighborhoods like the backs of their hand. They would put a giant dent in that well before a single shot was fired. Would that absolutely be the case if we invaded, say, Canada? Quite likely. The US government has so much existing control on US soil that I'd eat my hat if any US city lasted a week in active conflict.
