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Originally Posted by waste gate
Quote:
Originally Posted by bradclark1
Has regular armed forces ever defeated an insurgency in history? I can't think of one time.
Anyone?
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Hungary, 1956. Israel 66-70 AD. Indian Nations in the US.
Those are three that I thought of off the top of my head.
EDIT:
Realized that the seccessionists of the US civil war were also insurgents.
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There was also: the Malayan Emergency 1948-60, the Philippine Insurrection 1899-1913, the Second Boer War 1899-1902, the Greek Civil War 1946-49, Baltic resistance to the Soviet Union 1944-52 among others.
The media has built up a whole mythology around guerillla wars/insurgencies that doesn't have a whole lot of facts to back it up. Insurgencies have been won by government troops as often as they have been lost, it's around a 50-50 proposition historically and the success rate is on a par with any other sort of warfare. But you don't hear that, you hear all sorts of talk about the successful insurgencies which leads to the sort of talk of "You can't win a war against insurgents" which is bunk, it's been done many times before, and more than once by the US. But to listen to many in the media you'd think that just because it's a fight against insurgents we should run away as fast as possible because everyone knowns insurgents have magical powers and are unbeatable...
A case could be made that the US even won the "insurgency" phase of the Vietnam War as well, since after the Tet Offensive of '68 the VC was pretty much gutted as an effective force and the war continued almost exclusively through the use of NVA troops.
Whether or not the CSA was technically an insurgency is something that's still up for debate. There are good arguments both for and against it. However after the war, during Reconstruction there were indeed several small, scattered guerilla/insurgent campaigns fought in many places with the most notable ones being in Tennessee, South Carolina, Texas and Arkansas. Federal forces won all of those campaigns as well.