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> Does anyone have any insight as to why resistance forces are seemingly so much more effective today compared to the past? What past are you referring to? Armed insurrection is essentially endemic throughout human history. If you look during the Middle Age's, there's pretty much a peasant revolt going on somewhere, sometime. Of course, you don't hear much about it because such insurrection was rarely effective. The general populace was incapable of mounting a threat to well-trained armies. That changed with the introduction of the arquebus, which is essentially the first effective gun. Training someone to wield a warbow took a lifetime; training someone to use an arquebus took a few weeks. Serious revolts no longer meant having to sack an unpopular lord; they meant having to flee the country for fear of your life. With the rise of European colonization giving large groups of people motivation to maintain resistance for a long time, it took determined application of overwhelming force to actually dislodge them. The Mapuche, for example, resisted Spanish (and later Chilean/Argentinian) colonization attempts for 350 years. The US took 4 months to wrest the Philippines from Spanish control, and spent the next 14 years trying to put down independence rebellions. What has changed in the past 30-ish years is that wars have diminished. Especially in the big, neat, "clean" wars you think of, such as the Crimean War. That means that the messy, interminable low-level war that's been with us for 500 years is largely the only wars you hear about, whereas the retrospective look at historical wars, both within and outside of the military, focuses fairly exclusively on the big wars of history. It's not that they're new, or more effective; it's that they're simply much, much more visible. |