What would a modern American insurgency look like? - Playing armchair general in the Autistic Thunderdome

[Sicklick]

In Ukraine, 18 year olds were grabbing Kalashnikovs. In America, gen z & y can't even hold a stable job, nevermind defend their country while the boomers are dying off. Gen X has everything to do with it. And the boomers are what created the Xers in the first place. And before that, you had Soomers who created these boombooms but unlike the boomers, they actually grew up in a better time period. If a civil war broke out, 90% of gen z wouldn't know the first thing to do. I fucking hate gen X for creating the toddler generations we know as zoomers and millennials by hopelessly pampering them. Ever since coronahoax, zoomers/millennials have been quitting their jobs en masse and none of them can even hold a stable job in the first place. See that recent Dr. Phil episode. We need to go back.

 

[Wormy]

We need to go back.

How do you intend to do that?

 

[FunPosting101]

It would look something like The Troubles over in Ireland except with more AR-15s, less AR-18s and a lot more atrocities.

 

[draggs]

All this is silly, it would look like the Taliban taking over Afghanistan in like a month

The vast majority of American police, soldiers, and federal officers would side with the revolutionaries and resistance would swiftly crumble. There wouldn't be a need for a long insurgency

 

[BelUwUga]

So presupposing we've already gone through the steps that make an insurgency inevitable, and the government/military is unwilling to zealously stomp it out: there's several keystones of infrastructure that could absolutely cripple the economy. For any hope of success things like that would have to be prioritized targets. The government would have to use force that would have to have some amount of collateral damage. Afghanis knew if they stayed out of the way and weren't aiding coalition forces, the Taliban had a bunch of reasons to leave them alone. On the other hand even with insane ROE, the Taliban always had a fresh supply of dead civilians to prop up to condemn the coalition.

It could also be distributed in a fashion that uniquely and asymmetrically targets federal, not state, powers. If the national grid has collapsed due to cascading failures, isolating and relying on intrastate generation starts to make sense. In order to stop this from happening you are talking about a massive and expensive mobilization. The personnel deployed will never forget a 60mhz buzz but otherwise the vast majority will just be bored out of their minds and complacent. Did you know at transmission voltages something as simple as a balloon and string provides enough of a conductive bridge for an arc flash? You can find video of pajeets throwing wire over line and it looks like lightning strikes. Drag a long wire behind something like a rocket (model/whistle-mix special or a foreign/pilfered TOW) and fly over/into the right substation and you're doing massive and irreparable damage to critical stuff. There's a case out west where some mad lads used a rifle to cause serious damage with a handful of shots. To this day feds have no idea who it was. But they knew exactly what they are doing.

Another good hypothetical would be something like a high-volume rail corridor. It takes a trivial amount of thermite to cut through a rail. Simply bridging the severed section with wire would confound sensors meant to detect such tampering. How many thousands of miles of track are the backbone of the American supply chain. Even if the federal government would put forth the effort to patrol all of it, would it even be effective?

The underlying idea behind theoretical tactics like this are that it can easily be done by lone-wolves or compartmentalized cells. It's largely bloodless for non-combatants on the insurgents part, and the cost for the feds would be staggering. Either in personnel, indemnifying effected states, and/or burning political capital by ineffectively responding. It would force more and more situations that are opportunities to fuck up and kill innocents. While that cannot be condoned, as a practical matter that is a major propaganda victory. The more heart-wrenching, the more effective. Eventually something would have to give. It would take far less than 50/50 states demanding an end to the union at once to break it. Probably less than 10 if it's the right 10 and they are open to neighbors joining in.

 

[Darkholme's Dungeon]

There's a case out west where some mad lads used a rifle to cause serious damage with a handful of shots. To this day feds have no idea who it was. But they knew exactly what they are doing.

I believe the substations have been "strengthened". To which the most logically conclusion would be someone could just either suicide boming or drive a Mcveigh truck of peace into it.

Rail corridors have failsafes, theoretically have to hotlink the wire that run protections so the thermite doesn't separate the connection and turn the light/signal to STOP to the automated signalers.
Of course, the other method would to just to blow a bridge over a river for any transportation artery.

The only thing I can suggest that would be more effective than either of these theoretically is to just go yeet one of the telecom datacenter buildings in a large city with a dozer or truck. That would shut down the major airports, take down first responder radios (most are cell based now days), and people would riot in a few hours without internet access.

Gen Z wouldn't do any of this shit cause they're too lazy. I can't even get people to put things up properly when they're fucking color coded and I have written instructions for them.

No FBI, I wouldn't do it because I like being to autistically work on my hobbies and slave my life away in a coal mine.

 

[BelUwUga]

I believe the substations have been "strengthened". To which the most logically conclusion would be someone could just either suicide boming or drive a Mcveigh truck of peace into it.

The problem with some equipment is that by its nature it really cannot be strengthened. When your relying on a dozen feet or more of open air for insulation it's very difficult to then confine that to a structure. At the same time this is the "arms race" kind of mentality I was trying to illustrate. I could go buy a mylar balloon right now and pass multiple substations on my drive home that would be arcing and sparking if I were so inclined. Even at the hundreds of dollars for some sparky to hit a reset button, that's a damn good ROI. It's not like I'm in some high development area either.

Rail corridors have failsafes, theoretically have to hotlink the wire that run protections so the thermite doesn't separate the connection and turn the light/signal to STOP to the automated signalers.
Of course, the other method would to just to blow a bridge over a river for any transportation artery.

I fear/respect the rail companies enough not to detail the weak points other than to say they are there and easily exposed. Really there are too many avenues for them to simply plug all the holes in the metaphorical dyke with their fingers.

The only thing I can suggest that would be more effective than either of these theoretically is to just go yeet one of the telecom datacenter buildings in a large city with a dozer or truck. That would shut down the major airports, take down first responder radios (most are cell based now days), and people would riot in a few hours without internet access.

If you want to talk about actual hardened infrastructure, good luck with any of that. How long did that one dude knocking a place out with a bomb shut things down for? I think most issues were resolved within the day. People on scene shot and uploaded video of the detonation within minutes. OTOH Canada had a planned upgrade go fuckywucky and put a quarter of their population through a worse outage.

Unlike something that would get you the ole Timmy McVeigh treatment, going technical with something like an SDR would let you wreak much further havoc at much less risk. ADS-B is how most air traffic information works today. Larger control and tracking centers will have radar but will largely use that to confirm what ADS-B says. This is also an open protocol widely explored by amateur enthusiasts.

Likewise, while cracking cell-based networks is hard, effectively jamming them with amateur equipment would be trivial. Encrypted radio, particularly the kind used by most government/police radios stateside also have a very unique weakness. You can spoof a "home station" signal that triggers a cascading failure that renders their encrypted mode completely inoperable. This weakness is so glaring and vulnerable the researcher found almost a majority were simply defaulting to unencrypted comms as a practical matter. While it was very simple to trigger this cascading failure, the remedy requires bringing the radio to the home station to reconfigure it.

Gen Z wouldn't do any of this shit cause they're too lazy. I can't even get people to put things up properly when they're fucking color coded and I have written instructions for them.

These guys with the SDRs might be too old for Zoomers but it skews surprisingly young. Idle hands and the devil's handiwork and all that.

No FBI, I wouldn't do it because I like being to autistically work on my hobbies and slave my life away in a coal mine.

I would with the proper government authorization and a commensurate check from Uncle Sam for services rendered. Really more of a free agent I just think this stuff is really neat to theorize about.

 

[YellowIsACoolColor]

The vast majority of American police, soldiers, and federal officers would side with the revolutionaries and resistance would swiftly crumble. There wouldn't be a need for a long insurgency

We have seen the military and police side with the state in situations like this time and time again. They will use force against the American people no matter how uncomfortable it may make them feel.

 

[CivilianOfTheFandomWars]

Whole not exactly a rebellion, I read this book called Black Autumn that was basically two guys thinking about what a logical way for America to fall would be in the event of a nuke hitting a major population center. It was a lot of wanking over guns and military, but it was an alright read.
The basic idea was that once the trucks stop running, shit gets fucked immediately. People, without easy access to recourses and power, would join up with each other as a means of survival while the criminal elements would just raid and pillage shit because they have the guns and there’s no one to stop them. The interesting idea it posited was that the cities and more upperclass areas would suffer real bad because, unlike the more hillbilly/Mormon commune setting our characters were in, they don’t prepare or have the skills or materials to survive shit hitting the fan.
It’s been a while since I read it, but it made sense to me.