Except for the fact that the population would have military units backing them up during an invasion.
When is the last time you saw Red Dawn? They certainly didn't have immediate success. They were not even defeating the enemy...in the end pretty much all of them got killed. What they did was divert Russian manpower and resources.
Also...at the beginning, they were not fighting Soviet Soldiers...the Colonel, or whatever he was admitted straight up that he and his men (they were Cubans and Nicaraguans) were used to fighting as guerrillas themselves, not suppressing guerrillas. They called on the Soviets to come in, and the Soviets eventually killed most of the Wolverines.
I haven't seen the RD literally since it came out, so I don't recall the whole story... my bad.
Fantasy or no...having the ability to form a resistance is better than not....
Never argued with this. I am merely trying to disprove the silly notion that a bunch of poorly trained yahoos with customized ARs and ivory grip $500 pistols can take on a dedicated major modern military force and win.
every major invasion has had them.....the Jews against the Romans, the Spanish against the French in the Peninsular war (where the term guerrilla was invented)
In these times, the armament of a "proper" army wasn't all that different from what a well equipped resistance fighter could obtain. It was the organization, leadership, training and tactics that made the difference; especially in Antiquity. An armed Jewish fighter in Bar-Kokhba revolt was not much different in appearance from a Roman legionnaire. As a matter of fact, the famous Spartans - probably the best fighting force of it's time - were famously lightly armored and went to war almost naked with little armor protection and a small cheap helmet.
the Russians against the French in 1812,
The Grande Armee was done in by winter, starvation, and disease. Russian partisan resistance was a major nuisance but their scorched-earth policy was the main cause of Napoleon's defeat (and the fact that the Russian army was artfully avoiding being slaughtered until Napoleon's army was all but dead).
the French against the Nazis...
Sorry, the impact of French resistance was negligible. Not intended as an insult to those brave heroes who fought the Nazis.
the Finns against the Russians
Was a conventional war by well armed, well trained, well led, highly motivated armed force fighting in a familiar terrain vs extremely poorly led and poorly trained Red Army. In the end the Red Army won, even though with huge losses. But they achieved their initial objective (moving the border further West from Leningrad by taking some of the Finnish territory).
the Russians against the Nazis,
Was a conventional war fought on a massive, unprecedented scale by a huge mechanized modern army backed by an industry capable of outproducing the Nazis by a wide margin. Those 84,000 T-34 tanks and over 30,000 Yak fighters and 36,000 Il-2 ground attack planes were not produced by guerrilla shops hidden in a village smithy. The Soviet resistance movement was also very large but a lot of times it acted more like an army behind enemy lines, manned with large % of regular soldiers, led by professional commanders, supplied via massive air drops, and with units reporting to the central command and working to the single master plan. This kind of industrial-scale resistance would be impossible without the main fighting force supporting and directing it from behind the front lines. And it came at a terrible price, if I recall my history books, in one of the Soviet Republics (Belorussia ?) the civilian death toll was 1/4 of prewar population, largely due to the guerrilla war and Nazi retributions.
the Mujaheddin against the Soviets.
As far as bringing up the Soviet Afghan Conflict I don't consider losing 13% of their forces something to sneeze at...not to mention the Soviets were there helping a faction of the Afghan Government.
They didn't lose 13% of their forces. They stayed in the country for 9+ years, maintaining a presence of 115K troops, and lost 15k killed over that time. That's about 1,600 per year, or about 1.5 percent of the total force deployed on a yearly basis.
