Well, according to the training I got it's possible under the right conditions using just a few hundred feet of cable, a sturdy anchor point and the critical factor is a tight LZ ringed with some tall trees. So it's a fairly narrow window absent those stingers.
But I really wasn't referring to the general body of citizens sheep. I was really talking about a huge number of former servicemen and women dating all the way back to WWII. Like my wife's dad. Retired USMC Colonel. Navy Cross, DFC and 2 Silver Stars. Once took on forty zeros by himself, downing eight before the rest of the Black Sheep arrived. Yeah he's 85, but he's got firepower I wish I had and no worries about his future. He actually sort of yearns to serve his country again. Doubt he'd be pulling LRRP missions but you'd be amazed at the level of his skills and creativity.
Remember Eric Rudolph? Guy who bombed the abortion clinics way back when? He was a little old army pfc. Standard infantry grunt. He ran the FBI's 400 man task force ragged for three years in a 40 sq mile area of the west north Carolina mountains. Sure he had tons of local help. Food etc. So would anybody resisting government tyranny. But look at Rudolph and knowing his basic level of skills, imagine what a thousand PO'd SEALs could do. Or thousands of former special ops soldiers and marine recon. These are guys trained to whip up enough explosive material to drop the Golden Gate Bridge and do so with material found locally. Could they really win? I dunno. But a good idea on how it might go can be found in a series of books written by our very own freeper Travis McGee. EFAD.
I know this, winnable or not, it's better to die on your feet as a free man than live on your knees as a slave. But.... Maybe that's just me.
Of course, probably all the best troops in their prime are probably going to be on the gov’ts side. But again, the insurgents could probably cause chaos, but could they actually defeat and overcome the army or just lead them a merry dance? The taleban is doing a good job of leading the coalition forces a merry dance, but it can’t actually take the fight to them and defeat them.
I might check that book out if I can get it of Amazon, it does sound interesting...
“I know this, winnable or not, it’s better to die on your feet as a free man than live on your knees as a slave. But.... Maybe that’s just me.”
Well, the thing is, it isn’t likely that the government is just going to go all out for blatant tyranny, complete with a boo-hiss hate figure twirling a thin black mustache and going ‘muhahahahaha!’ Remember that even when the the Revolutionary War broke out, the colonies were still probably the freeist and most lightly taxed society in the world, except for the lack of parliamentary representation. Some took the view that the Crown’s infringements justified rebellion, wheras others believed the rebellion was wrong and/or that the rebels were a dangerous threat to the freedoms they already enjoyed (without the benefit of hindsight, many of them would have viewed Washington as a new Cromwell)....
Ping.
You get the idea...