A foreign army would come because it was sent by frightened or angry politicians. The soldiers of such an army have no interest or investment in the territory in question: they march because they are ordered to march, and paid to do it. They have little to lose in defeat, and gain very little in victory.
In your first sentence, you left out "greedy" and "fervent" (recall the Crusades, or the US advance into the American West). As to the second and third, armies like that never last very long - witness Iraq invading both Iran and Kuwait. OTOH, consider the US/Allied forces in both Gulf 1 and 2: while they certainly had little to gain, that didn't stop them from rolling over the opposition. And don't kid yourself - the "hadji's" (not my term) in Iraq lasted as long as they did because of confusion and incompetence at the top, not through any failing at the bottom.
As to having "little to lose in defeat", dead is still dead.
I left it out because it is a given, and goes without saying. Don't compare every army to the morons in the Middle East; not all are so incompetent that they are effectively impotent.
Lives are indeed something to lose, and politicians spend them like candy. My point, which you completely missed, was the strategic goals of an invader. If they lose, then their worst losses are measured in lives (which politicians consider expendable anyway). The wise course of action, then, is to pull out before their losses rise to unacceptable levels. For western nations, the level of "unacceptable casualties" is extremely low, and continues to drop. Kill a thousand American soldiers, and the American people will be screaming to pull their troops out of that meatgrinder. Westerners have lost their tolerance for the tragedies inherent in war: they want to win without suffering losses, and that's completely unrealistic. In war, people die: a simple unavoidable fact.
The defenders, on the other hand (if wise), are dug in and prepared to protect their homes. They have everything to fight for, and everything to lose if defeated: freedom, their homes, their very lives. They will fight because surrender means the annihilation of their society, and possibly extinction. They fight for their right to exist. That is an incredibly powerful motivator.
I'm sorry, but that is simply divorced from reality. Please see:
http://www.amazon.com/Conquest-Exploitation-Occupied-Industrial-Societies/dp/0691002428 If people see that resistance is hopeless, if the invader knows what they, themselves are doing, the vast majority of the people in the conquered area
will eventually cooperate with them, up to and including taking an active role vs their neighbors.
One example of collaborators does not supplant centuries of history. If the defenders perceive the consequences of defeat as
worse than death, and they are motivated to resist, they
will fight to the last. "Better to die on your feet, than live on your knees", as the old saying goes. Not all cultures stand by such ideology, but those that do, with populations that love their way of life and don't want to see it destroyed, will
most certainly fight to the death to protect what they love.
I'm not talking about the pathetic servile and corrupt Iraqis. I'm talking about the modern-day versions of Spartans and Vikings: the Mujahadeen of Afghanistan; the people of Malta; the people of Chechnya and South Ossetia (though the latter had help)... and the Malatorans... those proud cultures who refuse to bow before anyone, and make a stand against foreign tyranny. Those who defiantly answer "Molōn Labe" to the demand that they surrender their weapons; who are ready to give everything they have to defend themselves and what they hold dearest. Those who fight for their freedom and their right to exist (not wealth or power); those who are not built to be servile beasts of burden. Those who fight for a home, because they have no place else to go, and cannot retreat. ...It is
them I am talking about: these rare groups will
not collaborate, will
not surrender, and will
not stop fighting until every last one of them is dead.
"Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety." — Benjamin Franklin
Killing penny-packets of [professional] enemy troops simply makes them mad.
...At first.
Keep doing it, without stop, and it won't be long before the troops fear the snipers more than they fear their superior commanders.
...guerillas have nowhere to go, because the bad guys are living in their homes.
All the more reason to fight for freedom, so you can boot the invaders out of your homes.
If the guerrilla force can communicate well, they can employ swarming tactics that are ideally suited for their capabilities: these tactics are virtually impossible for conventional forces to stand up against.
I've read Arquilla and Rondfelt, too, and the "dirty little secret" of swarming is that it requires an extremely high level of communications infrastructure to work effectively, as well as requiring heavy weapons to have any real effect. A (real) regular military will have plenty of additional infrastructure to spare. Guerilla's won't.
Modern telecommunications puts advanced networks in the hands of the common citizen. A cell phone is all a freedom fighter needs to coordinate his actions with his furthest allies, and run circles around a larger and slower conventional force. In close proximity, coordination can be achieved by audio and visual signals.
You'd be surprised what light and home-made weapons can accomplish, if used correctly. I can destroy an M1A2 Abrams tank without any missiles or heavy guns, because I know precisely where and how to strike for maximum effect. When the tank has the advantage, I simply avoid it, and let it waste fuel. When the crew stops to sleep, they are toast.
Each defeated invader leaves behind more supplies and ammunition, strengthening the guerrillas while weakening the invaders.
Sorry, but that's just a fallacy - guerilla armies do not survive by raiding the enemy. They survive only through outside aide.
I didn't say the guerrillas can "survive" by scavenging the enemy; I said they "grow stronger" by doing so. They get their heavy weapons that way, and improve their equipment and capabilities by doing so. It is not difficult to disable a vehicle with a remote-control fougasse or other trap, kill the crew, and then you are free to strip the vehicle and crew of anything useful: ammo, food, armor, fuel, weapons (both hand weapons and mounted crew-served guns on the vehicle), explosives... Burn what you can't take with you, and leave the wreak as a roadblock. Then you merely have to use these new toys on the next enemy patrol to fall into your next trap. Repeat as necessary.
Additionally, I recommend looking up the operations of Executive Outcomes in Sierra Leone: An outright mercenary force (as opposed to a regular national army) fought a low-budget conventional war against a pointedly organized as such guerilla force -- and blew them all the way back to Stage 1 ops in under 90 days. That it was ultimately futile had nothing to do with EO's operations.
All that shows is the incompetence of the guerrillas, and their inability/unwillingness to adapt to the mercenaries. In that
isolated case, the guerrillas were not sufficiently motivated. If they had planned to fight a force like the mercenaries, and they were well motivated to win, history would probably have been very different.
See what I said above, about the kind of no-surrender people I'm talking about.
Eventually, after being put through hell and a meatgrinder for long enough with no end in sight, the larger army of invaders will be forced to run home like a whipped dog, or it will be obliterated to the last man. History shows again and again that a very small number of defenders can indeed stand against overwhelming odds, survive, and emerge victorious.
Name one...These things are most often "glorious deaths", not victories.
One notable example:
Finland, in the Winter War... a conflict forgotten in most of the western world, due to the attention given to the Nazi conquest of western Europe. The Fins, far outnumbered and outgunned by the Russians, made an epic stand at their frontiers. Not only did they halt the Russian advance in short order, they sent the Russians running most of the way home, and they did it all with very few people and poor weapons. What they lacked in manpower and firepower, they more than made up for in skill, tactics, and cold-hard determination. They did not lose that war, and they suffered far fewer casualties than the Russians (by proportion).
One short guy, alone in the woods of Finland.....
You can't base your strategy on one guy's experience. Just because the Red Army's officer corps had been destroyed by Stalin prior to the Winter War, that doesn't mean that the Finns were more capable, only that the Soviet's were painfully and lethally stupid...And I would point out that, even with all the factors against them, the Soviets still won.
I'm not basing a strategy on the experience of any one man: just using him as an example of what one motivated man can accomplish, and shooting down your argument that "guys in the woods with rifles" are not a serious threat.
And the Soviets didn't exactly "win". They set out to annex Finland, and utterly failed to do so, suffering grievous losses in the attempt. All they got out of the Moscow Peace Treaty was about 10% of the Finnish territory (and the
Soviets were the ones who dictated the terms), and the Continuation War the next year massacred another quarter of a million Russians, and Finland/Germany re-conquered much more territory from Russia than the Russians took in the Winter War (which was later ceded back to Russia in the Paris Peace Treaties of 1947). In both wars, Finland held its independence, and was never conquered.
Assuming that you are setting up shop in the real world, you have to do a coherent threat assessment of your potential enemies, and create forces accordingly; for example, Switzerland doesn't have large armored forces because they are a mountainous country, not because they can't afford them -- but even though they have a largely "militia" army, they spend a huge amount of money training and equipping them, and maintaining that equipment and training.
We are, and constant threat assessments are a fact of everyday life for us. We know our potential enemies very well, and have matched our strengths to precisely target their weaknesses, while protecting our own weaknesses.
Interesting you should mention Switzerland, as that nation has a defensive strategy (called the "porcupine principle") that closely matches our own strategies.
Creating forces takes money, as does keeping them "in shape". All you really need to do is do a quick examination of the wars of the US in the last 200-ish years: until WW1, the US lost a staggering percentage of its troops in wartime, compared to other, "more professional" militaries, precisely because the troops had little real training in peacetime...and a purely volutary force will very quickly find other things to do that "take a walk in the woods" a few times a year...and once you start mandating training, you start needing to pay the troops, or they will simply vote you out, or vote with their feet.
Wrong. Creating forces takes soldiers, training, and equipment. The abstract concept of "money" is meaningless in our society, and is not a factor in our combat strength. We are motivated by other means, and our flexible economy has no need for a monetary system (there is no greed in our society).
The forces we would deploy (our "guerrilla" soldiers) are highly trained professionals: akin to the "special forces" found on the regular militaries of America, the UK, and Russia. They will never stop fighting, because surrender would mean certain death (or far worse, torturous experimentation, or imprisonment in a zoo). They have no alternative
but to fight, and they fight for worthy causes: freedom, a home, justice, truth, peace. They fight because they are physically
designed to defend the helpless. They fight because their moral principles say they must; because they cannot tolerate any form of tyranny or oppression. They fight for a home. They fight for the
right to exist in this universe: for
simple survival. Isn't
that worth fighting to the death to protect? If we don't fight to the death, our kind would probably be killed anyway, and that means extinction; the world will be a lesser and much duller place without us.
Don't dictate to me the nature of warfare: I already know what you are talking about, and much more. I know history. I'm the Defense Councilor of FedCom: I know
precisely what my country is capable of (now and in the future), because
that's my job. I spend every day researching and evaluating threats, and developing the means to nullify those threats... every day, for over a decade. Think about that.
We have solid plans for success and defense, and we are following them to our ultimate and unrivaled freedom. Those who threaten our right to exist will find Malatora is like a force of nature: it cannot be tamed or stopped, knows no fear, and will beat down adversity like dust in the wet season.
You do not understand FedCom, you do not understand Malatora, and you do not understand the resolve or even the simple
nature of the Malatoran population... you have barely scratched the surface. We are unique in the world, and unlike any other civilization: your presumptions backfire when applied to us, and merely highlight your ignorance (here's a tip: assume we are
not a "human" civilization... that might be a better starting point for you, as we have very little in common with the vast bulk of the human species). Our uniqueness is what unifies and defines our society, and is the primary motivation to do everything we have done and will do: it is why we cannot accept anything less than absolute sovereignty.
