Recently Nick
Gillespie over at Reason wrote a piece
about gun control discussing his discomfort with many of the proponents and
their arguments. He makes a quite reasonable argument overall, one I think
reflects the thoughts of many people who are pro-gun rights on principle. I am
particularly happy he makes the general point that free people are free to own
what they will without justification. The notion that people need sufficient
justification to own guns (the only thing they are made for is killing people!)
has continually come up in the past few months, and I have seen precious few
people even challenge it.
However,
there is one passage I want to challenge, as people seem very comfortable
making the argument without really considering it:
The notion that a
rag-tag band of regular folks armed with semi-automatic weapons and the odd
shotgun are a serious hedge against tyranny strikes me as a stretch (and I even
saw the remake of Red Dawn!).
This is a counter point
to the common argument by gun rights activists that gun ownership protects
against tyranny, particularly that of our own government. Others who have
elaborated (Nick didn't bother) point out that the US government has tanks,
bombs, nukes and the like, so how could a few semi-auto rifles and shotguns in
the hands of the citizens matter? Likewise, if China gets crazy and invades,
are some citizens with rifles going to make the difference?
The main issue of this
argument is that it does not acknowledge the different stages of warfare, and
how the tools apply to them. I am going to lay out three different types of
warfare, and show how the tools, the tanks, missiles, bombs, and guns are used
to very different effect. But first, some talk about goals. Because you gotta
have goals.
The classic
understanding of how to win a war is to take away your opponent's ability or
desire to resist. Effectively this is the economic approach to war as well: it
is cheaper over all, both in lives and resources, to either leave your opponent
unable to fight any longer, or compel them to stop fighting of their own
accord. You do this by either destroying their capability to compete (say by
destroying their navy in a primarily maritime conflict) or by making it so
costly to continue that they decide that their best option is to quit the war
early (say by nuking a city or two.) No matter which path you choose (Can't or
Won't) the goal is to avoid having to kill your opponent down to the last man,
the worst possible way to win. (If you are in a hurry, skip to the TL:DR heading
below.)
So now that we know how
wars are won on a high level, we need to look at the types of wars people
fight. I am going to go really broad and say there are three types:
1: Conquest
2: Defense
3: Internal
The interesting thing
about these categories is that one side is always Conquest, with the other side
beginning in the Defense type and transitioning into Internal. The interactions
between these types determine the methods that are most useful.
Conquest is effectively
"You have stuff, and I want to take it." This is the idea behind
China invading the US; they want to control our country or what have you. The
second Iraq war (let's just call it that for now) was basically the same thing.
Hussein had control of Iraq, and the US and others wanted to take it away from
him. Effectively you have an attacker who has to force control on another.
A Conquest/Defensive war
looks a lot like how we see war in movies, with battlefields and sides fighting
over territory. The defenders try to keep the attackers out entirely, focusing
on removing their ability to attack, such as destroying units, cutting bridges,
all the usual things we think of with regard to war. At the same time, the
defender is attempting to make the attacker lose interest but making attacking
costly, by destroying units, and possibly launching counter attacks into the
attacker's territory. The latter tactic was pretty much the underpinning of the
whole Cold War strategy: no one will attack because if they do, their cities
get nuked shortly thereafter.
If the defense wins at
this point in the war, things generally end. The attacker gets repelled, and
either the defender stops at their border or starts their own war of conquest
into the former aggressor's territory, continuing the war from the other side.
If the defense loses, however, the war is not over and instead transitions into
the internal phase.
The Internal phase
begins when the attacker has control of territory, but has not removed
resistance to their will. We often think of this as revolution, insurgency or a
dozen other terms, but the general point is that while the attacker has control
of an area and cannot be stopped from rolling tanks and troops into it they
still do not face a populace who will do as they say without direct, individual
violence. This is the stance of most resistance fighters, civil uprisings, and
underground fighters, either when their preferred government is overthrown or
when they deem their government as illegitimate. The internal phase is often
referred to as asymmetric warfare, as the would be conqueror has all the
military might compared to the insurgents.
Now, how the attacker
goes about things is very different depending on the phase of the war. In the
Conquest/Defense stage, there is often a mix of destruction of ability to
resist and destroying willingness to resist, but the focus tends to be on the
latter for the simple reason that if you destroy everything you are obviating
your reason to attack in the first place. You don't want to destroy the very
things you want to take. The major exceptions to this are wars of genocide,
where the goal isn't so much taking as destroying, and wars that begin to drag
on to the point that getting things over with becomes more desirable than any
particular city or what not.
The defender in the
Conquest/Defense phase, however, often uses destruction of means and will at the
same time. Destroying enemies in the field accomplishes both goals, and
launching counter attacks, such as destroying factories, often does as well.
Importantly the Defender needs to show much less restraint, as if they are only
defending, they can destroy their opponent's country freely. Having not had
interest in taking it in the first place, nuking a city or two does not change
their cost/benefit analysis.
In the Conquest/Internal
phase, the attacker is further restricted in their behavior. Unless they
absolutely see no value in the populace (which is possible, but unlikely) they
have strong incentives to not be destructive for two reasons. Firstly, they
have already taken control of non-human resources, and so destroying the area
to remove resistance is counterproductive. Secondly, while some portion of the
populace might be willing to accept the killing of insurgents (say in the case
of civil war, or simply those who don't want to fight the attacker any
more) indiscriminate killing will only create backlash against the
attackers, making their occupation more expensive, and possibly being counterproductive.
It is possible that massacres and extermination will decrease resistance to an
attacker, but in general it is not considered likely. So, between destroying
the very resources and people you wish to control, and likely increasing
resistance over all, the attacker needs to be careful to only choose tactics which
will on whole reduce the insurgents’ willingness to resist, as destroying
ability is generally extremely costly.
The insurgents, however,
have a somewhat clearer position, with many more degrees of freedom. Destroying
the attacker, say by ambushing patrols, convoys or the like, is easier because
it is clear who the attacker is. If this is not an option, simply making
control of an area extremely expensive is very much an option, by very much the
same tactics. By being able to blend back into the populace, the insurgents
become effectively the prize and the enemy, making the attacker use very labor
intensive methods to root them out. From the insurgent's side, all they need to
do is make the cost of control more than the benefit.
To add just one more
layer to these considerations, let’s look quickly at how you fight from an
economic standpoint. That is to say, do you fight in a labor intensive manner,
or capital intensive?
Labor intensive is how
wars used to be fought: more bodies, each with very limited capability, but
there are lots of them. As technology improved over the eons, however, things
start to shift towards capital intensive warfare, where you spend more on each
soldier to make them more effective. Fewer bodies, but they are individually
more effective.
Some examples over time
would be the Aztec hordes (labor intensive) vs. the Conquistadors in their
armor (capital intensive); the Russians in WW2 (labor intensive) vs. the
Germans (capital intensive); the North Koreans (labor) vs. the United States
(capital.) Essentially, it is a question whether a side has more access to lots
of people compared to lots of equipment, training, defensive positions,
etc.
The difficulty with
capital means of warfare is that they generally destroy indiscriminately.
Bombs do not kill only those who fight you, but everyone nearby. A tank is not
effective for guarding anything you don't want big holes in except against
other tanks. Only human capital in the form of highly trained troops and
personal equipment for those troops can function as a scalpel in combat, but
that still leaves the difficulty of knowing just who your target is.
Importantly, those forms of capital make shifting to a labor intensive process
such as policing and occupation even more expensive, as each soldier is more
expensive individually. (Arguably, this is why the USA currently fields very
elite units such as Marine, Rangers, etc. in addition to the regular army; the
highly trained troops take areas, and the lesser trained, and thus less
expensive, troops hold them.)
TL:DR
So, consider the
scenarios brought up by both Nick and anti-gun advocates: gun owners against
domestic tyranny, and a foreign power invading.
In the first case, we
see a direct move to an attacker in tyrannical government vs. an insurgent
force. As recent events in Iraq and Afghanistan, this is a difficult position
for the attacker. In fact, the entire war on terror demonstrates the
difficulties of an attacker attempting to destroy an insurgency armed only with
basic weapons. The improved capital of the attacker, the tanks, bombs, and
missiles that we are in awe of in the battle between states do the attacker
very little good unless they are willing to destroy indiscriminately. The
conflict quickly turns into one of small arms and improvised weapons, and in
many cases the insurgents have the advantages. If the general populace is
generally supportive of the insurgence, the job of the attacker of even knowing
who to shoot is exceedingly difficult, while the insurgents can easily
determine their enemies. Further in such conflicts the difference between small
arms is very small; a good deer rifle is an effective sniper rifle, a
semi-automatic AR-15 is roughly as good as an M-16, an IED works as well as a
landmine. Making things impossibly expensive for the attacker is well within
the ability of a small armed group if they have support of the populace. The
Second World War and many later conflicts clearly demonstrate that even
irregular troops can make a very effective fortress out of a city, against
which tanks and planes are only effective if the attacker is willing to
outright destroy the entire city. In the case of Stalingrad even that was not
sufficient.
In the case of a foreign
invasion, it is true that the small arms of the citizenry will do little in the
Conquest/Defense phase of the war, but all wars of conquest devolve into an
attacker required to control ground, at which point we are back the situation
of tyrannical government vs. an insurgent force discussed above.
The question people
often ask when confronted with the statement that personal firearms are needed
to defend against their own government is often "What is
granddad's shotgun going to do vs. a tank or bombs?" This is, however the
wrong question. Tyrants cannot use tanks and bombs effectively to enforce their
will on the people, they need soldiers performing a police role, and shotguns
work perfectly well against people. The oppressed do not even need to destroy
every tank and every soldier, but only make the cost of control greater than
the tyrant is willing to pay. A tyrant or conqueror who wants to take control
of a country for its resources must preserve the population, as people are the
most valuable resource. Being able to resist this control by multiple means is the key to
freedom.
