Every now and again, President Joe Biden, the commander-in-chief of our armed forces, likes to get up and remind Americans that, if he truly wanted to, he could use overwhelming and devastating firepower to subdue us should we ever think about rising up.
He decided to remind us again, and on Martin Luther King day for that matter. Because I can definitely remember MLK telling us to obey the government at all times because they have fighter jets.
“I love my right-wing friends talking about how the tree of liberty is watered with the blood of patriots,” said Biden. “If you want to take on the federal government, you need some f-15s. You don’t need an AR-15.”
I’m going to skip his claim that there’s no “social redeeming value” to the weapons we Americans keep because those weapons haven’t just kept personal homes and neighborhoods safe, but they’ve also given foreign armies the very logical reason not to try an invasion. It’s hard to take over a city or state when most of its residents are placing bets on how they can kill more (insert derogatory name for invading army here) than their neighbor.
What I want to focus on is Biden’s continued claim that since he has all the fighter jets, tanks, and MOABs, he can win a war against the rest of America. It’s a notion that many leftists believe is the check-mate to pro-2A advocates.
On the other hand, anyone with any knowledge of military history and tactics knows that this claim from Biden is absolutely laughable. I imagine every time Joe whips out the “f-15” argument, his Generals wince. Greater, more technologically superior armies have lost wars to lesser armies before. America has been on both sides of that end before.
Let’s start with logistics. Biden’s fighting force is, as of this writing, somewhere around 1.3 million people. Now, not all of these are combat roles. In fact, only 1 out of around 10 people are actually combat-ready, the rest fall into support roles. So that leaves around 130,000 people to go out and fight…millions of gun owners in their own territory.
That’s a lot of territories to try to conquer and hold, and in the reality we currently inhabit, Biden doesn’t have the resources to do so.
This is also assuming that the vast majority of the military stays with Biden the moment he declares war on America and asks the military to go kill and subdue his enemies, which they won’t. The moment Biden tells his military to go kill their own countrymen is the moment AWOL reports skyrocket. Guaranteed, these soldiers will later resurface as rebels in their own communities and use their experience, training, and know-how to defend their homes.
So Biden doesn’t have the troop numbers to fight Americans.
But you might be saying “okay but this isn’t about people shooting at each other, this is about the full strength of America’s technological superiority.” Okay, so Biden begins rolling tanks down Mainstreet and flying bombing runs over middle-town America.
He still loses. My colleague and military veteran Kurt Schlichter addressed this scenario in his own article about this very subject:
For example, how do a bunch of hunters in Wisconsin defeat a company of M1A2 Abrams tanks? They ambush the fuel and ammo trucks. Oh, and they wait until the gunner pops the hatch to take a leak and put a .30-06 round in his back from 300 meters. Then they disappear. What do the tanks do then? Go level the nearest town? Great. Now they just moved the needle in favor of the insurgents among the population. Pretty soon, they can’t be outside of their armored vehicles in public. Their forces are spending 90% of their efforts not on actual counter-insurgency operations but on force protection.
It’s hard to fuel tanks or even man them when a handful of townsfolk with those AR-15s that Biden is laughing at make it impossible to transport food, supplies, and fuel to Biden’s remaining military. Airbases will wither as these same supply lines are cut by groups of locals with small arms that creatively use resources and terrain knowledge to their advantage.
I believe Biden is picturing wars that look a lot like men lining up and shooting at one another in lines, or even soldiers in parallel trenches popping up and shooting at one another. In this scenario, Biden absolutely does win because all the forces are organized into isolated locations and these people would be easy to bomb and kill collectively.
But this won’t be the case. What Biden will be up against are townsfolk who know their area well, live among the populace he’s looking to subdue, and look just like everyone else when they’re not geared up for a fight. Americans would fight a guerilla war, a strategy that doesn’t value straightforward engagements. The name of the game wouldn’t be to kill as many people as possible but to bring about carnage and disorganization through selective elimination and destruction of specific targets.
As it stands, Americans would have the numbers, know-how, and territory (a good chunk of which is food-producing) while Biden would have a severely reduced military with dwindling supplies and an inability to hold territory once it’s taken.
And a lot of this advantage Americans would have is thanks, in part, to our friend the AR-15.