mitigatedchaos:

To expand on why the “small arms are useless because the government has F-15s” meme is stupid…

You want to maintain that you’re a legitimate government conducting a mass arrest of criminals, not an incipient dictatorship plotting an ethnic-style elimination of a subset of the population.

If the F-15s come out, it means that 1) the revolutionary force have enough power that they can’t be stopped by conventional law enforcement personnel or plausibly-deniable regime allies (such as deputized paramilitaries, rioters, or members of the criminal class), 2) they have enough armored vehicles that they can’t be stopped without air support, and 3) they have enough air support that their armored vehicles can’t just be wiped out by attack helicopters and ground attack aircraft.

If this happens, either part of the military has defected to the revolutionaries, or the revolutionaries are receiving some pretty fucking serious support from a peer competitor.

If you have to bring out the F-15s, you are well and truly fucked. It’s possible that you could still win, but you’re looking at upwards of tens of thousands of direct casualties, and probably five times that in less direct casualties, including civilians.

The ironic thing is it’s the F-15, an air superiority fighter designed in competitive tension with other intercontinental empires’ multibillion dollar platforms, that is practically useless against an insurrection; by contrast ‘Nam-era protestors defeated warplanes on the ground with hammers several times