"But, But, But..." Part Deux

Another reply. Another response.
We continue:

@Mark

1) Spelling correction noted. Apologies for the misspelling.

2) You're assuming an enemy that is not, necessarily.

3) You're assuming that's the only enemy, or even the primary threat.

4) Hives are a target, not an asset. Ask a bear how that works.

5) Replacing lost air assets takes time, money, and inordinate amounts of personnel.
(It takes 1-2 years, minimum, to make one competent pilot, at a training cost of $1-3M. That's why we move heaven and earth to recover them, not just because we're nice guys. And most of our current airframes are no longer in production. Once they're lost, for any reason, they're lost forever. They're also the most expensive, expensive-to-operate, and fragile asset on the battlefield, even when they're coming at you fangs out. You don't squander them on covering every patrol in Indian Country, or pretty soon, you don't have them any more. Then where are you?)

6) The bases for those airframes are generally amidst red states. So are the manufactories for spare parts, ordnance, and their precious POL. In an insurgency, how long do you think Lockheed, Boeing, Northrup-Grumman, and General Dynamics would stay open in the middle of the functional equivalent of Anbar Province? They are a tank made of bone china in a world full of slingshots.

7) The Diversity of the Free Shit Army is the enemy that's likeliest to need ambushing after that. Probably long before as well. They have no armor, no artillery, no air support, no QRF, no training, no doctrine, little equipment, and very little in the way of command and control. This is what is known in the trade as a "juicy target". And as Team Stupid will find out, when the EBT cards go away, they will go rogue, and won't respond to prior command and control measures. Just bullets in the head. That's a feature, not a bug.

8) Anything amidst your AO, by definition, is worth ambushing. That's the difference between your AO, and free ground.

9) Your apparently complete ignorance of the military's composition and disposition is telling. Every unit is a mix of all states, and overwhelmingly composed of the people least likely to go along with bombing and shooting folks back home, anywhere, being inordinately represented by exactly the red-state redneck mofos who'll not merely refuse, but turn their guns around first chance they get, or simply desert, with everything they can carry off. Ask me how I know.

10) Colonels and generals can wave their hands all they like, but it's the troops (who largely won't want to play) who are the ones who load the machine guns, sling the bombs, gas up the vehicles, and maintain them. Or not. This is why the douchebags stand out, even now, after the last eight years' attempt to mold the military into some amalgation of Queer Eye For the Straight Guy, Meals On Wheels, and Black Lives Matter. It didn't work then, and it's being shrugged off as we speak. Slow learners get fragged. Hit by jeeps. Disappear in the woods. Smother under their pillows. It's a dangerous business at the best of times, and doubly so when your men won't follow you. Especially when they perceive that command is a greater threat to them than the nominal "insurgency", as will become the case two seconds after this starts, and in many cases, before it even goes wheels up.
Look for the military, in any sort of major crisis, to stand down completely, park their vehicles, and protect their bases, and no more, until further notice.

11) As I said, LE cannot even secure the cities they nominally protect, on their best day, now. (It pissed OIF/OEF vets and some prior service folks off when I posted in earlier days that the KIA rate in Chicongo was worse than serving a tour in the Army in the Sandbox, until the numbers proved the point.) Throw in even an insurgency of a mere 1%, and they'll be dead and non-existant in weeks, if not days or hours, never to return. If most of them don't elect to stay home and take care of what matters to them: their families. What's left won't be much to write home about, and the bigger cities will be worse in this respect than the smaller communities, because few of their numbers actually live there to begin with. Just getting there every day will become a non-starter, and that'll be that.
They depend on two (very fragile) things: automobiles, and radio communications nodes. Otherwise, even the NYFC PD couldn't control six blocks around city hall. And that's with 100% staffing, another thing they won't have.
They don't have individual MRAPs for all hands, and the black and whites and radio towers go away forever with a pint of gasoline in a glass bottle. Oh, wait, they're going to mount a guard on the towers, and only deploy as flying squads? Hello, ambush TTPs.
Game over for them on Day Two. Week two at the outside.
cf.: law enforcement in Mexico, now, except against a population that's armed to the teeth.  Anybody not plainly and obviously on the side of The People - and not the Free Shit Army people, btw - will be playing Butch & Sundance to the population's Bolivian Army. (And in many cities, they're about a whisker away from that day right now.) Best wishes with that plan.

12) LE air assets make military air assets look robust by contrast.
They're mainly rotary-wing, the most maintenance-intensive and fragile airframes in common use. The biggest LE air fleet AFAIK is that of LAPD, and you could take out most of it in twenty minutes on any given day, from up the street, with one or two shooters, the will, a SASR or two, and a few dozen rounds. (Important operating tip: number of Bell and Aerospatiale products that run well with a .50BMG through the gearbox: 0.) That assumes no one wants to simply play silly buggers with thermite and Molotov bombs using drones. They wouldn't be securing anything after that, nor replacing lost assets in ten years of trying. And the farther they get from Downtown, the harder it becomes to secure their attempted replacements.
So there won't be two airframes or helicopters, by Tuesday of Hell Week.
For bonus points, any surviving assets would be lured in purposely to ambush them, and any nominally-supported ground force, paving the way to more audacious follow-up activity.

13) And then we get into the fragility of POL, electronics, and maintenance supply chains. The dot Mil learned that lesson in VN from '65-'72. The LEO community has never learned it, and never attempted to operate in a non-permissive environment, nor ever could, for more than about a week. Just-in-time becomes just-too-late in sporty times. Massive amounts of the population they'd nominally try to lord it over know how to play that game blindfolded, and once again, that would be that.

I can do this all day.

More importantly, both the .mil and law enforcement, while not known for a lot of PhDs, have quite a number of pretty street-smart folks thereabouts, from bottom to top. The really big cesspool chunks get all the media attention (mainly for entertainment value, don't kid yourselves; the press are just as big kind of smartasses as anything I write, they just dress it up better), but it's the guys with mechanic's garage and barber shop common sense that get about 99% of things done, in both organizations.

And I can assure you, nothing written here is particularly news to them, which is why I doubt it'll ever be an issue so long as either organization exists in functional form.

Of course they do stupid sh*t institutionally, and occasional individuals are real moron standouts, which makes the internet entertaining most days; the stories are legion.

But what people fail to realize is that the story every day for hundreds of years hasn't been the overwhelming majority of either group who don't crash their ships, fly their airplanes into mountains or the ground, drown in swamps, or shoot themselves in the groin holstering their pistols, because they're just not that f**king stupid, despite official efforts to recruit stupider ones, and lifelong efforts to keep them all as dumb as possible consistent with doing their jobs.

It doesn't work well, because Darwin is a dangerous servant and a cruel master.

Law enforcement and the military, as long as any civilization worth the name survives, are either going to be on your side, or neutral, for the reasons laid out above. Any other choice is a decision for their own suicide.

The real problems come along when civilization doesn't survive, and you will have neither of them, and a keen appreciation for the lack.

That day is what these basic training skills are FOR.

You're going to be your own 9-1-1: Police, fire, EMS, and the muthaf**king Cavalry.
Most people would do far better wrapping their heads around 35 BC, 535 AD, or 1735, rather than around 1935.

Dollars to donuts if you're shooting at any troops, they'll have red stars on their gear and not white ones, but your targets are far likelier to look like looters in Ferguson or Lord Humungus' posse in Road Warrior than they are to look like a SWAT team or the local Notional Guard.

There will be outliers from time to time, and worth noting, but primarily as exceptions to the rule.
If things have gotten to the point that you're patrolling in small bands, I think you can pretty much kiss any idea of police work or a functional military goodbye as nothing but fond memories of happier days.

Look at the whole board, Mark.

You're worried about a military or LE with air and IR assets.
If you have a military and LE with IR assets, WTF are you patrolling around in small bands for?
More importantly, if you're already patrolling around in small bands, you probably haven't seen LE or military air assets for a long time, nor will again for even longer.
You're playing checkers, Mark. This is a chess game.