I told him it was the gnarled peasants of someplace that want to be left alone.
Think about it for a minute. Every nation teaches it's SpecOps people all about the latest weapons and killing machines. The SpecOps people go in thusly armed.
When the gnarled peasants decide to resist they don't have such finery so as a result EVERYTHING becomes a weapon.
EVERYTHING.
Look at the Ukranians. They use everything from Twitter to tin cans.
I always liked the Tweets from some Ukranian about how he was sodomizing Russian conscripts and was keeping score. It really likely didn't do a whole lot but like most things it was just another drop in the bucket. IIRC he was called the Odessa Ass Bandit.
Of course it was a recurring rumor that I have heard go around a few times over the years but when you get a teenage conscript the rumor goes through the barracks like $hit through a goose. In stays in the back of a kid's mind.
Meanwhile Private Ivan who has let this stew in his mind is posted on some kind of dopey guard duty near a building somewhere occupied by somebodys 93 year old grandmother. Granny gets up at 0300 to get a glass of water because she can't sleep and glances out the window. There's Private Ivan!
So Granny fishes through the trash for a tin can and simply drops it out the window where it hits the pavement with a clang and she is treated to a panic stricken Private Ivan reacting.
"Is ass bandit! Is ass bandit!" he shouts, running off into the darkness. Granny smiles and heads back to sleep with a smile knowing she did her bit. She knows Private Ivan is going to catch hell for leaving his post.
While not much, she has just added to his misery and demoralized him a little more and added to his homesickness.
Or the farmer that fired up his tractor and started stealing tanks that the Russkis had left behind because they ran out of fuel. An agricultural tractor certainly isn't a tank retrieving military vehicle or a weapon. Yet one of the peasants weaponizes it because it's all he has to work with. It does the job and now the Ukranians have another tank or two, free. For nothin'!
Or the little regional militia that drops a bridge to stop a train delivering Russian supplies and then drops the one behind the train so it can't back up and reroute in effect leaving a trainload of supplies that can either be guarded which ties up people or abandoned which means a trainload of free stuff for the Ukranians.
Actually the likely scenario there is that Putin will pour on the coal (hurting-maybe destroying- his economy) and overrun the Ukraine. When that happens Chapter Two will begin. Now the poor bastard has to keep it and in the absence of a Ukrainian military structure the gnarled peasants take charge and things get weird.
The Ukrainian people will start. There will be no pitched battles, just a slow grind of a murder here and there of a Russian. Sporadic vandalism. The bar Ivan frequents will be bombed and we're back to the slow grind. Some ten year old will drop a brick on Ivan's head from a third story building and Ivan will be sent back home to get coloring books for Christmas for the rest of his life.
Ivan's buddies will not be too happy, either. They'll be scared.
In short it may take a while but eventually Ivan will pack up and go home leaving the Ukranians to rebuild and return to their business.
This has happened to the Russians in Afghanistan and happened to the United States in Vietnam. It happened to the Japanese in the Philipines, the Germans in Paris and countless others.
If the people don't want someone there they will find a way to throw the invaders out.
We talk about counterinsurgency and our Green Berets but the truth is the Green Beret types will only be successful if the people want their help in the first place. If not, they'll get run out.
The all time best SpecOp fighters in the planet are the gnarled, pissed off peasants.
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