This is the tail end of a longer piece from one of my fave bloggers...
...In an actual insurrection—not the small scale urban riots headline writers pumped up as such for political reasons—there are battles but no front and, more importantly, no rear. In such a scenario both the regime and the "resistance" would see the same region as occupied by the other, creating a near free-fire zone in effect, where martial law presents one set of rules, its opponents another. The price for being caught out by either is the same. This isn't conjecture, it's recent history in many parts of the world.
Like Washington's army, a resistance doesn't have to win, it just has to not lose and keep on not losing. There's a notion going around among the determinedly self-deluded that small arms would be of no use, that armed drones and night-vision equipped helicopters and all the rest would annihilate any home-grown opponent. This misses the point. A resistance by definition sees itself as living in occupied territory, and sabotage is the tactic of choice, not armed confrontation. This doesn't just mean Hollywood-ready spectaculars, a daring moonlight attack on some photogenic bridge, say, it also means a gas pipeline quietly reprogrammed to blow itself up, or spoofed GPS signals making destruction by friendly fire a constant hazard. Competent sabotage is low risk, low cost, high return. Armed confrontation is its opposite. Ongoing degradation of basic infrastructure would affect survivalists more than combat operations.
Unlike partisan derring-do so beloved of novelists, widely dispersed sabotage and tactical hit and run means the regime may deploy massive firepower but have no target remotely worthy of it. As a business model it's a loser. Worse, the regime can never be sure who is or isn't working for the other side. Who better to take down a communications net than an anonymous laborer in the electronic vineyards, for instance? Eventually there would be no permanent distribution hubs, field headquarters, marshalling yards or anything else dependent on power transmission nodes and water mains. When the field of battle is everywhere, it means never knowing if a supply convoy will reach its intended destination, or if a real-time situation map is displaying fanciful information, or if the second shift at a maintenance depot is dumping sugar into the fuel tanks. Actual acts of sabotage may be only a little more debilitating than its prevention so the survivalist will, like everybody else, be under constant suspicion, unjustly accused and punished, and may even be included in indiscriminent retaliation.
The battlefield of old with its massed artillery and neat ranks of infantry maneuvering to the flag in mappish ways, its codes of honor and acts of valor, its pennants and pipes and drums, this is the strata of military legacy supporting its present dark reality. These are the official stories told around official campfires because even the basest nastiness yearns to present itself in better form and little else can be presented in mitigation. And nastiness it is. War's dirty secret is this: siege and starvation is its past and its future. In the Unpleasantness of the '40s the Green Folder and U-Boats and the Marshall Plan showed calories to be the equal of armaments. Eating when others don't is the modern measure of victory. It's why home gardens and deep pantries and non industrialized milk and heritage seeds are increasingly treated as prohibited munitions, and why provisioning for the future—a common sense private matter encouraged in times past from Aesop to Civil Defense—now makes the practitioner a "person of interest" to authorities.
The battlefield, the former field of honor, has devolved into a weft and woof of war and not-war, every man a combatant and noncombatant, sporadically and by turns, in short, we've come down from the mount into bush country where war isn't an event with a name, it's endless ambushes set by herdsmen for whatever strangers may walk into them, where death is proof of perfidy, where indiscriminate crossfire constitutes a battle and only fatigue declares the matter closed. If we stay down here long enough, one day we may again eat the enemy's liver. Such is the real nature of civil breakdown, martial law and insurgency and why they're best witnessed from a distance.
http://www.woodpilereport.com/html/index-280.htm
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