comments:
Oh they did. Just not in the "try to prevent them" way. If you're trying to convince the local people to support you, and the British respond with fires that impact civilians, it makes it easier to convince the locals to support you, because look at what the British did! It's pretty much the playbook that Mao wrote. > Modern insurgencies also often use their attacks to try to lure their more powerful opponents into applying excessive firepower, thereby doing their propaganda for them (on this, read W. Morgan, The Hardest Place (2021) for just how easy it is for a Big Firepower military with lots of powerful air support to fall into this trap again and again. https://acoup.blog/2022/03/03/collections-how-the-weak-can-win-a-primer-on-protracted-war/