There are far more former and reserve officers and NCOs with recent experience, than there are on active duty military plus police plus feds.
We are fighting 50,000 mostly illiterates with AKs in A-stan, and we are not winning.
How many 500 yard scoped deer rifles on up exist in private hands in the USA? Even Hitler would not attack Switzerland.
I don't disagree with what you're saying at all, and you've very articulately pointed out before how novel such a fight would be in world history. Still, the biggest problem we face, bar none, is the pairing of rising collectivist ambition with the inability of the modern military to properly understand or win wars. That's the kind of stuff that tragic miscalculations are made of.
Here's my concern. The left wants a fight. Specifically, they want a fight between the uniformed U.S. security forces (aka the center right) against the TEA Party/Constitutionalists/patriots (aka the far right).
The left doesn't have an army of its own, so their operational concept is to get the organs of the state to fight for them. They sit comfortably behind the flag, while making the actual patriots into public enemies. Rhetorically, it all works for them. The evil conservatives are vanquished, the left doesn't need to spill any blood, and the institutions that many conservatives cherish (military and law enforcement) are the ones that did the deed.
Fact of the matter is, the left has no army and really can't get one. They need a state-versus-patriot fight because there's no equivalent on the left. Just zero liability voters who expect to get paid in exchange for their support. They have needs and demands, true, but they're no pool of warriors ready to be tapped. That job will need to be outsourced.
The security structure in this country isn't leftist by any means, but there's lots of people with mortgages to pay and mouths to feed. They may be center right politically, but they'll do what they're told in the short run if the reason is marginally plausible. And that's the danger. The forces on the left that want the fight also want it to be over quickly, because it needs to be. They don't realize that realistically, once it starts, it could turn into Afghanistan in every single state. Even our own planners didn't realize that Afghanistan was going to turn into Afghanistan. Ditto Iraq. And at the higher levels, some of them are advising the same leftist powers-that-be on military and civil strategies like this.
Sadly, the left wants the fight so badly, and on paper they may think that the fight will be as easy as following the doctrine laid out by the nice men from the War College, but that kind of fight bedeviled us for a decade in the sandbox. It would be a thousand times worse here. It's that lack of understanding what they'd be unleashing that worries me more than anything. At least Hitler feared the Swiss for the right reasons. He may have been a fool in a number of ways, but he learned some hard lessons in WWI up close and personally. I really wonder if the left comprehends what kind of fire they're playing with.