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Maybe. Lots and lots of territory to cover. Towns every 5 to 10 miles. Outnumbered 10K to 1 and there won’t be any defined front or target. It’s not like Fallujah where you got towns in the middle of a desert of nothing. They will have serious attrition issues if people start fighting back. It may be like Somalia.

Towns every 5 to 10 miles.

My whole county is like that. There are 4 towns between 5 and 10 minutes drive from this one and every one of those towns have more little towns around them the same way. Growing up in little towns like that means strong connections and bonds to those neighboring towns.

It may be like Somalia.

That is the perfect example. Or perhaps Zimbabwe. In Somalia a couple of trucks with DShKs on the back made you a warlord. But a column of takes could make you king.

Farmers are not mobile. They are tied to the land. If you shoot the tax collector Rham isn't going to send another tax collector. He is going to drop a barrage (heck one well placed round would do nicely) on your house and then send out his loyalists to confiscate the food.

Also you assume the locusts will be outnumbered. Here in the Peoples Republic of Illinois the Chicago Metro has 9.8 million people. The entire rest of the state has only 3 million people, and most of those are clustered around St. Louis. So exactly who is going to have that advantage of numbers. How are you going to outnumber them 10 to 1 when they start off with a three to one advantage, and they have interior lines. The highways all lead to and from the cities.

Finally you count on attrition. Well remember this discussion starts off with the theory that the people in the cities are starving. So the choice is to risk quick death bullet or die with absolute certainty from starvation. Suddenly the threat of attrition works against the rural population in terms of motivation. The threat of starvation is highly motivating.

The one thing that could stop this is the loyalty of Air Force and ANG units. Continuing the Illinois example the Illinois ANG has no fighters. So they won't be of any help to Mayor Rham. So if even a had full of regulars with A-10s decide to back the rural population then any attempt to to a repeat of Sherman's March is going to end up more like the Highway of Death. The ability to call in close air support solves a multitude of problems.

On the other hand if the Illinois ANG can scrape up even a handful of F-16s (they rotate some through for training purposes) the A-10s will end up doing a reenactment of the Marianas Turkey Shoot. Again it all comes down to who gets what from the US arsenal, and to whom are the troops loyal. Heck with Ft Knox having the 1st Armored Division and the gold to buy gas and ammo Kentucky may end up running the entire country.

Probably the only place the dynamic if firmly in the hands of the rural population are Montana, Wyoming and North Dakota. They grow their own food so they won't go hungry. They don't have big cities so there are no problems with local locusts. And under the ground they have coal, some oil and about 450 LGM-30s. The former are a source of cash. The latter say keep off the grass like nothing else on Earth.