[Williams]

You’re talking generalized nonsense. The Philippines has never shown the ability to successfully go “scorched earth” on the insurgents.

Muslims have control of Southern islands and the government has no ability to wipe them out. They usually call on us for help but even so they make marginal progress.

[Zhang Fei]

[The Philippines has never shown the ability to successfully go “scorched earth” on the insurgents.]

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Post-independence, the Philippines has never attempted scorched earth on the insurgents. Then again, the Philippines had never, until Duterte, simply killed people in the streets, including serving elected officials, and left their bodies lying there.

This is not rocket science. Even the most incompetent regimes can exterminate entire regions. It’s basically a large-scale hunt, where every living human is killed. Alexander was able to do this with fairly primitive weaponry. The Indonesians did it mostly with edged weapons not too dissimilar from what the Greeks used. The Hutus killed 800,000 using similar methods.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rwandan_genocide