In response to someone who sarcastically said “how do you fight an ideology? I bet the men and women of our military have an answer!” This is sort of how I *thought* of responding….
What do you do to fight an ideology? Well, you’d want to find a low-cost method of sowing chaos and confusion – casualties would be good too – but some sort of low cost attacks on something that would freak out the entire economy. Big symbols, tall buildings… something like that. If you could force your opponent to kind of double-back on their stated ideals to create a lot of distrust of the establishment (like a “free democratic nation” could be driven towards a more surveillance-oriented mentality? Maybe a capitalist society would have to raise taxes in order to pay for that increase in security, something like that), and help reinforce negative stereotypes of your own people so that your enemy has a clear “us vs them” mentality. That’d probably help. Ooh! And a really good one would be if you kept your OWN establishment kind of nebulous, like… not really centralized… so that any action against you would inevitably rack up civilian casualties and a lack of immediate results, furthering that “us vs them” thing AND creating even greater distrust amongst your opponent’s people against THEIR government since they can’t see obvious victories. That would probably be expensive for THEM too – so you could have an even greater effect on their economy.
