Training The Peaceful Villagers / Real Life

• To a degree, this was how Hernán Cortés achieved the Spanish Conquest of the Aztec Empire. Although his many native allies were not exactly peaceful and had already their fair share of battle experience in their fights against the Aztecs, they were only accustomed to the local style of warfare, where Zerg Rush was a favorite tactic of all sides involved and there was more martial ritual than military sophistication. The Spaniards, however, brought to the table centuries of military innovations; not only elements than the natives didn't have a way to know, like steel, gunpowder and horses, but also concepts like siege tactics, war engineering and varied battle formations. The army that besieged Tenochtitlan was composed by only around 1,000 Spaniards and over 50,000 Tlaxcaltecs, Cholultecs, Texcocans and et caetera, but they all benefitted from the experience the Spaniards had gained besieging cities of the Moors and the French.
• Certain special forces groups worldwide, including the British SAS and the US Army's Green Berets, are sometimes tasked with raising up rag-tag revolutionary armies to bring down governments perceived as exploitative or antagonistic. The peacefulness of the villagers in question, however, varies wildly.
  • Afghanistan is the key example most folks will use. The villagers were never peaceful, but their pre-1900 rifles didn't do squat to attack helicopters. US trainers and assistance came in and gave them Stinger missiles, and not long after the Soviets learned how America felt in Vietnam.
    • The Taliban then used this against the Coalition forces during The War on Terror. Although in this case, "training" consisted of giving local farmers a wad of money and a cell phone and telling them to call the only phone number in the directory when a Coalition convoy passed by the nearby road. And that's how you got the many, many ISAF deaths.
  • Ironically, this happened in Vietnam too. There was a group of tribes collectively known as the Montagnards, who were routinely harassed by the North and South Vietnamese. US Special Forces provided them with training and some supplies and tools, and in return, they ended up proving to be very resourceful allies on the battlefield, who provided American forces with LOTS of helpful information. Too bad we didn't use that knowledge to make our lives easier in the past two decades' conflicts.
  • America itself only had a small standing army between 1865 and 1916, and especially between 1920 and 1940. Even in the latter case, the ability to raise an army as quickly as they did surprised a lot of other countries' leadership, on both sides.
    • Of course there is the example of the Prussian officer Baron von Steuben who, during the Revolutionary War, taught the ill-trained American Continental Army how to fight as well as the British.
• The Semai people had no violence, or even any words for violence. When they were taught to fight when the area became a war zone, they surprised their "teachers" by becoming frenzied and intoxicated with the bloodshed, since they didn't fully understand the effects of their actions. Fortunately, they are still extant and returned to their non-violent ways following the conflict ending.
• A key job of the British Special Operations Executive and the American Office of Strategic Services during World War II was to organise and train operatives to go behind enemy lines and train / supply resistance groups. Given the nature of the job, it was often a one-way journey.
  • This was also done by the Soviets whose partisans were often quite effective against the German Army. In this case, however, they were usually Soviet citizens but not necessarily ethnic Russians.
  • This came back to bite Stalin in the bum, as many of the partisans trained and recruited in Ukraine saw no reason to stop fighting after the Russians reconquered Ukraine from Germany. Anti-Russian and anti-communist partisans carried on sporadically fighting until well into the 1950s, the goal being a genuinely free Ukrainian state. Same (to various degrees) holds true for Baltic countries, Moldova, Belarus...
  • The downside to this is well illustrated in the aftermath of the war. Those same resistance groups that were so effective against the Axis powers were just as effective against colonial powers. Among the numerous groups helped was a group of resistance fighters in French Indo-China led by Ho Chi Minh.