First, here are some disclaimers! I do not support the use of underage peoples in war or work or whatever. Honestly, war is abominable, though sometimes necessary to defend the working class from oppressors. Even “normal” war killing between grown adults is a terrible thing, but sometimes there is no other choice.

Here is my best insight regarding the involvement of people under 18 in war:

For starters, we should differentiate between someone close to 18, like a 16 or 17 year old, being involved in war, and say… a 6 year old. The age of 18 is semi-arbitrary and was set by the west as the age of adulthood/voting/die-for-your-imperial-masters-if-things-are-still-mostly-stable-domestically, but the actual physical difference between a 17 year old and 18 year old, or even a 16 year old and 18 year old, is mostly negligible, physically anyway. This is why in many places even in the west the age of consent is often set to 15 or 16, usually with the caveat that if one of the participants in that relationship is older, they must not exceed a certain age gap. Even in the US, if someone graduates high school early, they can often join the military at 17. So including those ages as “child soldiers” means basically everyone everywhere has child soldiers.

Now, when participants in war have children, as in 6 year olds, or 9 year olds, 10 year olds, or other “very fucking young” people, involved in the violence, there is a lot of nuance that is necessary. For one, while many comrades on here referred to it as a “loser strategy”, I don’t think “loser” is as accurate as “desperate”, which is often the case in a revolution.

Revolutions are almost always a form of “asymmetric warfare” and “insurgency” with specific definitions. Asymmetric warfare is a war strategy employed when one or more participants VASTLY overpowers their adversaries, such as when the US was fighting against Vietnamese communist forces, or more recently Al-Qaeda or the Taliban. The US had more fighting personnel, more industry, more financing, higher technology levels, and allies with similar conditions, meanwhile the Vietnamese, Al Qaeda, and Taliban were poorly armed, trained, equipped, fed, and had very little civil infrastructure to rely on. Also, state actors can also engage in asymmetric warfare if their adversary is in a “superior” position, often employing such tactics in tandem with conventional warfare tactics. Inversely, particularly with insurgent revolutions, if an entity which started off utilizing asymmetric warfare from the disadvantaged position begins to gain the upper hand, they will tend to transition to more conventional methods of warfare.

A group entity is considered an “insurgency” when the group aspires to replace the existing government - including colonial governments - with one of their own or one they support. Al Qaeda wanted the US and Western influence out of the areas in which they operated (they wanted to eject existing colonial governments) and replace it with a government with their version of Islam and their cultural values at the fore (though with Al Qaeda, it didn’t need to be “them” specifically, just one with their values). With the Taliban, they wanted the US and company out and they wanted to replace that colonial government with a Taliban government. The Vietnamese Communists wanted the French and US out and their government in charge. Even the US war for independence was an insurgency; the USian entities wanted Britain out to be replaced by their own government.

So, revolutionaries almost always find themselves at a disadvantage at first. They lack funding, infrastructure, membership, and other cogs which allow them to conduct warfare “as equals”. They usually start off “desperate” and stay as such for the bulk of the war. This leads them to use desperate tactics, and this is especially true when fighting an enemy like the US who has no qualms about killing innocents, often openly justifying or bragging (see the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki) about it.

For example, there were children fighting against the Amerikkkans on the side of the Communists during that war. However, the Amerikkkans were massacring village after village after village, men, women, children, and even livestock. So entire villages had to defend themselves at all costs, because the cost was going to be everything if they lost. Children can’t go to school or have a fulfilling childhood if they are being killed in systematic genocide. However, as the Communists gained ground and started pushing the Amerikkkans out, there were fewer and fewer child soldiers, and by time the Vietnamese could declare victory, their forces looked very much like conventional forces and conducted themselves as such (they were using less boobytraps, wooden bullets, etc.). They had the means to do so.

That said, a grand majority of insurgencies, communist or not, do not use the very young kind of children, since even from a strategic perspective they can’t provide much assistance, not to mention the moral implications or the impact “forcing” children into war when it isn’t necessary can have on a cause and its chances of success. It is usually in circumstances like what I described with Vietnam in which the young kind of children become involved, and in that case I feel it says more about the US and company than it does about the Vietnamese communists.

Now, I’m going to repeat my disclaimer since it may have been forgotten after reading this.

I do not support the use of underage peoples in war or work or whatever. War as a whole is abominable, though sometimes necessary to defend the working class from oppressors. Even “normal” war killing between grown adults is a terrible thing, but sometimes there is no other choice.