A National State can normally not win from an insurgency that has sufficient critical mass. I will now demonstrate why this is generally not possible.
Some people believe that what matters is the number of guns on each side, and that the side with more weapons will win. The problem is that it is not enough to have a weapon. You will still need to know whom exactly to shoot. Therefore, it is a critical issue for the National State to know who exactly is part of the insurgency and who is not. Of course, insurgents also know this. Therefore, they will do everything possible to hide their identities from the National State. One simple measure that insurgents apply, is to generally hide their faces:
They must obviously also avoid using real names. They also avoid establishing databases from which it would be possible to extract the identities of the insurgents. Of course, the National State would love to know the precise identities of the men in the picture above. That would allow them to contact their families and friends, and put pressure on them to reveal information about their colleague insurgents. Would you be able to keep resisting a phone call from your own mother?
The National State cannot do the same to protect its own security personnel.
In the exercise of power, its officers will have to show their faces and will have to tell their names. For the purpose of their bureaucracy, they will even establish numerous databases which contain all kinds of personally-identifying information about the staff working in government security departments.
These databases are insanely dangerous. If the insurgents manage to obtain the list of government security personnel, with names, home addresses, job titles and so on, the insurgents will be able take them on one by one. Just to give you an idea of how dangerous this is. A group of, for example, five insurgents could theoretically visit all government personnel, one by one, and in that way knock out the entire state security apparatus, just by using knives.
So, weapons do not matter, but head count does not matter either. It is not even the side with the largest number of fighters that will win. Given a relatively small (but still large enough) head count and given a very minimum of weapons, the only thing that matters from there on, is therefore: information.
National States are horribly bad at protecting their own critical information.
It is trivially easy to obtain lists of very detailed identifying information of all critical security personnel of a National State. The only personnel members that actually matter, are the ones who work in intelligence and counter-intelligence. For example, if you want to have the complete list of everybody working CIA, FBI, NSA, other three-letter agencies, or in defense contractor firms supplying critical resources to them, just buy a digital copy of the
OPM database on the black market. There is obviously no point in OPM director Katherine Archuleta to resign over this, as they suggest in the article. The National State is simply full of information honeypots waiting to get harvested and sold on to the highest bidder.
If the insurgents are truly determined to overthrow the National State, they eventually will.
National States are always based on bluff. The few hundred people who stormed the Bastille prison in Paris, on the 14th of July 1789, can confirm this with you. With the Council of the Third Estate proclaiming the National Assembly in the Palace of Mirrors in Versailles, and in this way expelling the two other Estates from the government of France, popular attacks on the symbols of the old regime had become inevitable. Unfortunately, the French revolutionaries ended up creating a new National State. That new National State has indeed turned out to be even worse than the previous one.