Fabian tactics is the military strategy of avoiding direct conflict with a larger/more powerful military force, maintaining advantageous ground on the battlefield with your forces where possible, while attacking patrols and supply convoys of the enemy to weaken them and prevent total defeat. Used by the Roman politician Quintus Fabius Maximus Verrucosus to fight Hannibal after many direct conflicts resulted in massive defeats for the Roman Army.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fabian_strategy
This was later used by George Washington in the Revolutionary War. Has there ever been a successful countermeasure to this strategy in military science? Reprisals against the local population by an occupying force will usually only increase local resistance to the occupation. Any thoughts?
You might want to dig into the post history of /u/Bernadito, the topic expert for Modern Guerilla and Counterinsurgency. For example, on this question they talk about one of the examples of (limited) success in Vietnam, while [here] they talk about the Malaya Emergency, generally considered a successful counterinsurgency campaign. Although there certainly are lots of examples of these tactics being successful, I suspect they get remembered more than the failures, because they tend to be a story of the underdog winning.
I'd also raise a question: was the original Fabian strategy successful? It didn't defeat Hannibal. It might have done, given more time, but should a successful military strategy take into account the political realities at home? (Put another way: if Hannibal's strategy was to endure until the Romans got fed up of this kind of war, was this an effective countermeasure?)