[quote=Halo]
ahahahhahahahhahahahahhahahnolrn2historyI was gonna write out a huge post explaining why, but I don't want to get into a debate with all the 'murrikans here. It suffices to say that a colossal portion of the rebellion's victory was to do with luck, and to do with the aid of foreign nations who wanted to mess with Britain (the French in particular, as well as the Spanish and Dutch, all sided with the US at various points, if I recall correctly). And also, I think, to do with the fact that (particularly, but not solely, at the beginning of the war) the British (or, rather, Howe) were not willing to go all-out. Had they been, the rebellion would have been crushed very early on.Although thinking about it, I prefer the question "were the rebels actually the underdogs?" more than "could the British have beaten them?" That'd be much more fun to argue. >:3EDIT: Not that I'm claiming to be an expert on the Revolutionary War. I've never studied it in detail; my opinions on it are based mainly on what I've read around the internet from historians every single time this argument comes up.
[/quote]

The victory conditions were stacked in our favor. All we had to do was fight Britain to a stalemate unfavorable enough that they'd give up. The prospect of maintaining an American colony had to be so prohibitively expensive that any future attempts at control would be untenable. Which, turns out, was easy to accomplish -- simply by being in a state of open rebellion, Washington's mere existence was proof that we could not be ruled. It didn't matter that his army always lost -- [i]he had an army[/i], and he would always have an army -- would always be able to find international support from enemies of Britain, would always find colonists willing to replenish his ranks, would always and forever occupy *some* british territory *somewhere*, and nothing about that is a wise investment for an evil Redcoat overlord. 

TLDR -- of course America won. We had the smallest, poorest, worst-trained and badly led troops, but we also had the simplest victory conditions. That's the same thing currently giving us trouble in the middle east, too. It doesn't matter that you can kill a thousand terrorists with the click of a mouse -- that doesn't fuck with their odds of winning *at all*.