On Guerrilla Warfare (United States Marine Corps translation)/Introduction Chapter 3
III
The first law of war is to preserve ourselves and destroy the enemy.
—Mao Tse-tung, 1937
MAO HAS NEVER CLAIMED that guerrilla action alone is decisive in a struggle for political control of the state, but only that it is a possible, natural, and necessary development in an agrarian-based revolutionary war.
Mao conceived this type of war as passing dirough a series of merging phases, the first of which is devoted to organization, consolidation, and preservation of regional base areas situated in isolated and difficult terrain. Here volunteers are trained and indoctrinated, and from here, agitators and propagandists set forth, individually or in groups of two or three, to "persuade" and "convince" the inhabitants of the surrounding countryside and to enlist their support. In effect, there is thus woven about each base a protective belt of sympathizers willing to supply food, recruits, and information. The pattern of the process is conspiratorial, clandestine, methodical, and progressive. Military operations will be sporadic.
In the next phase, direct action assumes an ever-increasing importance. Acts of sabotage and terrorism multiply; collaborationists and "reactionary elements" are liquidated. Attacks are made on vulnerable military and police outposts; weak columns are ambushed. The primary purpose of these operations is to procure arms, ammunition, and other essential material, particularly medical supplies and radios. As the growing guerrilla force becomes better equipped and its capabilities improve, political agents proceed with indoctrination of the inhabitants of peripheral districts soon to be absorbed into the expanding "liberated" area.
One of the primary objectives during the first phases is to persuade as many people as possible to commit themselves to the movement, so that it gradually acquires the quality of "mass." Local "home guards" or militia are formed. The militia is not primarily designed to be a mobile fighting force; it is a "back-up" for the better-trained and better-equipped guerrillas. The home guards form an indoctrinated and partially trained reserve. They function as vigilantes. They collect information, force merchants to make "voluntary" contributions, kidnap particularly obnoxious local landlords, and liquidate informers and collaborators. Their function is to protect the revolution.
Following Phase I (organization, consolidation, and preservation) and Phase II (progressive expansion) comes Phase III: decision, or destruction of the enemy. It is during this period that a significant percentage of the active guerrilla force completes its transformation into an orthodox establishment capable of engaging the enemy in conventional battle. This phase may be protracted by "negotiations." Such negotiations are not originated by revolutionists for the purpose of arriving at amicable arrangements with the opposition. Revolutions rarely compromise; compromises are made only to further the strategic design. Negotiation, then, is undertaken for the dual purpose of gaining time to buttress a position (military, political, social, economic) and to wear down, frustrate, and harass the opponent. Few, if any, essential concessions are to be expected from the revolutionary side, whose aim is only to create conditions that will preserve the unity of the strategic line and guarantee the development of a "victorious situation."
Intelligence is the decisive factor in planning guerrilla operations. Where is the enemy? In what strength? What does he propose to do? What is the state of his equipment, his supply, his morale? Are his leaders intelligent, bold, and imaginative or stupid and impetuous? Are his troops tough, efficient, and well disciplined, or poorly trained and soft? Guerrillas expect the members of their intelligence service to provide the answers to these and dozens more detailed questions.
Guerrilla intelligence nets are tightly organized and pervasive. In a guerrilla area, every person without exception must be considered an agent—old men and women, boys driving ox carts, girls tending goats, farm laborers, storekeepers, schoolteachers, priests, boatmen, scavengers. The local cadres "put the heat" on everyone, without regard to age or sex, to produce all conceivable information. And produce it they do.
As a corollary, guerrillas deny all information of themselves to their enemy, who is enveloped in an impenetrable fog. Total inability to get information was a constant complaint of the Nationalists during the first four Suppression Campaigns, as it was later of the Japanese in China and of the French in both Indochina and Algeria. This is a characteristic feature of all guerrilla wars. The enemy stands as on a lighted stage; from the darkness around him, thousands of unseen eyes intently study his every move, his every gesture. When he strikes out, he hits the air; his antagonists are insubstantial, as intangible as fleeting shadows in the moonlight.
Because of superior information, guerrillas always engage under conditions of their own choosing; because of superior knowledge of terrain, they are able to use it to their advantage and the enemy’s discomfiture. Guerrillas fight only when the chances of victory are weighted heavily in their favor; if the tide of battle unexpectedly flows against them, they withdraw. They rely on imaginative leadership, distraction, surprise, and mobility to create a victorious situation before battle is joined. The enemy is deceived and again deceived. Attacks are sudden, sharp, vicious, and of short duration. Many are harassing in nature; others designed to dislocate the enemy's plans and to agitate and confuse his commanders. The mind of the enemy and the will of his leaders is a target of far more importance than the bodies of his troops. Mao once remarked, not entirely facetiously, that guerrillas must be expert at running away since they do it so often. They avoid static dispositions; their effort is always to keep the situation as fluid as possible, to strike where and when the enemy least expects them. Only in this way can they retain the initiative and so be assured of freedom of action. Usually designed to lure the enemy into a baited trap, to confuse his leadership, or to distract his attention from an area in which a more decisive blow is imminent, "running away" is thus, paradoxically, offensive.
Guerrilla operations conducted over a wide region are necessarily decentralized. Each regional commander must be familiar with local conditions and take advantage of local opportunities. The same applies to commands in subordinate districts. This decentralization is to some extent forced upon guerrillas because they ordinarily lack a well-developed system of technical communications. But at the same time, decentralization for normal operations has many advantages, particularly if local leaders are ingenious and bold.
The enemy's rear is the guerrillas' front; they themselves have no rear. Their logistical problems are solved in a direct and elementary fashion: The enemy is the principal source of weapons, equipment, and ammunition.
Mao once said:
We have a claim on the output of the arsenals of London as well as of Hanyang, and what is more, it is to be delivered to us by the enemy's own transport corps. This is the sober truth, not a joke.
If it is a joke, it is a macabre one as far as American taxpayers are concerned. Defectors to the Communists from Chiang Kai-shek's American-equipped divisions were numbered in the tens of thousands. When they surrendered, they turned in mountains of American-made individual arms, jeeps, tanks, guns, bazookas, mortars, radios, and automatic weapons.
It is interesting to examine Mao’s strategical and tactical theories in the light of his principle of "unity of opposites." This seems to be an adaptation to military action of the ancient Chinese philosophical concept of Yin-Yang. Briefly, the Yin and the Yang are elemental and pervasive. Of opposite polarities, they represent female and male, dark and light, cold and heat, recession and aggression. Their reciprocal interaction is endless. In terms of the dialectic, they may be likened to the thesis and antithesis from which the synthesis is derived.
An important postulate of the Yin-Yang theory is that concealed within strength there is weakness, and within weakness, strength. It is a weakness of guerrillas that they operate in small groups that can be wiped out in a matter of minutes. But because they do operate in small groups, they can move rapidly and secretly into the vulnerable rear of the enemy.
In conventional tactics, dispersion of forces invites destruction; in guerrilla war, this very tactic is desirable both to confuse the enemy and to preserve the illusion that the guerrillas are ubiquitous.
It is often a disadvantage not to have heavy infantry weapons available, but the very fact of having to transport them has until recently tied conventional columns to roads and well-used tracks. The guerrilla travels light and travels fast. He turns the hazards of terrain to his advantage and makes an ally of tropical rains, heavy snow, intense heat, and freezing cold. Long night marches are difficult and dangerous, but the darkness shields his approach to an unsuspecting enemy.
In every apparent disadvantage, some advantage is to be found. The converse is equally true: In each apparent advantage lie the seeds of disadvantage. The Yin is not wholly Yin, nor the Yang wholly Yang. It is only the wise general, said the ancient Chinese military philosopher Sun Tzu, who is able to recognize this fact and to turn it to good account.
Guerrilla tactical doctrine may be summarized in four Chinese characters pronounced "Sheng Tung, Chi Hsi," which mean "Uproar [in the] East; Strike [in the] West." Here we find expressed the all-important principles of distraction on the one hand and concentration on the other; to fix the enemy's attention and to strike where and when he least anticipates the blow.
Guerrillas are masters of the arts of simulation and dissimulation; they create pretenses and simultaneously disguise or conceal their true semblance. Their tactical concepts, dynamic and flexible, are not cut to any particular pattern. But Mao's first law of war, to preserve oneself and destroy the enemy, is always governing.