Mao and Che

In the twentieth century, despite the writings of Lenin, it was the exploits and writings of Mao Tse-tung and Che Guevara that brought a systemic and broader political perspective to insurgency strategies. Their writings on insurgency have laid the foundation for the development of COIN strategies. The foundation of COIN doctrine is largely based on a response to the seminal ideologies of communist insurgency, Marxist and Maoist, established and popularly articulated by those giants of revolution, Mao and Che. We’ll review the views of both Mao and Che on guerrilla warfare before reverting briefly to that IRA Handbook.

11.2.1

287 It is a complex agreement, detailing mechanisms to generate socio-economic equality for the communities of Northern Ireland; a new system of government and the nature of its relationships with the UK and the Republic of Ireland; a commitment by the PIRA to

‘decommission arms’ together with the normalisation of British security activities in Northern Ireland; the release of ‘political’ prisoners and an improved respect for human rights and the traditions of the communities of Northern Ireland. Agreed by referendum in N.I in May 1998 concurrent with a referendum in the Republic of Ireland to agree a requisite Constitutional Amendment, denouncing its claim on the territory of Northern other than unification of the two parts of the island in time and by political means.

http://www.dfa.ie/home/index/asdex?id=335 (accessed July 6, 2012)

288 Anonymous, The Green Book Vol I&II, Provisional IRA, (presumed mid-1970s)

Mao

Mao Tse-tung on Guerrilla War was translated by Captain Samuel B. Griffith US Marine Corps in 1940 and published by the US Marine Corps for internal instruction in 1961 with an introduction, summary and conclusions by the now Brigadier General Griffith.²⁸⁹ Griffith’s work and its publication by the Marine Corps offers an indication of Mao’s place in the literature on Insurgency and the belief that familiarity with it will assist in preparing commanders to address insurgencies. Griffith’s knowledge of Mao’s work is in itself instructive. In his introduction, Griffith warns that it is both Chinese and Soviet Communist Party policy in 1960 that the pace of “wars of liberation will be stepped up” and that it is certainly Soviet policy to “support just wars without reservation.” Such wars could be expected to be anti-Western and distinctly anti-American. Post WWII, many in the under-developed world experienced great expectations that the West would change their lives for the better and now many in of those feel that they are being forgotten as the West pulls up the ladder of development. Nowadays (1960) the potential for revolution exists in any country where the government has failed to deliver a basically decent standard of living to their citizens. Where a revolutionary movement that can provide the doctrine and organisation exists in an environment of social injustice, wealth and poverty, guerrilla activity can be easily initiated. They see successful examples of social revolution to imitate… where the structure of society is changed. The constituent parts of the revolution are, in context specific proportion; military, political, economic, social and psychological. Revolutions, especially those ones including guerrilla activity, have a depth and dynamic quality that ‘orthodox’ wars do not have, and they necessitate serious military consideration.

Despite technical simplicity, guerrilla warfare is highly sophisticated combining an extraordinary range of social, physical and intellectual phenomena permitting it to operate in primitive conditions. It contains the complexity of man. “While not always humane, guerrilla warfare is human.” It is political and ensures that all its cadres are appropriately politically educated. Mao required his commanders to constantly focus on explaining the political doctrine to the cadres and to the people, to ensure sound organisation, to inculcate loyalty and to ensure that they all understand the nature of their fight. In his early writings, Mao compared the guerrillas to fish that swim in the water of the people. If the political temperature is right, the fish will thrive. The priority then is to ensure that the political temperature is right. Griffith mentions how Ho Chi Minh and Che Guevara have studied the works of Mao in developing their successful revolutions although guerrilla warfare existed long before Mao. Closer to

289 Mao Tse-tung on Yu Chi Chan (Guerrilla Warfare), 1936, Translated by Samuel B Griffith, USMC, 1940, Published by USMC, Quantico, Virginia, USA, 1961

home in the US War of Independence, Francis Marion in South Carolina, ‘the Swamp Fox’, frustrated the regiments of the British commander Cornwallis with a ‘rag tag’ bunch of sharp shooting guerrillas, working in collaboration with organised units… using, according to his British detractors,

“ungentlemanly and un-Christian tactics”. He remembers the original Spanish guerrillas who had harried Napoleon’s supply lines and rear guards in the Peninsular Wars. He mentions the Cossacks and peasants who harried his retreat from Moscow in 1812; a scene repeated against Hitler’s war machine in 1945. Lenin launched guerrilla warfare with all its political potency, but it was Mao Tse-tung who first systematically provided the definitive and masterly instruction on techniques with which he himself had changed the world.

In a profile of the man, we hear that Mao grew up in a very strict middle-income agricultural family and had the benefit of an excellent education. He was a prolific reader but drawn especially to political science, particularly to Marx and Lenin. He realised that the chaotic and grossly unjust system in China of his day was untenable and studied the options, choosing Marxism as the best one. To survive, China had to change. He associated with the communist intellectuals and joined the Party in 1921.

The China of 1921 was culturally homogenous but politically and economically it was in feudal chaos;

its potential having been virtually eaten up by encroaching and bullying Western powers and Japan, leaving it, in Mao’s term, ‘semicolonial,’ with over 400 million peasants living from hand to mouth;

many not owning their own land.

In 1926, just as Chiang Kai Check took command of the National Revolutionary Army, Mao went about his business of agitation, almost on a solo-run, targeting the critical and most divisive issue of land reform to address the needs of the landless peasants in his home province of Hunan. Advocating the expropriation and a more just redistribution of land, he didn't make many friends amongst the landed gentry, the influential sector of the community that the nationalists were anxious to keep onside.

Mao envisaged the elimination of this class. In May 1927,Chiang executed a pogrom against communist and labour leaders in Shanghai and targeted communists within the National Revolutionary Army. The Communists left government as Soviet advisors quit China and the Communist leaders went into hiding in remote areas. Mao fled to a mountainous frontier area and began to develop his army. He gathered in local bandit chieftains who joined the Communists and Mao focused on political indoctrination, gradually expanding revolutionary activities, establishing district soviets, confiscating and redistributing land and funding activities by collecting ‘taxes’ from business interests. A base area established, Mao now commenced operations against the national army provincial out-posts. In 1930

the Central Committee of the Party ordered an offensive against urban centers held by the nationalists.

The following attacks were not successful and it led to a reassessment by Mao and a refocus away from attention on the winning of the urban population to a focus on the rural agrarian peasants. This critical decision is what has differentiated the Maoist from the Marxist revolution that focused on the industrial proletariat and Mao’s choice has proven the more successful of the two. Late in the same year Chiang launched his army against the Communists, and subsequently three more times in the next two years, all being failures. In 1933 he launched a more systematic squeezing-out of the communists from their base areas, using artillery and air support, and most effectively, evacuating villages as they moved. This worked and the communists, loosing their supporting masses, were forces to seek new bases of operation through the Long March, a 6,000 mile trek, initially North, constantly under attack, over difficult terrain to eventually settle in Yenan Province. Here, in 1936, with Chiang’s army preoccupied with the Japanese invasion, Mao wrote his theory and doctrine on guerrilla warfare.²⁹⁰ Guerrilla action is only one of a series of phases in gaining political control of the state and a critical element in an agrarian revolution. The first phase is the “organisation, consolidation and preservation of the regional base” which is located in a remote area. This is where the guerrilla army is indoctrinated and gradually built-up in a systematic and clandestine way, drawing from the disgruntled inhabitants establishing a loyal base and source of supply. Local militias are formed to provide a home guard and strengthen the movement by dealing with anti-revolutionary elements. In the second phase,

“progressive expansion” direct action gains importance with time. It included acts of sabotage, terror, elimination of collaborative threats, hitting remote police and military out-post while procuring arms and ammunition and other necessary supplies. Political indoctrination, reaching to adjacent areas continues throughout this phase. Phase three, the destruction of the enemy occurs when the movement is consolidated as a mass movement with an orthodox establishment, capable of engaging the enemy in conventional combat. During this phase, the movement may be engaged in negotiations but not for the purpose of compromise, simply to gain time and to support strategic political, military, economic and social maneuver. Successful guerrilla movements will offer few critical concessions. Intelligence is the key to success and is gathered from multiple sources, pervasive and deep within all areas of society.

Everyone is a source of intelligences. Guerrilla movements will rigorously deny information to the enemy. Secrecy is the key to survival. By controlling information the guerrilla maintains the initiative.

Guerrillas fight only when they will win. If the odds suddenly change against the guerrilla, he

290 Mao Tse-tung, Yu Chi Chan 1936, Op sit.

withdraws. The guerrilla relies on good leadership, imagination, surprise, subterfuge, deception, innovation, distraction and mobility to ensure the advantage. “Attacks are sudden, sharp, vicious and short.” Guerrillas “are experts at running away,” remaining fluid, flexible and amorphous, retaining freedom of action. The prime target is the minds of enemy leaders. They must be unsettled, uncomfortable, exhausted and fearful. Griffith quotes from the Chinese guerrilla rule… “Uproar (in the) East. Strike (in the) West.”²⁹¹ However, Mao’s primary rule remains to “preserve oneself and destroy the enemy.”

The guerrilla ranges over a wide area in a decentralised organisation permitting local leaders with sound local knowledge to use initiative. “The enemies rear is the guerrilla’s front. The guerrillas have no front.” Logistics supply is courtesy of the enemy.

Griffith analysis Mao’s ‘Principle of Opposites’ and equates it to the ancient Chinese philosophical concept of Yin-Yang; explaining the critical strength of opposites working together; male-female, dark-light, hot-cold, recession-aggression and thesis-antithesis resulting in synthesis. He considers the paradox of strength in weakness. In the asymmetric condition of the conventional force and the guerrilla movement, apparent disadvantages become advantages, resulting in the con-foundation of the conventional army. Quoting Sun Tzu, he comments that it takes a good general to recognise the strength in weakness.²⁹²

Griffith draws some conclusions. A partisan resistance begins and then it is organised. A revolutionary guerrilla movement is organised and then it begins. History suggests that it will be unlikely that a revolutionary guerrilla movement will be destroyed once it passes the first phase of revolution and has co-opted a significant portion of society, maybe 15 to 25%. Other factors affecting the success of a guerrilla movement include terrain, communications, and quality of enemy leadership, internal and external support, foreign fighters and the military capacity of the incumbent government. Griffith lists his variables in a pair of matrixes, considering Castro v. the Batista government in Cuba and Ho Chi Minh v. the French in Vietnam. a) Appeal of the programme, b) popular support, c) quality of leadership, d) quality of troops, e) Military efficiency, f) internal unity, g) equipment, h) base area terrain, j) base area communication and k) sanctuary; rating them from 1 to 10, 5 being satisfactory. He concludes that it should have been easy to predict the success of the guerrillas. It is unfortunate that

291 From the Chinese characters… “Shen Tung, Chi His”

292 Sun Tzu… Military general, strategist and philosopher who lived in China approximately 500 BC, who contributed to Asian history as much through the mythology surrounding him as his literary legacy. His influential opus, the Art of War, has been an indispensible textbook of military strategists for over two thousand years, perhaps laying the basis, in particular, of guerrilla tactics.

http://www.scribd.com/doc/51851445/Sun-Tzu-The-Art-of-War/120547157972228.html (accessed July 4, 2012)

later COIN operations did not employ Griffith’s matrix and consider more deeply the significance of his chosen variables in influencing the outcomes of guerrilla wars.

Topically in the context of current day COIN, Griffith turns his attention to the optimism being expressed for the potential impact of nascent technology, “gadgetry”, on future guerrilla wars. He is skeptical as the complexity of men’s minds is the dominant technology in guerrilla warfare.

Having expressed an opinion on how and when assistance should be given to guerrilla wars, Griffith states that anti-guerrilla operations (COIN concept not yet having been coined) can be expressed in three words; location, isolation and eradication. He initially misses the entire relevance of the masses, the people, and instead, unsurprisingly for a young Marine officer, focuses on the agency of military kinetic action in defeating a guerrilla revolution. He advises that guerrilla tactics must be used against guerrillas. Finally Griffith does consider the question if it is possible to ‘create effective counter-guerrilla forces. Mao was adamant that it is not, but Griffith says that this position does not stand up to examination, with some context specific cases offering the exception. However, Griffith is clear that military measures alone will not defeat a revolutionary war.

Griffith mentions the influence of Sun Tzu’s philosophy on Mao and says that his advise remains valid 2,400 years later. Mao’s massive Chinese guerrilla movement is unprecedented in its organisation and coherence of the military political and economic perspective. In his 1940 comments as a young Marine Captain, Griffith has underestimated the social element in Mao’s guerrilla warfare. In his further note added as a Marine brigadier general in 1961 he quotes Mao, considering the guerrilla war against the Japanese, “the moment that this war of resistance disassociates itself from the masses of the people is the precise moment that it disassociates itself from hope of ultimate victory.”

Having reviewed Griffith’s introduction, summary and conclusions, we can look briefly and directly at some of the key elements in Mao Tse-tung’s Yu Chi Chan (Guerrilla Warfare).²⁹³ Mao, having castigated the detractors of guerrilla action stresses the necessity for organisation and political coherence with sound political and military leadership. Quality is more important than quantity;

discipline, loyalty and integrity being critical qualities. Guerrilla tactics are based on alertness, mobility and attack adapted to enemy dispositions, strength terrain, communications, weather, the situation of the people and also adapted to context, focusing on the enemy’s rear while the guerrillas exposes no front or rear… they are amorphous.

293 Mao Tse-tung 1936, Op sit

Guerrilla movements that are not supporting the emancipation of the masses must be opposed.

Guerrilla warfare and conventional warfare are not comparable. Guerrilla warfare is not an end in itself but a phase of a larger war and should be ready to collaborate with supporting conventional forces (consider the context of opposing the Japanese invader) Guerrilla warfare in its final phase will move towards conventional warfare to defeat an opposing conventional force. Guerrilla warfare can be considered as “a necessary strategic auxiliary to orthodox operations.” In reviewing historical examples of guerrilla wars Mao contends, “historical experience is written in iron and blood.”… its example will spread across the world. History demonstrates that a people united in a righteous cause cannot be defeated.

The guerrilla band is formed from the masses, drawing expertise wherever it can be found incorporating a wide range of skills. Strength is in diversity. Organisation is vital, with all, in addition to the core guerrilla units, engaged in supporting the war effort including local security, indoctrination, anti-propaganda operations, vigilante activities, information gathering and misinformation dissemination, prevention of local counter-revolutionary activity, etc. The guerrilla is lightly equipped, scavenging arms and ammunition from the enemy and supported by the masses. Political indoctrination is critical at all stages of operation, both within the movement at in attracting the masses and in “awakening national consciousness… the complex objectives of emancipation must be explained to simple peasants.” The “revolutionary army has discipline that is established on a limited democratic basis.” In detailing how the guerrilla will behave to the local population, Mao lists the 3 Rules and the 8 Remarks.²⁹⁴ Treat enemy captives decently and propagandise them. “Conserve ones own strength and destroy the enemy’s.”

Guerrilla units start from nothing and grow. Guerrillas retain the initiative and plan attacks carefully in a protracted war of strategic defence; complement operations of the regular army (against the Japanese invader); establish bases; understand the relationship between the attack and the defence; develop mobile operations and have sound leadership.

Surprise, secrecy, speed, persistence, unpredictability, flexibility an fluidity, with the guerrillas maintaining the initiative to wrong-foot the enemy through alternate concentration and dispersion and independent action, are the mark of guerrilla tactics.

294 Mao’s 3 Rules and 8 Remarks for behavior with local populations:

Rules: 1. All actions are subject to command; 2. Do not steal from the people; 3. Be neither selfish nor unjust.

8 Remarks: 1. Replace the door when you leave a house; 2. Roll up the bedding on which you have slept; 3. Be courteous; 4. Be honest in your transactions; 5. Return what you borrow; 6. Replace what you break; 7. Do not bathe in the presence of women; 8. Do not, without authority, search the pocketbooks of those you arrest. From Mao Tse-tung, 1936, Op sit

Such is the seminal guidance from the Master to guerrilla movements throughout the world for the foreseeable future.

11.2.2 Che

Che Guevara dedicated his Guerrilla Warfare to his fallen comrade, fellow giant of the Cuban Revolution, Camilo Cienfuego, eulogising his friend’s qualities as a guerrilla fighter. ²⁹⁵ He includes inner vitality, tenacity, intelligence, loyalty, devotion, a man of the people, and above all, audacity…

those critical guerrilla qualities that defeated an oppressive regime. Guevara says that the success of Cuban Revolution against Batista oppression demonstrated that a people could indeed free themselves from oppression by means of guerrilla warfare in three fundamental lessons. a) Popular forces can win against a conventional army; b) one doesn’t need to wait for the right conditions; the insurgency can create them, and c) in an underdeveloped environment, the rural setting is the best place for guerrilla fighting. He says that oppression by an illegitimate government is already the end of peace in which dissent can express itself in active forms as a final option of the oppressed. If the government has come to power by legitimate means; a popular vote, and maintains “at least an appearance of constitutional legality”… peaceful means to resolve dissent have not been exhausted and insurgency should not be promoted under such conditions.

Guerrilla warfare is the basis of a people striving to rescue itself from injustice through liberation.

Guerrilla warfare is a phase of war that follows the ‘law of war’ but also must develop context specific characteristics. Guerrilla warfare is the people against an oppressor … it is a war of the masses, one that must have the full support of the people. It is a war of social reform, a response to the anger of the people at their oppressors and a social system that subjugates the unarmed masses.

Rural guerrilla warfare requires good local knowledge and capacity of rapid maneuver with the support of the people. This is facilitated by operating in “wild places with small populations;” places where the struggle for livelihood is greatest, facilitating an agrarian revolution. In such places the burning issue for social reform is usually the issue of land ownership and the desire of the population to be the owners of their means of production. He mentions that Mao learned this at the end of the Long March and shifted his focus from urban workers to the rural masses. Ho Chi Minh’s struggle was also based on the grievances of the rural peasants. He points out that the revolutions of both China and Vietnam

295 Ernesto Che Guevara, Guerrilla Warfare, Monthly Review Press, New York, 1961