Thursday
28 October 1999
0830-1130 (L/S)
We have always advocated the policy of 'luring the enemy in deep,' precisely because it is the most effective military policy for a weak army strategically on the defensive to employ against a strong army.
Mao Zedong
Introduction:
World War II undermined imperial regimes throughout the world, creating the opportunity for colonials and the politically underprivileged to overthrow their masters. Flowing out of World War II was a wave of "revolutionary wars" that roiled the international waters for nearly three decades, supported, as it was, by its own burgeoning body of military thought. The Chinese Communist revolution was one of the first and most prominent of modern "revolutionary wars." Its chief theoretician, Mao Zedong, has had enormous influence on both the body of revolutionary war theory and military theory in general.
Revolutionary war as a phenomenon, however, has both a longer and a broader history than that of the Chinese Communist experience and its successors. While revolutionary war today has a largely post-World War II connotation and is predominantly associated with communist guerrilla movements, that perspective is too narrow. You can go back to the Hittite Kingdom during the fifteenth century BC to find the earliest mention of revolutionary guerrilla warfare. You can also find such diverse manifestations of revolutionary war as the Continental regulars of the American Revolution, "Spanish guerrillas" fighting the Napoleonic armies, the Boer Burgher commandos of South Africa, the Chinese and Vietnamese communist national liberation armies, and the urban terrorists of Latin America. Despite such a long and varied history, however, the body of revolutionary warfare theory has been, until recently, relatively thin. Most likely, this paucity is due to the preoccupation of most revolutionaries with sheer survival and to the fact that each revolutionary war is so particular to the situation--so rooted in its own conditions and circumstances-that it is difficult to generalize from the specific to a more universal theory.
Mao's success, and the logic and coherence of his theory, coupled with the post-World War II surge in revolutionary warfare, stimulated the thought of leaders around the world during much of the last half of the twentieth century. The readings for this topic survey some of the most important contributions to this growth in revolutionary war theory. The first reading for today examines the general phenomenon of revolutionary war and its underpinning theory, including Mao's influence on both. Think carefully about the coherence of this particular conception and how it relates to Clausewitz's notion of "the trinity of war."
Objectives:
- Understand revolutionary war as a distinctive phenomenon, and the principal ideas of Mao Zedong and other selected theorists about the nature, character, and conduct of revolutionary war.
- Analyze the connections between revolutionary war and its theory and the other theories studied in this course.
Issues for Consideration:
- Define revolutionary war and its principal elements. Do you perceive greater or lesser scope for this form of warfare in the foreseeable future?
- Assess Mao's understanding of the nature of war and his analysis of the strategic problem confronting the Chinese Communists in their three-sided war against the Japanese and the Kuomintang? Are Mao's ideas transportable and suitable as the basis for a universal theory?
- Was Giap a faithful follower of the Mao model? Was he correct in attempting to apply Mao's ideas in the Vietnamese revolution against the French, against the post-colonial government in South Vietnam, and against that government's American allies?
- What concepts from the military theories you've examined would be most useful to defeat a revolutionary war enemy? Why?
Required Readings:
* John Shy and Thomas W. Collier, "Revolutionary War," Makers of Modern Strategy: From Machiavelli to the Nuclear Age, ed. Peter Paret (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986), pp. 815-862. (Student Issue)
* Mao Tse-tung (Zedong), "The Military Problem," "Characteristics of China's Revolutionary War," "On the Purely Military Viewpoint," and "Base Areas in the Anti-Japanese Guerrilla War," Guerrilla Warfare and Marxism, ed. William J. Pomeroy (New York, NY: International Publishers, 1968), pp. 168-193. (Reprint)
* Vo Nguyen Giap, People's War, People's Army (New York, NY: Frederick A. Praeger, 1962), pp. 11-37. (Reprint)
* Carl von Clausewitz, On War, ed. and trans. Michael Howard and Peter Paret (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976), pp. 479-483. (Student Issue)
Supplemental Readings:
* Walter Laqueur, Guerrilla: A Historical and Critical Study (Boston, MA: Little, Brown and Company, 1976).
* Robert Taber, The War of the Flea: A Study of Guerrilla Warfare Theory and Practice (New York, NY: The Citadel Press, 1970).
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