Strategy (34 page)

When, after the 1917 uprising, the Bolsheviks found themselves caught up in a civil war, military commissar Leon Trotsky also saw guerrilla warfare as a useful but subordinate form of fighting. It was demanding, so it required proper organization and direction and must be free from amateurish and adventurist influences. It could not “overthrow” an enemy but could cause difficulties. Whereas the stronger force would seek annihilation of the enemy using large-scale, centrally directed mass armies, the weaker force—Trotsky argued—might seek to disorganize the stronger using light, mobile units operating independently of one another. This followed Delbrück's distinction between annihilation and exhaustion. Trotsky was clearly in favor of annihilation. “The Soviet power has been all the time, and is still, the stronger side.” Its task was to crush the enemy “so as to free its hands for socialist construction.” It was the enemy, therefore, that was attempting guerrilla warfare. This reflected the shift, for the proletariat was now the ruling class and the tsarists were the rebels. Trotsky denied that his strategy was too ponderous and positional, and lacked mobility.
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The Red Army had begun with “volunteers, rebels, primitive, inexperienced guerrillas” and turned them into “proper, trained, disciplined regiments and divisions.” Nonetheless, as the civil war became more challenging, Trotsky sought to form mobile guerrilla detachments, supplements to “the weighty masses of the Red Army,” that would cause problems for the enemy on its rear.
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Guerrilla warfare was therefore viewed, even by radicals, as a lesser strategy, a defensive expedient but not a source of victory.

The expansion of the European empires during the nineteenth century prompted regular uprisings and rebellions, which put their own demands on regular forces. The British army put these tasks under the heading of imperial policing. The classic discussion was C. E. Calwell's
Small Wars
, published in 1896, which observed that as a general rule, “the quelling of the rebellion in distant colonies means protracted, thankless, invertebrate war.”
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It was Thomas Edward Lawrence, an archaeologist who made his name during the Great War seeking to foment an Arab rebellion against Ottoman rule, who did the most to develop principles about how guerrilla warfare should be fought rather than how it could be contained. Lawrence had not only a startling story to tell but also impressive literary gifts. His vivid metaphors and aphorisms help explain his influence. His memoir of the campaign,
The Seven Pillars of Wisdom
, remains a classic. His basic philosophy of guerrilla warfare, with a brief history of the revolt, was first published in October 1920.
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After the war, he struggled with the myth he had helped to create about himself, as well as with the failure of the Allied government to honor the promises of independence Lawrence had made to the Arabs.

The campaign against the Turks had begun in 1916 with operations against the long railroad between Medina and Damascus, a key supply line. The regular loss of trains frustrated the Turks, for whom fully protecting the railroad appeared impossible against the Arab enemy, Eventually, this turned into a full-scale Arab revolt—a major distraction for the Turks. Lawrence described a moment early in 1917. He had been wrestling with the limitations of irregular forces. They could not do what armed forces were supposed to do: “seek for the enemy's army, his centre of power, and destroy it in battle.” Moreover, they would not effectively attack a position nor could they defend one, as he had recently discovered. He concluded that their advantage lay in “depth, not in face” and that the threat of attack could be used to get the Turks stuck in defensive positions.

Lawrence then became ill and contemplated the future of his campaign while he recovered. He was “tolerably read” in military theory and impressed by Clausewitz. Yet he was repelled by the idea of an “absolute war” that was concerned solely with the destruction of enemy forces in “the one process battle.” It felt like buying victory in blood and he did not think the Arabs would want to do that. They were fighting for their freedom (“a pleasure only to be tasted by a man alive”). While armies were like plants, “immobile as a whole, firm-rooted, nourished through long stems to the head,” the Arab irregulars were more “a thing intangible, invulnerable, without front
or back, drifting about like gas.” The Turks would lack enough men to cope with the “ill will of the Arab people,” especially as they were likely to treat the rebellion in absolute terms. They would not realize “to make war upon rebellion is messy and slow, like eating soup with a knife.” Attacking the Turks' supply lines would keep them short of materiel. Instead of a war of contact there was the possibility here of a war of detachment. This would involve becoming known to the enemy only when there was an opportunity to attack and avoiding being put on the defensive by “perfect” intelligence. There was a psychological aspect to this. Lawrence spoke, in the commonplace of the time, of the “crowd” and the need to adjust the “spirit to the point where it becomes fit to exploit in action, the prearrangement of a changing opinion to a certain end.” The Arabs not only had to order their own men's minds but also those of the enemy (“as far as we could reach them”) and of supporting and hostile nations, as well as the “neutrals looking on.”

To this end Lawrence developed a small, highly mobile, and well-equipped force, which could take advantage of the Turks having distributed their forces thinly. The Arabs had nothing to defend and excellent knowledge of the desert. Tactics were “tip and run, not pushes, but strokes.” Having made their point in one place, they would not hold it but would instead move on to strike again elsewhere. Victory depended on the use of “speed, concealment, accuracy of fire.” “Irregular war,” Lawrence observed, “is more intellectual than a bayonet charge.” These tactics reduced the Turks to “helplessness.” Yet he conceded that this irregular war was not the main event in the defeat of the Ottoman Empire, which came as a result of a much more conventional push by British forces under General Allenby. In this respect, Lawrence's campaign was a “side show upon a side show,” though significant in a supporting role. In his acknowledgment of Allenby's role there was a tinge of regret that this deprived him of an opportunity to see whether war could be won without battles. It had been a “thrilling experiment” to “prove irregular war or rebellion to be an exact science.” He noted the advantages: an unassailable base (in his case the Red Sea ports protected by the Royal Navy), an alien enemy unable to manage the space it was occupying, and a friendly population (“Rebellions can be made by 2 per cent active in a striking force, and 98 per cent passive sympathetically.”). Lawrence offered the following synopsis:

In fifty words: granted mobility, security (in the form of denying targets to the enemy), time, and doctrine (the idea to convert every subject to friendliness), victory will rest with the insurgents, for the
algebraic factors are in the end decisive, and against them perfection of means and spirit struggle quite in vain.

It is not surprising to find that Liddell Hart was enamored of Lawrence, for he was the epitome of the indirect approach in action. The two men had brief correspondence after the war, and Liddell Hart borrowed Lawrence's insights. They later became friends when Liddell Hart summarized the main themes of Lawrence's thought for an article in the 1929 edition of the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
, for which he was military editor. Lawrence's exploits served a didactic purpose in illustrating the indirect approach, and Liddell Hart was impressed by this man who was both a thinker and doer and had found himself with such an influential command without have passed through the military system. Thereafter, Liddell Hart wrote an admiring biography in which he put Lawrence on a plinth.
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He was intrigued with Lawrence's observation that the Arabs hankered after bloodless victories. Otherwise he had little interest in irregular warfare for radical purposes. If anything, Liddell Hart disapproved of it because it normally led to brutality and terrorism. What enthused him was the possibility that regular warfare could develop along the lines Lawrence had shown to be possible with irregular warfare.
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This same resistance to the idea that guerrilla warfare could be a separate route to victory was evident in the strategy of Mao Zedong, who led the Chinese communists to victory over their nationalist opponents in 1949. Mao saw guerrilla warfare as an acceptable strategy when on the defensive but not as an independent route to victory. He relied on it whenever his immediate need was simply to survive. As this was often the case, his writings on guerrilla tactics have a certain authority, but his preferred form of warfare involved mobile, regular forces. Reliance on guerrilla warfare was dictated not only by the fact that for some twenty years Mao's forces were facing stronger armies in the former of the nationalist Kuomintang and Japanese occupation forces (from 1937–1945) but also because he made his base in rural areas and came to see the peasants rather than the urban proletariat as the source of revolution.

Although Mao came from a rural family, his initial work as a Communist Party activist in the 1920s focused on labor struggles. This was required by the Party's urban leadership, but Mao could not see how the working classes in such a vast, populous, and agrarian country as China could act as agents of
change. After witnessing peasant uprisings in Hunan, he observed in 1927 that the peasants, properly mobilized, could be “like a mighty storm, like a hurricane, a force so swift that no power, however great, will be able to hold it back,” sweeping away “all the imperialists, warlords, corrupt officials, local tyrants and evil gentry into their graves.” That year a fragile united front between the nationalists and the communists collapsed. In the ensuing confrontation, Mao's army was defeated and he was forced to flee. He concluded quickly that it was only by means of guerrilla warfare in the expanses of rural China that survival was possible.
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The next stage in his thinking, following the party leadership's disastrous forays against nationalist cities in 1930, was to conceive of the countryside not so much as a base from which to attack cities but as the place where the revolution could be made. He built up a new power base—the Kiangsi Soviet—but another failed conventional offensive against nationalist strongholds in 1934 led to a counterattack which put this base under pressure. He escaped by a mass evacuation, known as the Long March, which succeeded to the extent that he evaded capture—at an extremely high cost. The communists marched some six thousand miles for a year, until a new safe haven was found in Shensi province in October 1935. By then, Mao's force had been much reduced, to barely ten thousand men. According to Chang and Halliday, the nationalists actually allowed the communist army to escape—as Stalin was holding the son of nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek hostage—and then Mao took an unnecessarily long route to avoid joining a rival's larger force.
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With the old leadership discredited and a reputation, whether or not deserved, as a military commander and expert on rural China, Mao became Communist Party leader.

In July 1937, Japan invaded China. Mao had already proposed a united front against the Japanese. Though agreed upon the previous December, it was always tenuous in practice, not least because it suited Mao more than the nationalists as he was able to gain time. The nationalists were on the defensive, their leaders and officials pushed out of significant parts of the country. Meanwhile the Japanese were unable to establish effective authority, so the communists were given an opportunity to fill the political vacuum. They were accepted as the representatives of the anti-Japanese united front and given a hearing for the economic and social reforms they sought. The peasantry were given a chance to transform local power structures. At the same time Mao was extremely cautious when it came to taking on the Japanese. He concentrated on survival, especially once the United States entered the war in December 1941. Even after the war, when the civil war resumed in China, Mao remained cautious, expecting at best a negotiated peace with the Kuomintang.
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By 1947, he had begun to
appreciate that although the nationalists notionally occupied large parts of the country, their roots were not deep and were at last vulnerable to a communist offensive. He seized power in 1949.

Mao's ideas had taken shape a decade earlier. In their early formulations they diverged from received wisdom. As he was not then the Party leader, these ideas were formulated in more pragmatic and conditional terms than their more dogmatic later expressions suggested. The most authoritative presentation of the theory of people's war was a series of lectures in 1937, in the aftermath of the Long March and the Japanese invasion. These formed the basis of Mao's treatise on guerrilla warfare.
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They reflected his conviction that the peasantry could be an agent of revolutionary change. Because he was not working with the urban proletariat, who were supposed to acquire political consciousness as a matter of course, he put political education and mobilization at the heart of people's war. This required the masses to understand the politics of the struggle, the objectives for which it was being fought, and the program which would be implemented when it was won. The time gained by guerrilla tactics, therefore, had to be used productively “to conduct propaganda among the masses” to help them gain revolutionary power. Politics, therefore, always had to be in command.

Mao played down material factors, such as economic and military power, in which he was evidently deficient, in favor of human power and morale: “It is people, not things that are decisive.”
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Given the armed struggle in which he had been engaged for over a decade, it was not surprising that he insisted in another famous aphorism that “power grows out of the barrel of a gun,” reflecting the twists and turns of the armed struggle that had shaped his life. Mao had read Clausewitz and Lawrence.
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John Shy judged him to be in some respects closer to Jomini, with “similar maxims, repetitions, and exhortations,” and the same “compounding of analysis and prescription” and “didactic drive.”
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The influence of Sun Tzu was clear in his observations on how to wear down a superior enemy while avoiding battle (“The enemy advances, we retreat; the enemy camps, we harass. The enemy tires, we attack; the enemy retreats; we pursue”) and the importance of intelligence and a better grasp of the situation (“Know the enemy and know yourself and you can fight a hundred battles without disaster”).
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