Guerilla, Counter Guerilla
The Art of War. By Sun Tzu. Translated by Samuel B. Griffith with a foreword by B. H. Liddell Hart. (0.U.P., 35s.) People's War People's Army: The Vietcong insurrection manual for undeveloped countries. By Vo Nguyen Giap. (Pall Mall Press, 35s.) Counter-Guerilla Operations : The Philippine Experience. By Col. N. D. Valerian° and Lieut.-Col. C. T. R. Bohannan. (Pall Mall Press, 40s.) 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. (1936.)
IN 1949 when the State Department's 'China White Paper' admitted that over two billion dollars' worth of US equipment had been lost to the Communists by the Kuomintang it was at last clear to us all that Mao's remark quoted above was anything but a humorous aside. Dienbienphu and the current hostilities in Laos and South Vietnam only underline one of the most serious statements of politico-military intention in the twentieth century. For it has become increasingly clear in the last decade that the so-called wars of national liberation by which the Communists seek to expand by internal aggression—even limited aggressive war on the Korean pattern has now become too dangerous—may be the chink in the West's armour of regional alliances and security pacts. Indeed, Khrushchev himself, in his famous address to party functionaries in January, 1961, has strongly recommended this form of warfare as the best way of breaking down the 'imperialist' front.
The blueprint of Communist revolutionary warfare may be found in Mao's three great works written in Pao-An and Yenan in north Shensi province after the exertions of the Long March: Strategic Problems of China's Revolu- tionary War (1936), On Guerilla Warfare (1937) and On the Protracted War (1938). The basic thesis is that expanding guerilla warfare com- bined with the total political mobilisation of the masses will in the end defeat the imperialists and their puppets, obsessed as they are with a 'mechanistic' approach to war in which weapons are all-important. Underlying the current Com- munist offensive in south-east Asia, therefore, is the calculation that just as in China the Kuomintang-held cities were gradually encircled by the Communist countryside, so throughout the world the forces of imperialism—and perhaps even of 'revisionism'—will inevitably be isolated by a sort of global Boxer uprising. 'Man, not weapons, decides the issues of war.'
Mao's writings undoubtedly entitle him to a place among the great classical strategists. So there could hardly be a better time than the present, with the growing interest in his works, for the publication of a splendid new edition of Sun Tzu, the greatest of all Chinese writers on war, and one to whom Mao frequently refers. As Liddell Hart says in a foreword, Sun Tzu's essays On war 'have never been surpassed in comprehensiveness and depth of understanding . . . the concentrated essence of wisdom in the conduct of war.' This martial saga of the fourth century BC has been translated by General Samuel Griffith who besides .a long introduction contributes also appendices on the influence of Sun Tzu on the Japanese and on his various translations in the West. The Are of War, saYs the translator, 'is the source of Mao Tse-tung s strategic theories and of the tactical doctrine of the Chinese armies.. ..'
Sun Tzu believed that the moral strength and intellectual faculty of man were decisive in war, and that if these were properly applied war could be waged with certain success. Never rd be undertaken thoughtlessly or recklessly, wal was to be preceded , by measures designed 10 make it easy to win. The master-conqueror frustrated his enemy's plans and broke up his alliances. He created cleavages betwees sovereign and minister, superiors and inferiors, commanders and subordinates. His spies and agents were active everywhere, gathering infer' mation, sowing dissension and nurturing subversion. The enemy was isolated and demoralised; his will to resist broken. . . . Only when the enemy could not be overcome bY these means was there recourse to armed force. . .
There is little here that today's master-conqueror in Peking has improved on.
With Sun Tzu's aphorisms in mind, one reads with great interest General Giap's primer ots guerilla warfare. This is a facsimile of the book first published during 1961 in Hanoi, from where Giap, Vice-Premier and Defence Minister of the 'Democratic Republic of Vietnam,' and C-in-C of the 'Vietnam People's Army,' directs, in his own words, the struggle `to complete the national democratic revolution throughout the country.' Giap is in fact the opposite number of General Harkins and his 14,000 American 'advisers' who are fighting a particularly un' pleasant war against the Vietcong in the jungles and paddy fields of South Vietnam. His book iS therefore of the greatest importance in undef. standing the issues, strategy and tactics of this war. Although the manual is really a haphazard collection of essays written at different times, and although as Roger Hillsman, the State Department's Intelligence and Research Director, • says in a long analytical foreword, quite a •lot of it is simply lies, the book still contains a highlY intelligent outline of the means by which the Vietminh both won their great victory over the French, and hope to overthrow President Ngo Dinh Diem.
There is a great, but unacknowledged, debt here to Mao, not only in such remarks as 'the Army and the people are of the same heart, they are like fish and water,' but in the conception of the three stages of the protracted war, defensive, stalemate and counter-offensive. Giap also emphasises the importance of self-defence and guerilla units in 'the battle for the villages,' particularly important in Vietnamese conditions. But Giap does not mention here his one major error, which he is known to have discussed from captured documents, which was his premature leap into the stage of the counter-offensive in 1949-50, when he was defeated by the French with heavy casualties in the Red River delta. The account of the Dienbienphu campaign is, hoW- ever, an excellent description of the most spec- tacular battle in a war which began as long ago as December, 1944, when the first French out- posts were attacked. For as a master-practitioner of revolutionary warfare, Giap is as convinced of the ultimate 'liberation' of South Vietnam as Mao was certain in 1936 that the whole of China would eventually be his. The guerilla warfare analysed by Mao and Giap is, of course, the second type of irregular warfare, for the first, patriotic partisan warfare, is transformed into revolutionary warfare bY the injection of ideology, whether Marxist or nationalist, as in Algeria. Increasingly in the last Jew years attention has been given in the US and the UK to a third type of irregular warfare- counter-guerilla operations. Campaigns in Greece and Malaya have shown that Communist guerillas can be decisively defeated; the study by Colonels Valeriano and Bohannan is a comprehensive case-history of a classic counter- insurgency operation, the smashing of the Communist-led Huks in the Philippines. In counter-guerilla operations. as the authors say, techniques and ideologies may •differ, but the Objective of both sides is the same—the State and its people. Yet there are many intangibles in counter-guerilla warfare, as we can see in the .detailed and authoritative collection of essays edited by Lieut.-Col. T. N. Greene. Certainly a Political solution' by itself does not mean 1/.ietory, for as Roger Hillsman writes here, Internal security is a problem in its own right and not simply a function of good government or economic growth' Moreover, to assume that a Communist guerilla movement is proof that a government is unpopular and therefore not worth supporting iS worse than mistaken—it is defeatist. As W. W. Rostow says in a brilliant survey of the Administration's attitude towards the problems Of revolutionary warfare, the first object of the Vietcong is not to persuade the Vietnamese Peasants that Communism is good, but that life IS insecure unless they co-operate with the guerillas. In Vietnam. as elsewhere„the primary Communist targets are not military ones, but the agronomists and health and education officers of the Saigon Government. Other articles in this extremely useful survey discuss in great detail the course of the fighting in Greece and Malaya, While other contributors deal with guerilla light- ing in. Cuba and Cyprus. Algeria and Indochina.
Many problems remain to be surmounted. In Greece, Malaya and the Philippines victory over the guerillas was possible because these nations were in one way or another separated from the Communist heartland. And in abortive insurrections in Burma and Indonesia the Communists attacked emerging nationalist regimes, so making their failure certain. In Vietnam the privileged sanctuary of the Demo- cratic Republic in the north means that the struggle will be long and hard, for all the American counter-insurgency hardware such as the new and effective 'Huey' helicopters can be partly neutralised by the 'Ho Chi Minh trail' which pipelines in men and supplies from Hanoi. One lesson above all emerges from these varied studies on the menace of revolutionary warfare. Although social reforms and the latest military techniques are indispensable for the counter- insurgents, the most important 'factor of all is political willpower. We, too, must be prepared to fight a protracted war.
DAVID REES
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