Sarah Paine: evaluation

Transcript context

…riangle building, guerrilla warfare. And then, as you get more of these things, then you can start engaging in mobile warfare, try your hand at a little conventional warfare, reach out with diplomacy. And then if you go further in stage three, then you're talking positional warfare, and you're going to have the war-winning battle. And how do you get from the phases? 00:46:41 Well, the transition from phase one to two is basically you have a critical mass of base areas, cadres, armed forces that you can move into phase two. But the problem of being in phase two is what had looked like isolated acts of banditry in phase one to the incumbent government, now the incumbent government gets it, that they're facing an insurgency bent on regime change, and the regime changes strategy. So the communists are no longer under the radar, but they're in the crosshairs. And it's dangerous because they're weak and the enemy is strong. So when you transition to phase two, initially it is quite dangerous. And here's Mao writing about these problems and saying, "Look, in these stages one and two, the enemy is trying to have us concentrate our main forces for a decisive engagement," i.e. decisive in their favor, they'll win the war because they'll annihilate us. And of course, this is what General Westmoreland was trying to do in the Vietnam War, getting the North Vietnamese to concentrate so he could blow them off the map. And of course, they'd read their Mao and didn’t do that nonsense. 00:47:50 Mao was saying you only fight when you're sure of victory. Also, in order to get to phase three, you need a big friend. Why? Because phase three is conventional warfare, which requires infinite supplies of conventional armaments that requires an industrial base to produce it, and somewhere like China lacks this industrial base. So, good old Soviet Union played this role the world over. And so this is the secret sauce of people's war: if you want to get to phase three, you need a big buddy. That's where the Soviet Union came in. And so this is why Mao determines that Yan’an is going to be his terminal point of retreat. He's fighting his way through to the Soviet Union. No kidding, you've got to have the conventional arms. To fight this stuff. What's interesting about Mao's description of people's war is it actually applied not so much to the war with Japan, which he claimed it applied to, but rather to the civil war with the Nationalists. And here is the key. Mao didn't actually fight the regional war against Japan. The Nationalists did. The Nationalists did every bit of the conventional fighting, except one, and that's the Hundred Regiments campaign that Mao fought in North China in 1940, and he was smeared. The Japanese responded with a "three alls" campaign, which is "kill all, burn all, loot all," which is what they did. And it wiped out loads of communist base areas in North China. So, Mao never tried that ever again, and he certainly didn't write about it in his collected works. Don't talk about failures there. So, it's interesting. What he's talking about really applies to the civil war. 00:45:01 And Mao understands these different layers. te about it in his collected works. Don't talk about failures there. So, it's interesting. What he's talking about really applies to the civil war. 00:45:01 And Mao understands these different layers. So, as the Nationalists are busy fighting the Japanese and actually being destroyed by them, the communists are pretending that they're fighting the Japanese. They're later going to take credit for it and say, "We won against the Japanese," which is nonsense. There was also the United States in that as well. Because he's using that to strengthen the communists during all of this rural mobilization. So, when Japan's defeated and the communists, when the civil war resumes full bore, he's in a good situation. 00:48:47 Okay, that's it on Mao, the operational military leader at the operational level. Now let's put it all together as Mao the grand strategist, of linking all elements of national power into a coherent strategy. These are Mao's instruments of national power: the peasantry, propaganda, land reform, base areas, institution building, warfare, and diplomacy. The US military, when they're thinking about elements of national power, love this little framework: DIME. D is for diplomacy, I is intelligence, M for military, E for economics, as being critical elements of national power. It's better than only looking at the military elements, at least you got three more things. But if you look at Mao, this is not a cookie-cutter event. This is a different society, different national elements of national power are available. You've got to get to the other side of the tennis court net to see what the other team is doing. Mao is famous for all these reasons, but also for his sinification of Marxism, where he makes all the things that I’ve told you about, makes his version of Marxism much more applicable to these countries, the newly independent countries after World War II, of how they put things together. He positions himself to replace Stalin, who dies in 1953, as the leader of communism. 00:50:15 Mao was prescient on numerous levels. He was certainly prescient about the centrality of the peasantry. He was way ahead of his times on the importance of women. He was calculating and cunning on how he was going to use minorities and POWs. He had proven his kudoi and determination with his military strategy. He also anticipated when the Japanese war in China would stalemate, and he also anticipated, more or less, when the United States was going to get into the war in Asia. He's the great sinifier of Marxism. Mao produced all kinds of concepts and paradigms that are useful for insurgents who are trying to take over the host from within. I've listed a variety of them here, and I'm going to go through them in turn. These are the things that the counterinsurgent then has to counter. All right, rural mobilization. This is obviously a big deal in Mao. If you compare—and I'm going to be doing a lot of comparisons with the Vietnam War and the Korean War because they're communists and all these things—you can see Mao's rural mobilization was very successful in China. The North Vietnamese rural mobilization was also really good. South Korea, not so much. cause they're communists and all these things—you can see Mao's rural mobilization was very successful in China. The North Vietnamese rural mobilization was also really good. South Korea, not so much. 00:51:34 Why? The leader of North Korea was trying to mobilize the peasantry in the south, that wasn't so successful. And why? Syngman Rhee, the leader of South Korea, immediately did land reform, and this glues loyalty of soldiers to the leadership doing this. Maybe that is not the only factor, but an important factor for why the Korean War turns out differently. Base areas. Mao says those are really important. The North Vietnamese used them to great effect. They had all kinds of areas in the south and then on the borders of South Vietnam. North Korea, not so much. It couldn't form base areas in the South. Why? It's a peninsula which the US Navy cut off. It's also cold. So where are you going to flee if you want to do a base area? I think it's up a mountain in South Korea, and that will get cold in the winter, and you'll probably freeze to death. I believe “Al Qaeda” means "the base." I believe that's the correct translation. So if you're thinking about ISIS or whatever's left of it, you can go back to Mao's ideas about base areas, that you need a particular kind of geography that's good for the defensive. You've got to have a big party organization, a lot of local support, and you have to have military forces there. Does Al Qaeda—well, it's going to be ISIS or something—do they have all four of these things or can you remove any one of them? 00:53:03 Another idea from Mao is luring the enemy in deep. Mao had done that very successfully in the first three encirclement campaigns, and then he was removed from command, so he wasn't doing that anymore. Again, in the final phases of the Chinese Civil War, the `45 to `49 event, Mao lures the Nationalists deep into Manchuria. The Nationalists are a South China phenomenon. I showed you the map. Chiang Kai-shek starts in the south and he goes way up north, so he's weakest in the north. Mao lures him way up there in Manchuria, and then he springs a trap and destroys Chiang Kai-shek's armies up there. Then the entire civil war wraps up within a year of that. Mao also lured good old General MacArthur, who fancied himself a great Asianist in the Korean War. MacArthur goes all the way up to the Yalu River, right on the Chinese border in the Korean War, and Mao springs a trap. MacArthur didn't realize that 350,000 Chinese troops had been infiltrated around him. Oops, missed that. 00:54:12 It did not work out well. But for the US Navy, now, it needs to think about, what about being lured into the South and East China Seas and then the Chinese pulling the trap. There are places you don't need to go. The Chinese may have to go there, but maybe you don't have to. Another one is terminal point of retreat. I've talked about Yan'an being a really good one, and that worked. Then when the Manchurian campaign initially wasn't going well for Mao, he retreated up to Siping, which is a little bit north, and that worked well enough.…

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