On Guerrilla Warfare
'One of the most influential documents of our time, Mao Tse-tung's pamphlet on guerrilla warfare has become the basic textbook for waging revolution in underdeveloped and emergent areas throughout the world. Recognizing the fundamental disparity between agrarian and urban societies, Mao advocated unorthodox strategies that converted deficits into advantages: using intelligence provided by the sympathetic peasant population; substituting deception, mobility, and surprise for superior firepower; using retreat as an offensive move; and educating the inhabitants on the ideological basis of the struggle.This radical new approach to warfare, waged in jungles and mountains by mobile guerrilla bands closely supported by local inhabitants, has been adopted by other revolutionary leaders from Ho Chi Minh to Che Guevara. Mao wrote On Guerrilla Warfare in 1937 while in retreat after ten years of battling the Nationalist army of Chiang Kai-shek. Twelve years later, the Nationalist Chinese were rousted from the mainland, and Mao consolidated his control of a new nation, having put his theories of revolutionary guerrilla warfare to the test. Established governments have slowly come to recognize the need to understand and devise means to counter this new method of warfare. Samuel B. Griffith's classic translation makes Mao's treatise widely available and includes a comprehensive introduction that profiles Mao, analyzes the nature and conduct of guerrilla warfare, and considers its implications for American policy'.
On Guerrilla Warfare Accessories
On Guerrilla Warfare Reviews
There are very few books written by guerrillas on actually how to prosecute a guerrilla war, so this work must be given credit for originality alone. Mao's work has become a classic as a general overview of how to conduct irregular warfare against a traditionally organized army. Many of Mao's one-liners have become guerrilla warfare maxims like the guerrilla being a fish swimming in an ocean of people. Today, Mao's ideas of being polite to the populace, using indirect means to fight the enemy, and incorporating propaganda into every combat operation are accepted as basic tenets of guerrilla warfare.
While Mao's work is a must read for understanding the evolution of resistance methodology, Mao gets low marks for being focused on the narrow problem-set which was his personal war against the invading Japanese and Chiang Kai-shek. The single biggest error by Mao is his assertion that guerrilla warfare is only useful as an adjunct to conventional warfare. The FLN in Algeria would disagree with this after ejecting colonial France from North Africa through guerrilla warfare. And Hezbollah would also disagree, after waging their successful 18-year guerrilla war against Israeli occupation forces. In this case, Mao is wrong - guerrilla warfare can stand alone as a style of warfare that can successfully defeat conventionally organized armies.
Mao's work has been given much credence because of his own success. Other movements have tried to copy his revolutionary design and have fallen flat, like El Slavador's FMLN, Peru's Shining Path, and Colombia's FARC. While Mao's tenet's are sound, he was successful largely due to the unique situation that was China. Mao's work should be taken for what it is, a treatise on how to conduct revolutionary warfare in mid-twentieth century China - not the bible of guerrilla warfare. However, any student of guerrilla warfare must have this work in their collection.
This book is a "must read". To understand the basic premise of guerrilla/revolutionary warfare.(as practiced by the Chinese & others) To understand much of post WWII conflicts, Vietnam, and even Iraq. This work is a good distillation of Chinese military thought, and easier to understand than Sun Tzu, and/or the 36 Strategies of Ancient China. Start here and move on to those.
I may be one of the few people that read this book that has no military experience , but even without that I couldn't put this book down. I just wish it was longer.
A must reading for counterinsurgency. Although, some of the material are only relevant to historians such as the appendices with the table of military organizations, the first three are good background on why the Chinese insurgency was successful. As always, take this book with a grain of salt and with readings on the issue, the period, and Mao. This is a book written by a premier communist; many truths were mixed with falsehoods. Although Mao said that the people were not to be compelled to support the insurgency, history has shown that fear was a main weapon of many insurgency including the Chinese one.
Looking at the other reviews on this book, many complain that it is a simple, out-dated work, with few insights provided. I see this book as being written with the goal of a general educating his soldiers. Short this book creates the structure of how the general want's to see guerrilla units created (this book focusses only on guerrilla warfare). The reason that there is no complex indepth writting in this book is that it would limit the officers' ability to use their imagination to create fully functioning guerrilla units. Leaving the flesh off, forces the leaders to adapt to their specific area of operations putting the flesh on the structure themselves. There is a lot to be drawn out of this book, and to only skim or read it once is doing the reader doing himself/herself a diservice. I bet that Bin Laden has read this book more than once, now if we can only get our politicians to read it once.
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