The Future of Warfare by Bevin Alexander

Author:Bevin Alexander
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 1995-07-14T16:00:00+00:00

In 1937, Japanese aggression against China turned into a full-scale war. The Japanese spread over much of northern and central China. To create internal Chinese unity, Chiang agreed to form a united front with the Communists. Although the alliance was in name only, the two sides cooperated in some degree against the common enemy.

To advise the Chinese on fighting the Japanese, Mao published Guerrilla Warfare in 1937.4 It was the first systematic study of the subject and is remarkable for two reasons: (1) it summarized the lessons Mao had learned in his war of insurgency against the Nationalists, and (2) showed how the same techniques could be used against a foreign invader, in this case Japan.

Scholars have largely ignored this latter message and have seen Mao’s study mostly as the bible of insurgency warfare. The majority of analysts have viewed Mao’s methods as primarily designed to assist a radical minority within a country to mount and sustain an internal rebellion aimed at violent revolution against an existing government. They have cited the Vietnam War as the leading example: that the Vietnamese Communists, who employed Mao’s theory, were an insurgent minority rebelling against the established government of Vietnam.

Yet the Vietnamese Communists were able to gain wide popular support because their primary aim was to achieve national independence by ousting invading imperialists—first France and then the United States. This was the identical goal of the Chinese against the Japanese. From the point of view of the Chinese and of the Vietnamese Communists, the domestic governments supporting the imperialist invaders were puppets. To them their war was not an internal struggle between factions but a war to repel external aggressors.

In this light, Mao Zedong’s 1937 book has immense significance today for weaker countries that are forced to conduct wars against powerful aggressor states. For Mao explains how invaders can be hobbled, not by fighting the invaders’ military power directly, but by avoiding this power and striking at their weaknesses.

In the 1930s, the Nationalists possessed far better arms than the Communists, but remained much inferior to the Japanese, whose industries were able to supply the army with the most modern equipment. Against Japanese firepower, Chinese armies invariably melted. As a consequence, Japanese armies occupied all of north China, much of central China, and all China’s major ports. But here the Japanese armies had to stop. Because they feared an attack from the Soviet Union, the Japanese had to keep large forces in the home islands and on guard in Manchuria, and could spare only a million fighting men for China. These were insufficient to occupy the vast outer reaches of the country.

Stymied, the Japanese tried to conclude a peace treaty with Chiang Kai-shek. But he knew any agreement with Japan would turn the country into an exploited colony. Thus no peace treaty was possible. Nevertheless, the KMT armies were unable to meet Japanese forces on even terms and were virtually useless militarily. A stalemate developed, but it benefited Japan, not China, because the Japanese

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.