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After more than 70 years, the writings of Mao Zedong on guerrilla warfare are still relevant and worthy of indepth study by United States Army Special Forces. One has to look no further than the ongoing conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan to realize that insurgency and counterinsurgency are becoming the norm, not the exception, in modern warfare.
Guerrilla warfare is not new; its well-documented history stretches back through time. While large, well-equipped, modern, conventional armies generally look down on guerrilla tactics, military forces have used these techniques when circumstances dictated. Though guerrilla fighters may often resemble a disorganized rabble, the true guerrilla is, in reality, very different.1
Guerrilla warfare is a technique available to a strategically weaker and less well-armed opponent. Guerrillas have the initiative and can choose the time and place to attack the organized power of a stronger opponent. At the same time, the guerrilla often has the advantage because he has the ability to refuse combat and fade from the battlefield. The guerrilla fights on a strategic defensive, but as seen in the Middle East, he can conduct tactically offensive war against military or government targets for psychological impact. Guerrilla factions are not capable of defeating or destroying a well-equipped enemy. The fact that the guerrilla selects military and government targets differentiates him from the terrorist, who generally selects noncombatant civilian and nongovernmental targets for a different kind of psychological impact.
Savages, bandits, drug lords and well-trained commandos have all made use of many of the same techniques. However, neither they nor counterinsurgency forces are true guerrillas. The distinction is that the guerrilla is a politically motivated, "armed civilian whose principal weapon is not his rifle or machete, but his relationship to the community, the nation in and for which he fights."2
In 20th-century China, Mao blended political and military activity to develop new concepts of guerrilla warfare.3 Mao's new strategy theorized and practiced a form of military conflict known as the people's protracted war, which called for "engaging a civilian population, or a significant part of such a population, against the military forces of an established or usurpative governmental authority."4
Mao fashioned a doctrine of guerrilla warfare based on a unique combination of politics and war. He recognized that insurgents must...