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1-27. Protracted conflicts favor insurgents, and no strategy makes better use of that asymmetry than the People’s War conducted so well by the Chinese Communists and adapted by the North Vietnamese and Algerians. While this complex approach is relatively uncommon, it is the most difficult to counter. Mao Zedong’s model divides structurally into parallel political and military hierarchies, with the political hierarchy dominant. The overall strategic direction of the conflict comes from a centralized command element. The bulk of the effort is political subversion through united fronts and mass movements. Subversion often precedes the introduction of military forces into a region, and elements of the political cadre often remain behind after government forces have driven out the military elements. The guerrilla force expects to eventually wage a conventional war and seeks to form large conventional (what Mao calls “main force”) units.
1-28. Mao’s “Theory of Protracted War” outlines a three-phased politico-military approach:
Strategic Defensive. The enemy has the much stronger correlation of forces, and the insurgent must concentrate on survival and building support. Bases are established, local leaders recruited, and cellular networks and parallel governments established. The primary military activity is selective terrorist strikes to gain popular support and influence recalcitrant individuals.
Strategic Stalemate. Guerrilla warfare becomes the most important activity, as force correlations approach equilibrium. In the political arena, the insurgent concentrates on separating the people from the government and expanding areas of control.
Strategic Offensive. The insurgent now has superior strength. Military forces move to more conventional operations to destroy government military capability, while political actions are designed to completely displace all government authorities.
1-29. Maoist strategy does not require a sequential or complete application of all three stages. The aim is the seizure of political power within the state, and if the government’s will and capability collapses early in the process, so much the better. Later insurgent practitioners of this strategy have added new twists, to include rejecting the notion of an eventual switch to large-scale conventional operations. The Algerian insurgents could not manage much military success at all, but they were able to garner decisive popular support through superior organizational skills and astute propaganda that leveraged French mistakes. The North Vietnamese developed a detailed variant known as dau tranh, “the struggle,” which featured a variant of the logical lines of operations that will be explained in chapter 5. Besides modifying the three phases of military activity developed by Mao, they delineated specific political lines of operations to be conducted among the enemy population, enemy soldiers, and friendly forces. Though the North Vietnamese approach envisioned a culminating “general offensive–general uprising,” which never occurred as they expected, it was also designed to achieve victory by whatever means were effective. It did not attack one specific enemy center of gravity but instead put pressure on several, believing that over time victory would result from the activities of one or many lines of operation.
1-30. These protracted People’s War approaches are not only conducted nonsequentially along multiple politico-military lines of operations, but also are locally configured. One province could be in a guerrilla war while another was experiencing terrorist attacks. There may be differences in political activities between villages in the same province. The result is more than just a “three-block war”; it is a shifting “mosaic war” that is very difficult for a counterinsurgent to envision as a coherent whole, let alone centralize. This pattern can exist for any single insurgency, Maoist or not, and the COIN environment can become incredibly complex.