Document created: 6 January 04
Air University Review, July-August
1972
Major General
Edward G. Lansdale, USAF (Ret)
There are Americans who study the history of warfare in order to prepare themselves for leadership roles in the future armed conflict. It is not that they have an unhealthy love of war. Rather it is their awareness of the world we live in and of man’s proclivity for war that makes them study; if the United States gets into shooting trouble in the future, they want to be ready to serve our country expertly and professionally. I believe that these Americans, with their foresightedness, are admirable. In the event of war, I want them to succeed. Because I do, I offer them the following thoughts about the nature of a war which I feel may well be the next one in which Americans are involved.
In a war, of course, there are two sides, ours and theirs. Among those on the other side against us there will be at least one person who is the real opposite number of each American military leader, whatever his rank—an opposite number who will try to out-think the American—an opposite number who will try to outdo the American.
I believe that this opposite number will be a revolutionary. I don’t want him to surprise us.
Concluding from the course of studies pursued in our advanced service schools, I am aware that an American military leader is expected to have quite a different sort of opponent. I gather that he is supposed to come up against a fairly grown-up whiz kid—a bright military type who has learned to manage masses of men, money, and materiel for nuclear wipe-outs or for the “instrument of policy” gambits of power politics. That sort of thing.
I suspect that this opponent now emerges in the imagination as not too bad a guy. A professional like our Air Force professionals—only he is taking a course at his war college. Perhaps it is a national war college such as the Voroshilov General Staff Academy in Moscow or the Soviet air and naval war colleges at Monino and Leningrad. Or perhaps it is a war college such as the ones at Peking, Tirana, Brno, Dresden, Budapest, Bucharest, or Belgrade.
Well, maybe the course planners of our schools are right. But, again, maybe they are not. We live in a revolutionary era. My hunch is that history is waiting to play a deadly joke on us. It did so on recent graduates of the Imperial Defence College in London, who now find themselves facing the savagery of revolutionary warfare in Northern Ireland. It did so on the Pakistani officers under General Niazi, who undoubtedly wish now that they had learned better ways of coping with the Mukti Bahini guerrillas. It is starting to do so on Argentine graduates of the Escuela Nacional de Guerra in Buenos Aires, who are waking up to the fact that Marxist ERP guerrillas intend to win themselves a country with the methods of the Tupamaros next door.
Our place in history is one of great social ferment, a breeding time for advocates of making politics out of a gun barrel. As the defenders of what now exists, we are in the way of such advocates. So they are learning how to defeat us. Their education in how to do this, through revolutionary struggle, is vastly different from ours. Perhaps some of it, superficially, might look familiar, such as students attending lectures in a classroom of the associate course at Moscow’s Lenin Political Academy. The subject matter is not familiar, however. Further, the graduates of such formal schools are adept at getting others to carry out the actual struggle. They step in afterwards, as organization men, to actually run things. One need look no further than Cuba for a classic example of how the fighters lost their revolution to the organization men afterwards.
Our future opponent, the hard-core revolutionary, right now is probably getting his higher schooling in his style of warfare by carrying out illegal actions on the very battleground where we will come up against him later. Or maybe he is in jail, going through some further hardening that will set him apart from other men. Most likely he is an idealist whose experiences have forced him to grow a tough hide, to cling even closer to a political ideology and a belief in its eventual success—and its eventual humanity—to answer his own doubts about the ugly things he has had to do in the name of his cause. For he probably has killed at least one person, face to face, has blown up others with plastic or dynamite, and perhaps has done his share of kidnapping, arson, torture, and bank robbery.
He might even be from an affluent family, a college graduate, a seeming member of the part of society he is seeking to destroy—as have been so many of the revolutionaries of our time. Thus, his formal education might have been much the same as ours, except that somewhere along the line he started picking up other ideas and using them, committing himself. Perhaps these were the teachings of Mao Tse-tung, or of “Che” Guevara, or of Vo Nguyen Giap. Or perhaps they were the teachings that have supplanted Che’s with so many younger revolutionaries, those in “The Minimanual for Urban Guerrillas” by Carlos Marighella. (His book tells how to make and steal weapons, describes the most valuable places to bomb, whom to attack or kidnap, and how to survive in the concrete jungles of the cities.) Or perhaps our future opponent only learned the teachings in the new training films for revolutionaries now being shown throughout this hemisphere as well as in Africa and elsewhere.
The point is that he is getting ready in a hard, realistic school, learning rules of combat vastly different from those that are being taught in our war colleges. He has many recent examples to assure him that the rules he is learning will succeed over the rules that our professionals are learning.
About all that I can do in this article is to give a glimpse of what this prospective opponent knows and does—and a further glimpse of the only way I know of defeating him. I hope readers of the article will start studying him and his ways on their own. Certainly we are going to need every bit of knowledge and alertness and wisdom possible when we come up against him.
This possible future adversary of ours is a believer in waging total political warfare to gain his ends. His task is to destroy the existing social order. Its destruction accomplished, he intends to replace it with another social order, one that he believes to be ideal, beautiful, and as perfect as humans can make it. He says that this end justifies the means he uses, not daring to understand that ugly means only result in an equally ugly end, not the utopia he envisions.
Various names are given to this total political warfare that he wages. Among these names are “war of national liberation,” “people’s war,” “revolutionary war,” “guerrilla war,” and even “insurgency.” I feel that it is useful for us to think of these conflicts as “people’s wars,” because this helps us to focus on the most important feature of the battleground: the people who live on it. Whoever wins their support, and keeps it, wins the struggle.
We military men are great ones for studying the wars and the battles of the past. Yet, in the face of today’s people’s wars, it strikes me that too little time has been spent in studying the great “people’s wars” of the past—the ones that are so filled with precepts of use today. Three of the people’s wars of the past come to mind in particular: the American Revolution, the French Revolution, and the so-called Wuchang Uprising of 1911, when Sun Yat-sen’s ideas turned China upside down.
I admit that study of these people’s wars is not very rewarding in terms of conventional military operations. Somehow the critical actions in these wars seem to have been invariably offstage, out beyond the battalions somewhere. True enough, they were. Each of these wars was fought by revolutionaries as a total political war. Each saw masterful use of psychological warfare as the prime weapon in the struggle. Each resulted in the overthrow of centralized, dictatorial governmental rule by finding the weaknesses in it and then prying away at those flaws until they cracked open and the structure fell in on itself. It is significant that the French Revolution and the Wuchang Uprising overthrew centralized, dictatorial governments only to have them replaced by new centralized, dictatorial governments. It was only the American Revolution that wound up with a way in which the people could govern themselves.
Consider how Americans fought and won our Revolution. First they built a careful political foundation for their cause, a legal brief almost, one that pled their case eloquently in the court of world opinion. Then they engaged in dynamic psychological actions, backed by armed resistance where possible. Think of what would have happened in Vietnam if the practical ideas from our own Revolution had been applied there—by our side, not the enemy’s. If we had used the psychological actions of our own Revolution, Ho Chi Minh’s gang would have been scaled down to their frailties and split away from popular support—just as were George III’s forces. Ho’s claim to be the people’s leader was as phony as the claim of the divine right of kings—and every bit as vulnerable to devastating attack.
Lenin apparently heeded the lessons from the French Revolution when the Germans returned him to Russia in 1917. As is well known, the French revolutionaries were sloppy on discipline and organization, were violently moved by emotions while proclaiming themselves as men of reason, and killed their leaders at a great rate—until Napoleon appeared on the scene and took over with discipline and organization and secret police. Thus, it was not too surprising that when Lenin updated the French Revolution in his work in Russia, he essentially modernized the management techniques used by Napoleon-but did so from the start.
Similarly, while the strategy espoused by Mao Tse-tung owes much to the thinking of Sun Tzu and that of Clausewitz, his homely rules and principles for the behavior of 8th Route Army troops—at the crucial interface of his people’s war in China—came right out of the experiences and lessons of Sun Yat-sen’s revolution. Oddly enough, Chiang Kai-shek and the Kuomintang leadership had as much right and chance to learn and use these rules and principles, but they did not.
So I suggest that our military leaders study history some more before they meet our revolutionary opponent. In particular, they should take another reflective look at the American Revolution: see it for what it really was, a people’s war. They will have to do some digging, because many historians did not understand the nature of that war and thus interpreted it shallowly. Here are some tips for the digging:
These lessons are our true heritage for application in any people’s war. Let us learn them and be ready to use them.
Lenin and Mao, although together in their view of revolutionary goals, were widely divergent in their ideas on how to reach those goals. Basically, the difference between them was that Lenin was a city boy and Mao a country boy. Thus, when Lenin thought of revolutionary action, he thought in terms of using the proletariat in the van of his class struggle. To him, the proletariat was the urban working man, the manual laborer whose only property was himself and his skills. He was the one to be organized and used in guided actions. Once outside the cities” revolutionary actions would have to be carried out by disciplined and politically indoctrinated military forces. It was thus that he won Russia.
On the other hand, Mao had a farmer’s opinion of the cities. Cities and the people in them were rather poor things, existing only on the backs of the people on the agrarian land. He once summed up his revolutionary strategy in the slogan, “First the mountains, then the countryside, and finally the cities.” He organized and trained his forces at remote bases—in the mountains” of his slogan. He then moved his forces into the countryside, indoctrinating, organizing, and governing the farmers. By the time he was ready to subdue the cities, his guerrilla forces had grown into regular armies. It was thus that he won China.
By the time of World War II, these two operational philosophies had shaped markedly different usages of guerrilla forces. When the Germans invaded the Soviet Union, the Soviets formed groups of partisans to operate in German-occupied territory. These partisan groups were considered to be mere adjuncts to the Red Army, subject to its needs and operating primarily to ensure the success of the regular main forces. As an illustrative parallel, the doctrine of Soviet chiefs towards their partisans was almost identical with the doctrine of U.S. military commanders towards guerrilla forces, such as those in the Japanese-occupied Philippines. They were auxiliaries to main forces, not the core upon which main forces were to be built.
In contrast, Mao’s guerrillas in China were far from being auxiliaries of any regular army. For one thing, the only regular Chinese armies fighting the Japanese invaders were those of the Kuomintang leaders, Mao’s deadly rivals, for whose eventual defeat he was planning already. Thus, all he had to start with were rural guerrillas. Necessity mothered his invention of them as the nucleus for regular armies, which he built up once he controlled enough territory and manpower to make positional warfare feasible.
Or, put another way, Mao evolved a way in which a poor man could conquer a country with guerrilla forces. The Soviet partisan doctrine required that horribly expensive thing, a regular army, before it could go to work. It is small wonder that Mao’s ideas brought a gleam to the eyes of have-nots in country after country around the world. With Mao’s methods, a revolutionary did not need to be a multibillionaire to start a guerrilla war to win himself a country. All he needed was ambition, lots of ability, energy, and iron discipline—along with a cause to be sold to the people. Thus, most of the guerrilla wars of the past two decades have been instigated and led by revolutionaries who tried hard to stick by Mao’s guerrilla principles. Participants who wrote down rules of this warfare, such as Che Guevara or Giap, actually merely noted their versions of what Mao had meant. This is worth remembering when one searches out readings on guerrilla warfare for study.
Giap and other Vietnamese Communist leaders were students of Mao in Yenan, where they first learned their guerrilla trade. Thus, it is understandable that they have taken great pride in having added a new wrinkle to their old master’s strategy. In fighting the French in Indochina, the Vietnamese Communists actually entertained the thought that they could carry their political war to metropolitan France. They not only would apply Mao’s strategy in Vietnam but also would sap the will of the mother nation thousands of miles away, around the world from Vietnam. There were revolutionaries in France. The Vietnamese got to them. By the time the battle of Dien Bien Phu took place in Indochina, the Vietnamese political warfare in France was succeeding. There were mass demonstrations in France against the war. Large numbers of draft-age youngsters were hiding out from military service. Troop transports were blocked from sailing. There were serious morale problems and drug usage among the troops. There was a terrific din from pulpit, press, and political circles against the immorality of the French war in Indochina.
Nobody should have been surprised a decade later when, with U.S. troops fighting a war in Vietnam, across the world from home, similar political warfare broke out here in the United States. Nor should it be labeled “paranoia” to say so. Skilled political warfare should be respected, not just dismissed with a flip and fashionable put-down.
Soviet and Chinese strategies and tactics, of course, were seen by their manufacturers as export products, once the revolutions in Russia and China had succeeded. As a result, markets for these ideas have been lively for some decades now in many countries of the world. As they are tried, there are combinations and variations that grow out of local conditions. One current model has some of the old parts in it but really does not look like the old familiar types. It is the making of a revolution through urban guerrillas, a style that is undergoing constant innovation and refinement today. In several countries it is growing beyond the capabilities of urban police forces to cope with it and is becoming a problem for military forces.
Now, I am not claiming that revolutionaries are ten feet tall and can whip their weight in wildcats. All I am saying is that they look at armed struggle differently than we do and that they are dangerous. They have some human failings, too. The story of modern revolution in Venezuela is a case in point.
About ten years ago a team of revolutionaries in Venezuela blew up some oil pumping rigs on Lake Maracaibo. The rigs belonged to Venezuelan subsidiaries of U.S. oil companies. The sapper team had been trained in Cuba and did the sabotage raid in the name of the National Liberation Front (FLN) of Venezuela. Their action got a lot of attention in the world press and thus fulfilled much of its purpose. It also gave me a good excuse to get out of my Pentagon office for a look at the situation in Venezuela. And so I did.
In finding out what I could about Venezuela before the visit, I included a talk with Joe Kornfeder. I had met him through my Chinese guerrilla friend, Bernie Yoh. Kornfeder was a graduate of the Lenin Political Academy in Moscow, having attended its second class, just after the one that had Ho Chi Minh as a student. Kornfeder was one of the founding members of the U.S. Communist Party in 1919 and later was an executive in the Comintern, but he had sickened of what he was mixed up in, had quit, and was devoting the rest of his life to fighting Communists. When I asked him about Venezuela, he gave me a sort of rueful smile and told me about how the Venezuelan Communist Party and its revolution got started. He had had a hand in it.
One of Kornfeder’s earliest assignments as a professional revolutionary was to organize Communist movements in the northern tier of South America, including Venezuela. He was to do this among the proletariat, as he had been taught at the Lenin Academy. He went to Venezuela, in the guise of a U.S. trade unionist, and started to organize the workers there for a book-style class struggle. To his dismay, he discovered that most of his contacts in labor circles were actually members of the secret police or their informants. Venezuela was a dictatorship under Gomez at the time, and undesirables such as Kornfeder went to prison and disappeared. Kornfeder realized that he would have to act fast if he was to save his hide. The only possibility for help he could think of was a professor at the Central University in Caracas. A social friend in the U.S. had given him a letter of introduction to the professor, suggesting that the two of them might have a drink or dinner together. So Kornfeder visited the professor, gave him the letter, told him of the spot he was in, and asked for advice. Impulsively, the professor promised to hide him from the secret police.
Kornfeder hid with the professor for days until he could get out of the country safely. He found the professor to be notably sympathetic to his ideas but eager to organize a Communist Party in Venezuela. Soon the professor was bringing friends to the house for secret meetings with Kornfeder. They organized the Party. It was a far cry from the proletarian movement that Kornfeder had been charged with creating, and he was not too proud of the substitute. Its members were intellectuals from the upper and middle classes of the country.
They had a significant advantage, though, in the tradition of academic freedom accorded universities in Latin America. There the campus is a hallowed place, sacrosanct from police or governmental interference. Thus they discovered that the university made an ideal safe haven for revolutionary organization. In effect, the campus became the “remote base” envisioned in Mao’s doctrine—only, instead of being in the mountains, it was located right in the heart of the nation’s capital city. What started as an accidental makeshift in Venezuela soon became the fashion in South America, with universities becoming the birthplaces and freeholds of various national Communist parties.
By the time of my visit, years later, Venezuela had thrown out her dictators. A democratic regime was in power, and supported by both the workers in the cities and the ranchers in the countryside. The Communist Party had attempted and Maoist-style guerrilla action, starting with a base camp in the western mountains, only to discover that the people living there were not about to join any nutty cause to overthrow the government. The people felt that the government now belonged to them. They helped the police chase the Communists out of the mountains.
While I was in Venezuela, university students took advantage of their mid-year vacation and made another try at starting a Maoist guerrilla farce. This time they raised the flag of the National Liberation Frantz in the Falcon Hills. The students quickly discovered that they again had picked the wrong place. This time they found not only that there were no people in the hills but that there was no water either. Canteens empty, they had to come down out of the hills. (Intellectuals are not always bright when it comes to practical, everyday matters.)
With their attempts at following Mao’s doctrine a failure and as aliens to the urban proletariat, the Communist intellectuals had to make their revolution another way. They chase urban terror, waged by youth recruited from affluent families, in an attempt to destroy the established order at its center. The university was their safe-haven base. Students farmed an FLN brigade on campus, with headquarters in a dormitory that they renamed “Stalingrad.” Each morning the student brigade, mostly armed with submachine guns, would march out to the flagpole in the center of the campus and raise the FLN flag. It was a rather public affair, since main city streets skirted the campus and were filled with people going to work during these ceremonies.
Between classes and at night the students indulged in such off-campus thrills as committing murder, kidnapping, bombing, armed robbery, and intimidation. The police, the government officials, and the foreign community were the main targets. Policemen stopped wearing uniforms while off duty, instead changing into them on arrival at the station house and then making patrols only in pairs or squads. When alone and identifiable, they were subject to quick death.
One night I stayed at the Officers Club in Caracas. In the early morning hours four students drove up to the entrance in a Chrysler Imperial, two bays and two girls. One of the girls stayed at the wheel. The other girl swayed drunkenly up to the sentry at the door, put a cigarette to her lips and asked for a light. While the sentry was looking at her, one of the boys stepped up behind him and shot him in the back, killing him. The other boy raced inside the building and tossed a grenade into the empty corridor. Then the students went roaring away in the car. It was a typical action, lasting only brief moments.
Despite such urban terrorism over the years since then, the revolution has not succeeded in Venezuela. It remains too close to being simplistic anarchy in a place and time unripe for anarchy. In other countries, though, revolutionaries have done their political homework. They are making more sparing and more skillfully telling use of urban terror—as an identifiable instrument of their political program, which they have attempted to tie into popular needs. I expect that we shall get some firsthand experience with urban terror in the future, as target often do.
Now we come to the crunch. It is this: How does a country defend itself against modern guerrilla attack?
Preliminary to any answers, it is worth taking a look at the way an enemy defines his method of attack. The enemy in Vietnam told us his, plainly, in just seven words. Le Duan, one of the leaders in Hanoi, described the Communist actions in Vietnam as “exploiting internal contradictions in the enemy camp.” We should all think about those seven words. They give the essence of the strategy that the United States will encounter in people’s wars.
In Vietnam, the Communists clandestinely organized a political structure in villages and towns. The political cadre in this structure spotted contradictions in the political and economic systems, called them to the attention of the people, and exacerbated popular feelings about them, getting the people first angry about these wrongs and then to hating them. At this point the enemy would get the people to join their ranks, to right the wrongs. These contradictions were acts by political and economic leaders that could be portrayed as acts dishonoring the people’s respect for and trust in such leadership. The political leadership was especially vulnerable. It had representatives easily identified by the people—a district chief, a policeman, a military man. Any misbehavior by such a government man was blamed not only on the individual but also on his boss in Saigon. Diem, Thieu, Ky—all the leaders in Saigon—have been subjected to this type of attack, some quite effectively. Americans in Vietnam, and through them the U.S. President, have similarly been targets.
One of the earliest contradictions in Americans exploited by the Communists was our stated purpose for being in Vietnam. The political cadre would tell villagers: “The Americans claim to be here to protect your freedom. But they are liars, as you shall see.” The cadre would then fire on our troops or aircraft. Noting hostile fire, our folks would blast back at the village. There would be village casualties. The Communist cadre would then say to the villagers: “See, the Americans are not your friends but are your enemies. Join us and help drive them out of Vietnam.” This happened over and over again. Some Americans never did learn that, by this psychological judo, the enemy used our strength to have us hurt ourselves.
Of course, the perfect defense against a strategy that exploits contradictions is not to have any contradictions that can be exploited. Since perfection is not a human trait, the defender should do the next best thing: strive honestly and vigorously to remedy any weaknesses that make a country’s leadership alien to the people instead of being one that serves the people and reflects their will. Graft, brutality, self-serving and bullying misbehavior, even overweening autocracy—all are weak spots in the defense. If they are not corrected, the defense remains vulnerable. With clean hands, officials, troops, and police can join hands with the people, and together they can rid the body politic of a common enemy. This is a sound defense. It works. I saw it done in the Philippines. It happened in the western mountains of Venezuela, when the people refused to help the Communists overthrow the government because they looked upon that government as their own.
With such a sound defense, the defenders can then go into a counterattack, adopt the enemy’s strategy and exploit his contradictions. In Vietnam, for instance, the leaders in Hanoi keep speaking in the name of the people. Yet the people of North Vietnam have had no true choice in selecting anyone to speak for them. The only two elections in the last 25 years in North Vietnam were controlled ones, in true police-state style. So the position of the leadership in Hanoi is a contradiction, vulnerable to attack. The people of North Vietnam and the people of the world could be made to see this—if our side made the effort. It would be worth it. Hanoi’s leaders planned, prepared, and carried out the aggressions in South Vietnam. If they were made to stop doing this, the war would end.
There are hundreds of ways to carry out psychological and political attacks against Hanoi’s leadership. Think of what would happen if each of our bombing raids against North Vietnam were undertaken only after publicly announcing anew, specific act of aggression in South Vietnam—an act of aggression which we honestly identify as having been ordered by Hanoi: the Communist leaders made a new act of war, we label it for what it actually was, then we in return must damage the leaders’ ability to make war. It would put the burden of “to bomb or not to bomb” squarely on their shoulders, for all to see.
Much the same could be done about prisoners of war. We can go directly to the people of North Vietnam by leaflet. We could give them the names and status of their thousands of homesick men now prisoners in the South. We could bluntly tell them that the only thing preventing their seeing these men again is the selfishness of their leaders in Hanoi. We are willing to exchange prisoners; all the North Vietnamese people have to do is demand this of their leaders. Such actions—pitting the people against the leaders—are part of the real arsenal of people’s wars.
Above all, as Americans, let us be true to our own heritage. We have an ideology that is a rousing battle cry of freedom to people all around the world—if we serve it faithfully. It is stated plainly in our Declaration of Independence and in the Bill of Rights. It is our strongest rallying point in a people’s war. Free people—and those yearning to be free—are still expecting Americans to uphold our finest ideals wherever we serve. Let’s show them that we can do so!
Alexandria, Virginia
Major General Edward G. Lansdale, USAF (Ret), served in the Army of the U.S., 1943-47, and then in the USAF until his retirement in 1963. He served as special assistant to Ambassador Lodge in South Vietnam and as U.S. representatives on the Vietnamese government commission to win support of the countryside. He also served as assistant for special operations to the Secretary of Defense. General Lansdale has published articles in magazines and a recent book, In the Midst of Wars, his memoirs of the Philippine Huk campaign and Diem’s early leadership in Vietnam.
Disclaimer
The conclusions and opinions expressed in this
document are those of the author cultivated in the freedom of expression,
academic environment of Air University. They do not reflect the official
position of the U.S. Government, Department of Defense, the United States Air
Force or the Air University.
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