Sarah Paine

Clausewitz is the West's major military theorist of bilateral conventional land warfare.

Sun Tzu is Han civilization's great theorist of how you maintain power in a continental empire, multilateral world, using coercion and deception.

The two fellows on the right are maritime theorists.

In a way, they're writing the missing chapters of Clausewitz.

It doesn't talk about naval warfare at all.

The top one is Alfred Theramahan, the Naval War College's finest.

And what he's writing about are the prerequisites for and strategic possibilities for maritime power.

And the Britain underneath them there, Sir Julian Corbett, is writing about how a maritime power, i.e.

Britain, can defeat a continental power, i.e.

Germany or France.

But all of them are writing about warfare between states.

And Mao is a different event.

Mao has to do with triangle building.

The term triangle building comes from Clausewitz.

Clausewitz has this nice little passage here where he's talking about these abstractions, passion, creativity, and rationality as being mainly but not exclusively associated respectively with the people, military, and government.

A state has full-up military and civil institutions that have some connection to their people.

But an insurgent is going to be building these things from the ground up.

So that's what Mao is doing, is he's actually taking over the host from within by building a shadow government and eventually taking power.

And many of the decolonizing world,

after World War II were really sick of the West.