Sarah Paine

There are six possible prerequisites, two, you gotta have at least two,

before you fight.

And the most important one is that people have to actively support you.

You probably need a base area to pull this off.

He said that the last three things about enemy weak points, enemy exhaustion, enemy mistakes, those things could appear quite rapidly, but you better choose your terrain very carefully.

Terrain is immutable.

He also said that if you're weak, the way the communists were, you had to follow a strategy of annihilation.

What you do is you annihilate one small enemy unit at a time, and the cumulative effects will eventually change the balance of power.

Only someone who is really strong can tough out an attrition strategy.

He's also about triangle building in these areas.

So little gorilla detachments go out into the interface if it works out well, and it looks like they can start either a new base area or expand an existing one.

That's what they're going to be up to.

So these guerrilla forces are either a disposal force, which you could send them out to do risky things, and if they get wiped out, it doesn't endanger base area defense, or they can become a nucleus of a new base area.

So in small guerrilla groups, party members are toughened, cadres trained, the party government, mass organizations are consolidated.

And if they're successful, then you bring in the Red Army.

to do higher level institution building and either greatly expand an existing base area or you're forming a new one is what's going on.

Mao had two military services.

We always think of Army, Navy, Air Force.

That's not what it was for him.

It was guerrilla forces versus conventional forces.