Sarah Paine

paradigm theories, his three stages of people's war.

The first stage is the strategic defensive.

It's the prevent defeat phase.

The last phase, phase three, is a strategic offensive, the deliver victory phase.

In the first phase, you're focusing on the peasantry.

In the last phase, you're annihilating the enemy army.

And if you look at activities that go on in each phase, the activities of phase one and two never cease.

Rather, you add additional activities as competence increases.

So in phase one, you're doing popular mobilization, base area building, triangle building, guerrilla warfare.

And then as you get more of these things, then you can start engaging in mobile warfare, try or handle a little conventional warfare, reach out with diplomacy.

And then if you go further in stage three, then you're talking positional warfare and you're gonna have the war winning battle.

And how do you get from the phases?

Well, the transition from phase one to two is basically you have a critical mass of base areas, cadres, armed forces that you can move into phase two.

But the problem of being in phase two is what it looked like isolated acts of banditry in phase one to the incumbent government.

Now the incumbent government gets it, that they're facing an insurgency bent on regime change and the regime changes strategy.

And so the communists are no longer under the radar, but they're in the crosshairs.

And it's dangerous because they're weak and the enemy is strong.

So when you transition to phase two, initially it's quite dangerous.

And here's Mao writing about these problems and saying, look, in this stages one and two, the enemy is trying to have us concentrate our main forces for a decisive engagement, i.e.

decisive in their favor.