Sarah Paine

Mao also lured good old General MacArthur, who fancied himself a great Asianist in the Korean War.

MacArthur goes all the way up to the Yalu River, right on the Chinese border in the Korean War, and then Mao springs a trap.

MacArthur didn't realize that, I don't know, 350,000 Chinese troops had been infiltrated around him.

Oops, missed that.

It did not work out well.

But for the U.S.

Navy now needs to think about what about being lured into the South and East China Seas and then the Chinese pulling the trap.

There are places you don't need to go.

The Chinese may have to go there, but maybe you don't have to.

Another one is terminal point of retreat.

I've talked about Yan'an being a really good one, and that worked.

And then when the Manchurian campaign initially wasn't going well for Mao, he retreated up to Suping, which is a little bit north, and that worked well enough.

But when Shanghai tried to pick these Manchurian cities as a place to retreat in Manchuria,

Bad news.

There's only one railway system that gets you south out of Manchuria.

You suppose the communists don't know about it.

And they encircled the nationalists in these cities and destroyed them there.

So when you're thinking about insurgents and things, think about, well, if you knock them out of one area, where might they go next?

All right, another concept from Mao is disintegrating enemy forces, which is what happens to the nationalists.

Think about it.