Sarah Paine

And they're cumulative, right?

You do certain things and then they're

And then you get to phase two and you've had this cumulative effect of destroying enemy forces and you get any more accumulating casualties on the other side and finally win.

A student of mine said that's actually not a great way to look at or an even better way to use it.

It's like a metric.

of how an insurgency goes up and down so that ISIS may be on the cusp of going into stage three.

I don't know if they ever really, well, possibly with all the equipment they got initially, or whether then they get knocked back to stage one where you wonder whether they still exist anymore and come back and forth.

Anyway, that was that person's take.

I thought I'd pass it along to you.

All right, I have one last thing to talk about, Mao, is when you read these 7,000 pages, and I don't recommend it, one is struck by all these dualities.

And I think it goes back to yin and yang analysis, which is very prominent in China.

traditional Chinese thinking.

So if you look at Mao discussing triangle building, it's in terms of the presence or absence of factors, presence, absence being opposites.

So you're going from the absence of political power to the seizure of political power, from the absence of the Red Army to the creation of the Red Army.

And it goes on and on that studying the differences and connections between dualities is a task of studying strategy, and it's really everything.

So to defend in order to attack, to retreat in order to advance.

It goes on and on.

And it's all about correctly orienting yourself between these opposites.

So oppose protracted campaigns and the strategy of a short war.

Uphold the strategy of a protracted war in a short campaign.