Page:On Guerrilla Warfare (United States Marine Corps translation).djvu/30

Introduction If it is a joke, it is a macabre one as far as American taxpayers are concerned. Defectors to the Communists from Chiang Kai-shek's American-equipped divisions were numbered in the tens of thousands. When they surrendered, they turned in mountains of American-made individual arms, jeeps, tanks, guns, bazookas, mortars, radios, and automatic weapons.

It is interesting to examine Mao’s strategical and tactical theories in the light of his principle of "unity of opposites." This seems to be an adaptation to military action of the ancient Chinese philosophical concept of Yin-Yang. Briefly, the Yin and the Yang are elemental and pervasive. Of opposite polarities, they represent female and male, dark and light, cold and heat, recession and aggression. Their reciprocal interaction is endless. In terms of the dialectic, they may be likened to the thesis and antithesis from which the synthesis is derived.

An important postulate of the Yin-Yang theory is that concealed within strength there is weakness, and within weakness, strength. It is a weakness of guerrillas that they operate in small groups that can be wiped out in a matter of minutes. But because they do operate in small groups, they can move rapidly and secretly into the vulnerable rear of the enemy.

In conventional tactics, dispersion of forces invites destruction; in guerrilla war, this very tactic is desirable both to confuse the enemy and to preserve the illusion that the guerrillas are ubiquitous.

It is often a disadvantage not to have heavy infantry