Revolutionary War in Modern Theorists’ Views

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Insurgency is a part of human history with its positive and negative characteristics that may influence human development. After the events of 2001, the United States, as well as the military forces of other countries, began paying close attention to the essence of war theories, the necessity to override warfare, and the worth of the opinions developed by different leaders. This paper aims at comparing and contrasting the competing views on a revolutionary war introduced from four different perspectives in the middle of the 1900s, including Mao Zedong, Ernesto “Che” Guevara, David Galula, and Roger Trinquier. Though Galula and Trinquier were ordinary French military officers, compared to Zedong and Che Guevara who were great political and military leaders in their countries, all of them made significant contributions to a theoretical and practical representation of counterinsurgency warfare and a better understanding of a revolutionary war. The chosen four military theorists introduced rather different ways of seeing a revolutionary war with its distinctions and contradictions based on the importance of overlaps, disjuncture, and attitudes to military forces in the middle of the 1900s.

There are many interesting perspectives on a revolutionary war, as well as its role for political leaders and civilians. Some theories are based on positive military experiences. They can be used as helpful historical lessons of warfare with a number of contradictions resulting in military overlaps and disjuncture as the main elements of political infrastructure.¹ According to the opinions of the great political leaders such as the father of the People’s Republic of China, Mao Zedong, or the main revolutionary figure in Cuba, Che Guevara, a revolution is a result of the wrong political regime that promotes the creation of new leaders and followers. However, compared to Che Guevara and Mao who believed that a revolutionary war had to be just and fair for everyone, French revolutionaries David Galula and Roger Trinquier underlined the necessity to understand that revolutionary rules could not be applicable to all sides, and that that one group of people had to be ready to lose or consider some alternatives.² Still, despite the existing controversies and debates, a revolutionary war usually aims at destructing an old system and replacing it with another ideology.

Regarding the timeline and the military contributions introduced by the chosen theorists, Mao Zedong remains to be one of the most powerful and influential figures in the revolutionary war. Though Mao did not consider himself as a great tactician, he was smart enough to surround himself with a number of military minds and focus on women as the main military asset. The results of his work were impressive. Surviving the defeat in the 1920s, he made a decision to focus on peasants as the core of a revolution. Similar to Che Guevara, Mao believed that violence and overlaps were essential to a revolution. He also used social weaknesses as the strength of his own policy. For example, disjuncture, as the lack of union between social classes and forces, was taken into consideration. Mao believed that though “China’s population is great, it is unorganized”.³ Therefore, it was easy to choose a goal and unite people, providing them with new opportunities and improvements.

The decision to unite people under one similar idea promoted the development of a new military ideology. Mao was the creator of a strong political theory known as Maoism. Similar to other theories, Maoism aimed at proclaiming the power of civilians. Still, its main distinctive feature was Mao’s personal attitude to a revolutionary war as “a weapon that a nation inferior in arms and military equipment may employ again a more powerful aggressor nation”.⁴ Properly defined political consciousness and the presence of an authoritarian and confident political leader were the main characteristics of military force in the context of the post-1945 world. Mao’s works and guidelines were used by many political leaders around the whole world. In some way, Che Guevara was also under the influence of Mao’s thoughts.

The peculiar feature of Che Guevara’s work was the recognition of the reasons for a revolution and the choice of effective campaigns and motivation. Similar to Mao, Che Guevara wanted to use the people’s support and the necessity to fight against demoralization endorsed “by an invisible and invincible army which provides them no chance to display their military academy tactics and their fanfare of war”.⁵ Similar to Galula and Trinquier, Che Guevara introduced civilians as the main source of military force. Other theorists used the population to achieve personal needs and demands, and Che Guevara was obsessed with the intention to conquest political power, believing that guerrilla warfare and people’s struggle should have its end, and the winning is “that end, essential and inevitable for all revolutionaries”.⁶ In other words, if Mao saw overlaps and disjuncture as the means of a revolution, Che Guevara used them as its causes. His tactics and ideas inspired many global leaders. However, French revolutionaries wanted to take the lessons from the above-mentioned leaders and make their own additions to how a revolutionary war had to be interpreted through the prism of the post-1945 world.

Among numerous attempts to develop military theories, the work of David Galula deserves attention because of several reasons. This military officer was ready to demonstrate his maturity and indicate the mistakes or, at least, some shortages in Mao’s and Che Guevara’s methodologies. Galula admitted that Mao’s “laws of revolutionary war” turned out to be the major misleading point because those laws were only “of the revolutionary side”, and “the one who directs a war against a revolutionary movement will not find in Mao and in other revolutionary theorists the answers to his problems”.⁷ Similar to the chosen theorists, Galula identified a revolution as a serious social phenomenon that was characterized by specific rules and variables. However, his distinctive feature was the fact that he found it obligatory to divide the war into revolutionary and counterrevolutionary and define the characteristics of both as two separate types of activities. A revolutionary war is “an internal conflict” that is caused by the insurgent, aims to protect and underline the role of the population, and results in “external influences”.⁸ The population is the characteristic of a revolution that cannot be ignored or misunderstood.

Similar to Galula’s approach to understanding a revolution was developed by Roger Trinquier several years later. This theorist called revolutionary warfare as modern warfare based on the combination of political, economic, psychological, and military systems of actions.⁹ Though he was not obsessed with details and rules like Galula was, his allegiance to and expectations from the civilian population were high and defined the vital goals of the struggle. In comparison to all theorists, revolutionaries, and the representatives of military force, it is correct to consider Trinquier as a person who believed in the human power of the existing regimes and rules. The major goal of a revolution was to “overthrow of the established authority in a country and its replacement by another regime”.¹⁰ Therefore, it was not enough to identify who should gain the victory. It was more important to make sure that no single element of the old system was left. People should have a chance to live a new life, using their opportunities, skills, knowledge, and the lessons from the past. Overlaps and disjuncture may be a tool of a revolution but never its cause or an outcome.

In general, the thoughts and theories developed by Mao, Che Guevara, Galula, and Trinquier have a number of similar features, as well as a solid number of differences. On the one hand, the chosen revolutionaries believed that a war is an important social phenomenon that had its unique characteristics and serious causes based on the public mistrust of the current political leaders. In other words, all of them agreed that the current world was far from being perfect, and the connection between insurgency, conflict, and struggle was inevitable. On the other hand, in Mao and Che Guevara focused on political power, Galula and Trinquier chose the civilian population as the focus on their methodologies. It is impossible to say that some theorists made mistakes, and only some of them made significant contributions. Their works, principles, and approaches helped to introduce a revolution as a serious outcome of human mistakes and decisions and consider it as one of the best and the most effective solutions in military force through the context of the post-1945 world.

Bibliography

Chaliand, Gerard, ed. Guerrilla Strategies: An Historical Anthology from the Long March to Afganistan. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1982.

Che Guevara, Ernesto. Guerrilla Warfare: A Method. Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1964.

Galula, David. Counter-Insurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice. New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1964.

Trinquier, Roger. Modern Warfare: A French View of Counterinsurgency. Translated by Daniel Lee. Westport: Praeger Security International, 2006.

Tse-Tung, Mao. On Guerrilla Warfare. Translated by Samuel B. Griffith. Chelmsford: Courier Corporation, 2012.

Footnotes

Gerard Chaliand, ed., Guerrilla Strategies: An Historical Anthology from the Long March to Afganistan (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1982), 10.
David Galula, Counter-Insurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1964), x.
Mao Tse-Tung, On Guerrilla Warfare, trans. Samuel B. Griffith (Chelmsford: Courier Corporation, 2012), 67.
Mao Tse-Tung, On Guerrilla Warfare, 41.
Ernesto Che Guevara, Guerrilla Warfare: A Method (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1964), 4.
Ibid., 1.
David Galula, Counter-Insurgency Warfare, xi.
Ibid., 3.
Roger Trinquier, Modern Warfare: A French View of Counterinsurgency, trans. by Daniel Lee (Westport: Praeger Security International, 2006), 5.
Ibid., 5.

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Revolutionary War in Modern Theorists’ Views

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