These examples drive home the principle that a form or style of
warfare must be found by each nation corresponding to the state of the
nation _at that time_; the "psychology" of the nation may remain
constant for a century, but the way to make war will change if the
methods of production have changed. If the nation has lost (or won)
colonies, if education has reached the poor, if child labor has ended
(so that youths of eighteen are strong enough for tank duty), if women
are without civil rights, if a wave of irreligion or political
illiberality has swept over the country--if any vital change has
occurred, the style of war must change also. Every social change
affects the kind of war we can fight, the kind we must discover for
ourselves if we are to defeat an enemy who has chosen his style and is
trying to impose it on us. The analysis of Hitler's war-style must be
left to experts; if its essence is "synchronized timing", our duty is
to find a way of upsetting the time-table, not only by months, but by
minutes. Possibly the style developed by Stalin can do both--by
pulling back into the vast spaces of Russia, Stalin created a
battlefield without shape or definition, which may have prevented the
correlation of the parts of Hitler's armies; by encouraging guerillas,
he may have upset the timing of individual soldiers, tanks, and
planes. The success of the Eighth Route Army in China was based on a
totally different military style, the only completely Communist style
on record; for the army was successful because it built a Communist
society on the march, actually and literally, establishing schools,
manufacturing arms, bearing children, and fighting battles at the same
time, so that at the end of several years the army had extricated
itself from a trap, crossed and recrossed miles of enemy territory,
reformed itself with more men and arms than it had at the
beginning--and had operated as a center of living civilization for
hundreds of thousands.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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