Guerrilla Warfare: Mao's Three Phases, Che's Foco and Lawrence's Gas

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Guerrilla warfare rests on one rule: never meet a stronger force on open ground. The word, Spanish for little war, entered English through the Duke of Wellington around 1809 in the Peninsular War, but the methods are far older. Sun Tzu described them in the 6th century BC, the Han general Peng Yue starved enemy armies by raiding their grain convoys, and Quintus Fabius Maximus shadowed Hannibal, earning the name Cunctator, the Delayer. In the Irish War of Independence, Michael Collins ran small urban cells in Dublin while Tom Barry's flying columns in County Cork fought ambushes that rarely lasted more than 15 to 30 minutes, ending before British reinforcements could arrive.

Mao Zedong's 1937 manual set out three phases: win the population, wear down the state, then switch to conventional war, a sequence Vo Nguyen Giap carried out in Vietnam. Che Guevara's foco theory worked in Cuba and failed in Bolivia, where he was captured and executed. T.E. Lawrence compared guerrillas to a gas, and Abdul Haris Nasution, who fought on both sides of the problem, argued that the real contest is for civilian support. The episode then turns to shadow states, the law of war and the line between guerrillas and terrorists.

• Insurgents arm themselves with captured weapons, taxes collected in areas they control and foreign state sponsors.
• In Myanmar's civil war, the National Unity Government runs its own schools, hospitals and police.
• The 1977 First Additional Protocol grants guerrillas combatant status only if they carry their weapons openly during operations.
• Posing as a civilian or wearing the enemy's uniform to launch an attack is the war crime of perfidy.
• Sir Robert Thompson's approach in the Malayan Emergency rested on outgoverning the insurgents rather than outshooting them.