People's War: The French in Indochina.

摘要

For all the apparent simplicity of nuclear weapons, their existence has made warfare more complex than ever. With the tremendous increase in destructiveness, greater care must now be taken to limit the conduct of war; this, in turn, means more sophisticated weapons, increasingly complex command and control systems and the utter necessity of coordinating ends and means in war as well as in the conduct of national policy prior to war. Ironically, at the same time modern conventional and nuclear war had become so deadly, the world witnessed a tremendous increase in warfare at the other end of the spectrum, at the level of unconventional warfare. Yet is is not so paradoxical as it may at first appear to state that unconventional war in another reflection of the growing complexity of war. A form of war whose primary weapon and primary objective, to an extent far exceeding that of conventional or nuclear war, is the hearts and minds of the people and in which the enemy cannot be distinguished by uniform, language or the like, requires a degree of sophistication often blurred by the primitive weapons of those who conduct it. This paper provides a basic understanding of the phenomenon of people's war, both by considering theory and by looking at the French experience in Indochina (1945-1954). (jhd)