A people’s war calls for a correct line in building up forces, a line which consists in mobilizing and arming the entire people, involving them in insurrection and war in all forms, organizing the immense political forces of the masses and the popular armed forces with their three categories of troops as the core of people’s war.
This line is the creative application to the concrete conditions of our country of Marxist-Leninist thought concerning the mobilization and arming of the people and the building of a new-type revolutionary army. In the building up of forces for revolutionary warfare, it embodies the thesis according to which revolutionary violence means violence by the masses. This line continues and develops the traditions of our nation in her wars of liberation and national salvation, these traditions being illustrated by such popular sayings as: “Every citizen a soldier”, and “When bandits come, even the women must fight”...
For a people’s war, the entire nation must be mobilized. This is a fundamental point in our Party’s line concerning the building up of forces for people’s war. Lenin said:
“Every force in the country must be summoned for this war. The whole country must be turned into a revolutionary camp. Everyone must help!”(1) “The country’s entire manpower and resources are placed entirely at the service of revolutionary defence”(2).
The mobilization and organization of the entire nation for insurrection and war is a continuous process of mass education and organization carried out by our Party, passing from lower to higher forms pursuant to a correct revolutionary line.
Ever since its founding, our Party has conducted an immense work of propaganda, organization and leadership of the masses with a view to winning power through revolutionary violence. The mobilization and organization of the large masses during the revolutionary upsurge of 1930-1931, the period of the democratic movement in 1936-1939, and that of the national-liberation movement in 1940-1945 account for the springing up of great insurrectional forces in the August Revolution, the mobilization of the entire nation in the former war of resistance against the French colonialists and the present resistance to the American imperialists.
At the time of partial insurrections, relying on underground political bases and armed organizations, our Party roused the popular masses to overthrow the enemy administration at the base and replace it by the revolutionary power. Then it launched a local guerilla war, intensified political and armed struggle, quickly developed the masses’ political forces and revolutionary armed forces, thus bringing about a revolutionary upsurge in the whole country and stepping up preparations for a general insurrection.
For the general insurrection, the entire people, mobilized and assembled in a broad national united front under the leadership of the Party, rose up everywhere, in both town and countryside, to break the yoke of the imperialists and feudalists and seize power on a national level. In the course of the revolutionary war, we already had a State organization in our rear and a popular power. In those conditions, the mobilization and organization of the people for the struggle was carried out in all fields with greater scope and depth and a higher organizational standard. Pursuant to the mottoes: “Resistance by the entire people, resistance in all fields”, “Everything for victory”, the numerous and diverse forces of the nation were mobilized to the maximum. During the war, our Party constantly paid great attention to propaganda, agitation and organization of the people’s forces; it ceaselessly broadened the political forces and developed the armed forces with a view to an ever more intense mobilization of the people’s capabilities for final victory.
The mobilization of the nation for uprising and war calls for the building both of large mass political forces and of popular armed forces as the core of people’s war.
The political forces are the patriotic forces of the nation which are involved in uprising and war in an organized way under the leadership of the vanguard Party. They include the revolutionary classes, the patriotic social strata, the various ethnic groups, who are gathered in a broad national united front, on the basis of the worker-peasant alliance and under the leadership of the working class. They constitute a solid basis for building and developing, both at the front and in the rear, the forces of revolutionary war in all fields: material and spiritual, political and military, economic and cultural.
The political forces constitute the basis for building and developing the people’s revolutionary armed forces. If it were not for the revolutionary people, their immense political forces, the political army of the masses (the bulk of which is constituted by the workers and peasants organized and led by the Party), there could never be powerful popular armed forces. From the first self-defence squads of the Nghe-Tinh Soviets (1930-31), through the detachments of the Army for National Salvation, the Propaganda Brigade of the Viet Nam Liberation Army, the Ba To guerillas, the thousands of self-defence squads and shock teams formed everywhere during the August Revolution, to the powerful units of our present army, the people’s armed forces have quickly developed thanks to voluntary and especially to compulsory military service. Their growth is always based on that of powerful political forces of an organized revolutionary people with an ever higher political consciousness.
All this explains the revolutionary character of our armed forces and their prestigious development at the great moments of the revolution and the decisive turning points of the wars of resistance.
Revolutionary practice in our country also shows clearly that the political forces of the masses are themselves capable of attacking the enemy through revolutionary violence – in both war and, especially, insurrection – by joint action with the armed forces in the most varied and effective forms.
Improving upon the experiences of the August 1945 general insurrection and the first war of resistance in a new historical juncture, the people’s political forces in South Viet Nam, under the banner of the National Front for Liberation, have proved their valour in a protracted and intense struggle against all schemes of domination and all forms of aggressive war on the part of American neocolonialism. Now more powerful than ever, they have played an essential, decisive role in the great chain of concerted insurrections. They have foiled the strategy of “special war” and, together with the people’s armed forces, are defeating that of “limited war” by the American imperialists.
The “political army” is a remarkable creation as a form of organization of the forces of revolutionary war in South Viet Nam at present. It is organized on the basis of powerful mass political forces with the workers and peasants at the core; it comprises the best and most courageous elements of the mass organizations; it includes people of all ages and walks of life; it has its grassroots organizations everywhere, in both the lowlands and the highlands, the rural and the urban areas. Admirably organized and militarized, it wages its struggle in a masterly way, using varied and manifold forms. It constitutes the mainstay of the masses’ political struggle in revolutionary war in South Viet Nam.
Armed uprising and revolutionary war are the highest forms of revolutionary struggle aimed at winning and keeping power. They necessarily imply action by the armed forces. That is why, with a view to preparing and carrying out armed uprising and revolutionary war, our Party, while building up political forces, has paid particular attention to the building of popular armed forces, the core of people’s war.
Under the glorious banner of the Party, our armed forces were born and have developed in the nation’s intense revolutionary struggle, on the basis of the people’s political forces. Our army is an army of the people, sprung from the people and fighting for the people. In the last decades, our popular armed forces have developed from groups of partisans and self-defence squads recruited from the masses and have grown into specialized military organizations; from small guerilla groups they have expanded into ever bigger units eventually comprising regulars, regionals, and militia; from poorly-equipped foot-soldiers they have become an army including ground, air and naval forces and with an ever more modern equipment. In this process, the Party’s line and conceptions regarding the building of popular armed forces have been gradually perfected.
In our Party’s theoretical conception, the key problem of building up armed forces is to give them a class character, a revolutionary character. Our army is an army of the people, mainly of the toiling people, in fact an army of workers and peasants led by the Party of the working class. It includes the best elements of the revolutionary classes, first of all of the working class and the peasantry, coming from all nationalities of Viet Nam. It is the instrument serving the Party and the revolutionary State in revolutionary struggle aimed at fulfilling the tasks of the Party. It constitutes the armed forces of the State of people’s democracy which formerly exercised the functions of the worker-peasant dictatorship and now fulfils the historical mission of the dictatorship of the proletariat. It defends the fruits of the revolution and people’s power against internal and external foes. Its character is that of the working class; its ideology is that of Marxism-Leninism.
In the days of the first units of partisans as well as at present, when our armed forces have become a powerful and modern popular army, our Party has constantly paid attention to reinforcing their class stand, which it considers the surest guarantee and the fundamental factor of their fighting power. This strengthening of the class stand takes on particular importance in a country where the peasantry and the petty bourgeoisie make up the majority of the population while the leading class, the working class, is less numerous.
When the worker-peasant Red Army was being formed, Lenin considered the increase in the percentage of workers in its composition one of the important measures to strengthen the revolutionary character of the Soviet armed forces. In our country, the reinforcement of the Party’s leadership, of proletarian ideological education and political work among the armed forces, together with the increase of worker and peasant elements among the cadres in particular, are essential measures to heighten the revolutionary character of those forces.
In the course of the development and consolidation of our armed forces, we have had to solve the following essential political problems:
– To ceaselessly strengthen the Party’s leadership, an exclusive, direct, and all-inclusive leadership over the people’s armed forces; this is the most fundamental principle.
– To ceaselessly strengthen political work, the source of the fighting power of the armed forces; this is a fundamental principle. To pay particular attention to political education and ideological leadership, so that cadres and combatants assimilate the political line and tasks, the military line and tasks, all the Party’s directives and the State’s legislation; to inculcate Marxism-Leninism in the armed forces; to heighten their class consciousness along with their national consciousness; to instil in them love of the fatherland and socialism and proletarian internationalism; on that basis, to increase their combativeness and their determination to fight and win.
– To ceaselessly consolidate the Party’s organization and the system of political work from top to bottom.
– To train a body of cadres absolutely faithful to the Party’s revolutionary cause and competent in leadership, organization and command.
– To apply democratic centralism. To correctly apply freely accepted discipline, the iron discipline of a revolutionary army, on the basis of broadening internal democracy. To strengthen cohesion in the army, the union between the army and the people (as between fish and water), to promote fraternal international solidarity on the basis of proletarian internationalism.
It is thanks to all that educational and organizational work that our popular armed forces have gained a fine revolutionary character and proved to be “always faithful to the Party, devoted to the people, ready to fight and endure sacrifices for the sake of the country’s independence and freedom and that of socialism”; that they have proved to be an effective instrument of the worker-peasant dictatorship at the stage of the people’s democratic national revolution, and of proletarian dictatorship at the stage of socialist revolution.
Our Party has successfully solved the problem of building the armed forces organizationally on the basis of building them up politically.
Our experience in people’s war in the course of the last twenty-five years has shown that the organization of the armed forces into three categories – the regulars, the regionals, and the people’s militia – is the best way to mobilize and organize the whole nation for combat; that great attention must be paid to the building up of regular troops while seeing to the setting up of regional forces and the people’s militia; that close co-ordination should be achieved between the building of regular forces and regional forces, of forces “on the spot” and mobile forces. This is a new development of our ancestral traditions in the organization of the nation’s armed forces.
The people’s militia – guerillas and self-defence squads – makes up the large forces of the toiling people at the grass-roots. Without getting divorced from production work, it is the instrument of the dictatorship of the people’s power at the base. Set up in hamlets and villages, factories, streets, etc., to meet the needs of combat and the characteristics of each region, those forces form a vast network which covers the whole country; they always stand ready to fight, and to fight well, with all appropriate weapons, both rudimentary and modern, and with highly effective methods; in this way they ensure the people’s protection directly, safeguard and expand political bases, play their role as shock groups in production and supply good cadres and fighters to regional and regular forces.
The regional troops form the core of armed struggle in a given region. Set up in accordance with the requirements and real conditions of each battlefield and each region, they make up strong, high-quality units, equipped with the necessary weapons, capable of operating either alone in a region or in close co-ordination with guerillas, partisans and regulars, and of fulfilling these missions: to annihilate the enemy, step up guerilla warfare, defend the population, and safeguard the people’s power.
The regular troops are the mobile forces which operate everywhere in the country or in certain given strategic areas. They include various armies and armed services, essentially a land army of adequate strength, an air force and a navy in an appropriate ratio. They must be inspired with high combativeness and constitute real “fists of steel”; they must be capable of waging large-scale annihilation battles and deal the enemy harder and harder blows; once involved in combat, they must win victory, liquidate ever more important enemy units, and bring about important changes in various theatres of operations.
Thus, the people’s armed forces must not only fulfil their essential task of annihilating the enemy but also defend the population, contribute to the building and development of the masses’ political forces, and serve as the core of people’s war. In view of the characteristics of the revolutionary struggle in our country and the intensification of the war, especially in the conditions of a neo-colonialist aggression, we must, while organizing regular troops of ever higher combativeness, set up powerful regional forces. Only then can the three categories of troops bring their combat capabilities into full play, closely co-ordinate their actions to destroy the enemy and effectively defend the people’s potential, safeguard the people’s power at various levels, and vigorously and fully boost people’s war.
In close co-ordination with the political forces and security forces, the three categories of troops are organized and built up in appropriate proportions and rationally distributed in the various strategic sectors, theatres of operations and regions, so as to keep ready important local forces and powerful mobile forces, and closely combine their actions in key sectors, at various levels, and in the whole country. This is a typical trait of the building up of popular armed forces and an overwhelming superiority of people’s war. Having at our disposal strong local forces, we can attack everywhere with units knowing the terrain and the enemy well and where to strike; we can hit back everywhere in a timely way, decimate, destroy, disperse and pin down enemy forces, thus making it possible for our mobile forces to concentrate and destroy the enemy where he is the most exposed. In a country which is not very large in area and facing an enemy having great mobility and numerous troops, such an organization and a distribution of forces can check the strong points of the enemy while favouring the growth of our own forces and create a solid strategic stand making it possible to keep the initiative in all circumstances. They allow us to always have at our disposal enough troops to strike at the enemy everywhere while being able to concentrate powerful units to defeat the enemy’s strategic mobile forces, thus to be in a position to win ever greater victories without being compelled to keep a standing army equal or superior in number to the enemy’s.
Our army has gradually passed from the regime of volunteers to that of compulsory military service. The people’s mobilization for the building of popular armed forces and the consolidation of national defence has thus made new progress.
Relying on the masses’ political consciousness, in the first war of resistance we applied the regime of volunteers to build the army. Since 1954, the North, entirely liberated and engaged in socialist construction, has become a state with the complete structure of an independent country. The new revolutionary tasks require the strengthening of popular national defence, the building of a regular standing army of high quality and a powerful reserve force, the judicious alliance of economics and defence, the improvement of the people’s armaments, the stepping up of their military training, the full development of their right to be masters of the country, the participation of all citizens to the defence of the fatherland. We have put an end to the inconveniences brought about by the prolongation of the regime of volunteers and decreed compulsory military service.
This is a new step forward, a new success in the building up of our people’s army, the strengthening of our national defence. Along with military service, we step up military training on a minimum program as well as physical education and sports, the popularization of military knowledge, especially among the youth, so as to get the people ready to fulfil their military duties and defend the country.
Armaments and equipment constitute the material and technical basis and one of the fundamental factors of the armed forces’ fighting capacity. To increase the latter, equipment must be improved. The Marxist-Leninist conception on the relationship between man and armaments considers man the determining factor, and armaments and equipment an important and indispensable factor. To solve this problem we take into account the concrete conditions of our country and the realities of our revolutionary war.
Where lies the source of our equipment? We must rely on the popular masses, equip ourselves with what we have, try to manufacture arms ourselves, seize weapons from the enemy to destroy him, and, when conditions permit, get help from the brother countries so as ceaselessly to improve our equipment.
At the beginning, we ran into innumerable difficulties. Our country was economically backward, without industrial bases to manufacture arms, and moreover encircled on all sides by the imperialists. With the slogan “Let’s fight with what we have” the Party called on the people to supply the armed forces with the necessary equipment, and to overcome all difficulties in organizing the production of arms and ammunition. It clearsightedly stressed that the armed forces must seek to get equipment on the fighting front itself by seizing weapons from the enemy to fight him. During the first war of resistance, our armed forces’ modern equipment was essentially taken from the enemy. Only in 1950 did we start receiving aid from the brother socialist countries.
Since 1954, we have relied on our quickly progressing socialist economy and the substantial aid of the fraternal countries of the socialist camp to bring about a large-scale improvement of our equipment in the sense of modernization. In the course of our struggle against American aggression, we have been able to make qualitative leaps forward in the improvement of the equipment and technique of our armed forces; we have also been able to quickly expand modern weapons, especially antiaircraft defence and aviation, in order to defeat the American aggressors.
Drawing on those sources for equipment, adjusting ourselves to the concrete conditions of our country, following our general line of people’s war with its peculiar tasks and its own military art so as to take full advantage of the fact that we are fighting on our own soil, we have combined the use of modern, or relatively modern, weapons with that of rudimentary ones and have ceaselessly improved and raised the level of modernization of our equipment.
The regular and regional troops are essentially equipped with modern and relatively modern weapons and means but, in both training and combat, must know how to make the best use of rudimentary materials. The people’s militia gives priority to rudimentary weapons while gradually and partially equipping itself with modern and relatively modern ones. The practice of war in our country clearly shows that while modern weapons are most important in the destruction of the enemy, rudimentary ones are also very effective and make it possible for the entire people to participate in the resistance to aggression. Along with improving our equipment, we have made great efforts to raise the level of organization and management, the knowledge of and the capacity to use all sorts of weapons in accordance with our Party’s line and military thought and the conditions prevailing in the various theatres of operations in our country.
At present our armed forces are possessed of a large body of cadres, battle-seasoned and absolutely faithful to the revolutionary cause of the Party and the people. Tempered by the revolutionary struggle, by the nation’s protracted and intense armed fighting, they have successfully fulfilled all the tasks entrusted to them by the Party and the people. Fostered by the Party and relying on the masses, they have met the needs, in both quantity and quality, of the standing and the reserve forces and fulfilled the complex tasks of building and combat in conditions of both war and peace.
In the fostering of cadres, our Party has put forward a correct line; it has defined a class line and other criteria and set forth a concrete and judicious policy concerning cadres.
Our Party has stuck to this class orientation, with cadres of worker and peasant origin at the core. It pays great attention to selecting, perfecting and promoting elite cadres among worker and peasant elements and also among the best intellectuals who are in close touch with the working class and the peasantry and who have proved their absolute loyalty to the revolutionary cause. In applying the Party’s line on the cadre policy, we have energetically struggled against all tendencies to deviate from the class orientation and to underestimate the fostering of cadres of worker and peasant origin and against all manifestations of “workerism”.
Those cadres are revolutionary and competent, imbued with a firm class stand, fervently patriotic, ready to fight and endure sacrifices for the country’s independence and freedom and for socialism, absolutely faithful to the revolution, and to the Party’s line and political and military tasks, resolved to carry them into effect, closely bound to the masses and highly qualified both technically and professionally. They are capable of fulfilling their duties in all circumstances. At all times, our Party has striven to temper them in the practice of mass revolutionary struggle, especially in combat.
In the building of popular armed forces, we have correctly solved problems relating to both quantity and quality; we have paid adequate attention to both while giving priority to quality. This is a fundamental point in our military traditions; this was the conception followed by Tran Hung Dao and Nguyen Hue who, thanks to high-quality troops, were able to defeat armies several times superior in number to their own.
The quality of the armed forces results from many factors: men and armaments; military, political, and logistical factors; ideology, organization, equipment, combat methods. The most determining factors are: men, politics, and ideology.
The best troops are those inspired by high combativeness and great resolve to act on the offensive. They must possess a high technical and tactical standard, good combat methods, a strong and streamlined organization, and good armaments. Cadres and command organs must have great organizational capabilities and good discipline. The troops must show stamina and great mobility over all terrains and in all weathers. They must be adequately equipped, from both the technical and material points of view. The three categories of troops have different requirements: the people’s militia must be ubiquitous and strong, the regional and regular troops must be elite ones and in sufficient numbers.
Our population being not very great, our standing army is in general inferior to the enemy’s in numbers. And so its quality should manifest itself through high strategic effectiveness and high combat efficacy. Strategically, we must defeat a numerically superior and better-equipped enemy; operationally and tactically, we must destroy large numbers of enemy personnel and record great successes with our troops inferior to the enemy’s in number and armaments.
With high-quality troops capable of great combat efficacy, it is possible to increase severalfold the combativeness of any given number of soldiers while lightening problems of organization, direction, reinforcements, and supply. For us this is a problem of strategic importance.
To ensure for our troops ever-increasing combat power and ever greater successes in a long and arduous war, we have built and developed our forces while fighting. To fight in order to build and expand; to build and expand in order to fight ever bigger battles and win ever greater successes. Development should be gradual, but leaps forward must be made when favourable opportunities present themselves and are likely to lead to great victories.
Thanks to our Party’s judicious line on building the armed forces, the latter have developed and grown up steadily and quickly and are now endowed with invincible combat capabilities. There lies the secret of their prestigious feats of arms. Our Party’s thesis regarding the building of people’s armed forces has thus proved to be correct in the very practice of people’s war.
Its great strength lies in the fact that it has mobilized, tempered and organized the forces of our entire people, our entire nation, to turn them into an iron whole entrusted with tasks in a rational and scientific way and displaying great combativeness in attacking and defeating all armies of aggression, however ferocious, numerous and well-equipped. This thesis is vividly and movingly embodied in President Ho Chi Minh’s historic appeal: “The 31 million of our fellow-countrymen in both zones, young and old, men and women, must be 31 million valiant fighters in the struggle against American aggression, firmly determined to win final victory”.
(1) V.I. Lenin, Collected Works, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1965, Vol. 28, p. 365.
(2) V.I. Lenin, Collected Works, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1965, Vol. 27, p. 30.
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