"What I'm about to say are my ideas, they don't  necessarily represent those of the US government,   the US Navy Department, the US Department of  Defense, or the Naval War College, you got   that clea..."

"And oh, by the way, a lot of  those 8,000, 7,000 pages weren't   that interesting, so in a way, you owe me. All right, these are major military theorists,   just to run you through them. Clausewitz  i..."

"than a political revolution. You're  not just replacing the government;   you're going to wipe out entire social classes.  And I don't mean then, "Hey, here's your one-way   ticket out of here" kind o..."

"to understand Mao's theories, I need to put  it in the context of the wars that he fought.  So in 1911, Qing Dynasty collapses. The  country shatters into a multilateral warfare   among warlords, thes..."

"Long march is a real misnomer. It's the Long  Rout. The Communists lose 95% of their forces.  I believe in English “decimate” means to  lose 10%. Losing 95%, I think you need a   whole new verb for wh..."

"Now, I promised you a simple framework. Here's  the simple framework. Simple framework should   have three to five things because that's all  about any of us could really handle on short   notice. And..."

"All right. Mao began his public service  career as a propagandist. And if you   look at his early biography, he's born in  1893 to a prosperous but not particularly   well-educated father who tilled h..."

"to reach a population and mobilize it. Military messengers are a little different.   Every single military unit had about a 20-member  propaganda team. That's a lot of people. According   to Mao, the ..."

"an institutional medium of education. And here is  Mao, the primary school teacher, in his element.  Most of the people in his armies were illiterate,  but Mao knew all about how to reach them. There ..."

"Counter-Japan Red Army University,  of the first original departments,   political work is one of them. This is not  professional military education the way it's   done in the West, it's a separate th..."

"And he goes further into the statistics  and he identifies 70% as poor peasants,   20% who are like his father—they till their  own land, they're middle peasants—and then   there are the exploitative ..."

"That's what the Communists are going to do.  But he says, "Look, the system of landlords and   tenants cannot be completely destroyed yet." Because he needs the peasants to join him,   and the peasant..."

"we're going to do Mao the military leader. You've probably heard this chestnut from Mao:   "Political power grows out of the barrel  of a gun." Mao spent his- it’s still part   of his early career- be..."

"it, that Mao may have known what he was doing. Then, on the Long Retreat, Mao chose as his   terminal point of retreat, like  where you’re going to wind up,   as up in Yenon, way up north, deep in Mus..."

"and that the ones that were ongoing were  the civil war with the Nationalists and   then the regional war with Japan. Pearl  Harbor comes a little later. And he talked   about defeating Japan in three..."

"He also said that if you're weak the way  the Communists were, you had to follow a   strategy of annihilation. What you do is you  annihilate one small enemy unit at a time,   and the cumulative effec..."

"the Long March was up in Yenan. He thought it was  important to figure those things out in advance.  Mao also cultivated an unprecedented group of  allies, never before assembled in Chinese history:  ..."

"he had a strategy of disintegrating the enemy  army and let me tell you how that one worked.  In every county, you select a large number of  workers and peasant comrades, people below the   radar, and..."

"This meant that guerrillas could roam  far and wide behind Japanese lines. Also,   the Japanese were brutal, just gratuitously  brutal, and they're outsiders. This means   that the peasantry are natur..."

"theory is his three stages of people's war.  The first stage is the strategic defensive.   It's the "prevent defeat" phase. The last phase, phase three,   is the strategic offensive, the "delivery  vi..."

"is basically you have a critical mass of base  areas, cadres, armed forces that you can move   into phase two. But the problem of being in  phase two is what had looked like isolated   acts of banditr..."

"role the world over. And so this is  the secret sauce of people's war:   if you want to get to phase three, you need a  big buddy. That's where the Soviet Union came in.  And so this is why Mao determ..."

"talking about really applies to the civil war. And Mao understands these different layers. So,   as the Nationalists are busy fighting the  Japanese and actually being destroyed by them,   the communi..."

"land reform, base areas, institution  building, warfare, and diplomacy.  The US military, when they're thinking about  elements of national power, love this little   framework: DIME. D is for diplomac..."

"who dies in 1953, as the leader of communism. Mao was prescient on numerous levels.   He was certainly prescient about the  centrality of the peasantry. He was way   ahead of his times on the importan..."

"take over the host from within. I've listed  a variety of them here, and I'm going to   go through them in turn. These are the things  that the counterinsurgent then has to counter.  All right, rural ..."

"thinking about ISIS or whatever's left of it,  you can go back to Mao's ideas about base areas,   that you need a particular kind of geography  that's good for the defensive. You've got to have   a bi..."

"and that worked. Then when the Manchurian campaign  initially wasn't going well for Mao, he retreated   up to Siping, which is a little bit north,  and that worked well enough. But when Chiang   Kai-s..."

"Of course, Mao's big contribution was his three  stages of people's war. Mao presents them as   sequential: you go from one to two to three, and  tada, you win. And they're cumulative, right?  You do ..."

"recommend it—one is struck by all these dualities.  I think it goes back to Yin and Yang analysis,   which is very prominent in traditional  Chinese thinking. So, if you look at   Mao discussing trian..."

"they're graduated, and evolution is much more  conducive to economic development than revolution. So here's something I'm confused by. You  were talking about Mao as a shrewd commander,   somebody who..."

"those factors. It's so big when you start putting  a policy in place from Beijing. And then how that   actually fans out over the whole country, it's  got to be a mess. Different localities and things..."

"disposal than what the Chinese communists are  going to have. Also, the kind of warfare. Think   about the warfare in China. You got the  Taiping Rebellion, only the biggest of   the peasant rebellion..."

"Mao can't surf that wave, no one can. Just to linger on this...  Uh-oh. New exit strategy. Even if he's not a specialist on agriculture,   and even if China is a hard country to govern,  he was somebo..."

"It's a real case against dictatorship. For all  the chaos of party politics, you're at least   forced to confront the counterargument.  It is a healthier situation to be in.  Let's go back to the end ..."

"reason you all are prosperous is there's a  global maritime order in which people obey   rules because it is so much cheaper to obey  rules. Because what do you do when people   break the rules? You h..."

"There are 300 million Americans,  while the world's got 8 billion. Uh,   be cautious. What's key on this maritime order,  the big insurance policy of it all, is our allies   and institutions. This is ..."

"parliaments and other things. So that when you  give Germans some cash, and Japanese as well,   they know exactly how to recreate things  and rapidly produce modern institutions.   You're talking abou..."

"and who knows how they raised their families? I thought it was the case that George Marshall,   who was the envoy to China, the diplomat.  I thought it was a case that later on   they realized it was ..."

"of the Marshall Plan to keep China from turning  Communist. And look what the consequences were:   Vietnam, we had to fight, Korea, we had  to fight, Cambodia, the genocide there.  But you can't solve..."

"the mistake- and this is a common  one that Americans make so this is   worth talking about- is Americans often don't  look at warring parties to understand if they are   primary adversaries there is ..."

"country and didn't have the attitude of a great  power until after World War II. In World War I,   we felt dragged into it, and these horrible  wars, and being quite irresponsible during the   Great D..."

"Taiwanese were given bonds, and they thought those  bonds would be like the pieces of paper that were   issued in the mainland, i.e worth nothing, but  actually after time they became quite valuable. ..."

"there in the incredibly baggy clothing.  No one's got luxury wear or anything.  Although after they won, Mao is famously a fan  of luxury and has -- right? In a way that I think   Stalin would sleep o..."

"but it does not deliver prosperity, it delivers  compounding poverty, take a look at North   Korea. It's a mess, but the man's in power. Why don't the high-level officials in the CCP,   after they see..."

"And it is ruinous for production, right? Doing all  this. And you're gutting your educational system.   All the people who gave the hard grades, who  may have actually known something, they're gone.  ..."

"So he's a believer in communism. Don't ever  kid yourself that the Communist Party of China   doesn't believe in communism now. They think  they've modified some of the economic stuff   under Deng Xia..."

"I'm guessing, I'm not Chinese, but I think all  of us need to be proud of things. Of course,   one thing to be very proud of if you're  Chinese is Chinese civilization. These   enormous achievements i..."

"ever go to a Chinese movie you hear  the erhu, whatever the instrument is,   it's just so sad and melancholy. Whereas  American movies are all happy. Millions   of people die, but the good guys live, ..."

"has that can't—that no one can  duplicate—except for crazy stuff.  What I find disturbing about communism in  comparison to—I mean, maybe even especially   Chinese communism— is... when Hitler is kill..."

"was the nature of his anti-communism? Because in  retrospect, obviously the means we don't endorse,   but he was right about that understanding of  what would happen with the Communists in power.  He ..."

"When you read Western journalists who are  covering the communists in China sympathetically,   people like Edgar Snow, and this is not just true  of China, Walter Duranty covering up the Holodomor   i..."

"So what was it? Sun Yat-sen,  the founding father of China,   is married to one of the Soong sisters.  Another one of the Soong sisters is married   to Chiang Kai-shek. And there's a third one  who's ..."

"original version has all kinds of pictures of  people that Mao subsequently purges, so those   pictures go away. All references to those people  go away, and they're no longer in the index.  And Edgar..."

"When you had the slogans up about what Mao is  telling the peasants or the different slogans   he would come up with, it's not tremendously  sophisticated stuff. It's like one line that's   catchy or ..."

"good at understanding both sides fighting,  and then you feed information both ways so   that they're just at each other's throats, and  being more and more dysfunctional. Oh, yeah.  When was the last..."

"Yeah. When you're in these archives and you're  studying all these atrocities that happen,   if you look at the numbers themselves,  it might be fair to call it genuinely   the worst thing that ever h..."