IV. Strategy and tactics
The Party has correctly set the politico-military strategic line of protracted people's war. This means encircling the cities from the countryside and accumulating strength over a long period of time until enough strength and capability have been accumulated to seize the cities on a nationwide scale in the stage of strategic offensive.
This line is based on the reality of the Philippines where the majority of the people are peasants, and the countryside offers the social and physical terrain for building the people's army and carrying out the people's war in stages.
The correctness of the strategic line is well proven by the fact that the New People's Army has been able to preserve itself and has grown from small to big and from weak to strong against brutal enemy attacks. Such attacks include campaigns of division-size task forces to nip the people's army in the bud from 1969 to 1972, the 14-year fascist dictatorship of Marcos and the series of national counterrevolutionary military campaign plans launched by the successive pseudo-democratic regimes after Marcos.
In the long course of the Marcos fascist dictatorship, we were able to build the people's army that started with only nine automatic rifles and 26 inferior firearms (single-shot rifles and handguns) in early 1969 and reached the national total of 5,600 automatic rifles in 1985. Since 1985, however, it had become obvious that the NPA was being debilitated by such "Left" opportunist lines as the "strategic counteroffensive" and the "Red area-white area" line.
These "Left" opportunist lines undermined the strength of the NPA and wrought havoc on the revolutionary mass base and caused the reduction of the mass base by more than 60% in the 1980s. They played into the hands of the enemy that carried out Oplan Lambat-Bitag (OLB) I, II and III designed to put the NPA units under strategic encirclement and "gradual constriction," and hunted them down with "special operations teams."
The Second Great Rectification Movement criticized and repudiated the "Left" opportunist lines as engaging in self-constriction and separation from the masses under the guise of strengthening the NPA through unwarranted verticalization and premature formation of larger units. In areas where the "Left" opportunist lines took hold, the need for the horizontal spread of NPA units was laid aside, thus undermining and destroying our close links with the masses. The organized mass base of the revolutionary movement shrank even as the prematurely formed companies had bigger logistical demands.
Under the direction of the Party in the rectification movement, the NPA had to go back to the basics of guerrilla warfare. It was reoriented, reorganized and redeployed to carry out intensive and extensive guerrilla warfare on the basis of an ever widening and deepening mass base. The enemy knew about the return to small units and was emboldened to deploy its scout ranger teams against these units. But the NPA was able to preserve itself and recover the mass base precisely by adhering to its correct line during the entire period of the Ramos and Estrada regimes.
The stress on the horizontal spread of small NPA units in order to counter the harmful results of the premature verticalization and to recover the mass base was not without any negative aspect. It engendered guerrilla-ism or the roving rebel mentality and conservatism, especially where there were no conscious and resolute efforts to develop the revolutionary forces in a balanced way and the necessary correlation of the center of gravity and dispersed units in the work of the people's army. However, so long as the mass base was growing, it was much easier for the Party to rectify conservatism and guerrilla-ism.
The next big test of the NPA has been Oplan Bantay Laya (OBL) with its brutal campaign against legal social activists and forced displacement of peasants and indigenous people in the countryside. OBL far exceeded OLB in scope, duration, intensity and brutality. The US and the Arroyo regime (agitated by militarists and clerico-fascists who are US CIA assets) harped on the line that progressive social activists are NPA fighters in disguise and calculated that the military campaigns would be more effective in the countryside if such social activists were suppressed through abductions, torture and extrajudicial killings.
OBL has proven the inadequacy of the reactionary military, police and paramilitary forces to cover even only 10% of Philippine territory at every given time. The NPA can easily move about in 90% of the territory. Thus, it has been able to grow in strength and defeat the objectives of OBL. With OBL, the Arroyo regime has gained notoriety throughout the world for its gross and systematic violations of human rights.
But we must learn well the lessons from the various tactics the enemy has used in OBL, such as the "shock and awe" tactics of General Palparan in Oriental Mindoro, Eastern Visayas and Central Luzon, the "convergence" approach of General Gomez in Bohol, the "center of gravity" approach of Colonel Dagoy and the "sitio" approach of Colonel Bustillos.
From a strategic view, all these are paper tigers. But at the tactical level, where they pounced upon the guerrilla fronts and the masses, they were real brutal tigers inflicting a measure of damage, generating real problematic conditions for the revolution and causing errors and weaknesses on the part of the subjective forces of the revolution.
The Party has brought together and analyzed the reports from the regions concerned and has come up with plans to overcome the problems and to further strengthen the revolutionary forces. We have learned valuable lessons in overcoming the attacks of the enemy, preserving and upgrading our forces and mass base, launching full-scale guerrilla warfare and advancing the revolutionary struggle. Our difficult experiences have tempered us and we have emerged stronger, continue to inflict more widespread and heavy blows against the enemy, and are ever determined to advance and win our people's war.
At present, the NPA stands as the largest people's army that the Filipino working people have ever been able to put up, surpassing the number of riflemen in the revolutionary army of 1896 to 1902 and the old people's army of 1942 to 1952. To claim false credit, the reactionary forces keep on repeating the lie that the NPA had 25,000 fighters in 1986 and that they have succeeded in cutting the number down to 5,000 or even less. 
The NPA rifle strength in 1986 was only 6,100 (an increase of 500 over the 1985 figure of 5,600), with no accurate accounting of the consequence of the "Left" opportunist lines and anti-informer hysteria, particularly Kampanyang Ahos in Mindanao. From figures of the 1985 Central Committee plenum, Mindanao had accounted for about 50% of NPA armed strength.
The current strength of the NPA is of critical mass in terms of its thousands of fighters with high-powered firearms. With proper deployment and employment, it can rapidly grow and advance in waves and in well-defined phases (middle and advanced) of the strategic defensive and the threshold and early phase of the strategic stalemate. Wherever NPA units exist under any level of command: barrio, section, guerrilla front, interfront, provincial, subregional and regional, there must be a relatively concentrated force as center of gravity. The center of gravity must be situated on the best available terrain. As wide areas are saturated with adjoining company-strength guerrilla fronts and transformed into subregional military areas and later further on into fluid war fronts, their centers of gravity develop larger vertical forces.
At the same time, the further development of horizonal forces consisting of a full-time guerrilla platoon at the municipal level would be beefed up with the proliferation of platoon-size people's militias, barrio self-defense corps and self-defense units of mass organizations at the barrio level, and the deployment of armed city partisans in urban centers within guerrilla fronts.
The current number of guerrilla fronts is more than adequate a base for aiming to cover almost all if not all the 179 rural congressional districts of the reactionary state with the Party, mass organizations, alliances and units of the people's army within the next two or three years. The strength of the NPA must not be divided and dissipated just to cover said congressional districts in an absolutely equal and even way. The NPA must grow in strength where they are and advance wave upon wave or deploy advance or seed units in such districts on the best available terrain.
In the next five years, the NPA is bound to deliver more telling lethal blows on the reactionary military, police and paramilitary forces that would belie the false claims of reactionaries, pseudo-progressives and renegades that the NPA has been undermined and weakened by the post-Marcos antinational and antidemocratic regimes and by their military campaigns. Most importantly, the Party and the NPA are determined to increase the armed strength and political power of the working people.
The probable stages of development for the people's war is from the strategic defensive to the strategic stalemate and from the latter to the strategic offensive. After being at the strategic defensive for four decades, we have developed the basis to aim at and reach the stage of strategic stalemate in the next five years and then strive to move onward to the final stage of strategic offensive.
We must sum up our fighting experience and current situation and develop guidelines and plans at the levels of the Central Committee, the Military Commission and NPA operational command; at the level of the regional Party committees and the regional operational commands; and at the subregional, provincial and district or guerrilla front levels for the purpose of launching tactical offensives and increasing the armed strength of the NPA to enable us to advance from the strategic defensive to the strategic stalemate.
It is feasible for us in the next five years to have a guerrilla front in each of the 179 rural congressional districts and to deploy armed city partisans in all urban congressional districts. The coverage of a rural congressional district by a guerrilla front is facilitated by the existence and growth of guerrilla fronts in adjoining districts. The emergence and growth of guerrilla fronts will be uneven but we must always strive to realize the standard requirements and raise the general level of development. The regional Party committee and NPA operational command must make sure that centers of gravity at the regional, subregional, provincial and guerrilla front levels are located on terrain favorable for maneuver.
The guerrilla fronts would have more breadth and depth and become relatively stable as they become better coordinated under the interfront, provincial, subregional or regional levels of the Party leadership and NPA command. The enemy forces would still have the capability to concentrate forces on the entirety or a part of a particular guerrilla front. But the interconnection and coordination of several adjoining guerrilla fronts under commands higher than that of the guerrilla front and the availability of strike forces for counterattacks by regional, subregional, provincial or interfront commands will be crucial for preserving, strengthening and expanding the guerrilla fronts and launching coordinated tactical operations in the areas covered. Adjoining guerrilla fronts would be more easily coordinated than before and have an echelon of commands, such as the regional, subregional and provincial.
The enemy will always try to put our forces on strategic encirclement and launch strategic offensives. But the NPA would have increased initiative and ability in launching tactical encirclements and tactical offensives as the levels of regional, subregional and provincial commands are developed. Our increased offensives will compel the enemy forces to increase personnel for the defense of camps, police stations and vital installations and reduce the number of enemy armed personnel for offensive operations. And yet the enemy lines of patrols and supplies will remain vulnerable to NPA tactical offensives.
Wherever the enemy forces choose to encircle our forces, we engage in tactical counterencirlements and fight on exterior lines. At the same time, we can take the initiative of launching tactical offensives elsewhere. We maintain a war of fluid movement. We continue to master and apply the tactics of concentration, shifting and dispersal in order to achieve our objectives according to concrete circumstances.
Whenever necessary, we trade space for time. We do not engage in any hard-headed defense of territory and allow ourselves to be forced into battles that put at risk any main unit of the NPA in any guerrilla front, province, subregion or region. At all times, our small units that are dispersed for mass work must be vigilant against being caught by surprise and forced to fight purely defensive battles or chance encounters.
We wage only those battles of quick decision that we can win. We give priority to delivering blows on the weakest points of the enemy forces. The enemy is blind and deaf because it is hated by the people. They cannot tell when and where our forces are poised to strike. We take the full initiative in waging battles of annihilation, which would yield weapons for further strengthening the people's army and would inflict casualties that reduce the strength and weaken the morale of the enemy forces.
We have a wide array of tactics, which are more complex and more unpredictable to the enemy than a single-occasion ambush, raid and arrest operation, which may have its own complexity in the deployment of blocking, containing and close-in units. The complex tactics we refer to include the following: luring the enemy in deep and leading it to our zone of fire; ambushing or raiding one enemy force and as prelude to a bigger strike against the reinforcements; feigning to attack the east in order to attack the west; inducing an enemy force to go out of its base and destroying the base; tiring the enemy force by letting it march deep into our territory and ambushing it when it tries to return to base; and so forth.
Our principal objective is to wage and win battles of annihilation against the enemy forces. We must also wage attritive actions that serve to weaken and demoralize the forces of the enemy. These include sniping at enemy personnel by sniper teams or sparrow units, use of explosives against enemy vehicles, burning enemy fuel and motor depots and so on. We can make the monster bleed to death from battles of annihilation and attritive actions.
The advance of our people's war in stages and phases will mean the advance of our military tactics and technique. We learn our tactics from the summing up and analysis of our positive and negative experiences. We capture weapons, communications equipment and other forms of logistics from the enemy.
Even now we have access to sophisticated electronic equipment for communications and storing and retrieval of information. We must be strict in using these properly in our communications, work and offensives. Used irresponsibly, the same equipment can facilitate the infliction of harm on us by the enemy. We must never neglect the use and development of primitive but more reliable forms of communication such as the courier system on the basis of organized mass base and alliances.
We must conduct political work to recruit medical personnel and other professionals and technicians for various departments of the people's army and to develop alliances to enable us to have access to various types of professional and technical services. We must promote production by the people's army for its own needs and by the people to support the people's army and families of our Red fighters. We must gather the contributions of the working people who have benefited or stand to benefit from the policies of the revolutionary government and movement.
The people's government has the power of taxation in order to control and regulate enterprises and assets that earn rent and profit and in order to collect the resources for the delivery of social services much needed by the masses, including the administration and support for the programs of production, education, health, defense and cultural development. When certain political groups and individuals make donations to the people's government, these are used for social purposes and are not payment for the right to campaign or win a position in reactionary elections.
Aside from combat operations to wipe out units of the military, police and paramilitary forces and private armed groups, we must carry out operations to arrest for trial and punishment the exploiters and oppressors who have incurred blood debts, violators of human rights, the plunderers, landgrabbers, destroyers of the environment and the top purveyors of prohibited drugs. We must dismantle the reactionary organs of political power and antipeople enterprises that grab land and destroy the environment.
We must remove the incorrigible oppressors and exploiters from our guerrilla fronts. We expand and consolidate Red political power by eliminating or driving them away from the guerrilla fronts. We must prepare ourselves against the further increase of US military intervention forces as we succeed in advancing from the strategic defensive to the strategic stalemate. We must be prepared against all-out US military aggression.
Take advantage of the crisis conditions by intensifying the people's war!
Fulfill the political requirements under the leadership of the Party!
Continue extensive and intensive guerrilla warfare!
Advance from the strategic defensive to the strategic stalemate!
Carry forward the new democratic revolution through people's war!
