Central Committee, Communist Party of the Philippines
July 1992

Reasserting the Absolute Leadership of the Party over the Army

The Party must exercise its absolute leadership over the people's army by deploying Party cadres properly. The Party leadership in the army command must not be allowed to pay lip service to the comprehensive Party leadership and yet proceed to take all initiative in building a "separate" structure by grabbing all Party cadres within its reach for staffing. The Party should not thus be "left behind" only to be told to catch up in building and consolidating the mass base when its limbs have been cut off precisely because the army has preempted the personnel and resources. The Party has to take the initiative in deploying cadres and resources properly and take full command of the people's army.

The premature concentration of army command and coordination at higher levels (national and interregional) must be corrected and, relative to this, the direct leadership of the Party territorial committee over the organization and units of the army within their respective scopes must be strengthened. The premature centralization of army command, which is one of the factors of "regularization" and verticalization deprived the guerrilla units of flexibility, encouraged disregard for political considerations and local conditions and resulted more often in incorrect judgments not only politically but also militarily. The practice of some higher army commands to bypass the regional Party committee and directly order the deployment and mission of the main "regular" formations must be stopped. The policy of declaring as war zones all the areas within the guerrilla fronts, thus giving the army command and the main army units the license to bypass the local Party committees and disregard political conditions, considerations and plans in launching military actions must also be stopped.

Within army units, the role and leadership of both the military commander and the political officer should be strengthened; their cooperation must be continuously strengthened for the all-round development of the army unit. What is appropriately the authority of the military commander, especially in military situations, must be ensured while the collective leadership of the Party over the army unit must be developed and strengthened. The tendency to overstress the authority of the commander at the expense of the role of the Party committee, branch or group over the army unit must be avoided.

There have been cases of overstressing the army's line of authority and command almost to the point of liquidating collective life and depriving the Party members in the army of their right to participate in collective discussions about policies and ideological, political, organizational and military matters. There have also been cases at upper command levels of important decisions taken and implemented and operations launched without being referred to or, worse, hidden from the knowledge of the concerned Party committee and reported only after the fact.

Such violations of the absolute leadership of the Party over the army should be corrected. We must ensure that at all times the army operates according to the line of the Party and to the comprehensive policies, plans and priorities and the correct balance between military and political work set by the leading Party committees at different levels. Ideological, political and organizational work to ensure and strengthen Party leadership over the army must be constantly attended to.

It is wrong to maintain big formations in absolute concentration when these are not on tactical offensives or training exercises. The people's army should be like a net which is drawn in when it is to engage an enemy force that it is capable of defeating; and is cast out widely to attend to mass work and other noncombat tasks when not on a fighting mode.

It is wrong to maintain big formations in absolute concentration when these are not on tactical offensives or training exercises. The people's army should be like a net which is drawn in when it is to engage an enemy force that it is capable of defeating; and is cast out widely to attend to mass work and other noncombat tasks when not on a fighting mode. Considering the amount of weapons that the NPA has, it is wiser to have the regional command lead a company as rallying point for the entire region. When not fighting, such a company should be in relative concentration with the headquarters platoon within the radius of a few barrios and the squads in the other platoons can be deployed within a wider radius of more barrios per squad. Such a company can do fighting and other tasks, move from one guerrilla front to another to launch an offensive or to perform other tasks, with the augmentation or coordination of the more numerous and widespread front and local guerrilla units.

It is wiser to multiply the number of guerrilla fronts, with platoons as the rallying point and squads and half-squads spread out within a wider radius for mass work. The objective should be to attain extensive and intensive guerrilla warfare throughout the country. We should be able to make the monster bleed from thousands upon thousands of wounds.

It is wrong to say that the number of guerrilla fronts is already enough and that the point is to verticalize the armed strength into a few big formations. This is the self- constriction which falls into line with the kind of war that the enemy wants us to fight because it allows him to beat us in his war of quick decision and gradual constriction, which is based on his superior military forces. Painstaking mass work and guerrilla warfare are still our winning line at this stage of our people's war. These lay the horizontal foundation for the vertical growth of the people's army in due course.

Confronted by the brigades and battalions deployed by the enemy, let us apply the law of contradiction in our warfare. The enemy is not always in solid large formation. The rough countryside and the archipelago objectively divide the enemy forces. There is no large enemy formation that does not divide itself according to several functions and that does not make its parts vulnerable to our attack. Instead of going into the path of certain defeat by trying to match the enemy's large formations, we must use guerrilla tactics to induce the enemy force to divide itself and unwittingly provide us with part after part that we can wipe out.

Where we cannot as yet raid a camp successfully, we must find success in ambushing the part of the enemy that we can wipe out on the road. Where we cannot as yet wipe out regular enemy troops, we can find success in repeatedly seizing arms from police and paramilitary units through appropriate operations.

It is wrong to say that luring the enemy in deep, letting him move around blind and deaf, and letting him punch the air when we cannot fight to win are outmoded tactics just because our people's war has grown increasingly more intensive as we advance. These are useful at any stage of the people's war. The winning line is to fight only the battles that we can win. The losing line is to stick out big heads or to overreach. Another losing line is not to fight even the battles that we can win. All the way we assume that we expand and consolidate the mass base.

We cannot induce our advance to the stage of regular mobile warfare because it would mean feeding our army and our mass base to senseless attrition or to self-destruction by prematurely rushing into strategically decisive battles or campaigns. Advancing to regular mobile warfare is a strategic advance that necessitates fulfilling the requirements in stages, building up the strength and capability of the Party, the mass base, the reserves and logistics at a higher level and also a greater degree of the enemy's weakening and disintegration, with due consideration of other important factors inside and outside the country. Even the guerrilla warfare for developing the requisites and laying the conditions for regular mobile warfare in the future will have to go through stages, progressively from simple and lower levels to more complex and higher.

The rectification of the line of "regularization" and premature vertical buildup of the people's army should result in the reinvigoration and improvement of the quality of mass work and mass base building in the countryside. It is urgent that we attend to the work of expanding the guerrilla fronts and recovering lost areas as well as of solving the problems of consolidation that have been relegated to secondary position since we started to undertake "regularization" and "to raise the level of our warfare". It is necessary for us to understand and implement the line of solid organizing, correct balancing of expansion and consolidation, antifeudal struggle, consistent education and propaganda, and developing various types of mass campaigns.

We must take advantage of the enemy's loosening hold over wider parts of the countryside as he concentrates the majority of his forces and resources for offensives on the few priority targets of Lambat-Bitag II. But we must also learn to adjust to and persevere in developing our mass work even under conditions and within areas of more intense contention with the enemy. We cannot just leave and abandon the areas that are more populated, along lines of transportation, communications and supply, and important in linking up with the movement in the cities simply because these areas are more easily accessible to or more closely watched by the enemy. We must therefore be good at combining _ according to the changing military conditions and particularities of the areas (remote and mountainous, foothills and plains, adjacent to urban centers and along highways) _ forms of organizations and struggles that are open and secret, legal, semilegal and illegal, traditional and nontraditional, as well as forms of struggles that are armed and nonarmed in order to maintain as far as possible our link with, guidance over and development of the movement and the mass base.

One long running problem in our mass work is the smallness of the membership of our mass organizations; in many localities, the only existing people's organizations are the organs of political power or a semblance of it. We must solve this problem by organizing as fully as possible the workers, peasants, youth, women, children and cultural activists. And we must develop the organs of political power, supported by working committees for mass organization, education, defense, land reform, production, finance, health, arbitration, cultural affairs and so on. These can be drawn from mass organizations.

In organizing the masses, we must also avoid premature verticalization and give priority to horizontal spread and consolidation at the barrio and municipal levels. In the last several years, there has been a tendency to push the building of the structure of the organs of political power and the mass organizations upward to the level of the district and higher even as the scope and strength of the mass organizations at the basic levels have diminished, thus absorbing the already limited number of cadres at the lower levels in order to preoccupy them with the tasks of administration, coordination and formal processes of organization at upper levels.

It is of urgent necessity to organize the masses. But getting organized is not enough. Mass campaigns must be launched. Through these, the masses can develop their own power, effect changes for their social and economic wellbeing and resist and frustrate enemy attacks by unarmed and armed, open and secret means.

The key campaign to benefit the peasant masses is the campaign for the realization of the minimum program of our land reform and increased production. There are some elements who _ without having much in carrying out the minimum program of rent reduction _ already wish to carry out the maximum program of land confiscation. We have had more than enough negative experiences of this kind of overreaching _ of trying to achieve what we cannot as yet achieve.

Elements of the maximum program (such as land confiscation and redistribution or restitution) may be carried out only against despotic landlords (those who harm the peasant masses and farm workers and refuse to negotiate with them) and landgrabbers so that we can still take advantage of the split between the despotic and enlightened landlords, prevent the landlords (big, medium and small) from uniting against us and allow us to further develop our strength among the peasant masses not only in the current guerrilla fronts but also in the more extensive areas to which we must expand.