4. FURTHER STRENGTHEN THE PEOPLE'S ARMY AND CARRY FORWARD THE REVOLUTIONARY ARMED STRUGGLE!

We must further strengthen the New People's Army as the main form of organization under the leadership of the Party and carry forward the revolutionary armed struggle as the main form of our people's struggle. We have established a good basis for the further strengthening of the New People's Army.

Our Red fighters have a high level of political consciousness and are closely linked with the masses. Every squad has a Party group within it and oftentimes the majority of the Red fighters are Party members. The Party branch is at presently based on the platoon.

The people's army has grown in rifle strength from early 1969 to the eve of fascist martial rule and from the latter time to the present. What it is now in armed strength is a far cry from the 35 rifles and handguns that it started with. The people's army now has guerrilla forces in all regions outside Manila-Rizal and has a total of twenty guerrilla fronts.

Each regional army organization is led by a regional Party committee. The nationwide expansion of the people's army under the direction of the Central Committee is a far cry from its beginnings in the second district of Tarlac.

Our army has gained invaluable experience and has become tempered. It has undergone the acid test of massive and prolonged enemy campaigns. We recall Tarlac of 1969-71, Isabela of 1972-73, Sorsogon of 1974-75 and Aurora of 1975. At the peak of his campaigns, the enemy always employs a number of troops more than a hundred times bigger than ours, with the support of paramilitary forces, heavy weapons and the most modern means of communications and air and land transport.

Our heroic Red fighters and Party cadres together with the masses have overcome tremendous odds. Despite all the enemy campaigns, marked by the most wicked forms of "population control," the people's army has on the whole grown in armed strength. We have suffered some setbacks. There is not a single regional army organization which has not suffered serious setbacks at varying times. But the expansion, shifting and recoveries by our guerrilla forces have more than compensated for the losses.

Because of the nationwide expansion of the people's army, the enemy cannot concentrate his combat troops on one region without risking the advance of our forces in other regions. So far, he has not had the pleasure of inflicting a total or strategically decisive defeat on all our forces in any single region. Within a region, the existence of several guerrilla fronts tend to weaken the enemy campaign whether directed against all or any of these.

Despite all our achievements in building the people's army, our overall armed strength is still so small in comparison to that of the enemy who is several hundreds of times stronger. The course of historical development and the current balance of forces, particularly our level of armed strength, determine the mode of our warfare, which is guerrilla warfare.

There is no course for us but to grow in strength step by step. Our revolutionary armed struggle is just and enjoys abundant support from the people. So long as we adhere to a correct strategy and tactics, we shall grow from small and weak to big and strong. To repeat, we shall do so step by step.

Our people's war is protracted. It shall take a long period of time to change the balance of forces between us and the enemy. We must recognize further that at the back of the local reactionaries is U.S. imperialism. This superpower will keep on supplying and assisting them at the least. It regards the Philippines as an important base for maintaining itself as a Pacific power and as a position of strength in Asia.

The worldwide decline of U.S. imperialism, especially after its failed war of aggression in Indochina, is definitely favorable to our revolutionary armed struggle. But we must also recognize that U.S. imperialism is at the moment hardening its position in the Philippines precisely as a result of its defeats elsewhere and, for a long time to come, only a deep-going people's war can strike effectively at its foothold.

Friendly forces abroad cannot extend military assistance to us as much as we may need or wish. We must reconcile ourselves to the irony that when we need such assistance most it is most difficult for us to get it. The single imperialist power dominating the country is not yet an easy pushover in terms of the next few years. And his prior hold on our small archipelagic country is a serious factor to contend with.

We have to maintain a high degree of self-reliance in our people's war. We must rely on ourselves most certainly to a degree higher than many revolutionary armed movements abroad. There is no course for us but to always raise our determination to get all that we need for the armed struggle from our people and from the enemy himself in the battlefield.

Our strategic line in our people's war is to encircle the cities from the countryside until such time that we become capable of moving on the cities from stable revolutionary bases in the countryside. For a long time, we have to develop guerrilla warfare on a nationwide scale so as to convert into our advantage the disadvantage of fighting in a small archipelagic country, whose countryside is so vast in relation to the cities but fragmented into so many islands.

We are at the stage of the strategic defensive and we are precisely at its early substage of developing guerrilla warfare from almost nothing. From almost nothing because of the revisionist line of the Lavas and Tarucs that threw away all previous revolutionary gains of the people.

We have only to look at how much armed strength we have in each of the eight regions outside Manila-Rizal to know the magnitude of hard work that we have to do to further increase our squads and platoons. Again it shall take another magnitude of hard work to advance from the present phase of squads and platoons.

In the whole country or in an entire region, we are on the strategic defensive in the face of the large enemy forces encircling us. But we are capable of tactical offensives. In parts and parts of the countryside, we can achieve local superiority. At a given moment and in a limited area, we can put a small enemy unit in the tightest bag and crush it.

We must launch tactical offensives as the most essential content of our strategic defense. We simply refuse to engage our small forces in any strategically decisive engagement with the far larger forces of the enemy. Not in any region or guerrilla front should this happen. Knowing that large forces of the enemy is divisible, as everything is from a Marxist viewpoint, we must take the initiative of maneuvering the enemy to divide his forces and then concentrating our small forces at only that part of the enemy which we are sure of wiping out at a given place and time.

We should accumulate the small victories from our ambushes and raids. Over a period of time, such victories should give birth to more guerrilla squads and platoons. Then our capacity to destroy the enemy will increase. The highest mark of initiative in our guerrilla warfare is annihilating the enemy and capturing his weapons. We should not waste our precious limited ammunition and we should plan well the disposition and intensity of our lines of fire on a given target. There is no point in killing enemy troops if it is not in the course of depriving them of the weapons which they would refuse to yield.

We must learn well the rudimentary tactics of guerrilla warfare. We disperse to do propaganda and organizational work among the masses. We concentrate a superior force to destroy the enemy. We shift or circle round to avoid a superior enemy force, learn more about it through the masses and through our own reconnaissance and move to an advantageous position politically and militarily.

We can apply our guerrilla tactics well only if we have the wide and deep organized support of the people and we have eliminated the enemy informers and bad elements who are incorrigible. With the organized masses screening out the enemy, rendering him blind and deaf, we can foil his attempt to concentrate his forces on our small forces. Even when he is still preparing to attack us, we can learn through the masses his strength and movements and as a result we can act appropriately.

When the enemy is on some short-term offensive and wants to move in on us in superior force, we must deprive him of a target and we let him punch the air and thereby exhaust himself. We can remain on the active side either by laying an ambush on a weak part of the enemy disposition, attacking the enemy in an entirely different area or simply going elsewhere to do mass work. We should never accept or undertake any battle that we are not sure of winning. We may not be able to smash an enemy offensive but certainly we can frustrate it.

In all our experience, it is the massive and prolonged army campaigns, marked by forced mass evacuation and all kinds of barbarities, that have been our most outstanding problem in the battlefield. The enemy has launched such campaigns in areas where we are relatively strong over a wide area. At the early stage of such enemy campaigns, when enemy control is not yet tight, we must make him pay as much of a heavy price as we can exact from him, without prejudice to the prompt shifting of our main guerrilla forces to an alternative guerrilla front or area.

Enemy campaigns, whether short-term or protracted, are very costly to the enemy. That is why the military budget of the fascist dictatorship keeps on rising. Repeatedly frustrating them and depriving them of a target will undermine the resources of the reactionary government and also undermine the morale of enemy troops who also suffer some deprivations for nothing.

There is nothing wrong about shifting when faced with enemy forces ten or a hundred times stronger. This is neither accepting defeat nor flightism. This is preserving our forces to destroy the enemy another day. The areas that adjoin or are a short leap from the area being encircled by the enemy and under his heavy concentration are also fertile soil for revolution. Besides, we can always recover any "lost" area after sometime.

So as not to be merely forced to shift to an uncertain destination by an enemy campaign, we should be prepared long beforehand for such an enemy campaign by developing alternate guerrilla fronts and by deploying propaganda teams in areas where guerrilla warfare is to be developed from scratch or is to arise upon the shifting of guerrilla forces from elsewhere.

The unpopulated forest areas are good passageways and offer good points for schooling and temporary retreats. But to simply wait out a massive and prolonged enemy campaign of about one year to two years in the forests is to fall for the siege tactics of the enemy. It is also artificial to bring a considerable number of unarmed masses with you in this kind of retreat. Movement will be hampered. Food will soon run out and isolated kaingins are easily detected by the enemy.

When the masses are being forced to evacuate, legal mass struggle should be launched to oppose and stop the evacuation. Even when the forced mass evacuation is already done these legal mass struggles can go on for the restitution of damage to their crops and homes, for better treatment and rationing at evacuation centers and for their early return to their evacuated homes.

Some of the masses or selected families can also be directed by us to shift mainly on their own and by different ways to the area where we are shifting. There are many of those who might have relatives and friends there. Or there are public lands there which they can open like other people do.

Whenever the time comes for us to recover an area previously abandoned by us and then abandoned by the enemy, we must disarm the "home defense units" left by the enemy and increase the weaponry of the people's army. We must clean up those who have blood debts And we must be alert for spies planted in the midst of the masses.

We have insisted that for a start in every region we must develop our guerrilla fronts on favorable terrain, that is to say, forested, mountainous and hilly terrain with population. It is in this kind of terrain where enemy rule and influence are usually weak and where we can establish our guerrilla bases within the shortest possible time at this stage. Here we not only have a wide area for maneuver but also easily achieve depth in our maneuvers. Here we can best apply the tactics of "luring in" the enemy. He can not come in without first exposing himself and alerting us. It would be easy for us to be on the look-out and prepare for his coming.

We have also directed that for a start in a region, two or three guerrilla fronts on such a terrain should be established. We have been concerned with the possible dissipation of our limited Party cadres and resources by a previous current that we should have a guerrilla force in every province. But any regional Party organization can have more than two or three guerrilla fronts, whenever development and conditions permit.

While we must take advantage of the most favorable terrain for our guerrilla warfare, we must strive to move forward from the mountain to the plains and coordinate the revolutionary forces in the mountains and in the plains as well as those in the barrios and in the towns. In dealing with the islands, we should attend to the major islands first and then the minor ones.

This early, we must also pay attention to the coastal areas. This is important inasmuch as we are an archipelagic country.

Conditions are not yet ripe for having a well-known central revolutionary base, where the Central Committee of the Party and the general headquarters the New People's Army are seated. We should keep the enemy guessing and ignorant where our principal leaders are in the countryside. But certainly at this stage, we should be firmly taking the steps towards creating such a base in the best possible location.

The emergence of the central revolutionary base presupposes the achievement of a higher stage in our people's war and takes into consideration the development of nationwide guerrilla warfare and international developments involving U.S. imperialism. We still have a long road to traverse in this regard. Of all the regional Party and army organizations, the most directly concerned in bringing about the conditions for the emergence of the central revolutionary base are Northwest Luzon, Northeast Luzon and Central Luzon.

It remains the long-term strategic task of the revolutionary forces of Luzon to destroy the main forces of the enemy. The day is certain to come when the forces from the north and south of Luzon will converge on Manila-Rizal in a general offensive. It also remains the long-term strategic task of the revolutionary forces of Mindanao and the Visayas to draw the forces of the enemy and disperse them. At certain times, the bulk of enemy forces can be drawn to Mindanao. The area for maneuver for us here is as wide as that in the three regions north of Manila-Rizal, and the people's army can either take advantage of or coordinate its efforts with the resistance of the Bangsa Moro Army, if integration of the latter is not possible.

We have repeatedly pointed to the present low level of armed strength of the New People's Army. To amplify this strength, we must give full play to the participation of the people in the revolutionary armed struggle. We should not limit this participation to merely providing for the material needs of the full-time Red fighters and watching out for the enemy.

We must give political-military training to as many able-bodied men and women from the mass organizations and from time to time get the required number of volunteers from them to participate in well-planned military actions where their inferior weapons can blend with more advanced weapons of the full-time Red fighters. In the hands of so many people inferior weapons can prove to be superior and yet we make sure that at the core of such weapons as bolos, spears, bows and arrows and homemade explosives are good guns.

When the people's combative spirit is kept high by continuous political education and military training, they will make do with any weapon and will use every trick and ruse to disarm the enemy even with bare hands. The most important thing is the people's revolutionary determination and wisdom. In the future, popular uprisings or insurrections will arise over extensive areas.