Mobile Warfare

Not to be confused with Maneuver warfare.

Mobile warfare (Chinese: 运动战; pinyin: yùndòngzhàn) is a military strategy of the People’s Republic of China employing conventional forces on fluid fronts with units maneuvering to exploit opportunities for tactical surprise, or where a local superiority of forces can be realized. One of early CCP leader Mao Zedong's three forms of warfare (Chinese: 战争形式; pinyin: zhànzhēng xíngshì), mobile warfare was the primary form of warfare used by Chinese communist forces from the early 1930s to the conclusion of the Chinese Civil War. The other two forms of warfare that Mao defined in On Protracted War, guerrilla warfare (游击战; yóujīzhàn) and positional warfare (阵地战; zhèndìzhàn), were less frequently employed.

The most notable example of Chinese mobile warfare was the Long March, a massive military retreat in which Mao marched in circles in Guizhou until he had confused the vastly larger armies pursuing him, and was then able to slip through Yunnan and Sichuan, although the retreat was completed by only one-tenth of the force that left for the Long March at Jiangxi.

The Chinese People's Volunteer Army's first five campaigns in the Korean War were characterized by a strategy of mobile warfare, in which the PVA encircled the enemy through maneuvers and sought to annihilate the enemy. Then it entered a stage of positional warfare, when both the PVA and UN forces fought to a stalemate along the 38th parallel north.

See also

• Tunnel war

Sources

• Seeking Truth From Facts: RAND 1991, page 136. The book is mostly about post-Mao developments within the Chinese military.
• various English-language sources using the phrase