BY LEON TROTSKY
A quickening of military thought and a heightening of interest in theoretical problems is unquestionably to be observed in the Red Army. For more than three years we fought and built under fire, then we demobilized and distributed the troops in quarters. This process still remains unfinished to this very day, but the Army is already close to a high degree of organizational definitiveness and has acquired a certain stability. Within it is felt a growing and increasingly urgent need of surveying the road already travelled, drafting the balance sheet, drawing the most necessary theoretical and practical conclusions in order to be better shod for the morrow.

And what will tomorrow bring? New eruptions of civil war fed from without? Or an open attack upon us by bourgeois states? Which ones will strike? How should resistance be prepared? All these questions demand an orientation that is international-political, domestic-political and military-political in character. The situation is constantly changing and, in consequence, the orientation likewise changes. It changes not in principle but in practice. Up to now we have successfully coped with the military tasks imposed upon us by the international and domestic position of Soviet Russia. Our orientation proved to be more correct, more farsighted and deeper-going than the orientation of the mightiest imperialist powers who have sought individually and collectively to bring us down, but who burned their fingers in the attempt. Our superiority lies in possessing the irreplaceable scientific method of orientation--Marxism. It is the most powerful and at the same time subtle instrument--to use it is not as easy as shelling peas. One must learn how to operate with it. Our party's past has taught us through long and hard experience just how to apply the methods of Marxism to the most complex combination of factors and forces during the historical epoch of sharpest breaks. We likewise employ the instrument of Marxism in order to define the basis for our military construction.

It is quite otherwise with our enemies. If the advanced bourgeoisie has banished inertia, routinism and superstition from the domain of productive technology, and has sought to build each enterprise on the precise foundations of scientific methods, then in the field of social orientation the bourgeoisie has proved impotent, because of its class position, to rise to the heights of scientific method. Our class enemies are empiricists, that is, they operate from one occasion to the next, guided not by the analysis of historical development, but by practical experience, routinism, rule of the thumb, and instinct....  
 
'History is working in our favor'
We foresaw the inevitability of the imperialist war as the prologue to the epoch of proletarian revolution. With this as our starting point we then kept following the course of the war, the methods employed in it, the shifts in the groupings of class forces and on the basis of our observations there crystallized much more directly--if one were to employ a pompous style--the "doctrine" of the Soviet system and the Red Army. From the scientific foresight of the further course of events we gained unconquerable confidence that history is working in our favor. And this optimistic confidence has been and remains the foundation of all our activity.

Marxism does not supply ready-made prescriptions, least of all in the sphere of military construction. But here, too, it provided us with the method. For if it is correct that war is a continuation of politics by other means, then it follows that the army, with bayonets held ready, is the continuation and the capstone of the entire social-state structure.

Our approach to military questions proceeds not from any "military doctrine" as a sum-total of dogmatic postulates; we proceed from the Marxist analysis of what the requirements are for the self-defense of the working class that has taken power into its own hands; the working class that must arm itself after having disarmed the bourgeoisie; that must fight to maintain its power; that must lead the peasants against the landlords; that must not permit the kulak democracy to arm the peasants against the workers state; that must create a reliable commanding staff in the Army, etc., etc.

In building the Red Army we utilized Red Guard detachments as well as the old statutes as well as peasant atamans and former Czarist generals. This, of course, might be designated as the absence of "unified doctrine" in the sphere of forming the army and its commanding staff. But such an appraisal would be pedantically banal. Assuredly, we did not take a dogmatic "doctrine" as our starting point. We actually created the army from the historical material ready at hand, unifying all this work from the standpoint of a workers state fighting to preserve, entrench and extend itself. Those who can't get along without the metaphysically compromised word, doctrine, might say that in creating the Red Army, the armed power on a new class foundation, we thereby built a new military doctrine, inasmuch as despite the diversity of practical measures and the multiplicity of ways and means employed in our military construction, there could not be nor was there either empiricism, barren of ideas, or subjective arbitrariness in the entire work which from beginning to end was fused together by the unity of the class revolutionary goal, by the unity of the will directed to this end, by the unity of the Marxist method of orientation.  
 
 
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