Strengthening defence and security is an inevitable requirement for building and firmly protecting the Fatherland in all situations. However, hostile forces always attempt to sabotage our defence and security consolidation and revolution. Therefore, it is necessary to identify and resolutely fight against their sabotage strategy.

Defence and security serve as a particular field and a central, routine task of the entire Party, Military, and people. Our Party’s viewpoints and guidelines on defence, security, and the Fatherland protection, particularly in the past 35 years of national renewal have been unceasingly supplemented, developed, and completed via National Party Congresses; notably the Resolution of the 11^th Party Central Committee’s 8^th Plenum on Strategy for Fatherland protection in the new situation. The Party’s 13^th National Congress continued affirming that “consolidating defence and security and firmly protecting Vietnam Socialist Fatherland represent a key, routine task of the Party, the State, the political system, and the people, with the Vietnam People’s Army (VPA) and the Vietnam People’s Public Security (PPS) playing as the core”. This is the development of our Party’s thinking on the basis of inheriting the tradition of national construction and protection and creatively applying Marxism-Leninism and Ho Chi Minh’s thought to the new condition. To achieve that development, our Party has objectively, accurately assessed and anticipated the situation on national, regional, and international scales, while aligning the Fatherland protection with national construction and renewal and international integration.

Our Party’s new thinking on defence and security acts as an objective, important factor that contributes to obtaining significant achievements in national renewal, construction, and protection and raising the country’s status, prestige, potential, and strength. However, with their wicked intention of sabotaging the Vietnamese revolution, hostile forces and political opportunists have sought every artifice to distort Vietnam’s defence and security policy and remove the Party’s absolute, direct leadership over defence and security. More seriously, they have taken advantage of social networks and a number of overseas Vietnamese media outlets to brazenly slander our Party’s viewpoints and guidelines on defence and security consolidation and our important diplomatic activities and events relating to defence and security. They have always exploited complex developments in our security, political, and social situation, particularly in border, sea, island areas to disseminate fake news, cause doubts among people from all walks of life, especially the youth, and incite discontented elements and extremists to fight against our Party, State, and armed forces.

With equivocal arguments, hostile forces have distorted our defence and security tasks, underlining that in order to strengthen their ruling role, our Party and State have scared all citizens with “peaceful evolution”, riots, conversion, and risks of armed conflicts and wars of aggression as an excuse for absolutising defence-security consolidation and the Fatherland protection and for dismissing socio-economic, cultural development. More dangerously, hostile forces have blamed Vietnam for increasing its defence-security potential and building revolutionary, regular, elite, gradually modern VPA and PPS, with a number of services and forces moving straight to modernity as “the spark of an arms race in the region” or “its plot against a third country”. Besides, hostile forces allege that our Party and State have concentrated too many resources on building the VPA and the PPS, thereby “negatively impacting on the people’s life”, leading to negative practices, such as privilege and uncontrollable corruption, driving the country into poverty and backwardness. In order to cause doubts and perceptual conflicts amongst the people about the Party’s guidelines on modernising the VPA and the PPS, hostile forces have provoked a fight for abolishing the Party’s absolute, direct leadership over the building of the VPA and the PPS in particular, the cause of defence, security, and Fatherland protection in general. With the plot of “depoliticising” our Military, hostile forces have advocated that “the VPA should remain neutral and apolitical”, and it should “only abide by the law” like Western armies. At the same time, hostile forces distorted and denied the VPA’s revolutionary nature, fine tradition, goal, ideal, functions, and tasks, while exaggerating our Military’s weaknesses, slandering and defaming our military senior leaders and commanders, with a view to causing confusions amongst citizens, undermining the people’s faith in the Party’s defence-security guidelines, and sabotaging the national great unity block. More seriously, hostile forces have incited opportunists and discontented elements to constantly intensify attacks via social networks, with the aim of forcing our Party to “adjust” its viewpoints on defence and security.

Those above-mentioned artifices by hostile forces are extremely dangerous as they may cause doubts and undermine the people’s faith in our Party and State’s guidelines on military, defence, security, and Fatherland protection tasks and the modernisation of the VPA and the PPS. At the same time, hostile forces’ severe sabotage may impede the implementation of our Party’s defence-security guidelines, damage our foreign affairs, particularly our military, defence, security relations with major powers and regional countries, and negatively impact on our country’s peace, stability, and development. Hostile forces have also attempted to steer our public opinion towards a Western-style Army and aroused a “yearning” within our society for “support” from major powers for the modernisation of our Military, thus hampering the construction and defence of the Vietnam Socialist Fatherland in the new situation.

There is a fact that in response to the impacts made by the 4^th industrial revolution and the emergence of new forms of warfare, many countries in the region and around the world have increased investments in defence, which has imposed higher requirements upon the building of the VPA and the PPS, defence-security consolidation, and the firm protection of national independence, sovereignty, and territorial integrity. More investments in defence and security serve as a direct factor in the establishment of a peaceful, stable environment for the sake of national construction and development. More importantly, in order to opportunely respond to increasingly complex non-traditional and traditional security threats, defence and security consolidation acts as a top priority to not only Vietnam, but also all nations across the globe. Hence, our Party’s guidelines on “strengthening defence and security and firmly protecting the Vietnam Socialist Fatherland as a central, routine task of the Party, the State, the political system, and all people, with the VPA and the PPS playing as the core” are absolutely proper and in accordance with our economic potentials, the country’s science and technology, and the trend of the region and the world. Those guidelines satisfy both long-term and short-term requirements set by the Fatherland protection as well as legitimate expectations and aspirations of cadres and soldiers of the VPA and the PPS and all citizens. Moreover, throughout their history, the Vietnamese people have always been confronted with invasions by foreign countries having overwhelming military and economic superiority. Therefore, “defending the country even when it is not in danger” is a big idea and valuable tradition of Vietnam. In response to requirements of reality, our Party has supplemented and developed such idea and tradition into policies for safeguarding the Fatherland from afar, particularly into the system of strategies relating to defence, security, and the Fatherland protection. That has provided an objective precondition of critical importance to foster the country’s socio-economic development and bring peace, prosperity, and happiness to our people.

The power for protecting the Fatherland comes from various elements, with defence and security potentials and strength playing a pivotal role. For that reason, building the VPA and the PPS into compact and powerful direction straight to modernity under the Resolution of the 13^th National Party Congress represents an unavoidable requirement especially when the world is witnessing a lot of increasingly complicated and unpredictable developments, such as local wars, armed conflicts, ethnic and religious conflicts, arms races, and disputes over borders, seas, and islands. Making the VPA and the PPS revolutionary, regular, seasoned, and modern is for the purpose of self-defence and demonstrates the Vietnam nation’s nature of peace and justice, but not the “initiation” of an arms race in the region to counter a third country or complicate the situation as treacherously slandered by hostile forces.

Our Party and State have always been consistent in comprehensively modernising the VPA. Not only weapons and equipment, but all components of the VPA’s combat power would be modernised according to the fundamentals of Marxism-Leninism concerning the building of a new-style army of the proletariat as well as Ho Chi Minh’s thought and the Party’s viewpoints on building the all-people national defence and the VPA and protecting the Socialist Fatherland. That is also a thorough grasp of the standpoint “personnel first, guns later”, aiming to effectively settle the relationship between personnel and materiel. Staying away from those above-mentioned principles will lead to the building of a “professional”, “neutral”, “apolitical” army as instigated by hostile forces. In that case, our VPA will fall into political disorientation, lose its working-class nature, and fail to increase its combat strength, which will possibly lead to far-reaching consequences. Hence, distortions of our Party’s viewpoints on defence and security should be resolutely rejected.

Sr. Col. BUI QUANG HUY, PhD.