Echoes of the Past

The first book on counterinsurgency that I read was David Galula's Counterinsurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice, acknowledged as the primary inspiration behind the celebrated Army/Marine Corps counterinsurgency manual. There have been many criticisms of the "neoclassical" counterinsurgency school, and I think that Frank Hoffman's Parameters article on the subject was most persuasive in delineating some of the theory's limitations.

I have returned to the "classical" era by reading Roger Trinquier's Modern Warfare. Trinquier, like Galula, was a French officer of the late imperial era who cut his small wars teeth in Algeria and Vietnam. I have not gotten far in Trinquier's book, but much of his rhetoric could have been written by defense writers today. Depending on where you sit in the COIN debate that could be either a good or bad thing.

This paragraph, for example, sounds eerily prescient:

"Thanks to a specially adapted organization and to appropriate methods of warfare, they have been successful in imposing themselves upon entire populations and in using them, despite their own desires in the matter, against us. Our enemies are submitting us to a kind of hateful extortion, to which we shall have to accede in the end if we cannot destroy the warfare system that confronts us. We would be gravely remiss in our duty if we should permit ourselves to be thus deluded and to abandon the struggle before final victory. We would be sacrificing defenseless populations to unscrupulous enemies."

Comments

[Johnsonr]

Yeah, but Trinquier was responsible for some pretty nasty stuff in Algeria -- check out his take on interrogations. Wow. He's definitely more Sri Lanka COIN than Hearts and Minds COIN. He's crazy interesting to read, but I can't get past that creepy feeling in my belly.

[A.E.]

Yes, that's also one aspect that I plan to blog about later. Bernard Fall's characterization of him as a far-right "centurion" is extremely apt.