America's Dirty Wars

We have seen how the French experience in Indochina directly led to the application of guerre révolutionnaire in Algeria. While crude, in hindsight these counterinsurgency principles proved ruthlessly effective against the Algerian insurgents. In fact, contrary to what is often posited today, the French counterinsurgency methods in Algeria suggest that, at least at the time, torture could pay intelligence dividends. There was one military thinker in particular, David Galula, who emerged from this conflict to have a tremendous influence on how Western government and militaries would approach counterinsurgencies.

Having served in the French Army in North Africa, Italy, and then Indochina and Algeria, Galula was certainly a seasoned practitioner of counterinsurgency warfare. He even spent eighteen months in Greece just as that civil war was winding down. In 1962, Galula resigned his French commission and moved to the United States to study warfare at Harvard University. Over the next few years, he wrote books on both the French experience in Algeria and counterinsurgency warfare more broadly. His work Counterinsurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice subsequently became a sort of “counterinsurgency bible” for budding military strategists eager to unlock the way to defeat Marxist insurgencies across the globe. Galula’s insights into the nature of insurgencies were not entirely novel; rather, they reflected the lessons gleaned from his intellectual predecessors such as Sir Charles Gwynn, a British officer who wrote a seminal 1939 text titled Imperial Policing, which laid out key principles for how colonial powers could quell native uprisings.