Center for a New American Security

Tom highlights a quote from Ike:

French divisions are always a questionable asset." -- Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1945.

Well, yeah, and I can imagine what Eisenhower thought of the Wehrmacht, too. But that just makes me wonder what he would make of NATO in Afghanistan today. Up is down and down is up? Or, as a French diplomat friend of mine complained in frustration, "Look, aside from 45 days in 1940, we're really a quite martial people."

That made me chuckle when he said it, but he's right, of course. The way Americans view the French military has been long overdue for a revision, and I think that revision has taken place to a degree -- driven by study of Galula and Trinquier and Bigeard and at the expense, perhaps, of the Germans -- in the U.S. military's officer corps if not in public perceptions.

This blog has a fantastic network of spies who monitor the effect COIN doctrine is having on countries outside the United States. Our friend Stephanie Pezard sent along this speech that French defense minister Hervé Morin gave at the CSIS. (Another friend, Thomas Rid, aparently managed to even swing himself an invitation. He's cool like that.) A translation of the speech is available here on .mp3.

Now, one must remember that David Galula -- whose writings have been so influential on the development of U.S. COIN doctrine -- was first published in English and not his native French. It was not until just last year that Galula's Counterinsurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice was published in French for the first time. (And with an introduction written by David Petraeus! Amazon.fr reports it is en stock. Which is more than you can say for my book.) During the speech, though, Morin referred to Galula's book as "the latest Bible," claimed he read the book over the course of a weekend, and said:

[This] writing should inspire, in depth, our action toward the Afghan population. This goes also through a strong respect for for the Afghan people -- for their traditions, for their faith -- and we must do everything we can to avoid side effects -- collateral damage -- which of course is giving strength to the recruiting for the Taliban...

Obviously, that sounded a lot better in French. But leaving out the fact that Gian Gentile is now deep in the basement of West Point's library, furiously translating his articles into French, this represents a milestone for population-centric COIN theory. For much of the 20th Century (and even the later years of the 19th Century), French small wars theorists have heavily influenced the way in which we in the English-speaking world have thought about countering insurrections. Now things have come full circle in the most ironic of ways, with Americans popularizing and interpreting a French thinker for the French themselves.

These are happy days -- though it bears keeping in mind that France is not exactly hurting for living Frenchmen in the first ranks of theorist-practitioners.

The French are finally studying the lessons of Waterloo:

It was a defining moment in British history – a triumph that brought the crowning of a national hero and the end of a bitter foe.

And France is determined to ensure that it never happens again.

Almost two centuries after the Battle of Waterloo, senior army officers have been sent back to the scene of their predecessors’ humiliation. In all 38 spent a day analysing what went wrong for Napoleon in his bloody struggle with the Duke of Wellington.

Brigadier-General Vincent Desportes ordered strategists from France’s Armed Forces Employment Doctrine Centre to undertake the visit because “you learn more from your failures than from your successes”.

Lost in this article from the Times of London, though, is the fact that Vincent Desportes, the officer who ordered the visit, is a serious defense intellectual every measure the equal of his peers in the U.S. and UK armies. On Abu Muqawama's French COIN Reading List (which one of our readers was kind enough to contribute), Desportes's writings on stabilization and counter-insurgency make no fewer than five appearances. In fact, the more he thinks about it, Abu Muqawama is not sure the U.S. Army has a figure in its ranks quite like Brigadier-General Desportes, an intellectual who has published (a lot) and risen high in the ranks. In the British Army, Lieutenant General Sir John Kiszely might be a rough equivalent.

Go here for more on evolving French Army doctrine, and here for more on Desportes.

THE French cut off the medina with three cordons of troops, through which no Arab could escape. Inside the medina were detachments of Foreign Legionnaires, colonial infantry with tanks, barefoot Berber goumiers, whose hatred of the Arabs is legendary, and French police from whose wrists swung weighted truncheons. Police men, working with maps, split the medina into half a dozen sectors. Then the legionnaires, working systematically, began breaking down the doors of every house.

Once a door was smashed, in went the goumiers and drove out every male, except small boys. Women cried out in terror, and were beaten back with clubs or gun butts.

On top of a low hill in Port Lyautey's medina is a dusty sheep market. Legionnaires drove the Arab men there and herded them under the muzzle of a Patton tank. A dozen policemen formed a gauntlet, six on either side. One by one, the Arabs were thrust forward, each with his hands on his head.

"Entrez done, Monsieur," said a reserve police colonel. "The session is about to begin." He smiled broadly, then hit a middle-aged Arab with his right fist, below the belt. As the Arab went down, the colonel kneed him in the groin. The Arab tried to get up; another cop caught him across the jaw with a club. Down went the Arab and the next cop kicked him, twice. He got up again and ran into the arms of still another policeman, who poked him into a sitting position with the muzzle of a carbine.

Abu Muqawama has been searching in vain for something in the news to highlight today, but the only thing being covered in most newspapers is Hillary Clinton's continuing and hilarious efforts to get John McCain elected president. That said, via Angry Arab, Abu Muqawama came across this report from TIME Magazine's correspondent in Morocco, in 1954, on the brutal counterinsurgency tactics employed to pacify one of the troublesome Arab quarters. The fact that this particular quarter was in Port Lyautey (now Kenitra) is ironic.* Hubert Lyautey -- along with Bugeaud and Gallieni -- was one of the first theorists of population-centric counterinsurgency. (There is a good chapter on him in Paret's Makers of Modern Strategy, authored by Douglas Porch.)

Not too long ago, Thomas Rid was kind enough to send along a copy of Lyautey's famous Du Role Colonial de L'Armée (Paris: Armand Colin & Co. 1900). As Porch makes clear, the French never really bought into population-centric COIN in the way that Lyautey would have liked. And he himself found such tactics difficult to employ in practice. But Lyautey & Co. are important because their ideas form the intellectual basis for the writings of David Galula and Roger Trinquier, which in turn help form the intellectual basis for that copy of FM 3-24, Counterinsurgency sitting beside you. For all the great French contributions to the theory of counterinsurgency, though, they never really nailed it down in practice, did they? Comparatively, the U.S., in Iraq, has had much more success executing population-centric COIN than the French ever did in Morocco, Indochina, or Algeria.

Ah, but it's like what the French bureaucrat said: "I see how it works in practice, but how does it work in theory?"

*There was also, apparently, a Cold War-era U.S. Naval Air Station in Port Lyautey. Abu Muqawama has passed through Kenitra on the train but has never visited.