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insurgent force that ultimately pushed the French out in 1954 and left the country divided
with a communist North Vietnam and a United States supported South Vietnam. In Malaya,
the British supported Malayan colonial government successfully fought a communist backed
insurgency of indigenous ethnic Malayan Chinese for most of the 1950s. Shortly after their
defeat in Vietnam the French became involved in suppressing another nationalist inspired
insurgency in their colony of Algeria. And the United States in so trying to prevent the spread
of communism from North Vietnam into the south fought a major war in that country from
1965 to 1972. These are just a few examples of the wars of communist and nationalist
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revolutions that came about during the decades following the end of World War II.
Direct application of military force was often used in these wars of national liberation
to end the rebellions. In the case of France the experience of many of its officers in fighting
wars in Vietnam and then Algeria became especially traumatic because both of these wars
were lost by the French. Out of this experience emerged a very distinct body of knowledge
concerning theory and technique to defeat revolutionary insurgencies.
Like the earlier airpower theorists, counterinsurgency theorists believed that the people of
a nation would be decisive in victory or defeat. But unlike the airpower theorists, the coun-
terinsurgency theorists of the French Revolutionary War School sought to protect and control
civilian populations and not target them with military force. In both cases, civilian popula-
tions were seen ultimately as controllable and malleable; with airpower theorists through
killing, with counterinsurgency theorists through protection.
French Army officers of the French Revolutionary War School defined the future wars
they would be fighting as ones of countering a revolutionary insurgent movement within one
of their own colonies or within states that were allied with France or other western nations.
The general threat and cause behind these insurgencies was communist expansion inspired
by the Soviet Union and China, according to these French officers. For them the threat of
communist expansion was not just about the maintenance of their colonial empires but a total
war between what they saw as the western free world and the forces of communism. They be-
lieved that even though nuclear weapons would not be used between the superpowers, these
emerging wars of insurgencies would become in effect total themselves because they would
be fought amongst the people’s of the world requiring a total commitment of the French na-
tion (and other western nations as well) to win. Theirs was a conception of future war and
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the approach to fighting it that would change the world.
French officers of the Revolutionary War School constructed a simplified model to ex-
plain these types of insurgencies based on Mao Tse Tung’s rebellion and overthrow of the
national Chinese government in 1949. Mao referred to the internal war within China that
led to overthrow of the Chinese government as Revolutionary War. French officers reduced
Maoist Revolutionary war into a simplified and rigid template for action that other commu-
nist inspired insurgencies, they believed, would follow. Historian and Strategist Peter Paret,

21 For good summaries of counterinsurgency wars and guerilla wars see D.M. Condit, ed, Challenge and Res-
ponse in Internal Conflict, Volumes 1-4 (Washington, D.C.; Center for Research in Social Systems, 1967);
Robert B. Asprey, War in the Shadows: The Guerilla in History (New York: Doubleday and Company,
1975); and Ian Beckett, Modern Counter-Insurgency, (Burlington: Ashgate Publishing, 2007).
22 Paret, French Revolutionary Warfare, 3-8;