Page 205 - Conflitti Militari e Popolazioni Civili - Tomo II

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Countering a Maoist revolutionary war required an intricate, step-by-step-approach to
separate the people from the insurgency. The focus of this method would become not so
much the enemy insurgents bent on the overthrow of the government but on securing and
controlling the population which would in turn result in the eventual removal of the in-
surgents. French Army officer David Galula, for example, stated that the objective in any
counterinsurgency operation was “the population.” Another French Army officer, Roger
trinquier, noted that:

“the stake in modern warfare is the control of the populace, the first objective is to assure the
people their protection by giving them the means of defending themselves, especially against
terrorism.” 26

As the population was being secured the counterinsurgent force would begin to restruc-
ture government systems and carry out projects to improve the lives of the people, further
separating them from the grips of the insurgents. As long as the counterinsurgent’s nation
maintained the political will to continue with this type of war victory could be achieved;
although victory would come about only after many, many years of involvement in countries
where internal revolutions were occurring.
A common theme of these French officers was that countering maoist communist revolu-
tions was the face of future war. Gone were the days where armies would fight each other
on an open fields of battle. French Army officer Roger Trinquier referred to World War II
as “a type of warfare that no longer exists and that we shall never fight again.” trinquier
27
and his contemporaries believed that contests between the counterinsurgent and his insur-
gent enemy happened in the midst of populations. Those populations had to be secured and
controlled to defeat the insurgents. This focus on populations was much like the airpower
theorists approach to bypassing armies fighting in the open and instead going directly after
the people through bombing. In both cases these theorists saw their new form of war as total.
For airpower theorists the bypassing of field armies meant that the people of warring nations
would come into direct conflict with each other, hence the totality of war. French officers
like Trinquier reasoned along similar lines. Since modern war would be fought amongst the
peoples and armies would no longer fight each other as in the past, to win these wars amongst
the peoples required the French nation to commit a total national effort to fighting these wars.
It was, in a sense, a move to militarize the entire French nation to a total war effort.
28
In the field and in practice a number of prominent French Revolutionary War theorist stood
out for their articulate expositions of how to carry out a counterinsurgency campaign. Many

26 Galula, Counterinsurgency Warfare, 7; Trinquier, Modern Warfare, 29.
27 trinquier, Modern Warfare, 3
28 Ibid., 26-28; Paret, French Revolutionary Warfare, 5-7; Paret details a number of French officers who were
proposing the militarization of French society to confront the perceived communist world wide threat. Of
note was R Giradert, “Civil and Military Power in the Fourth Republic,” in S.P. Huntington (ed), Changing
Patterns of Military Politics (New York, 1962); There is also an interesting correlation between these French
Revolutionary War officers with some American Airmen in post war America in calling for a defense es-
tablishment completely focused on nuclear war and complete militarization of American society since in a
total war involving nuclear weapons the line between soldier and civilian had vanished.