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victory or defeat in a revolutionary war.
What made Trinquier’s writings troubling too was his advocacy of a counterinsurgent
force using torture against insurgents. Trinquier rationalized the use of torture in a way that
relates to his conception of revolutionary war being a total war. According to Trinquier in
traditional wars where armies fought other armies a soldier fighting in these wars accepted
hardship, suffering, and death as a condition of fighting. In revolutionary wars the insurgent’s
main weapon in fighting the government by control of the population was to use terror at-
tacks to control the people. But when the insurgent used terror as a weapon and since it was
near impossible for the counterinsurgent to strike back at the insurgent when terror was used,
the insurgent unlike the conventional soldier in traditional war was not subjected to the hard-
ships and suffering of war. It was in this sense that Trinquier reasoned that torture should be
used against captured insurgents because it brought an equal measure of suffering and hard-
ships that the insurgent dished out to the civilian population through acts of terror but did not
get back in return. Torture applied by the counterinsurgent became the reciprocal response by
the counterinsurgent to the insurgent’s use of terror attacks.
32
The officers of the French Revolutionary War School were not the only ones writing
about how to defeat an insurgency in a revolutionary war. Other western army officers expe-
riencing counterinsurgencies after World War II also wrote about their experiences. Notably
was the British official who led counterinsurgent forces in Malaya in the 1950s, Sir Robert
Thompson. His book although highlighting different aspects of his experiences in Malaya
as a senior leader of British forces along with a few years later advising the early American
effort in Vietnam was essentially the same approach to counterinsurgency warfare as the of-
ficers from the French Revolutionary War School.
33
The British counterinsurgency effort in Malaya from 1951 to 1960 was successful in
defeating the communist backed insurgency. The conditions that the British faced, especially
compared to what the United States would face in Vietnam in the 1960s (and to what America
faces in Iraq today) were relatively simple. The Malayan insurgency had no external support
and the Malayan communists insurgents were ethnic Chinese who could be easily identi-
fied by the British counterinsurgent forces. Still (and like Galula in North algeria in
34

32 trinquier, Modern Warfare, 16-25; In an introduction to the English translation of Trinquier, noted military
writer Bernard Fall provides an excellent short biography of Trinquier and some insights into Trinquiers
argument for torture. For a disturbing first-hand account by a French Officer responsible for a military unit
that took part in torturing Algerians in the Battle of Algiers in 1957 see Paul Aussaresses, The Battle of the
Casbah: Terrorism and Counter-Terrorism in Algeria 1955-1957, (New York: Enigma Books, 2002), 118-
131
33 thompson, Defeating Communist Insurgency; on the British in Malaya also see: Richard L. Clutterbuck,
The Long, Long War: Counterinsurgency in Malaya and Vietnam (New York: Praeger, 1966); and Richard
Stubbs, Hearts and Minds in Guerilla Warfare: The Malayan Emergency 1948-1969 (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1989).
34 For a comparative view of counterinsurgencies by the Americans in Vietnam and British in Malaya see
John A. Nagl, “Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam,
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). Nagl’s book while important as a work on military culture and
organizational learning and adapting, should not be viewed as a work of history. The sweeping comparisons
between the American counterinsurgency effort in Vietnam and the British in Malaya and the conclusions
he draws—that the British Army learned and adapted while the American army did not—does not take into