Page 208 - Conflitti Militari e Popolazioni Civili - Tomo II

710 XXXIV Congresso della CommIssIone InternazIonale dI storIa mIlItare • CIHm

the 1950s) it took the British almost ten years to defeat the insurgents. This consideration
is important when considering how heavily the experiences and writings of Thompson and
Galula shaped the current American approach to counterinsurgency in Iraq and the vast dif-
ferences between these discrete historical and present cases.
In fact what is important to remember when considering these numerous studies written
by western military officers on conducting counterinsurgency campaigns after World War II
is their very specific and discrete historical contexts. It is also important to note that by and
large—Trinquier, Galula, Thompson, etc—all devised the same approach to fighting insur-
gencies. That approach revolved around a simplified conception of the maoist revolutionary
war process, a symmetrical and procedural approach to countering that process, and a fun-
damental belief in the importance of populations as being the key to success in any counter-
insurgency. With these basic tenets common to all of the writings and thinking on counterin-
surgency at the time, the differences between them were more in terms of past experiences
and the methods and techniques each chose to highlight. But they were all written at a time
when the future security environment was defined as one of existential communist inspired
wars of revolution against western nations and their allies. So the way to counter these wars
of revolution as conceived by writers like Galula, Thompson, and Trinquier were specific to
the time, place, and context in which they were written. Such books and writings should be
seen as primary texts and not necessarily contemporary analyses offering templates for pres-
ent and future action in current and future wars of insurgencies.
On the “Acknowledgments” page of the American Army’s recently (December 2006)
published counterinsurgency doctrine, FM 3-24, three sources are listed: David Galula’s
1964 Counterinsurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice, Sir Robert thompson’s 1966 De-
feating Communist Insurgencies: The Lessons of Malaya and Vietnam, and an article written
in 2005 for The New Yorker magazine by Dan Baum titled “What the Generals Don’t Know.”
35 There is no explicit explanation as to why these three choices were selected for the “Ac-
knowledgments Page.” However, after reading the entire manual the implicit message for the
selection of these sources becomes clear. The manual’s overall thrust is to teach its readers
how to become a learning organization in counterinsurgency operations. The more recent
article by Baum shows that in Iraq at least Army and Marine officers well below the rank of
generals were learning and adapting. But that learning as it is expressed in FM 3-24 should
inevitably lead to an overall method based on the writings of David Galula, Robert Thomp-
son, and the approach best summarized by the French Revolutionary War School of the early
1960s; a population centric, protracted people’s war approach demanding close and lengthy
involvement of American combat forces in populations countering insurgencies.
If history did repeat itself then one could be content with a contemporary American Army
counterinsurgency doctrine that turned its lessons learned into templates for action on the
ground in Iraq today, and in the future. Yet the Thompson and Galula approach of the early
1960s envisioned countering maoist revolutionary wars that appeared—appeared--to be an
existential fact of life in the early 1960s and the wave of future conflict. That was then and

account historical complexity, contingency, and context which would have at least qualified and tempered
some of his grandiose conclusions.
35 FM 3-24, viii