Page 210 - Conflitti Militari e Popolazioni Civili - Tomo II

712 XXXIV Congresso della CommIssIone InternazIonale dI storIa mIlItare • CIHm

can combat troops. And in so doing, when problems of insurgencies present themselves to
American military planners the only option seeming to be available is Galula and Thomp-
son. Or, large numbers of American combat boots on the ground protecting the people
43
from the insurgents. This is why the American army has become dogmatic.
44
Echoing the voices of Galula and Thompson and population centric counterinsurgency
methods serving Army officer and member of General Petraeus’s “brain trust” Colonel Peter
Mansoor noted that in any counterinsurgency operation the “people are the prize.” As Colo-
nel Mansoor was a part of a group of Colonels who were advising President Bush on his
options for Iraq in November and December 2006 he at the same time published a review of
a book written in 1964 by French Army officer Jean Larteguy titled “The Centurions.” The
book is a fictional account of a young French Army officer fighting France’s wars of coun-
terinsurgencies in the early 1960s and learning the lessons that needed to be learned on how
to fight insurgencies amongst the people. Mansoor, in his review of the book in late 2006 as
he and other senior army leaders had an eye on the months ahead and the Surge, noted that
the lessons that Larteguy’s characters learn are the “truths of “‘modern’” counterinsurgency
wars. In the book, Mansoor informs his readers, are the “principles and paradoxes of coun-
terinsurgency warfare,” among others, “the need to secure the population.”
45
About eight months before Mansoor’s review was published a conference at Fort Leaven-
worth Kansas in February 2006 was held by the authors of FM 3-24 to vet and review drafts
of the manual one of the primary authors asked if there was “too much Mao in it.” that
46
question has been more recently answered by scholars reviewing FM 3-24. In the Ameri-
can Political Science association’s journal Perspective on Politics Yale University politi-
cal scientist Stathis N. Kalyvas noted that in FM 3-24 there was little that was “new.” The
“substance” of the manual, he argued, can be found in earlier works on counterinsurgency by
Galula, Thompson, and Trinquier. Stathis concluded that FM 3-24,

“…beyond a substantial does of practical, technical instructions on operational matters…is an
elaboration and reformulation of a body of work that emerged in the 1960s, primarily in response
to anticolonial or communist insurgencies in such places as colonial Algeria or Malaya.”

Another scholar reviewing FM 3-24, Stephen Biddle who is a Senior Fellow for Defense
Policy at the Council on Foreign Relations, pointed out that the manual assumes counterin-
surgencies to take place amongst the people of a country and the key to success is “winning
their “hearts and minds” like the United States tried to do in Vietnam. Serving army officer

43 On this point see Ralph Peters’s trenchant critique of the manual, “Dishonest Doctrine: A Selective Use of
History Taints the Coin Manual,” Armed Forces Journal, (December 2007), 42-45; and Edward Luttwak
44 Gian P. Gentile, “The Dogmas of War,” 38-40; Gentile, “Eating Soup with a Spoon,” Armed Forces Journal
(September 2007), 30-33; and Gentile, “Our Coin Doctrine Removes the Enemy from the Essence of War,”
Armed Forces Journal (January 2008), 39.
45 Peter Mansoor, review of John Larteguy’s “The Centurions,” in Military Review (November-December
2006), 103.
46 On the Leavenworth Coin conference of Feb 2006 see Cullen Nutt “Petraeus’s Big Tent,” New Jersey Star
Ledger, and Gian P Gentile’s critique of Nutt’s article on Small Wars Journal blog; http://smallwarsjournal.
com/blog/2008/03/not-so-big-of-a-tent/