David Galula and the Revival of COIN in the US Military

Abstract

The doctrine of counter-insurgency or COIN, rediscovered around 2006 by the brains of the American military and certain defence intellectuals as a tool to rescue the failing Iraq occupation and to redefine American grand strategy and military organisation, was guided by two hitherto obscure texts written in the early 1960s by a French veteran of the War for Algerian Independence, David Galula. This later-day prophet died in 1967 after an honourable but comparatively pedestrian military career. Forty years later, French strategists and soldiers, whose stable of legendary small warriors is extensive, wonder why General David Petraeus found inspiration for his 2007 Anbar ‘surge’ in the writings of an innocuous major with limited combat experience. Pacification in Algeria 1956–1958 and Counterinsurgency Warfare written in the early 1960s to inform the doctrine of a US military on the threshold an equally ill-fated crusade in Southeast Asia ironically made Galula the conduit to transfer France’s Algerian experience into FM 3–24 Counterinsurgency published in December 2006 which provided the doctrinal underpinning of the COIN revival in the US Army and Marines: ‘Of the many books that were influential in the writing of Field Manual 3–24’, say its co-authors, ‘perhaps none was more important as David Galula’s Counterinsurgency Warfare’, writes Galula biographer Ann Marlowe. Marlowe believes that Galula’s ‘rigor, analytical sophistication, and capacity for self-criticism’ as well as stylistic clarity explains why two tracts written in the early 1960s by an obscure French major with limited operational experience caught the eye of the authors of FM 3–24.