5 - David Galula in Algeria

Summary

David Galula’s (1964) Counterinsurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice likely shaped current American counterinsurgency doctrine more than any other historical text. A French national of North African birth, he wrote his core works in English, for American military readers. While sharing many strategies and tactics with Anglophone theorists from the period, his manual adopted a strikingly unified process narrative for the step-by-step defeat of insurgency. His work was informed by decolonization in East Asia and North Africa as well as a deep anticommunism. More than anything else—and largely to the exclusion of past French doctrine—he was informed by reading Mao and by field observation of Maoist guerrillas in China. Galula’s strategy was to run Maoist guerrilla warfare backward. In adopting this process story, he tacitly internalized the logic of Mao’s politics as such. He produced an apparently hyper-coherent doctrine that was in practice divided against itself in multiple ways. This account acquired enormous influence, intermittently shaping Anglo-American counterinsurgency for decades.