We should also note that Galula, his writings and his experience, fit very neatly within the counterinsurgency-only narrative that defines the American Army today. The Coin experts who felt they were the minority and not treated fairly in the American Army in the 80s and 90s latched on to Galula because he fit into the supporting Vietnam loss-narrative that had Creighton Abrams as the guy who got it right because he understood the so-called primacy in any Coin op of the “people” and Westmoreland as the conventional minded, big battle fool (Andre Birtle’s excellent new book on the history of Coin in the American Army goes a long way at debunking this myth) because he purportedly only wanted to go out and kill people and blow things up. Writers like L. Sorely in the 90s created the notion that the Vietnam war was winnable if we had just allowed General Abrams to continue his “population centric” approach. But alas those pesky politicians, the will-lacking American people, and the evil MSM pulled the rug out from under him, or so the story goes.

There were many American army officers who were part of the Coin Group and viewed David Galula as their model for counterinsurgency operations. These individuals and their writings were generally shunned by the conventional minded army in the 90s. However the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan brought them into the limelight and with them came Galula; as LTC Nagl points out the writers of FM 3-24 relied heavily on Galula when writing FM 3-24.

I have argued in other places that the American Army’s current operational doctrine is no longer FM 3-0 but instead FM 3-24 counterinsurgency. In fact one could prove this by simply taking Galula’s book, removing the historical and contextual references by bringing them up to date, give this document to a LT or SFC just returned from Iraq or Afghanistan, ask them what they had just read, and you would get an answer like, “Oh I just read a summary of FM 3-24.” Ask these same individuals to summarize the Army’s new overall operational doctrine or FM 3-0 and they could not even come close. Is our Army, as General Casey has warned, “out of balance?” I think it is.

Back to Galula. I find it ironic that we have premised the Surge in Iraq on FM 3-24 and that doctrine is heavily premised on David Galula’s writings. Remember Galula was an infantry company commander in Algeria in the 1950s. Galula tells us that it took about a year for him and his company of infantryman to turn their area of responsibility and the people within it against the insurgency. It took over a year for an infantry company, sided with a relatively small Algerian population and isolated by terrain and lack of technology from larger population centers to “win.” In Iraq today we assume that the Surge—using Galula’s methods—turned the country around in a matter of months over the summer of 2007. Simple mathematical extrapolation from Galula to the Surge makes such an assumption improbable. The Surge and the so-called new Counterinsurgency methods were not the main cause of the lowered levels of violence but the neo-con spin machine would have us believe otherwise (see in this regard Kim Kagan’s newest oped running today in the WSJ.)

The importance of the writings of the firebrand Ralph Peters and Charles Dunlap on American counterinsurgency doctrine is that they both challenge the fundamental assumptions and premises that went into its creation. A process of meaningful challenging and questioning should have happened when the doctrine was written but it was not. So we end up with a doctrine that is useful but narrow because it is based on a single theory of Coin given to us by David Galula and that theory has unfortunately turned into principle and further turned into an immutable rule that can not be challenged. Because of this we have become dogmatic to the point of thinking that we can do Coin just about anywhere in whatever kind of situation presents itself to us. How else does one explain recent criticisms of certain Nato countries conducting Coin in Afghanistan?

Galula needs to be challenged and read with a historical mindedness; that is to say we should not be looking to the past as a pool of lessons learned to be plucked at will, turned into doctrine, then applied dogmatically on the ground. This is not history but a pop-process of the production of lessons learned. It is hurting us more than helping us.