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1. The Need To Adapt Our Military Apparatus to Modern Warfare (Modern Warfare)
The defense of national territory is the raison d'être of an army; it should always be capable of accomplishing this objective.
Since the liberation of France in 1945, however, the French Army has not been able to halt the collapse of our Empire. And yet, the effort the country has made for the army is unprecedented. No French military man ought to rest until we have created an army at last capable of assuring the defense of our national territory.
We still persist in studying a type of warfare that no longer exists and that we shall never fight again, while we pay only passing attention to the war we lost in Indochina and the one we are about to lose in Algeria. Yet the abandonment of Indochina or of Algeria is just as important for France as would be the loss of a metropolitan province.
The result of this shortcoming is that the army is not prepared to confront an adversary employing arms and methods the army itself ignores. It has, therefore, no chance of winning.
It is a fact that in Indochina, despite a marked superiority in materiel and in troops, we were beaten. From one campaign to another, our commanders tried to drive the Vietminh into a classic pitched battle, the only kind we knew how to fight, in hope that our superiority in materiel would allow an easy victory. The Vietminh always knew how to elude such maneuvers. When they finally accepted the conventional battle so vainly sought for several years, it was only because they had assembled on the battlefield resources superior to our own. That was at Dien Bien Fhu in May, 1954.
Despite the record, our army Is employing, with few exceptions, the identical combat procedures in North Africa. We are trying in the course of repeated complex operations to seize an adversary who eludes us. The results obtained bear no relation to the resources and efforts expended. In fact, we are only dispersing, rather than destroying, the attacked bands.
Our military machine reminds one of a pile driver attempting to crush a fly, indefatigably persisting in repeating its efforts.
The inability of the army to adapt itself to changed circumstances has heavy consequences. It gives credence to the belief that our adversaries, who represent only weak forces, are invincible and that, sooner or later, we shall have to accept their conditions for peace. It encourages the diffusion of dangerously erroneous ideas, which eventually become generally accepted. France is accused of having conducted rigged elections in Algeria, and one is led to believe that those carried out under the aegis of the (Algerian) National Liberation Front (F.L.N.) would be genuine. At the same time, it is well known that any threat that would subsequently confront the voters would be effective in quite a different way from the former, merely administrative, pressures.
All this is nonetheless what a large part of our own press tries to tell the public.
We know that it is not at all necessary to have the sympathy of a majority of the people in order to rule them. The right organization can turn the trick.
This is what our adversaries are accomplishing in Algeria. Thanks to a specially adapted organization and to appropriate methods of warfare, they have been successful in imposing themselves upon entire populations and in using them, despite their own desires in the matter, against us. Our enemies are submitting us to a kind of hateful extortion, to which we shall have to accede in the end if we cannot destroy the warfare system that confronts us. We would be gravely remiss in our duty if we should permit ourselves to be thus deluded and to abandon the struggle before final victory. We would be sacrificing defenseless populations to unscrupulous enemies.