| Part of a series on |
| Counterinsurgency |
|---|
Conclusion
In modern warfare, as in the traditional wars of the past, it is absolutely essential to make use of all the weapons the enemy employs. Not to do so would be absurd.
We lost the war in Indochina largely because we hesitated to take the necessary measures or took them too late. For the same reason we are going to lose the war in Algeria. France will seek a compromise peace it never would have considered if the army had given it the victory the country had rightly come to expect in view of the sacrifices it had made.
If an army has atomic weapons and is firmly resolved to use them to dissuade a potential enemy from attacking, we ought equally to be firmly decided to employ every resource of modern warfare to ensure our protection.
Such resolution, clearly stated, may be enough to deter aggression.
The forms of warfare and its weapons have evolved gradually over the ages. We are once again at an important juncture of that evolution.
Science is allowing the military to kill more and more of the enemy at greater and greater distances. Airmen, artillerymen, even infantrymen have killed and been killed without having seen a single enemy. The hard and pitiless realities of war—cruel and brutal physical contact with the enemy—are being spared the modern soldier. Combatants philosophically accept killing and dying, but usually avoid the rugged contact of physical suffering and death individually given and received.
With the advent of the atomic weapon, the power of destruction has become such that its use would probably involve the simultaneous disappearance of belligerents of both camps. It will therefore not be used.
But war itself will not disappear. The increasing power of weaponry, which places distance between combatants, is also abruptly bringing them together. Once again, they will confront one another on a clearly defined field, and will rediscover the physical contact lost these many centuries. Immense armies will no longer simultaneously invade a vast battlefield. War will be a juxtaposition of a multitude of small actions. Intelligence and ruse, allied to physical brutality, will succeed the power of blind armament.
A problem confronts us: Will we in modern warfare make use of all necessary resources to win, as we have always done in the traditional wars of the past and as we at present envisage doing when we construct nuclear weapons?
Other soldiers have been confronted with problems of this nature in the course of history. At the battle of Cr6cy in 1346, the army of the French King refused to use the bow and the arrow the English handled so effectively. For them, true combat, the only fair and permissible kind, remained man-to-man, body-to-body. To use an arrow, to kill one's adversary from afar, was a kind of impermissible cowardliness not compatible with their concepts of honor and chivalry.
At Agincourt in 1415, the lesson of Cr6cy went unheeded. Once again on horseback, with breastplate and sword, French knights advanced on English archers, and once again were crushed.
The knights, at that time the professional military men of the nation, refused to use the new arms, but the King of France, responsible for the destiny of the country, adopted them and armed his infantry with the bow. Charles VII, in fact, from that time on obliged every parish to maintain an archer, the first step toward our present national army.
Knights, having become an archaic and useless luxury, disappeared from the field of battle. For them, a page of history has been turned for all time.
No nation deprives its army of material resources or moral support. It allows it its own system of justice, swift and severe, to pass judgment in the context of warfare on those soldiers found guilty of offenses or crimes; doctors to care for the wounded on the field of battle; chaplains to ensure spiritual peace to the dying, and the power of life and death over opponents within the framework of the rules of war. Usually, the army lives isolated from the people for the duration of conflict.
The nation does not ask the army to define problems, but to win the war it is engaged in and to ensure the population's protection and security against any threatening danger.
If, like the knights of old, our army refused to employ all the weapons of modern warfare, it could no longer fulfill its mission. We would no longer be defended. Our national independence, the civilization we hold dear, our very freedom would probably perish.