Had General David Petraeus not made him required reading for American officers in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as for students at the Command and General Staff College,⁽¹⁾ it is highly likely that David Galula would be less well known to his compatriots. He was a lieutenant-colonel in the French Army, then a Harvard researcher from 1962 and died in 1968. His principal work was entitled Contre-insurrection, théorie et pratique.⁽²⁾

This voice from the 1960s could be seen merely as a slice of French history to be explained to American military men and allies, along with other contributions to the Algerian period. This would be a limited view, giving it little bearing on the present or the future. Having ‘rediscovered’ Galula, this would be burying him all over again.

In the preface of the French edition of Counter-insurgency, General Petraeus, paraphrasing Bernard Brodie on Clausewitz’s On War, makes this judgement: ‘In the same way, it can be said of Galula’s work that it is at the same time the greatest and the only major work ever written on non-conventional warfare’ and, a few lines later, ‘It will be considered one day as the most important French military writing of the last century. It already is in the United States.’ This flattering comparison shows the high esteem in which General Petraeus holds Galula but is also a way of understanding this military thinker.