Concrete Hell: Urban Warfare From Stalingrad to Iraq by Concrete Hell- Urban Warfare From Stalingrad to Iraq (epub)

Author:Concrete Hell- Urban Warfare From Stalingrad to Iraq (epub)
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Urban Warfare From Stalingrad to Iraq
ISBN: 9781782003137

Torture

A major weakness of the French strategy was that it was based on the assumption that the primary ideological focus of the insurgents was Marxist communism. It did not account for an ideological motive based on indigenous nationalism and anti-colonialism. The ideological and spiritual nature of the conflict was internalized by many in the French army and became one justification for torture. They saw the enemy as communist and therefore as inherently evil. The struggle was one of ultimate national and ideological survival. This extremely ideological view of the war justified any tactical technique, regardless of its legality or morality, in order to achieve success. One French officer testified that young officers were told that the end justified any means and that France’s victory depended on torture. Many French army leaders believed that the extremely high stakes of strategic success or failure justified moral compromise at the tactical level.

Another justification for torture was that insurgent warfare was completely different from conventional warfare, and therefore required a different operating approach. In accordance with this view, the laws of conventional land warfare were considered inappropriate and counterproductive in the context of counterinsurgency warfare. The French also understood the primacy of HUMINT to successful counterinsurgency and they believed torture was an effective way to quickly get tactical intelligence information. This combination of perceptions led to the official condoning of torture.

A third justification for torture was that it was a controlled application of violence used for the limited purpose of quickly gaining tactical intelligence. Toward this end some French officers subjected themselves to electric shock to ensure they understood the level of violence they were applying to prisoners. What these officers did not understand was the huge difference between pain inflicted in a limited, controlled manner without psychological stress, and pain inflicted in an adversarial environment where the prisoner is totally under the control of the captor. They also failed to understand that once violence was permitted to be exercised beyond the standards of legitimately recognized moral and legal bounds, it became exponentially more difficult to control. In Algeria, officially condoned torture quickly escalated to prolonged abuse, which resulted in permanent physical and psychological damage, as well as death.

The official sanction of torture by French army leaders had numerous negative effects that were not envisioned because of the army leadership’s intensive focus on tactical success. The negative results of torture included a reduction in France’s ability to affect the conflict’s strategic center of gravity – the Muslim population; internal fragmentation of the French army officer corps; decreased moral authority of the army; the enabling of even greater violations of moral and legal authority; and providing a major information operations opportunity to the insurgency. The irony is that even though some tactical successes can be attributed to the use of torture, the French had numerous other effective HUMINT techniques and were far from reliant on torture for tactical success.

French doctrine and counterinsurgency theorists recognized at the time that the goal of the insurgents and the counterinsurgents, the center of gravity for both, was the support of the population.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.