Roger Trinquier

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Roger Trinquier bigraphy, stories - French military writer

Roger Trinquier : biography

20 March 1908 – 11 January 1986

Roger Trinquier (20 March 1908 – 11 January 1986) was a French Army officer during World War II, the First Indochina War and the Algerian War, serving mainly in airborne and special forces units. He was also a counter-insurgency theorist, mainly with his book Modern Warfare.

Algeria

Trinquier returned to France in January 1955, being promoted to Lieutenant Colonel and assigned to the staff of General Gilles, commander of the airborne troops. He was posted to Algeria in August 1956 at the airborne base of French North Africa as the war against the FLN was becoming more intense. He then served as second-in-command to General Massu, commander of the 10th Parachute Division, during the Battle of Algiers, where he was one of the leading figures behind the creation of the DPU (Dispositif de Protection Urbain).

After a brief stay in France as a director to the airborne school, Trinquier returned to Algeria in March 1958 to take over command of the 3rd Colonial Parachute Regiment, soon to be the 3rd Marine Infantry Parachute Regiment, when its commanding officer, Marcel Bigeard, was recalled to France. He became a member of the committee for public safety formed by Generals Massu and Salan during the May 1958 crisis, which brought Charles de Gaulle back to power; Trinquier resigned from the committee on 11 June and returned to his regiment. He led it during the fighting in southern Algeria and in the Kabylie, where he captured Si Azzedine, a senior FLN leader.

During the first half of 1959, Trinquier led the regiment during the Challe Offensive, proposed by the French commander in Algeria, Maurice Challe, to cripple the FLN. In March 1959, he handed over the command of the regiment to Louis Bonnigal and in July, took command of the El Milia sector in Constantine department. He was recalled to France in July 1960 and in December assigned to Nice and the staff of the general commanding that group of sub-divisions.

Modern Warfare

Trinquier is a theorist on the style of warfare he called Modern Warfare, an "interlocking system of actions – political, economic, psychological, military – which aims at the overthrow of the established authority in a country and its replacement by another regime." (Modern Warfare, Ch. 2). He was critical of the traditional army’s inability to adapt to this new kind of warfare. These tactics included the use of small and mobile commando teams, torture, the setting-up of self-defense forces recruited in the local population, and their forced relocation in camps, as well as psychological and educational operations.

Perhaps his most original contribution was his study and application of terrorism and torture as it related to this Modern Warfare. He argued that it was immoral to treat terrorists as criminals, and to hold them criminally liable for their acts. In his view terrorists should be treated as soldiers, albeit with the qualification that while they may attack civilian targets and wear no uniform, they also must be tortured for the very specific purpose of betraying their organization. Trinquier’s criteria for torture was that the terrorist was to be asked only questions that related to the organization of his movement, that the interrogators must know what to ask, and that once the information is obtained the torture must stop and the terrorist is then treated as any other prisoner of war. (See Chapter 4 of Modern Warfare).

The French army applied Trinquier’s tactics during the Algerian War. In the short run these tactics resulted in a decisive victory in the Battle of Algiers.Edward Behr The Algerian Problem, ISBN 0-8371-8722-2 These tactics were exposed by the press, with little or no effect at the time, as they were generally regarded as a necessary evil. In the longer term the debate on the tactics used, particularly torture, would re-emerge in the French press for decades to come (with the trial of Paul Aussaresses)

These methods were adopted by the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) during the Vietnam war in the "Phoenix" program and, presumably, continued during the early years of Afghanistan: Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF) / Iraq: Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF) by this agency using "extraordinary rendition"