Articles: GCMA/GMI: A French Experience in Counterinsurgency during the French Indochina War

Philippe Pottier

Small Wars and Insurgencies, 2005, vol. 16, issue 2, 125-146

Abstract: In 1951, the French created a special unit in Indochina, the Groupement de Commandos Mixtes Aéroportés (GCMA), to deal with the unconventional side of Vietminh strategy. Its initial purpose was to destroy Vietminh subversion of the rural population and not to harass Vietminh units. The GCMA developed an efficient process of swiftly taking control of large zones in the Vietminh rear areas through the use of native contact Special Mission teams. These infiltrated the population, gathered intelligence, and established guerrilla bands. This process enabled the GCMA to increase its strength dramatically through this specialised native recruitment to 14,000 men during the latter half of 1953. An important lesson from this experience is that the isolated teams were militarily weak and thus vulnerable to any concerted Vietminh offence. Counterinsurgency thus cannot be successful without an effective coordination between conventional and unconventional forces to counter this vulnerability.

Date: 2005
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/09592310500079874 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:fswixx:v:16:y:2005:i:2:p:125-146

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/fswi20

DOI: 10.1080/09592310500079874

Access Statistics for this article

Small Wars and Insurgencies is currently edited by Paul Rich

More articles in Small Wars and Insurgencies from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().