Goya, Michel Théorie du combattant

Le combat rapproché, un éternel retour ou une révolution à venir?

On 18 August 2008, 10 French soldiers were killed and 21 others wounded in the Afghan mountains. No one had seen the ambush by the Taliban and their local allies coming. This tragic event is the starting point for Michel Goya's new work, which begins with a description of these battles in the Uzbin Valley and then analyses their consequences. Immediately after the events, a stark contrast emerges between the national shock caused by the destruction of a French infantry platoon in this ambush and the few measures that had been taken to prevent this tragedy. Close combatants, whose job it is to kill or be killed in direct contact with the enemy the vast majority of whom are infantrymen and special forces are indispensable to the victory of armies. If their death triggers a national event, they must rightly be the subject of a national priority, especially since there have never been so few of them in France. In reality, however, this has never been the case: the importance of infantrymen is only recognised when they die. Michel Goya begins by describing what a modern close combatant has been since the industrial age and how their profession has evolved from the small arms revolution to the end of the Second World War. Since then, little has changed for these warriors, while other military technologies and other types of warfare have undergone major developments. The French infantry unit destroyed by Afghan rebels with old Soviet weapons in 2008 could just as easily have been destroyed by a German infantry company in 1944. Finally, the author describes the current problems facing Western close combatants, while their direct opponents, who are currently often irregular, have never been so numerous. He also examines how to initiate a new revolution in the way warfare is conducted. A powerful and necessary iconoclastic reflection by a historian and strategist.