To staff officers in Tunisia Boumedienne disclosed his new military tactics a month after his assumption of office: the previous policy of periodic, massive breaching attempts on the Morice Line with their "decimating" losses was to be abandoned; liaison agents would still have to run the gauntlet through the Line to keep up contact with the "interior", but they would only go in small, highly trained packets, taking advantage of electric storms which fused the high-tension barrier. Using its increasing firepower, the A.L.N. would harass the French army with repeated, painful "pin-pricks", shelling and mortaring units from the safety of their Tunisian and Moroccan sanctuaries. This, Boumedienne reckoned with reason, would "freeze" on the frontiers substantial numbers of French troops — thereby granting the hard-pressed "interior" as much relief as the reinforcements that could be run through to them at appalling and unacceptable cost. Meanwhile, the "interior" was instructed to maintain a low profile; to refuse combat in the face of continuing French ratissages; to break up and dissipate in small groups and, if necessary, take refuge in another Wilaya far from the current offensive. Without in any way launching a new wave of terrorism that would inevitably bring massive counter-measures, the fidayine were just to keep the pot simmering with an occasional grenade thrown into a café here, a burst of machine-gun fire against bathers on a beach there. The aim was to continue to terrorise Muslims away from lending support to any possible "third force", and also constantly to remind the outside world that the F.L.N. remained in existence.

XREF: Evokes classic asymmetric-warfare doctrine (freezing enemy forces, preserving strength) paralleling theories in counterinsurgency literature.

Horne, Alistair, A Savage War of Peace- Alge…, loc. 1266