There were many senior French officers who agreed with Colonel Trinquier that, although the Line had served its primary purpose well, it was accompanied by all the traditional disadvantages of fixed fortifications (plus the mentality that had led, painfully, to Dien Bien Phu). The only way, they felt, to deal decisively with the F.L.N. was to strike into the foreign territories harbouring rebel forces—as indeed, noted Trinquier, had been the accepted norm in the pacification wars of the nineteenth century.

Horne, Alistair, A Savage War of Peace- Alge…, loc. 821