In 1933 a group of senior military figures in the French colony of Algeria began informal discussions about the foundation of a new organisation to care for and control the increasingly restive indigenous veteran population. Alarmed at both the obvious neglect of indigenous veterans by the colonial state and the rising threat of nationalist, Communist and reformist indigenous political movements, they formed the Comité des Amitiés Africaines. Throughout the rest of the 1930s, the Comité and its network of local centres, the Diar-el-Askri, would combine a system of provision for indigenous veterans and their families with a strict form of supervision that sought to counter any signs of political dissidence among a social group seen as crucial to the stability of the colonial state. This paper explores the early years of the Comités des Amitiés Africaines and its activities in North Africa and the French metropole. It examines the implications of the transfer of responsibility for indigenous veterans from the pre-existing structures, run by a combination of civil society organisations and the French state, to a semi-private organisation under the control of military and colonial officials. It interrogates how this impacted the notion of rights-based provision enshrined in the French legislation designed to compensate veterans. It questions to what extent the Comité and its actions affected the indigenous veteran population in both positive and negative terms. Furthermore, it asks where the Comité fits in the wider history of welfare provision in colonial Algeria. Is s it an aberration or does it mark a continuity with past and future policy? Finally, it considers the legacy of the Comité, tracing its history through rest of the colonial period and the War of Independence and on to post-independence Algeria. The history of the Comité des Amitiés Africaines, largely overlooked in existing scholarship, offers a fascinating insight into the intertwined nature of welfare provision and political-military supervision in the French Empire, especially in Algeria. It also highlights the dilemma facing indigenous veterans who had to balance their desire for just reward for participation in the Great War with the fear of interference in their private and public life by the over-zealous paternalists of the Amitiés Africaines.