True to form?

1 PRE-PUBLICATION DRAFT OF CHAPTER INCLUDED IN Insurgencies and Counterinsurgencies: National Styles and Strategic Cultures, Beatrice Heuser and Eitan Shamir, eds. (Cambridge University Press, 2017).

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True to form? Questioning the British counterinsurgency tradition Robert Egnell and David H. Ucko By virtue of its twentieth-century history and tradition the British military has long been considered masters of counterinsurgency. During the recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, British experiences with counterinsurgency greatly informed the rediscovery of this operational approach and, accordingly, the principles and theory that fill today’s counterinsurgency manuals. Within the United Kingdom, the reencounter with counterinsurgency also had particular significance. Both within and outside the British military, it was argued that it was uniquely equipped, by dint of its experiences of imperial conquest, policing and withdrawal, as well as the Troubles in Northern Ireland, to understand and manage political violence and defeat insurgency. The common narrative spoke of a certain British style based on the pillars of minimum force, close civil-military cooperation, intelligence-led operations and adaptability.1 This chapter provides a more complex image. The principles and theory derived from British experiences are generally still relevant, but the notion of an enduring British approach to counterinsurgency that reflects such theory must A. Alderson, ‘Britain’ in T. Rid and T. A. Keaney (eds.), Counterinsurgency: Doctrine, Operations, Challenges (London: Routledge, 2010), p. 28. 1


be challenged. As should be expected, there has been great variation in the conduct of operations both between and (critically) within specific campaigns. The more successful campaigns can be said to share certain unsurprising characteristics – such as operational adaption and the tailoring of armed force to political ends – but the track record as a whole is too inconsistent to speak of a particular style or institutional ethos. Instead, the British experience – while replete with lessons, both negative and positive – must be approached via specific cases rather than as a reified whole. Glossing over important discontinuities in the search for an approach encourages the construction of myths, which while identity-furnishing and flattering produces not only bad history, but a poor basis for operations to come. Indeed, from the discussion of a British approach to counterinsurgency cannot be excluded Britain’s most recent experiences in Afghanistan and Iraq. In the aftermath of Saddam Hussein’s toppling in 2003, it was expected that Britain would adapt more readily to the challenges of insurgency that soon enveloped the country. Yet, contrary to many hasty and largely decontextualised comparisons between British and American styles of combat, it was ultimately Britain that struggled to adapt, stumbling as it did over its own institutional complacence and its related misreading of the situation. The British campaign in Afghanistan reveals that the experience in Basra was no aberration and that something fundamental has changed in Britain’s ability to conduct counterinsurgency as it often did. The question, then, for Britain and its allies is whether the notion of a British approach to counterinsurgency was ever helpful or can still be made relevant for operations today and tomorrow.


Untangling the narrative As Basra fell on 6 April 2003, the British Army quickly adjusted from a combat mind-set to one of peace-support operations. Leaning on their experiences with peacekeeping in the Balkans, troops marked the end of ‘major combat operations’ and the onset of ‘post-conflict operations’ by removing their flakjackets and replacing their helmets for berets, so as to convey a more benign posture.2 Despite the contextual differences between Iraq’s Shia-dominated south, where British troops were operating, and the Sunni-dominated American area of responsibility, many attributed the relative stability in Basra following the invasion to the British Army’s approach: its appreciation of the campaign’s political and economic dimensions and its firm but friendly manner of conducting operations.3 The House of Commons, in its ‘Initial Assessment’ of the campaign, suggested that British historical experience and the many lessons learned – most recently in Northern Ireland, but also half a century ago in Malaya and Aden – had made the difference.4 Back then, before the bruising experiences that were to come, this narrative was often accepted at face value. Claims of an innate talent were rarely

W. Murray and R. H. Scales, The Iraq War: A Military History (London: Belknap Press, 2003), p. 152. 2

House of Commons Defence Committee [hereafter HCDC], Iraq: An Initial Assessment of Post Conflict Operations (London: The Stationery Office, 2005), Q 361; W. Chin, ‘Examining the Application of British Counterinsurgency Doctrine’, Small Wars and Insurgencies, 18(1) (2007), 8; Murray and Scales, The Iraq War, p. 152; J. Keegan, The Iraq War (New York: Vintage Books, 2004) p. 178. 4 HCDC, Iraq: An Initial Assessment of Post Conflict Operations, pp. 34–5. 3


put to writing – much like any urban legend, the narrative builds on an oral rather than written tradition – yet there is sufficient evidence in the literature to indicate its prevalence.5 Witness, for example, the prominent British historian who in 1986 alluded to the ‘characteristic British mode of response to public security challenges, one which may well be labelled the “British way”, a pragmatic, limited application of traditional legal doctrines’.6 Similarly, an eminent British academic, counterinsurgency scholar and former soldier wrote in 1998 of the ‘intuitive professional character’ of the British Army that ‘has for some time reflected the needs of smaller operations’, also known as ‘small wars’.7 In 2001 the same authority explicated on the ‘British institutional wisdom’ in counterinsurgency, presented as deriving ‘from Robert Thompson’s classic articulation of doctrine in the 1960s’.8 Also in 2001, the Army issued doctrine for counterinsurgency in which it suggested that ‘the experience of numerous “small wars” ha[d] provided the British Army with a unique insight into this demanding form of conflict’.9 The earlier 1995 manual on ‘Operations Other than War’ had similarly claimed that the ‘long experience of dealing with civil populations, both benign and hostile’ had contributed to the Army’s ‘current military policies’ This observation of an oral tradition is based on extensive interviews with serving British military personnel and academics, dated for the most, but not exclusively, in the late 1990s and early 2000s. 6 See C. Townshend, Britain’s Civil Wars: Counterinsurgency in the 5

Twentieth Century (London & Boston: Faber and Faber, 1986), p. 18. 7 J. Mackinlay, ‘War Lords,’ RUSI Journal, 143, no. 2 (1998), 24. 8 J. Mackinlay, ‘NATO and Bin Laden,’ RUSI Journal, 146, no. 6 (2001), 38. 9 British Army, Army Field Manual Volume 1 Combined Arms, PartX Counter Insurgency Operations, Army Code 71749 (London: Ministry of Defence, 2009), pp. 1–2.


toward similar challenges.10 This narrative survived into the initial phase of the Iraq War. Even as late as 2004, one former soldier and well-placed academic spoke of the British Army as ‘a counterinsurgency army’, while two years later, another leading British academic and retired officer wrote of a ‘British approach to counterinsurgency’ that ‘allow[s] for a much easier transition to these from high intensity, as was witnessed in Basra in 2003’.11 Where did this narrative come from? One of its most obvious foundations is the sheer frequency of British Army experience with imperial policing and counterinsurgency. As noted by General Sir Mike Jackson, former Chief of the British General Staff, there ‘is a sense of a real historical thread in this type of operation for the British Armed Forces’. The thread, he adds, ‘most certainly did not begin with Malaya, or even the period after World War II … we can go back at least a couple of centuries to Ireland, to India a century and a half ago, to Africa at about the same time and, indeed, to Iraq almost a century ago’.12 British Army, British Army Field Manual Volume 1 Part X Countering Insurgency, Army Code 71876 (London: Ministry of Defence, 2001). For other sources making similar points, see D. French, The British Way in Counterinsurgency, 1945–1967 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 4. 11 R. Thornton, ‘Historical Origins of the British Army’s Counterinsurgency and Counter-Terrorist Techniques’ in T. Winkler, A. Ebnöther, and M. Hansson (eds.), Combating Terrorism and Its Implications for the Security Sector (Stockholm: Swedish National Defence College, 2005), p. 26. See also R. Thornton, ‘The British Army and the Origins of Its Minimum Force Philosophy’, 10

Small Wars & Insurgencies, 15(1) (2004), 83. D. Benest, ‘Aden to Northern Ireland 1966–1976’, in H. Strachan (ed.), Big Wars and Small Wars: The British Army and the Lessons of War in the 20th Century (Abingdon: Routledge, 2006), pp. 117–18, 141. 12 M. Jackson, ‘British counter-insurgency’, Journal of Strategic Studies, 32(3) (2009), 347.


These repeated engagements are said to have engendered a certain genetic predisposition toward the attendant tasks of counterinsurgency. During the days of Empire, the British military faced the challenge of managing a global realm with limited resources. The dilemma forced the British military to emphasise small-scale instead of large-scale operations, indirect control versus direct and some degree of consent rather than pure coercion.13 As an example, the Army of British India operated with a relatively small number of British officers and soldiers over truly vast areas, including present-day India, Pakistan and Bangladesh.14 Critical counterinsurgency practices – co-opting local elites, raising local forces and administrations and achieving sufficient legitimacy – reduced the scope for ruinous conflicts, allowed for indirect rule and thereby doubly mitigated the problem of limited resources.15 This historical context explains the general proclivity within the British military for a type of counterinsurgency geared toward accommodation, local partnerships and the maintenance of ‘normalcy’ – as far as possible. Indeed, these principles are present in the several British texts on counterinsurgency, which advocate ‘police primacy’, ‘minimum force’, ‘operating R. M. Cassidy, ‘The British Army and Counterinsurgency: The Salience of Military Culture’, Military Review, 85(3) (2005). 14 See T. A. Heathcote, ‘The Army of British India’ in D. Chandler and I. Beckett (eds.), Oxford History of the British Army (Oxford: Oxford University 13

Press, 2003), 362–84. 15 I. A. Rigden, ‘The British Approach to Counter-Insurgency: Myths, Realities and Strategic Challenges’, in US Army War College Strategy Research Report (Carlisle, PA: US Army War College, 2008), pp. 15–16. See also T. Mockaitis, British Counter-Insurgency, 1919–1960 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1990), p. 64.


within the law’, not to mention the political need to co-opt local leaders and their armies. In themselves, these texts represent yet another pillar in Britain’s counterinsurgency tradition: though few in numbers, the works authored by British soldiers and practitioners have assumed proto-doctrinal status and had a remarkable influence on counterinsurgency theory both in Britain and beyond. Alexander Alderson has in a useful analysis of British counterinsurgency doctrine highlighted the key works, beginning with Colonel Charles Callwell’s

Small Wars, first published in 1896, and Charles Gwynn’s Imperial Policing from 1934. Following the Malayan Emergency, we find Defeating Communist

Insurgency, Sir Robert Thompson’s classic account of British activities there, which was in 1972 complemented by Low Intensity Operations by Frank Kitson, another leading counterinsurgency practitioner. Beyond the principles listed above, these books also converge on such notions as ‘civil-military cooperation’, ‘intelligence-led operations’ and the need to ‘learn and adapt’ – principles that feature, often verbatim, in today’s doctrine, including the British Army’s latest field manual, Counter Insurgency Operations, released in 2009.16 Other tenets of the narrative obtain. The thirty-year-long conflict in Northern Ireland is often framed as a counterinsurgency training ground to which virtually all British soldiers were exposed, often through multiple tours. The ‘quasi-tribal’ regimental system of the British Army is also held up as enabling informal learning within close-knit and ‘flat’ community-based structures, where the wisdom of past and ongoing campaigns can be passed on

16

Alderson, ‘Britain’, 28; British Army, Counter Insurgency Operations.


and discussed informally.17 It is such factors that have led to the perception of a particular proclivity and, at times, the semblance of an unparalleled track-record, with one analyst suggesting that ‘only the British have enjoyed notable success in counterinsurgency’.18

Deconstructing the British tradition The frequent engagements and doctrinal basis have made counterinsurgency part of the British Army’s history. Contrary to the US Army, whose experiences with counterinsurgency have not historically been a source of institutional pride or generated high-profile accounts and theorisation, the British Army has a higher regard for such engagements, which it sees as reflecting a proud tradition. Yet the effects of this enculturation on the British military – institutionally and operationally – are far from linear, or entirely positive. The problem arises when an expectation of excellence is allowed to substitute for preparation, when mythologised history breeds complacence, or when the contextual enablers behind key past successes are neglected and repeat performances are demanded in their absence. Such a tradition misinterprets the history from which it borrows and provides poor guidance for practice.

17

E. A. Cohen, ‘Constraints on America’s Conduct of Small Wars’,

International Security, 9(2) (1984), 172. See also A. Garfield, Succeeding in Phase IV: British Perspectives on the U.S. to Stabilize and Reconstruct Iraq (Philadelphia: Foreign Policy Research Institute, 2006), p. 32. 18 R. M. Cassidy, Peacekeeping in the Abyss: British and American Peacekeeping Doctrine and Practice after the Cold War (Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing Group, 2004), p. 62.


An inconsistent approach Scratching below the surface of the British counterinsurgency tradition, it soon becomes clear that the ‘British approach’ was far less consistent or uniform than the narrative would suggest. Indeed, it would be highly inaccurate to suggest that Britain has a stellar or uncontested record of fighting insurgencies, even during the colonial era. Among the handful of comparatively successful cases lie a number of far less notable campaigns, in which British policy faltered or can even be said to have failed. One informal tally carried out in 2008, on the basis of operations from 1945, arrived at seventeen British counterinsurgencies, whereof seven can be seen as successes (Malaya, Kenya, Brunei, Malaysia, Radfan, Dhofar and Northern Ireland), one is ‘generally regarded as a draw’ (Cyprus), five are failures (Palestine [1945–8], Egypt [1946–56], Aden [1955], Aden [1956–8], Aden [1965–7]), three are difficult to quantify (Greece [1945–6], Eritrea [1949], Togoland [1957]) and two (Iraq and Afghanistan) were, then, still in progress but today tend increasingly to be included among the seven failures.19 Whether the assessment is entirely accurate is for our purposes irrelevant; the point is the lack of consistency in outcome, or even of gradual learning over time, which should force a serious questioning of what the British counterinsurgency tradition is all about.

Rigden, ‘The British Approach to Counter-Insurgency’, 1, 32. For the qualification of recent efforts as ‘failed’, see F. Ledwidge, Losing Small Wars: British Military Failure in Iraq and Afghanistan (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011). 19


From a more historical perspective, it is equally true that the longue

durée of British (or English) ‘counterinsurgency’ goes back far beyond the cases alluded to above and provides a very different picture indeed. The English campaigns in Ireland, Wales or Scotland, not to mention India and the Boer Wars, were particularly nasty and reflect few of the principles of later doctrine. Indeed, talk of a British approach can quickly appear ahistorical, considering a different type of track-record, one that harkens way back to the Harrying of the North by the Normans when they first imposed themselves after 1066, the suppression of Welsh uprisings in the twelfth–fifteenth centuries and the attempts to impose overlord-ship on Scotland. To this list, one may also add the repression of Irish independence movements since Henry II appointed himself ruler of Ireland, the siege of Drogheda, the massacre of Glencoe, the punitive aftermath of the Battle of Culloden and in India, the repression of the Indian Mutiny, and – of course – Amritsar. Finally, what of the various early struggles against the indigenous populations encountered in many of Britain’s colonial conquests, which tended to pit an organised and unrestrained British military against what Charles Callwell called the ‘uncivilised or semi-civilised races’ or those ‘lowest in the human scale’?20 Suffice to say that when references are made to British counterinsurgency prowess or a particular style, what is meant is only its post– World War II experiences, and even then, many of those campaigns are still excluded from consideration.

C. E. Callwell, Small Wars: Their Principles and Practice, 1906, 3rd ed. (London: Her Majesty’s Stationary Office, 1914), p. 50. 20


Indeed, even among these more recent campaigns, the ‘British approach’ has been rather mixed. On the one hand, variation in practice is to be expected: there is no template for counterinsurgency operations – each campaign must be tailored to the context in which it unfolds and responds to the sui generis drivers of violence, meaning of legitimacy and politics at hand. Accordingly any determination about what constitutes the ‘minimum’ use of force, for example, is inherently subjective and a decision forced upon the commander (or his or her superior), often at short notice. For better and for worse, the systematic interpretive process – incorporating both structural and agency-related factors – explains why despite frequent engagements and consistency in doctrine, British counterinsurgency practice has varied greatly across time and space. But there is a more fundamental issue at stake, beyond context. The British Army is not a doctrine-driven organisation and has historically preferred to adapt on the ground. Such an approach can be defended. As Brigadier Gavin Bulloch argued in 1996, ‘despite long experience in counterinsurgency, the British have not developed any set methods of dealing with the problem of insurgency; indeed it is probably unwise to attempt this because every situation is different’.21 Similarly Brian Holden-Reid notes ‘a widespread reluctance to formulate scientific, doctrinal statements’ within the Army and a preference ‘to review and resolve each problem as it occurs on its own terms free from any system’.22 The problem arises when flexibility is achieved at the cost of G. Bulloch, ‘Military Doctrine and Counterinsurgency: A British Perspective’, Parameters, 26(2) (1996), 4. 22 B. Holden-Reid, ‘A Doctrinal Perspective, 1988–98’, SCSI Occasional Paper, 33, (1998), 12. 21


forgetfulness – not of step-by-step guides and templates, but of the basic considerations and principles unearthed through past experience. Indeed, while the main British texts on counterinsurgency form the backbone of counterinsurgency theory as we know it, their effect on the British Army as an institution was less notable. Many of the works were not formal doctrine, or they were manuals written for a specific campaign; regardless, their long-term influence institutionally has been weak. It has therefore been difficult for the British Army to build counterinsurgency capabilities or internalise best practices, forcing a renewed process of adaptation with each new campaign. During the days of empire, sufficiently frequent engagement in notionally similar operations would produce individual (vice institutional) memory of relevant precedents, which would accelerate the necessary learning.23 Even then, the tendency was to start on the back-foot and adapt, with greater or lesser success. For long, the gap between narrative and practice was glossed over due to a misreading of the British counterinsurgency texts. At some point, through a process that warrants further examination, the prescriptive terms and notions elaborated in these texts were confused with actual descriptions of how British forces had and would perform in theatre. As David French perceptively notes, Robert Thompson’s seminal work, Defeating Communist Insurgency, was never intended to be read as a ‘historical treatise’ on British operations but as a ‘didactic book in which he tried to emphasise what future counterinsurgent

See H. Eaton and G. Boehmer et al., The British Approach to LowIntensity Operations, Network-Centric Operations (NCO) Case Study (Washington DC: Office of Force Transformation, 2007). 23


operators should do if they wanted success’.24 Fatefully, it is a misreading with significant impact on the general perception of Britain’s counterinsurgency style. ‘The effect’, as Hew Strachan has noted, ‘was to suggest that the British army conducted its minor conflicts with greater consistency than was actually the case’.25 In so doing, it also encouraged complacence about a ‘British approach’ adopted instinctively by its military. In practice, by contrast, the approach – even among post-1945 campaigns – is too broad to be codified and often differed substantively from the ideals stipulated in counterinsurgency theory. French argues that the hallmark of British counterinsurgency from 1945 to 1967 was the use of a ‘wide range of coercive techniques to intimidate the civilian population into throwing their support behind the government rather than behind the insurgents’.26 Similarly, Paul Dixon and Andrew Mumford argue that the operations of colonial withdrawal were actually far more violent than the literature would imply.27 The same line has been taken in more recent accounts of British operations in Kenya, in Cyprus and in the Boer Wars, leading one analyst to conclude that ‘the British

D. French, The British Way in Counter-Insurgency 1945–1967 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 247. 25 See H. Strachan, ‘Introduction,’ in Strachan (ed.), Big Wars and Small Wars: The British Army and The Lessons of War in the 20th Century (Abdingdon 24

and New York: Routledge, 2006), p. 8. 26 French, The British Way, p. 247. 27 P. Dixon, ‘“Hearts and Minds”? British Counter-Insurgency from Malaya to Iraq’, Journal of Strategic Studies, 32(3) (2009), 366; A. Mumford, The Counter-Insurgency Myth: The British Experience of Irregular Warfare (London: Routledge, 2011).


never employed minimum force in their imperial policing and counterinsurgency campaigns’.28 These critical accounts of British counterinsurgency can be helpful in correcting the view of past campaigns as benign, enlightened acts of altruism in which the British forces unerringly implemented their tradecraft approach to good effect. Yet it is also possible to overstate the case and deduce that British counterinsurgency, as a whole, was therefore uniformly brutal.29 Wars always involve violence and harm, and counterinsurgency is no exception, but beyond this simplistic point it is difficult to find a consistent pattern that characterises the many centuries of British counterinsurgency experience. Instead, it is important to move beyond these totalising notions in favour of a richer understanding that is sensitive to specific cases and also to variation within each. The British approach, in toto, was neither consistently brutal nor benign, and most if not all of the instruments and approaches highlighted in this volume have been used at different times and in different contexts. This particularised understanding would also provide the best chance of learning from past campaigns, by first of all understanding their context, their evolution and the political interests at hand.

See the special issue on British counterinsurgency in Small Wars and Insurgencies, Volume 23, Issue 4–5, 2012, wherefrom the quotation is also drawn (see M. Hughes, ‘Introduction: British Ways of Counter-Insurgency’, 583). 29 See, for example, D. Porch, Counterinsurgency: Exposing the Myths of the New Way of War (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013). 28


Learning from successes If useful deductions are difficult to draw from the British counterinsurgency experience as a whole, what of the specific few campaigns that form the basis of its tradition? Among Britain’s various engagements throughout history, the Malaya Emergency and the ‘troubles’ in Northern Ireland have received by far the most coverage and are those that most immediately spring to mind whenever British counterinsurgency excellence is discussed. They are also the campaigns which are thought to correspond most closely to Britain’s own counterinsurgency theory and doctrine. Both campaigns are rich in lessons. Malaya, in this context, provides us with an example of how counterinsurgency principles can be successfully applied and serves as the original blueprint for doctrine and theory. It seems beyond doubt that the outcome of the Emergency was successful: through British actions, the Malayan National Liberation Army (MNLA) was defeated, democratic elections were held, a multi-ethnic Malayan government was formed and by mid1960, the Emergency was declared over, with many former guerrillas becoming valued members of the newly independent state. The campaign also showcases the British military’s ability to adapt quickly on the ground and to develop an approach marked by tactical, operational and strategic congruence. In broad terms, it saw the gradual strengthening of the security forces; an operational shift toward intelligence-led small-unit operations; the establishment of a sophisticated intelligence-gathering infrastructure; and the creation of a network of executive committees, enabling interagency information-sharing,


decentralised decision-making down to the district level and a coordinated counterinsurgency effort.30 Northern Ireland is where these principles were refined to suit a more constrained political and legal environment.31 Again, the campaign as a whole was a success. Following three decades of conflict, in July 2005 the Irish Republican Army Council announced an end to its armed campaign. Since then, the Provisional IRA (PIRA) has ceased to exist in any meaningful sense. Northern Ireland remains part of the United Kingdom but is in many respects selfgoverned, while also being tied in some policy areas to the Republic of Ireland. Accounts of the British role in bringing about this outcome tend to underline the Army’s effective gathering and use of intelligence, its conduct of patrols and other covert operations and its application of counterinsurgency methods as part of a broader political strategy. For all this, the lessons gleaned from these two campaigns are too often uncritical of the circumstances and enabling factors unique to each case. The Malayan Emergency, for example, did not involve the challenges of urban operations, external support or sanctuary for the insurgents, or a more sophisticated guerrilla group capable of adapting to and circumventing British counterinsurgency practices. While the achievements in Malaya are not to be belittled, the transfer of lessons from this particular case to other essentially

This draws on D. Ucko, ‘The Malayan Emergency: The Legacy and Relevance of a Counter-Insurgency Success Story,’ Defence Studies, 10(1) (2010), 29. See also K. Hack, ‘The Malayan Emergency as Counter-Insurgency Paradigm’, Journal of Strategic Studies, 32(3) (2009), 383. 31 Alderson, ‘Britain’, 38. 30


different, and perhaps more complex contexts, requires great caution – something not always apparent in treatments of this case. In Northern Ireland, the three decades required to bring a political solution to the conflict may simply reflect the frustratingly long timelines of irregular conflicts, but it could also be argued that in this campaign there were as many mistakes and lost opportunities as successes. Certainly, the initial period of Army operations, until the introduction of police primacy, echoes many of the errors committed in the initial phase of the Malayan campaign: the lack of intelligence, excesses in the use of force and the uncertain or altogether absent political guidance from the home government in London.32 Britain was also afforded key advantages in this campaign: the geographical proximity, lack of linguistic or cultural barriers and the familiarity of the troops with the urban terrain; certainly these advantages facilitated the intelligence collection for which the campaign is now known.33 Is a thirty-year timeline nonetheless an adequate standard for success, and, if so, what precedent does this set for achieving ‘success’ in campaigns further afield? Because discussion of British counterinsurgency is so dominated by Malaya and Northern Ireland, the variety of experiences alluded to above is often missed, to a point where even other success-stories, such as the Dhofar

See R. Thornton, ‘Getting It Wrong: The Crucial Mistakes Made in the Early Stages of the British Army’s Deployment to Northern Ireland (August 1969 to March 1972)’, Journal of Strategic Studies, 30(1) (2007), 104–5. 33 See J. Storr’s contribution to this volume. 32


campaign, are crowded out.34 This disproportionate focus on just two campaigns also encourages a view of British counterinsurgency experiences as on the whole successful – a gross and rarely stated generalisation of course, but one that has helped set the British record apart from those of the French, the Portuguese and also the Americans.35 As such, the narrative of British counterinsurgency depends at once on the sheer frequency of experiences yet also on excluding many of them from consideration. Going further, the memory of these campaigns, in particular Malaya, has also been dangerously distorted, providing a very two-dimensional nature to the lessons derived. The initial motive in resurrecting this campaign has typically been to underline its more exceptional facets, at least when compared to other wars. The notion of addressing the causes of violence, of building legitimacy and of integrating social, economic and political concerns into war planning and execution are so alien to the mind-set of most militaries that these aspects of the campaign have been lifted, underlined and emphasised, sometimes to the extent of skewing the overall understanding of what took place. Indeed, in giving special focus to the notion of ‘winning hearts and minds’, a phrase closely associated with the Malayan campaign, analysts tended also to misinterpret this very phrase. Presented as the ‘soft’, altruistic and humanitarian aspects of operations, winning hearts and minds was, historically, about combining coercion with co-

Dhofar has recently began to receive more attention but was tellingly included as part of the ‘unknown wars’ in older books on British counterinsurgency. See J. Newsinger, British Counter-Insurgency: From Palestine to Northern Ireland (New York: Palgrave, 2002), Chapter 6. 35 Ibid., p. 1. 34


option in such a way that a local population is secure, wants to side with the counterinsurgents and anyway sees resistance as futile.36 This shrewder understanding is far from apparent in the popular telling of the campaign, yet it informed the use of coercion – and of co-option – seen in Malaya, particularly from 1950 onward. Problematically, the experience in Northern Ireland would reinforce this interpretation, because of the tendencies alluded to above. For many years, the campaign helped the Army sustain its post-colonial self-understanding as a counterinsurgency force, not least as so many service members repeatedly rotated through the province. Yet, over time, the campaign evolved from outright conflict to a contested peace, in which the Army adopted a lesser role.37 Certainly by the early 1990s, the conflict had reached a certain stability, and Army units were no longer engaged in countering insurgency as much as terrorism, along with discrete acts of violence. Whereas the frequency of engagement and the individual memories of service members from previous nominally similar campaigns had always been the best guarantee of adaptation in follow-on wars, the transmutation of its Northern Ireland deployments into something far removed from counterinsurgency, and the simultaneous shrinking of Britain’s colonial duties elsewhere, meant that the soldiers of the British Army gradually found themselves missing their counterinsurgency ‘instruction’, such as it was. In

This draws on R. Egnell, ‘Winning Hearts and Minds?: Legitimacy and the Challenge of Counterinsurgency Operations in Afghanistan’, Civil Wars, 12(3) (2010), 282–303. 37 P. Mansoor, ‘The British Army and the Lessons of the Iraq War’, British Army Review, 147 (2009), 11–12. 36


the place of the counterinsurgency practices typical of the earlier phases of the campaign, what British soldiers learned during their later tours in Northern Ireland would more resemble the practices on show in the peacekeeping operations of the same decade, in Bosnia and Kosovo. Thus, counterinsurgency ‘as we know it’ came to subsume such principles as ‘doing no harm’, maintaining ‘neutrality’ and applying force only in self-defence. Along with the ‘hearts and minds’ historiography of the Malayan campaign, the Northern Ireland experience could easily encourage the misleading notion that ‘nice guys finish first’.

A military approach? Beyond the level of violence, methods employed and cases relied upon, another dangerous difficulty with the narrated tradition’s accuracy is that it tends to exaggerate the role of the British Army. Most accounts are authored by officers or academics with a specific interest in military history, and, accordingly, they tend to give more space to the role of the armed forces. Within the British military and perhaps even more so within the political leadership, this reading of past campaigns led to over-confidence about what the Army can achieve on its own. Counterinsurgency then comes to be seen as a primarily military activity, obscuring the need for civilian partners and a political strategy to inform all military and civilian efforts. A deeper understanding of past counterinsurgency successes reveals that, rather than involving just the Army, the prosecution of such mission relied on a broad array of actors. Even within the security domain, these would include


locally recruited security forces like the Iban Scouts in Malaya, and perhaps most importantly national police forces, home guards and other paramilitary outfits trained and controlled by the British.38 In Malaya, for example, a total of 250,000 men had by 1953 been recruited into various constabulary, police and selfdefence units.39 In Northern Ireland too, following the declaration of police primacy in the mid-1970s, responsibility for the campaign’s day-to-day prosecution lay with the police, not with the Army, requiring the expansion of the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) from 3,000 to more than 8,300 full-time officers and 4,500 reservists, and its development of intelligence, surveillance and direct action capabilities.40 In contrast, in the contemporary context, raising the standard, number and accountability of local police forces is a consistent challenge, not just in counterinsurgencies but in other efforts to stabilise wartorn lands. Going further, the historiography of British counterinsurgency tends to underplay, in favour of the military aspects, the role of civilian infrastructure and partners to carry out what are typically lumped together as the ‘non-military’ lines of effort – reconstruction activities, the provision of basic services and the A. Jackson, ‘British Counterinsurgency in History: A Useful Precedent?’, British Army Review, 139 (2006), 12. 39 Rigden, ‘The British Approach to Counter-Insurgency’, 13; F. Kitson, Low Intensity Operations: Subversion, Insurgency, Peace-keeping (London: 38

Frank Cass, 1971). 40 B. Hoffman and J. Morrison Taw, A Strategic Framework for Countering Terrorism (Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 1992), p. 22. See also W. Chin, ‘Northern Ireland (1976–1994): Police Primacy’ in H. Eaton and G. Boehmer et al. (eds.), The British Approach to Low-Intensity Operations (Washington, DC: Office of Force Transformation, 2007).


establishment of governance. Historically, these would be carried out by hostnation structures working together with colonial administrations that would commonly have years, if not decades, of experience within the particular political and cultural context. Their diminutive role in the historiography underplays the significance of their absence in today’s counterinsurgency campaigns. Finally, the focus on a military approach can easily obscure the fact that it required, to be meaningful, a political strategy. Whereas there is no shortage of books and articles on the conduct of jungle operations in Malaya, one tellingly under-researched element of the campaign is the way in which the British leadership in the country coaxed and convinced the Malayan elite to accept the inclusion of the ethnic-Chinese population as part of the new nation. As the ethnic tension between these two minorities lay at the root of the conflict, this was a political and social hurdle that had to be overcome and without whose resolution no amount of tactical and operational skill on the part of the British military would have sufficed. Similarly, the British political intent to work toward Malayan independence was the sine qua non of the outcome remembered today: ‘had the British simply refused to leave, we would most likely be talking about a misguided British defeat—yet another Aden’.41 For these reasons, it is misleading and even harmful to focus on the ‘British approach’ in isolation, if by this we mean a military approach, without considering its placement within a political context and broader strategy. This

Interview with Thomas A. Marks, a leading authority on counterinsurgency and people’s war, by David H. Ucko, Washington, DC, March 30, 2006. 41


point has significant implications also for military history as an area of study; as Jeremy Black puts it, where issues of co-option, of winning over or of fostering legitimacy are concerned, it is critical that ‘military history becomes an aspect of total history; not to “demilitarise” it, but because the operational aspect of war is best studied in terms of the multiple political, social and cultural context that gave, and give, it meaning’.42

An eye to context This question of context introduces this critique’s final point on the British tradition. Key changes have occurred since the supposed heyday of British counterinsurgency in the mid-twentieth century. Not only has the strategic context and Britain’s international role evolved dramatically since the campaigns in defence of the British colonies, but so has the British domestic political and military context, which provided the foundation for earlier successes. Invocations of the British counterinsurgency tradition are too neglectful of these shifts, which have compromised the British capabilities, latitude and strategic rationale to conduct counterinsurgency. This raises questions about the salience of its legacy for operations that, in many ways, are not actually comparable to those seen in recent years. First, counterinsurgency is not situated with the same strategic context as before, and the character of insurgency has changed. Colonial counterinsurgency operations took place as ‘internal’ challenges within the realms of empire; today, J. Black, Rethinking Military History (Abindgon: Psychology Press, 2004), p. 19. 42


operations are typically conducted by coalitions, in support of legally sovereign states. In the place of the leverage that comes with imperial control, we are left with weak yet entirely independent host-nation governments that are either unable or unwilling to follow Whitehall writ.43 The countries engaged in these struggles are also in a vastly different position than before. For Britain, its political and military capabilities for sustained expeditionary campaigns have subsided significantly since the days of empire. The colonial resources and structures are no more: instead of colonial administrators, most notably the Colonial Office, we are left with the ‘Comprehensive Approach’ – a mere rhetorical device that purports to link a massive inter-departmental bureaucracy, much of which domestically focused, for the purpose of coordinated campaigns abroad. Beyond the jargon, few Western states have invested in civilian expeditionary capabilities, which leaves the military perilously isolated whenever it deploys. The military, too, has changed. Given the nature of the colonial system, the British Army had long-standing experience of the countries in which it was operating, was used to protracted conflicts far from home and deployed its troops on two-year tours that provided some familiarity with local institutions. With the end of empire, the opportunity to sustain and develop these skills vanished. British troops now tend to deploy for six months – scarcely enough time to have a concerted effect in the field. Long-term exposure to foreign

John Mackinlay made this very point in 1998. See J. Mackinlay, ‘War Lords’, RUSI Journal 143, no. 2 (1998). Still, the discontinuity, while extant, must not be exaggerated. See French, The British Way, pp. 252–3. 43


cultures, languages and politics is also far more difficult to acquire. While changes such as these should have forced a serious reconsideration of what British forces would be able to accomplish abroad, there is little evidence of such a reevaluation. Instead, throughout the Cold War and into the 1990s, the British military’s main institutional preoccupation remained conventional or state-onstate warfare, at the expense of counterinsurgency or irregular warfare as a whole. This prioritisation could be defended during the Cold War, given the prospect of a conventional, armoured and possibly nuclear confrontation across the Central Front, but its logic contravened the growing engagement (and expectation for) expeditionary peacekeeping, crisis management and interventions during the 1990s. To the extent that the decade’s experience with peace support operations in the Balkans made a mark, these challenges were still considered ‘containable and potentially resolvable within a state-centric framework and the national and international security arrangements developed during the Cold War’.44 As an institution, therefore, the British Army that made its way to Iraq in 2003 had ‘changed little in terms of structure, training focus and ethos from that which had stood ready to face the 3rd Shock Army on the plains of Westphalia during the Cold War’.45 44

E. Krahmann, ‘United Kingdom: Punching above Its Weight’ in E. J.

Kirchner and J. Sperling (eds.), Global Security Governance: Competing Perceptions of Security in the 21st Century (London: Routledge, 2007), p. 93. 45 R. Dannatt, ‘Address by Chief of General Staff at the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR)’, London, 19 January 2009. Retrieved from: www.mod.uk/DefenceInternet/AboutDefence/People/Speeches/ChiefStaff/200 90119AddressToTheInstituteForPublicPolicyResearch.htm.


This institutional neglect of counterinsurgency stemmed from the overarching premise that the British ‘train for major war while constantly staying ready for different forms of peace operations’.46 The apparent flexibility required for this system to work is a source of institutional pride, but it has never received the investment needed for it to work. Instead, what dismissively used to be called ‘Operations Other Than War’ were marginalised or lumped together, despite their disparate requirements. In education, the focus on counterinsurgency in the British Army’s Advanced Command and Staff Course decreased substantially in 1997.47 Also in doctrine, counterinsurgency came to be subsumed as part of ‘peace operations’, which while overlapping in some respects differ critically in others.48 While the British Army did publish updated counterinsurgency doctrine in 1995, as Alex Alderson explains, it was neither studied nor taught, and the subject fell into decline.49 This neglect could not be balanced out by the Army’s regimental system, which some commentators see as the key to its purported adaptability. Whatever its merits, it has not protected these units from the overriding institutional focus on conventional warfare. Indeed, due precisely to its informality, this system of learning is dangerously dependent on an ad hoc practice of information

Brig. Simon Mayall, interviewed by Robert Egnell, Ministry of Defence, London, November 2004. 46

Alderson, The Validity of British Army Counterinsurgency Doctrine, PhD dissertation (Shrivenham: Cranfield University, 2009) p. 94. 48 On this latter point, see D. H. Ucko, ‘Peace-building after Afghanistan: Between Promise and Peril’, Contemporary Security Policy, 31(3) (2010). 49 Alderson, The Validity of British Army Counterinsurgency Doctrine, p. 94. 47


sharing.50 For this system to have any bearing on a unit’s counterinsurgency capabilities, the latter must either have continuous experience in such operations, to keep the familiarity alive, or view such engagements as important and prepare accordingly. In the British case, since its withdrawal from empire, neither condition has obtained. Meanwhile, claims of a ‘British approach’ persisted, in spite of the sea-change in context.

Myths come home to roost: Basra, Helmand and the demise of a tradition Let us return to the British experience in Basra and Helmand. Specifically, an assessment of British actions and assumptions in these two wars brings out the dangers of the counterinsurgency myths and legacies that have dominated the British military at least since the 1980s. In neither Iraq nor Afghanistan did the outcome stem directly from the British counterinsurgency tradition. In Iraq, Britain failed to articulate or resource a clear strategy and was furthermore a junior coalition partner with limited say, and in Afghanistan there was little that British troops could by themselves do to address the central government’s lack of legitimacy, NATO’s shortage of deployable troops and Pakistan’s reluctance to support fully the counterinsurgency effort.51 Even so, in critical ways the

50 51

A point discussed previously in Ucko, ‘The Malayan Emergency’, 33. For a broader assessment of these two campaigns, see D. H. Ucko and R.

Egnell, Counterinsurgency in Crisis: Britain and the Challenges of Modern Warfare (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), pp. 45–108.


constructed tradition undermined the type of adaptation needed to mitigate misperceptions and mistakes made at the political level. First, in both campaigns, a misplaced complacence with counterinsurgency among British political and military leaders impeded an accurate reading of the situation. In Basra, during at least the first year of operations, many observers within the British government and armed services perceived the army’s prior operational experience as compensating for the critical dearth of a strategy or formal planning.52 To the UK Ministry of Defence (MoD), Britain’s ‘counterinsurgency experience from Northern Ireland and the

Balkans [had] enabled the British Army to make a positive start in Iraq’.53 Indeed, during this first year of the campaign, complacence developed around the notion of British soldiers in berets engaging with local community leaders, conducting reconstruction and operating in a manner that US forces, with their harsher methods and cultural resistance to peace operations, struggled to understand. That the British forces formulated this approach on the hoof and without strategic guidance also lent credence to the notion of a ‘British approach’ passed down and refined over time.54 Problematically, the initial calm in Basra related more to the local population’s opposition to the Saddam Hussein regime than to British inputs, and, more forcefully, it was also largely illusory or at least

UK MoD, Operations in Iraq: An Analysis from a Land Perspective (London: Ministry of Defence) 2005), pp. 2–6. 53 MoD, Stability Operations in Iraq (Op Telic 2–5): An Analysis from a Land Perspective (London: Director General Corporate Communication, 2006), p. 14. 54 Ledwidge, Losing Small Wars, p. 24. 52


superficial, given the mass looting, crime and gradual takeover of Basra by sectarian militias and criminal networks. The failure to identify or react appropriately to these developments sowed the seeds for eventual British failure. By the time British troops deployed to Helmand in spring 2006, there should have been plenty of opportunities to transfer lessons from the everworsening security situation in Basra. It is therefore remarkable that the seriousness and volatility of the security situation were once again severely underestimated. The units that initially deployed to Helmand Province were not prepared, manned or equipped for what turned out to be a hornet’s nest of Taliban fighters and drug lords, all of whom viewed the arrival of British troops as a threat to their interests. The first deployment comprised just one brigade (3,200 troops) for this largest of Afghan provinces (similar in size to Croatia). Despite meeting fierce resistance that put British and civilian lives – along with the mission – at risk, it took two years to increase that number to 8,500.55 Secondly, once counterinsurgency was under-way, British forces and commanders were unfamiliar with the term’s meaning and principles. By the time the Army reached Iraq in 2003, it was not uncommon for British officers to be unable to ‘list the British COIN principles, define their meaning, or discuss past British successes in a meaningful way’. There was also little familiarity with the canonical texts on counterinsurgency, given the limited focus on this topic

T. Farrell, ‘Improving in War: Military Adaptation and the British in Helmand Province, Afghanistan, 2006–2009’, Journal of Strategic Studies, 33(4) (2010), 587. 55


from basic British officer education at the Royal Military Academy in Sandhurst through to the Staff College.56 The lack of preparation for this type of engagement meant that the British military adapted on the basis of past experience, which by this point consisted of largely permissive deployments to Northern Ireland and peacekeeping in the Balkans. On this basis, the British military adopted a people-friendly, community-oriented approach that for some time was seen as a strategy in its own right. Altogether absent, despite their critical role in past counterinsurgency campaigns, was consideration of area control, population security and political reform.57 Instead, British troops adopted a low profile and assumed that doing so would lead to greater support for the occupation. Intended to ‘normalise’ post-war Basra, this reflexive adherence to the principles of peace operations instead ceded the initiative. In Helmand, the military failed repeatedly to make the most of the admittedly minimal resources provided for the task at hand. The decision to disperse the small number of troops available throughout the province, for example, was an operational-level decision and interpretation of political intent, but one that contravened key counterinsurgency principles of progressive occupation. As to adaptation to the context, as Anthony King has noted, the role of regimental culture was a far greater determinant of operational conduct than

D. Marston, ‘Adaptation in the Field: The British Army’s Difficult Campaign in Iraq’, Security Challenges, 6(1) (2010), 72; Alderson, The Validity of British Army Counterinsurgency Doctrine, p. 198. 57 This draws on Ucko and Egnell, Counterinsurgency in Crisis, pp. 52–7. 56


the environment, context, political aims or counterinsurgency best practices.58 Consequently, each of the first three brigades deployed fell back to what they knew best, based on their respective regimental core competences.59 Counterinsurgency doctrine and principles were hardly in play. Thirdly, the militarised recollection of past campaigns informed the overall neglect of the political and developmental effort necessary for counterinsurgency to succeed. Infrastructure in Basra required immediate redress, given the neglect under Saddam, damage during the war and further devastation during postwar looting. But, in contrast with Britain’s colonial experiences, the civilian presence in Basra was too small and ill-resourced to carry out the interim functions of an occupying power. The Army-administered quick-impact projects attempted to compensate for this capability gap, yet as a later Ministry of Defence review would note, the armed forces lacked ‘the resources and expertise to play more than a limited role in other campaign strands—political, economic, social, legal and cultural’.60 As a result, while the transfer of political control floundered, garbage piled up, electricity outages were frequent and problems with sewage and water caused an outbreak of cholera. These problems turned the population against the occupying forces, and as instability soared, the few civilians remaining in theatre disappeared. Similarly, in Helmand, the failure to provide stability or to hold more than very limited terrain not only impeded, but virtually precluded, any progress in A. King, ‘Understanding the Helmand Campaign: British Military Operations in Afghanistan’, International Affairs, 86(2) (2010), 325. 59 Ibid.; see also Farrell, ‘Improving in War,’ 573. 60 MoD, Stability Operations in Iraq (Op Telic 2–5), p. 45. 58


the areas of economic development and governance – both essential aspects of the British strategy there. Regardless, the British-led Provincial Reconstruction Team (PRT) in Helmand – its civilian presence – was also understaffed, and it would take three full years for its civilian staff to increase, from twenty-five in 2007 to eighty in 2009. Finally, it became increasingly clear in both Basra and Helmand that the strategic rationale that had underpinned and informed previous British counterinsurgencies – during its colonial era or in managing its demise – no longer obtained. Instead, Britain has acted with a sense of strategic drift, badly undermining its operations in the field. In Basra, the Blair government set out several grand strategic objectives to be met, but it was also painfully aware of the rancour back home over the war, resulting in an untenable balancing act. As early as May 2003, the British government began reducing its forces, and within three months of the fall of Basra, force levels had shrunk from a maximum of 46,000 to some 10,500.61 For all their domestic appeal, these swift withdrawals made it impossible for deployed forces to provide any form of security or control the local population, whose safety was now in the hands of hastily formed local security forces. Indeed, by late 2003, only a little more than 9,000 coalition soldiers remained for the approximately 4.6 million inhabitants of Multinational Division–Southeast (MND-SE) – a far cry from the tentative force ratios found to apply in previous counterinsurgencies. Yet in contrast with the iconic campaigns of its past, Britain entered Iraq as a junior coalition member and was always less

MoD, Operations in Iraq: Lessons for the Future (London: Director General Corporate Communication, 2003), p. 70. 61


interested in seeing the operation through or responding robustly to new challenges. This strategic underpinning, such as it was, had crippling effects on the troops in theatre. In Helmand things were, if possible, even worse. Occurring against the backdrop of NATO’s expansion beyond Kabul, the deployment to Helmand was mired in confusion as to the purpose of the mission there. The British government’s initial aim, in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, was to support the United States in countering international terrorism and to maintain the ‘special relationship’. Both of these objectives pointed to the need to defeat al-Qaeda and topple the Taliban regime that had given it sanctuary. The notion of statebuilding, on the other hand, was secondary and framed foremost as an indirect means of ensuring al-Qaeda’s permanent exile from the country. However, over time the aims morphed to include ‘counterinsurgency, counter-narcotics, protection of human rights and state-building’.62 At any time, the political leadership talked of a peace support operation to support counter-narcotics while the brigade personnel worked under the assumption of a major counterinsurgency campaign.63 The confusion of trying to do so many (difficult) tasks at once raised questions that were never adequately answered: why were British forces being sent to Helmand, and where were the resources that would

House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee, Global Security: Afghanistan and Pakistan, Eighth Report of Session 2008–2009, (London: HMSO, 2009), p. 9. 63 D. Marston, ‘Lessons in 21st-Century Counterinsurgency: Afghanistan 2001–2007’ in D. Marston and C. Malkasian (eds.), Counterinsurgency in Modern Warfare (Oxford: Osprey, 2008), p. 237. 62


be commensurate with the complexity of their mission, however defined? Indeed, it was not until 20,000 US Marines reinforced the British effort in Helmand that the coalition came close to having a positive impact in the province, but by this time the strategic intent had shifted again, this time to emphasise withdrawal.

Conclusion: the dangers of myths What is left of the ‘British approach’ after this deconstruction? The positive statements that can be made are modest in scope: some of Britain’s many engagements with counterinsurgency have yielded successful outcomes, and, on average, in so far as averages are in this context meaningful, its counterinsurgency experience post-1945 has been less brutal and less violent than it could have been. Such findings do not say much and certainly confer no innate ability or genetic predisposition toward counterinsurgency. The implicit belief in such a superiority was not just inaccurate and ahistorical, but dangerous, in that it left forces ill-prepared for the challenges they were to face both in Iraq and Afghanistan. So of what relevance is the British counterinsurgency tradition today? Despite the contextual discontinuities between then and now, the past is not dead (in some ways it is not even the past). However, in learning from history, it must be treated with caution and care. The historical cases are rich in lessons but must be approached not as part of a reified whole but on their own merits.


Counterinsurgency must also be seen as a function of the political context in which it unfolds – this is not purely, or even mainly, a military effort. As to the theory derived from such experiences, the principles of British counterinsurgency are still largely relevant: indeed, it is difficult to argue against the importance of achieving a nuanced political understanding of the campaign, of operating under unified civil-military command, of using intelligence to distinguish civilians from insurgents, of isolating insurgents from the population, of using the minimum amount of force necessary to achieve set objectives and of assuring and maintaining the perceived legitimacy of the counterinsurgency effort in the eyes of the populace. Most valuable, perhaps, is the exhortation to ‘adapt and learn’ and to arrive at a tailored response rather than fall back on template solutions. Somewhat unsurprisingly, these principles – when applied – have often met with success. And yet the critical distinction must be made: these principles are guideposts, some of them more obvious than others, not descriptions of what British armed forces have historically done or can in the future be expected to do. While valuable for military organisations beholden to more traditional and apolitical understandings of warfare, they are nevertheless insufficient in the absence of a viable strategy, adequate resources and the skills and capabilities to apply them in the field. In all of these respects, Britain, and Western states in general, are disconcertingly ill-prepared.