Small Wars & Insurgencies
ISSN: 0959-2318 (Print) 1743-9558 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/fswi20
Misapplying lessons learned? Analysing the utility
of British counterinsurgency strategy in Northern
Ireland, 1971–76
Aaron Edwards
To cite this article: Aaron Edwards (2010) Misapplying lessons learned? Analysing the utility of
British counterinsurgency strategy in Northern Ireland, 1971–76, Small Wars & Insurgencies,
21:2, 303-330, DOI: 10.1080/09592318.2010.481427
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09592318.2010.481427
Published online: 21 Jun 2010.
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Date: 06 October 2016, At: 08:39
Small Wars & Insurgencies
Vol. 21, No. 2, June 2010, 303–330
Misapplying lessons learned? Analysing the utility of British
counterinsurgency strategy in Northern Ireland, 1971 – 76
Aaron Edwards*
Department of Defence and International Affairs, The Royal Military Academy Sandhurst,
Camberley, Surrey, UK
This article examines the British Army’s deployment in support of the
civil power in Northern Ireland. It argues that the core guiding principles
of the British approach to counterinsurgency (COIN) – employing the
minimum use of force, firm and timely action, and unity of control in civil –
military relations – were misapplied by the Army in its haste to combat
Irish Republican Army (IRA) terrorism between 1971 and 1976. Moreover,
it suggests that the Army’s COIN strategy was unsuccessful in the 1970s
because commanders adhered too closely to the customs, doctrine, and
drill applied under very different circumstances in Aden between 1963 and
1967, generally regarded as a failure in Britain’s post-war internal security
operations. The article concludes with a discussion of the British government’s decision to scale back the Army’s role in favour of giving the Royal
Ulster Constabulary primacy in counter-terrorist operations, a decision which
led ultimately to success in combating IRA violence.
Keywords: Northern Ireland; British Army; counterinsurgency; lessons
learned
Indeed the fact has to be faced that the very use of the military to maintain law and
order, however extreme the situation and however scrupulously the military and
civil authorities behave, could be represented as a symbol of repression at all times
and in all places.1
The degree of force which is appropriate to use will depend very much on the
political climate. In civil disturbances which do not savour of revolt or rebellion,
armed force will be essentially in support of the civil power and the principle of
minimum force should be applied most conscientiously. In the case of the more
violent threats with serious political undertones, some latitude may be allowed to the
commander to ensure that he can produce sufficient force to deal with the situation.
Although still aiding the civil power, there may, under these circumstances, be
occasions when the police are placed under the direction of the military commander
in a given area for a specific period of time.2
The process [of counterinsurgency] is a sort of game based on intense mental
activity allied to a determination to find things out and an ability to regard
everything on its merits without regard to customs, doctrine or drill.3
*Email: [email protected]
ISSN 0959-2318 print/ISSN 1743-9558 online
q 2010 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/09592318.2010.481427
http://www.informaworld.com
304
A. Edwards
Introduction: the British school of COIN
The temptation to extrapolate lessons from the Northern Ireland ‘troubles’ and
export them to other seemingly intractable conflict zones around the world is
becoming ever more common in light of the successful transformation of the peace
process from terrorism to democratic politics. Deployed to the province in August
1969 in support of the civil power the British Army’s peacekeeping mission soon
evolved into a counterinsurgency (COIN) drive against the Irish Republican Army
(IRA) between 1971 and 1976.4 During this phase the Army took the lead role in
combating terrorism and insurgency until police primacy was finally restored in
1976– 77. The Army’s role was then scaled back in support of the RUC for the
remaining 30 years of its deployment. However, while Operation Banner (the
military codename given to the campaign) is often lauded as a COIN ‘success’ for
the Army, comparatively little has been written about how ‘failure’ was only
narrowly averted in the 1970s. As a means of exploring this unique case study the
article has three objectives. First, it explores three of the core guiding principles of
British COIN theory. Second, it analyses Operation Banner in light of these
principles. Finally, it critically considers how failure was only narrowly averted by
an adaptation to the unique social and political realities of Northern Ireland.
Many of the internal security5 tactics employed by the Army in Northern
Ireland had been tried and tested in other operational theatres throughout the
post-war period, in places as geographically diverse as Aden (1963 – 67), Cyprus
(1955 – 58), Kenya (1952 –60), Malaya (1948 – 60), and Palestine (1945 –48).
In some ways this generic importation appeared to run counter to the perennial
British military belief that each ‘small war’6 should be treated on a case-by-case
basis in order to remain flexible and adaptable in the face of armed challenges.7
The salient belief that each operational theatre was unique can be traced back to
the writing of perhaps the most important contributor to the evolution of British
COIN theory and doctrine, Major-General Sir Charles Gwynn. Gwynn’s seminal
book Imperial Policing dealt with the context within which the British Army
deployed in support of the civil power in the early part of the twentieth century.
Considering a range of case studies, he articulated the view that the military
ought to remain institutionally subordinate to the civilian administration at all
times. For Gwynn it was essential:
That questions of policy remain vested in the civil government and must be loyally
carried out. It is however the duty of the soldier to advise the Government and its
subordinate officers as to the effect of the policy, contemplated or pursued, on
military action.8
Gwynn formulated three overarching principles, which he thought should serve
to guide the Army’s approach to internal conflict:
. That the amount of military force employed must be the minimum the
situation demands.
. Allied with the principle of the minimum use of force is that of firm and
timely action.
Small Wars & Insurgencies
305
. A further principle is that of co-operation . . . when unity of control . . . is
not provided, the necessity of close cooperation and of mutual
understanding is all the more important.9
Gwynn’s book soon became essential reading on internal security operations, a
subject officially taught on the syllabus at the Staff College in Camberley, an
institution of which he had earlier been Commandant between 1926 and 1931.10
Imperial Policing has been criticised by Beckett and Pimlott on the grounds that
it ‘totally ignored . . . the example of development of a politically-motivated
insurgency in Ireland between 1919 and 1921’.11 However, it could be argued
that Gwynn avoided the Irish case because he did not consider Ireland to be a
colonial setting. Despite its omissions the overarching principles identified in
Imperial Policing continue to influence British thinking about the pattern of
COIN operations up to the present day.12
Taking each of these principles together they form the triumvirate
overarching ethos of British COIN. Minimum use of force was a constant feature
of the British approach to COIN and had its genesis in the dialectical relationship
between Christianity and Victorian sensibilities, on the one hand, and in the
practical necessity of imperial policing on the other.13 It became the essential
bedrock for the Army’s rules of engagement in Northern Ireland, calling upon
even the most junior of commanders to exercise tight control over their
subordinates in the face of provocation.14 Interestingly, such an approach was
deemed integral to military operations after the Amritsar massacre in 1919,
through the last days of the British Mandate over Palestine in the late 1940s, and
beyond.15 Indeed, there is historical evidence available which suggests that
British politicians were particularly concerned about the military’s use of force
throughout the post-war world and sought to place further checks and balances on
the military instrument. Political elites recognised, as did the more politically
astute military commanders, that only firm and timely action would turn the tide
on armed oppositional forces. Perhaps one of the most understated concepts
explored by Gwynn – and in many respects the raison d’être of his book – is that
of unity of control between the civilian and military authorities, touted by Gwynn
as the recipe for success in COIN operations. Indeed, the Army’s training
pamphlet Keeping the Peace (Duties in Support of the Civil Power), both in the
1957 and 1963 versions, amplified the limits of purely military measures and
stressed the importance of effective civil – military effects in defeating
insurgencies.16 The Army’s 1969 doctrine on internal security operations also
clearly emphasised all three of Gwynn’s principles, a measure perhaps of his
continuing relevance.17
British COIN in Northern Ireland: theory versus practice
The British Army was initially deployed on the streets of Northern Ireland on
14 August 1969 in a peacekeeping role, in the main to protect the Catholic
306
A. Edwards
minority from orchestrated attacks by militant Loyalists. Little consideration was
given to formulating a coherent strategy beyond providing short-term assistance
to the local government administration. Moreover, up until December 1968, it
was being reported by the Director of Military Operations that in his talks with
the General Officer Commanding Northern Ireland (hereafter GOC) and
Inspector-General of the RUC, both men ‘look upon the use of troops in aid of the
Civil Power for the maintenance of law and order as anything more than a remote
possibility’.18 Indeed, so unprepared for the eventuality was the Army, that the
influx of new troops was to be hastily absorbed by pre-existing military force
structures, which included only two infantry battalions and an armoured car
regiment.19 Nonetheless, it had been decided at a Chiefs’ of Staff Committee
meeting as early as January 1969 that the GOC ‘should have operational control
over all forces of the three Services for the purposes of internal security covering
aid to the civil power and ground defence’.20 With the Army committed to restore
law and order amidst growing sectarian conflict, the GOC Sir Ian Freeland
emerged to ‘spell out that his soldiers were under military control and that there
was no question of the police giving them orders’.21
Admittedly, the decision to request Army support was a torturous one,
reached by the Stormont-based government in a last-ditch effort to restore law
and order. Given that the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) was overstretched
and its part-time auxiliary, the Ulster Special Constabulary (also known as the
‘B Specials’), had proven wholly inadequate in applying urban-based riot control
drills and techniques, the Army was constitutionally obliged to provide Military
Aid to the Civil Power (MACP).22 With an upsurge in violence the governmentappointed advisory committee on police in Northern Ireland – chaired by Lord
Hunt – rather curiously recommended the routine disarmament of the RUC and
the disbandment of the B Specials. Apart from being opposed by the majority
Protestant Unionist community, it demonstrated a lack of understanding of the
situation and did little to clarify the role of the Army in law and order.23
Consequently the Army was left without political direction and caught between
‘two masters’ amidst the ongoing political wrangling between Belfast and
London over security policy.
With IRA attacks on its soldiers mounting by the closing months of 1970
the Army drew on its operational experience in colonial theatres of war for a
quick-fix ‘one-size-fits-all’ solution to the inter-communal violence. Britain’s
involvement in these small wars had far-reaching implications for soldiering in
Northern Ireland, especially since the Army had not been on active deployment
on Irish soil since the 1916– 21 troubles. As Hew Strachan has persuasively
argued:
Ireland has provided a symmetry to the British Army’s experience of
counterinsurgency. Having failed there in its first experience of such operations
after the First World War, it returned in 1969, just as Britain completed its
withdrawal from east of Suez. Thus it became the last campaign in a sequence
Small Wars & Insurgencies
307
of colonial disengagements. The Army set out to apply there the principles which it
had derived from its intervening experiences.24
In other ways, however, the Army’s initial deployment in Northern Ireland
would seem to run counter to the fundamental tenets of British COIN.25 There
were important reasons for this disparity; most notably that British defence
doctrine remained largely unwritten until the late 1980s.26 And in any case
doctrine, in the British military use of the term, is a compilation of best practice,
not a dogmatic guide to action.27 The Army, in short, placed a huge amount of
responsibility on the shoulders of even the most junior of commanders on
operations to exercise restraint in the face of intense close quarter fighting as the
second quotation headlining the article demonstrates.28 Moreover, the Army’s
experience of small wars and insurgencies in the post-war period revealed that
success on operations depended on having an accurate understanding of the
unique political context which gave rise to armed opposition as much as
keeping a check on the amount of force one employed in battling one’s
enemies.29
Minimum use of force
COIN is sometimes mistakenly regarded as a less coercive form of warfare, yet
the application of force is just as central to successful COIN operations as it is to
more conventional forms of conflict. The main difference, however, would seem
to be in the correct and well-planned application of that force in a way that
maximises counterinsurgent success while minimising the opportunity for their
opponents to turn it to subversive advantage. In General Sir Frank Kitson’s
writings one of the key components necessary for assembling a robust COIN
strategy is adequate intelligence. In his view ‘Clearly an adequate supply of the
right sort of information is needed at the top to enable the government to work out
a sensible policy for countering the insurgents’.30 Kitson wrote extensively about
the important role of a civilian Special Branch in COIN – an organisation that
took the lead responsibility in Northern Ireland31 – but he never lost sight of the
Army having its own intelligence capability.
The importance of building up an accurate intelligence picture in British
Army operations has a long genealogy stretching back to Victorian times.
Major-General Sir Charles Caldwell, in his influential 1906 book Small Wars:
Their Principles and Practice, suggested that, ‘In no class of warfare is a well
organized and well served intelligence department more essential than in that
against guerrillas’.32 More perceptively Caldwell argued that a ‘well organized
corps of scouts drawn from the more intelligent members of the community who
may side with the regular forces, is an invaluable adjunct to the intelligence
department’.33
The disorganised nature of intelligence machinery in Ulster posed a huge
challenge to the Army, and while it continued to arrest suspected IRA officers,
senior Army officers were claiming that it had almost dried up considerably, with
308
A. Edwards
a hopelessly inadequate picture of Protestant paramilitaries.34 As the GOC
candidly observed in a routine meeting with the Chief of the General Staff (CGS):
The low key approach [adopted by the Army] remained the policy. However the
GOC was more and more worried about the decreasing amount of intelligence
available. He was not happy that the point about the need for minute to minute
intelligence being available at battalion level had been really hoisted in by the
officials in the Northern Ireland Office. He had been at pains to emphasise this need
to S[ecretary] of S[tate] Northern Ireland, and had arranged a special intelligence
briefing of those officials at Lisburn, to hammer the point home.35
Human Intelligence (HUMINT), therefore, remained somewhat elusive for much
of the 1970s.36 This was evidenced most starkly by internment, which saw the
detention of 1,981 individuals; 95% of whom were from the Catholic minority
and the remainder from the majority Protestant community. One former Official
IRA officer recalled how:
Internment was the biggest recruiting tool for the Provos and how it was handled
made it even worse because about 70% of those arrested were not involved at all.
The records were too old. They arrested the guy who bought my house from seven
months previous and he was interned for two or three months. The politicisation
arising from all that meant they were queuing up to join the Provos [Provisional
IRA] at a time when the Stickies [Official IRA] were arguing about cease fires, etc.
The Provos were saying let’s shoot the Prods.37
Internment was an unmitigated failure and served to alienate Catholic working
class opinion.38 In the days running up to internment, officials inside the MoD,
including the GOC and CGS, took the view ‘that internment should not at present
be recommended on military grounds’. As with almost all of the Army’s actions,
however, it was emphasised how the ‘Ministry of Defence entirely accepts that
the final decision must rest with Ministers who will have to take into account
both military and political considerations’.39 Retreating to a position of first
principles – by supporting the Protestant-dominated Stormont government,
which was intent on facing down the challenge from Republicans – meant that
the Army ‘was soon seen to become primarily engaged against armed groups
within the Catholic nationalist community’.40 Adopting an increasingly hard-line
approach in Catholic areas led to the drying up of intelligence, particularly since
more and more people were reacting both to the Army’s actions while mindful of
the IRA’s growing ruthlessness.
To compensate for the lack of intelligence harsh methods were frequently
employed by the Security Forces in a knee-jerk reaction to regain the upper
hand.41 The rounding up of terrorist suspects and their subjection to deep
interrogation became the primary tool for gathering information on the IRA,
especially from those arrested or detained under emergency provisions
legislation. In line with methods adopted in other operational theatres such as
Cyprus and Aden:
The object of interrogation is to obtain reliable information, not to obtain evidence.
Interrogations to obtain information are therefore conducted without regard to the
Small Wars & Insurgencies
309
rules which govern the admissibility of a statement before a court of law.
The responsibility for obtaining a statement in compliance with the Judges’ Rules
for use as evidence will nor normally rest with a military interrogator.42
The central hub for co-ordinating intelligence across all government departments
at Whitehall was the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC). Under the JIC’s
interrogation guidelines the military were only permitted to detain suspects for
tactical questioning and that there ‘should be substantive evidence of a detainee’s
involvement in terrorist activities before he is selected for protracted
interrogation at the special interrogation centre’. Tactical questioning, frequently
involving harsh treatment, was a common by-product of the Army’s intense work
routine of mounting patrols, maintaining public order duties, and battling against
gun and bomb attacks on Security Force barracks and patrols. The lessons of
Aden were soon forgotten: ill-treatment, bordering on torture, only served to
harden the resolve of insurgents. In the words of a senior officer in Aden: ‘the use
of cigarette ends for counter irritant is not easy to explain’.43
Perhaps the most controversial aspects of interrogation were the so-called
‘five techniques’, which included: wall standing, hooding, white noise, a limited
diet of bread and water, and sleep deprivation. Directives issued to the military in
other operational theatres, such as Aden, were that the first three techniques were
only to be employed for the following purposes:
to maintain the secrecy of the location of the interrogation centre; to protect the
identities of those selected for protracted interrogation; to protect guards and
interrogators from sudden violent demonstrations; and to maintain absolute secrecy
over the questioning of particular suspects and to prevent inter-communication
between detainees.44
Allegations of ill-treatment of detainees by Security Forces reached a pinnacle
when the Irish government took the British government to the European Court of
Human Rights in 1976. The resulting report concluded that:
The Commission is of the opinion, by a unanimous vote, that the combined use of
the five techniques in the case before it constituted a practice of inhuman treatment
and torture in breach of Art. 3 of the Convention.45
Harsh interrogation techniques were later justified by British Ministers on the
grounds of operational necessity. As Sir Robert Andrew, former Permanent
Under Secretary at the Northern Ireland Office (NIO), elaborated:
I think in justification for these methods it has to be remembered that there was a
desperate need to get intelligence and that it was thought, and rightly so, that lives
depended on getting it.46
Nonetheless, there was a fine line to be walked between deep interrogation, which
often yielded actionable information, and torture, which yielded little but
hardened resolve in those belonging to the ranks of the insurgency. Unfortunately
this was only realised once the Army’s COIN strategy began to fall apart in the
mid-1970s.
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A. Edwards
In terms of public opinion, there was a wave of international protest aimed
at British involvement in the province. As Thomas Mockaitis has observed,
in Aden:
No-one complained about the use of disorientation techniques such as hooding,
wall-standing or flooding a cell with white noise. Use of the same methods in Ulster
produced a storm of protest, and they had to be abandoned.47
Such blunt techniques were deemed ‘unreliable’ by military commanders, and it
was resented that RUC Special Branch officers ‘had had their hands tied behind
their backs’; interestingly a similar complaint had been made by senior Officers
in Aden.48 As one secret communiqué revealed:
It is generally agreed, however, that the major factor is the lack of confidence and
wholeheartedness among the RUC Special Branch, who were badly shaken at the
time of the Compton and Parker Enquiries, and who are still under the shadow of the
Strasbourg Commission’s investigations.49
Although torture was a gross violation of international humanitarian law, not to
mention European Union human rights norms, Paul Dixon has found that with
rising troop casualties British public opinion – amplified by the media –
remained mixed, although people seemed to be in favour of a greater use of force
against the IRA. Had this harsher policy been implemented, writes Dixon, it
‘would have been hardly likely to have won “hearts and minds” in Northern
Ireland’.50
Even the CGS bemoaned the restrictions placed upon the Security Forces in
extracting information from terrorist suspects: ‘In the present situation, we are
vitally concerned to make the most of all sources of intelligence, and of these
interrogation is the one which appears to be falling far short of its potential’.51
Yet the gathering of intelligence was also a highly sensitive issue. The GOC,
General Sir Frank King, was at pains to stress the need for political top-cover for
the arrest, detention, and interrogation of terrorist suspects, especially in his
correspondence with the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland Merlyn Rees:
I have become increasingly disturbed by the lack of intelligence forthcoming from
the questioning of the many terrorists that we have arrested. In the remainder of the
United Kingdom it would be true to say that police questioning is one of, if not the
primary, source of operational intelligence against subversives. Whilst I fully
understand the emotive issues that arise with Army involvement and also the
problems for the RUC with Strasbourg still unresolved, it does appear that this is an
area which is going by default and it is tying the hands of the Security Forces to a
degree which makes no sense in what must be termed insurgency conditions.52
King suggested what the government might look at the provision of more
guidance for those who had a very difficult job to do. He remained ‘confident that
the Chief Constable would also welcome some easing of the present inhibiting
rules’. King’s views were echoed by the Secretary of State for Defence Roy
Mason.
A keen supporter of the military during his spell as Defence Minister, and
later in his role as Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, Mason took a hard-line
Small Wars & Insurgencies
311
attitude towards the IRA. In a letter to his Cabinet colleague Merlyn Rees he
acknowledged that
there could be no going back on the previous Government’s undertaking that there
will be no further recourse to the particular techniques which were examined by the
Compton and Parker Committees [which reported on allegations of physical
brutality by the Security Forces in November 1971 and interrogation of persons
suspected of terrorism in March 1972 respectively], nor any encouragement to the
RUC to go outside the law in their questioning. There may nevertheless be scope,
acting entirely within the law, for questioning to be conducted much more
thoroughly and hence more productively if the organisation and facilities are right –
and if the will is there.53
Interestingly, when Mason switched portfolios in 1976 he would be responsible
for rubber-stamping the official deployment of the Special Air Service (SAS) to
the province.
In an earlier letter to Rees, King pressed upon the Secretary of State the need
to implement a more robust policy:
I cannot understand why crimes in Ireland are punished so lightly while in England
the penalties are much more severe . . . If we hope to deter terrorism, we must be
seen to be treating terrorist crimes with the seriousness they deserve. I realise that
any attempt to solve this problem of sentencing could raise various constitutional
issues but I feel the nettle ought to be grasped.54
King was openly in favour of firmer action against the IRA, as he revealed in the
conclusion of his letter:
All in all I do sincerely believe that if we are to break the will of the IRA and run
down this campaign then firm action is needed now and we must make clear and
bold pronouncements to show the Northern Ireland people our collective
determination to end violence.55
It is the issue of firm and timely action that this article now turns to address.
Firm and timely action
Countering the IRA’s guerrilla campaign proved difficult for the British Army in
the main because military operations against this type of enemy had been
grounded in an organisational culture which had evolved out of policing Britain’s
shrinking empire. Apart from a lack of detailed knowledge about the complexity
of the local social and political dynamics underpinning the insurgency, as well as
those fomenting sectarian violence between the two communities, there was an
even greater failure to follow the well-established doctrinal principle of
protecting the population, which arguably could have greatly stabilised the
security situation. This led invariably to a tactical-level over-reliance to
employ force disproportionately in the fight against the IRA. In Dixon’s
view Britain’s ‘hearts and minds’ strategy was a mailed fist in a velvet glove.
Building on the work of David Benest,56 Dixon argues that the term ‘does not
accurately represent Britain’s experience of counterinsurgency in the retreat
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A. Edwards
from Empire’.57 Yet, as alluded to above, COIN is no less a coercive form of war
than other categories of warfare.58
It is the central argument of this article that military operations in Ulster in the
early 1970s were shaped by an institutional memory that had undergone little
adaptation in the short gap since withdrawal from Aden in 1967. Perhaps the most
striking example of this came when the Army purportedly unfurled a banner
calling upon rioters to disperse, only to discover that the warning was written
in Arabic.59 This, more than anything else, symbolised the importation of a
‘one-size-fits-all’ strategy that had failed in the South Arabian peninsular and was
destined to fail in the British cities of Belfast and Londonderry. It was this culture
that led to the misapplication of COIN tactics by the Army in the early 1970s
in a desperate bid to regain the upper hand from a determined IRA insurgency.
The Republican movement had been galvanised by the repressive attitude of the
local Unionist administration and a series of ‘accidents’ perpetrated by the Army
in majority Catholic areas.
However, there is much evidence to suggest that such repression was the
unintended consequence of bad timing and the employment of excessive force.
Moreover, when combined with the malign influence of IRA agents’
provocateurs in driving a wedge between the Catholic community and the
Army, the military’s actions created a negative equity. There is much evidence to
suggest that by the summer of 1970 Army commanders were well aware that the
IRA was orchestrating riots and street disturbances very often as a way of
provoking the Army into using excessive force. One HQNI Intelligence
Summary (INTSUM) revealed how:
IRA tactics will continue to aim at causing the Security Forces to over-react,
thereby bringing them into conflict with the bulk of the Catholic population. They
will seize on any excuse in order to achieve this aim which would result in a return
to widespread support for the IRA. The Provisional IRA will continue to provoke
inter-sectarian clashes with the aims of bringing the Security Forces into direct
confrontation with the Protestant community and the collapse of the Initiative.60
Amidst the often chaotic scenes of rioting and looting, high levels of command
and control inevitably broke down. Perhaps the most glaringly obvious use of
excessive force was the shooting of 28 civilians by the 1st Battalion of the
Parachute Regiment on 30 January 1972; 13 of whom died instantly, while
another died a few weeks later.
The events that took place on ‘Bloody Sunday’ are complex and multilayered,
and it is beyond the scope of this article to consider them in any great detail.
However, in the weeks running up to the incident an internal Army report had
been drawn up by the Commander Land Forces, Major-General Robert Ford, to
assess the deteriorating security situation in the city. He recommended three
courses of action: the first that things would be left as they were; the second that
some sort of limited operation should be undertaken to dismantle the barricades
erected by local militants; and the third to take a more coercive approach towards
Small Wars & Insurgencies
313
re-establishing a greater civil –military footprint in the city. However, with the
final option it was felt that:
The risk of casualties is high and apart from gunmen or bombers, so called unarmed
rioters, possibly teenagers, are certain to be shot in the initial phases. Much will be
made of the invasion of Derry and the slaughter of the innocent.61
Ford rounded off his report by outlining the following caveat:
The only way to restore law and order in the Bogside and Creggan areas is to adopt
Course 3 and there is no doubt that this is the best military solution. The difficulty of
course is that the problem is not entirely a military one; indeed it can be argued that
there is really no military necessity to enter the area at all, since it could be
contained from the outside until such times as a Solution is reached elsewhere in the
Province. The political disadvantages of Course 3 are considerable. It will be
represented as repressive against one section of the community and will generate an
emotive reaction, which could become politically counter productive. It also
requires 7 battalions, which cannot be provided from within N Ireland and therefore
means a reinforcement of 3 additional battalions – all infantry.62
Ford’s appreciation of the threat and other constraints (although not importantly
the ground!) imposed upon the Army led him to recommend course three
somewhat reluctantly. In his words, although the third course was ‘the correct
military solution to the problem of restoring law and order in Londonderry the
political drawbacks are so serious that it should not be implemented in the present
circumstances’. Security policy in Londonderry remained chronically susceptible
to the current political climate and would not change until after the incursion of
the Paras into the Republican Bogside area on 30 January 1972.63 The available
evidence suggests that a low-key approach was adopted to keep Derry out of the
headlines.64
‘Bloody Sunday’ changed everything. It undoubtedly served as a recruiting
sergeant for the IRA and inevitably led to an escalation in the ‘shooting war’
between the IRA and the Security Forces. While the Army preferred to observe
events in Londonderry from a pragmatic vantage-point, the Unionist government
remained dogged in ensuring that its writ ran throughout the province. In an
insensitive speech to the Northern Ireland House of Commons, the Unionist
Prime Minister Brian Faulkner stated:
We are told that the people of the Bogside and Creggan resent the presence of armed
soldiers in the streets of Londonderry. But why are these soldiers there? Not out of
any desire of the United Kingdom Government, which have many other obligations
to meet in Europe and elsewhere. Not out of any wish of the Northern Ireland
Government, whose aim is to have ordinary civil policing in all parts of the country.
The troops are there because the law is not respected; because, above all, illegal
organisations are seeking by force of arms to overthrow established government and
coerce the great body of our citizens. There is the disease of which the recent
terrible events are only the symptoms.65
The IRA retaliated swiftly in the wake of ‘Bloody Sunday’ – including exploding
no-warning car-bombs in the small County Londonderry town of Claudy (which
killed nine civilians) and in Belfast on ‘Bloody Friday’, when 22 no-warning
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A. Edwards
bombs were exploded within a one-mile radius of Belfast city centre, killing 11
people and injuring 130 in just under an hour.
Public opinion was outraged and led to a decision by the British government
to retake so-called ‘No-go areas’ by the summer.66 No-go areas – like those
dismantled by ‘Operation Motorman’ on 31 July 1972 – were a feature of several
of Britain’s earlier interventions in Palestine, Cyprus, and most recently in Aden.
Unlike in Northern Ireland, territory held by the insurgents was not aggressively
invaded and forcibly reoccupied for fear of causing civilian casualties.
As Lieutenant-Colonel Michael Dewar has pointed out, this was a political
decision on a similar par to those taken in Aden:
In Aden in 1967, the GOC, General Philip Tower, did not re-occupy Crater, the
heart of Aden town, which had been taken over by elements of the South Arabian
Army (SAA) and Aden Police, because to do so successfully would have required
considerable force, including probably the 76 mm guns of the Saladin Armoured
Cars.67
Yet Dewar overlooked the fact that ‘many of the British officers posted to
Northern Ireland had experienced dealing with civil unrest and conflict only in
such colonial campaigns’. One example was the commander of British troops in
Derry, Brigadier Peter Leng, who had been a battle group commander in Aden
between 1964 and 1966.68
Such experience clouded the judgement of several Army commanders in
Northern Ireland. However, rather than learn lessons from previous deployments,
British forces misapplied them in the haste to counter a growing IRA insurgency.
Large-scale cordon and search operations, together with internment and curfews
imposed in Cyprus were regarded by the local populace as punitive and a form of
collective punishment.69 A majority of the population of Greek Cypriots
supported EOKA, unlike the IRA, which, if measured by political support, was
firmly concentrated in Catholic working class areas where it remained politically
diluted until after the Hunger Strikes of 1981. These were lessons ignored by the
Heath Government, especially when they supported the Unionist administration’s
reintroduction of Internment without trial for terrorist suspects on 9 August
1971.70 As Geraghty has observed:
Thanks to Heath’s hardline approach, alienation had started. Over the next two
years, it would tip the country into an armed conflict that would last for thirty years
or more. In Oman, by contrast, a hearts-and-minds campaign spearheaded by the
SAS, providing veterinary and medical aid, water wells and even firearms for
former enemies, combined with a full-blooded use of military force against active
insurgents from 1970 onwards, brought lasting peace to the country in six years.71
The battle to win over the hearts and minds of the Catholic people of Northern
Ireland, like the Greek Cypriots, was fought against considerable odds.
The application of disproportionate force only served to hamper the Army’s
efforts further. As in other theatres of war public opinion at home mattered:
The lack of public support was very much to the disadvantage of the Security
Forces, who were driven as a result to operate throughout under a great
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315
handicap. They were faced with the vicious circles, which is common in varying
degrees to all counterinsurgency campaigns. They could not defeat EOKA because
of a lack of information from the public; but until they defeated EOKA, they were
unlikely to obtain this information, except by quite different means, based on their
own efforts.72
Interestingly, Julian Paget suggested shifting the focus of COIN from defeating
the enemy to providing security for the civilian population:
The Emergency in Cyprus proved again the decisive part played by the local
population in any counterinsurgency campaign, and also the essential need for the
Security Forces to be able to protect the populace if they were ever to win their
support.73
Winning support was crucial for the Army, especially in those operations against
armed groups which indulged in terrorism, propaganda, and subversion. Despite
observing a proportionate use of force and taking firm and timely action, backed
up by accurate information, the Army also sought to apply a civil effect in its
COIN strategy. Often overlooked by the secondary literature, the unity of control
in civil –military affairs is nonetheless a key component of the theories advanced
by British warrior-scholars; something that has supplanted the Army’s latest
COIN doctrine.74
Unity of control in civil – military affairs
One of the overarching themes in the COIN literature – and admittedly the
most fundamental strategic lesson learned from Operation Banner – is that
‘a democracy cannot defeat terrorism by military action alone’.75 In concert with
Britain’s other small wars in the post-war era, such as Palestine, Malaya, Kenya,
Cyprus, and Aden, Northern Ireland exhibited a political dimension that could be
transformed by applying what would nowadays be termed ‘soft power’, as well as
the promotion of structural reforms aimed at improving the socio-economic
fortunes of the Catholic working class in areas where insurgents and terrorists
traditionally drew much of their support.76
For Kitson it was essential to enter into a battle to win the hearts and minds of
the civilian population and to ‘drain the swamp’ as the principal method for
defeating the insurgency. And this was something he attempted to translate into
practice when he was commander of 39 (Infantry) Brigade between 1970 and
1971. Drawing on his experience in Kenya and Malaya, Kitson recognised the
need to hold regular operational meetings with his opposite number in the RUC,
Sam Bradley, Assistant Chief Constable for Belfast. Working in co-operation
with the police, the Army set up Divisional Action Committees, based on each of
the policing divisions, which would formally meet once a week as a forum for the
military, police, intelligence, and civil authorities to work towards ‘unified
planning and central control’.77 Although Kitson’s early request for a civil
servant to co-ordinate this machinery was overlooked, the Army did bolster its
civil –military affairs department as the conflict progressed.
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A. Edwards
The Army realised that it could not weaken the IRA purely by attrition in
large part because of the legal constraints placed on the use of force in a domestic
setting.78 Consequently it sought to de-escalate the situation and thereby bypass
the risk of employing disproportionate force. As one staff officer, who was
closely involved in ‘hearts and minds’ activities in Catholic West Belfast,
observed:
39 Brigade therefore based its activities on a policy of de-escalation, in which
operations to discourage people from supporting extremists were supplemented by
Community Relations projects designed to persuade or encourage the people to
support the Government and Security Forces.79
Rocked by the daily occurrence of bombings, shootings, and significant fatalities,
local government structures were under intense strain and the rule of law had
broken down. The former senior Civil Servant Sir Kenneth Bloomfield
recalls how:
The scale and tempo of violence was now such as to pose the most grave threat to
the stability of Northern Ireland . . . Use of the army was constrained by the
undiluted requirements of the law and the fastidiousness of a British public opinion
that did not yet see the IRA as any significant threat to Britain.80
In one vignette worth considering in more detail, the local Provisional IRA unit
controlling the Ballymaccarret area of East Belfast was removed in a joint push
by the 1st Battalion, The Queen’s Own Highlanders, and the RUC. After
December 1971 the area was ‘virtually free from subversive elements’, but the
‘power vacuum waited to be filled’. As the staff officer argued, in classic COIN
terms:
The military need was clear – here was a chance to show how good and effective
government was, once the terrorists had been removed. Here was the chance to win
over the people. Squads of workmen were urgently needed to clean the area which
had been devastated by rioting, to get street lights on, to get local authorities to
move energetically with re-housing problems, indeed, to set up a local committee so
that the immediate needs of the moderate local people could be heard. There was no
Civil Rep and the military unit had no experience in how to deal with government
departments to ensure problems were actioned quickly. Within six weeks the
vacuum was filled by a weakened, but nevertheless resurrected, IRA company.
It was thus a classic example of how an area went back to being hard because of the
failure of coordination and cooperation between the civil authorities and
the Security Forces, in spite of the fact that the military authorities had recognised
the threat and made a plan to deal with it as best they could using their own resources.
Had there been an energetic Civil Rep on the ground at that time, Ballymaccarret
would almost certainly have returned to being a moderate, albeit Republican area.81
The influence of Sir Robert Thompson’s three-pronged strategy of ‘clear-holdbuild’82 can be clearly discerned here, and it may have proved useful in dealing
with the IRA in the short term. Ultimately, however, the Army failed to
appreciate the multidimensional nature of predominantly Catholic areas.
Moderate voices within the community existed, but they were now being
drowned out by the voluminous gunfire from both wings of the IRA and the acute
Small Wars & Insurgencies
317
sense of fear of an impending Loyalist backlash, which increased support for IRA
extremists.
The experience of areas such as Ballymaccarret suggested that violence
between the Provisional IRA and the British Army could see-saw when three key
variables came into play. As the anthropologist Frank Burton contended at the
time, ‘What tilts the balance of the see-saw are the various activities of the British
Army, Protestant paramilitary groups and the Provos’ own military profile’.83
Thus, while Internment and Bloody Sunday tipped the balance in the favour of
the IRA, Operation Motorman served to re-set the equilibrium. As the 39 Brigade
staff officer recalled:
The area turned gradually from a ‘No Confidence Area’ into one of hope for the
future. As experience in Malaya, Kenya and Vietnam has shown when this happens,
information from the people begins to flow. If the military see no other advantage
from close coordination with, and support of, a civil affairs programme, surely they
can understand this benefit which is real, does happen, and is the key to the whole
campaign.84
There was a realisation that successful COIN operations in Northern Ireland,
depended on the ability of the Security Forces to look beyond the purely military
dimension of the conflict:
There is a great need for training and understanding in the Army to appreciate this
aspect of CRW [Counter-Revolutionary Warfare – the term was used in the 1970s
to describe activities designed to combat threats such as civil disturbances, terrorism
and organised insurgency]. From the start soldiers must be taught to look beyond the
purely military campaign towards the long term and appreciate that good and
effective civil administration is essential to the defeat of the terrorist. If the system
of local government is inadequate or inefficient then it must be improved or the
local people will simply support those who are trying to bring it down.85
Despite the oft-cited parallels drawn with other operational theatres the Army has
always had to relearn lessons.
The thinking informing the Army’s civil effects approach was that Civil Reps
would continue to be an emergency measure and that ‘control must be returned to
the civil power once the emergency is over’. In a phrase reminiscent of Charles
Gwynn’s writings, in particular:
The military must also help, assist and cooperate with the Civil Representative and
more training must be given both in the Army and the Civil Service to teaching the
lesson that coordination between the Security Forces and the civil authorities is vital
in any CRW campaign. ‘Civil Affairs’ is a weapon in a CRW campaign and must be
regarded as such.86
The effects which these non-military operations were having on the IRA’s hard
core support were later exploited by the government in awarding funding to
community-based projects.87
In the long term, the civilian effects of the British COIN strategy were deeply
felt and not always in the way that Republicans cared to admit. In one
318
A. Edwards
retrospective account of Army activity in the 1970s, Sinn Fein President Gerry
Adams recalled how:
At that point in 1969, the British Army had been involved in, and had lost more than
50 colonial wars since 1945. Over 50 colonial wars in that period of forty odd years.
And the experience that it had in Kenya, Malaya, Cyprus, and Aden, that experience
was brought here to the North of Ireland. Especially through people who had been
involved. People like the Belfast Commander of the British Forces, Brigadier Frank
Kitson, who became an expert, if there is such a thing, in these activities. They saw
in terms of low intensity operations; they saw collusion, counter gangs, dirty tricks,
as well as the manipulation of the media, the criminal justice system and the
apparatus of the state. All this, integral parts of a political-military strategy, of an
integrated strategy.88
Adams went on to suggest that the British state preferred to adhere to a purely
repressive military strategy throughout the conflict:
You don’t have to believe me in that. Kitson has written about it. He has written
about the needs for all these arms of the state to become agencies of the
counterinsurgent forces. And while some Loyalist groups, particularly the UVF, had
been active during the 60’s, the UDA and a variant of so-called defence groups
emerged following Kitson’s involvement here . . . And the British Government, or
at least the establishment, locked into a sort of Colonial mindset that dictated British
policies here for centuries, looked to those people, looked to the generals, looked to
spooks and the securocrats for a military victory, for a military solution to pacify the
people here.89
In many respects Adams is correct in so far as the Army in general and Kitson in
particular took away much learning from involvement in earlier small wars and
insurgencies. However, he was incorrect in claiming that the British Army
advocated a ‘military solution to pacify the people here’.90 The truth was that
Kitson and others believed that the Army could only neutralise the IRA by
neutralising the subversion – the sea in which it swam – and by protecting the
population by bolstering security. A purely military solution, relying on the
employment of force, was doomed to failure.
While British troops enjoyed a hardy welcome from many Catholics in the
summer of 1969, within a matter of months the relationship had broken down
amidst the turmoil of riots, baton charges, arrests and detentions, shootings and
the indiscriminate use of CS gas. As Niall O’Dochartaigh has perceptively
argued:
After internment, the conflict moved on to a new plane for many years afterwards.
The comprehensive alienation of huge sections of the Catholic community from the
state had the effect of transforming the Republican movement from a small,
marginal and conspiratorial group of individuals, linked by family and tradition,
into a major force within the Catholic community.91
In the eyes of many Catholics local Unionist rule now rested on the bayonets of
the British Army. It was difficult to think of a climate less conducive to the
construction of a COIN strategy in which the local population could be persuaded
to back the government.
Small Wars & Insurgencies
319
Within 18 months of his appointment as Secretary of State for Northern
Ireland Merlyn Rees had prepared the ground for a shift in British security policy
which would see police primacy re-established.92 In July 1976 he laid down the
terms of reference for the Ministerial Committee he himself convened to examine
law and order in the province, which would
examine the action and resources required for the next few years to maintain law
and order in Northern Ireland, including how best to achieve the primacy of the
Police; the size and role of locally recruited forces; and the progressive reduction of
the Army as soon as is practicable.93
The Bourne Committee, as it became known, had come to the conclusion that the
Army’s role ought to be scaled back to provide military assistance to the police as
and when required. Rees’s replacement, Roy Mason, was left to implement the
committee’s ‘Way Ahead’ report. Mason shared the view of his predecessor by
arguing that it was important ‘to create a political framework that would restore
peace and stability to the province, thus making it possible for the British
government to downscale its commitment to Northern Ireland’. Yet, where he
parted company with Rees was that he ‘did not believe that an institutional
accommodation between the two communities was necessary to achieve this’.94
In November 1977 a new GOC, Lieutenant-General Sir Timothy Creasey,95
was chosen primarily, according to Colonel Mike Dewar, ‘to oversee the
“Way Ahead” policy and in particular the gradual handing back of responsibility
for security to the RUC’.96
The shift in British security policy in Ulster had the immediate effect of
integrating the Army’s command structure into a Security Policy Committee,
over which the Secretary of State presided. The Chief Constable and
GOC continued to meet on a weekly basis to decide operational matters.
In a directive issued in the summer of 1977 the GOC’s formal title changed
from Director of Operations to Director of Military Operations. It emphasised
how:
The Secretary of State for Northern Ireland is responsible for deciding the security
policy to be followed in Northern Ireland. In your capacity as Director of Military
Operations, you will:
a. Advise him (or, where appropriate, his senior representative in
Northern Ireland) on the military aspects of his responsibilities
for security policy.
b. Consult him (or, where appropriate, his senior representative
in Northern Ireland) on all policy matters concerning the operations
of the Armed Forces, and act in agreement with him on such matters.
Should you disagree on military grounds with the views of the Secretary of State for
Northern Ireland (or, where appropriate, his senior representative in Northern Ireland),
you are to refer the matter to the Chief of the General Staff, who in turn will refer it if
necessary to the Chief of the Defence Staff and the Secretary of State for Defence
before a final decision is made.97
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A. Edwards
The directive demonstrated how far British security policy in the province had
swung back in a pendulum movement towards civilian primacy. It signalled a
new departure that meant that the focus had now shifted from a COIN to a
Counter-Terrorism strategy, with the law enforcement agencies taking the lead
and the Army in support. As Newsinger argues:
A counterinsurgency strategy derived from colonial experience was abandoned in
favour of an internal security strategy that was believed to be both more appropriate
and more effective in an advanced liberal democracy.98
The government had now shifted its focus towards a counter-terrorist strategy
where the aim was to contain the IRA. As the revised aim of its security policy
made clear, the government’s role was ‘to achieve the restoration of the rule
of law by isolating the terrorists from their support in the community and
prosecuting them as criminals through the courts’.99
Conclusion
The Army had deployed on 14 August 1969 to relieve battered and exhausted
members of the RUC and USC amidst an increasingly heated atmosphere on
Northern Ireland’s streets. Despite Home Secretary James Callaghan’s initial
reluctance to approve MACP, he duly authorised a company of the Prince of
Wales’ Own Yorkshire Regiment to aid the RUC in Londonderry. 24 hours later
the 3rd Battalion, The Light Infantry, deployed to West Belfast to keep the peace
between rival groups of Protestants and Catholics.100 Within a matter of months,
relations between the troops and local civilian population had broken down;
gun battles ensued and the Army very quickly became, first, a referee, and then,
ultimately, a party to the local conflict. The deterioration in relations between the
Catholic working class community and the Army became complete once force
was exercised disproportionately: the net result being that the IRA now emerged
as self-proclaimed defenders of an embattled minority community. Unionist
intransigence did not make the task of the Army any less arduous, nor did the lack
of political vision emanating from Westminster.101
There is certainly evidence to suggest that the Army had considered the
likelihood of being called upon to assist local authorities to maintain law and
order as early as November 1968, yet high-ranking military officers thought
that if ‘military forces were called for . . . the situation would deteriorate
considerably, and the Nationalists in the North and South would make the most
of it politically’.102 Such scepticism ultimately proved correct and with the
emergence of a sophisticated insurgent propaganda machine the Army’s stock in
the eyes of the Catholic nationalist community soon plummeted.
Ethno-sectarian tensions between Protestants and Catholics, and the
purported socio-economic inequality amongst the latter community in particular,
meant that any security policy – to be successful – would have to address the
grievances underpinning Republican insurgency. However, and contrary to the
principal thrust of the Army’s recent pamphlet Operation Banner: An Analysis
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321
of Military Operations in Northern Ireland, modernisation did not – by itself –
lead to an end of the conflict. The retrospective view of providing the people of
Northern Ireland with ‘decent, respectable homes with proper amenities’,103 as a
solution to the conflict, was as patronising as it was mistaken. Yet that is not to
ignore the political importance of socio-economic factors, as two COIN experts
have commented persuasively:
Tactical brilliance at counterinsurgency translates into very little when political and
social context is ignored or misinterpreted. Time and time again tactical military
successes have not deterred a local population from supporting or joining an
insurgency if its concerns are not addressed.104
This article has argued that the Army misapplied lessons from previous
experiences and only narrowly averted failure by returning to its first doctrinal
principles of responding to the challenge posed by this operational context on its
own unique terms. It has also drawn attention to the disparity in terms of civil –
military co-ordination, which was born largely in the period before Heath’s
prorogation of the Stormont Parliament in March 1972, though had far-reaching
consequences throughout ‘the troubles’. Moreover, there is overwhelming
evidence to support the view that political constraints on the use of force limited
the Army’s freedom for manoeuvre and straight-jacketed its initiative.
Unfortunately, due to spatial constraints, that is a debate for another time.
Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank the organisers of An Irish Model for Peace?
Interdisciplinary Debate, International Lessons conference, which was held at Trinity
College Dublin on 22 – 23 May 2009, and Dr Kevin Bean, Dr Paul Dixon, Dr Conor
Galvin, Dr Thomas Hennessey, Dr Cillian McGrattan, and Dr Niall O’Dochartaigh for
their helpful questions and remarks on this occasion. My colleagues at Sandhurst also
afforded me the opportunity to present my findings to the prestigious War Studies
Discussion Group (WARDIG) on 6 October 2009 and helped to clarify my thinking on a
number of issues. Thanks also to the editor Dr Paul Rich, Dr Andrew Sanders, Alan Ward,
and the two anonymous referees for their comments on the article. I remain solely
responsible for any errors. I also wish to acknowledge the Staff and Trustees of the Liddell
Hart Centre for Military Archives, King’s College London, for granting me access to
archival material. The opinions expressed in this article are the author’s and do not
necessarily reflect the views of the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, the Ministry of
Defence, or any other UK government agency.
Notes
1. National Archives Kew, DEFE (MoD) 25/257, Secret: Use of the Military in Aid of
the Civil Power in Northern Ireland, 4 December 1968.
2. Liddell-Hart Centre for Military Archives (hereafter LHCMA), MoD, Land
Operations: Volume III – Counter Revolutionary Operations, Part 2 – Internal
Security, 1.
3. Kitson, Low Intensity Operations: Subversion, Insurgency, Peacekeeping, 131.
4. Newsinger, ‘From Counter-insurgency to Internal Security: Northern Ireland,
1969 –1992’, 88 – 111.
322
A. Edwards
5. According to its doctrine in 1969, the British Army defined ‘internal security’ as
‘[a]ny military role which involves primarily the maintenance and restoration of
law and order and essential services in the face of civil disturbances and
disobedience, using minimum force. It covers action dealing with minor civil
disorders with no political undertones as well as riots savouring of revolt and even
the early stages of rebellion’. ‘Insurgency’ was regarded as the next phase in the
much broader process of what was termed ‘revolutionary warfare’ and meant that
the ‘“dissident faction” had the support or acquiescence of a substantial part of the
population’. LHCMA, MoD, Land Operations, Volume III – Counter
Revolutionary Operations: Part 1 – Principles and General Aspects, 4.
6. Mokaitis, British Counterinsurgency in the Post-Imperial Era, 135. ‘Small wars’
have been defined by another key theorist in the British school of COIN, Colonel
(later Major-General) Charles Callwell, as ‘campaigns under-taken to suppress
rebellions and guerrilla warfare in all parts of the world where organized armies are
struggling against opponents who will not meet them in an open field’. In reality
there is ‘no particular connection with the scale on which any campaign may be
carried out; it is simply used to denote, in default of a better, operations of regular
armies against irregular, or comparatively speaking irregular, forces’. Callwell,
Small Wars: Their Principles and Practice, 21.
7. Nagl, Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya
and Vietnam, 192.
8. Gwynn, Imperial Policing, 13 – 14.
9. Ibid., 14.
10. Young, The Story of the Staff College, 1858– 1958, 10.
11. Beckett and Pimlott ‘Introduction’, 5.
12. Thomas Mokaitis suggests that ‘one can only speculate on the degree to which such
works were read and their ideas disseminated, although both works convey a strong
sense of being compendiums of the folk wisdom of the British Army’. Mokaitis,
British Counterinsurgency in the Post-Imperial Era, 134. Interestingly, in the
British Army’s doctrine on COIN, from Keeping the Peace: Parts 1 and 2 (1963),
through Land Operations Volume III: Counter Revolutionary Operations (1969)
and onto Countering Insurgency (October 2009) Gwynn’s legacy is still
discernable. At a recent COIN study day held at the Royal Military Academy
Sandhurst in December 2009 one senior officer (responsible for drafting the latest
British Army COIN Field Manual) detailed the intellectual evolution of COIN
theory throughout the Twentieth Century, in which Gwynn featured prominently.
For more on the intellectual genealogy of the British Army’s COIN doctrine see
Alderson, ‘Revising the British Army’s Counter-Insurgency Doctrine’, 6– 11.
13. Thornton, ‘The British Army and the Origins of its Minimum Force Philosophy’,
83 – 106.
14. A secret government minute drawn up on behalf of the Secretary of State for
Defence entitled ‘Military Assistance to the Northern Ireland Government’, dated
20 November 1968, suggested that ‘The situation was based upon two principles of
the Common Law, namely that military men (like everybody else) are under an
obligation to assist the civil authorities in maintaining law and order, and secondly
that in doing so they have to decide on their own responsibility how much force is
necessary to achieve the object, and they must use no more than the minimum’. This
remained the guiding policy throughout Operation Banner. DEFE 25/257.
15. The importance of maintaining a minimum use of force policy when providing
security for the divided population of Palestine is much in evidence in the
operational correspondence housed in the LHCMA. See particularly Stockwell
Small Wars & Insurgencies
16.
17.
18.
19.
20.
21.
22.
23.
24.
25.
26.
27.
28.
29.
323
Papers 6/8, ‘Lieutenant-General G.H.A. MacMillan to Major-General Stockwell,
13 February 1948’.
In fact not only did the 1957 [revised in 1963] doctrine stress the limited nature of
the use of force but suggested that the principles ought to inform the following
activities in order of importance: ‘safeguarding of civilians, maintenance of public
confidence, use of publicity and propaganda, integration of intelligence, the
selection and maintenance of the aim, co-operation, security, the maintenance of
morale, offensive action, surprise, concentration of force, economy of effort,
flexibility and administration’. By the end of the 1960s doctrine was stressing the
guiding principles of joint control (including ‘subordinating purely military aims to
other considerations so that political ends can be achieved’), Hearts and Minds,
Intelligence, Security of Bases, Planned Pattern of Operations (the so-called ‘ink
spot theory pioneered in Malaya), Seizing and Holding the Initiative, Speed,
Mobility and Flexibility, and Surprise and Security.
The relevant section reads: ‘335. Civil Authority. The military will always be in
support of the civil authority except in extreme cases of urban anti-terrorist
operations. 336. Minimum Force. The principle of the use of minimum force must
be applied. This must not be confused with the number of troops deployed on the
ground. A large concentration of troops deployed at a critical time may actually
enable a commander either to use less force than he otherwise would have done or
avoid having to use it altogether. 337. Co-operation. The military must co-operate
at every level, in every sphere and at every step with the civil authorities. The police
and military must work together as a single team’. LHCMA, MoD, Land
Operations, Volume III – Counter Revolutionary Operations: Part 1 – Principles
and General Aspects, 85 –6.
DEFE 25/257, Northern Ireland Political and General – IRA Activity, Secret: Notes
by DMO on a Visit to Northern Ireland – 11/12 Dec. 68, 16 December 1968.
DEFE 25/257, Northern Ireland Political and General – IRA Activity, Top Secret:
Note of a Meeting held at 10.30 a.m. on Tuesday 28th January 1969 at the Home
Office on Northern Ireland.
DEFE 25/257, Secret: Chiefs of Staff Committee, Northern Ireland – Internal
Security Higher Chain of Command – Draft Note by the Defence Operations Staff,
15 January 1969.
Hamill, Pig in the Middle: The Army in Northern Ireland, 1969– 1984, 21.
See Deakin, ‘Security Policy and the Use of the Military – Military Aid to the Civil
Power, Northern Ireland 1969’, 211– 27.
Edwards, A History of the Northern Ireland Labour Party: Democratic Socialism
and Sectarianism, 168.
Strachan, The Politics of the British Army, 181– 2.
Tuck, ‘Northern Ireland and the British Approach to Counter-insurgency’, 165– 83.
See the comments by former Chief of the General Staff, Sir Richard Dannatt, in a
‘Speech to the International Institute of Strategic Studies, 21 September 2007’.
These comments must be tempered in light of the sizable volumes of doctrine on
internal security operations, which were consulted for the purposes of the present
article.
DCDC, British Defence Doctrine, JDP: 0-01, iii. The definition of doctrine is taken
from Carl von Clausewitz On War blended with the standardized NATO definition.
In other words, doctrine is ‘the how to think, not the what to think’. See Alderson,
‘Revising the British Army’s Counter-Insurgency Doctrine’.
See note 2.
Mockaitis, British Counterinsurgency in the Post-Imperial Era, 134. See also
Smith, The Utility of Force: The Art of War in the Modern World.
324
A. Edwards
30. Kitson, Bunch of Five, 287.
31. Kirk-Smith and Dingley, ‘Countering Terrorism in Northern Ireland: The Role of
Intelligence’, 553.
32. Callwell, Small Wars, 143.
33. Ibid., 144.
34. DEFE 11/789, Secret – Perimeter – UK Eyes Only – CGS meeting with GOC
(NI), 20 April 1972; DEFE 11/789, Northern Ireland Policy Group, Record of a
Meeting held in the Secretary of State for Defence’s room on Monday 1 May 1972
at 10.15. Indeed, another crucial stumbling block was with regard to the Army’s
arrest procedures, which afforded troops the opportunity to arrest or detain
Provisional IRA officers and those volunteers who posed a serious security threat
but said nothing about Protestants, who were also engaged in terrorism. DEFE
24/824, MoD – Arrest Policy for Protestants, dated 8 December 1972. For more on
the intent and capabilities of Protestant paramilitaries see Edwards, ‘Abandoning
Armed Resistance? The Ulster Volunteer Force as a Case-study of Strategic
Terrorism in Northern Ireland’, 146– 66.
35. DEFE 11/789, Secret – Perimeter – UK Eyes Only – CGS meeting with GOC
(NI), 20 April 1972.
36. DEFE 24/1226, Northern Ireland: General Legal Matters – Briefing Papers,
Debates, Minutes, Etc. Intelligence briefs often outwardly complained about this
lack of tactical level intelligence. Many briefs were totally inadequate in relation to
Protestant paramilitaries, with the usual disclaimer added that Loyalists were
‘confused and indecisive’. The truth was that the Security Forces knew little about
Protestant paramilitaries because the most active – such as the Ulster Volunteer
Force – was also the most secretive.
37. Interview with Brendan Mackin, 10 January 2006. Mackin had been a former
chairman of the Falls Labour Party in 1969– 70 and, following his resignation,
became the Adjutant of the Official IRA’s Belfast Brigade.
38. In a rather honest digest of the Army’s operations in Northern Ireland it was
admitted that ‘Both the reintroduction of internment and the use of deep
interrogation techniques had a major impact on popular opinion across Ireland, in
Europe and the US. Put simply, on balance and with the benefit of hindsight, it was a
major mistake’. MoD, Operation Banner: An Analysis of Military Operations in
Northern Ireland, para 220.
39. DEFE 70/214, R.J. Andrew to Graham Angel, ‘Secret: Northern Ireland, 4 August
1971’; ‘Draft Message to the Prime Minister of Northern Ireland from the Home
Secretary’.
40. Iron, ‘Britain’s Longest War: Northern Ireland, 1967– 2007’, 168.
41. One example of how individual soldiers meted out harsh treatment included
modifying an armoured ‘pig’ vehicle’s ‘framework or pushing bar’ to allow soldiers
to administer shocks to individuals. The electrification of vehicles was originally
intended for crowd dispersal. The instructions on the ‘electrification of wheeled
“A” Vehicles’ warned that ‘The current must be limited to a safe value so that it will
not cause serious or permanent injury or prove fatal’. An explanation and wiring
diagram can be found in WO, Keeping the Peace: Part 2: Tactics and Training,
120– 1. The Belfast-based journalist Malachi O’Doherty revealed in an interview
with the author that a soldier administered a low grade shock to him in reprisal
for drunken and abusive behaviour. Such practices, however, were not systematic
as Republican propaganda claimed. Interview with Malachi O’Doherty,
17 November 2009.
Small Wars & Insurgencies
325
42. CAB 190/24, JIC, Cabinet Joint Intelligence Committee: Joint Directive on
Military Interrogation in Internal security Operations Overseas, 17 February 1965.
The relevant directive was known as JIC (65) 15.
43. LHCMA, Dunbar Papers, 2/4, Military problems of Counter Insurgency
(n.d. 1967?).
44. CAB 190/24, JIC, Top Secret – Perimeter: UK Eyes Only: ‘Prisoner Handling in
Interrogation Centres Northern Ireland: A Draft Report by the Intelligence
Co-ordinator, 2 November 1971’.
45. European Commission on Human Rights, Ireland Against the United Kingdom of
Great Britain and Northern Ireland: Report of the Commission, 490.
46. Sir Robert Andrew, quoted in Taylor, Brits: The War against the IRA, 73.
47. Mockaitis, British Counterinsurgency in the Post-Imperial Era, 144.
48. The controversial comments made by the Commanding Officer of the Argyll and
Sutherland Highlanders, Lieutenant Colonel Colin ‘Mad Mitch’ Mitchell on Aden
are a case in point. Mitchell wrote about the constraints on the use of force, when, in
June 1967, he was observing ‘the culminating disgrace of British policy in Aden,
the horrifying point when political expediency has so influenced military
judgment’. Sunday Express, 13 October 1968.
49. DEFE, 13/838, Interrogation by the RUC in Northern Ireland, CGS to Secretary of
State, 14 May 1974.
50. Dixon, ‘Hearts and Minds? British Counter-insurgency in Northern Ireland’, 472.
51. DEFE, 13/838, Interrogation by the RUC in Northern Ireland, CGS to Secretary of
State, 14 May 1974.
52. DEFE 13/838, Lieutenant-General Sir Frank King to Merlyn Rees MP,
16 April 1974.
53. DEFE 13/838, Draft minute from Defence to Northern Ireland (n.d.).
54. DEFE 24/824 ‘Lieutenant-General Sir Frank King to Merlyn Rees MP,
28 March 1974.
55. Ibid.
56. Benest, ‘Aden to Northern Ireland, 1966– 76’, 115– 44.
57. Dixon, ‘Hearts and Minds? British Counter-insurgency from Malaya to Iraq’, 355.
58. Keeping the Peace was less concerned with passive, defensive, and impartial tactics
and more with the swift and often aggressive tactics needed to suppress an
insurgency of the type encountered in Malaya (1948 – 60) and later Cyprus
(1955 – 58). It stated categorically that in Internal Security drills, ‘Depending upon
the circumstances, the minimum force necessary to restore law and order can vary
from the mere appearance of troops to the use of all force at the commander’s
disposal’. WO, Keeping the Peace: Part 1: Doctrine, 7. Such language was
significantly toned down in the 1969 doctrine.
59. Taylor, Provos: The IRA and Sinn Fein, 57. This might well have been an
apocryphal tale, but the relevant extract from the doctrine reads ‘Warn the crowd by
all available means that effective fire will be opened unless it disperses at once. This
can be done by a call on a bugle followed by the display of banners showing the
necessary warning in the vernacular and an announcement over a loudhailer or
megaphone’. See Keeping the Peace: Part 2, 9. The same instructions are produced
word-for-word in the 1969 doctrine. Interestingly, in the 1969 doctrine, direct
comparison is made to the tactics of the Royal Hong Kong Police, which apparently
preferred to use shotguns for crowd control, a much more indiscriminate weapon
system! In Northern Ireland trained marksmen, firing aimed shots from rifles, were
only to be used because of the risk to innocent civilians in more urbanised
environments. MoD, Land Operations: Volume III – Counter-Revolutionary
Operations, Part 2 – Internal Security, 79.
326
A. Edwards
60. DEFE 11/789, HQNI Operational Summary for the week ending 0700 hours Friday
21 April 1972.
61. DEFE 24/210, Future Military Policy for Londonderry: An Appreciation of the
Situation by CLF (Major-General Ford), 14 December 1971.
62. Ibid.
63. See O’Dochartaigh, ‘Bloody Sunday: Error or Design?’, 89 – 108. O’Dochartaigh’s
interpretation advances the view that the Army drove policy at the operational level
and that this led ultimately to a strategic blunder. He apportions most blame to
General Ford, a highly questionable position given that the army’s own doctrine and
experience emphasised political primacy. A more nuanced version of security
policy emerges if one carefully consults the official MoD papers housed
in the National Archives. See also Thomas Hennessey’s expert analysis of
‘Bloody Sunday’ in his The Evolution of the Troubles, 1970 –72.
64. Hamill, Pig in the Middle, 85.
65. Northern Ireland House of Commons Debates, (1 February 1972), 84, Col. 17 – 18.
66. Smith and Neumann ‘Motorman’s Long Journey: Changing the Strategic Setting in
Northern Ireland’, 422.
67. Dewar, The British Army in Northern Ireland: Revised Edition, 70.
68. O’Dochartaigh, From Civil Rights to Armalites: Derry and the Birth of the Irish
Troubles, 158.
69. Paget, Counter-insurgency Campaigning, 146. The Army’s doctrine suggested that
the curfew ‘should not normally be imposed on punitive grounds, nor should it be
applied to impress on the population the inconvenience and hardships which their
behaviour warrants’. It was acknowledged that ‘if timings are wrong the curfew will
soon become unworkable’ and therefore inhabitants’ routines should be taken into
account. LHCMA, MoD, Land Operations, Volume III – Counter Revolutionary
Operations, Part 2 – Internal Security, 57. It was not until 1977 that the Army’s
doctrine had been altered to take into account how ‘Cordoning an area, thus
restricting people’s movement and then invading their privacy by searching their
homes is bound to irritate the innocent and may, particularly if the inconvenience is
unduly prolonged, cause the loss of some of their sympathy. It is therefore
important that there should be good intelligence indicating that a search is likely to
be productive and worth the unpopularity which it is bound to accrue. When it has
become known that a search has been successful, the innocent people who had to
put up with it may be mollified to know that their inconvenience was worthwhile’.
MoD, Land Operations, Volume III – Counter-Revolutionary Operations, Part 2 –
Procedures and Techniques, 81.
70. Interestingly Kitson opposed internment, suggesting that it would only destabilize
the situation further. Yet the Army nonetheless implemented the will of Brian
Faulkner’s Unionist Government, launching large-scale swoops on 9 August 1971.
Within six months there were signs that the Army was beginning to soften its
attitude towards the policy and that it even countenanced releasing lower-grade IRA
volunteers as a means of ‘recapturing the confidence of the Catholic community,
while retaining that the of the Protestants’. DEFE 70/214, Appended Letter to the
document ‘The Future of Internment’, dated 16 February 1972. By the time the
letter was received the CGS, General Sir Michael Carver, was reporting a hardening
in the attitude of the RUC Special Branch HQ about the relaxation of internment.
As he observed in a meeting with the Secretary of State for Defence, ‘so long as the
relaxation of internment was seen as part of a political solution, he would not expect
any reaction from the Army in terms of loss of morale’, DEFE 70/214, Northern
Ireland: Internment Policy, 16 February 1972. In the language of British COIN
doctrine adhered to at the time ‘All ranks must understand the political background.
Small Wars & Insurgencies
71.
72.
73.
74.
75.
76.
77.
78.
79.
80.
81.
82.
83.
84.
85.
86.
87.
88.
89.
90.
91.
92.
93.
94.
95.
96.
97.
98.
99.
100.
101.
327
Often purely military aims become subservient to political requirements’, MoD,
Land Operations, Volume III – Counter-Revolutionary Operations, Part 3 –
Counter Insurgency, 2.
Geraghty, The Irish War, 39.
Paget, Counter-insurgency Campaigning, 148.
Ibid., 148.
MoD, Army Field Manual, Vol. 1, Part 10: Countering Insurgency.
Irwin and Mahoney, 213.
See the conceptually rich insights about the structural dynamics of COIN provided
by the scholar Kevin Bean in his excellent book The New Politics of Sinn Fein.
Much of the factual information underpinning this section is drawn from the
recollections of Kitson’s Brigade Major, subsequently Lieutenant-Colonel, Peter
Graham in his article, ‘Low-Level Civil-Military Coordination, Belfast, 1970– 73’,
80 – 4.
For more on this point see Evelegh, Peacekeeping in a Democratic Society.
By October 1972 each individual police division was reported to have its own civil
representative.
Bloomfield, Stormont in Crisis: A Memoir, 148.
Graham, ‘Low-Level Civil-Military Coordination, Belfast, 1970– 73’, 82.
Thompson, Defeating Communist Insurgency: Experiences from Malaya and
Vietnam.
For more on the complex ‘see-saw relationship between the IRA and the
community’ see Burton, The Politics of Legitimacy: Struggles in a Belfast
Community, 85.
Graham, ‘Low-Level Civil-Military Coordination, Belfast, 1970– 73’, 83.
Ibid., 83.
Ibid., 84.
See Bean, The New Politics of Sinn Fein.
Adams, ‘Third Damien Walsh Memorial Lecture’.
Ibid.
The British Army’s own doctrine was quite explicit on this point. ‘Counter
revolutionary operations must therefore be concurrently political and military in
nature. There can be no purely military solution’. MoD, Land Operations, Volume
III – Counter Revolutionary Operations: Part 1 – Principles and General Aspects,
20. Adams and other Republicans preferred to portray British political and military
policy in caricature because it suited their armed propaganda.
O’Dochartaigh, From Civil Rights to Armalites, 265.
Newsinger, ‘From Counter-insurgency to Internal Security’, 99; Neumann,
‘Winning the “War on Terror”?’, 50.
DEFE, 24/1618, Working Party on Law and Order in Northern Ireland: Draft Paper
on Future Policing Policy – for Discussion, circulated on 9 June 1977.
Neumann, ‘Winning the “War on Terror”?’, 47.
Creasey had previously served in Kenya, Aden and Oman.
Dewar, The British Army in Northern Ireland, 154.
DEFE 11/918, NI General, Secret: Directive for the General Officer Commanding
Northern Ireland as Director of Military Operations, 29 June 1977.
Newsinger, ‘From Counter-insurgency to Internal Security’, 99.
DEFE 24/1618, Secret: The Future Role and Organisation of the UDR, HQNI,
22 September 1977.
Irwin and Mahoney, ‘The Military Response’, 199.
For a critical treatment of politics in the 1970s, see McGrattan, Northern Ireland,
1968 –2008: The Politics of Retrenchment.
328
A. Edwards
102. DEFE 25/257, Lieutenant-General Sir Ian Harris, GOC NI, to Lieutenant-General
Sir Victor Fitzgeorge-Balfour, Vice-Chief of the General Staff, 20 November 1968.
103. MoD, Operation Banner, para 810. It is beyond the scope of the present article to
analyse the pamphlet, which is unfortunately littered with several historical and
factual inaccuracies. However, its central thesis, that Operation Banner was – on
balance – a success, despite the absence of an ‘overall campaign authority’, is
broadly correct.
104. Marston and Malkasian, ‘Introduction’ in Counterinsurgency in Modern Warfare,
16 – 17.
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