The Wretched of the Empire: Politics,Ideology and Counterinsurgency in Rhodesia, 1965–80

This article examines the vital importance of political ideology in formulating effective counterinsurgency, by examining the case of Rhodesia between 1965 and 1980. During this period, the Rhodesian Front (RF) Government of Ian Smith adopted a radical right-wing ‘world-struggle ideology’ to justify settler resistance to African decolonisation. The RF's ideology, based on settler-status anxiety, upheld a conspiratorial interpretation of modern politics that emphasised virulent forms of Anglophobia, anti-communism, anti-internationalism and anti-liberalism. The Smith Government portrayed African nationalism not as an indigenous political phenomenon, but as an external instrument of world communism and Western appeasement. After 1972, when Rhodesia faced a protracted insurgency, many of the principles of RF ideology were applied to counterinsurgency warfare with disastrous results. Because the Rhodesian Government viewed African guerrilla warfare as unrelated to domestic politics, Rhodesian counterinsurgency lacked a realistic political dimension. The dictates of settler ideology blinded the Rhodesian Government to the vital need to win ‘hearts and minds’ by applying timely principles of political pacification and reform to its counterinsurgency effort. Instead a Rhodesian counterinsurgency campaign of maximum force was pursued. Such a campaign proved counter-productive accelerating strategic deterioration and leading ultimately to the political victory of the African guerrilla cause in 1980.     

Unnecessary or unsung? The utilisation of airpower in Britain's colonial counterinsurgencies

Making extensive use of primary archival documents, this article seeks to explore whether airpower in three of Britain's most significant post-war colonial counterinsurgency campaigns, Malaya, Kenya and South Arabia, was an unnecessary part of British strategy, offering little useful military force due to the futility and strategic damage rendered by offensive bombardment, or whether airpower was indeed an unsung factor that provided operational flexibility through its effectiveness in a supply context, as well as its intelligence role in providing valuable aerial reconnaissance. In all three case studies the role played by the RAF in medical evacuations, in troop drops, in crop spraying during food-denial initiatives, and in providing ‘Voice Aircraft’ for the propaganda campaign, provide insights into an under-explored component of Britain's politico-military efforts in counterinsurgency in the 1950s and 1960s and suggests that the main strategic value of airpower in counterinsurgency, then and now, lies in its non-kinetic functions.     

Defeating Balkan Insurgency: The Austro-Hungarian Army in Bosnia-Hercegovina, 1878-82

The occupation and pacification of Bosnia-Hercegovina by Austro-Hungarian forces between 1878 and 1882 constitutes a politico-military rarity: a major colonial-style campaign waged in Europe. Yet Vienna's 1878-82 operations in Bosnia - including a hard-fought, multi-corps invasion followed by a sustained counterinsurgency campaign to put down lingering resistance to Habsburg rule - remain little known even among scholars of the region and counterinsurgency experts. However, their strategic lessons are of import today, as Vienna's battlefield successes in Bosnia brought a degree of peace and stability to the region that it has rarely known in modern times. Moreover, Austro-Hungarian military leaders waged a victorious campaign in the field that strengthened political objectives, and provided a textbook example of how to vigorously wage a counterinsurgency campaign against religiously-inspired foes in harsh terrain without undermining the occupier's political legitimacy.     

Size Still Matters: Explaining Sri Lanka’s Counterinsurgency Victory over the Tamil Tigers

The military effectiveness literature has largely dismissed the role of material preponderance in favor of strategic interaction theories. The study of counterinsurgency, in which incumbent victory is increasingly rare despite material superiority, has also turned to other strategic dynamics explanations like force employment, leadership, and insurgent/adversary attributes. Challenging these two trends, this paper contends that even in cases of counterinsurgency, material preponderance remains an essential—and at times the most important—factor in explaining battlefield outcomes and effectiveness. To test this, the paper turns to the case of the Sri Lankan state’s fight against the Tamil Tiger insurgency, a conflict which offers rich variation over time across six periods and over 25 years. Drawing on evidence from historical and journalistic accounts, interviews, memoirs, and field research, the paper demonstrates that material preponderance accounts for variation in military effectiveness and campaign outcomes (including military victory in the final campaign) better than strategic explanations. Additionally, a new quantitative data-set assembled on annual loss-exchange ratios demonstrates the superiority of materialist explanations above those of skill, human capital, and regime type.     

Countering Insurgent-terrorism: Why Nato Chose The Wrong Historical Foundation For Cimic

History teaches that counterinsurgency and counterterrorism campaigns have never been won through purely military action. Defeating an opponent who avoids open battle, but who uses force to reach his goals, including terrorist action, requires a combination of police, administrative, economic and military measures. As a counterinsurgency campaign should pursue a comprehensive political objective, it requires high levels of civil–military cooperation. However, current NATO doctrine for Civil–Military Cooperation (CIMIC) as it emerged from the 1990s is founded in conventional war-fighting and outdated peacekeeping doctrine. CIMIC's focus is on supporting military objectives rather than enabling the military to make a coherent contribution to political objectives. This makes CIMIC unfit for the Alliance's main operational challenges that have expanded from peace operations on the Balkans to countering insurgent terrorism in Afghanistan. When developing CIMIC, the Alliance obviously neglected the historical lessons from counterinsurgency campaigns.     

The revisionist historiography of Britain’s decolonisation conflicts and political science theses of civilian victimisation in counterinsurgency

ABSTRACT

Recent historical research exposed the myth of self-restraint as the distinctive feature of British counterinsurgency during decolonisation. This article shows that the revisionist historiography of British counterinsurgency has important, but unnoticed, implications for political scientists. Specifically, historical scholarship challenges the predictions and causal mechanisms of the main social scientific theses of civilian victimisation in counterinsurgency. Using revisionist historians’ works as a source of data, I test those theses against Britain’s decolonisation conflicts. I find that they do not pass the test convincingly. I conclude that political scientists should be more willing to explore the theoretical implications of new historical evidence on counterinsurgency campaigns.     

The Hunt for Martín Caballero

While the success of Colombia's fight against illegal armed groups, led by Fuerzas armadas revolucionarias de Colombia – ejército del pueblo (FARC-EP), is generally lauded as evidence of the effectiveness of both COIN doctrine and security assistance, the configuration of Colombia's counter-insurgency effort remains largely unstudied. This article will explain the success of one of those campaigns carried out principally by the Colombian marines (Colmar) in an area of northern Colombia known as the Montes de María. Contingent factors shaped the success of this campaign, beginning with the fact that the Montes de María forms an area where insurgents, relative late comers to the region, found it difficult to put down deep roots. However, operations to eradicate them were complicated by the inexperience of the Colmar, and by constraints placed by Colombia's Constitutional Court on COIN methods modeled on those successfully applied by the British in Malaya and Kenya. Therefore, Colmar officers initiated their five-year campaign by building up a base of popular support in the towns and targeting insurgent logistical networks. This bought time to strengthen the Colmar's combat and intelligence capabilities, and take the offensive that eventually isolated and killed the leader of the FARC in the Montes de María, Martín Caballero. Unfortunately, the failure of the Colombian government to follow up the Colmar victory by installing a regional and local governments viewed as legitimate by the population, and to resolve long standing land tenure issues, has meant that, so far, the Colmar looks to have delivered a tactical victory in a strategic vacuum.     

Military Maladaptation: Counterinsurgency and the Politics of Failure

Tactical learning is critical to battlefield success, especially in a counterinsurgency. This article tests the existing model of military adaption against a ‘most-likely’ case: the British Army’s counterinsurgency in the Southern Cameroons (1960–61). Despite meeting all preconditions thought to enable adaptation – decentralization, leadership turnover, supportive leadership, poor organizational memory, feedback loops, and a clear threat – the British still failed to adapt. Archival evidence suggests politicians subverted bottom-up adaptation, because winning came at too high a price in terms of Britain’s broader strategic imperatives. Our finding identifies an important gap in the extant adaptation literature: it ignores politics.     

‘Troops were then forced to fire’: British army crowd control in Palestine,November 1945

In November 1945, British army shooting during street riots and search operations in Palestine resulted in the death of 13 Jews and the injuring of dozens. The most costly in casualties caused by army fire during the whole Jewish insurgency, these incidents have nevertheless not received detailed attention in literature on the British army's counterinsurgency campaign in postwar Palestine. This article outlines British military use of firepower to control civilian crowds and the difficulties involved during these incidents, contributing to the debate on the army's principal of ‘minimum force’. It also highlights the serious problem of legitimizing opening of fire on unarmed protestors, epitomized in the army's fabricated account justifying shooting at a large crowd rushing a military cordon at Givat Hayim.     

Birth of the Cold War: irregular warfare first blood in Greece

ABSTRACT

While often held up as a model of successful American counterinsurgency, the Greek Civil War presents a unique case. Peculiar local conditions and geopolitics contributed to the defeat of communist forces in Greece. A firm British and later American commitment to combating communism stood in contrast to ambiguous support from the Soviet Union in an area they considered outside of their sphere of influence. Strong nationalist feeling among the Greek population buttressed support for the government and undermined the ‘internationalist’ concessions of communist forces. These characteristics make the extrapolation of broader lessons focused on victory through the application of overwhelming American resources and the financing of local forces problematic. If lessons are to be gleaned from this case, they should focus on the critical roles played by internal political dynamics and geopolitics in undermining the strength of the insurgent forces and how these provided a stable platform from which the counterinsurgents could operate.     

Winning hearts and minds to lose control: exploring various consequences of popular support in counterinsurgency missions

The strategy of ‘winning hearts and minds’ is considered key to successful counterinsurgency, but it often works at the expense of political control over the course of war. This happens when the strategy requires the counterinsurgent to work with a local nationalist group that takes advantage of its lack of access to civilians. This exposes the counterinsurgent to a dilemma inherent in the strategy; because working with the group is a crucial part of the strategy, victory would be impossible without it. Yet when the strategy is implemented through the group, it compromises the policy it serves. I show how this dilemma undermined British political control during the Malayan Emergency.     

Enmeshed in insurgency: Britain's protracted retreats from Iraq and Afghanistan

Ten years of counterinsurgency in Iraq and Afghanistan have produced little in Britain's national interest. This article examines the political objectives set in these wars and the reasons why they have proved elusive. The core foreign policy aim was to sustain Britain's position as a great power by assuming responsibility for global order. Alliances with the United States and NATO would be the diplomatic tool for pursuing this aim. These alliances brought obligations, in the shape of agreed common threats. Rogue regimes with weapons of mass destruction and international terrorists harboured in failed states were deemed the primary threats to British security. Military means were therefore used in Iraq and Afghanistan to attack them. Whether Tony Blair's vision of global order ever made sense is debatable, and it attracted scepticism from the outset. The article argues experience in Iraq and Afghanistan showed that a strategy to eliminate terrorism (the WMD threat turned out never to have existed) by expeditionary counterinsurgency could only fail. Therefore the attention lavished on operational-level performance by most studies is misplaced, because no amount of warfighting excellence could make up for strategic incoherence. Finally, the article proposes the more important question arising from the last ten years is why the UK pursued a futile strategy for so long. The difficulties associated with interpreting events, a malfunctioning strategic apparatus, weak political oversight, and bureaucratic self-interest are posited as the most significant explanations.     

The Kargil Conflict: Waging War in the Himalayas

In 1999 India and Pakistan engaged in a limited war in the Himalayan peaks of Kashmir. Pakistani irregulars occupied territory in the Indian-held district of Kargil. A campaign that lasted 74 days and cost each side more than 1,000 casualties concluded with India in control of the commanding heights around Kargil. The conflict exposed flaws in the Indian armed forces as well as enduring truths of combat in the high mountains. Political constraints combined with the unforgiving environment and a determined enemy to diminish India's military advantage. Transition from counterinsurgency to high-intensity combat in the Himalayas proved to be a daunting task. Early failure was only overcome through innovation and adaptation to the environment. Specialised forces, unconventional techniques and the focused application of overwhelming firepower ultimately secured victory.     

British Special Forces in the Falklands War of 1982

This article explores the role of British Special Forces in the Falklands War of 1982 and argues that they played an indispensable part in the British victory. The concepts underpinning British Special Forces today can be linked to ideas developed in World War II (to influence strategy by unconventional means) which subsequently underwent significant redevelopment during the Cold War. The tremendous difficulties posed by the military campaign during the Falklands War, most notably the intelligence gap on Argentine forces, placed great emphasis on the activities of Special Forces to tip the strategic balance in Britain's favour.     

Operation Motorman (1972) and the search for a coherent British counterinsurgency strategy in Northern Ireland

The role of the British Army in Northern Ireland during Operation Banner (1969–2007) is an instructive case study of counterinsurgency operations as well as an important chapter in recent British military history. Given troops deployed to the province as aid to the civil power, it is particularly useful in discussions about the principle of minimum force. This article seeks to explore the issue of minimum force through the example of Operation Motorman, the Army's successful attempt to remove the barricades, which had established so-go areas for the security forces in Northern Ireland.     

A more complex and conventional victory: revisiting the Dhofar counterinsurgency, 1963–1975

Following the emergence of a communist regime in South Yemen and the multiplication of subversive movements in the United Kingdom's Gulf protectorates, British policymakers genuinely feared the spread of communism throughout southern Arabia. Defeating the People's Front for the Liberation for the Occupied Arabian Gulf (PFLOAG) insurgency in Oman's Dhofar province was considered central to preventing such an outcome. In their pursuit of victory, British officers overthrew the sultan of Oman, escalated the war by conducting attacks in South Yemen, and, ultimately, appealed to Islam as a means of rallying support against communism. However, lessons learned in previous counterinsurgencies (Malaya, Kenya, and Borneo) proved of only limited value in Oman's physical and cultural environment. Unfortunately, none of these measures worked as anticipated. Only Iran's direct military intervention and the dramatic growth of Oman's financial resources after the 1973 oil crisis provided the resources to conduct large-scale offensive operations. Even so, victory was only achieved in 1975 because the rebellion's leaders unwisely attempted to oppose the Anglo–Omani offensives conventionally.     

The Effectiveness of Coercive and Persuasive Counterinsurgency Practices since 1945

Which counterinsurgency approaches are most effective in defeating insurgencies? Counterinsurgency advocates and critics have debated the effectiveness of winning hearts and minds as well as using brute force against ordinary civilians. But little scholarship has sought to systemically compare these counterinsurgency approaches among a broad range of cases. This paper seeks to remedy this gap in the literature with an empirical analysis of 47 counterinsurgency wars from 1945–2000 to evaluate the effectiveness of coercive and persuasive approaches to counterinsurgency. To do so, I use crisp-set qualitative comparative analysis (QCA), or Boolean analysis, to identify the presence or absence of six coercive and persuasive counterinsurgency practices across all cases. This method enables me to highlight how counterinsurgency victory can be produced by combinations of practices rather than a single set of practices that might be expected to be useful across cases. The results demonstrate that many combinations of coercive, persuasive, and mixed counterinsurgency practices can lead to victory. However, more persuasive combinations of practices consistently lead to counterinsurgent victory compared to others, although limited coercion against civilians is constant in all cases of counterinsurgency. These findings cast doubt on the ability of counterinsurgents to refrain from harming civilians and suggest that victory requires a mix of both positive and negative incentives for cooperation.     

Just How Important Are ‘Hearts and Minds’ Anyway? Counterinsurgency Goes to the Polls

Despite all the talk of ‘hearts and minds’ being the key to counterinsurgency, local public opinion is rarely studied and when it is, it often yields surprising conclusions. Through analyzing polling data from Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, this article shows that public opinion is less malleable, more of an effect rather than a cause of tactical success, and a poor predictor of strategic victory. As a result, modern counterinsurgency doctrine’s focus on winning popular support may need to be rethought.     

A Clash of Wills: Hizballah's Psychological Campaign Against Israel in South Lebanon

This article analyzes Hizballah's war against Israel in south Lebanon as a psychological contest where public opinion, perception, and persuasion were the real determinants of victory. Hizballah successfully mobilized popular support for its war by communicating nationalist and religious themes to different sectarian groups in Lebanon. At the same time, it used classic guerrilla warfare as a carefully calibrated psychological tool to erode the morale of Israeli forces, their Lebanese allies, and the Israeli public's support for the war. Hizballah's sophisticated media capability, particularly combat video footage aired on its satellite TV station and the Internet, played a critical role in amplifying the effects of its attrition campaign. By orchestrating information-age media and guerrilla tactics, this strategy has important implications for the future of irregular warfare.     

Misapplying lessons learned? Analysing the utility of British counterinsurgency strategy in Northern Ireland, 1971–76

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.