Countering Insurgents through Distributed Operations: Insights from Malaya 1948–1960

Abstract

This article examines the emerging US Marine Corps concept of ‘Distributed Operations’ (DO) and its applicability to counter-insurgency. DO involves dispersing the force and empowering decentralised units so as to create a network of mobile, agile and adaptable cells, each operating with a significant degree of autonomy yet in line with the commander's overall intent. This concept's applicability to irregular campaigns is assessed with reference to the Malayan Emergency, in which the British and Commonwealth forces employed dispersed and decentralised small-unit formations to great effect. The article teases out the conditions that allowed DO to succeed in Malaya, and comments on the requirements and implications for the use of DO today in the prosecution of the ‘Long War’.

Key Words:

• counter-insurgency
• Distributed Operations
• Malayan Emergency
• US Marine Corps

Acknowledgements

I am most grateful to Lt. Colonel Frank G. Hoffman, USMC (Ret.), for his comments on an earlier draft of this paper and for sharing a wealth of knowledge on the topic. I also need to thank the staff of the Sounds Archive at the Imperial War Museum for providing an invaluable service and a remarkable resource. This article has benefited from the insightful input of Lieutenant Ian Rae, Royal Artillery (Ret.), a veteran from the Malayan campaign, and from the suggestions and feedback of Wing Commander Harry Kemsley, MBE, RAF.

Notes

¹This article draws in part upon work conducted for a US Dept. of Defense (Office of Force Transformation) – UK Ministry of Defence (Command and Battlespace Management/J6) project on network-centric warfare and the British approach to low-intensity operations, for which the present author contributed a chapter on the Malayan Emergency. See ‘The British Approach to Low-Intensity Operations’, Network Centric Operations Case Study, Transformation Case Studies Series. The article was produced in September 2006 and does not take into consideration any refinements or changes made to the concept of Distributed Operations since that date.

²USMC, A Concept for Distributed Operations (Headquarters USMC: Washington DC, 25 April 2005), I.

³John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt, Swarming and the Future of Conflict (Santa Monica, CA: RAND 2000), vii.

⁴While DO and network-centric operations rely on similar type of technology, DO places a heavier emphasis on decentralised decision-making. See Lt. Col. Edward Tovar, ‘USMC Distributed Operations’, Proceedings of DARPA Tech 2005, 9–11 Aug. 2005, 22.

⁵See the foreword of Gen. M.W. Hagee, USMC, A Concept for Distributed Operations. See also Brig. Gen. Robert E. Schmidle, USMC and Lt. Col. Frank G. Hoffman, USMC (Ret.), ‘Commanding the Contested Zones’Proceedings, Sept. 2004; ‘Questions and Answers About Distributed Operations’, March 2005, p. 1, available at <www.mcwl.usmc.mil/SV/DO%20FAQs%2016%20Mar%2005.pdf>; or Lt. Brian P. Donnelly, ‘Commandant signs off on Distributed Operations concept’, Marine Corps News, 21 July 2005.

⁶B.H. Liddell Hart, Strategy: The Indirect Approach (London: Faber 1967), 378.

⁷John Boyd, Patterns of Conflict (Dec. 1986), 108. Available at <www.d-n-i.net/boyd/pdf/poc.pdf>. OODA denotes an ‘observe-orient-decide-act’ decision-making cycle.

⁸Sean J. A. Edwards, Swarming on the Battlefield: Past, Present and Future (Santa Monica, CA: RAND 2000), 83. To Edwards, a swarmed force would also be more capable of ‘reacting to suspected areas of insurgent activity when needed; and [of] constantly gathering human intelligence’.

⁹Arquilla and Ronfeldt, Swarming and the Future of Conflict, 79.

¹⁰By way of experimentation, the USMC has trained and equipped a platoon in Afghanistan to conduct DO. According to Gen. Michael W. Hagee, Commandant of the Marine Corps, the experience has been an overall success. See Matt Hilburn, ‘The Future Course’, Sea Power 49/7 (July 2006); ‘Onto the Battlefield’, Sea Power 49/8 (August 2006).

¹¹R.W. Komer, The Malayan Emergency in Retrospect: Organization of a Successful Counterinsurgency Effort, R-957-ARPA (Santa Monica, CA: RAND 1972), 49–51.

¹²That the insurgency was limited to the ethnic Chinese community did of course simplify the task at hand. Nonetheless, the British and Commonwealth forces still faced the formidable task of separating ethnic Chinese guerrillas from ethnic Chinese civilians. And while the British authorities had valuable long-standing links with Malaya, it had been significantly less successful in forming relations and understandings with the ethnic Chinese community. The campaign therefore required the sophisticated counter-insurgency strategy that was ultimately developed and for which the Malaya campaign is now known.

¹³This institutional amnesia was in part a product of the post-war demobilisation of the units involved in jungle warfare and the declaration of Indian independence in 1947, which resulted in the loss of several Gurkha regiments.

¹⁴Clutterbuck notes that ‘we seldom met them after 1952 in parties of more than 30; most often, they numbered a dozen or less’. See Richard Clutterbuck, The Long Long War: The Emergency in Malaya 1948–1960 (London: Cassell 1967), 122.

¹⁵Riley Sunderland, Army Operations in Malaya, 1947–1960 (Santa Monica, CA: RAND 1964), 133, referring to an article by Maj. E.R. Robinson, ‘Reflections of a Company Commander in Malaya’, Army Quarterly 61 (Oct. 1950), 80–7.

¹⁶See Sunderland, Army Operations in Malaya, 132–3 for more information on this shift.

¹⁷Richard Stubbs, Hearts and Minds in Guerrilla Warfare: The Malayan Emergency 1948–1960 (Singapore: OUP 1989), 71.

¹⁸Air Commodore P.E. Warcup, CBE, RAF, as cited in A.H. Peterson, G.C. Reinhardt and E.E Conger (eds.), Symposium on the Role of Airpower in Counterinsurgency and Unconventional Warfare: The Malayan Emergency (Santa Monica, CA: RAND 1963), 26.

¹⁹Ibid.

²⁰Clutterbuck, The Long Long War, 158. Bombardment was however used to harry rebels out of a particular area or to keep them ‘on the move’.

²¹Ibid., 52.

²²Riley Sunderland, Antiguerrilla Intelligence in Malaya, 1948–1960 (Santa Monica, CA: RAND 1964), 17 – based on Quarterly Historical Report, 1st Battalion, Devonshire Regiment, 31 March 1950.

²³Donald Mackay, The Malayan Emergency, 1948–60: the Domino that Stood (London: Brassey's 1997), 166, fn.2.

²⁴Clutterbuck, The Long Long War, 49.

²⁵Sunderland, Army Operations in Malaya, 119.

²⁶Clutterbuck, The Long Long War, 113.

²⁷Harry Miller, The Communist Menace in Malaya (New York: Praeger 1954), 99–101.

²⁸Brig. J. M. Calvert, cited in John Nagl, Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam: Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife (Westport, CT: Praeger 2002), 195.

²⁹Mackay, The Malayan Emergency, 71.

³⁰Miller, The Communist Menace in Malaya, 72.

³¹Interview with Lt. Ian Rae, 16 Nov. 2005.

³²Raffi Gregorian, ‘“Jungle Bashing” in Malaya: Towards a Formal Tactical Doctrine’, Small Wars and Insurgencies 5/3 (Winter 1994), 347.

³³As cited in Anthony Short, The Communist Insurrection in Malaya, 1948–1960 (London: Muller 1975), 229–30.

³⁴Sunderland, Antiguerrilla Intelligence in Malaya, 10 – based on Appendix C, Quarterly Historical Report, 1st Battalion, 2nd King Edward VII's Own Gurkha Rifles, 31 Dec. 1948.

³⁵Interview with Lt. Rae, 16 Nov. 2005.

³⁶Clutterbuck, The Long Long War, 52.

³⁷Lambeth, United Kingdom, Imperial War Museum, Sounds Archive, London, Accession No. 10175, Richard Joseph Wauchope Craig, 11 April 1988.

³⁸Because the MRLA relied so heavily on indoctrination, a break of loyalty would often be absolute. Only a complete shift of loyalty would be psychologically manageable and the SEP would therefore often happily give away the position of his erstwhile comrades. See Lucian W. Pye, Guerrilla Communism in Malaya: Its Social and Political Meaning (Princeton UP 1956).

³⁹In a dispatch dated 26 Jan. 1955, the High Commissioner Sir Donald MacGillivray notes a drop in the surrender rate from a monthly average of 31 in 1953 to a level of 17 in 1955. Dispatch found in A.J. Stockwell, Malaya: Part III: The Alliance Route to Independence, 1953–1957, British Documents on the End of the Empire (London: HMSO 1995), 83–9.

⁴⁰Ibid.

⁴¹Sunderland, Army Operations in Malaya, 145.

⁴²See Clutterbuck, The Long Long War, 58, for a detailed table on the civil, military and police representatives in these committees.

⁴³Riley Sunderland, Organizing Counterinsurgency in Malaya (Santa Monica, CA: RAND 1964), vii, 15, 27.

⁴⁴Sunderland, Antiguerrilla Intelligence in Malay, 49. See Sunderland, Organizing Counterinsurgency, 46–8, for information on the structure and workings of the operations rooms of the various committees.

⁴⁵Lambeth, United Kingdom, Imperial War Museum, Sounds Archive, Accession No. 10120, Peter Eric Harry Maule-Ffinch, 16 Feb. 1986.

⁴⁶See USMC ‘Marine Corps Operating Concepts for A Changing Security Environment’, March 2006, 64. See also USMC Combat Development Command, Tentative Manual for Countering Irregular Threats: An Updated Approach to Counterinsurgency Operations, Quantico, VA: MCCPC, 7 June 2006, 24–5.

⁴⁷Christian Lowe, ‘Nowhere to Hide’, Marine Corps Times, 22 May 2006, 14.

⁴⁸USMC, ‘Questions and Answers About Distributed Operations’, 1.

⁴⁹‘A Concept for Distributed Operations’, v.

⁵⁰The troops were also helped by the aerial reconnaissance of the RAF, whose planes could recognise signs of rebel activity (harvesting, habitation) in the jungle. With time, however, the MRLA became more cautious and learned how to camouflage their presence so as to avoid being spotted from the air.

⁵¹‘A Concept for Distributed Operations’, vii.

⁵²Sunderland, Army Operations in Malaya, 61.

⁵³Tovar, ‘USMC Distributed Operations’, 23.

⁵⁴See Population Division of the Dept. of Economic and Social Affairs of the United Nations Secretariat, World Population Prospects: The 2004 Revision and World Urbanization Prospects: The 2005 Revision, available at <esa.un.org/unup>.

⁵⁵See Frank G. Hoffman, ‘Small Wars Revisited: The United States and Nontraditional Wars’, Journal of Strategic Studies 28/6 (Dec. 2005), 923–4.

⁵⁶‘Questions and Answers About Distributed Operations’, 5.

⁵⁷Clutterbuck, The Long Long War, 55–6.

⁵⁸This classic lesson of irregular warfare is a leitmotif in a series of recently released USMC publications on the topic. See USMC Combat Development Command, Tentative Manual for Countering Irregular Threats; ‘Marine Corps Operating Concepts for A Changing Security Environment’; USMC, Small-Unit Leaders' Guide to Counterinsurgency, June 2006.