The minimum force debate: contemporary sensibilities meet imperial practice

Abstract

No aspect of British counter-insurgency has been more problematic and controversial than the doctrine of minimum force. This common law principle provided ambiguous guidance for soldiers and police quelling unrest within a global empire and has become the subject of intense scholarly debate in the post-imperial era. The argument divides academics into two broad camps. One group sees minimum force as a vital element of a largely successful, uniquely British approach to counter-insurgency. The other claims that the legal principle never really restrained British security forces and considers the British approach to counter-insurgency neither unique nor particularly successful. This debate appeared in an exchange of views between John Newsinger and the current author in a 1990 volume of Small Wars and Insurgencies and more recently in a similar but lengthier argument between Rod Thornton and Huw Bennett in the same journal between 2007 and 2010.1 Such disagreements are of course endemic to academic discourse. This one, however, seems to be about more than history.

Keywords:

• aid to the civil power
• Arab revolt
• counter-insurgency
• Dhofar campaign
• insurgency
• Malayan Emergency
• Mau Mau
• Northern Ireland
• Palestine

Notes

 1. Newsinger, ‘Minimum Force’; Mockaitis, ‘Minimum Force: A Reply’; Bennett, ‘The Other Side of COIN’; Thornton, ‘Minimum Force: A Reply to Hew Bennett’; Bennett, ‘Minimum Force in British Counterinsurgency’.

 2. Duties in Aid of the Civil Power, 1923, WO 32/3456), 3, The National Archives [TNA].

 3. General Napier, quoted in Townshend, Britain's Civil Wars, 20.

 4. Slim, Unofficial History, 84–5.

 5. Lloyd, ‘The Amritsar Massacre and the Minimum Force Debate’.

 6. ‘Drones and the Man’, 10.

 7. Interpretive Guidance on the Notion of Direct Participation in Hostilities under International Humanitarian Law, Reports and Documents, Volume 90, no. 872 (December 2008): 1008.

 8. See Bill Boothby, “‘And for such time as”: The time dimension to direct participation hostilities,’ 42 N.Y.U. Journal of International Law & Politics, Vol. 42, no. 3 (2010): 741–768.

 9. Bennett, ‘Minimum Force in British Counterinsurgency’, 460.

10. Bennett, ‘“A Very Salutary Effect”’, 442.

11. Thornton, The Imperial Idea, 1.

12. Shoul, ‘Soldiers, Riot Control and Aid to the Civil Power’.

13. Norris, ‘Repression and Rebellion’.

14. Hughes, ‘The Banality of Brutality’.

15. Ibid., 350.

16. Hack, ‘Iron Claws on Malaya’.

17. Bennett, ‘“A Very Salutary Effect”’.

18. Ibid., 432.

19. Ibid., 436.

20. Short, The Communist Insurrection in Malaya, 242.

21. DeVore, ‘A More Complex and Conventional Victory’.

22. Ibid., 165.

23. Ibid.

24. See Mockaitis, British Counterinsurgency in the Post-Imperial Era, 96–132, for a discussion of the campaign.

25. Elkins, Imperial Reckoning.

26. Anderson, Histories of the Hanged.

27. Bennett, ‘The Other Side of the COIN’.

28. Ibid., 648.

29. Barnett and Njama, Mau Mau from Within, 208.

30. Bennett, ‘The Other Side of the COIN’, 648.

31. Ibid., 649.

32. Sir George Erskine, ‘Message to be Distributed to All Officers of the Army, Police, and Security Forces’, 23 June 1953, WO 236/17, TNA.

33. Bennett, ‘The Other Side of the COIN’, 639.

34. Canon F.C. Bewes, Letter to Sir Evelyn Baring, 26 Jan. 1953, CO 822/471, TNA.

35. Percox, ‘British Counterinsurgency in Kenya, 1952–1956’, 52.

36. Elkins, Imperial Reckoning, 54–5.

37. Author Interview with Field Marshal Viscount Harding, June 1987.

38. Mockaitis, British Counterinsurgency, 1919–1960, 44.

39. Mockaitis, British Counterinsurgency in the Post-Imperial Era.

40. Masters, Bugles and a Tiger, 208–9.

41. Hughes, ‘Banality of Brutality’, 354.

42. BBC, ‘Timeline Guatemala’.

43. Kitson, Low-Intensity Operations, 65.

44. Mockaitis, Resolving Insurgencies.