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Abstract
In recent years a number of commentators have posited that the British reputation for conducting small wars has suffered in the wake of setbacks in Iraq and Afghanistan. The argument here contests whether such a tradition can be truly said to have ever existed. A close examination of this supposed tradition reveals it to be a myth. In fact, rarely have the British armed forces claimed a facility for counter-insurgency or small war. Invariably, commentators outside the Army have ascribed the tradition to them. Most notably, commentators in the United States keen to discern practices of minimum force or rapid institutional learning generated the narrative of British COIN expertise. Ultimately, what this myth reveals is that, when deconstructed, it is political will, not an ingrained understanding of fighting insurgencies, that has determined Britain's success, or otherwise, in so-called small wars.
Notes
1. CitationBritish Army, Army Field Manual –V, 1–1.
2. CitationBeckett, ‘British Counter-insurgency’, 783.
3. We take this view of myth from CitationGirardet, Mythes et Mythologies Politiques, 17. Girardet argues that myth has its own logic that constitutes a system of understanding ‘de logique de discourse mythique’.
4. British Army, Army Field Manual, IV-1.
5. Ibid., VI-10–17.
6. Ibid., VI-20.
7. Ibid., IX-24.
8. Ibid., IX-26.
9. CitationLieb, ‘Suppressing Insurgencies in Comparison’, 628.
10. CitationLedwidge, Losing Small Wars, 3.
11. Ibid., 16.
12. Ibid., 151.
13. Ibid., 5.
15. See for example, CitationElkins, Imperial Reckoning.
16. There are now numerous accounts that retail the problems encountered by British forces in Iraq and Afghanistan by journalists, former soldiers, and academics. See for example, CitationFergusson, A Million Bullets; CitationGrey, Operation Snakebite; CitationBury, Callsign Hades; CitationFairweather, A War of Choice; CitationBird and Marshall, Afghanistan; CitationAnderson, No Worse Enemy; CitationHarnden, Dead Men Risen; CitationGall, The War Against the Taliban.
17. See for example CitationBetz and Cormack, ‘Iraq, Afghanistan and British Strategy’, 321.
18. See CitationBritish Army, Countering Insurgency, 1–4.
19. See, for instance, Gwyn, Citation Imperial Policing ; CitationFeatherstone, Colonial Small Wars, 1837–1901.
20. CitationUcko, ‘Innovation and Inertia’, 291.
21. CitationThompson, Defeating Communist Insurgency.
22. Ibid., 50–62.
23. CitationPaget, Counter-insurgency Campaigning.
24. CitationBarber, War of the Running Dogs.
25. CitationKitson, Low Intensity Operations.
26. CitationKitson, Bunch of Five.
27. CitationMcGuffin, The Guinea Pigs.
28. See CitationKitson, Gangs and Counter-gangs.
29. CitationUrban, Big Boys Rules, 35–9.
30. See CitationNeumann, Britain's Long War.
31. CitationHamill, Pig in the Middle, 159–223.
32. CitationRyder, The RUC, 226–372
33. See CitationMcInnes, Hot War Cold War.
34. See for example, CitationDewar, Brush Fire Wars, 180–5.
35. CitationMockaitis, British Counter-insurgency, 1919–1990.
36. CitationMockaitis, British Counter-insurgency in the Post-Imperial Era, 12.
37. CitationCallwell, Small Wars, with introduction to the Bison Books edition by Douglas Porch, v.
38. See British Army, Field Manual, IV, footnote 1.
39. Ibid., 2-1-1.
40. CitationNagl, Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife, 59–111.
41. CitationPetraeus, ‘Learning Counterinsurgency’, 2–11.
42. CitationMcFate, ‘The Military Utility of Understanding Adversary Culture’, 42.
43. Quoted in CitationStannard, ‘Montgomery McFate's Mission’.
44. See CitationMcFate, ‘Iraq: The Social Context of IEDs’, 37–40; CitationMcFate and Jackson, ‘An Organizational Solution’, 18.
45. British Army, Field Manual, 3–2.
46. CitationHouse of Commons Defence Committee, Iraq, 27–35.
47. CitationNorton-Taylor, ‘General Hits Out at US Tactics’.
48. CitationJackson, ‘British Counter-insurgency’, 347.
49. CitationAylwin-Foster, ‘Changing the Army’, 2–15.
50. Ibid., 8.
51. Ibid.
52. Ibid., 9.
53. House of Commons Defence Committee, Iraq, 4.
54. CitationMinistry of Defence, Stability Operations in Iraq, 14.
55. Quoted in CitationDavis, ‘UK Officer Slams US Iraq Tactics’.
56. For an account, see CitationCamp, Operation Phantom Fury. See also CitationBellavia, House to House; CitationLowry, New Dawn.
57. Aylwin-Foster, ‘Changing the Army’, 4.
58. CitationNorton-Taylor and Wilson, ‘US Army in Iraq Institutionally Racist’.
59. Quoted in Davis, ‘UK Officer Slams US Iraq Tactics’.
60. CitationWaldman, ‘British “Post-Conflict” Operations’, 61–86.
61. See for example CitationHolland and Phoenix, Phoenix; CitationO'Callaghan, The Informer; CitationMoloney, A Secret History of the IRA; CitationMcDonald, Gunsmoke and Mirrors. Far from any discernible ‘British way’ counter-insurgency programme, security policy in the Northern Ireland Troubles evinced a wholly different concept where the IRA was slowly but systematically penetrated by informers and agents to a point in the early 1990s when it almost certainly lost control over large parts of its organisation. The concept was neither one of ‘minimum force’ nor of ‘coercion’ and ‘exemplary force’. British security policy towards the IRA was one of spying on it, infiltrating it, controlling it, and then collapsing it from the inside.
62. CitationDixon, ‘Hearts and Minds?’, 366.
63. CitationHack, ‘Iron Claws on Malaya’, 102. See also CitationHack, ‘The Malayan Emergency’, 383–414.
64. CitationNewsinger, British Counter-insurgency.
65. CitationBennett, ‘A Very Salutary Effect’, 415–44; CitationBennett, ‘Minimum Force in British Counterinsurgency’, 459–75; CitationFrench, The British Way in Counter-insurgency.
66. CitationBennett, ‘Soldiers in the Court Room’, 717–30.
67. CitationHack, in ‘Every One Lived in Fear’, 678, identified something of ‘a herd mentality’ in the denunciation of British COIN methods, exemplified in CitationGrob-Fitzgibbons's Imperial Endgame which argued Britain ‘self-consciously deployed “dirty wars” and related tactics to shape a postcolonial world friendly to the West and to capitalism’.
68. CitationPorch, ‘The Dangerous Myth’, 249.
69. For example, see CitationFrank Kitson's principal work on the British Army, Warfare as a Whole. Only one chapter is dedicated to ‘Activities Outside the NATO Area’, and even here no mention whatsoever is made of any predilection for counter-insurgency operations, see pp. 60–81.
70. For one interpretation, see CitationGumz, ‘Reframing the Historical Problematic of Insurgency’, 553–88.
71. CitationWhittingham, ‘Savage Warfare’, 592.
72. Callwell, Small Wars, 395, quoted in ibid., 594.
73. Whittingham, ‘Savage Warfare’, 592.
74. Lieb, ‘Suppressing Insurgencies in Comparison’, 627–8.
75. CitationFrench, ‘Nasty Not Nice’, 757.
76. CitationMockaitis, ‘The Minimum Force Debate’, 773.
77. Ibid., 774.
78. CitationHughes, ‘Introduction’, 581.
79. Ibid., 584.
80. See Ledwidge, Losing Small Wars, 141, 163, 174.
81. Whittingham, ‘Savage Warfare’, 592.
82. Ibid., 593.
83. CitationSurridge, ‘An Example to be Followed’, 609.
84. Mockaitis, ‘The Minimum Force Debate’, 766.
85. British Army, Field Manual, 3–2.
86. See Hughes, ‘Introduction’, 585.
87. See for example CitationTerraine, The Smoke and the Fire; CitationSheffield , The Chief.
88. See CitationPritchard and Smith, ‘Thompson in Helmand’, 65–90.
89. See CitationFarrell, ‘A Good War Gone Wrong?’ 60–4.
90. Surridge, ‘An Example to be Followed’, 614.
91. Ibid., 622.
92. Ibid., 923.
93. Lieb, ‘Suppression of Insurgencies in Comparison’, 637.
94. Ibid., 637.
95. It is perhaps not without reason that after the experience of combating the Viet Minh in Indochina in the 1940s and 1950s an important section of French military thinking focused very precisely on the question of political will as the ultimate determinant of success in suppressing rebellion. See CitationCradock and Smith, ‘No Fixed Values’, 68–105.
96. Hughes, ‘Introduction’, 586.
97. CitationCesarani, ‘The War on Terror that Failed’, 663.
98. Ibid., 663.
99. Dewar, Brush Fire Wars, 17–26.
100. In August 1946, British viceroy Archibald Wavell wrote home to the Labour government that British rule ‘was on the point of dissolution’. Quoted in CitationBayly and Harper, Forgotten Wars, 251.
101. Dewar, Brush Fire Wars, 113–36.
102. For an assessment, see CitationDyson, ‘Alliances, Domestic Politics and Leader Psychology’, 647–66.
103. See Country-data.com, ‘Lebanon: The Multinational Force’, available at http://www.country-data.com/cgi-bin/query/r-8078.htm (accessed 18 July 2012).
104. For an account, see CitationFisk, Pity the Nation, 443–192.
105. See CitationHammel, The Root.
106. See BBC Home, ‘On This Day’, http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/february/26/newsid_4153000/4153013.stm (accessed 18 July 2012).
107. CitationGentile, ‘Strategy without Tactics’, 5–6.
108. Dewar, Brush Fire Wars, 180.
109. Ibid., 180–5.
110. For one notable account in this regard, see CitationDorman, Blair's Successful War.
111. In this context of inventing tradition, see the classic study by CitationHobsbawm and Ranger, The Invention of Tradition.
112. CitationCondren, Argument and Authority in Early Modern England, 26–7.
113. For a survey, see CitationDickie, The New Mandarins; CitationMeyer, Getting Our Way; CitationHurd, Choose Your Weapons.
114. CitationClausewitz, On War, 88.
115. Ledwidge, Losing Small Wars, 148.