The British Way in Counter-Insurgency, 1945 - 1967

by David French

The claim by the Ministry of Defence in 2001 that 'the experience of numerous small wars has provided the British Army with a unique insight into this demanding form of conflict' unravelled spectacularly in Iraq and Afghanistan. One important reason for that, David French suggests, was because contemporary British counter-insurgency doctrine was based upon a serious misreading of the past.

Until now, many observers believed that during the wars of decolonisation in the two decades after 1945, the British had discovered how western liberal notions of right and wrong could be made compatible with the imperatives of waging war amongst the people, that force could be used effectively but with care, and that a more just and prosperous society could emerge from these struggles. By using only the minimum necessary force, and doing so with the utmost discrimination, the British were able to win by securing the 'hearts and minds' of the people. But this was a serious distortion of actual British practice on the ground. David French's main contention is that the British hid their use of naked force behind a carefully constructed veneer of legality. In reality, they commonly used wholesale coercion, including cordon and search operations, mass detention without trial, forcible population resettlement, and the creation of free-fire zones to intimidate and lock-down the civilian population. The British waged their counter-insurgency campaigns by being nasty, not nice, to the people.

The British Way in Counter-Insurgency is a seminal reassessment of the historical foundation of British counter doctrine and practice.

Genres: Military History, History, Nonfiction, War, British Literature, Military Fiction, 20th Century

304 pages, Hardcover

First published February 1, 2012

About the author

David French was born in Essex in 1954 and educated at the University of York and King's College London. After briefly holding teaching posts as North London Polytechnic, the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, and Herriot-Watt University, he spent twenty-seven years at University College London. The author of nine previous books, he is a former Fellow of the Woodrow Wilson Centre in Washington DC, a recipient of the Arthur Goodzeit Prize of the New York Military Affairs Symposium, and a three-times winner of the Templer Medal awarded by the Society for Army Historical Research. He is now Professor Emeritus at UCL, a Fellow of both the Royal Historical Society and the Historical Association, and a Vice-President of the Army Records Society.

Reviews

[Roger Burk]

This is the work of a professional historian, slow going, with 1-3 inches of footnotes on every page. Alas, all the scholarship does not convince the reader of the writer's thesis, that contrary to common opinion British counterinsurgency campaigns in 1945-75 were not especially law- and development-oriented, but were coercive, brutal, and nasty. The trouble is that he is so concerned with showing that British counterinsurgencies were not perfectly benign that he neglects to tell us whether it was better than others (except for a few comments that the French did far worse in Algeria). The standard of comparison seems to be Swiss police work, not combatting terrorist insurgencies. He clearly has no sympathy with the British authorities--every expression of concern for the people or desire to do good or remediate wrong is taken with great skepticism and explained away as cynical posturing. Finally, he goes back and forth among the wars, giving no connected account of what happened in Kenya, Aden, the Suez Canal Zone, Borneo, Malaya, Cyprus, Palestine, and so on. He doesn't tell us what worked and what didn't. Bottom line: If you want a careful, scholarly, well-documented collection of what the British did wrong, and nothing else, this book is for you.