Counter-insurgency (COIN) is a relatively recent label for the measures taken by governing authorities and their armed forces to combat attempts to subvert and overthrow them. In earlier times there was no need for the term because the suppression of insurgency proceeded along the lines of ‘kill them all, let God sort them out’. But once the time-honoured techniques of massacre and scorched earth ceased to be regarded as appropriate responses, ‘hearts and minds’ and other COIN concepts came to the fore.
It represents perhaps the key military issue of the later 20th century. As the term implies, it is an essentially reactive process, generated and shaped by the nature of insurgency. Historically the core problem in devising appropriate countermeasures has been the difficulty of clarifying or specifying the nature of the threat. The learning curve of both soldiers and politicians has been quite flat, largely because insurgency, if it is at all effective, operates beyond the margins of conventional political and military action. A number of historians have demonstrated the slowness with which even those armies, such as the British and French, with extensive experience of irregular war, developed a systematic doctrine of counter-insurgency. In Britain, for instance, the experience of insurgency in Ireland between 1919 and 1921 was sidelined. The army held to the sensible, but almost wholly unpolitical, doctrine of imperial control codified by Gwynn in 1934 (in a book that left Ireland out), with its traditional emphasis on minimum force and subordination to the civil authorities, and ignored the more sophisticated and challenging analysis published a few years later by H. J. Simson. This argued that a new kind of conflict had emerged, requiring a new kind of strategy ignoring the traditional dichotomies between civil and military, peace and war.
In the years after WW II a recognizable idea of counter-insurgency finally began to emerge. It can be dated fairly precisely. Simson was reacting to the situation in Palestine, where from 1936 to 1939 the British authorities had great difficulty in controlling an Arab guerrilla insurgency that was militarily quite weak. When a more formidable Jewish insurgency began in the same country after 1945, the military authorities showed no recognition of the need for different methods, or indeed any understanding of the nature of the threat they faced. But the humiliating British failure in Palestine, ending in the chaotic abandonment of a UN Mandate in 1948, was followed by a very different outcome in the Malayan emergency, which the British authorities had effectively strangled by the early 1950s. Their method rested on bridging the gap between civil and military authorities, by means of a special commissioner, and the development of policies designed to detach the civil population from the insurgents, which became famous as ‘winning hearts and minds’. The British even broke with tradition by producing a semi-theoretical handbook explaining their success. Sir Robert Thompson's immensely influential Defeating Communist Insurgency, published in the mid-1960s, with its ‘five principles’, became a bible of counter-insurgency.
The core of Thompson's analysis simply made explicit a deep-rooted British assumption about the need to maintain the government's legitimacy by operating within the law. But it departed from British experience in insisting that not only must the government have a clear political aim, it must also ‘have an overall plan’. In the Malayan emergency it had been possible for the authorities to offer, in addition to political emancipation, social and economic reforms that headed off the threat of mass opposition, and exploited the ethnic difference between the mainly Chinese insurgents and the Malay majority. Where this could not be so easily done, legitimacy was harder to preserve. The French failed in Indochina between 1945 and 1953 by attempting to secure a conventional military victory over the insurgent Vietminh. After suffering this disaster, the French army embraced a far more radical doctrine of guerre révolutionnaire which located the struggle for hearts and minds not so much in the material as the ideological sphere.
The USA followed this line in a series of military interventions conceived as aspects of the Cold War struggle against international communism. On the basis of studying successful counter-insurgency campaigns like Greece, the Malayan emergency, and the Philippines, as well as unsuccessful ones, American writers argued, as in Col John McCuen's The Art of Counter-Revolutionary War: the Strategy of Counter-insurgency (1966), that it was possible to ‘apply revolutionary strategy and principles in reverse’. This boiled down to outbidding insurgent promises and propaganda. In practice this proved to be extremely difficult to do. Michael Shafer later identified the fatal contradiction in American logic that led to the USA becoming the puppet rather than the puppet-master of its allies threatened by insurgency. If the threat was serious enough to justify American intervention (that is, a threat to US national security), the threatened government could not be effectively forced to implement the reform policies that were fundamental to the counter-insurgency strategy.
The late 1960s and early 1970s were identified by one security specialist as ‘the counter-insurgency era’, the heyday of belief in the possibility of preventing revolution. In broad terms, there was a common doctrine: unity of command, effective intelligence organization, and the creation of appropriate special forces. Radical critics saw this as a threat to all political change, branding counter-insurgency experts as ‘the hired prize-fighters of the bourgeois state’. The most famous British counter-insurgency text, Frank Kitson's Low Intensity Operations (1971), proposed an exceptionally sophisticated civil-military system to facilitate the early recognition of an insurgent threat. This concept did not transfer very easily from the British context. By the mid-1970s, after the debacle in Vietnam, the concept seemed to be losing its charm. A decade later there was a revival of interest in the problem of low-intensity conflict (LIC) as global instability increased. In 1986 a ‘Low Intensity Warfare’ conference at the US Department of Defense avoided highlighting the term counter-insurgency, but indicated that the issue would remain a prime threat to ‘peace and freedom’ for the rest of the century at least.
Bibliography
- Beckett, Ian, and Pimlott, John (eds.), Armed Forces and Modern Counter-Insurgency (London, 1985).
- Galula, David, Counter-Insurgency Warfare (London, 1964).
- Paget, Julian, Counter-Insurgency Campaigning (London, 1967).
- Shafer, D. Michael, Deadly Paradigms: The Failure of US Counterinsurgency Policy (Princeton, 1988).
- Townshend, Charles, Britain's Civil Wars: Counterinsurgency in the 20th Century (London, 1986)
— Charles Townshend
