A formula made famous by Col (later Gen Sir) Frank Kitson in his book of 1971. It deals with the diffuse and ill-defined forms of conflict—his subtitle instanced ‘subversion, insurgency and peacekeeping’—that may be said to lie somewhere between peace and war. By the 1970s these kinds of unconventional operations had become the most common military business for the British army and many others, but doctrinally they remained in a kind of limbo. The difficulty of reaching a clear military analysis lay in the highly political nature of the issue; the early stages of insurgency could not be dealt with by straightforward military methods. Unless martial law was declared, military action in aid of the civil power had to follow the old common-law rule that the force applied must never exceed what is reasonably necessary, and had to take place within the civil administrative and judicial framework. In Kitson's experience (which included the Malayan emergency and Mau Mau uprising), the civil authorities invariably underestimated the threat posed by subversive movements. Military aid was always hampered by dependence on police forces that had by definition already failed (otherwise the army would not have been required) but which would have to be reconstructed if a stable pacification was to be achieved. The crucial problem that Kitson dealt with was how to involve the army more closely without pushing the conflict over the brink into outright war. The answer lay in systematic civil-military co-operation at all administrative levels (historically, difficult to achieve) and the development of more effective counter-insurgency techniques by the army. In particular the army would have to throw itself wholeheartedly into the burdensome task of intelligence-gathering, which offered the only prospect of linking ‘background’ with ‘contact’ information to make engagement with the insurgent forces possible. The point of the concept ‘low intensity’ was that such operations would depend on the energy and initiative of small units, and indeed every individual soldier, in a way that regular operations did not. Whether the phrase ‘low intensity’ precisely expressed Kitson's complex and sophisticated model may perhaps be doubted. When the term eventually crossed the Atlantic it was in the significantly different phrase ‘low-intensity conflict’, with the implication that it was defined in terms of the weight of weaponry employed (on a spectrum ranging through ‘medium’ to ‘high’ intensity, the latter being nuclear war) rather than what may be called the politicized use of violence.
Bibliography
- Corr, Edwin G., and Sloan, Stephen, Low-Intensity Conflict: Old Threats in a New World (Boulder, Colo., 1992).
- Kitson, Frank, Low Intensity Operations: Subversion, Insurgency and Peacekeeping (London, 1971)
— Charles Townshend
