Insurgents, Raiders, and Bandits (38 page)

Kitson’s Primary Areas of Operations

The guerrilla war in Malaya began with the assassination in June 1948 of three colonial estate managers, all of them British, by the Communists. A week after these acts, a state of emergency was declared and followed by mass detentions of suspects and military “sweeps.” The dead hand of Kitchener still ruled British counterinsurgent strategy. But neither of these measures worked, for the insurgents had built among the Chinese population a robust network of cells and nodes known as the
MIN YUEN
. The guerrillas were widely dispersed, as Tito’s forces had been, and operated in very small units, with handfuls of individuals mounting attacks. A year on into the emergency, they were committing more than a dozen acts of murder or sabotage every day.

The British response was still more detentions, with thousands of deportations—mostly of ethnic Chinese—and liberal use of the death penalty for such offenses as possession of firearms. Security forces grew swiftly to about fifty thousand, and then doubled by 1951, stepping up the sweeps. For all these efforts, however, the operational tempo of the insurgency only accelerated, in part due to the reaction of the ethnic Chinese to the cruelty of British policy.

While the approach to counterinsurgency in Malaya was redolent of Boer War era practices, the Briggs Plan, named after the British director of operations, Sir Henry Briggs, featured the new twist of separating the ethnic groups from one another in their own “strategic hamlets” and breaking the connection between the Chinese population and the insurgents. This, combined with continuing sweeps by massive numbers of forces (relative to the few thousand guerrillas operating in Malaya), began to wear down the enemy. Throughout the mid-1950s the campaign ground on, making progress by inches.

Alongside this attritional approach, some elements of the counterinsurgent forces were trying out innovative ideas, including the notion of enlisting friendly locals to infiltrate the guerrilla ranks. The recruitment of Chinese operatives by the British “Special Branch,” while not rising to the level of Kitson’s pseudo gangs, began as early as 1952, more than a year before they formed up in Kenya.
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During this same period, and not far from Malaya, the Philippine Constabulary had established its own Force X that fought the Huks, also using the pseudo-gang concept, and quite successfully.
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Thus when Kitson arrived in Malaya in 1957, he came with useful lessons from Kenya and joined colleagues who had already begun to experiment with the techniques that had given him so much success in the fight against the Mau Mau. In fairly short order, pseudo operations were undertaken in Malaya, and the guerrillas proved almost completely unable to cope with this new approach to fighting them. Sometimes the pseudos would meet up with guerrilla units, get the drop on them, and blast away. On other occasions they would place beacons near insurgent camps as they were allegedly passing through. These homing devices served to guide the attack aircraft that would then come through to bomb the guerrillas. Both techniques worked splendidly. By 1960 the “emergency” was over.

During the 1960s Kitson continued to master his craft. From 1962 to 1964 he commanded troops and provided advice on how to counter guerrilla forces opposed to the newly independent government of Cyprus, a decade before the Turkish military invaded and divided that island. Later Kitson was involved in Oman, largely in an advisory capacity, as this Arab country dealt with its own internal difficulties. These took the form of hit-and-run raids mounted by separatist forces trying to break the province of Dhofar (a remote part of Oman that abuts Yemen) away from the rest of the country. Here too pseudo operations proved their worth, and the insurgents were ultimately defeated; though by the time the British Special Air Service fielded a strong pseudo force in Oman, the
FIRQAT
, Kitson was already on to his next posting.
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Even in his absence, these operations went exceptionally well, with the rebel forces regularly detected, tracked, and ambushed in true pseudo fashion. Success in Oman was a testament to the power of the concept.

By 1967, now in his early forties, Kitson was named to command the First Battalion of the famous Royal Green Jackets, whose reputation for marksmanship and bush fighting (their green jackets were originally used as camouflage, differentiating them from the traditional Redcoats of earlier centuries) was without peer in the British military. He was also writing about his experiences and crystallizing his thoughts and as the decade came to a close he enjoyed a fellowship at University College in Oxford during the 1969–1970 academic year. While he was there, a whole new irregular war—this time close to home, in Northern Ireland—erupted and worsened to the point that a major British military campaign was in the offing. Thus in 1970 Kitson, now a brigadier, found himself in the middle of what has come to be known as the Troubles. A terrible new challenge awaited him.

*

It is curious that, for all their growing expertise in irregular warfare, British military leaders—even when empowered by Kitson’s pseudo operations concept—were unable to hold the tottering empire together. One insurgency after another was defeated or contained, yet one colony after another was set free. In 1963, for example, Kenya was granted independence, and that same year Malaya formed the key part of the new country of Malaysia, both of these developments occurring despite the fact that insurgents had been decisively defeated in each place. In part these outcomes were due to the unacceptable economic cost of maintaining the countries under colonial control. But they also went free because the promise of independence had been used as a means of garnering local support for the counterinsurgent campaigns waged against independence-minded insurgents.

By 1970, when Kitson was sent to confront terrorism and insurgency in Northern Ireland, a part of the United Kingdom, more than forty of the nearly fifty colonies Britain would lose after World War II were already gone. Now an irregular war was brewing at home, its goal being the union of the North with the rest of Ireland. For nearly half a century after formation of the largely Catholic Irish Free State in 1922, Northern Ireland with its Protestant majority had remained, most of the time quite peacefully, within the United Kingdom. The Catholic minority in the North had refused to provide support for the Irish Republican Army of the Free State and its earlier attempts at terror campaigns, one that began during World War II—to take advantage of Britain’s diverted attention to the Nazi threat—the other in the late 1950s.

But in 1969 the powder keg exploded when the perceived oppression of Catholics reached a point of no return. The sparks that touched off the conflagration were the violent repressions of a number of peaceful civil rights marches—the Northern Irish Catholics were emulating the methods of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., that had gained such traction in the United States just a few years earlier. The Protestant gangs intent on attacking the marchers were not prevented from doing so by the constabulary; on the contrary, some off-duty police actually joined in these attacks. Their rationale was that the marches had been orchestrated by the IRA, not that they represented a homegrown outcry against social and economic injustice. Soon even more violence arose from this scapegoating of the “foreign agents” by the Protestant majority. As one of the great scholars of this conflict, J. Bowyer Bell observed, “For those who cannot defeat their own demons, outside agitators, illusive and invisible, are often summoned up as the cause of trouble.”
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The initial deployments of British troops to Northern Ireland were chiefly intended to quell the violence and protect the Catholic minority. Yet these troops, and the Protestant population, quickly became the targets of an IRA-led insurgency that consisted mostly of setting off bombs—what we now call “improvised explosive devices” (IEDs) largely by members of the Provisional IRA that had split from the parent organization in 1969. The “Provos,” whose fighters probably never exceeded one thousand, presided over a death toll that rose rapidly during the first years of the fighting, when Kitson was there. It went from 25 in 1970 to 174 in 1971 and 467 in 1972.
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By the following year casualties were cut almost in half and then continued to plummet as a range of measures, including several devised and carried out by Kitson, began to take effect against this largely urban guerrilla movement. All this was achieved without ever seriously impinging on the haven the IRA enjoyed in the Irish Free State.

Just what had Kitson done to improve the situation? John Newsinger has concluded that “Kitson was responsible for developing the use of covert operations in Northern Ireland.”
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To a great extent these measures consisted of dressing up British soldiers to look and act like IRA gunmen. Here there was much less need to “turn” detainees, and no one had to go around in blackface as they did in Kenya. British battalions of six hundred to seven hundred troops commonly had as many as 20 percent of their number going about in pseudo fashion. One well informed view was that “fifty soldiers in civilian dress were more effective than four hundred in battle-dress.”
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But some activities with which Kitson was associated went far beyond pseudo operations. For example, covert British teams that went on patrol looking like guerrillas and trying to ferret out the enemy seem sometimes to have shot first and made inquiries later, leading the historian Charles Townshend to describe their actions as “assassinations.”
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There is even some indication of these covert forces’ darker deeds extending to the killing of innocent Catholics in the hope of sparking ramped-up retaliatory violence aimed at the Protestants rather than at British soldiers—an extremely unethical form of “deflection.”
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Torture charges were leveled at Kitson; but these, like the other ethically unacceptable actions of the British, remain, even in the light of history, no more than allegations.

*

In the midst of Kitson’s stay in Northern Ireland in 1971, what would become his best-known book,
LOW INTENSITY OPERATIONS
, appeared. Aside from its homage to the counterinsurgency techniques he had been mastering in various theaters of operations over the course of the 1960s, a curious tone of political ruthlessness is apparent in his call for the creation of a “British national security state.” It implies on some level that the extreme measures employed against the IRA were consonant with strategies to ensure the survival and security of the state. Kitson himself seemed to realize, eventually, that he had gone too far with this formulation, and he backed away from it in his subsequent
WARFARE AS A WHOLE
(1987). In the years after his departure from Northern Ireland he stepped further away from his more radical concepts—at the same time he was stepping up in the military hierarchy.

His first posting after his time fighting the Troubles was as commandant of the British School of Infantry from 1972 to 1974. Kitson always placed high value on education, and he made sure that his traditional military would have an officer corps steeped in the principles of irregular warfare that had so dominated his own career. Thus were his famous formulations diffused from these pupils to the entire British military, among them his assessment that “insurgents start off with nothing but a cause and grow in strength, while the counterinsurgents start with everything but a cause and gradually decline.”
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Kitson had a great gift for clarity that sometimes echoes Edward Gibbon’s pithy insights into the ancient Romans.

After holding divisional command during the late 1970s, Kitson rose to become commander-in-chief of United Kingdom land forces from 1982 to 1985, a period that included both continuing operations in Northern Ireland and a full-blown war with Argentina over the Falkland Islands. He also served as military aide-de-camp to Queen Elizabeth II. Aside from decorations for bravery in his early counterinsurgent days, he also became a knight commander of the British Empire. When Kitson retired in 1985 he had a wealth of official honors and the respect and admiration of peers in the military. How different his end was from Robert Rogers or T. E. Lawrence.

Yet there are two problems with this flattering portrait of a great irregular warrior. First, the methods he employed in the field, while highly successful in the short term, often depended on longer-term inducements—like the promise of independence—that actually undermined the empire’s ability to retain colonial control. He may have helped defeat insurgents in Kenya and Malaya, but both countries went free soon after these conflicts ended. And in Northern Ireland, where independence was not a bargaining chip, the twilight struggle went on for decades after Kitson’s departure. Pseudo gangs hardly put an end to the IRA’s efforts. Seen in this light, Kitson’s many campaigns, taken together, seem to constitute a mad Arthurian quest to shore up a tottering empire.

The second problem has to do with the legacy Kitson left in the realm of strategic thought about irregular warfare. While assessments of his innovations have almost all been glowingly positive over the years, judgments about the most successful tactics in his two famous campaigns, in Kenya and Malaya, have focused on the Kitchener-like detentions and sweeps rather than the pseudo gangs. This emphasis has resulted in the notion, still dominant today, that counterinsurgent forces must outnumber their foes by at least ten to one in order to have a good chance of defeating them. This point of view, as it relates to the lessons of Malaya, was summed up by Lucian Pye, in his day one of greatest American experts on Asian military and security affairs: “Guerrilla warfare cannot achieve victories over an enemy vastly superior by conventional military standards.”
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