Abstract
The aim of this chapter is to provide a corrective to the post-dated script writing which has characterised contemporary understanding of the British Army’s campaign in Northern Ireland. The campaign is now often viewed through the prism of more recent operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. However, this means that the historical record has become partially obscured and the ‘lessons’ lifted from Northern Ireland are sometimes based on a limited understanding of the nature of that campaign. What follows is not a reflection on counter-insurgency (COIN) doctrine or practise, but an attempt to caution against COIN-centric interpretations of how a complex civil conflict was brought to an end after around thirty years of comparatively low-level violence. Nothing in the chapter is intended to be prescriptive for current or future campaigns; the aim is to provide a clearer historical record of a campaign which remains central to British conceptions of irregular warfare; and to move from generic points about ‘what to do’ and ‘what not to do’ in comparable situations to a better understanding of the mosaic of failures and successes which make up British security policy in Northern Ireland.
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Notes
J. Bowyer Bell, IRA Tactics and Targets: An Analysis of Tactical Aspects of the Armed Struggle, 1969–1989 (Dublin: Poolberg, 1990).
See, for example, Christopher Tuck, ‘Northern Ireland and the British Approach to Counter-Insurgency’, Defence and Security Analysis 23, no. 2 (June 2007): 165183.
Warren Chin, ‘Examining the Application of British Counterinsurgency Doctrine by the American Army in Iraq’, Small Wars and Insurgencies 18, no. 1 (April 2007): 1–26.
See also James K. Wither, ‘Basra’s not Belfast: The British Army, “Small Wars” and Iraq’, Small Wars and Insurgencies 20, nos. 3–4 (2009): 611–35.
See David Betz and Anthony Cormack in, ‘Iraq, Afghanistan and British Strategy’, Orbis 53, no. 2 (March 2009): 319–36.
Andrew Mumford, Puncturing the British Counterinsurgency Myth: Britain and Irregular Warfare in the Past, Present, and Future (Carlisle, PA: Strategic Studies Institute, US Army War College, September 2011).
See, for example, Paul Dixon, ‘“Hearts and Minds?” British Counter-Insurgency Strategy in Northern Ireland’, Journal of Strategic Studies 32, no. 3 (2009): 445–74
Paul Dixon, ‘Guns First, Talks Later: Neoconservatives and the Northern Ireland Peace Process’, The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 39, no. 4 (November 2011): 649–76.
John Bew, Martyn Frampton and Inigo Gurruchaga, Talking to Terrorists: Making Peace in Northern Ireland and the Basque Country (London: Hurst & Co., 2009).
Aaron Edwards, ‘Misapplying Lessons Learned? Analysing the Utility of British Counterinsurgency Strategy in Northern Ireland, 1971–1976’, Small Wars and Insurgencies 21, no. 2 (June 2010): 303–30.
British Army, Countering Insurgency (Warminster: Ministry of Defence, 2009), p. CS4–4.
Karl Hack, ‘‘‘Everyone Lived in Fear”: Malaya and the “British Way in Counter-Insurgency”’, Small Wars & Insurgencies 23, nos. 4/5 (2012); David French, The British Way in Counter-Insurgency, 1945–1967 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).
Thomas Hennessey, Northern Ireland: The Origins of the Troubles (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 2005).
M.L.R. Smith and Peter R. Neumann, ‘Motorman’s Long Journey: Changing the Strategic Setting in Northern Ireland’, Contemporary British History 19, no. 4 (2005): 413–35.
See John Newsinger, ‘From Counter-insurgency to Internal Security: Northern Ireland, 1969–1992’, Small Wars and Insurgencies 6, no. 1 (1996): 88–111.
Henry Patterson, ‘The Border Security Problem and Anglo-Irish Relations 1970–73’, Contemporary British History 26, no. 2 (2012): 231–51.
Mark Urban, Big Boys’ Rules: The Secret Struggle against the IRA (London: Faber and Faber, 1993).
For an example, see Paul Dixon, ‘“Hearts and Minds”: British Counterinsurgency Strategy in Northern Ireland’, in The British Approach to Counterinsurgency: From Malaya and Northern Ireland to Iraq and Afghanistan, ed. Paul Dixon (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), pp. 265–90.
Thomas G. Mahnken, ‘The British Approach to Counter-Insurgency: An American View’, Defence and Security Analysis 23, no. 2 (June 2007): 227–32.
Roy Mason, Paying the Price (London: Robert Hale, 1999), pp. 166–72.
Thomas G. Mahnken, ‘The British Approach to Counter-Insurgency: An American View’, Defence and Security Analysis 23, no. 2 (June 2007): 227–32.
Ed Moloney, A Secret History of the IRA (Dublin: Penguin, 2002), pp. 318–19.
For discussion of them, see, respectively, Martin Ingram and Greg Harkin, Stakeknife: Britain’s Secret Agents in Ireland (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004)
Jack Holland and Susan Phoenix, Phoenix — Policing the Shadows: The Secret War against Terrorism in Northern Ireland (London: Hodder& Stoughton, 1996), pp. 391–3.
Ibid. See also George Clarke, Border Crossing: The Stories of the RUC Special Branch, the Garda Special Branch and the IRA Moles (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 2009), p. 184.
Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political [1932], trans. by George Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), p. 1.
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© 2014 John Bew
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Bew, J. (2014). Mass, Methods, and Means: The Northern Ireland ‘Model’ of Counter-insurgency. In: Gventer, C.W., Jones, D.M., Smith, M.L.R. (eds) The New Counter-insurgency Era in Critical Perspective. Rethinking Political Violence series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137336941_9
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