Kitson and countergangs
How the theory of counterinsurgency shaped military practice in Northern Ireland
A Times obituary today reports the death of General Sir Frank Kitson, the British Army’s best-known exponent of counterinsurgency.
Kitson participated in a number of the British Army’s colonial conflicts in the waning days of empire after World War Two, most notably in Kenya and Malaya, and wrote a number of books on counterinsurgency strategy. One of these, Low Intensity Operations, was published in 1971 when he headed 39 Brigade in Belfast, and was thus a leading British commander in the early years of the Irish Troubles.
Although British commentators have often downplayed Kitson’s influence, the book was inevitably read as a guide to the Army’s actual strategy in the conflict. Among Irish nationalists, his name acquired a kind of currency reminiscent of Oliver Cromwell, of whom he wrote a military biography.
Some of the tactics described in Low Intensity Operations were undoubtedly attempted in Northern Ireland. For example, Kitson wrote:
In most counterinsurgency campaigns the main burden for developing background information falls on the normal military units and has to be carried out by men using the skills and equipment available to them in the ordinary course of events. In some cases, however, groups are formed designed to develop information by using special skills and equipment or by exploiting the characteristics of special people such as captured insurgents.1
Both the use of special plain-clothes troops and of captured insurgents were pioneered in Northern Ireland by the Military Reaction Forces (MRF), which emerged precisely in Belfast in 1971. An indispensible account of that story can be found in Margaret Urwin’s 2012 study Countergangs: A history of undercover military units in Northern Ireland 1971-1976, which is available as a free download from the Pat Finucane Centre.
Frank Kitson, Low Intensity Operations, Subversion, Insurgency and Peacekeeping, Faber & Faber, 1971, pp.99-100.