Seeking Success and Confronting Failure

Seeking Success and
Confronting Failure

The British Army’s Campaigns in Ireland
and Northern Ireland, 1919 to 2007

Geoffrey Sloan

Oxford - Berlin - Bruxelles - Chennai - Lausanne - New York

Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek.

The German National Library lists this publication in the German National Bibliography; detailed bibliographic data is available on the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Sloan, G. R. (Geoffrey R.) author

Title: Seeking success and confronting failure : the British Army’s campaigns in Ireland and Northern Ireland 1919-2007 / Geoffrey Sloan.

Other titles: British Army’s campaigns in Ireland and Northern Ireland 1919-2007

Description: Oxford ; New York : Peter Lang, [2025] | Series: Reimagining Ireland, 1662-9094 ; volume 145 | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2025025008 (print) | LCCN 2025025009 (ebook) | ISBN 9781803748160 print | ISBN 9781803748238 epdf | ISBN 9781803748245 epub

Subjects: LCSH: Great Britain--Relations--Ireland | Ireland--Relations--Great Britain | Great Britain. Army--History--20th century | Great Britain--History, Military--20th century | Northern Ireland--History, Military

Classification: LCC DA47.9.I75 S58 2025 (print) | LCC DA47.9.I75 (ebook)

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2025025008

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2025025009

Cover image: Cheri Hunston, Wildwood Arts.  

Image Courtesy of the National Army Museum.

Cover design by Peter Lang Group AG

ISSN 1662-9094

ISBN 978-1-80374-816-0 (Print)

ISBN 978-1-80374-823-8 (ePDF)

ISBN 978-1-80374-824-5 (ePub)

DOI 10.3726/b22438

© 2025 Peter Lang Group AG, Lausanne (Switzerland)

Published by Peter Lang Ltd, Oxford (United Kingdom)

info@peterlang.com – www.peterlang.com

Geoffrey Sloan has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this Work.

All rights reserved.

All parts of this publication are protected by copyright.

Any utilisation outside the strict limits of the copyright law, without the permission of the publisher, is forbidden and liable to prosecution. This applies in particular to reproductions, translations, microfilming, and storage and processing in electronic retrieval systems.

This publication has been peer reviewed.

TO

Professor John Vincent (1943–1990) - Inspiring Teacher.

Professor Colin Gray (1943–2020) - Outstanding Colleague and Friend.

Contents

Preface

Acknowledgements

CHAPTER 1 The Operating Codes – Echoes from Two Campaigns

CHAPTER 2 A Slow Burning Fuse

CHAPTER 3 Fire and Water: Fighting an Insurgency

CHAPTER 4 Tactics, Operations, and Lost Victories

CHAPTER 5 Assessing the Assessors – Operation Banner

CHAPTER 6 Successes and Failure: A Judgement on Operation Banner

CHAPTER 7 Conclusions

Bibliography

Index

Preface

This book will challenge the accepted judgements concerning the British Army’s two counter-insurgency campaigns in Ireland and Northern Ireland. The first is regarded as an exemplar of sub-optimal military effectiveness, which resulted in defeat. The second is regarded as a stalemate or an honourable draw¹ depending on interpretation.

During the twentieth century and in the early years of the twenty-first century, the British Army, uniquely among European armies, fought two domestic counterinsurgency/terrorist campaigns. They were not expeditionary counterinsurgencies such as the recent operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, as they both occurred within the jurisdiction of the British state. This distinction is important as it meant Britain was in an advantageous position in terms of the ability to generate domestic support and acquire and interpret intelligence. In addition, the strategic calculus, political stakes, and options open to a sovereign power are different from a state which has foreign military forces deployed inside its territory. In both campaigns, the British state was obliged to defend the political integrity of its sovereign area. This represented a key national interest, by contrast, deploying the army abroad was and is a choice, not a necessity.

There is a geographic dimension that requires qualification. The first campaign took place when the British state was geographically synonymous with the British Isles: The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. It lasted from 1919 to 1921. The British Army produced an assessment of its own performance in 1922. It was a five-volume report titled: ‘A Record of the Rebellion in Ireland 1920–1921’. It was classified as secret and not declassified until 2012, some 90 years after it was written.² In sequence, the volumes were titled ‘Operations’, ‘Intelligence’, ‘Law’, ‘Training and Administration’, while the fifth volume consisted of reports from Divisions and Brigades.³ The last three volumes represent a new source on the effectiveness of the British Army, in conjunction with the Royal Irish Constabulary, and the Dublin Metropolitan Police in fighting a rebellion that was led by a coalition of Sinn Fein, the Irish Republican Brotherhood, and the Irish Volunteers.

The second campaign, starting some 47 years later, was undertaken by a state whose geographical parameters had changed. It was now the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. This new configuration brought with it a degree of strategic, operational, and tactical complexity that the first campaign did not have. In terms of geographical parameters, the second campaign was defined by the outcome of the first. A consequence was the creation of an internationally recognised boundary between the Irish Republic and the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.⁴ This second campaign lasted from August 1969 to July 2007 and was given the official designation of Operation Banner. In July 2006, the Army produced a report titled: ‘Operation Banner: An Analysis of Military Operations in Northern Ireland, Army Code 71842’. This was an assessment of the role that the army played in conjunction with the Royal Ulster Constabulary. This report was originally classified as ‘Restricted’ but was then declassified against military advice. Subsequently, it was reclassified on ministerial direction.⁵ The sensitivity pivoted around a candid institutional self-assessment, and critiques of the decision making by successive generations of British policy elites.

These two reports were separated by 84 years and have spawned a voluminous literature.⁶ The two campaigns, despite the different geographical parameters, illuminate continuity in the relationship between geography strategy and politics. This has been summarised by General Sir Rupert Smith: ‘Geography shapes the strategy, and politics shapes the execution of that strategy within the geography’.⁷ Furthermore, both reports represent institutional attempts to assess success and failure. The narrative of defeat in the first campaign has found a number of adherents. The military historian Hew Strachan claimed that ‘Britain slithered to defeat’ in Ireland. The historian Charles Townshend has argued: ‘The Republican guerrilla campaign is portrayed as too determined, too resilient, and too resourceful to be put down by the military forces employed against it. In the relentless pursuit of a certain type of idealism, and even more in the efficiency with which it organised itself and mobilised popular support, the Republic of 1919–1921 was outstanding in the history of Irish resistance movements.⁸ David French has claimed the campaign had a particular “hallmark”: which was the wide range of coercive techniques to intimidate the civilian population into throwing their support behind the government rather than behind the insurgents’.⁹ French judged this as a major factor in the failure of the campaign. As he has phrased it: ‘Southern Ireland was granted Dominion status in 1921 because Sinn Fein’s resistance demonstrated the impossibility of countering violent nationalism with nothing but military repression’.¹⁰

The campaign between 1969 and 2007 has produced a huge spectrum of literature. There is a paradox identified by the academic M. L. R Smith; the military dimension of the conflict in Northern Ireland has been one of the most under-studied aspects. Yet it gave the conflict its crucial form: ‘The academic study of the conflict in Northern Ireland has been, to a great degree, insulated – intellectually interned, to coin a phrase, from influences and debates at work in the wider academic world’.¹¹

The military dimension has produced a variegated literature. This ranges from a claim of a victory denied¹² to a ‘draw’: ‘The British Army obviously became more skilled in counterinsurgency terms as the campaign in Northern Ireland went into the 1970s and the 1980s. But it was a case of locking the stable door after the horse had bolted, and later improvements were mere sticking plasters that could only hold until peace had been negotiated with the PIRA leaders in the 1990s’.¹³

M. L. R. Smith assessed the evolution of a violent Irish Republicanism from the rebellion of 1916 to the early 1990s with reference to strategic theory.¹⁴ However, this analysis does not have the British Army as its main focus. Another interpretation was the reciprocal effect of the British Army, and the IRA on each other, which produced a unique outcome.¹⁵

Another pathway has been the lack of organisational learning within the British Army. The longevity of the second campaign made this a focus. Douglas Porch has claimed the British Army was not a learning institution with respect to counterinsurgency, and was incapable of differentiating between the domestic and expeditionary counter – insurgency campaigns: ‘The British Army’s record in Northern Ireland, or in Iraq or Afghanistan after 2003 for that matter, fails to support the assertion that the British were able through institutional learning to develop a travelling circus technique to deal with insurgent challenges to imperial authority’.¹⁶ David Ucko has claimed the soft weapon of doctrine was missing in Northern Ireland and the British Army was not ‘a doctrine-driven organisation’. Instead, it prefers extemporising on the ground. This had consequences for military effectiveness: ‘The problem arises when flexibility is achieved at the cost of forgetfulness – not of the step-by-step guides and templates, but of the basic considerations and principles unearthed through past experiences’.¹⁷

The narrative of a military stalemate has become an article of faith for Gerry Adams: ‘the IRA could not be defeated by the use of tactics which could clearly have been counter-productive for the London government. British policy instead aimed more and more towards containment, though this strategy was exposed as being inadequate. There was a military and political stalemate’.¹⁸ The political scientist Aaron Edwards has given a more nuanced interpretation of this claim. He has argued that by the early 1990s a more effective Counter-Terrorism strategy did constraint the IRA’s options with the following consequences: ‘They could neither escalate their violence – and thereby risk alienating their support base-or-opt for the path of least friction, that is, negotiation and dialogue’.¹⁹ The senior hierarchy of PIRA choose the latter pathway.²⁰ After the Belfast Agreement of 1998, a distinct narrative of the 1994 ceasefire emerged. It represented a: ‘tautological argument that the peace process was a by-product of a military stalemate between the IRA and the state’s security forces’.²¹ In addition, Edwards has argued that this narrative became the dominant one in terms of republican explanations for the end of the conflict.²²

Work on this book started 20 years ago and is a product of a research project I undertook into the geopolitics of Anglo-Irish Relations in the twentieth century. In 1994, I was appointed a Defence Fellow at St Antony’s College, Oxford by the British Ministry of Defence. What struck me about the literature at that time was a narrative that endorsed two political outcomes. First had already happened, the secession in 1922 of the south of Ireland from the rest of the United Kingdom. Second, the literature suggested Northern Ireland would, at some point in the future, secede and become part of the Irish Republic. There was no acknowledgement of the complex character of the Anglo-Irish relationship. There was a geopolitical paradox that lay at its heart: it is close but tortuous.²³ Furthermore, the nature of the union is a multilayered and variegated entity, which has much in common with the kingdom of Spain. This has been largely ignored in the literature.

In terms of methodology, this book will use the following approach. At each of the three levels of warfare: the strategic, operational and tactical, there is an independent variable that enables an assessment of success and failure in both campaigns to be made. A critical question is to what extent were these variables were recognised by successive generations of army commanders and given expression on the ground? If they were is it now necessary to revise the accepted judgements about what constitutes failure and success? If only one or two of these variables were recognised, what are the implications for judgements about failure and success?

At the strategic level, the independent variable it is the willingness and ability to engage with and counter, and if possible, erode the narrative of the insurgents. This was dependent on the support and commitment of the government of the day. It was something that an army should or could not do on its own.

At the operational level, the independent variable is the ability to subvert, divert and destroy the various networks that the insurgents need to sustain their campaign. This includes financing, bomb making, engineering, procurement of intelligence, access to weapons and ammunition, the ability to import weapons from overseas, and keeping them secure. With respect to Operation Banner, there were a number of state agencies involved, apart from the British Army. For example, the Royal Ulster Constabulary Special Branch was responsible for investigating sources of finance. Both MI5 and MI6 were involved in intercepting supplies of weapons, ammunition and explosives.

At the tactical level, there were three functions that have to be performed. First, the capabilities of the insurgents have to be reduced through intelligence-informed operations. Second, the security forces have to deter the launch of attacks. Finally, they must reassure the public that lives, and property were being protected. All three of these functions have to operate within the framework of the legal constraints of the state.²⁴ These independent variables encapsulate the principles of counterinsurgency²⁵. Furthermore, they constitute three criteria that can be applied to both campaigns. Attention will be paid to the extent to which success and failure can be discerned in both campaigns. In addition, did success and failure happen at the same levels in both campaigns. If this is the case, how do we explain it?

One way of explaining success and failure is the concept of ‘operating codes’. They have their origins in a book, and a series of articles written by Nathan Leites between 1951 and 1955.²⁶ They are now regarded as landmarks in the behavioural approach to the study of political elites. The focus is on unstated rules of conduct and norms of political behaviour. Alexander George reinterpreted these separate elements into a tight set of beliefs about the issues and questions associated with political action. He viewed them as: ‘a set of premises and beliefs about politics and not as a set of rules and recipes to be applied mechanically to the choice of action – that the “operational code” construct is properly understood’.²⁷ This will be examined in detail in the first chapter.

The three independent variables will be used as a fishing net to trawl through the history of both campaigns and illuminate the impact that these ‘operating codes’ had on both the military and political outcomes. Furthermore, it will be argued that these levels are connected. A tactical success can result in strategic failure if policy objectives fail to provide guidance and legitimacy for the tactical use of force.

An important qualification to make is that both reports constitute institutional accounts. Inevitably, these official reports have omissions and weaknesses. To compensate for this new archive material will be used to provide a more comprehensive understanding of the assessments made. In the case of Operation Banner, classified information is limited beyond 1995. To address this dearth of material, a number of elite semi-structured interviews have been undertaken with former members of the Royal Ulster Constabulary and British Army officers who served in Northern Ireland during Operation Banner.

Irregular wars, despite their different character have the same logic as regular wars: the application of military force to change or modify the enemy’s will and destroy his fighting power. What is different is the context in which this takes place. The insurgents do not have access to the resources of a state. By contrast they have to construct a strategic path whereby force is used to modify the enemy’s will, but they have to develop a cause which has legitimacy and can access resources. Critically they have to affect the perception and will of the local population and the degree of support they give to the police and other security forces. Another important dimension is the degree of external support, both political and practical, they can attract and rely on. In both conventional and irregular wars, conventional armies face the same challenge: they are dependent on the government to develop and sustain at the strategic level the coordination of the political and military dimensions. However, this is more demanding in the counter-insurgency warfare: ‘Militaries confronting insurgency must therefore seek to use force appropriately on the operational and tactical levels, in concert with an integrated political – military approach, rather than simply focussing on exit strategies. There is no shortcut to success in counterinsurgency’.²⁸ These variables, while central to producing an answer to the main research question, raise another key question. To what extent did British policy makers adhere to an ‘integrated political-military approach’? The pivotal importance of this has been articulated by the French army officer David Galula: ‘every military move has to be weighed with regard to its political effects and vice versa’,²⁹ In both campaigns, there was a proclivity of British policymakers to pursue separate political initiatives with inconsistent results. This systematically undermined the key goal of achieving integration. To paraphrase Colin Gray,³⁰ there was a black hole where integration should have resided.

In order to provide answers to these questions, I have adopted the following construct. The first chapter identifies a number of similarities and differences in both reports. It will begin to develop an understanding of the nature and impact of the ‘operating codes’ of the British policy elite. It is these codes that defined behaviour, decisions and outcomes in both campaigns. To what extent did they affect the strategic level and what were the consequences, if any, at the operational and tactical levels? In particular, did it affect the manner in which a violent Irish Republicanism was dealt with?

Chapter 2 provides an assessment of the period from April 1916 to December 1919. This formed a vital backdrop to the first campaign. Three related perspectives are examined: the decisions taken by the British policy elite, the operational challenges the British Army faced, and the actions of the Irish Republican movement.

Chapters 3 and 4 will assess the British Army’s response to the campaign from January 1920 to July 1921. Particular attention will be paid to the role played by Assistant Undersecretary Alfred Cope. He was the only British civil servant named in the Army’s 1922 report. New archive material reveals he was sent to Ireland as a Special Representative of the British Cabinet. His official civil service post was merely a cover for this secret political mission.