Substantial British military involvement in Northern Ireland began in August of 1969 when the Army intervened “in assistance of civil authorities” after large-scale sectarian rioting in Belfast and Londonderry revealed the inability of the police to maintain public order. Indeed, some parts of both cities were declared “No Go” areas by paramilitary forces and the police dared not enter them. Eventually, British Army strength in Northern Ireland grew from a mere 3,000 in August of 1969 to a high of 32,000 in 1972. Subsequently, the maximum strength of British forces in Northern Ireland declined and has usually fluctuated between about 17,000 to 19,000 at any given moment.

From 1969 through 1976, the military had primacy in security operations in Northern Ireland with the police playing a supporting role. The British Army’s “policing” mission created a number of serious problems. Soldiers on the streets of Belfast and Londonderry needed to make arrests, but had no statutory authority to do so at first. Also soldiers had to use the right words when making arrests; failure to do so would lead courts to release the suspect and/or to award the detainee civil damages for breaching his rights. Worse yet, soldiers who overstepped the mark might face criminal charges in civilian courts for their use of deadly force. (Later this was amended so those soldiers would only go before military courts.)

Between 1972 and May of 1974, the British Army seriously reduced the level of urban violence to a point where the IRA had difficulty operating in Northern Ireland. At this point, the IRA shifted to British targets in Europe and within the United Kingdom. This ultimately led to a string of spectacular attacks which included the Brighton bombing in October of 1984 which was designed to kill the British Prime Minister and her cabinet and the February 1991 mortar attack on 10 Downing Street while John Major’s Cabinet was in session at the height of the Gulf War. IRA Active Service Units also began targeting individual British soldiers and airmen assigned to NATO roles in Europe during the same period.

Beginning in May of 1976, the police began to reassert their primacy over security operations in an effort to “criminalize” paramilitary operations, thereby robbing their actions of political luster. Indeed, the idea was to treat terrorists like any other violent individual who had broken the law. Consequently, a reinvigorated and enlarged police force began to reenter the “No Go” areas. As this process gathered steam over the next three years, the Army lost its primacy over security operations in Northern Ireland. Post-1979 to 1997, the Army maintained a lower profile within cities and was called out only when events seemed to be getting out of hand. The military is also still responsible for “sealing” the border between the north and south to contraband weapons and the passage of terrorists bent upon mischief. The following lessons are drawn primarily from the period 1969-1976.

A. Strategic Lessons:

Lesson 1: Military action could not solve deep-seated political problems but did buy time for politicians to search for potential solutions. Despite 28 years of British military involvement in Northern Ireland the underlying political problems of Catholic-Protestant intolerance and irreconcilable preferences for either union with the Irish Republic or continued membership in the United Kingdom have never been resolved. British military presence, however, was able to reduce the overall level of violence to a point where the civilian police could again operate in so-called “No-Go” areas of Belfast and Londonderry. Senior British military commanders often recognized the limitations of their efforts and were frustrated by a lack of initiative in the political arena. Lt. General Sir Henry Tuzo, General Officer Commanding in Northern Ireland, specifically acknowledge this proposition in a BBC television interview in June of 1971.

Lesson 2: It was difficult to get well-defined policy objectives to which the Army could work steadily and logically. When guidance was forthcoming, it often vacillated greatly. Part of the difficulty in the early days stemmed from the fact that the British Army in Northern Ireland needed policy direction from two sources simultaneously: (1) the Unionist Government of Northern Ireland located in Stormont and (2) the British Government in London. Even after Direct Rule was established by London, Governments’ continued to be torn between the desires of the Protestant and Catholic communities in Northern Ireland as well as by domestic British political preference to minimize involvement in “the troubles”. For example, Sir Ian Freeland, General Officer Commanding in 1969, repeatedly asked for a statement of policy aims for the security forces under his direction, but was never given one. At about the same time, another senior officer complained: “Politicians and the media often referred to our having ‘softly-softly’ or ‘go in hard’ instructions. No instructions of that sort ever arrived! We worked on our own, knowing damn well that if things went successfully all would be well and if they did not we would carry the can. The one firm guideline we had was the law -- until we tried to get the lawyers to interpret it!” On the whole, officers would have preferred either strong political control or none at all instead of the hesitant direction they got, particularly in the early days.

Lesson 3: Contrary to initial expectations, operations in Northern Ireland were neither short-lived nor low cost. When the British commenced military operations in Northern Ireland in 1969, British Home Secretary James Callaghan told Parliament: “The General Officer Commanding Northern Ireland has been instructed to take all necessary steps, acting impartially between citizen and citizen, to restore law and order. Troops will be withdrawn as soon as this is accomplished. This is a limited operation... (emphasis added).” Instead, British military presence in Northern Ireland grew from a mere 3,000 prior to Callaghan’s statement to a high of 30,000 in 1972. Overall, 300,000 British soldiers, sailors, and airmen served in Northern Ireland between 1969 and 1994. Director General of MI5 (British counterintelligence) also admitted recently that half of MI5’s resources go to countering the threat from Irish terrorism. The death toll over the years was also significant. If the level of violence in Northern Ireland between 1969 and 1981 were reproduced in a population the size of the United States, there would have been 340,000 deaths over that same period.

Lesson 4: Long-running operations in Northern Ireland elevated overall British Army and the Royal Ulster Constabulary force levels as well as warped the Army’s overall combat force mix. British operations in Northern Ireland absorbed between 20% to 33% of all British infantry battalions at any one time between 1969 and 1993; these figures include units in training to deploy to Northern Ireland as well as those already on the ground. This led the British to keep a greater number of infantry battalions within the overall Army combat force mix` than they would have otherwise needed to meet overall operational requirements. These significant manpower requirements also led to larger overall force levels than necessary to meet NATO and other external security requirements. The man-power intensive nature of anti-terrorist operations also ballooned the size of the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) as well. A White Paper done for the RUC estimates that total police force size could shrink from 12,000 to 5,000 with a political agreement and an end to terrorist violence in Northern Ireland.

Lessons 5: Police and military activities overlapped to a point where the demarcation between police and military functions blurred. This worked to the detriment of both organizations. Police were neither adequately equipped nor trained to deal with an armed terrorist “army.” Similarly, the military was not prepared to enforce the law in a rigorous way. The problem for the Army in doing police work was twofold. First, soldiers initially had no legal authority to arrest people, set up vehicle checks, or break up gatherings under the provisions of the Specials Powers Act by which the Army was deployed in Northern Ireland “in aid of civil authority”. (This situation was later remedied by the British Parliament.) Second, soldiers were expected (with little or no formal training in law enforcement) to use the correct legal terms when arresting someone; getting it wrong obliged the Government to pay huge civil damages and/or release a well-known villain.

Lesson 6: Both Catholic and Protestant paramilitary groups received substantial financial and materiel assistance from abroad. The Libyans admit providing aid to the IRA in the amount of 9 million pounds sterling in the 1980s. They shipped 130 tons of weapons to the IRA between 1985 and 1987. These weapons are believed to include: (1) 650 AK-47 assault rifles, (2) 12 general-purpose machine-guns, (3) 20 DHSK armor-piercing machine-guns capable of shooting downing helicopters, and (4) one surface-to-air missile. The Libyans also allegedly tried to send 20 SAM-7 missiles to the IRA in 1987, but the ship was intercepted off France. A defecting First Secretary from the Iranian Embassy in London told British reporters that his former Government was providing funds to the IRA. Another newspaper story reports that the IRA considered an Iranian arms-for-assassination arrangement for about 3 months before declining the offer. According to this story, Iran would fill an IRA weapons shopping list that included: (1) micro-communications and eavesdropping equipment, (2) Semtex explosive, (3) 8 stinger surface-to-surface missiles, (4) 400 Colt pistols with 80,000 rounds of ammunition, and (5) 100 Uzi submachine-guns with 50,000 rounds of ammunition plus provide $6 million in cash if the IRA would assassinate leading Iranian dissidents living in Europe. (Both Libyan and the Iranian aid to the IRA was apparently seen as a way of getting back at the British Government for anti-Libya and anti-Iran policies.) Allegedly, Armaments Corporation of South Africa (Armscor) also tried to trade rocket-propelled-grenades to unnamed Protestant paramilitary groups in return for parts of a British Blowpipe missile in 1989.

Lesson 7: Both the Protestant and Catholic paramilitaries increasingly turned to crime over time to finance their activities. Protestant and Catholic paramilitaries turned to robbery, extortion, and especially drug-dealing in England and Northern Ireland to finance their military activities, pay salaries of full-time officers, and support the families of jailed comrades. They appear to be taking advantage of contacts originally made with organized crime to run guns to now smuggle drugs into Northern Ireland and to distribute drugs for the paramilitaries in the United Kingdom. Some journalists have speculated that personal profits derived from drugs may now be a larger motive for some than politics for the continued violence in Northern Ireland. It is impossible to quantify exactly how much income the paramilitaries derive from criminal activities, however, estimates range from 3 to 7 million pounds sterling per year.

Lesson 8: When British security operations began achieving results, the IRA started attacking British targets on the Continent and within the United Kingdom. Since 1972, the IRA has carried out a series of bombings in England. The most spectacular of which include: (1) the Brighton bombing in October 1984 which was designed to kill the British Prime Minister and many of her Cabinet during a Party Conference, (2) the February 1991 mortar attack on 10 Downing Street while John Major’s Cabinet was in session at the height of the Gulf War, and (3) the March 1994 mortar attacks on Heathrow Airport. Besides these high profile events, the IRA has also attacked a wide variety of targets which could effect the British man-in-the-streets. These include bombings of pubs, resort hotels, and shopping districts. IRA Active Service Units have also operated in Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, and France against British soldiers and airmen fulfilling the UK’s NATO obligations. The Protestant paramilitaries also threatened to attack targets within the Republic of Ireland as well as to strike Republican sympathizers residing on the English mainland.

Lesson 9: IRA and Protestant paramilitary operations more often aimed at achieving political advantage than military results. Operations against Heathrow airport, shopping districts, pubs, and hotels seem to have little military value, but often translated into political gain. Even attacks against military targets were often carried out for political advantage. IRA strategists believed that they had detected a pattern in past British colonial policy. At the start of terrorist activity, the Government would affirm its intention to remain, but over time would tire of the violence and decide the asset was not worth preserving. Shortly thereafter, the British would leave. Initially, the IRA reasoned that if the deaths of 36 British soldiers in Aden had sapped British resolve they could achieve the same results killing a small number of soldiers in Northern Ireland. Even though it has not worked out that way, IRA strategists still believe that political gain is the chief goal of military operations.

B. Operational Lessons:

Lesson 10: Existing British military doctrine was inappropriate for operating in Northern Ireland. Despite having extensive experience in counter-terrorist operations in Kenya, Malaya, Aden, Hong Kong, Cyprus, and many other colonial outposts, the British Army could not apply proven approaches and methods due to the unique status of Northern Ireland as part of the United Kingdom. For example, the traditional approach to suppressing riots involved the following steps: (1) British soldiers would form into a tightly knit box formation, (2) deploy barbed wire to separate themselves from the unruly crowd, (3) order the crowd to disperse or they would be fired upon, and (4) shoot a few of the obvious ringleaders in the hostile crowd. Shooting down UK citizens (under the watchful eye of TV) was understood by military leaders to be a “no go” from the beginning. (A wise decision in view of the furor caused when the 1st Parachute Regiment shot 13 demonstrators on what came to be called “Bloody Sunday”.) The British military also had to abandon traditional, doctrinally prescribed, intelligence-gathering techniques like “interrogation in-depth” because they soon aroused accusations of “torture” which were investigated by a special commission headed by Sir Edmund Compton. The uproar over using “interrogation in-depth” on a small number of specially selected prisoners caught British military authorities off-guard since these techniques had been taught at the Joint Services Intelligence School for some time.

Lesson 11: Clear rules of engagement were deemed essential. Because the British Army was theoretically only operating “in assistance of civil authorities” the actions of its personnel were individually accountable under the provisions of British law. Thus if a soldier exceeded his authority he might be charged and tried in a criminal court. (The Army resisted civil prosecution of military personnel and eventually the Government agreed that soldiers would only appear in military courts.) Therefore the British Army issued “Yellow Cards” to each soldier to define what he could do. These rules of engagement were well below the top line of what the law allowed. This meant that soldiers could theoretically exceed their instructions slightly without breaking the law. This approach of building a wide margin for error within the rules of engagement was probably wise since soldiers found the “Yellow Cards” cumbersome and often felt that if a they stuck to the rules they would not be doing their job properly.

Lesson 12: Rules of engagement are sometimes difficult to enforce. Despite the British military headquarters in Northern Ireland officially promulgating minimum force/maximum respect for the law policies through its “Yellow Card” rules of engagement, there is strong evidence suggesting that at times security forces in the field actually operated on a shoot-on-sight basis at their own initiative. The rules of minimum force and respect of the law were seriously challenged in late 1982 after 3 RUC officers were murdered by the IRA from ambush in Lurgan. Shortly thereafter, security forces killed three IRA men when their car “failed to stop at a checkpoint.” One week later, an RUC patrol spotted suspicious activity alongside a deserted cottage near Lurgan and opened fire on two suspects carrying 65-year old Mauser bolt-action rifles. Also as the soldiers increasingly became the target of violence, some soldiers became rude, abusive, and sometimes even violent with transgressors. For example, one officer (upset about the restrictions laid down on using “rubber bullets”) complained: “It used to madden me to read that it should not be fired in any circumstances where it could hurt anybody. My view was that if it didn’t hurt anybody, what was the point of letting it go? The aim was to give people a whacking great thump!” Newspaper accounts also quote a U.S. State Department report on human rights in Northern Ireland as saying: “Security forces, both army and Royal Ulster Constabulary, frequently harass citizens verbally, particularly your people in areas where community support for terrorist is considered strong. Security forces have also been accused of more serious incidences of physical mistreatment.”

Lesson 13: Situation-oriented training greatly improved British military effectiveness. In the early years, training for service in Northern Ireland was either nonexistent at worst or haphazard at best for two reasons. First, battalions were often rushed to Northern Ireland with little or no notice to stem a rapidly deteriorating situation. Second, few knew what to train the troops for. This situation changed in 1972 with the establishment of Northern Ireland Training Assistance Teams (NITAT) in England and Germany to prepare units for deployment. Indeed, the formation of NITAT was the first decisive institutional step taken by the British Army toward dealing with the long-term nature of its commitment in Northern Ireland. The standard Northern Ireland training package for infantry includes: (1) urban patrolling techniques, (2) riot-control procedures, (3) how to shoot at fleeting targets, (4) first aid, (5) powers and procedures for arrest, (6) rules of engagement for using deadly force, (7) description of IRA and Protestant paramilitary tactics, organization, and capabilities, and (8) use of internal security equipment. Engineer troops receive different training in subjects like search procedures and how to disarm booby traps. Realism is added to the training through the use of specially constructed urban combat ranges where troops can go through a wide variety of scenarios drawn from actual experience in Northern Ireland. Additionally, the British instituted a procedure by which each battalion on orders to go to Northern Ireland would send an advanced party some weeks before the main body arrived to familiarize themselves with the actual situation on the ground as well as to extract the corporate knowledge of the unit scheduled to rotate out.

Lesson 14: The tempo of operations in an urban environment was intense. Therefore, personnel tended to “burn out” quickly. Living conditions were often grim with units housed in poor quarters or spending days at a time in covert observations positions. No one got much sleep -- often no more than 2-4 hours at any one stretch. There was a constant round of patrols, intelligence gathering, base duties, administrative work, plus the requirement to be ready to deploy within an assigned sector on short-notice. On top of fatigue, British soldiers were constantly under the threat of sniper attack while on patrol, mortar attack when at base camp, and a continuous barrage of insults and verbal abuse from all sides while moving within the community. In this environment soldiers could get very tired and easily make mistakes. To minimize the possibility of mistakes and to maximize the effectiveness of duty personnel, the British Army allotted one four-day Rest and Recreation leave to each soldier per tour and rotated out entire units after four months on-station.

Lesson 15: Intelligence is even more critical in urban environments fighting paramilitary groups than in more conventional combat operations. Intelligence was critical since troops operating Belfast and Londonderry found themselves fighting an enemy in plain cloths which made them indistinguishable from the local population. Good information allowed the British military to selective target military operations against specific individuals. Good information also allowed the British to avoid humiliating mistakes like arresting old women, the physically infirmed, and pro-peace community leaders based on bogus tips anonymously supplied by the IRA disinformation operations. Unfortunately, the Royal Ulster Constabulary’s intelligence-gathering capabilities in Catholic areas was virtually non-existent when the British Army intervened in 1969. Therefore the Army had to start building its own intelligence system from scratch which meant pouring in a large amount of money, men, and effort. Starting from scratch meant that it was along time before the British received the full return on their investment in intelligence-gathering activities. Eventually, however, they produced impressive results. The Director General of MI5 (British counterintelligence) estimates that security forces now prevent four out of every five attempted terrorist attacks in Northern Ireland.

Lesson 16: Urban operations (especially intelligence operations) required careful co-ordination among military, police, and civil agencies. This was often difficult to achieve in Northern Ireland. At the beginning, many of the lessons learned elsewhere about the value of coordination were either forgotten or ignored. In the intelligence arena there was virtually no coordination between MI5, M16, the RUC, and the Army. Differing loyalties and institutional rivalries were partly to blame for this situation. For example, both MI6 and the RUC would mark papers to ensure that the other did not have access to them. Similarly, procedural barriers generally inhibited the exchange of information among Army and police elements at the unit level in the early phase of the joint Army-RUC campaign against the IRA and the Protestant paramilitaries. Eventually many of these roadblocks were overcome so that cooperation and coordination improved greatly; institutional rivalries, however, never complete disappeared and so still continue to inhibit coordination to some degree.

Lesson 17: Psychological operations were a key part of the British military strategy for Northern Ireland. There were three primary goals for British psychological operations: (1) winning public confidence (or at least reducing hostility to British military presence) through a “winning the hearts and minds” campaign, (2) countering disinformation spread by the paramilitaries and spontaneously generated damaging rumors, and (3) spreading disinformation to damage or unbalance the paramilitaries. Sometimes British disinformation was consciously spread. For example, the British carried out a disinformation operation to counteract the annoying (and potentially dangerous) IRA early warning technique of having hundreds of women stand-on in the streets beating trash can lids and blowing whistles every time a British patrol entered an area. To discourage this practice, the British sent out five two-vehicle patrols into an area, mobilized the early warning network, and then withdrew. The British repeated this performance every two hours over a couple of days. Towards the end, some patrols found the stand-to scouts asleep and would awake them by saying “We’re back. You should be beating you trash can lids and blowing you whistles.” Eventually, this practice subsided and the British could routinely patrol an area without rousing the entire population. On other occasions, the British would engage in passive disinformation; e.g., allow unfounded rumors to circulate that a particular operation was sparked by an inside informant.

Lesson 18: British military operations were very infantry intensive affairs. Last year, for example, there were 18 battalions serving infantry roles in Northern Ireland. These figures are consistent with our earlier discussion in Lesson 4 that Irish operations absorbed between 20% to 33% all the infantry battalions in the British Army and that need for infantry in Northern Ireland led the British Army to retain a larger number of infantry battalions in the total combat force mix than the otherwise would have done.

Lesson 19: Operations in Northern Ireland stressed the British logistics system because of unusual requirements and abnormally high consumption rates. Units deployed to Belfast and Londonderry discovered they needed large quantities of a wide variety of items not usually assigned to combat elements; e.g., riot batons, riot shields, tear gas, water cannons, “rubber bullets”, marking dye for identifying specific demonstrators, handcuffs, and metal spikes for blocking roads to vehicular traffic. These needs, especially in the early days, put enormous demands on the logistical system. During one large-scale deployment of additional combat forces to Northern Ireland, British logisticians had to fly extra helmets, shields, and other riot gear in from Hong Kong on short notice. Eventually, some of these problems were eased by having departing units leave their special urban warfare kit for newly arriving troops. The other logistical difficulty was the high expenditure rate of consumables in major urban operations. In one crowd control operation in Belfast, for instance, the security forces used 700 tear gas cartridges and grenades. Conversely, consumption of traditional combat supplies like artillery and anti-tank ammunition was abnormally low for units seeing action.

Lesson 20: The “hard-core” fighting strength of paramilitary organizations facing British security forces was relatively modest. Despite the widespread popularity of Protestant and Catholic paramilitaries among the general population, the actual fighting strength of these organizations remained modest. For example, activists in the ultra-violent Irish National Liberation Army are estimated to number between 50-70 members in Northern Ireland and an additional 20-30 in the Irish Republic. Hard-core IRA membership is believed to have ranged from a high of about 1,000 in the 1970s to a low of 250-300 in the mid-1980s.

Lesson 21: Special forces were very useful military tools, but sometimes became political embarrassments. Special Air Service (SAS) personnel began operating in Northern Ireland selectively as individuals in 1971 and then later as acknowledged SAS units in 1976. These special forces effectively carried out a number of general missions: (1) intelligence gathering, (3) reconnaissance and surveillance, (4) training regular British military units in covert observation techniques, (4) ambush and harassment of insurgents, (5) retaliatory raids, and (6) out-of-area/out-of-country operations (e.g, incursions into the Irish Republic and the tracking of IRA terrorists through Spain and ultimately killing them in Gibraltar). These last two missions, although never publicly acknowledged by either the British Government or the Army, were widely believed to be the work of the SAS; a perception that caused great political angst in London. Indeed, the British Government was initially concerned that introducing the SAS would be the beginning of a “slippery downward slope” from a political perspective given the fearsome reputation of the SAS and the fact that it would be operating domestically. This concern was well founded since charges of brutality, assassination, and “terrorism” have been hurled at the SAS by critics of British policy.

C. Tactical Lessons:

Lesson 22: Patrolling was central to the British strategy in Northern Ireland. Patrols in Northern Ireland were high-profile affairs whose main function initially was to reassure public and to assert Government authority, especially in the so-called “No-Go” areas which were declared off-limits to the police by paramilitary forces in some parts of Belfast and Londonderry. More specifically, patrolling was intended to: (1) dominate the ground thereby denying the enemy freedom of movement as well as asserting the primacy of Government authority, (2) gather information about the territory and its inhabitants for future operations, (3) react to “kill or capture” opportunities as they presented themselves.

Lesson 23: Patrolling in Belfast and Londonderry evolved into a very different kind of operation than patrolling in a conventional combat situation. Whereas traditional combat patrol procedures stressed low visibility and furtiveness, British Army patrolling in Northern Ireland were intended to be seen and so were intentionally high-profile affairs. There is another major difference between classic patrolling techniques and those employed in Northern Ireland. Whereas conventional combat patrols are conducted to support the maneuver of larger forces, patrolling in Northern Ireland was the maneuver. Finally, patrolling in Northern Ireland differed from conventional patrolling practices since the frequency of patrols was driven more by political expediency than military necessity.

Lesson 24: Coordination was essential for the British urban patrolling tactics. Haphazard patrolling was found to produce few results plus it exposed patrols to unnecessary danger because they had no back-up support. Coordination, on the other hand, ensured the systematic and thorough canvassing of an area plus allowed commanders to have patrols moving in parallel so that they could reinforce one another if necessary. Coordination also reduced chances of patrols unknowingly confronting each other and exchanging fire by accident. Conversely, predictable and repetitive patrolling made it easier for the IRA to stage ambushes. Therefore, company commanders had to strike a balance between these to conflicting requirements.

Lesson 25: Although the British used both vehicular and foot patrols, many commanders believed foot patrols were the most effective approach. Many British commanders believed that patrolling on foot afforded soldiers a better opportunity to get to know an area as well as offered them more opportunities to gain information because they could get to know the people who lived in their assigned patrol area. In doing so, commanders were always faced with trading off the greater safety offered by patrolling in armored vehicles versus better effectiveness gained by operating on foot.

Lesson 26: The British concluded that wheeled armored vehicles were preferable to tracked vehicles for operating in Belfast and Londonderry. Early on, the British high command in Northern Ireland decided against using tanks because they were difficult to operate under urban conditions (e.g., narrow streets), caused damage to roads, were noisy, and were expensive to operate. More importantly, however, senior British commanders worried that, since most laymen categorized all tracked armored vehicles as “tanks”, the deployment of tracked vehicles would be politically unacceptable. No one wanted to evoke the recent negative images of Soviet tanks rolling through Prague.

Lesson 27: Human intelligence was more important than technical intelligence in Northern Ireland and the responsibility for its collection rested at the battalion and company level. The paramilitaries offered fewer opportunities for technical collection than conventional military forces because of the nature of their organization and equipment. Consequently, the collection and evaluation of human intelligence became much more important. Increased need for human intelligence, and devolution of responsibility for its collection and assessment to battalion and company level, led to increasing the normal wartime compliment of the battalion intelligence section from 5 or 6 people up to 30 people.

Lesson 28: Special close observation platoons were created around traditional battalion reconnaissance platoons to conduct long-term, covert surveillance from static observation posts. During 1973, the General Officer Commanding instructed that more covert observation posts be established in order to reduce the number patrols. Soldiers, trained by the members of the Special Air Service Regiment, would lie in ad hoc, covert observation posts with binoculars, high-powered telescopes, and night vision devices for days or weeks on end in order to target specific individuals or areas. Equipped with tactical radios, these covert observation posts could link with patrols in order to dominate an area.

Lesson 29: Soldier loads had to be dramatically reduced because urban warfare requires greater individual agility. Urban operations required greater agility from British soldiers. That is, they need to be able to enter and exist armored vehicles quickly, catch fleeing demonstrators, and climb through buildings. Some regiments, for example, outfitted its fastest runners in track suits and tennis shoes so that they could catch fleeing rioters.

Lesson 30: Small unit leadership, particularly at the junior noncommissioned officer level, was an especially critical link in the British chain of command for urban operations. Most British operations in Belfast and Londonderry involved small units which were in almost continuous contact with citizenry, and situations often demanded quick, on-the-spot decision-making. Thus, junior NCOs had an inordinately large impact on British success or failure when compared to conventional combat operations.

Lesson 31: Fixed-wing aircraft played an important, but limited, role in Northern Ireland. Given the British rules of engagement, there was no close air support role for fixed wing aircraft. Instead, they were confined to conducting overhead reconnaissance and transporting equipment and personnel to Northern Ireland. It is impossible to understate the importance of the heavy lift mission since often equipment and/or units had to arrive in-country on short notice.

Lesson 32: Although helicopters were important assets in Northern Ireland, there is no evidence that they were widely used in urban operations. The bulk of the Royal Air Force’s presence in Northern Ireland consist of two support helicopter squadrons. Helicopters are considered “vital” for in hazardous near-border operations. Overall, helicopters served several purposes, including: (1) transporting supplies to isolated security outposts, (2) moving wounded, (3) airlifting quick-reaction forces to trouble spots, (4) overhead reconnaissance, and (5) transporting senior personnel. This last role of helicopters produced a very serious setback for British efforts in Northern Ireland when a helicopter crashed in June of 1994 while carrying 29 senior intelligence officials from the RUC Special Branch, Army, senior members of MI5 (British counterintelligence), and several officials of the Northern Ireland Office. Loss of these 29 people was devastating because, in the words of one RUC officer, “These people were right at the heart of intelligence....It’s impossible to explain such a loss.”

Lesson 33: Snipers were particularly effective in urban areas, but less so than in rural operations. The British made extensive use of snipers, especially from covert observations posts, in Belfast and Londonderry. Nevertheless, the British discovered that it was difficult for a sniper to hit a fleeting target (even at ranges of 100 meters) because of the density of cover in built-up areas. Consequently, the ratio of shots fired to hits achieved in urban areas was disappointingly low compared to sniper operations outside cities.

Lesson 34: Paramilitary actions against British soldiers were generally carried out by small teams using hit-and-run tactics. The ambush, boobtraps, mines, and remotely controlled mortar attacks were the mainstay of paramilitary tactics against British military forces, including helicopters. A typical such attack occurred in January of 1994 when the IRA rocketed a joint Army/police base at Crossmaglen in South Armagh as military personnel were attempting to recover a vehicle used in an earlier mortar attack. Such attacks were usually carried out by small IRA Active Service Units numbering from 8 to 12 members each.

Lesson 35: “Non-lethal” technologies were useful for crowd control and riot suppression. British security forces employed a large number of “non-lethal” technologies in combating riots and for dealing with unruly crowds in Belfast and Londonderry. These included: (1) tear gas, (2) water cannons, (3) dye for marking trouble-makers in the crowd for later arrest, (4) riot batons, and (5) rubber bullets (introduced for the first time on a wide-scale basis in Northern Ireland in the early 1970s) and plastic baton rounds which replaced rubber bullets in 1975. The latter two weapons were especially useful for keeping demonstrators out of petrol bomb range.

Lesson 36: Extensive use of some “non-lethal” weapons can become counterproductive. British security forces in Northern Ireland discovered that the tolerance of young demonstrators to tear gas increased four to five-fold over time because of its extensive use. The other problem with tear gas was that it indiscriminately seeped into the houses of people in the neighborhood where the riot took place and effected casual by-standers with the consequence that it turned such innocent victims against the security authorities.

Lesson 37: “Non-lethal” technologies caused some deaths accidentally. Casualty statistics from Northern Ireland reveal that one death occurred per every 4,000 plastic baton rounds used and one fatality per 18,000 rubber bullets fired.

Lesson 38: Soldiers may sometimes have either misused or deliberately modified“non-lethal” technologies to make them more harmful than intended by their designers. There were claims that soldiers regularly and consciously disregarded minimum range instructions for firing rubber bullets and plastic baton rounds as well as deliberately aimed high in order to injure demonstrators more seriously. More seriously, some have charged that British soldiers modified these rounds by inserting razor blades, nails, and electric flashlight batteries before firing at demonstrators. While it is impossible to prove the validity of these accusations (indeed spokesmen for the British Government flatly deny them), it was noted in Lesson 12 that British soldiers believed that it was senseless to fire at demonstrators unless one planned to hurt them.

Lesson 39: Static facilities in Northern Ireland were hardened in the same fashion as those in conventional conflicts. Hardening, stand-off layering, and defense in-depth were all used in Northern Ireland to protect base camps and police stations.

Lesson 40: Rigorous communications security is essential, even against relatively primitive enemies. At one point, the British discovered that the IRA had “bugged” telephones in British military headquarters.

D. Technical Lessons:

Lesson 41: Some British military equipment was modified to counter to enemy tactics and equipment. The British made a number of technical adjustments: (1) appliqué armor was added to soft-skinned vehicles like Land Rovers to protect their crews from blast, fire, acid bombs, and low-velocity small arms fire; (2) special unfolding screens were added to the sides of the AT-104 (“Pig”) armored personnel carrier so that they could be extended in narrow streets to block off a road as well as protect security personnel from missiles thrown by rioters; (3) wire cages were fitted over the superstructures of armored vehicles to defeat petrol bombs and rocket-propelled grenades; and (4) countermeasure packages were added to helicopters to deal with shoulder-fired surface-to-air missiles.

Lesson 42: Not all “non-lethal” technologies were judged suitable for wide-scale deployment in Belfast and Londonderry. The British Army experimented between 1969 and 1975 with rocket-fired nets to catch demonstrators, stun-guns that fired heavy bean bag-type missiles to wind rioters, and laughing gas for service in Northern Ireland. All were rejected as impractical after Army testing.

Lesson 43: Conventional military radios were unsuitable for urban operations. The British Army experienced two serious problems with its standard military radios in urban operations: (1) most were too large, bulky, heavy, and complex for use in the streets by small teams and (2) the signals of the standard Larkspur A41 VHF radio, designed to operate most efficiently where there is a reasonable line of sight between radio stations, were blocked and distorted in and around the buildings of Belfast and Londonderry. For these reasons, the British introduced small, so-called Pocketphone radios in the early 1970s that operated in both VHF and UHF modes via permanent ground stations.

Lesson 44: The British military fulfilled some of their equipment needs with commercial off-the-shelf technology. Over the years, the Army supplied off-the-shelf radios as a way of providing simple and efficient communications for patrols on the ground with company and battalion level headquarters. At other times, troops in the field took the initiative in substituting commercial equipment for military issue. For example, British soldiers at the end of 1975 were buying the “single point”, commercially-made rifle sight at their own expense because they said it provided a quicker shot at terrorists than the authorized Army model.

Lesson 45: The enemy often employed home-made weapons against security forces. The IRA, for example, has developed and fielded at least 16 models of home-made mortars over the course of the conflict in Northern Ireland. Typically, these mortars range in size from 40-60 pound devices with a range of 80 to 300 yards. The IRA also make a horizontally-fired mortar (the Mark 10) which can hurl a 50 pound charge up to 80 yards for use against lightly armored security vehicles.

Lesson 46: Armored vehicles, not specifically designed for internal security work, often afforded the crew poor visibility in cities. The British-designed Saracen armored personnel carrier was the mainstay of the British Army’s tactical vehicle fleet in Belfast and Londonderry. Although judged a good all-around vehicle, visibility was poor for drivers, especially in narrow town streets as well as for the commander in the turret and for men trying to see out the back of the Saracen.

Lesson 47: Urban operations required specialized vehicles and equipment beyond standard issue. In one operation, the British had to bring in specialized tanks which were orginially designed in 1944 to deal with concrete pill-boxes in the German Atlantic Wall to clear urban street baracades which were thought to be mined.. Each of these specialized tanks was fitted with a great bulldozer blade on the front as well as a wide, stubby-barrel main gun which fired a projectile that looked “rather like a dustbin.” (After this one operation, these specially-fitted tanks were withdrawn from Northern Ireland.)

Lesson 48: Irish paramilitary forces remained lightly armed throughout almost three-decades of conflict. Both Protestant and Catholic paramilitary units, to date, have only used light weapons like small arms, machine-guns, mines, rocket-propelled grenades, and mortars. While there has been speculation of their interest in acquiring man-portable surface-to-air missiles, there is scant evidence of them having done so. It is not clear why Irish paramilitary forces have not acquired more sophisticated, heavier weapons, especially since they are now readily available in the international arms market. Explanations for the continued IRA preference for light weapons range from lack of military training to difficulty in smuggling heavier weapons into the country. None of these explanations seems compelling. Therefore, we can merely note this trend without being able to explain it.

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