The Briggs Plan is well known, but this chapter shows it instituted much more than a civil–military executive committee system and ‘population control’ through resettlement. Instead it aimed at a broader ‘geodemographic’ control of people and space, including ‘things’ such as food. It intended this to variously weaken insurgent–rural population links, provide ‘cover’ for the popultion to refuse what insurgents asked of them and create killing grounds as it forced insurgents to approach resettlements in more predictble ways. This chapter shows multiple individuals threatening resignation as the staggering scale of the plan – over 1 million were moved – tested people to the limit. It ends with promising signs but also still-high incident levels and rising concern in the wake of the killing of the high commissioner, Sir Henry Gurney, in October 1951. It also reminds us that even as geodemographic control was tightening and the first amenities for the resettled appearing, Briggs’s idea of clearing successive area was going nowhere. The operations were just too short, and too short of covering entire communist committee districts, to stop the MCP regenerating afterwards.

The first months of the Emergency saw chaos and uncertainty as both sides were caught off-guard and scrambled to organise. A combination of MCP policy of intermingling with rural villagers and British policy of exerting ‘pressure’ on the same villagers saw huts burned, people shot running and ‘excesses’ including twenty-four killed at Batang Kali. In effect, rural civilians were caught between MCP ‘terror’ (objectively, if not by intent) and British ‘counter-terror’ and pressure. Government, meanwhile, was gestating more positive measures, so that by the year’s end it was pushing states to start resettlement of villagers and was working with Chinese leaders in the MCA.

1947–8 saw fateful decisions by the MCP and the British, with these interweaving to create a spiral towards violence. This chapter traces the ‘long cold war’ that preceded and framed these events, the decision-making by both sides and how they combined both with international communism and local events at Sungei Siput to spark a full-scale insurection and counterinsurgency.

The Bosnian War (1992–95), fueled by complex alliances and deeply held animosity among the belligerents, bedeviled diplomatic resolution despite years of effort. In fall 1995, Operation Deliberate Force became the preeminent ingredient forcing warring factions to negotiate a settlement at the Dayton Peace Conference. Despite this success, airmen remain reluctant to claim Deliberate Force’s effectiveness because of its graduated, incremental, and restrained character. This ambivalence would have astonished earlier generations of airmen, who could only dream of such success.

In June 2014, ISIS fighters swept into Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city, and easily defeated the Iraqi Security Forces, armed with advanced American weaponry but unready or unwilling to engage in close combat against the Salafist militants. The campaign to liberate Mosul from ISIS may be the purest expression yet of twenty-first-century warfare. It was highly politicized, ideologically charged, fought in a fractured state among civilians by a coalition of the willing, with great power involvement on all sides, exposed to the world on social media. The air war, too, represented an intensification of recent operational trends: enhanced command and control measures, universal employment of precision munitions, increased intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance capabilities, ubiquity of remotely piloted aircraft, and decreased tolerance for civilian casualties. None of these factors was new in 2016, but each of them was manifested over Mosul to a degree not previously seen.

What was the canvas on which the Emergency was fought? This introduction and overview sketches in the population, the main players (British, MCP, UMNO, MCA), the importance of locality, the main phases and shape of the conflict and the historiography. In so doing it challenges some myths and sets the scene for later chapters to discuss issues of violence, harm and ‘winning hearts and minds’, and how and why insurgent strategy failed and counterinsurgent strategy ultimately succeeded.

For more than thirty years, a conventional mindset of applying force has clashed with the passions of the Iraqi people, complicating decisive outcomes despite US-led coalitions possessing overwhelming technological superiority in Iraq. Most studies of Operation Iraqi Freedom focus almost exclusively on the first few weeks of largely conventional

force employment, thereby missing how much this campaign has in common with other contemporary air campaigns. Air power made enormous contributions against the military “leg” of the Clausewitzian triangle over the course of thirty years with precision and stealth capabilities, but this advantage does not translate neatly into enduring strategic effect. As such, OIF should be reevaluated in a balanced manner that focuses more on the complex interactions between militaries, governments, and people and less on the overwhelming application of US kinetic force.

In the Second Lebanon War the effectiveness of Israeli air operations at the operational level was minimal, with success limited to a subset of targets for which there was good intelligence and proved to be easy to find from the air, such as Hezbollah’s medium-range rocket launchers. However, Hezbollah’s rocket campaign against Israel, the IAF’s partial response to this challenge, and Israel’s unwillingness to end this military struggle without defeating Hezbollah developed into an attrition air campaign. In the short term it appears both Israel and Hezbollah achieved some of their political goals in the war – a mixed outcome in a war of limited political aims. Yet the cumulative damage to Hezbollah from Israeli air strikes ultimately generated significant, long-lasting effects. Although in this asymmetric conflict air power proved ineffective in stopping the war, it was effective in the long run by imposing costs that deterred further conflict.

Over 1953–60 counterinsurgency was optimised, buidling upon the solid foundations of geodemographic control achieved over 1950–2, and of systems optimisation achieved under Templer. Framework operations by units bolted onto localities were continuously refined, as was the use of jungle forts to win over the Orang Asli, and of big combined Special Branch–food control–military operations. Together these sustained an ‘elimination’ rate (kills, surrenders, captures) of about 20 per cent of insurgents a year – that is, until after the MCP attempt to negotiate at Baling in 1955 was rebuffed, and then further negotiation was refused from late 1957. As hope faded insurgent ‘surrenders’ (some induced or duped) snowballed in the face of priority big operations. By now those featured months-long intense controls, each targetting the entire area of one or more MCP committees. That way the MCP would struggle to regenerate afterwards. The collapse of local MCP forces often came as freedoms increased elsewhere, while a big operation clamped down more strongly than ever on the targetted area. In 1958 the MCP decided on a strategy of running down the military campaign, and the Emergency was formally ended on 31 July 1958.

Since the end of the Cold War there has been an age of primacy marked by a series of conflicts for which powerful states have chosen to go to war over nonvital interests against much weaker state or nonstate actors. In these asymmetric conflicts, the powerful have coerced concessions, imposed regime change, and suppressed the spread of violence through counterterrorism or counterinsurgency operations. Powerful nations have largely succeeded in achieving both their military and political objectives by taking advantage of asymmetries in technology to wage war from afar, at low risk to their own forces. War outcomes have not, however, always translated into broader foreign policy objectives of long-term peace and stability. This introductory chapter provides an overview of the evolution of air power theory, presents characteristics of contemporary air warfare and measures of military and political effectiveness, and then briefly assesses the ten air wars examined in subsequent chapters.

This chapter shows how Templer recognised that the MCP’s October 1951 Resolutions had shifted the strategic initiative to government, but also that it had increased the importance of winning ‘hearts and minds’. It shows how he increased both punishment and reward, and resettlement amenities and training to secure kills, until late in his term, but above all optimised the government, military and committee system, and the policy towards Orang Asli and the jungle. He created a better system and learning organisation, which in turn started to experiment with the big combined food control–Special Branch–military operations that would start to clear communist committees out of one area after another. The next chapter shows how that learning took off over 1953–4, providing a solution to the problem Briggs had not cracked: how to ‘clear’ areas. Rejecting both hagiographic and hateful accounts of Templer, it reveals the truth about the man, and about the perfecting of Malaya’s counterinsurgency apparatus and the constant refining of its recipe of ingredients.

This chapter shows how Templer recognised that the MCP’s October 1951 Resolutions had shifted the strategic initiative to government, but also that it had increased the importance of winning hearts and minds. It shows how he increased both punishment an

Air power played a central, if uneven, role in the US military response to the September 11 attacks during Operation Enduring Freedom. For many, the successes of the air campaign in Afghanistan heralded a “New American Way of War” – a strategy characterized by the precise application of long-range air power, ISR support, and special forces coordinating with local allies against the enemy. However, air operations over Afghanistan generated mixed levels of effectiveness against the Taliban and Al-Qaeda, with success often tempered by the degree and quality of teaming between air and ground components. This chapter explores the legacy of air power during Operation Enduring Freedom, carefully examining the origins and context of the air campaign, key characteristics and events of air operations throughout the conflict, whether air power in Afghanistan ultimately proved effective, and finally how applicable the experiences of the air campaign might be for future conflicts.

In 2011, the Arab Spring led to numerous uprisings against authoritarian leaders across the Middle East. While the reactions of governments varied, Libya sparked the most interest given its notoriety as a pariah state and Colonel Qaddafi’s provocations against the regime’s domestic enemies. This chapter examines how the anti-Qaddafi coalition formed under the guise of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) and how the imposition of a no-fly zone to protect civilians slowly transitioned into a mission to destroy pro-Qaddafi forces while defending rebel positions. Momentum shifted as anti-regime forces developed innovative ways of communicating with NATO air forces, which provided more precise targeting. However, the downfall of Qaddafi – aided by air power – was a short-lived victory as the country fragmented along numerous political and tribal lines, with a full-blown civil war reigniting in 2014. To this day, numerous countries are backing different rebels that claim to represent the Libyan government.

The conclusion gives sweeping summaries of four different angles on the Emergency and of how they inter-relate. These are the government perspective, the insurgent perspective, the local perspective and the perspective of practitioners and scholars who have held the Malayan Emergency up as a counterinsurgency case study for global study, if not emulation. In so doing the Conclusion rejects myths about the primacy of violence and of hearts-and-minds measures alike, instead showing how strong control and big operations remained key to destroying the influence of MCP committees where they remained influential, even as persuasive measures and white areas became more important elsewhere. The Conclusion also revisists the question of violence and harm, highlighting how their intensity and prevalence changed markedly over different conflict phases. Terror and government counter-terror (‘pressure’) were high in 1948, transmuting into structural harm in 1949, and were replaced by a determination to outbalance harms with social goods as resettlement acccelerated across 1950–2. It finishes with the hope that the book’s sensitivity to variegation across place and time will inform future studies, and future debates about causation, impact and significance of the Emergency, both for Malaysia itself and for more universal study of counterinsurgency.