A More Talkative Place: Why the Human Domain Still Matters in Strategic Competition — Brutality in an Age of Human Rights

Brutality in an Age of Human Rights: Activism and Counterinsurgency at the End of the British Empire. Brian Drohan. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2017.

One of the guiding yet implicit assumptions of the return to strategic competition appears to be that human terrain does not matter in a near-peer or peer-conflict as much as it does in counterinsurgency. As such, Brian Drohan’s Brutality in an Age of Human Rights: Activism and Counterinsurgency at the End of the British Empire may read as a relic of the COIN-infused approach to the Global War on Terror. But that interpretation would be wrong. Drohan’s work on counterinsurgency speaks to increasingly important issues ranging from lawfare to crafting narratives that are foundational to strategic competition.

Drohan—an Army officer who received his Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina before returning to teach at West Point—begins by pointing out the convenient myths that surround British counterinsurgency after World War II, especially the idea that the nation succeeded by adhering to its own laws, unlike other colonial powers. According to Drohan, this kind of myth infuses more contemporary documents as well, such as Field Manual 3-24: Counterinsurgency.[1]

In reality, though, Drohan highlights the paradox between British rhetoric and British reality. British officials did not conform to laws in conducting counterinsurgency, and activists pushed back, forcing those officials to craft their own competing narratives. The British continually insisted they used only “minimum force” and adhered to the “rule of law” but “rights activists” disagreed, and their efforts to challenge British officials helped shape “wartime policies and practices.”[2] Thus Drohan focuses his work on the human “topography of war.”[3]

Drohan labels the British strategy of responding to social activists as “cooperative manipulation.”[4] He describes how activists managed to stoke the public’s outrage at British violence, although they often found themselves outmaneuvered by British officials who only seemed to be cooperating. At times, this strategy worked for the British until its involvement in Northern Ireland in 1969. Drohan avoids making a strongly-worded argument about the success of British strategy because he believes these situations had too many causes to justify sweeping assertions about cooperative manipulation. Also, the larger implied point for the book is not whether cooperative manipulation worked, but what Western nations should do in the future. 

Drohan explores three case studies: an insurgency in Cyprus from 1955 to 1959, one in Aden from 1962 to 1967, and the aforementioned one in Northern Ireland, focused specifically on 1969 to 1976. As some British officials found to their dismay, norms and communication patterns changed during these decades, with the world becoming a “more talkative place” by 1970 than it had been in the 1950s and 1960s.[5] And the events central to Drohan’s book occured before billions of people gained near constant connectivity.

The first case study on Cyprus shows how  Cypriot lawyers cleverly attempted to attack British legitimacy in both Cyprus and abroad. Naturally, the British responsed and adapted to manage and disseminate information while seeking to maintain developments they found advantageous, such as by threatening the death penalty to gain valuable intelligence.[6]

Having declared a state of emergency in 1955, the British had enormous powers. Any person ranked major or higher, for example, could authorize an individual’s detainment for close to a month without pressing charges.[7] Further antagonizing Cypriots, children up to the age of 18 could be whipped as punishment by police officers for minor actions including handing out propaganda.[8] And some of these harsh measures worked at times to disrupt the insurgency.[9]

But lawyers countered British counterinsurgency efforts by turning the Cyprus Bar Council into “an activist organization.”[10] They worked to allow detainees to access lawyers and brought evidence of torture to the European Commission of Human Rights, which embarrassed the British. Scholars increasingly are highlighting the critical relevance of these issues on the battlefield of the law, which is essential to strategic competition.

Drohan reveals how the British responded by seeking to “deflect future allegations” and created the Special Investigation Group (SIG), which helped British public relations go from being on the defensive to the offensive.[11] Four months after its creation, for example, the British used a new counter-propaganda unit after searching a residential area to determine which civilians had complaints. Before the curfew ended, unit members spoke with locals and then quickly prepared responses, such as pointing out contradictions in the locals’ allegations.[12] The almost dizzying developments in information warfare point to the challenge of such responses today. As Zac Rogers provocatively argues, for example, the “net effect of the fragmentation and disutility of the information environment is not merely one of many more contested narratives. It is of no narratives.”[13] The case of the conflict in Ukraine, however, provides some challenge to this view, as that nation has crafted consistently powerful narratives since Russia invaded again in February 2022.

An important but understandable weakness of the work is that it primarily highlights the interactions and power plays between British officials and Cypriot lawyers, thus it is largely a story of the powerful and relatively powerful more than the powerless. Drohan, for example, makes a strong case for the cleverness of the Cypriot lawyers, many of whom had been educated and even fought for Great Britain in World War II. They could use their familiarity with English common law, for example, against their imperial overlords.[14] But the impact that British publicity had on the average Cypriot is unknown. How much did Cypriots buy the evolving British responses designed to pacify them? Certainly some British officials believed that they had successfully “disguise[d] propaganda so that it appears to be perfectly ordinary news” but that does not mean locals reacted to it in that way.[15] These insights—understandably difficult to obtain—could provide a more comprehensive picture of messaging and counter-messaging in insurgencies.

Prisoners Under Guard in Aden, 1966 (National Army Museum)

The Cypriot experience fed into subsequent British efforts to quell an insurgency in Aden, as British officials there deliberately sought to learn from the experience in Cyprus.[16] Ironically, though, Drohan notes how those officials employed a far more brutal “scorched-earth campaign” to which British citizens rather than Cypriot lawyers provided the main source of push back.[17]

While the International Committee of the Red Cross had taken a conservative position of keeping quiet about British abuses, Drohan highlights how the newly-formed Amnesty International (AI) took a different approach. In fact, the two teamed up to reinforce each other’s capabilities, with some of the same British citizens who collaborated with Cypriot lawyers founding Amnesty International. Meanwhile, British officials took steps to appear more humane, such as by building new prison buildings. Thus the British avoided garnering as much negative international attention as they did in Cyprus by ensuring that investigators from the International Committee of the Red Cross in South Arabia would not be shocked at the prisoners’ conditions.[18]

With lawyers in Aden unable to mobilize as successfully as their Cypriot counterparts, Drohan explains how Amnesty International offered the most significant challenges to highly questionable British counterinsurgency practices such as destroying homes. Drohan found enlisted soldiers, however, who expressed their “reluctan[ce]” to participate in such activities.[19]

Amnesty International’s outcry instigated an official investigation that led to changes in interrogations, although these changes were largely superficial. Since the information gained from interrogation provided one of the only useful sources of intelligence, the British continually pushed back at reform attempts. As it had in Cyprus, the British government managed critiques by appearing to make reforms and undertake investigations and then undermining them once the initial furor had died down.

The British had been brutal in Aden, launching a “scorched-earth campaign” in the mountains north of Aden city that resulted in a “humanitarian crisis.”[20] As tensions escalated, the British sought to extricate themselves as quickly as possible. Only two years later they faced a new and different situation in Northern Ireland, which was neither a colony nor fully part of Britain. Yet the British continued to use many of the same brutal tactics that they had in the past. Here, as in the previous chapters, Drohan provides some contradictory evidence regarding whether harsh interrogation was effective or counterproductive in containing insurgency. And, of course this very issue dogged the Bush Administration during Operation Iraqi Freedom.[21]

An important difference, though, from previous counterinsurgencies was the involvement of British citizens, who engaged in more sustained and outspoken debates regarding these practices than had occurred previously. Moreover, British involvement in Northern Ireland occurred at a time when Westerners as a whole had become more committed to promoting human rights. Thus the government eventually adopted a strategy that departed from previous military-based counterinsurgency approaches to more police-based ones.[22]

Drohan concludes that British actions in Cyprus and Northern Ireland might be deemed successes whereas involvement in Aden represents more of an abject failure.[23] But assessing their effectiveness is not Drohan’s primary concern. Rather, he wants to stress how the British determination to “hide evidence of brutality fueled the contemporary myth that British forces were exceptionally successful in fighting insurgencies because they obeyed the rule of law.”[24]

Undercutting this myth is essential because of similarities in the Global War on Terror, where Drohan notes that U.S. lawyers “used the same trick” that the British had in Norther Ireland by narrowly defining torture in ways that “ignore the important role of moral appeals in contemporary warfare.”[25] What may seem like a pedantic legal issue, then, has strategic implications because a nation can no longer wage war without a “moral explanation of the conflict” undergirding its “strategic narrative.” Drohan’s work thus explicitly builds on Emile Simpson’s arguments for narratives based on Simpson’s own experiences in Afghanistan.[26] But the U.S. at times struggled with this even in counterinsurgency, at times disseminating offensive images, making the challenges of crafting effective narratives in strategic competition seem almost staggering.[27]

Of course all of Drohan’s cases studies help contextualize U.S. involvement in regions around the world since the onset of the Cold War. In 1965, a Marine general suggested that combatants on both sides of the Vietnam War could “move to another planet” and still not win using the current strategy because the real prize was the Vietnamese people.[28] As such, the general sought to create the ultimate infantrymen to win in Vietnam by “defeating the enemy not just through combat power but through ingenuity, diplomacy, flexibility, decency, and tact.”[29]

Similarly, a focus on the human domain reigned supreme, even if it was problematic at times during the Global War on Terror.[30] The Department of Defense sent teams of anthropologists to Afghanistan and Iraq.[31] And students in professional military education read and wrote widely on the cultures of the nations they often returned to wage counterinsurgency in after graduation.

A United States Army Human Terrain Team social scientist, talking to local residents to investigate a tribal dispute in the village of Wum Kalay, Paktia Province, Afghanistan in 2009. (Marco Di Lauro/Getty)

The formal return to great power conflict—occurring with the release of the National Defense Strategy in 2016—changed that. Suddenly, the human domain became more of an afterthought in a struggle dominated by louder debates over A2/AD, which included endless debates on the relevance of aircraft carriers and the pursuit of lethality, with the qualities seen as requisite to fight so-called small wars largely have been relegated to the past as irrelevant.

Even as the U.S. military at times acknowledges the increasing importance of information operations, it also too narrowly focuses on force-on-force engagements and the technology required to do so. A description of a wargame in a city, for example, ignores the actual inhabitants, instead stressing game results like the conclusion that “teams that failed to take full advantage of the flexibility of this all-domain mosaic force resorted to conventional tactics that were ineffective and quickly devolved into costly fights for buildings that bled their force.”[32] The game assumes the existence of buildings but ignores that of civilians.

In a similar vein, the dominant focus of the Army and Air Force since the release of the 2016 National Defense Strategy has been on what has now been termed joint all-domain command and control (JADC2). While some aspects of JADC2 do stress human terrain, JADC2 is first and foremost a technological solution to future warfare because it rests on “assured communication” between the various branches to bring coordinated effects on the necessary domain while capitalizing on “windows of superiority.”[33]

Even the arguably more people-based services have put technology first and people second in some of their public documents. Marine Corps Commandant David Berger’s 2019 guidance, for example, flips the typical prioritization of the Marine Corps on people by placing “force design”—meaning the kind of equipment needed to support the Navy—first in his guidance.[34]

Similarly, counterinsurgency—and thus culture and human terrain—quickly fell out of favor in professional military education. While some argued for reading more Mao and teaching more counterinsurgency, others pushed back. Elsewhere, the emphasis on culture dropped dramatically as well.[35] 

These changes reflect Department of Defense guidance to its educators. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff 2019 memo to guide professional military education’s “special areas of emphasis” for the upcoming academic years mentions lethality more than once. It only vaguely mentions the “importance of understanding human, physical, and informational aspects of the security environment.” But culture matters just as much in strategic competition as it does in less conventional conflicts.[36]

Culture and, more specifically, human terrain has not gone away with the returned focus on strategic competition. Drohan’s work highlights the tensions between moral and immoral and legal and illegal ways of seeking to defeat insurgencies as well as how governments shape and disseminate narratives that will be equally important in more conventional conflicts of the future. From winning hearts and minds to large-scale combat operations themselves, morality—indeed the whole expanse of human terrain—is just as important as lethality, not only to strategic narratives but to strategy itself.

Heather Venable is an associate professor of military and security studies at the U.S. Air Command and Staff College and teaches in the Department of Airpower. She has written   How the Few Became the Proud: Crafting the Marine Corps Mystique, 1874-1918. The views expressed are the author’s alone and do not represent the official position of the U.S. Air Force, the U.S. Department of Defense, or the U.S. Government.

This article appeared originally at Strategy Bridge.

[1] Drohan, 2.

[2] Brian Drohan, Brutality in an Age of Human Rights: Activism and Counterinsurgency at the End of the British Empire (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2017),15.

[3] Drohan, 194.

[4] Drohan, 4.

[5] Drohan, 152.

[6] Drohan, 35.

[7] Drohan, 20.

[8] Drohan, 21.

[9] Drohan, 45.

[10] Drohan, 46.

[11] Drohan, 58, 61, and 63.

[12] Drohan, 64.

[13] Zac Rogers, “The End of Information Warfare?,” Modern War Institute, 18 June 2020; https://mwi.usma.edu/end-information-warfare/.

[14] Drohan, 27-28.

[15] Drohan, 74.

[16] Drohan, 81.

[17] Drohan, 94.

[18] Drohan, 113.

[19] Drohan, 95.

[20] Drohan, 94.

[21] See, for example, James Risen,  “American Psychological Association Bolstered C.I.A. Torture Program, Report Says,” NY Times, 30 April 2015.The U.S. military spent over $800 million in seven years on its Human Terrain System’s program. The name in itself is cringe-worthy. At the program’s peak, it used 31 teams of 5-9 members consisting of academics, analysis, data collectors, and other individuals. Brian Price, “Human Terrain at the Crossroads,” Joint Force Quarterly 87, https://ndupress.ndu.edu/Publications/Article/1325979/human-terrain-at-the-crossroads/.

[22] Drohan, 181.

[23] Drohan, 189.

[24] Drohan, 190.

[25] Drohan, 193.

[26] Drohan, 193.

[27] Sultan Faizy and Shashank Bengali,“U.S. military apologizes for ‘highly offensive’ leaflets it distributed in Afghanistan,” Los Angeles Times, 6 September 2017; https://www.latimes.com/world/asia/la-fg-afghanistan-usmilitary-apology-20170906-story.html.

[28] John C. McManus, Grunts: Inside the American Infantry Combat Experience, World War II through Iraq (New York: NAL Caliber, 2001), 208.

[29] McManus, Grunts, 214.

[30] Joan Johnson-Freese, Educating the U.S. Military (New York: Routledge, 2013), 26.

[31] See, for example, Whitney Cassel, “The Army Needs Anthropologists,” Foreign Policy, 28 July 2015; https://foreignpolicy.com/2015/07/28/the-army-needs-anthropologists-iraq-afghanistan-human-terrain/.

[32] Benjamin Jensen and John Paschkewitz, “Mosaic Warfare: Small and Scaleable are Beautiful,” War on the Rocks, 23 December 2019; https://warontherocks.com/2019/12/mosaic-warfare-small-and-scalable-are-beautiful/.

[33] Interview, “Multi-Domain Command and Control: The Air Force Perspective with Brigadier General B. Chance Saltzman (Part 2 of 2),” Over the Horizon, 11 April 2017; https://othjournal.com/2017/04/11/multi-domain-command-and-control-the-air-force-perspective-with-brigadier-general-b-chance-saltzman-part-2-of-2/; Sean Kimmons, “With multi-domain concept, Army aims for 'windows of superiority,'” U.S. Army, 14 November 2016; https://www.army.mil/article/178137/with_multi_domain_concept_army_aims_for_windows_of_superiority.

[34] U.S. Marine Corps, Commandant’s Planning Guidance, 2019; https://www.hqmc.marines.mil/Portals/142/Docs/%2038th%20Commandant%27s%20Planning%20Guidance_2019.pdf?ver=2019-07-16-200152-700.

[35] See, for example, The Rise and Decline of U.S. Military Culture Programs, ed. Kerry B. Fosher and Lauren Mackenzie (Quantico: Marine Corps University Press, 2021); https://www.usmcu.edu/Portals/218/TheRiseAndDeclineOfUSMilitaryCulturePrograms_web.pdf?ver=n7Ok7X4Yiz3K0ERNKyG92w%3D%3D.

[36] Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Memorandum, Special Areas of Emphasis for Joint Professional Military Education in Academic Years 2020 and 2021, 6 May 2019; https://www.jcs.mil/Portals/36/Documents/Doctrine/education/jpme_sae_2020_2021.pdf.