The Growing Desperation of the British Army

Current official estimates of the IRA's strength are higher than earlier ones, while the guards demand a free hand.

In his book Memoirs of a Revolutionary, Sean MacStiofain writes nostalgically of his encounters with Greek Cypriots in EOKA whom he met in jail in England in the nineteen fifties, and of their discussions about the strategy of guerilla warfare. While MacStiofain himself ran the IRA very much along traditional lines, it does seem that his successors have absorbed many of the tactics set out by Grivas in his book, Guerilla Warfare, and to have added some new ones of their own.

It is to Cyprus that the British Army now refers more and more when assessing its problems in dealing with the Provisional IRA in Northern Ireland. It does so rather ruefully. EOKA waged what was, by any standards, a spectacularly successful campaign against the British in Cyprus, and if it failed to solve the historic conflicts of that beautiful and divided island it did succeed in effecting British withdrawal. It did this with force which, by most estimates, rarely exceeded three hundred active members.

While it is difficult to assess the strength of the IRA - where does active membership shade into enthusiastic support and support shade into quiescent acceptance? - the British Army now puts the organisation's strength at somewhere between three hundred and five hundred, rather more than were involved in the EOKA campaign. Against this force are ranged 13,000 British soldiers.

Both Grivas in his Memoirs and later Frank Kitson in his book, Low Intensity Operations, make the point that in' any given situation there is an optimum number of troops that can be usefully employed. If the number is increased it helps the insurgents more than the security forces. Grivas gives as his reason the increase in targets and to this Kitson adds the increase in the cost of the campaign, the temptation to commanders to use men needlessly, and the break in continuity in collecting and developing information which can be more efficiently achieved by a small body of resident troops.

There are signs that this situation has now developed in Northern Ireland, that large numbers of uniformed soldiers are being deployed primarily as a propaganda exercise to pacify Unionist politicians and that their presence in some areas - for example, parts .of South Armagh - is helping rather than hindering the IRA in the ways mentioned above.

It has become a cliche to repeat that in ten years of conflict the Provos have come a long way from the slaphappy bomb-making folk heroes roaring openly around the Catholic ghettos of the early seventies. Major General Glover, Commander of Land Forces and currently the most important senior British officer in Northern Ireland as the GOC Lt. General Creasey prepares to leave and his successor has yet to mark himself in, is under no illusions about that. It was Glover who as Brigadier in charge of

Defence Intelligence was responsible for the leaked Army "Document 37" assessing the IRA. In December 1978 he wrote, "The mature terrorists, including for instance the leading bombmakers are usually sufficiently cunning to avoid arrest. They are continually learning from mistakes and developing their expertise. We can therefore expect to see increasing professionalism and greater exploitation of modern technology for terrorist purposes."

Events since then show that, if anything, the odds have lengthened against Major General Glover's soldiers. Statistics published for the first ten months of this year show that all figures for incidents of violence are up on the comparable period in 1978, with the single exception of civilian deaths. Most dramatic is the increase in the deaths of members of the security forces. By the end of October this year 32 soldiers had been killed, compared with 14 in 1978.

This figure was, of course, weighted by the deaths of 18 soldiers at Warrenpoint on the same day as the Mountbatten murders in Co. Sligo. For the British Army, Warrenpoint was traumatic proof of the IRA's increased capacity to inflict physical and propaganda damage which, according to Grivas, should be the twin prongs of any guerilla campaign. For over a year' now, and particularly since "Document 37" was leaked to the press, it has been accepted that the main purpose of the Provisional IRA's reorganization in early 1978 was to institute a structure of tightly knit cells operating in isolation from one another which would staunch the extremely damaging flow of information to the RUC in the North. This restructuring served its purpose in that the IRA's own security was very much improved.

What has changed then is that Provos now have the capacity and the confidence to mount operations involving between ten and twenty men should the need arise. In recent months there have been several instances of this, such as the attempts to bring down army helicopters and, most publicly, in the propaganda stunt mounted for the BBC Panorama programme when between ten and twenty men sealed off the village of Carrickmore, in the heart of mid-Ulster nearly twenty miles from the border.

Other statistics are also less than encouraging for the security forces'

in the North. While a considerable amount of weapons and explosives continue to be seized north and south of the border, both the Provos and the INLA appear to have virtually unlimited access to weapons and the funds to buy them. Moreover there is evidence, from the weapons seized, that the two

organizations are now working much more closely together.

Most important of all, from the security forces' point of view, is the fact that the Provos seem to have laid to rest the classic theory of guerilla warfare, that the guerilla fighter, like the fish in the water, can only operate in a community which supports him. Support for the Provos in the Catholic ghettos of the North is probably as low as it has ever been. One indicator of this is the almost total apathy, outside those directly concerned, about the Republican prisoners in H Block and the Provos' growing desperation on the issue. What the IRA still has, and has learnt to turn to its advantage, is the quiescent ambivalence in Catholic areas of Belfast and Derry, which may fall short of active support but still ensures that almost nobody is prepared to go out on a limb to co-operate with either the Army or the RUC.

In many ways Warren point seems to have been a shuddering turning point for the British Army in the North. It came at a time when frustration was growing at the political inhibitions imposed on the Army by operating in a part of the United Kingdom which was increasingly attracting the spotlight of international political attention.

The killing by the Provos of 18 soldiers in a single operation led to massive recriminations and demands that the Army be allowed to supersede the police as the front line of attack against the IRA. The police had failed, it was widely said, and the time had come to let the Army get on with the job which it was trained to do and could do if given the chance. The GOC, Lt. General Timothy Creasey, made a rare speech, appropriately enough at the opening of a British Legion Hall in Antrim, where he said that his experience in another war elsewhere had convinced him that "a considered and co-ordinated effort" could defeat terrorism. As the other war was in Oman where Creasey had been Chief of the Sultan's Armed Forces during a campaign of ruthless (and successful) repression of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Oman, the storm signals about the Army's mood were clear.

The British Prime Minister's response was characteristically swift. Sir Maurice Oldfield was sent in as security supremo partly to placate the Army and partly to act as referee in the deteriorating relationship between the military and the police. While Sir Maurice remains a resolutely shadowy figure two things have been made clear since his arrival:. first there would be no overtly dramatic changes in security policy, second he had Mrs. Thatcher's ear and if anyone stepped out of

line she would know about it.

This is not to say that there will be no changes. For some time now there has been less emphasis on Army presence in the streets, much more on undercover surveillance work such as the charting of IRA suspects' movements. This will now be stepped up even further in an effort to trap those whom Major General Glover described as the "mature terrorists ... sufficiently cunning to avoid arrest."

The other aspect of security which the British Army is watching with keen interest, particularly in the wake of the Lynch-Thatcher talks, is the South. Compared to most British politicians, the Army appears to be much less critical of Dublin's security performance. Perhaps because they have learnt to live with their own politicians' double talk on security matters they are fairly philosophical about the often, quoted statistic that only 3 per cent of violent incidents emanate from the South, merely replying that the IRA's weapons and explosives come via the South and that known IRA men can still live and practice their techniques in border areas. Against this, praise for the Garda Siochana, particularly given their limited resources, is high. The recent arms haul in Dublin, the arrest of a man whom the British believe to be one of the Provos' top operatives in Co. Louth, the police's performance in Donegal, are all cited with approval.

Also contrary to much of the argument that has raged in Dublin, the British security forces do not appear to be overly concerned about the air corridor. This may be because British helicopters have been overflying Irish airspace for much of the present troubles and while ritual complaints have been lodged by the Irish Government little action has been taken.

What the British military establishment would like to see is much more direct contact across the border either between the British and Irish armies or the Army in the North and the Gardai in the South. At the moment, while both the British and Irish governments insist that their respective troops are acting as support forces to the civilian police, all communications have to be routed through them which can result in crucial loss of time. This question of direct cross border contact may well be the major concession which Mrs. Thatcher was won from Mrs. Lynch.

If so it is one with large political as well as security implications. At the very least it puts a severe dint in what has up to now been the cornerstone of British security policy in the North, that fighting the IRA is a matter of dealing with common criminals and that the RUC are the proper people to control that situation.