Concrete Hell: Urban Warfare From Stalingrad to Iraq
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The PIRA response to Operation Motorman was increased violence and attacks against Protestants, the RUC, and the British Army. In response, the British Army stepped up its efforts against the PIRA, completing the transition from peacekeeping operations to full counterinsurgency operations. These operations, however, were not very effective. Though Operation Motorman made it more difficult for the PIRA to operate, it did not stop them. British counterinsurgency strategy was not adequate to the conditions in Northern Ireland. The type of counterinsurgency strategy with which the British Army was familiar called for a significant use of force and dramatic constraints on the sympathetic civilian community. Neither course was available to the army in the context of British Northern Ireland within the European community. Thus, British force was not sufficient to even curtail the operations of the IRA, much less destroy the organization, and the British Army was virtually powerless to intervene with the Catholic civilian community. However, enough force and interference with the civilian community occurred to ensure that the IRA retained the sympathies and support of the bulk of Catholics despite the tremendous number of innocent deaths that resulted from IRA operations. The violence continued through 1973 and 1974 – death totals in those years were 255 and 294 respectively.
Despite direct rule from London, little changed on the political front. After imposing direct rule the British government attempted to build a nonsectarian Northern Irish government based on power sharing between the communities. This effort was defeated by a combination of loyalist politicians, loyalist paramilitaries, and the Protestant-dominated trade unions. The Sunnydale power-sharing arrangement failed in the summer of 1974. The British Army’s failure to curb loyalist paramilitary violence, which claimed 209 lives in 1973 and 1974, as well as the army’s failure to intervene in the trade union strike of 1974, continued to confirm to the PIRA and the Catholic community that the army was a sectarian tool. British military operations were, however somewhat effective at disrupting PIRA operations and organizations. Casualties in 1975 to 1976 among PIRA operatives were 41 killed and numerous arrested. Total casualties on all sides including noncombatants in 1975 and 1976 were 260 and 295, indicating that despite the disruption caused to the PIRA, the two sides were locked in a deadly stalemate.
Policing
In 1975, the PIRA changed their strategy and determined to pursue a long war, in which they would attrite their adversaries over time until public pressure forced the British Army to leave Northern Ireland, and forced the Protestants to acquiesce to unification. As part of this strategy the PIRA reorganized into a cell structure as advocated by classic Maoist revolutionary war doctrine. These small units of four to 10 members were called Active Service Units (ASUs).
The British, however, were also adjusting. In 1976 they introduced their elite special operations forces, the Special Air Service (SAS), into operations in Northern Ireland. They also made a key decision in 1976 to change the security force strategy. Since the end of the peacekeeping mission, the British had pursued a classic counterinsurgency strategy in Northern Ireland that was primarily focused on securing the population and destroying the PIRA. Beginning in 1975 the British changed their strategy to one of police primacy. This shift was more than just moving the RUC to the fore of operations; it also included the end of internment, the beginning of civil trials and conventional imprisonment, political engagement with the Irish Republic to seek a political solution, back-channel talks with the PIRA, and the implementation of political reform.
The switch to police primacy, along with an increase in the effectiveness of the RUC, had some immediate effects as the PIRA was put on the defensive and their ability to operate was curtailed. Deaths resulting from PIRA attacks dropped dramatically beginning in 1976. However, it was not a long-term solution. The PIRA was still able to execute operations. Also, no important progress was made to separate the Catholic community from its tacit support of the republican paramilitaries. This was largely because of the continued sectarian nature of the RUC and British operations. No serious efforts were made by the RUC or the army to act against loyalist paramilitaries. In the years 1972 to 1979 the loyalist paramilitaries accounted for the deaths of 609 persons (as compared to 1,067 deaths caused by republican paramilitaries). In addition, the RUC was notorious for abusing prisoners with suspected ties to the PIRA. The RUC was widely believed to routinely beat confessions from those it arrested. Those confessions were then used to achieve long prison terms in court. Thus, the Catholic community remained estranged from the British government and continued to provide sanctuary for the PIRA. The lack of progress in Northern Ireland was one of many issues that contributed to a change in the British government in 1979 as the Labour Party, in charge since 1974, was replaced by the Conservative Party led by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, marking the third change in government since the beginning of the conflict.
Margaret Thatcher’s government’s engagement with Northern Ireland began inauspiciously in May 1979. Even before the Conservative Party officially took over the reins of the British government, an INLA bomb killed the designated British Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, Airey Neave, in March. On August 27, the PIRA executed two of its most notoriously successful attacks of the conflict: a bomb assassinated Lord Louis Mountbatten, uncle of Queen Elizabeth II’s husband Philip; and a multiple bomb ambush in Northern Ireland killed 18 members of the British Army. These attacks confirmed the new British government’s commitment to a hard-line approach to Northern Ireland policy.
The inflexible approach of Margaret Thatcher’s government toward Northern Ireland policy became evident in the handling of the IRA prisoner hunger strike. The Thatcher government refused to consider giving in to republican prisoner demands to be accorded non-criminal special status. Beginning in March 1981, prisoners began to go on hunger strikes. The first hunger-striker, Bobby Sands, died in May. By the end of August a total of 10 prisoners had died. The British government did not give the prisoners political status, though by the end of the strike in October 1981, they had conceded on a number of demands. Though the British government conceded on several demands, the government declared victory over the hunger strikers; however it was a pyrrhic victory at best. The hunger strikers once again focused critical Catholic and international attention on British operations and policy in Northern Ireland. The strikers galvanized the Catholic community in much the same way as internment and “Bloody Sunday” had. The PIRA had widespread Catholic community support, such that Bobby Sands was elected to a seat in the British House of Commons from the district of Fermanagh and South Tyrone during his hunger strike in prison. That victory inspired increased political participation by the PIRA’s political branch, Sinn Fein. Sinn Fein’s increased role gave the PIRA a political strategy to accompany their military strategy that ultimately was characterized by the slogan “armalite and ballot box.”
The British political mishandling of the hunger strike strengthened the PIRA, however, in the Anglo-Irish Agreement of 1985, the British government somewhat redeemed its earlier policy misstep. The Anglo-Irish Agreement was an extremely important political milestone in the war between the Northern Irish republican paramilitaries and the British security forces. It established several important policy markers. First, it officially recognized a role of the Republic of Ireland in the future of Northern Ireland. Second, it firmly established that Northern Ireland was a part of the United Kingdom. Third, it recognized that the status of Northern Ireland would only change with majority consent. Finally, the agreement established a formal mechanism for joint Anglo-Irish government policy coordination on issues related to Northern Ireland. In the short term, none of these policy issues would make any real difference in the state of the war. They all would become important in the next decade.
In the short term the Anglo-Irish Agreement was important more for who opposed it than who championed it. It was vehemently opposed by the vast majority of Protestant residents of Northern Ireland. All the Protestant
political parties opposed the agreement and widely condemned it to the public. Margaret Thatcher was condemned, and 200,000 Protestants rallied against the agreement in front of Belfast city hall. In addition, Protestant unions called a nationwide strike to protest the agreement, similar to the strike in 1975 that had doomed the Summerdale agreement. The PIRA, ironically, was also vehemently against the agreement. Their major objection was the fact that in the agreement the Irish Republic recognized British sovereignty over Northern Ireland. The objections of the Protestant majority and the PIRA to the agreement are important because they were ineffective. The RUC, backed up by the army, unlike in 1975, controlled the Protestant protest. The PIRA found itself isolated from the Catholic community in its opposition to the agreement. Catholics, both in Northern Ireland and in the Irish Republic supported the agreement as a major political step forward.
Though an important political achievement, there were no immediate changes in the tactical situation in Northern Ireland due to the Anglo-Irish Agreement. However, the effectiveness of security force operations increased dramatically through the 1980s. Though there were several attempts to resurrect army security primacy in the 1980s, the policy of the RUC leading security matters remained intact. This had two important results. It increased legitimacy of British security forces, at least in some important domestic and international audiences, if not among the Northern Irish Catholics. It also allowed the RUC to develop significant covert intelligence capability. This, combined with increased army covert capability, made it increasingly difficult for the PIRA to operate.
The British Army’s elite SAS was the major military action component in Northern Ireland beginning in the 1980s. The SAS first deployed to Northern Ireland in 1976, mostly as a political statement to demonstrate the resolve of the British government. In the 1970s one of the four squadrons deployed into Northern Ireland for six-month long tours of duty. In the 1980s the presence of the SAS was reduced to a troop of approximately 20 operators and the length of the tour was increased to a year. At the time of their initial deployment the SAS had no particular training in urban warfare, or integration into urban police operations. Their capabilities over the next 20 years demonstrated increased refinement, capability, and also the inherent difficulty of urban special operations, particularly in a policing environment.
In the 1970s the SAS suffered from a lack of good intelligence, but as RUC and army intelligence capabilities increased in the 1980s, so did the abilities of the SAS to launch effective attacks. Though most of the SAS operations were passive surveillance or backup to RUC arrest operations, they launched a significant number of arrest operations on their own and also several spectacular ambushes. The number of arrests made by the SAS is unknown because in arrest operations the SAS quickly handed captured paramilitaries over to the RUC and thus their role went unrecorded. However, action operations in which the SAS engaged the PIRA could not remain covert. In the 1970s, in several encounters with the PIRA, the SAS killed six paramilitaries while losing none of its own. In the 1980s, with a much reduced presence in Northern Ireland, the SAS lost two of its own operators and killed 26 paramilitaries. Its most intense ambushes were in 1987 and 1988. In May 1987 a heavily armed eight-man PIRA ASU was ambushed in the process of bombing an RUC police station in the village of Loughgall. All eight paramilitaries were killed while several soldiers were injured as the bomb severely damaged the police station. In March 1988, an SAS unit killed all three members of a PIRA ASU as they were preparing to bomb British headquarters in Gibraltar – the only direct confrontation between security forces and the PIRA outside of Great Britain proper. Later that same year another three-person ASU was ambushed by the SAS near the town of Drumnakilly in Northern Ireland. The SAS remained active in Northern Ireland in the first part of the 1990s and accounted for 11 paramilitaries with no SAS casualties.
One of the reasons for the success of the SAS in the 1980s and 1990s was the creation of a specialized intelligence unit for Northern Ireland: 14 Intelligence Company. This unit was created specifically to operate in the urban environment in Northern Ireland, its members were highly trained special surveillance specialists carefully selected to blend into the urban population. The operatives of 14 Company included older individuals and women, to increase their ability to avoid suspicion. The activities of 14 Company were coordinated with the SAS under one command called Intelligence and Security Group Northern Ireland. The command operated directly for the British military command in Northern Ireland. Though the damage done to the paramilitaries by the SAS and 14 Company was significant in terms of members killed and captured, perhaps the greatest damage done was psychological. The SAS was a formidable foe and paramilitaries were increasingly aware that at any time and in any place they might be under surveillance and targeted by British military special operations capability. This inspired increased caution, and internal security measures which greatly inhibited the paramilitary’s ability to conduct operations.
Though able to conduct some very significant operations in the 1980s and 1990s, including the highly disruptive bombing of the London financial district, the PIRA was increasingly on the defensive. Its ability to inflict casualties reflected this. Casualty rates steadily decreased in the 1980s and 1990s, particularly among security forces. There were two reasons for the decreasing PIRA effectiveness, particularly as the conflict entered the early 1990s. One reason was the effectiveness of the RUC and to a lesser extent, the British military and national intelligence services, to infiltrate informers into the republican paramilitary groups and to turn existing members of the group into informants. Such was the extent of security force penetration of paramilitaries that in the early 1990s the PIRA killed more of its own members as suspected informers, than it did members of the British military. Sophisticated electronic surveillance measures and effective army and police framework operations also contributed to the increasing quality of security force intelligence and decreasing freedom of action for the PIRA.
The other reason for reduced effectiveness of the PIRA was the increased activity of the loyalist paramilitaries against both the Catholic community in general and the PIRA in particular. The loyalist paramilitaries were not aggressively targeted by the security forces for the simple reason that in a resource-constrained environment they were considered the lesser of two evils. The loyalist paramilitaries, as a matter of policy and general practice, did not target security forces. That said, there is also no doubt that many in the RUC and in the major army reserve unit, the Ulster Defense Regiment (UDR), were at least sympathetic to the loyalist paramilitaries if not actual members of one of the various loyalist organizations. Much of the arms and intelligence that the Protestant paramilitaries had available came from these sympathetic sources – hundreds of weapons were stolen over the years from UDR armories. Thus, the loyalist paramilitaries were a significant and capable force and in the late 1980s and 1990s they began to hit Catholic and suspected PIRA targets with great effectiveness. In 1992 the loyalist paramilitaries killed 38 people compared to the republicans killing 40, however in 1993 they killed 49 compared to 38 killings by the republicans, and in 1994 it was 37 to 25. In many ways these statistics are indicative of even greater violence, since the population that the loyalists targeted was significantly smaller than the PIRA’s target population.
Though the loyalist paramilitaries were not officially sanctioned by the British government, they operated outside of the law, and they often – like the PIRA – targeted innocent civilians, there is no denying that they were very effective in influencing events. The Catholic civilian population feared the loyalist paramilitaries because of their ruthlessness and because there was no protection against them. The PIRA also feared them because, unlike the security forces, they were not inhibited by any notions of due process and rule of law, and they were willing to attack the friends and relatives of the PIRA when the primary targets were not available. Both groups also feared the loyalists because they were very effective. T
he PIRA and the various loyalist paramilitaries frequently engaged in cycles of tit-for-tat violence that affected both sides. However, because of the loyalists’ larger numbers and sympathizers within the security forces, the PIRA most often came out the worse from the exchange. These conditions made the Catholic community more sympathetic to a peace process which might halt the sectarian attacks, and it encouraged the Sinn Fein politicians within the PIRA to push the organization to accept a political solution given that the military strategy of bombings and sniping was becoming problematic.
Because of the increased military pressure from security forces and loyalist paramilitaries, and the decreasing support from the Catholic community in general, the PIRA declared its first extended cease-fire in August 1994. During that time it negotiated with the British government but, because of the dependence of the Conservative British government on Protestant votes in Northern Ireland, the negotiations made little progress. The major issue was the requirement to decommission PIRA weapons prior to substantive talks regarding a political settlement, a requirement to which the PIRA and Sinn Fein would not agree. In February 1996, the PIRA’s cease-fire ended. In May 1997 the Conservative British government of John Major was replaced by the Labour government of Tony Blair. The Blair government continued the process begun by Major, but since it did not rely on Northern Irish votes, it compromised on the issue of decommissioning, permitting that issue to be discussed in parallel with political talks. In July 1997, the PIRA renewed its cease-fire. On April 10, 1998 – Good Friday – the governments of the Republic of Ireland and Great Britain, along with the representatives of most of the prominent political parties of Northern Ireland, agreed to a political solution to the sectarian Troubles of Northern Ireland. Sinn Fein represented the PIRA in the negotiations and signed the agreement. The only major party that did not agree was the loyalist Democratic Unionist Party (DUP). Among the important provisions of the agreement were: respect by all parties for human rights; respect for the desires of the majority regarding the issue of unification; understanding of the interest of the Republic of Ireland; rejection of violence as a means of settling political disagreements; and finally that both unification with Ireland and independent membership in the United Kingdom were legitimate political positions.