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This study examines contemporary counter-insurgency (COIN) warfare in terms of military ethics. The intention is to reflect upon the changing face of COIN conduct in the light of serious ethical challenges resulting from modern trends affecting combatant status, and the deployment of military force in a multipurpose framework. It shall engage with what many commentators have termed the 'grey area' of the Just War tradition: the ambiguous and challenging interim zone that lies in between the more clearly defined forms of COIN conduct. The resultant analysis shall suggest the need for a more nuanced form of ethical conduct, orientated around restraint, more flexible discriminatory principles and a proportionality framework closer to domestic policing than formal warfare. In particular, this analysis suggests that by hybridizing the military imperative with the policing model of the continuum of force a more effective, less vague and more ethically coherent construct can be produced. By embracing these concepts, military practitioners may overcome ambiguous and unhelpful moral guidance and tailor their conduct more closely to the challenges of the contemporary COIN environment. Such actions will assure they act as justly as possible in the face of 'grey area' ethics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Operation Motorman – the ending of the ‘no-go’ areas in Belfast and Londonderry – was one the biggest deployments of British forces since 1945, yet few analysts have grasped its enduring significance. This article argues that Motorman helped break the vicious circle of violence and atrocity that characterised the most violent years of the early troubles. In hindsight we can see that the aftermath of the operation irrevocably altered the strategic setting in Northern Ireland that, in time, enabled constitutional unionism and nationalism to slowly become more tractable towards each other. While Motorman can in no sense be regarded as the proximate cause of the current Northern Ireland peace process, it can be argued that in removing the most important factor that made the IRA a potent threat, Motorman shattered the IRA's military bargaining strategy, the long-term effect of which was eventually to propel the republican movement down a path that would ultimately lead it to question the value of its armed struggle. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The provision of Military Assistance to the Civil Powers (MACP) encapsulates the traditional approach towards countering terrorism on the British mainland, which emphasises minimum force, proportionality, police primacy and the rule of law, with the military retained as a supporting instrument, being employed only as a measure of last resort. Recent terrorist incidents in major urban centres do, however, question the effectiveness of these established methods. This analysis initially codifies the conceptual issues that underscore the tensions between civil policing and military anti-terrorist approaches in the UK, and proceeds to evaluate and compare a number of operations that indicate the nature of the challenges facing the MACP apparatus. In particular, potential shortcomings in the MACP provisions are identified in the form of threat perception and deployment and enforcement gaps. The assessment finds that there are facets of MACP that are of enduring relevance in the current era, yet a continuing need persists to reconcile police and military imperatives toward serious civil disorder contingencies and conditions of emergency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article seeks to lay out a comprehensive framework by which those who utilize a campaign of strategic terrorism seek to attain their ends. It identifies a distinctive modus operandi: 1) disorientation: to alienate the authorities from their citizens, reducing the government to impotence in the eyes of the population; 2) target response: to induce a target to respond in a manner that is favorable to the insurgent cause; 3) gaining legitimacy: to exploit the emotional impact of the violence to insert an alternative political message. By elucidating the strategy of terrorism, the analysis also reveals its inherent limitations. Resting on the premise that a militarily more powerful adversary will in some way feel restrained from bringing the full force of its military superiority to bear, the strategy relies exclusively on the exploitation of the psychological effects of armed action, thereby rendering it vulnerable to those who are willing to view the resolution of clashes of interest principally in terms of the tangibles of military power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]