Bunch of Five

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A fortnight later, on 15 February 1972, Frank Kitson was knighted by the Queen for “gallant and distinguished” service in Northern Ireland.

What this meant, was that the prisoner would be offered two choices, one that was terrifying or one comparatively more appealing (Melshen 15). It launched his reputation as a counter-insurgency expert whose theories – including in how to use “countergangs” – shaped British and United States military strategy for decades to come.As a junior, then middle-ranking officer in the Rifle Brigade, Kitson was decorated and promoted for tactical successes in three of Britain’s most notorious colonial wars in the 1950s and 1960s—the Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya, the mainly Chinese communist revolutionary struggle in Malaya (known as the ‘Malayan Emergency’ by the British), and the EOKA-led Greek nationalist uprising against British rule in Cyprus. Britain did not send troops there but did provide intelligence, transport, and trained US forces at the army’s jungle warfare school in Borneo. An estimated 90,000 Kenyans were slaughtered in the Kikuyu uprising while just over a thousand were hanged on a portable gibbet.

Defence Secretary Gavin Williamson explained why, saying "Our Armed Forces are the face of Global Britain and our presence in Bahrain will play a vital role in keeping Britain safe as well as underpinning security in the Gulf".Photo: Andrew Parsons - No 10 Downing Street / Flickr / cropped from original / shared under license CC BY-NC-ND 2. From the 1950s, the regime struggled to contain an independence movement and Britain used violent crowd control techniques to prop up its puppet government. The US repeated this ‘surge’ operation in Afghanistan in 2009, hoping to prop up its puppet government there and to defeat the Taliban. The murder was put down to Loyalist paramilitaries – but the man found guilty of it, Albert Baker, was a former soldier who claimed links to British intelligence.