After the post-war occupations in Europe and Asia came to an end, most of the specific knowledge of civil affairs evaporated. With the rapid reductions of the military forces that had fought the Second World War the British, Canadians, and Australians discarded their specialized capacity to perform military interim government activities, leaving only the US Army in possession of a dedicated civil affairs organization. However, civil affairs survived in two different forms outside the United States. The Second World War dramatically upset the existing world order and the two prevailing politico-military developments to emerge in its wake were superpower rivalry and the sudden and rapid disintegration of Europe's colonial empires. NATO, founded in 1949 to counter the Soviet threat in Europe, created a special function for civil-military cooperation (CIMIC). Unlike the Americans, however, the European allies did not create a specialized organization to coordinate its defensive operations on the German plains with the local government institutions and population. Outside Europe, civil affairs and civil-military cooperation re-emerged as a prominent aspect of the fight against nationalist and communist insurgencies in the colonies, although not specifically designated in those terms or as a concept at the time. This type of unconventional warfare is crucial to understanding the second theme in this work – military support to civil authorities during internal security operations. Following an introduction into irregular warfare and the problematic search for a military answer, this chapter centers on the British approach in Malaya in the 1950s. This has often been regarded a ‘model campaign’ and ‘textbook case in counterinsurgency.’ The Malayan campaign stood out for a number of reasons, but most of all for its adequate balance between civilian and military measures and eventually the high degree of coordination and cooperation between soldiers, civil administrators and police.

Imperial Policing

A wide array of terminology has been created to name the fight against irregular opponents in war. According to one scholar, this is reflective of ‘the profound discomfort of conventional armed forces with unconventional war.’