General Sir Mike Jackson dead at 80: Former British Army commander on his experiences in Northern Ireland and 'asymmetric warfare'
Sir Mike Jackson, the former head of the British Army, had warned that force alone was not enough to defeat paramilitaries.
Sir Mike died on Tuesday, aged 80.
In his long career, he had served in the Balkans and Iraq.
He did three tours of duty in Northern Ireland, the last of them in the early ‘90s.
He had been a press liaison for the Parachute Regiment at the time its soldiers shot dead a string of civilians in the Ballymurphy area of Belfast in 1971, and was second-in-command at the time of Bloody Sunday the following year when 14 civilians were killed.
In his 2008 memoir ‘Soldier’, he recalls being the incident commander at the aftermath of the IRA’s 1979 Warrenpoint bombing, which killed 18 paratroopers.
He arrived about half-an-hour after the bloodbath.
"It was a horrifying scene,” he wrote. “There was human debris everywhere, in the trees, on the grass verge and in the water...
"I had seen the effect of bombs before, of course, but never carnage on this scale.”
He was characterised at times as “macho” and was reportedly nicknamed “the Prince of Darkness” by his troops.
But speaking at a University of Edinburgh event in 2009, largely about Iraq and Afghanistan, he had stressed that brawn alone was no solution to the “asymmetric warfare” of the modern world.
"There is of course a temptation, and we have our long experience in Northern Ireland which is a very good handrail here, there's a temptation to overplay the use of force as a single manner of defeating such an insurgency,” he said.
"It cannot be. There are many strands to this of which the military strand is but one.
"Some evidence shows I think both from Northern Ireland and indeed from elsewhere that an excessive use of force – whatever its legality – is actually operationally counterproductive in any way.
"So you would not want to go down that road."
He said while insurgent groups "don't give a damn about the Geneva Conventions", it still requires "very careful discipline on the conventional armies – not the 'unconventional' ones – because if they misbehave they are giving away their moral high ground".
The general was asked: do the rules of warfare against such 'unconventional' enemies need to be spelled out in law?
"I think there's much in that suggestion,” he replied.
General Jackson had also regarded Operation Banner as a success – and a rare one of its kind.
In 2006, he had written the foreword to an internal army document titled "Operation Banner: An analysis of military operations in Northern Ireland".
In it, he said: "The military operations which started in Northern Ireland in 1969 will, without a doubt, be seen as one of the most important campaigns ever fought by the British Army and its fellow Services.
"That campaign is the longest to date; one of the very few waged on British soil; and one of the very few ever brought to a successful conclusion by the armed forces of a developed nation against an irregular force…
"The immediate tactical lessons of Operation Banner have already been exported elsewhere, with considerable success.
"Operations in the Balkans, Sierra Leone, East Timor, Afghanistan and Iraq have already demonstrated both the particular techniques and the levels of expertise learnt through hard experience, both on the streets and in the fields of Northern Ireland."
In fact, the general may have had a hand in the entire army document, not just the foreword; the opening page says it was "prepared under the direction of the Chief of the General Staff", who at that time was Mike Jackson.
The document went on to describe “intransigence and entrenched views” in the Province, adding: “The two communities have tended to become victims of their own views; moderate political opinion, compromise and often logic has largely been marginalised.”
As the News Letter revealed five years ago, as part of a tranche of newly-declassified files, the general (then a brigadier) had set out his thoughts on what it would take to defeat paramilitaries in a letter to the Northern Ireland Office in 1990.
The strategy must include, he said, “an economic policy designed to improve the general standard of prosperity, and particularly that of the deprived areas” as well as “a social policy aimed at equal opportunities and the removal of sectarianism”.
It was crucial, he said, to “isolate the terrorist from those on whose behalf he purports to wage the ‘armed struggle’” and for the terrorist to be “spurned by his co-religionists”.
What was needed was to “change the perceptions… of those who may overtly or tacitly support terrorism” via a “deliberate and carefully designed information offensive to win the bloodless battle for the mind”.
He is survived by his wife Sarah, his sons Mark (also a soldier) and Tom, daughter Amanda, and four grandchildren.