Frank Kitson

General Sir Frank Kitson OBE, KCB, MC (born 1926) is a retired British Officer and counterinsurgency theorist. He rose to be Commander-in-Chief UK Land Forces from 1982 to 1985 and was Aide-de-Camp General to the Queen from 1983 to 1985. In 1985 he became a Knight Grand Cross of the Order of the British Empire. He saw active service in counter revolutionary operations in post war colonial conflicts. He is one of the leading theorists of counterinsurgency to have emerged from the British military.

The Historian Bernard Porter has noted:

"Between 1970 and 1972 Kitson served in Northern Ireland as commander of a brigade in Belfast. He may have been largely responsible for the setting up and development of ‘Psyops’ units there. If he was not, then somebody else was. By all accounts this side of the army’s work expanded enormously over the next ten years, and involved some techniques which could be described as devious. That may be putting it mildly indeed. Among the ‘tricks’ attributed to various British intelligence agencies in Northern Ireland in the 1970s - army intelligence, MI5, MI6, British Special Branch, RUC Special Branch - were torture, for which Britain was censured by the European Human Rights Commission in 1976; murder, faked to look like ‘sectarian’ killings; the planting of bombs in Dublin in 1974 ...; homosexual seduction and blackmail; ‘black’ propaganda and disinformation; ‘shooting to kill’; fabricating evidence; and ‘covering up’. At one stage, because of inter-departmental rivalry, MI5 and MI6 were rumoured to be indulging in covert operations against each other..."

Career

• Kenya 1951
• Malaysia 1957
• Oman 1958-1959
• Cyprus 1962
• Britain 1969-1987
• Ireland 1970-1972

Counterinsurgency Theorist

His earlier published work on counter-gangs and measures of deception, including the use of defectors, continues to provoke strong opinions. Although sometimes wrongly credited with inventing concepts of pseudo-gangs and pseudo-operations (for example, used earlier in the Huk Insurrection in the Philippines), his writing gave the issue a wider audience. In retirement he has given evidence to the Saville Inquiry into Bloody Sunday in Northern Ireland.

Publications

• Gangs and Counter-gangs (1960), Barrie and Rockliff
• Low Intensity Operations: Subversion, Insurgency and Peacekeeping (1971), Faber and Faber - reprint 1991 ISBN 0-571-16181-2
• Bunch of Five (1977)
• Kitson, Frank (1987) Warfare as a Whole, London:Faber and Faber.
• Prince Rupert: Admiral and General-at-sea (1998), Constable and Robinson
• Old Ironsides: The Military Biography of Oliver Cromwell (2004), Weidenfeld Military

External Resources

• Bloody Sunday Inquiry Statement of Sir Frank Kitson, 18 October 2001, accessed 4 December 2007.

See Also

David Kilcullen | John Nagl | Robert Thompson | Orde Wingate