Managing COIN: Lessons from Malaya

[Madhu]

That narrative is largely incorrect. "The primary historical record," Gentile writes, "shows that there was no discontinuity" between Briggs and Templer. Both were committed to implementing the Briggs Plan: a massive and often brutal resettlement program that relocated hundreds of thousands of people suspected of sympathizing with the insurgents (chiefly members of the ethnic Chinese minority in Malaya).

In retrospect, the British victory was never much in doubt. The Malayan Communist fighters never numbered more than 7,500. The ethnic Malays were generally supportive of the British counterinsurgency campaign because they opposed a communist takeover of their country. "It was a war," Gentile observes, "that would have been very difficult for the British to lose."

http://reason.com/archives/2013/07/3...the-better-war

I sometimes note that American policy makers have trouble with scale (I first noted this in medicine, lots of people have made that point actually) and translating policy that works for small European states to the US setting. This 'trouble with scale' might make for an interesting area of study in various policy discussions.