Sir Robert Thompson, who was a senior civil servant during the Emergency, wrote a number of serious works on COIN which greatly influenced American COIN doctrine, including FM 3-24. His 1966 Defeating Communist Insurgency is a classic. Easily derived from his book is a model for the conduct of COIN which Manwaring tested against the SWORD model (see our "The SWORD Model of Counterinsurgency" in the Journal Dec 2008. Although Thompson was influential among COIN thinkers and with President Diem (in the early days of the Vietnam War), his approach was largely rejected by MACV, in the end, both at the strategic and tactical levels.

Cheers

JohnT