Quote Originally Posted by JMA View Post
I can't think of a reason why anyone 60 years old and over would want to inflate this percentage 30 years after the fact. Can you?
I can think of a bevy of reasons. BH Liddell Hart frequently presented false or misconstrued historical data to back up his own belief on how things work. Perhaps these authors want to prove that their argument that "fireforce tactics are more effective than conventional COIN tactics".

Perhaps not - I am in no way insinuating that they made the figures up or pulled them out of thin air; perhaps they are going with "what they know", figures that were commonly accepted as fact back during the war that have persisted until know. Other common myths like the "3:1" rule persist under the same logic.

Fact is, nobody can say what it is because there is absolutely no reference at all to the Malayan or Rhodesian figures and the objective reader can't go off of the author's word only. There needs to be, at the very least, an explanation as too how such figures are derived or where they originated from.

When it comes down to it, this is an interesting piece that I enjoyed but it can only be taken as a matter of historical opinion rather than a concrete historical examination of tactics.