Not the Wars You’re Looking For

Abstract

This chapter examines support for the compellence theory in three cases: the Malayan Emergency, the Greek Civil War, and the Philippines' campaign against the Huk insurgency. In the British campaign in Malaya, 1948–1957, the colonial government defeated a small, isolated Communist insurgency that failed to gain political traction even within the population of impoverished ethnic Chinese rubber plantation workers that it targeted as its often-unwilling base of support. In Greece in 1947–1949, the United States backed the repressive, fragile post-World War II Greek government and built its military capacity sufficiently to defeat the Communist and nationalist insurgents. In the Philippines in 1946–1954, the United States backed the Philippine government as a bulwark against Communist expansion in Asia, pressing for major governance reforms while building Philippine security forces. In all three cases, elite accommodation played a significant role in the counterinsurgent's ability to defeat the insurgency militarily, with the type of elite involved varying by case; uses of force included forcefully controlling civilians; and uses of force broke the insurgency before reforms were implemented, if they were implemented at all, as the compellence theory predicts.