 unit (covert or overt) tasked with conducting deep operations may be given a variety of surveillance or disruptive tasks, such as infiltrating the financial dealings of an insurgency, or conducting overt checks to break up or expose an insurgent's patterns of behavior and lines of communications.
Close operations normally take place at the tactical level in counterinsurgency operations. Those operations involving fixing tasks should normally be aimed to reassure the general public and foster improved community relations. Where close operations involve striking against the insurgency, it is essential that the deep operation has already found and fixed the insurgent group. In this manner the initiative is retained. Often, however, close operations are reactive to an insurgent group's activities and there is no time for a planned deep operation. On these occasions the fixing has to be carried out as part of the close operation. The key to success is to wrest the initiative from the insurgent as quickly as possible in order that military forces can maneuver to a position from which they can then strike.
Rear operations in counterinsurgency should attract a higher priority than they generally do in offensive operations in war, and may need a commensurately greater priority in terms of operational planning, staff effort, and resources. The aim is not simply physical protection of the force, but also securing political and public support, from which all government freedom of action flows. An insurgent commander may have identified as government vulnerabilities certain nonmilitary targets, such as VIPs or economic assets, and selected them as decisive points in his campaign. That being the case, government forces are likely to become more heavily committed to protective duties than they would wish. While the aim will always be to secure and hold the initiative by means of aggressive action, significant numbers of troops are likely to be needed until locally recruited militias can be organized to take their place and technological aids put into key locations. This has important implications for training, force structuring, and the timing of offensive operations in the military campaign plan. Counterinsurgency campaigns are often protracted affairs; establishing secure operating bases, developing lines of communication, maintaining public support, and recruiting local militia are carried out to enable the security forces to sustain a long operation. Hence the value of rear operations to any overall campaign plan.
Over and above the integration of deep, close, and rear operations, there is a discrete and undefined balance among reassurance, the application of deterrence, and military action. Applying a firm and clear political and military deterrent to insurgents and their activities helps to reassure public opinion and gain local support for government policies and plans; military action, when properly focused and directed, can remove hard-core activists and reduce the ability of insurgents to act coherently.
Rules of Engagement
Within the application of any military doctrine, it is vital for a commander to know what law applies in a given set of circumstances and what it is that triggers any changes in the law to be applied. The answer to this type of question relates directly to the sort of rules of engagement that would be issued by a government.
In the UK, government ministers provide political direction and guidance to commanders by means of rules of engagement which govern the application of force. It follows that such rules which are approved by ministers may be changed only by ministerial authority. Commanders will in turn wish to issue rules of engagement to their subordinates. These rules of engagement will be cast within the discretion allowed by the rules approved by ministers.
Rules of engagement define the degree and manner in which force may be applied and are designed to ensure that such application of force is carefully controlled; rules of engagement are not intended to be used to assign specific tasks or as a m