ABSTRACT
This chapter examines how the British Army approached the varying military requirements of colonial warfare both imperial policing and small wars paying particular attention to how it devised doctrine and specialised training for such operations in India. The British Army lacked any official detailed study of how to conduct either small wars or imperial policing, as it had always emphasised practicality rather than theory in this type of operation. The 1920 edition of Field Service Regulations (FSR) formed the foundation upon which the training of the British Army was based. In Egypt in 1919, Palestine in 1929 and Cyprus in 1931, troops were employed on several occasions on duties in aid of the civil power, to contain outbreaks of resistance to imperial rule. The control of the trans-border Pathan tribes on the North-West Frontier, in the mountainous belt of no-mans-land between Afghanistan and the administrative border, was the most insistent military problem in India.
