In the fight against the Mau Mau, the British Army in Kenya worked alongside civilians on a daily basis. These politicians, administration officials, policemen and settlers all had their own political agendas, which threatened to clash with the army's goals. As we have seen, the common desire to crush the rebellion quickly and formalised cooperation through the committees tended to minimise disputes. This book is concerned with exploring how the army used force to defeat Mau Mau, so we need to move beyond the institutions to examine policy implementation. Some of the policies explored in this chapter have been analysed as contributing towards restraint or coercive force. Here policies are analysed for a distinct purpose: to assess how army behaviour was shaped by external groups, and how the army in turn influenced civilians.

Each policy area is analysed with reference to three modes of interaction: civilian control, military influence and consensus. In the first case, a civilian group imposed its view on the army and decisively affected policy. In the second, the military influenced a civilian group to behave in a certain way, thus changing policy. In the third category, policy was discussed and a consensus reached between the military and one or more civilian group. By applying this conceptual device to each policy area in turn, the army's political power and degree of subjection to civilian control may be understood in practice. A wide range of policy fields could be explored in this manner. This book restricts itself to the three most salient fields for the campaign in Kenya from 1952 to 1956: intelligence, administration and the use of force. In the intelligence arena, the police Special Branch dominated, but the army sought to ensure its interests by meshing the police and military intelligence structures together. Even though the police broadly controlled intelligence-gathering, the army assumed primacy in exploiting the product, using this higher-status position to pressurise the police to collect intelligence in a form soldiers deemed suitable. Special forces teams and pseudo-gangs effectively merged intelligence-gathering and exploitation in independent, self-sustaining units. The police and army both ran their own teams, but these played a relatively minor role in the overall strategy until 1955.