Mitigating the Risks of Imported Soldiery: Britain, Dhofaris, and the Early Military of the Emirates

Abstract

Various polities have imported soldiers to compensate for a lack of manpower, to reduce costs, or to avoid the risk of arming potentially disloyal citizenry. However, importing soldiery is not without dangers. Foreign soldiers may carry with them subversive ideas, continue homegrown conflicts in their employer’s territory, be unreliable, or, worse, revolt. How importers of foreign soldiers might mitigate these risks is little studied. This case study reveals the repertoire of measures Britain used to mitigate the risks posed by one group of imported soldiers—the Dhofaris from Oman’s restive southern province who served from the late 1950s to 1973 in the British protected Trucial States, which became the United Arab Emirates in 1971. It concludes that intelligence collection measures were hampered by an inability to penetrate the Dhofaris’s linguistic and sociocultural world, and that threat analysis failed to accurately consider the impact of the conflict in their homeland.