Robert Grainger Ker Thompson Sir Robert Grainger Ker Thompson KBE CMG DSO MC ( 1916 – 1992 ) was a British military officer and counter - insurgency expert and " He was widely regarded on both sides of the Atlantic as the world ' s leading expert on countering the Mao Tse - tung technique of rural guerrilla insurgency " . Biography . Thompson was the son of Canon W . G . Thompson . He went to Marlborough College and took an MA at Sidney Sussex College , Cambridge . While at Cambridge he joined the University Air Squadron and learnt to fly . He was commissioned into the Royal Air Force Reserve in 1936 . In 1938 he joined the Malayan Civil Service as a cadet . At the start of World War II Thomson joined the RAF , and was serving in Macao when the Japanese attacked . He escaped the Japanese and with a suitcase full of money and a knowledge of Cantonese , he gambled his way across China to Burma . He was a liaison officer with the Chindit in the Burma Campaign , being awarded the DSO and the M . C . ( the latter an unusual army decoration for an RAF officer ) . At the war ' s end he returned to the Malayan civil service , becoming assistant commissioner of labour in the state of Perak in 1946 . After attending the Joint Services Staff College at Latimer and holding the local rank of Lieutenant - Colonel , he was member of the staff of the British director of operations during the Malayan Emergency . He would later say that much of what he had learned about counter insurgency operations was learned while serving under Lieutenant - General Sir Harold Briggs and his replacement General Sir Gerald Templer . In 1959 , ( after Malyan independence ) , Thompson became permanent secretary for defence for Tun Abdul Razak ( who later became Malayan prime minister ) . In response to a request from President Ngo Dinh Diem of South Vietnam , Tunku Abdul Rahman , the Malayan prime minister sent a team to South Vietnam to advise Diem on how to counter his insurgency problems . Thompson headed that team which so impressed Diem that he asked the British to second Thompson to the government South Vietnam as an advisor . In September 1961 the British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan appointed him head of the newly established BRIAM ( British Advisory Mission ) to South Vietnam - and by extension Washington . Thompson conceived of an initiative he called the Delta Plan but when he saw the effects of the strategic hamlets initiative , begun in February 1962 he became an enthusiastic backer , telling President Kennedy in 1963 that he felt the war could be won . Under Thompson ' s leadership BRIAM put economic pressure on the South Vietnamese government that Thompson described as a " straight invitation to a coup " . Kennedy was receptive to Thompson ' s ideas but the American military establishment were extremely reluctant to implement them . His warning not to bomb villages went unheeded and his dismissal of American air supremacy was ignored . " The war [ will ] be won by brains and on foot " , he told Kennedy but competing interests in Washington and Saigon acted to marginalise Thompson and ultimately his strategies had no real effect on the conflict . He stepped down from BRIAM in 1965 and the organisation , deprived of the man who was essentially its raison d ' etre , folded up around him . Despite his relatively acrimonious criticism of United States policy in Vietnam , Thompson returned to a post assisting the American government in 1969 when he became a special advisor on " pacification " to President Nixon . In later life Thompson wrote extensively about the use of commando s and counter - insurgency operations in Asymmetric warfare . Defeating Communist Insurgency : Experiences in Malaya and Vietnam . Certain principles of counter - insurgency warfare are well known since the 1950s and 1960s . The widely distributed and influential work of Sir Robert Thompson offers several such guidelines . Thompson ' s underlying assumption is that of a country minimally committed to the rule of law and better governance . Elements of Thompson ' s moderate approach are adapted here :