Ulsterisation

The name of the policy comes from a similar US strategy towards the end of the Vietnam War called "Vietnamization". The move to locally based policing followed the Hunt Report, published on 3 October 1969. This recommended a complete reorganisation of the Royal Ulster Constabulary, with the aim of both modernising the force and bringing it into line with the other police forces in the UK. In 1970, Lord Carrington also warned that British Army expenditures in Northern Ireland were unacceptably high; throughout the 1970s, military leadership stressed the need to focus on confronting the Red Army on the North German Plain, rather than on fighting in Northern Ireland. ==Implementation==

Ulsterisation included various attempts to reform views of the RUC, whose reputation had suffered from its involvement in the 1969 Northern Ireland riots, which was seen as biased by Northern Ireland civil rights movement campaigners. Under Labour's first Secretary of State for Northern Ireland Merlyn Rees, increases in the proportion of police and army recruits from Northern Ireland into the UDR continued until the signing of the Anglo-Irish Agreement in 1985. they produced the often controversial strategies of "criminalisation" and Ulsterisation. These policies would later be extended by Roy Mason, and would include the use of the Special Air Service on the Irish border. ==Result==

Ulsterisation brought about striking changes in the casualty patterns, with military/police casualties from Northern Ireland exceeding those from Britain for the rest of the conflict, reversing the previous pattern. A related strategy, 'Criminalisation', was meant to alter perceptions of the conflict from a colonial war to that of a campaign against criminal gangs. It was judged that the political impact in Britain of killings of British soldiers by the Provisional Irish Republican Army was greater than the deaths of local security forces members. The drop in the number of non-UDR British Army casualties by 1976 helped prevent any build-up of sentiment in Britain for a withdrawal from Northern Ireland. ==References==