Counterinsurgency
Conventional warfare using massive firepower and the failure to implement adequate counterinsurgency had extremely negative effects, which was the strategy that the NVA adeptly used to countering by the protracted political and military warfare model. After the replacement of General William Westmoreland, newer concepts were tried including a revival of earlier COIN strategies including Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Support. The US and its allies later implemented the Phoenix Program, which targeted the Viet Cong political infrastructure through capture, defection or assassination of Viet Cong members. The program was very successful at suppressing Viet Cong political and revolutionary activities.

Malaya: British forces used the relocation method with considerable success during the Malayan Emergency. The Briggs Plan, implemented fully in 1950, relocated Chinese Malayans into protected "New Villages", designated by British forces. By the end of 1951, some 400,000 ethnic Chinese had moved into the fortifications. Of that population, the British forces formed a "Home Guard", an armed resistance against the Malayan Communist Party, an implementation that was later mirrored by the Strategic Hamlet Program, which used by US forces in South Vietnam. Despite British claims of a victory in the Malayan Emergency, the military historian Martin van Creveld noted that the results of the counterinsurgency, the withdrawal of British forces and the establishment of an independent state, are identical to those of Aden, Kenya and Cyprus, which are not considered victories.

Dutch Empire: The Dutch formulated a new strategy of counterinsurgency warfare during the Aceh War by deploying light-armed Marechaussee units and using scorched-earth tactics.
In 1898 Van Heutsz was proclaimed governor of Aceh, and with his lieutenant, who later became Dutch Prime Minister, Hendrikus Colijn, they finally conquered most of Aceh. They followed Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje's suggestions of finding cooperative uleebalang or secular chiefs to support them in the countryside and to isolate the resistance from its rural support base.
During the South Sulawesi Campaign, Captain Raymond Westerling of the KST, Special Forces of the Royal Netherlands East Indies Army used the Westerling Method. Westerling ordered the registration of all Javanese arriving in Makassar because of the large numbers of Javanese participating in the Sulawesi resistance. He also used scouts to infiltrate local villages and to identify members of the resistance.
Based on their information and that of the Dutch military intelligence service, the DST surrounded one of more suspected villages during night and drove the population to a central location. At daybreak, the operation began, often led by Westerling. Men would be separated from women and children. From the information gathered, Westerling exposed certain people as terrorists and murderers, who were shot without any further investigation. Afterwards, Westerling forced local communities to refrain from supporting guerillas by swearing on the Quran, and it established local self-defence units with some members recruited from former guerrillas deemed as "redeemable".
Westerling directed eleven operations throughout the campaign. He succeeded in eliminating the insurgency and undermining local support for the Republicans. His actions restored Dutch rule in southern Sulawesi. However, the Netherlands East Indies government and the Dutch Army command soon realised that Westerling's notoriety led to growing public criticism. In April 1947, the Dutch government instituted an official inquiry of his controversial methods. Westerling was put on the sidelines and was relieved of his duties in November 1948.

France: France had major counterinsurgency wars in its colonies in Indochina and Algeria. McClintock cited the basic points of French doctrine as:

Quadrillage (an administrative grid of population and territory)
Ratissage (cordoning and "raking")
Regroupement (relocating and closely controlling a suspect population)
'Tache d'huile' – The 'oil spot' strategy
Recruitment of local leaders and forces
Paramilitary organization and militias
Much of the thinking was informed by the work of earlier leading French theoreticians of colonial warfare and counterinsurgency, Marshals Bugeaud, Gallieni and Lyautey.
WMcClintock cites the 1894 Algerian governor, Jules Cambon, as saying, "By destroying the administration and local government we were also suppressing our means of action.... The result is that we are today confronted by a sort of human dust on which we have no influence and in which movements take place which are unknown to us". Cambon's philosophy, however, did not seem to survive into the Algerian War of Independence(1954–1962).

Indochina: Post-war doctrine, as in Indochina, took a more drastic view of "Guerre Révolutionnaire", which presented an ideological and global war with a commitment to total war. Countermeasures, in principle, needed to be both political and military: "No measure was too drastic to meet the new threat of revolution". French forces taking control from the Japanese did not seem to negotiate seriously with nationalist elements in what was to become Vietnam, which reaped the consequences of overconfidence at Điện Biên Phủ.
It occurred to various commanders that soldiers who were trained to operate as guerrillas would have a strong sense of how to fight guerrillas. Before the partition of French Indochina, French Groupement de Commandos Mixtes Aéroportés (GCMA), led by Roger Trinquier, took on this role, drawing on French experience with the Jedburgh teams. GCMA, operating in Tonkin and Laos under French intelligence, was complemented by Commandos Nord Viêt-Nam in the North. In those missions, the SOF teams lived and fought with the locals. One Laotian, who became an officer, was Vang Pao, who was to become a general in Hmong and Laotian operations in Southeast Asia while the US forces increased their role.

Algeria: The French counterinsurgency in colonial Algeria was a savage one. The 1957 Battle of Algiers resulted in 24,000 detentions, with most tortured and an estimated 3,000 killed. It may have broken the National Liberation Front infrastructure in Algiers, but it also killed off French legitimacy as far as "hearts and minds" went.
Counterinsurgency requires an extremely capable intelligence infrastructure that is endowed with human sources and deep cultural knowledge. That contributes to the difficulty of foreign, as opposed to indigenous, powers in counterinsurgency operations.
One of France's most influential theorists was Roger Trinquier. The Modern Warfare counterinsurgency strategy, described by Trinquier, who had led anti-communist guerrillas in Indochina, was a strong influence on French efforts in Algeria.
Trinquier suggested three principles:

separate the guerrilla from the population that supports it;
occupy the zones from which the guerrillas previously operated, make the area dangerous for the insurgents and turn the people against the guerrilla movement; and
co-ordinate actions over a wide area and for a long enough time that the guerrilla is denied access to the population centres that could support him.
Trinquier's view was that torture had to be extremely focused and limited, but many French officers considered its use to be corrosive to their own side. There were strong protests among French leaders: the Army's most decorated officer, General Jacques Pâris de Bollardière, confronted General Jacques Massu, the commander of French forces in the Battle of Algiers, over orders institutionalizing torture, as "an unleashing of deplorable instincts which no longer knew any limits". He issued an open letter condemning the danger to the army of the loss of its moral values "under the fallacious pretext of immediate expediency" and was imprisoned for sixty days.
As some of the French Army protested, others increased the intensity of their approach, which led to an attempted military coup against the French Fourth Republic itself. Massu and General Raoul Salan led a 1958 coup in Algiers to demand a new republic under Charles de Gaulle. When de Gaulle's policies toward Algeria, such as a 1961 referendum on Algerian self-determination, did not meet the expectations of the colonial officers, Salan formed the underground Organisation armée secrète (OAS), a right-wing terrorist group, whose actions included a 1962 assassination attempt against de Gaulle himself.

West Africa: France has had taken Barnett's Leviathan role in Chad and Ivory Coast, the latter on two occasions, most significantly in 2002–2003. The situation with France and Ivory Coast is not a classic FID situation, as France attacked Ivorian forces that had provoked UN peacekeepers.
Another noteworthy instance of counterinsurgency in West Africa is the Nigerian Armed Forces experience against the Boko Haram insurgency. Military operations against Boko Haram occur predominantly in the far northeast areas of Nigeria. The operations have been ongoing since June 2011 and have greatly expanded within the Lake Chad Basin sub-region of West Africa.

India: There have been many insurgencies in India since its independence in 1947. The Kashmir insurgency, which started by 1989, was brought under control by the Indian government and violence has been reduced. A branch of the Indian Army, known as the Rashtriya Rifles (RR), was created for the sole purpose of destroying the insurgency in Kashmir, and it has played a major role in doing so.