Sir Robert Grainger Ker Thompson KBE CMG DSO MC (1916–1992) was a British military officer and counter-insurgency expert who "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".
[1] His 1966 book Defeating Communist Insurgency played an important role in popularizing the "hearts and minds" approach to counterinsurgency.
[1] At the start of World War II, Thomson joined the RAF, and was serving in Macao when the Japanese attacked.
"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.
[8]: 332 Despite his relatively acrimonious criticism of United States policy in Vietnam, Thompson returned to a post assisting the American government in November 1969 when he became a special adviser on "pacification" to President Nixon.
Thompson advised Nixon that the South Vietnamese government was winning the war and would continue to do so unless Vietnamization proceeded too quickly.