They were a well-trained military force, but people often underestimate the Rhodesian army.

I've written before on this topic elsewhere, and this is what I wrote then:

Just like with everything else when it comes to history, this is not something you could immediately say is false or true. The truth is far more complex than branding the RLI as a sort of counterinsurgency virtuoso force. If you've hung around "military history buffs" or people in general with an interest in modern military history, you've probably heard this claim being done before.

Counterinsurgency is a very misunderstood topic these days. When people think military, they think only of military force and not the fact that when it comes to counterinsurgency, you have to use more than just brute force to win the war. Those that effectively combine social and military means into one strategy are those that win.

Let's dwell deeper into this. The Rhodesians number one priority was the elimination of the guerrillas. This is known as a direct approach, but which means that all the other concepts that are so important, such as winning the hearts and minds of the population etc., are given a second rate role. Even within the armed forces there were classes on 'African customs' given, but the truth is that an understanding was never properly reached and that gap between the white Rhodesians and the black Rhodesian was always present. The Rhodesian Light Infantry was very qualified in its military role. It was trained for COIN missions, it knew exactly what it was doing and the Rhodesian military had great success in military terms with its infamous Fire Force tactics. However, not even that could control the fact that the insurgents constantly grew in size and would soon enough stretch the capability of the Fire Force to deal with all the incidents of guerrilla warfare. The insurgents themselves learned soon enough to adopt tactics to evade Fire Force. In the end, the Rhodesian way of warfare was seen as innovative and hailed as being effective by contemporary voices, but in hindsight, they seemed to only escalate and make an already bad situation even worse. They were true military professionals, but to quote Paul Moorcraft: "But the 'field' in revolutionary warfare is not the same as that in conventional warfare. In a guerrilla war the battlefield is the political loyalty of the mass of the population. The Rhodesians did not develop tactics to win enough battles in that more subtle war."

Like /u/khosikulu pointed out in the same thread, the Rhodesian army even proceeded to expand the conflict into regions surrounding Rhodesia, "helped to poison the region's prosperity for a goddamn generation. They were initially behind RENAMO in Mozambique, they were behind attacks in Zambia, they were peripherally engaged with what was going on in Angola and Botswana with MK. As in South Africa, there was no way to win without giving up the privilege they ostensibly were defending--and that they ended up losing anyhow."