Free shear layers are building blocks of many flows of interest in applications, including jets, cavity flows, and separated flows. It was found several decades ago that free shear layers are unstable to small perturbations over a wide range of frequencies, that they are dominated by coherent large-scale structures (even at high Reynolds numbers), and that the dynamics of these structures dominate important processes: entrainment, mixing, momentum transport, and noise generation. These findings motivated extensive research activities to actively control their development using excitation of instabilities, but early experimental research focused primarily on the control of low-speed, low-Reynolds-number free shear layers. This extensive body of the literature is briefly reviewed. The authors' recent work using localized arc filament plasma actuators in jets shows that free shear layers respond to the excitation over a large range of conditions that have been explored: jet Mach number (up to 1.65), convective Mach number (up to 1), and Reynolds number (up to 1.65 × 10 6). However, the nature of large-scale structures, shear-layer growth rate, and generation of Mach waves all depend on the jet Mach number and compressibility level. The results clearly demonstrate the similarity of instability processes and development of large-scale structures in free shear layers, regardless of the Mach or Reynolds numbers. Nomenclature