David Kilcullen

When Americans think of modern warfare, what comes to mind is the US army skirmishing with terrorists and insurgents in the mountains of Afghanistan. But the face of global conflict is ever-changing. In Out of the Mountains, David Kilcullen, one of the world's leading experts on current and future conflict, offers a groundbreaking look at what may happen after today's wars end. This is a book about future conflicts and future cities, and about the challenges and opportunities that four powerful megatrends--population, urbanization, coastal settlement, and connectedness--are creating across the planet. And it is about what cities, communities and businesses can do to prepare for a future in which all aspects of human society--including, but not limited to, conflict, crime and violence--are changing at an unprecedented pace. Kilcullen argues that conflict is increasingly likely to occur in sprawling coastal cities, in peri-urban slum settlements that are enveloping many regions of the Middle East, Africa, Latin America and Asia, and in highly connected, electronically networked settings. He suggests that cities, rather than countries, are the critical unit of analysis for future conflict and that resiliency, not stability, will be the key objective. Ranging across the globe--from Kingston to Mogadishu to Lagos to Benghazi to Mumbai--he offers a unified theory of "competitive control" that explains how non-state armed groups such as drug cartels, street gangs, and warlords draw their strength from local populations, providing useful ideas for dealing with these groups and with diffuse social conflicts in general. His extensive fieldwork on the ground in a series of urban conflicts suggests that there will be no military solution for many of the struggles we will face in the future. We will need to involve local people deeply to address problems that neither outsiders nor locals alone can solve, drawing on the insight only locals can bring, together with outsider knowledge from fields like urban planning, systems engineering, renewable energy, conflict resolution and mediation. This deeply researched and compellingly argued book provides an invaluable roadmap to a future that will increasingly be crowded, urban, coastal, connected--and dangerous.

The Coming Age of the Urban Guerrilla

Out of the Mountains

2014 has the potential to go down as a crucial year in modern world history. A resurgent and bellicose Russia took over Crimea and fueled a civil war in Eastern Ukraine. Post-Saddam Iraq, in many respects a creature of the United States because of the war that began in 2003, lost a third of its territory to an army of hyper-violent millennialists. The peace process in Israel seemed to completely collapse. Finally, after coalescing in Syria as a territorial entity, the Islamic State swept into northern Iraq and through northeastern Syria, attracting legions of recruits from Europe and the Middle East. In short, the post-Cold War security order that the US had constructed after 1991 seemed to be coming apart at the seams. David Kilcullen was one of the architects of America's strategy in the late phases of the second Gulf War, and also spent time in Afghanistan and other hotspots. In Blood Year, he provides a wide-angle view of the current situation in the Middle East and analyzes how America and the West ended up in such dire circumstances. Whereas in 2008 it appeared that the U.S. might pull a modest stalemate from the jaws of defeat in Iraq, six years later the situation had reversed. After America pulled out of Iraq completely in 2011, the Shi'ite president cut Sunnis out of the power structure and allowed Iranian influence to grow. And from the debris of Assad's Syria arose an extremist Sunni organization even more radical than Al Qaeda. Unlike Al Qaeda, ISIS was intent on establishing its own state, and within a remarkably short time they did. Interestingly, Kilcullen highlights how embittered former Iraqi Ba'athist military officers were key contributors to ISIS's military successes. Kilcullen lays much of the blame on Bush's initial decision to invade Iraq (which had negative secondary effects in Afghanistan), but also takes Obama to task for simply withdrawing and adopting a "leading from behind" strategy. As events have proven, Kilcullen contends, withdrawal was a fundamentally misguided plan. The U.S. had uncorked the genie, and it had a responsibility to at least attempt to keep it under control. Instead, the U.S. is at a point where administration officials state that the losses of Ramadi and Palmyra are manageable setbacks. Kilcullen argues that the U.S. needs to re-engage in the region, whether it wants to or not, because it is largely responsible for the situation that is now unfolding. Blood Year is an essential read for anyone interested in understanding not only why the region that the U.S. invaded a dozen years ago has collapsed into utter chaos, but also what it can do to alleviate the grim situation.

The Unraveling of Western Counterterrorism

Blood Year

fighting small wars in the midst of a big one

The accidental guerrilla

A counterinsurgency advisor to General David Petraeus and the author of The Accidental Guerrilla collects his best writings on counterinsurgency and the global war on terror, including his "Twenty-Eight Articles," his 10-point plan for "the Surge" in Iraq, his frank assessment of the challenges in Afghanistan and much more. Original.

Counterinsurgency

Just a few years ago, people spoke of the US as a hyperpower-a titan stalking the world stage with more relative power than any empire in history. Yet as early as 1993, newly-appointed CIA director James Woolsey pointed out that although Western powers had "slain a large dragon" by defeating the Soviet Union in the Cold War, they now faced a "bewildering variety of poisonous snakes." In The Dragons and the Snakes, the eminent soldier-scholar David Kilcullen asks how, and what, opponents of the West have learned during the last quarter-century of conflict. Applying a combination of evolutionary theory and detailed field observation, he explains what happened to the "snakes"-non-state threats including terrorists and guerrillas-and the "dragons"-state-based competitors such as Russia and China. He explores how enemies learn under conditions of conflict, and examines how Western dominance over a very particular, narrowly-defined form of warfare since the Cold War has created a fitness landscape that forces adversaries to adapt in ways that present serious new challenges to America and its allies. Within the world's contemporary conflict zones, Kilcullen argues, state and non-state threats have increasingly come to resemble each other, with states adopting non-state techniques and non-state actors now able to access levels of precision and lethal weapon systems once only available to governments. A counterintuitive look at this new, vastly more complex environment, The Dragons and the Snakes will not only reshape our understanding of the West's enemies' capabilities, but will also show how we can respond given the increasing limits on US power.

How the Rest Learned to Fight the West

The Dragons and the Snakes

Greg Mills

'These things happened. They were glorious and they changed the world,' said Charlie Wilson of America's role in supporting the mujahideen against the Soviet Union. 'And then we fucked up the endgame.' The scandal-prone US Congressman lamented the absence of support for Afghanistan after that war, a vacuum which the Taliban and Osama bin Laden would fill. The Ledger identifies and assesses the failures of the West's approach to Afghanistan after 9/11 - military, diplomatic, political and developmental. For Afghans, the war is not over because the West has declared it so, and neither will its geo-political effects simply disappear along with the last of NATO forces. Afghanistan remains connected to the world through communications and the networks of the last twenty years. The Ledger also considers these lessons for the benefit of future, similar peacebuilding missions in Africa and elsewhere. Dr David Kilcullen and Dr Greg Mills are uniquely placed to reflect backwards and forwards on the Afghan conflict, having worked with the international mission as advisers and within the Arg. Both have considerable experience of counter-insurgency and stability operations elsewhere, in Latin America, Asia and across Africa. There is plenty of blame to go around, as this book shows, in the attempts to bring peace to Afghanistan after 9/11. The signs of the collapse had been there for a long-time, mostly conveniently ignored as they were ill-suited to the political narrative of 'we're making progress' and then, as the deadline drew closer, 'mission accomplished'. In understanding why and where the failure took place, The Ledger warns against the eternal human curse in believing that we can be an exception to all that precedes us. Whatever the desire to avoid future military and diplomatic 'quagmires', the reality is that politicians will not always follow that advice, nor can these crises always be avoided.

Accounting for Failure in Afghanistan

The Ledger

Last year was a “blood year” in the Middle East – massacres and beheadings, fallen cities, collapsed and collapsing states, the unravelling of a decade of Western strategy. We saw the rise of ISIS, the splintering of government in Iraq, and foreign fighters – many from Europe, Australia and Africa – flowing into Syria at a rate ten times that during the height of the Iraq War. What went wrong? In Blood Year, David Kilcullen calls on twenty-five years’ experience to answer that question. This is a vivid, urgent account of the War on Terror by someone who helped shape its strategy, as well as witnessing its evolution on the ground. Kilcullen looks to strategy and history to make sense of the crisis. What are the roots and causes of the global jihad movement? What is ISIS? What threats does it pose to Australia? What does its rise say about the effectiveness of the War on Terror since 9/11, and what does a coherent strategy look like after a disastrous year? “As things stand in mid-2015, Western countries . . . face a larger, more unified, capable, experienced and savage enemy, in a less stable, more fragmented region. It isn’t just ISIS – al-Qaeda has emerged from its eclipse and is back in the game in Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Syria and Yemen. We’re dealing with not one, but two global terrorist organisations, each with its own regional branches, plus a vastly larger radicalised population at home and a massive flow of foreign fighters.” —David Kilcullen, Blood Year Winner of the 2015 Walkley Award for best long feature writing.

Terror and the Islamic State

Quarterly Essay 58 Blood Year

Trent Dalton

Margaret Simons

Patrick Carlyon

Kate Legge

Dave Tacon

Paul Toohey

Walkey Longreads 2015

David Spencer

Dickie Davis

No country has managed as rapid and positive a turnaround in governance and security conditions this century than Colombia. In 1999, rebels of the FARC and ELN were, literally, at the gates of Bogota, Colombian known more for rapacious corruption, weak government, drug smuggling and criminality, a country synonymous with the antics of Pablo Escobar. Fifteen years later the guerrillas and the government are at the peace table in Havana, the economy has been a top performer in Latin America, and drugs are no longer the pervasive scourge they once were. To date, however, there has been no comprehensive examination of the different elements employed by government to combat the guerrillas, to win local and international political and military support, extend government authority to the 75 percent of the countryside where it was seldom felt, and to turn the Colombian economy into a success resembling the high-growth examples of Southeast Asia. How the Colombians did all of this is the subject of this book by four international specialists with untrammelled policy and practical expertise in counter-insurgency campaigns in Colombia and elsewhere, bringing a unique comparative perspective. Based on field-work in Colombia's regions, the study provides a history to the conflict, compares it to other historical and contemporary case-studies, examines the war from the perspective of the government and the guerrilla, delves into the development of special Colombian capabilities notably in intelligence and the use of airpower and special forces, and explains the economic dimension in terms both of historical exclusion and ongoing attempts at growth and inclusion. Finally, it concludes with an assessment on the country's prospects: can the combination of improved security, a flourishing economy and the peace process offer an opportunity to finally translate Colombia from, in Gabriel Garcia Marquez's words, 'a great perhaps' into something more permanent?

Colombia: Conflict and Divergence

A Great Perhaps?

Islamic State and the Failures of the War on Terror

'These things happened. They were glorious and they changed the world,' said Charlie Wilson, of America's role backing the anti-Soviet mujahideen. 'And then we fucked up the endgame.' With no support for Afghanistan after that war, the vacuum was filled by the Taliban and bin Laden. The Ledger assesses the West's similarly failed approach to Afghanistan after 9/11-in military, diplomatic, political and developmental terms. Dr David Kilcullen and Dr Greg Mills are uniquely placed to reflect backwards and forwards on the Afghan conflict: they worked with the international mission both as advisers and within the Arg, and they have considerable experience of counterinsurgency and stabilization operations elsewhere in the world. Here these two experts show that there is plenty of blame to go around when explaining the failure to bring peace to Afghanistan after 9/11. The signs of collapse were conveniently ignored, in favor of political narratives of progress and success. Yet for Afghans, the war and its geopolitical effects are not over because NATO is gone-Afghanistan remains globally connected through digital communications and networks. This vital book explains why and where failings in Afghanistan happened, warning against exceptionalist approaches to future peacebuilding missions around the globe.

A Senior Counterinsurgency Advisor to General David Petraeus, Kilcullen's vision of war dramatically influenced America's decision to rethink its military strategy in Iraq. Now, Kilcullen provides a remarkably fresh perspective on the War on Terror.

David Kilcullen

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