David Kilcullen
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David Kilcullen, Ph.D. (born 1967) is a leading contemporary practitioner and theorist of counterinsurgency and "counterterrorism". A former Australian Army officer, he left that army as a lieutenant colonel in 2005 and now works for the United States State Department. He is currently serving as the special adviser for counterinsurgency to the United States Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice. During 2007 he served in Iraq as Senior Counterinsurgency Adviser, Multi-National Force - Iraq, a civilian position on the personal staff of US army General David Howell Petraeus, responsible for planning and executing the 2007-8 Joint Campaign Plan, which drove the Iraq War troop surge of 2007.

Kilcullen has a doctorate in politics from the University of New South Wales, focusing on the effects of guerrilla warfare on non-state political systems in traditional societies. His thesis[1] applied ethnographic fieldwork methods and involved extended residential fieldwork that focused on the political power-diffusion effects of successful and failed counter-insurgency operations on traditional societies in Indonesia and East Timor. He has served in several counterinsurgency and guerrilla warfare campaigns in Southeast Asia and the Middle East, as well as in peacekeeping and peace enforcement operations.

While at the US State Department in 2005-6 he served as Chief Strategist in the Office of the Coordinator for Counterterrorism, and has worked in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq, the Horn of Africa and Southeast Asia. He has also written several very influential papers on the Iraqi insurgency after the fall of Saddam Hussein.

He is one of a group of highly educated, combat-experienced, civilian specialists and military officers, including Colonel H.R. McMaster and others, who were seconded in late 2006 to the personal staff of General Petraeus, to oversee the specialized counterinsurgency aspects of the Iraq campaign in 2007. He previously contributed to the new United States Counterinsurgency Field Manual FM 3-24, published in December 2006, of which he authored a chapter entitled "A Guide to Action".

Dr Kilcullen is also an advisor to the United States, British and Australian governments and several private sector institutions, on "counter-terrorism" and counter-insurgency issues. He is reputed to be independent, non-political and outspokencitation needed, a trait that has apparently given him significant credibility with senior officials and leaders from both sides of American politics.

Contents

Brief Biography

The first published edition of Kilcullen's paper "Twenty-Eight Articles: Fundamentals of Company-Level Counterinsurgency"[2] includes a short biography.

Principal Contributions to Counterinsurgency Theory and Practice

Complex Warfighting

Kilcullen's 2003 paper Complex Warfighting formed the basis for the Australian Army's future land operational concept, officially approved in 2005. It identifies the key drivers of modern conflict as globalization and anti-globalisation, and US conventional military dominance (which forces all potential opponents to adopt unconventional approaches). The paper describes the land conflict environment as being driven by four key factors: complexity, diversity, diffusion and lethality. The paper analyses the environment of contemporary conflict, in order to determine how land forces (the army and those elements of the navy and air force that support land operations) must operate in order to succeed in this environment. The paper identifies the contemporary conflict environment as complex, diverse, diffuse and highly lethal.

Countering "Global Insurgency"

His 2004 paper "Countering Global Insurgency" proposed a new strategic approach to the global "War on Terrorism". The paper argues that the strategy is best understood as a "global Islamic insurgency", initiated by a diffuse grouping of Islamist movements that seek to re-make Islam’s role in the world order.

Conflict Ethnography

Kilcullen has argued in most of his works for a deeper cultural and linguistic understanding of the conflict environment, an approach he has recently begun calling "conflict ethnography". In May 2007 on the Small Wars Journal website he argued that:

The bottom line is that no handbook relieves a professional counterinsurgent from the personal obligation to study, internalize and interpret the physical, human, informational and ideological setting in which the conflict takes place. Conflict ethnography is key; to borrow a literary term, there is no substitute for a “close reading” of the environment. But it is a reading that resides in no book, but around you; in the terrain, the people, their social and cultural institutions, the way they act and think. You have to be a participant observer. And the key is to see beyond the surface differences between our societies and these environments (of which religious orientation is one key element) to the deeper social and cultural drivers of conflict, drivers that locals would understand on their own terms.

Counterinsurgency Redux

Kilcullen’s 2006 paper, “Counterinsurgency Redux”, questions the relevance of classical counterinsurgency theory to modern conflict. It argues from field evidence gathered in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and the Horn of Africa that:

…today’s insurgencies differ significantly from those of the 1960s. Insurgents may not be seeking to overthrow the state, may have no coherent strategy or may pursue a faith-based approach difficult to counter with traditional methods. There may be numerous competing insurgencies in one theatre, meaning that the counter-insurgent must control the overall environment rather than defeat a specific enemy. The actions of individuals and the propaganda effect of a subjective ‘single narrative’ may far outweigh practical progress, rendering counter-insurgency even more non-linear and unpredictable.

Twenty-Eight Articles

Dr Kilcullen's most widely-read paper, "Twenty-Eight Articles" is a concise practical guide for junior officers and non-commissioned officers engaged in counter-insurgency operations in Afghanistan and Iraq. The paper's publication history is an illustration of new methods of knowledge propagation in the military-professional community. It first appeared as an e-mail that was widely circulated informally, among US Army and Marine officers in April 2006, and was subsequently published in Military Review in May 2006. Later versions of it were published in IoSphere and the Marine Corps Gazette, and it was translated into Arabic and Spanish by the editors of Military Review. It was later formalized as Annex A to FM 3-24, the US Army's new counterinsurgency doctrine, and is in use by the US, Australian, British, Canadian, Dutch, Iraqi and Afghan armies as a training document.

Iraq Invasion Was F*cking Stupid

According to the Washington Independent, David Kilcullen, who helped General Petraeus design his 2007 counterinsurgency strategy in Iraq, bluntly called the decision to invade Iraq "stupid" -- in fact, he said "fucking stupid" -- and suggested that if policy-makers apply the manual's lessons, similar wars can be avoided in the future. "The biggest stupid idea," Kilcullen said, "was to invade Iraq in the first place." However, Kilcullen explained his comment the very next day this way:

Spencer Ackerman, in yesterday’s Washington Independent, claims I told him the Iraq war was “f*cking stupid”. He did not seek to clear that quote with me, and I would not have approved it if he had. If he HAD sought a formal comment, I would have told him what I have said publicly before: in my view, the decision to invade Iraq in 2003 was an extremely serious strategic error. But the task of the moment is not to cry over spilt milk, rather to help clean it up: a task in which the surge, the comprehensive counterinsurgency approach, and our troops on the ground are admirably succeeding. Anyone who knows me has been well aware of my position on Iraq for years. When I went to Iraq in 2007 (and on both previous occasions) it was to end the war, by suppressing the violence and defeating the insurgency. (Note: I said END the war, not abandon it half-way through, leaving the Iraqis to be slaughtered. When we invaded Iraq, we took on a moral and legal responsibility for its people’s wellbeing. Regardless of anyone’s position on the decision to invade, those obligations still stand and cannot be wished away merely because they have proven inconvenient)...The question of whether we were right to invade Iraq is a fascinating debate for historians and politicians, and a valid issue for the American people to consider in an election year. As it happens, I think it was a mistake. But that is not my key concern. The issue for practitioners in the field is not to second-guess a decision from six years ago, but to get on with the job at hand which, I believe, is what both Americans and Iraqis expect of us. In that respect, the new strategy and tactics implemented in 2007, and which relied for their effectiveness on the extra troop numbers of the Surge, ARE succeeding and need to be supported.[1]

See also

External links
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