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 theUnited 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 outspoken[citation needed], a trait that has apparently given him significant credibility with senior officials and leaders from both sides of American politics.

Contents

[edit] Brief Biography

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

[edit] Principal Contributions to Counterinsurgency Theory and Practice

[edit] 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.

[edit] Countering Global Insurgency

His 2004 paper "Countering Global Insurgency" proposes a new strategic approach to the global War on Terrorism. The paper argues that the War 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. They use terrorism as their primary, but not their sole tactic. Therefore counterinsurgency rather than traditional counterterrorism may offer the best approach to defeating global jihad. But classical counterinsurgency, as developed in the 1960s, is designed to defeat insurgency in a single country. It demands measures – coordinated political-military response, integrated regional and inter-agency measures, protracted commitment to a course of action – that cannot be achieved at the global level in today’s international system. Therefore a traditional counterinsurgency paradigm will not work for the present War: instead, a fundamental reappraisal of counterinsurgency is needed, to develop methods effective against a globalised insurgency.

Counterinsurgency in its traditional guise is based on systems analysis. But Cartesian systems analysis cannot handle the complexity inherent in counterinsurgency. Fortunately, since the 1960s scientists have developed new approaches to systems analysis, based on the emerging theory of Complexity, which does provide means for handling this complexity. Therefore complex systems analysis of insurgent systems may be the tool needed to develop a fundamentally new version of counterinsurgency for this War.

Applying the branch of complexity theory that deals with organic systems, the paper develops a model of insurgencies as biological systems. This model identifies key system elements and means to attack them. It also allows insights into the systems dynamics of global insurgency, the enabling role of culture in insurgent systems, evolution and adaptation in insurgent groups, insurgent ecosystems, and the nature of the Islamist ‘virtual state’. A historical survey of five previous counterinsurgency campaigns provides a tentative validation of this systems approach. Applying this model generates a new strategy for the War on Terrorism – Disaggregation. Like Containment in the Cold War, a Disaggregation strategy means different things in different theatres or at different times. But it provides a unifying strategic conception for the War. Disaggregation focuses on interdicting links between theatres, denying the ability of regional and global actors to link and exploit local actors, disrupting flows between and within jihad theatres, denying sanctuary areas, isolating Islamists from local populations and disrupting inputs from the sources of Islamism in the greater Middle East.

This gives rise to an operational concept: the aim of counterinsurgency (hence the war aim in this campaign) is to return the insurgency’s parent society to its normal mode of interaction, on terms favourable to us. This demands an understanding of what ‘normality’ is for a given society, and a realisation that military measures only create preconditions for other elements of national power to resolve underlying issues. The systems model also generates practical insights – the need for a common strategic understanding, a constitutional path to address legitimate grievances, understanding of the global insurgent ecosystem and our role in it, a tailored analysis of each insurgency, and improved cultural capability.

[edit] 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.

[edit] 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. The counterinsurgent, not the insurgent, may initiate the conflict and represent the forces of revolutionary change. The economic relationship between insurgent and population may be diametrically opposed to classical theory. And insurgent tactics, based on exploiting the propaganda effects of urban bombing, may invalidate some classical tactics and render others, like patrolling, counterproductive under some circumstances. Thus, field evidence suggests, classical theory is necessary but not sufficient for success against contemporary insurgencies.

[edit] 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 is a distillation of best practices for small-unit counterinsurgency, sequenced in chronological order to assist commanders in preparing for, and carrying out, counter-insurgency operations. 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 U.S. 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 U.S. Army's new counterinsurgency doctrine, and is in use by the U.S., Australian, British, Canadian, Dutch, Iraqi and Afghan Armies as a training document.

[edit] See also

[edit] External links