David John Kilcullen FRGS (born 1967) is an Australian author, strategist, and counterinsurgency expert and current president of the Cordillera Applications Group. Previously he served as non-executive chairman of Caerus Associates, a strategy and design consulting firm that he founded.
From 2005 to 2006, he was chief strategist in the Office of the Coordinator for Counterterrorism at the U.S. State Department.
Education
Kilcullen graduated from St Pius X College in 1984. He then attended the Australian Defence Force Academy and completed a Bachelor of Arts with honours in military art and science through the University of New South Wales and graduated as a distinguished graduate and was awarded the Chief of Defence Force Army Prize in 1989. He took his army officer training at the Royal Military College, Duntroon. After twelve months of training in Indonesia, Kilcullen graduated from the Australian Defence Force School of Languages
in 1993 with an advanced diploma in applied linguistics. He is fluent in Indonesian and speaks some Arabic and French.
Kilcullen received a Ph.D. in politics from the University of New South Wales at the Australian Defence Force Academy in 2000. His thesis, entitled The Political Consequences of Military Operations in Indonesia 1945–99: A Fieldwork Analysis of the Political Power-Diffusion Effects of Guerrilla Conflict, focused on the effects of guerrilla warfare on Stateless nation political systems in traditional societies. He drew on ethnography to research traditional systems of governance in East Timor and West Papua.
His research centred on investigating diffusion in Indonesia during the Darul Islam Era of 1948 to 1962 and the Indonesian Occupation of East Timor of 1974 to 1999. Kilcullen argues that counter-insurgency operations, whether successful or not, cause the diffusion of political power from central to local leaders and that populations are the major actors in insurgency and counter-insurgency dynamics.
Australian Army
Kilcullen was commissioned as a lieutenant in the
Australian Army and served in a number of operational, strategic, command, and staff positions in the Royal Australian Infantry Corps and Australian Defence Force. He served in several counter-insurgency and
peacekeeping operations in
East Timor, Bougainville, and the
Middle East.
Kilcullen attained the rank of lieutenant colonel in the Australian Army and served as a staff officer in the Australian Defence Force Headquarters. In 2004, he became a senior analyst in the Australian Office of National Assessments, where he served on the writing team for the Australian Government's 2004 Terrorism White Paper, "Transnational Terrorism: The Threat to Australia."
He left active duty in 2005
Career in the United States
Kilcullen was seconded to the United States Department of Defense in 2004, where he wrote the counter-terrorism strategy for the Quadrennial Defense Review that appeared in 2006.
After going to reserve status in the Australian Army, Kilcullen worked for the United States Department of State in 2005 and 2006, serving as the Chief Strategist in the Office of the Coordinator for Counterterrorism.
He worked in the field in
Pakistan,
Afghanistan,
Iraq, the Horn of Africa and
Southeast Asia. He helped design and implement the Regional Strategic Initiative.
Kilcullen helped write the United States Army's Field Manual 3-24, Counterinsurgency, published in December 2006.
In early 2007, Kilcullen became a member of a small group of civilian and military experts, including Colonel H. R. McMaster, who worked on the personal staff of General David Petraeus, the Commander of the Multi-National Force – Iraq.
He has also served as the Special Advisor for Counterinsurgency to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in 2007 and 2008.
Kilcullen was a member of the White House 2008 Review of Afghanistan and Pakistan Strategy. From 2009 to 2010, he was the counterinsurgency adviser to NATO and the International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan. Kilcullen has also been an adviser to the British Government, the Australian Government, and to several private sector institutions and companies.
He was a senior fellow and a member of the advisory board of the Center for a New American Security.
Contributions to counter-insurgency
Complex Warfighting
In 2004, Kilcullen wrote
Complex Warfighting, which became the basis of the Australian Army's Future Land Operating Concept, approved the next year.
It identifies an operating environment heavily influenced by
globalization and the United States' conventional military dominance. The concept claims that future conflicts will feature asymmetric threats requiring land forces to be flexible, able to deploy quickly, and operate in urban terrain. The paper calls for "modular, highly educated and skilled forces with a capacity for network-enabled operations, optimised for
close combat in
combined arms teams. These teams will be small, semi-autonomous, and highly networked, incorporating traditional elements of the combined arms team as well as non-traditional elements such as
civil affairs, intelligence, and psychological warfare capabilities. They will have a capacity for protracted independent operations within a joint interagency framework."
While not strictly limited to counter-insurgency, it stated that counter-insurgency and other non-traditional actions were going to compose a greater part of warfare in the 21st century.
"Countering Global Insurgency"
"Countering Global Insurgency" proposed a new strategic approach to the war on terrorism. It was first published in
Small Wars Journal in 2004
and then a shorter version appeared in the Journal of Strategic Studies in 2005.
The paper argues that
al-Qaeda is best understood as a "global Islamic insurgency" that seeks to promote its
takfiri version of
Islam and increase its role in the world order. Thus, counter-insurgency strategies and tactics need updating to deal with a globalised movement like al-Qaeda, especially increasing participation and cooperation of many states' intelligence and police agencies.
"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:
"Twenty-Eight Articles"
Kilcullen's paper "Twenty-Eight Articles"
is a 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 U.S. Army and
US Marines 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 has been translated into Arabic, Russian, Pashtu and Spanish.
It was later formalised as Appendix A to FM 3-24, the US military's counterinsurgency doctrine, and is in use by the US, Australian,
British army,
Canadian army,
Dutch army,
Iraqi army and
Afghan army armies as a training document.
Conflict ethnography
Kilcullen has argued in most of his works for a deeper cultural understanding of the conflict environment, an approach he has called conflict ethnography: "a deep, situation-specific understanding of the human, social and cultural dimensions of a conflict, understood not by analogy with some other conflict, but in its own terms."
In the same essay, "Religion and Insurgency," published in May 2007 on the Small Wars Journal, he expanded this view:
Counterinsurgency
In 2010, Kilcullen brought together his writings in his book
Counterinsurgency and developed his understanding of counterinsurgency to address radical Islam's globalised threat. He argues that successful counterinsurgency is about out-governing the enemy and winning the adaptation battle to provide integrated measures to defeat insurgent tactics through political, administrative, military, economic, psychological, and informational means.
Positions on American policy
Iraq War
In an interview with
Spencer Ackerman of the
Washington Independent in 2008, Kilcullen called the decision to invade Iraq "fucking stupid" and suggested that if policy-makers apply his 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."
Kilcullen didn't deny saying it, but rather that "I can categorically state that the word 'fucking' was said off the record".
Kilcullen explained his comment the next day:
In his book Blood Year, published in 2016, Kilcullen makes very clear his view that "there undeniably would be no Isis if we had not invaded Iraq." In a March 2016 interview on the UK's Channel 4 News, he went on to say:
Criticizing American policy
On 6 March 2009, Kilcullen published a piece on Small Wars Journal titled "Accidental Guerrilla: Read Before Burning." The piece responded to
Andrew Bacevich's review
of Kilcullen's book,
The Accidental Guerilla: Fighting Small Wars in the Midst of a Big One, and also addressed his criticisms of American administrations. Kilcullen wrote:
Drone use
Kilcullen argues that targeted killings with drone strikes in Afghanistan and Pakistan is a mistake. in 2009 he said: "These strikes are totally counter-productive. It is a strategic error to personalise the conflict in this way, it’ll strengthen the enemy and weaken our friends. How can one expect the civilian population to support us if we kill their families and destroy their homes."
Publications and testimony
Books
See also
-
Counter-insurgency
-
Counter-terrorism
-
Human Terrain System
-
Iraq War troop surge of 2007
External links
