Strategist Behind War Gains
Today’s edition of The Australian offers up a profile on counterinsurgency expert, and Small Wars Journal contributor, Dr. David Kilcullen — Strategist Behind War Gains by Rebecca Weisser.
… when the invasion of Iraq was being planned, Kilcullen was one of a handful of senior military advisers in the coalition of the —to voice a dissenting view. “I was one of a bunch of people … who said ‘Iraq is going to be a lot harder than you people seem to think, based on 20 years of experience doing it and studying it. It’s going to take a lot more than you seem to be —to commit.”
It was a view that then US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld rejected out of hand, saying Kilcullen didn’t know what he was talking about.
But now, after more than four years of entrenched conflict with no end in sight, Kilcullen’s doctrine of counterinsurgency prevails in Washington and on the ground in Afghanistan and Iraq, where it provided the foundation for the surge strategy the Bush administration says is beginning to succeed.
His no-nonsense guide to fighting insurgents, The 28 Articles: Fundamentals of Company-Level Counterinsurgency, is used by the US, Australian, British, Canadian, Dutch, Iraqi and Afghan armies as a training document.
The fact that Kilcullen turned out to be right did not initially win him and his supporters any friends in Washington. “Because we said something that turned out to be a little prescient, we were on the nose in Washington for a couple of years there. People didn’t want to engage with us because it would be like an admission of failure.”
But after Rumsfeld resigned, Kilcullen’s friend David Petraeus was appointed commander of the multinational force in Iraq. Petraeus and Kilcullen had shared the same views on Iraq since 2003 and Petraeus asked Kilcullen to be his senior adviser.
Kilcullen’s philosophical approach to counterinsurgency overturned the prevailing orthodoxy. The goal was no longer finding and killing the enemy: it became protecting the population that supports the country’s government, winning more and more people to that group and pushing the insurgents to the margins. “If you try to kill the enemy, you end up destroying the haystack to kill the needle,” Kilcullen tells Inquirer. “But you can drive the insurgents away, like combing fleas out of a dog. And then you hard-wire them out of the environment.”
In 2006, Kilcullen started working with Petraeus on a military handbook about a new approach to the war. For reputedly the first time in the US, the military workshopped the handbook with the human rights and legal community, non-government organisations such as aid groups, and diplomats. After six months, in another first, they circulated it among junior officers in the field. The feedback was blunt. Company commanders needed something more practical.
Much more at The Australian…
