Meet An Urban Planner For Cities That Don’t Yet Exist
07.30.2012 at 12:55am
"Let’s Map Who Owes The Local Warlord Money": Meet An Urban Planner For Cities That Don't Yet Exist by David Holmes, Fast Company.
After 25 years in the military, Dr. David Kilcullen needed a change. So he started Caerus Associates, which is "two-thirds tech, one-third social science, with a dash of special operations." Now he's helping solve land disputes in Monrovia, and creating crime maps in Lagos.
Quants without strategy and provided in an unlimited and unconstrained fiscal post-Keynesian style often result in bridges to nowhere.
Bill M,
“how am I seeing it?”
Outside of profit, devoid of any consequence.
A bridge to nowhere.
Like Bill M I too had to look up Quant, as I got it confused with that scene from White Men Cant Jump where Billy’s girlfriend is on jeopardy and her answer to one of the problems was “what is a “quince.”
Anyway and seriously, I am with Mike and I see his points.
I also ask what has happened to Kilcullen and his whole Coin thing? I mean his last book was titled “Counterinsurgency.” Now he has moved on to, as Mike characterizes it as a “Quant” thing?
Kilcullen’s path is strikingly similar in some ways to Galula’s in the early 60s: they are both smart opportunists and once the Coin well dried up they moved on to bigger and better things. But look what is left in the former’s wake: a broken strategy in Afghanistan with wasted blood and treasure but a strategy built on the myth that Coin and its experts made it work in Iraq (Kilcullen actually says this in his book AG)and then that very template was applied directly to Afghanistan. Shoot, it is no wonder that Kilcullen was a member of Coin central at CNAS and just a few doors down from him was Exum who stridently recommended Coin Surge version 2 in Afghanistan in late 2009.
Mike, you are right there is no accountability with the quants, but neither was there accountability before when the thing was coin.
gian
While trying to find information about 1982’s “Operation Peace for Galillee” based on the Hezbollah article, I found this past gem:
http://smallwarsjournal.com/documents/urbancasestudies.pdf
The urban warfare lessons of Lebanon (if not the overreaching occupation) stand in stark contrast with the Russian fiasco in Grozny and Chechnya.
Both, and operations in Iraq and Afghanistan show that whether or not we want to fight and stabilize adjacent to the population, it will occur. Military forces can either make a mess of it and level the city like Grozny, or they can show restraint. According to the link, at one point, over 4,000 artillery rounds per hour were raining down on Grozny, which kind of makes a mockery of the disruptive power of 1500 tactical ballistic and cruise missiles thwarting our access in the Pacific.
Will COIN and well-executed Stability Ops win hearts and minds? We certainly know from the Lebanon and Chechnya examples that failure to make some attempt at reaching the affected population will have deleterious effects. We also note successful COIN employment by Hezbollah to win acceptance in Lebanon.
To me, it’s also mind-boggling that some can’t appear to do the math when it comes to the surge and manning these wars. If you have countries the size of Texas, it’s common sense that more troops and more dispersion of those troops controls a broader area. In the insurgency stage, many key areas the insurgent seeks to influence are populated. Do we ignore those towns and villages and instead waste resources searching uninhabited areas with complex terrain better understood by the insurgent? How did that work for us in Vietnam?
When we look at the efforts of well-intentioned but undercommitted allies like Canada and Great Britain, we often see that they simply lacked the manpower and other helicopter and armor assets to seize and hold areas like Kandahar, the Arghandab, Sangin, Kajaki Dam, and Basra. Replace those forces with better-resourced and manned U.S. forces, and effectiveness immediately increased.
Others seem to cling to counterfactuals that if we had simply left Iraq and Afghanistan after we broke it, that peace and prosperity would have been forthcoming on its own. The Taliban that fled to Pakistan would have remained there. Al Qaeda would have thrown up its hands saying, guess those U.S. bombs and ground power showed us and it’s time to surrender. State department and USAID elements would have flocked into country and turned everything around, venturing into the countryside and urban areas without any protection.
Such speculation, along with believing that just special ops and airpower alone would have fixed Afghanistan, are contrary to common sense. If insurgents can return from cross-border sanctuaries to hug populations in an area the size of Texas, and 100,000+ ISAF forces can barely contain it, how could 10,000 SOF and airpower? It appears essential to employ military power to perform wide area security and at least limited “build” or “restore” of areas affected by war. Am I wrong?
Gian,
I see you write this same argument in forum after forum, as if there should be some kind of truth commission to haul all the academic proponents of counterinsurgency in front of where they can admit their past mistakes and depart from them forever.
But I believe you are missing the mark. We’re ‘stuck with the strategy’ in Afghanistan because the President and nearly all of his closest, most influential advisers believed in it and recommended it to him, he chose to listen to them instead of the critics of the strategy (and there were critics) and he ultimately ordered the government to implement it. You give Exum, et al too much credit for President Obama’s adoption of his strategy in Afghanistan; most people cannot even spell CNAS, even in the Pentagon.
Moreover, what the military and various agencies did/are doing on the ground vice what Exum, et al advocated ( at the tactical, operational, and policy level are vastly different than what was/is being implemented, in this author’s humble opinion. We’re on our third Ambassador, and what, the fourth ISAF commander now, not to mention the 7-8 times that other flag level headquarters and senior state/agency personnel rotated in once and out forever, so it might be a lengthy process to structure an argument here, save for the fact that continuity in Afghanistan for American government personnel is a challenge.
And why would Think Tanks and academics at this point NOT move on from COIN? The US is not ‘stuck’ in Afghanistan, it is ‘winding down the war responsibly’. Why write about something that the current administration, and presumably its opponent, care little to nothing about, and there is no appetite for in Afghanistan and elsewhere? And how many books are you going to write about the folly of COIN before you move onto something different, like the History of MILES Gear or something? Hopefully no more than three or four.
Could we say that Kilcullen is still working in the same general field that he was involved in previously, to wit: “tackling international development challenges?”
Dave Dilegge,
Since you minimized my last comments as drive by one-liners and personal attacks b/c you did not comprehend what I was stating, I’ll reply in full.
First, Dave Kilcullen is the CEO of Caerus Associates, a for profit strategy and design firm. Emphasis on for profit, hence the quip on beltway bandits that Dr. Kilcullen skirted.
Currently, Kilcullen runs a consulting firm that relies on government and non-government contracts to compete. As a for-profit industry, the mission is to make money and convince folks to give him money.
Second, Kilcullen states that he’s “two-thirds tech, one-third social science, with a dash of special operations.”
This is quants theory, unproven data gathering and analysis, based on the Keynesian Model. In the post-WWII and post-Cold War Model, the results have been mixed. Particularly when intermixed with external “consulting” or intervention.
For a footnote, the Army and Military conduct the same research in the OR TRAC programs and the social scientists of the CORE program.
Third, the secondary and tertiary results from any intervention are often much worse than expected.
Thus, it becomes a bridge to nowhere until that bridge is proven to lead somewhere.
I actually like Kilcullen. I was just disappointed that he was not truthful in his intent to make a lot of money while trying to change the world.
In the discouraging of analogies, his methodology is intervening in the Banana Wars to build roads and bridges that do not ultimately provide provide profits from the production and distribution of bananas to the sea.