I saw (on TV) Kilcullen give a fascinating address at the press club in August 2009, which prompted me to read his book. It was a pretty tough read. In Kilcullen's own words:
This book, like its wars, is a hybrid...perhaps too academic to be popular and too populist to be purely academic.
It definitely errs on the textbook side of things, with very dense text. Having said that, Kilcullen presents a interesting analysis of a number of insurgency-based conflicts, with a focus on Afganistan and Iraq. He analyses the tactics that have been used, their problems, and details why the (mis-named) 'surge' in Iraq was effective due to a switch to a counterinsurgency approach. Kilcullen, an Australian, rose spectacularly to fame to become Petraeus' most senior counterinsurgency advisor in Iraq.
Kilcullen agrees with the Chinese PLA authors of Chao Xian Zhan (Unrestricted Warfare), in that:
Western countries, particularly the United States, had created a trap for themselves by their very dominance of conventional warfare. Confronting the United States in direct conventional combat would indeed be folly, but rather than eschewing conflict, other countries or even nonstate actors could defeat the superpower through ignoring the Western-defined rules of "conventional" war, instead applying what the authors called the "principle of addition": combining direct combat with electronic, diplomatic, cyber, terrorist, proxy, economic, political, and propaganda tools to overload, deceive, and exhaust the US "system of systems."
and
strong countries would not use "unrestricted warfare" against weak countries becuase "strong countries make the rules while rising ones break them and exploit loopholes...[The United States] has to observe its own rules of the whole world will not trust it."
Can the US change how it wages war? Maybe not:
...And because capabilities for irregular or unconventional conflict are much cheaper to acquire than those for conventional conflict...they are paradoxically less likely to be developed...a substantial portion of the American economy, and numerous jobs in almost every congressional district, are linked to the production of conventional war-fighting capacity.
Kilcullen chooses the term takfiri to refer to Islamic terrorists:
The doctrine of takfir disobeys the Qur'anic injunction against compulsion in religion (Surah al-Baqarah: 256) and instead holds that Muslims whose beliefs differ from the takfiri's are infidels who must be killed. Takfirism is a heresy within Islam: it was outlawed in the 2005 Amman Message, an initiative of King Abdullah II of Jordan, which brought together more than 500 'ulema (Islamic scholars) and Muslim political leaders...in an unprecedented consensus agreement...Al Qa'ida is takfiri, and its members are universally so described by other Muslims.
Kilcullen presents four models to represent the current threat environment, which are neither exhaustive or mutually exclusive. They are the 'Globalization Backlash' thesis, the 'Globalized Insurgency' model, the 'Islamic Civil War' theory, and the 'Asymmetric Warfare' model. I won't address them all, but here is a quote on the Islamic Civil War theory:
...the Islamic civil war thesis suggests that the primary threat of takfirism is against stability in the Arab world and the broader Muslim community worldwide, and only secondarily against Western governments and populations. By intervening directly against AQ, this theory suggests, we have not only waded into someone else's domestic dispute but have also treated AQ as a peer competitor worthy of our top priority and full attention, thus immensly increasing AQ's credibility and clout in its struggle for ascendancy over the ummah.
On asymmetric warfare:
the 9/11 Commission estimate that the 9/11 attacks cost AQ between $400,000 and $500,000, plus the cost of training the 19 hijackers in the United States prior to the attack. This would make the 9/11 attacks the most expensive terrorist attack in history. But when one considers that the attacks inflicted a direct cost of $27.2 billion on the United States, and that subsequent operations in the "War on Terrorism" have cost about $700 billion to mid-2008, it is clear that the cost of the attack to America has vastly outweighed its costs to AQ...
the United States has so far spent $1.4 million per dollar of AQ investment in the attacks on the response.
The coalition screwed up in Afganistan by being out-governed by the Taliban at the local level. While the 'international community is training Supreme Court judges and seeking to build an Afgan legal system based on the post-2001 constitution', the Taliban is providing practical dispute resolution and legal services throughout southern Afghanistan, a 'shadow judiciary that expanded Taliban influence by settling disagreements, hearing civil and criminal matters' etc.
Counterinsurgency is all about providing security for the population in their local area, ie. it is population-centric rather than enemy-centric (where enemies are hunted down and killed in sweeping manoeuvres):
the more organized, locally present, and better armed a group is, the more likely it is to be able to enforce a consistent system of rules and sanctions, giving the population the order and predictability it craves...
The idea is to maintain a persistent presence to draw the enemy out of hiding into attacking your defences. This was proven to be much more effective in Iraq during the surge than the previous enemy-centric strategy of search-and-destroy sweeps that killed many civilians and provoked a public backlash.
On page 121 Kilcullen provides a brilliant description of the 'dialogue of the deaf', which perfectly characterised the disconnect between Americans trying to reduce incident numbers as a measure for success for congress, and the Iraqis trying to protect the population.
There is so much quotable in this book I could go on forever, but this is already too long. Needless to say, I found the book very interesting, although I often found myself saying 'well, Duh', because some of the observations and strategies seemed to be common sense. In any case, I'm so glad someone with that common sense is now advising the American military.
A few to end with.
I have shown how most of the adversaries Western powers have been fighting since 9/11 are in fact accidental guerrillas: people who fight us not because they hate the West and seek our overthrow but because we have invaded their space to deal with a small extremist element that has manipulated and exploited local grievances to gain power in their societies.
In terms of strategy, the Iraq example indicates that for us to invade foreign countries with large-scale unilateral military intervention forces simply plays into the AQ exhaustion strategy already described, creates space for the infection of societies by extremism, and prompts contagion to the wider world. (As successive intelligence estimates have shown of Iraq, the conflict has exacerbated extremism worldwide, and as noted actual violence has spilled over into neighboring countries, and further afield, as has radicalization.)
This explains a lot:
Why did most countries (including those who opposed the Iraq war) believe in 2002 that Saddam Hussein's regime had WMDs? Because they were intercepting the regime's communications, and many senior Iraqi regime members believed Iraq had them.
Despite learning a lot from this book I can't give it a high score because it is such a hard read - it is extremely wordy, dense, and has a fair bit of repetition.
2 stars.
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