Strategist Behind War Gains

[G]

Some interesting points about this article:

1. This can be seen as a another article recognising the positive changes in Iraq.
2. "Success has many fathers"
3. Interested to hear from QP's what their take is on the man (is he at all known in US military circles?)
4. Got to hope that the politics allows for us not to suffer "groundhog day" as per the article.

:munchin



http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,22263435-5001561,00.html

Strategist behind war gains
Rebecca Weisser | August 18, 2007

DAVID Kilcullen answers to the most powerful woman in the world: Condoleezza Rice, the US Secretary of State. The Australian counterinsurgency expert is Rice's eyes and ears on the ground in Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, the Horn of Africa and in the corridors of Washington.

But when the invasion of Iraq was being planned, Kilcullen was one of a handful of senior military advisers in the coalition of the willing 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 willing 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.

Kilcullen is one of the most influential Australian military minds of his generation. He grew up on Sydney's north shore, the son of academics. He studied counterinsurgency as a cadet at Duntroon, served for more than 20 years in the Australian Army and was awarded a PhD in political science from the University fo NSW for a thesis on Indonesian insurgent and terrorist groups and counterinsurgency methods. He has been a military adviser to the Indonesian Special Forces in counterinsurgency, taught counterinsurgency tactics at the British School of Infantry, and served in peacekeeping operations in Cyprus and Bougainville. Kilcullen also commanded an Australian infantry company in counterinsurgency operations in East Timor and trained and led East Timorese forces after the independence vote in 1999. He was a special adviser for irregular warfare to the 2005 US Quadrennial Defence Review and is Rice's chief strategist on counterinsurgency and counter-terrorism, working in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq, the Horn of Africa and Southeast Asia.

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."

Kilcullen faced a huge task in changing the mind-set of the entire US military. But he had an unexpected weapon on his side. "The Americans are extremely willing to hear new ideas and are very adaptive when they understand the need for something, but they don't like being lectured. The new counterinsurgency approach was really a Commonwealth approach but they didn't want to get lectured by the Brits. I'd love to think it was my naked raw talent, but I think I've benefited from the novelty factor of not being American and not being British, what I call the Crocodile Dundee factor."

Kilcullen had another ace up his sleeve. "Secretary Rice uses me as eyes and ears to cut through the spin. Part of it is that I'm not political. Not Democrat, not Republican. I have no party affiliation in Australia either, so I don't have to say, 'It's all going very well, Mr President.' I just tell it like it is."

Kilcullen says that the great strength of Americans is that they learn from their mistakes and when they do decide to do something, they make it happen. "It's a self-correcting system. There's been a whole sea change in the way the US army does business. The first year and a half in Iraq, the soldiers on the ground got zero counterinsurgency training. For most of 2005 they got some counterinsurgency training but there was no handbook or doctrine."

[G]

cont....

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.

When a senior defence official stood him up for a meeting, Kilcullen went to the Pentagon cafe and wrote, in half an hour, a series of practical points which he finished at about midnight with a little help from bottle of single-malt scotch. "I didn't actually model it on (T.E.Lawrence's) 27 Articles," one of the classics in training for Middle East warfare, "but it happened to come to 28 (points), so I called it The 28 Articles."

The articles were the first word most soldiers got of a revolution that was to sweep through the US military, transforming the way they would train and fight. They have become the equivalent of the Lonely Planet guide for an infantry fighting asymmetrical battles: a pragmatic, blunt and at times blackly humorous tract that has revolutionised the way the so-called war on terror is being fought. And like Lonely Planet books, the articles are updated.

"They started life as an email that was sent to the junior officers that had asked for advice. Then a few generals found out about them, started sending them out, and within a few days they went viral around the US military, the State Department, the CIA.

"Now we've done a complete review of how we train people, with Afghan and Iraqi villages set up in the desert in the US, manned by actual Afghans and Iraqis, and the objective is not capture the town but keep the town safe. The Iraqis who are there are Iraqi Americans who will sit soldiers down and explain how to get on with an Iraqi leader.

"We have specialised training for intelligence and civil affairs and non-infantry elements. We're also training diplomats, aid workers, medical workers in how to do their job in a counterinsurgency environment. It's beyond the military. We're training and employing people across the whole of government in a new way."

Kilcullen says that one of the movements in the 1980s that revolutionised militaries in the West was that they went from single services that never co-operated to being a joint force that worked together. "Australia was one of the leaders in that and one of the best at getting services that co-operate closely in the field. Now what we're doing is extending that beyond the military to a whole-of-government approach and beyond that to work with NGOs."

Kilcullen says a lot of what the military has learned in Afghanistan and Iraq is applicable to any large government undertaking with a lot of different government and other agencies involved in a complex operation in a hostile or forbidding environment. But it could spread even further. He says counterinsurgency techniques are applicable to a lot of different fields: to business, to counter-terrorism, to aid work.

"After 40 years of struggling with the aid dependency trap we learned that you don't go in there and do it all for them. That builds corruption, it creates dependency and it weakens the people you're trying to help. It's much better to do it on a commercial basis, to give people jobs, don't give them aid."

Kilcullen says everywhere in Iraq and Afghanistan where the techniques have been applied, they have worked. He is confident that the counterinsurgency can stabilise Iraq but he is not confident that it can be done to fit in with a US electoral timetable.

"Throughout history there has never been a counterinsurgency that has succeeded in five years. Ten years is the norm. Difficult ones like Northern Ireland, that had a sectarian dimension, took 30 years."

Kilcullen believes there is a strong moral argument about Iraq that doesn't get talked about enough. "When people feel tired of the war and want to walk away, we have to remember we assumed a responsibility when we invaded Iraq and we can't leave until we can hand over to a stable sovereign government. These people's lives are in our hands now. It's important to realise Iraqis don't want us to leave. They are terrified we are going to leave. If we walk away it will be like Rwanda. And it won't be quick. It will play out on CNN over five years."

Kilcullen says he's been targeted in Iraq as a civilian adviser but he has also been targeted in the US. "There's this war about Iraq going on in Washington. I have been targeted by enemy insurgents but also by the far Right and the far Left in American politics as a bit of a hate figure.

"The far Right thinks I'm too nice to Muslims and that I should be killing more of the enemy and focusing less on the population, and I should be saying up-front Islam is the problem, which is not the case. And the far Left think I'm some sort of Nazi occupation leader locking up Iraqis."

Kilcullen has earned the wrath of some on the Right for daring to suggest that in some ways the enemy may not be so different from us. "If you are a bright, motivated, honourable young man in the Muslim world today, the insurgents or terrorists approach you with a propaganda pitch which says, 'This is a great movement of history. Islam has been suppressed by the West for 600 years. We're putting the band back together.' It's adventure. It's wanting to belong to a group that has high ideals. And if you look into the heart of your own motivation, it's not that different."

He says that's good news. "It often means we can get these guys out of these groups based on showing them al-Qa'ida is not the way to achieve what they want to achieve, that it's taking them on a path to destruction.

"Some on the far Right call me a jihadist lover but I've got a pretty long body count of jihadists that I've either killed or put in jail. These dudes who sit behind desks in Washington, when you've killed half a dozen jihadists you can come and talk to me about not liking jihadists."

It's hard not to think that Kilcullen is a latter-day John Monash, promoted on ability to the highest ranks and bringing about a revolutionary change in tactics that is saving lives and just might win the allies the war. But Kilcullen modestly suggests that while there are parallels with World War I, the transformative moment is still to come. "We are still at the stage of doing things better but we haven't yet made the tactical breakthrough. That's the intellectual challenge for those of us who are involved in this, not day-to-day developments in Iraq."

There is no alternative but to keep going, he says. "Any smart enemy has watched what's happened in Iraq and Afghanistan and they have worked out how to beat the West, so this thing isn't going away. We could leave Iraq tomorrow, but until we demonstrate an ability to win this kind of campaign, any smart enemy is going to adopt these tactics.

"We have got to come up with a solution to this, otherwise its Groundhog Day. We're going to live this day over and over again until we get it right."

[The Reaper]

Good piece.

Thanks, G.

TR

[Five-O]

"After 40 years of struggling with the aid dependency trap we learned that you don't go in there and do it all for them. That builds corruption, it creates dependency and it weakens the people you're trying to help. It's much better to do it on a commercial basis, to give people jobs, don't give them aid."

Wow. This is as true there as it is CONUS. Great article.

[Snaquebite]

Good reading. I saw this yesterday and meant to post. Here's his paper called "28 Articles" "Fundamentals of Company-level Counterinsurgency"

Another good read.

8143

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.

[RTK]

I have met Dr. Kilcullen once and wrote a summary of his 28 Articles through the eyes of a company/troop commander and how we applied the 28 articles at the troop level. Tom Odom wrote along the same vein from the perspective of a FAO. He's a smart guy IMHO and I wish he'd published the 28 Articles about 6 years ago. We may have avoided some of our issues on the conventional side earlier.