Counterinsurgency’s Comeback
Can a colonialist strategy be reinvented?
Nasser Hussain
Boston Review
No one embodies the rising fortunes of counterinsurgency better than David Kilcullen. A political anthropologist with the Australian army, Kilcullen spent the 1990s at the Land Warfare Studies Centre in Duntroon, Australia finishing a doctoral dissertation on insurgency in Indonesia. At the time, counterinsurgency was largely relegated to military history after its heyday in the 1950s and ’60s, when it served as the imperial response to wars of national liberation and communist insurgencies.
Then came 9/11. By 2005 Kilcullen was in the Pentagon, collaborating on the Quadrennial Defense Review. He later became a special advisor to Condoleezza Rice.
Around the same time, General David Petraeus returned from Iraq, where the Americans were floundering in the face of a growing insurgency. Part of the problem, Petraeus later wrote, was that the U.S. Army had not produced a counterinsurgency manual for twenty years, leaving a doctrinal and instructional vacuum. So a group came together to rapidly compile what would become The U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual. One of the leading contributors, John Nagl, is president of the Center for a New American Security—a think tank with considerable leverage in the Obama administration—where Kilcullen was a senior fellow. Kilcullen’s theories were prominent in the new Field Manual, and he was appointed Senior Counterinsurgency Advisor to General Petraeus during the 2007 Surge. The Field Manual has since acquired an almost iconic status, and Kilcullen has continued his work on counterinsurgency with his own book, The Accidental Guerrilla: Fighting Small Wars in the Midst of a Big One.
Although the Field Manual and Kilcullen’s book are different creatures—one is an instruction manual for commanders; the other combines instruction with memoir—together they provide valuable insight into the theoretical assumptions and operational practices that have transformed America’s war on terrorism.
(Continued here.)
Nasser Hussain
Boston Review
No one embodies the rising fortunes of counterinsurgency better than David Kilcullen. A political anthropologist with the Australian army, Kilcullen spent the 1990s at the Land Warfare Studies Centre in Duntroon, Australia finishing a doctoral dissertation on insurgency in Indonesia. At the time, counterinsurgency was largely relegated to military history after its heyday in the 1950s and ’60s, when it served as the imperial response to wars of national liberation and communist insurgencies.
Then came 9/11. By 2005 Kilcullen was in the Pentagon, collaborating on the Quadrennial Defense Review. He later became a special advisor to Condoleezza Rice.
Around the same time, General David Petraeus returned from Iraq, where the Americans were floundering in the face of a growing insurgency. Part of the problem, Petraeus later wrote, was that the U.S. Army had not produced a counterinsurgency manual for twenty years, leaving a doctrinal and instructional vacuum. So a group came together to rapidly compile what would become The U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual. One of the leading contributors, John Nagl, is president of the Center for a New American Security—a think tank with considerable leverage in the Obama administration—where Kilcullen was a senior fellow. Kilcullen’s theories were prominent in the new Field Manual, and he was appointed Senior Counterinsurgency Advisor to General Petraeus during the 2007 Surge. The Field Manual has since acquired an almost iconic status, and Kilcullen has continued his work on counterinsurgency with his own book, The Accidental Guerrilla: Fighting Small Wars in the Midst of a Big One.
Although the Field Manual and Kilcullen’s book are different creatures—one is an instruction manual for commanders; the other combines instruction with memoir—together they provide valuable insight into the theoretical assumptions and operational practices that have transformed America’s war on terrorism.
(Continued here.)
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