Out of the Mountains

Scribe Publications
OUT OF THE MOUNTAINS

David Kilcullen is one of the world's foremost thinkers on counterinsurgency and military strategy. He served 24 years as a soldier, diplomat, and policy adviser for the Australian and United States governments, and he held the position of senior counterinsurgency adviser to General David Petraeus in Iraq and to the NATO Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan. He is currently the chief executive officer of Caerus Associates, a Washington-based strategy and design firm. His books include
The Accidental Guerilla
, which was a
Washington Post
bestseller, and
Counterinsurgency
.

Scribe Publications Pty Ltd

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Published by Scribe 2013
This edition published by arrangement with C. Hurst & Co. (Publishers) Ltd.

Copyright © David Kilcullen 2013

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National Library of Australia
Cataloguing-in-Publication data

Kilcullen, David, author.

Out of the Mountains: the coming age of the urban guerrilla / David Kilcullen.

9781922070678 (paperback)
9781922072658 (e-book)

1. Insurgency. 2. Guerrilla warfare. 3. Asymmetric warfare. 4. Counterinsurgency. 5. Terrorism. 6. Subversive activities.

355.0218

scribepublications.com.au
scribepublications.co.uk

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction:
Ambush in Afghanistan

1.
Out of the Mountains

2.
Future Cities, Future Threats

3.
The Theory of Competitive Control

4.
Conflict in Connected Cities

5.
Crowded, Complex, and Coastal

Appendix:
On War in the Urban, Networked Littoral

Notes

Acknowledgments

I called this
book
Out of the Mountains
, but I might just as easily have called it
Back to the Future
, since the issues I examine here—centered on conflict in the urbanized, networked littorals of an increasingly crowded planet—were already well understood by the end of the last century.

Marine Corps general Charles Krulak said in
1996
that “the future may well not be ‘Son of Desert Storm,' but rather ‘Stepchild of Somalia and Chechnya.'” Ralph Peters, Robert H. Scales, Alan Vick, Roger Spiller, Russell Glenn, Paul Van Riper, John Arquilla, Michael Evans, and Justin Kelly had all written extensively by the late
1990
s on urban operations in coastal cities. By
2000
, Dave Dilegge—later a torchbearer for the insurgency of ideas through the
Small Wars Journal
—had founded a community of interest around his
Urban Operations Journal
. At the same time, Duane Schattle, Dave Stephenson, and Frank Hoffmann were thinking through the challenges of urban operations against hybrid threats. Military forces in several countries were expanding their amphibious and urban capabilities, while police services, aid agencies, and some NGOs were considering governance and human security in marginalized urban areas. I myself had written a series of papers on urban tactics and amphibious operations, informed by the experience of late-
1990
s peace enforcement in coastal environments.

But much of this thinking on urban littorals, an already very well established set of ideas by
2001
, was sidelined by urgent military necessity after the horrendous Al Q
 
aeda terrorist attacks of
9
/
11
. We found ourselves (not by choice) involved in a landlocked, rural insurgency—far from cities or coastlines—hunting guerrillas in mountain valleys, trying to work with and protect the remote tribal communities in which they nested and on which they preyed. As Iraq descended into chaos after
2003
, we were drawn into intense urban counterinsurgency—but, again, we were far from the coast. For a decade since then, the vibrant civilian and academic discussion about future challenges in coastal megacities has gone on without much input from those who have been fighting the war. Bing West, with his closely observed studies of urban combat in Iraq, and Lou DiMarco, with his survey of urban operations since Stalingrad, are two outstanding exceptions to this rule—but even their work has had less impact on the debate than it deserves.

That civilian debate, however, has been enormously productive. Diane Davis, Stephen Graham, Jo Beall, Mitchell Sipus, Saskia Sassen, and Mike Davis, among many others, have added immensely to our understanding of development and conflict in connected cities. Policing and crime thinkers such as John P. Sullivan and Diego Gambetta, and urban sociologists such as Sudhir Venkatesh have studied the challenges of criminal insurgency in large cities and explored the ways in which underworld networks communicate. Institutions such as the World Bank, the United Nations, and the Asian and African Development Banks, along with firms such as IBM and McKinsey, have studied the problems of future urbanization. Universities including the London School of Economics, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Columbia University and the Harvard Graduate School of Design, among many others, have established cities programs, while think tanks such as the Brookings Institution (with its Global Cities Initiative) have examined the problems of urban growth, littoralization, and connectivity. Architects such as Oystein Gronning and Eyal Weizman have applied spatial design thinking to urban conflict.

Now that the war in Afghanistan is beginning to wind down, it's time for the military to reengage with the challenge of irregular conflict in the urban littoral. When the dust eventually settles and our generation, the generation that fought the war, shakes itself off and turns from the moment-by-moment challenge of the war to once again consider the future environment, we'll find that the same old challenges of the urbanized littoral remain, but that much of what we thought we understood has changed. Not only have enormous advances been made over the last decade in cloud computing, complex systems theory, big data analysis, remote observation, and crowd-sourced analytics—allowing new insights into old problems—but vast amounts of real-time data are now available to inform our thinking. Most important, the environment itself has changed. The level of connectivity and networked interaction (among populations all over the planet, and between and within coastal cities) has exploded in the last decade, and it's time to bring this new understanding to bear on the problems of urbanization and conflict. What we may find—and what this book tentatively suggests—is that things aren't where we left them when we headed off into the mountains after
9
/
11
.

In writing this book, I've benefited from the thinking and research of all these individuals and institutions, and also from the unstinting and generous help of friends, colleagues, and family across the whole world. Professor Tammy Schultz read and carefully critiqued every chapter. Dr. Erin Simpson kept me focused on the big issues and helped sharpen the argument over many discussions in the field and over the map. Greg Mills, Oyeshiku Carr, John Pollock, Claire Metelits, Satish Chand, and Amit Patel contributed foundational ideas, as did Leah Meisterlin, Steve Eames, Nigel Snoad, Oystein Gronning, Antonio Giustozzi, Claudio Franco, Andrew Exum, Gordon Messenger, and John Sullivan. Stacia George, Alex Hughes, Jason Knobloch, Matt McNabb, Richard Tyson, and Will Upshur at Caerus designed and led community-participative mapping programs in some extremely challenging urban environments—and developed crowd-sourced analytics and remote observation tools that made it possible to see the patterns discussed in this book. Likewise, Anna Prouse, Nate Rosenblatt, Jacob Burke, and Omar Ellaboudy pioneered field research techniques to map the virtual/human network overlaps that turn out to be critical in this environment. Nate Rosenblatt, in particular, provided many insights and key sources that proved critical to understanding the Arab Awakening, while Anna Prouse fearlessly walked the streets of several hostile cities (not just in Africa) as we figured things out. Christian Chung and Scott Long did the initial desktop analysis on Jamaica and Sri Lanka that helped me to do effective fieldwork later. Michael Stock, Randy Garrett, Ben Riley, John Seel, Pat Kelleher, Nadia Schadlow, Marin Strmecki, and Dan Ermer provided guidance, insight, funding, and moral support—not necessarily in that order of importance—that made this research possible. Ben Fitzgerald and his team at Noetic were essential partners in the effort, and the Smith Richardson Foundation gave generous financial and intellectual support to field research and tech platform development. To the extent that this work has any merit, it derives in large measure from the wisdom of this great community of research and program partners; the errors, omissions, and misstatements, of course, are mine alone.

At Oxford University Press, David McBride and Sarah Rosenthal were cogent, insightful, and supportive through multiple delays, rewrites, and email absences as we pulled the manuscript together, while Kim Craven and Christian Purdy were helpfully (but not endlessly) patient. At Hurst & Co. in London, Michael Dwyer provided extremely helpful inputs at critical times, and Jon de Peyer kept me focused on the timeline, as did Henry Rosenbloom at Scribe Publications in Melbourne. My parents, John and Anne Kilcullen, my sister Janet, and my whole American family—including Ken Schoendorf and Jennifer Parker, Jimmy Davidson and Melanie Pease, Jim Davidson and Sarajane Wallace, and Patrick and Roberta Davidson—gave me vastly more than moral support: their edits, ideas, and perspectives (not to mention a succession of kitchen tables, sofas, and desks on which to perch my laptop while I wrote the manuscript) were incredibly helpful. Finally, as an intellectual partner, a critical sounding board, a perceptive editor, and an emotional rock, I can only humbly thank my beautiful wife, Janine, and promise to be calmer (and hopefully less absentminded) now that the bloody thing is finally done.

Washington, D.C.

April
2013