Counterinsurgency Primer
Max Boot at WSJ on David Kilcullen’s The Accidental Guerrilla: Fighting Small Wars in the Midst of a Big One, ranks it among the classics of war.
Almost everyone, even if otherwise ignorant of military affairs, has heard of Karl von Clausewitz and Sun Tzu. Very few people, though, have heard of C.E. Callwell, David Galula or Robert Thompson. Yet they, too, wrote immortal works on military strategy — but on unconventional, or guerrilla, conflicts.
For all their timeless wisdom, their books were also a product of their times — Callwell of the imperial wars of the late 19th century, Galula and Thompson of the wars of “national liberation” in the mid-20th century. Because of the global jihadist insurgency, the early 21st century has produced a new epoch in the annals of low-intensity struggle. It is fitting, then, that to help us understand the current conflict another soldier-scholar has emerged in the tradition of Callwell, Galula and Thompson.
In “The Accidental Guerrilla,” a combination of memoir and military analysis, David Kilcullen looks at the conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq, East Timor, Indonesia and southern Thailand, all of which, excepting the last, he has seen first-hand. He then draws lessons from his experiences and those of other soldiers.
Boot dickers with the somewhat literary designation of ”accidental” but has nothing but praise for Kilcullen’s focus on “reconcilable” vs “irreconcilable” foes and “population centric” vs. “enemy centric” operations, and the no-one-size-fits-all approach. One point on which I’d bicker with Boot.
As a former Australian army officer, Mr. Kilcullen may seem to have an odd background for this task, since Australia is hardly a central player in the global war on terrorism. Yet the Aussies have a long, distinguished history of involvement in guerrilla wars, from Vietnam to Indonesia. Mr. Kilcullen, having studied the Indonesian suppression of Muslim separatists in the 1950s and 1960s (he has a doctorate in political anthropology), went on to command an Australian infantry company in East Timor during its independence struggle from Indonesia in 1999. In 2007-08, he served as a counterinsurgency adviser for Gen. David Petraeus and for Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. In those jobs he spent considerable time with troops in Afghanistan and Iraq observing what works and what doesn’t.
Australia’s stalwart support of the Bush administration in Iraq and Afghanistan through the Howard years, continuing in Afghanistan under Rudd, made this small nation at the other end of the world a key player in the GWOT and a moral authority among nations, with its rejection of what former Aussie FM Alexander Downer called “multinationalism of the lowest common denominator.” As evidenced by Australia’s willingness to take decisive, responsible action repeatedly in its own neighborhood. But if in terms of numbers Australia’s GWOT contribution has never great, it is the quality that has Australia fighting well above its weight, and Kilcullen’s role in bringing stability to Iraq is a leading example of that.
Kindle edition: The Accidental Guerrilla: Fighting Small Wars in the Midst of a Big One
With a nod to Small Wars Journal.
Prior re Kilcullen:
Long War, Petty Battle, Cheap Shots
Topics: Australia, GWOT, military
Posted by Jules Crittenden at 9:33 am Comments (0) on Monday, March 16, 2009
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