David Kilcullen > Quotes

“If I were a Muslim, I'd probably be a jihadists'; another: Just because you invade a country stupidly doesn't mean you have to leave it stupidly.”
― David Kilcullen

“My personal position on counterinsurgency in general, and on Iraq and Afghanistan in particular, could therefore be summarized as "Never again, but..." That is, we should avoid any future large-scale, unilateral military intervention in the Islamic world, for all the reasons already discussed. But, recognizing that while our conventional war-fighting superiority endures, any sensible enemy will choose to fight us in this manner, we should hold on to the knowledge and corporate memory so painfully acquired, across all the agencies of all the Coalition partners, in Afghanistan and Iraq. And should we find ourselves (by error or necessity) in a similar position once again, then the best practices we have rediscovered in current campaigns represent an effective approach: effective, but not recommended.”
― David Kilcullen, The Accidental Guerrilla: Fighting Small Wars in the Midst of a Big One

“Leon Trotsky said, “You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.”
― David Kilcullen, Out of the Mountains: The Coming Age of the Urban Guerrilla

“The unified field theory that best fits the currently known facts is what I call the “theory of competitive control.” This is the notion that nonstate armed groups, of many kinds, draw their strength and freedom of action primarily from their ability to manipulate and mobilize populations, and that they do this using a spectrum of methods from coercion to persuasion, by creating a normative system that makes people feel safe through the predictability and order that it generates.”
― David Kilcullen, Out of the Mountains: The Coming Age of the Urban Guerrilla

“Insurgents make fish traps, as do militias, gangs, warlords, mass social movements, religions (Jesus, for instance, called his apostles to be “fishers of men”) and, of course, governments.3 Like real fish traps, these metaphorical traps are woven of many strands—persuasive, administrative, and coercive. Though each of the strands may be brittle, their combined effect creates a control structure that’s easy and attractive for people to enter, but then locks them into a system of persuasion and coercion: a set of incentives and disincentives from which they find it extremely difficult to break out.”
― David Kilcullen, Out of the Mountains: The Coming Age of the Urban Guerrilla

“In a free society, there’s clearly a balance to be struck between the risk of violence from insurgency, crime, or social chaos (nonstate violence, if you like) and the risk of state repression. This was exactly the problem in Iraq, with ordinary people caught between nonstate violence from Sunni extremists, on one hand, and state violence from the Shi’a-dominated Iraqi National Police, on the other. Could we, then, help a neighborhood become self-defending against all comers, making people both safer from nonstate violence and harder for the state to oppress?”
― David Kilcullen, Out of the Mountains: The Coming Age of the Urban Guerrilla

“Of course, in order to do this, here and there they had to kill some of the occupying forces and attack some of the military targets. But above all they had to kill their own people who collaborated with the enemy.”
― David Kilcullen, The Accidental Guerrilla: Fighting Small Wars in the Midst of a Big One

“For example, the second battle of Fallujah, during the Iraq War, included 13,500 American, Iraqi, and British troops, opposed by somewhere between 2,000 and 4,000 insurgents, for a total of roughly 17,500 combatants. But the battle didn’t take the form of a single large combat action: rather, it was fought over forty-seven days between November 7 and December 23, 2004, across the entire city of Fallujah and its periurban districts, and was made up of hundreds of small and medium-sized firefights distributed over a wide area, each involving a relatively small number of fighters on each side.107 This disaggregating effect of urban environments is a key reason why even state-on-state conflict in the future will exhibit many irregular characteristics”
― David Kilcullen, Out of the Mountains: The Coming Age of the Urban Guerrilla

“Since irregular combatants don’t have the combat power to stand up to government forces in a direct fight, they tend to hide, and thus to rely on cover and concealment. The concealment and protection afforded by complex environments help them avoid detection by security forces, letting them move freely and fight only when and where they choose. For this reason, guerrillas, bandits, and pirates have always flourished in areas where cover was good and government presence was weak. For most of human history, this meant remote, forested, mountainous areas such as the Afghan mountains discussed in the preface. But with the unprecedented level of global urbanization, this pattern is changing, prompting a major shift in the character of conflict. In the future environment of overcrowded, undergoverned, urban, coastal areas—combined with increasingly excellent remote surveillance capabilities (including drones, satellites, and signals intelligence) in remote rural areas—the cover is going to be in the cities.”
― David Kilcullen, Out of the Mountains: The Coming Age of the Urban Guerrilla

“the specifics of a particular war may be impossible to predict, but the parameters within which any future war will occur are entirely knowable, since wars are bounded by conditions that exist now, and are thus eminently observable in today’s social, economic, geographic, and demographic climate. If we accept this idea, along with the fact that war has been endemic to roughly 95 percent of all known human societies throughout history and prehistory, it follows that warfare is a central and probably a permanent human social institution, one that tends (by its very nature as a human activity) mainly to occur where the people are.”
― David Kilcullen, Out of the Mountains: The Coming Age of the Urban Guerrilla

“Food insecurity resulting from urban expansion is thus just one facet of a pervasive urban problem: reliance on complex infrastructure subsystems with many moving parts, all of which have to work together for society to function, and which require stable economic and political conditions.”
― David Kilcullen, Out of the Mountains: The Coming Age of the Urban Guerrilla

“Rather than focusing on stability (a systems characteristic that just isn’t present in the urban ecosystems we’re examining here), we might be better off focusing on resiliency—helping actors in the system become better able to resist shocks, bounce back from setbacks, and adapt to dynamic change. Instead of trying to hold back the tide, we should be helping people learn to swim.”
― David Kilcullen, Out of the Mountains: The Coming Age of the Urban Guerrilla

“Insurgents tend to ride and manipulate a social wave of grievances, often legitimate ones, and they draw their fighting power from their connection to a mass base. This mass base is largely undetectable to counterinsurgents, since it lies below the surface and engages in no armed activity”
― David Kilcullen, Counterinsurgency

“as Somalia was for the past two decades—concepts such as “illicit networks” ring hollow anyway, since no authority exists to declare things licit in the first place. In a deeper sense, networks themselves, by definition, are neither licit nor illicit. Behavior may be licit or illicit; networks just are. People self-organize in networks of all kinds, and they use those networks to engage in complex hybrid patterns of illicit and licit behavior”
― David Kilcullen, Out of the Mountains: The Coming Age of the Urban Guerrilla

“The future threat won’t be neatly divisible into the categories we use today (state versus nonstate, domestic versus foreign, or war versus crime). As the Mumbai, Mogadishu, and Kingston examples illustrate, future threats will be hybrid: that is, they’ll include irregular actors and methods, but also state actors that use irregulars as their weapon of choice or adopt asymmetric methods to minimize detection and avoid retaliation. Neither the concept nor the reality of hybrid conflict is new—writers such as Frank Hoffman, T. X. Hammes, and Erin Simpson have all examined hybrid warfare in detail. At the same time, Pakistan’s use of the Taliban, LeT, and the Haqqani network, Iran’s use of Hezbollah and the Quds Force, or the sponsorship of insurgencies and terrorist groups by regimes such as Muammar Gadhafi’s Libya, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, and the Soviet Union, go back over many decades.”
― David Kilcullen, Out of the Mountains: The Coming Age of the Urban Guerrilla

“Economically driven incidents of violence have, unfortunately, become extremely common across the south and east of Afghanistan, while even in the relatively quiet north a provincial governor half-jokingly told the German commander in his area, “The Pashtuns in the south shoot at you, and you give them money. Here we support you, and we get nothing. Who do we have to shoot to get some aid around here?”12 This pattern isn’t unique to Afghanistan.”
― David Kilcullen, Out of the Mountains: The Coming Age of the Urban Guerrilla

“the Shower Posse solely as the U.S. embassy cable did—as an “international criminal syndicate”—is to describe only a small part of the group’s role. The Shower Posse was (and is) both local and transnational, a nonstate armed group that nests within a marginalized and poor but tightly knit local community in Kingston, yet is connected both to the Jamaican government and to a far broader international network. It was and is as much a communitarian militia, social welfare organization, grassroots political mobilization tool, dispute resolution and mediation mechanism, and local informal justice enforcement system as it is an extortion racket or a transnational drug trafficking organization. Drug trafficking doesn’t define what an organization like Coke’s group is; it’s just one of the things the group does.”
― David Kilcullen, Out of the Mountains: The Coming Age of the Urban Guerrilla

“Perhaps it had nothing to do with the Taliban and everything to do with perverse incentives created by rapid and uneven development in a tribal society whose economic, social, and agricultural systems have been wrecked by decades of war. No external aid is neutral: a sudden influx of foreign assistance creates a contracting bonanza, benefiting some at others’ expense, and in turn provoking conflict. Likewise, it creates spoils over which local power brokers fight for personal gain, to the detriment of the wider community, and can contribute to a sense of entitlement on the part of locals. Access to foreigners, who have lots of money and firepower but little time or inclination to gain an understanding of local dynamics, can give district power brokers incredibly lucrative opportunities for corruption. A tsunami of illicit cash washes over the society, provoking abuse, raising expectations but then disappointing them, and empowering local armed groups, who pose as clean and incorruptible, defenders of the disenfranchised, at least till they themselves gain access to sources of corruption.14”
― David Kilcullen, Out of the Mountains: The Coming Age of the Urban Guerrilla

“The gang leader in each area, known as a “don,” maintained a group of armed followers or “shooters” who acted as enforcers, kept down petty crime, and enforced a strict normative system of punishment and reward upon the population. The don acted as a mediator and resolver of disputes, liaised with police and city authorities to manage violence and crime, and became an intermediary for the distribution of government handouts—jobs, housing, welfare benefits, contracts—to the population.”
― David Kilcullen, Out of the Mountains: The Coming Age of the Urban Guerrilla

“While some people in these communities accepted the system only through fear of violence, most did so willingly “because of the perception that this is swift justice, because of conformity pressures, and because of the influence of group solidarity and communal identity.”
― David Kilcullen, Out of the Mountains: The Coming Age of the Urban Guerrilla

“I’ve written elsewhere in detail on the intellectual history of counterinsurgency, and on various critiques of the theory.120 For now, though, it’s enough to note that there is solid evidence that counterinsurgency, or COIN, can work if done properly, with sufficient resources, for long enough.121 But it’s also clear that COIN is not the answer to every question. Likewise, counterterrorism (ranging from the comprehensive “global war on terrorism” of President George W. Bush’s administration to President Obama’s unrestrained drone warfare) can help to temporarily suppress a particular type of threat, but it can’t do much about the broad and complex range of challenges we’re about to face. In fact, any theory of conflict that’s organized around dealing with a single type of enemy is unlikely to be very helpful in a conflict environment that includes multiple overlapping threats and challenges.”
― David Kilcullen, Out of the Mountains: The Coming Age of the Urban Guerrilla

“An investigation by the U.S. Army’s Combat Studies Institute found that the Waygal elders might have deliberately drawn out a meeting that had been called to discuss the site for the new American outpost, keeping the officers from 173rd Airborne talking long enough for an ambush to get into place to attack the Americans as they left.10 The same study found that the local community, for historical, ethnic and economic reasons, had a strong incentive to stop the U.S. Army building a road into their valley—a traditional buffer zone between two antagonistic local population groups, Nuristanis and Safi Pashtuns, who competed politically and economically and had a long history of violent conflict.11”
― David Kilcullen, Out of the Mountains: The Coming Age of the Urban Guerrilla

“the Mumbai raiders showed an extraordinary ability to exploit transnational littoral networks and both legitimate and illicit traffic patterns, inserting themselves into a coastal fishing fleet to cover their approach to the target. Their actions blurred the distinction between crime and war: both the Indian ship captain and local inhabitants initially mistook them for smugglers, and their opponents for much of the raid were police, not soldiers.”
― David Kilcullen, Out of the Mountains: The Coming Age of the Urban Guerrilla

“While the success of the Mumbai terrorists came in large part from the tactical and operational inadequacy of Indian law enforcement response, it is easy to imagine a small group of terrorists creating multiple centers of disorder at the same time within a major American city in same manner. An equally terrifying scenario is a Beslan-type siege in school centers with multiple active shooters. Paramilitary terrorists of this kind would aim for maximum violence, target hardening, and area denial—capabilities that many SWAT units would be hard-pressed to counter.43”
― David Kilcullen, Out of the Mountains: The Coming Age of the Urban Guerrilla

“This connectivity lets urban Somalis tap into global networks for the exchange of money and information, allows them to engage in trade, and lets them pursue legitimate business (such as mobile phone companies).37 Of course, people who live in rural areas without cellphone coverage can’t access these connectivity-enabled overseas sources of support. Thus, greater access to global systems of exchange—something that’s available only from well-connected urban locations—has become a major reason for people to migrate to cities, increasing the pace of urbanization.”
― David Kilcullen, Out of the Mountains: The Coming Age of the Urban Guerrilla

“Ambushes are complex enterprises, the most difficult task an infantry small unit can undertake, and they’re won or lost in the first few seconds, with the outcome often decided in the very first burst of fire. Seemingly trivial details—the placement of a key weapon, the angle of the sun, a gust of wind, split-second timing in the moment of the first shot—can have disproportionately large effects.”
― David Kilcullen, Out of the Mountains: The Coming Age of the Urban Guerrilla

“Muslim world: a youth bulge, corrupt and oppressive governments, a dysfunctional relationship between the sexes that limits the human capacity of societies by denying productive roles to half the population, a deficit of democracy and freedom of expression, economies dependent on oil but unable to provide fulfilling employment to an increasingly educated but alienated young male population, and a generalized anomie and sense of being victimized by a vaguely-defined “West.”
― David Kilcullen, The Accidental Guerrilla: Fighting Small Wars in the Midst of a Big One

“Before independence, huge numbers of Somalis, who could best be described as semi-pastoralists, moved to Mogadishu; many of them joined the civil service, the army and the police. It was as if they were out to do away with the ancient cosmopolitan minority known as “Xamari,” Xamar being the local name for the city. Within a short time, a second influx of people, this time more unequivocally pastoralist, arrived from far-flung corners to swell the ranks of the semi-pastoralists, by now city-dwellers. In this way, the demography of the city changed. Neither of these groups was welcomed by a third—those pastoralists who had always got their livelihood from the land on which Mogadishu was sited (natives, as it were, of the city). They were an influential sector of the population in the run-up to independence, throwing in their lot with the colonialists in the hope not only of recovering lost ground but of inheriting total political power. Once a much broader coalition of nationalists had taken control of the country, these “nativists” resorted to threats, suggesting that the recent migrants quit Mogadishu. “Flag independence” dawned in 1960 with widespread jubilation drowning the sound of these ominous threats. It was another thirty years before they were carried out.74”
― David Kilcullen, Out of the Mountains: The Coming Age of the Urban Guerrilla

“Each party used evictions, forced residential cleansing, denial of public services, government-sponsored gang violence, intimidation by a politicized police force, and outright demolition of entire garrisons to punish the other party’s supporters. Elections, by the 1970s, had become violent turf battles in which whole neighborhoods voted en bloc and fought each other with rifles in the streets. They were fighting quite literally for survival, since the losers’ districts might be physically demolished. This pattern empowered nonstate armed groups.”
― David Kilcullen, Out of the Mountains: The Coming Age of the Urban Guerrilla

“Society abhors a governance vacuum. People will replicate police when the police are inadequate. Governments have reduced public spending in the inner city [while] criminal dons have replaced the state as the major patrons of residents and replicated state services including an informal justice system.”
― David Kilcullen, Out of the Mountains: The Coming Age of the Urban Guerrilla