The Accidental Guerilla – David Kilcullen

[Kunal Biswas]

David Kilcullen is an author and a consultant on counter insurgency and counter terrorism. A former Australian Army officer, he left that army as a Lieutenant Colonel in 2005 and now works for the United States State Department. During 2007 he served in Iraq as Senior Counterinsurgency Adviser, Multi-National Force – Iraq — a civilian position on the personal staff of U.S. Army General David Petraeus, responsible for planning and executing the 2007-08 Joint Campaign Plan which drove the Iraq War troop surge of 2007.

Kilcullen is also an advisor to the United States; British and Australian governments; the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and several private sector institutions (including the Australian-based Noetic Corporation), on counter-terrorism and counter-insurgency issues. A former Senior Fellow of the Center for a New American Security, he is now on the CNAS's Advisory Board.

He has a doctorate in politics from the University of New South Wales at the Australian Defence Force Academy, focusing on the effects of guerrilla warfare on non-state political systems in traditional societies. His thesis is titled "The political consequences of military operations in Indonesia 1945-99: a fieldwork analysis of the political power-diffusion effects of guerilla conflict". He applied ethnographic fieldwork methods and involved extended residential fieldwork that focused on the political power-diffusion effects of successful and failed counter-insurgency operations on traditional societies in Indonesia and East Timor. He has served in several counterinsurgency and guerrilla warfare campaigns in Southeast Asia and the Middle East — including tours in both Iraq and Afghanistan — as well as in peacekeeping and peace enforcement operations.

He is one of a group of civilian specialists and military officers, including Colonel H.R. McMaster and others, who were seconded in late 2006 to the personal staff of General Petraeus to oversee the specialized counterinsurgency aspects of the Iraq campaign in 2007.[2] He previously contributed to the new United States Counterinsurgency Field Manual FM 3-24, published in December 2006, of which he authored a chapter entitled "A Guide to Action". His book The Accidental Guerrilla: Fighting Small Wars in the Midst of a Big One was published in early 2009.

Given below is a video of David Kilcullen speaking at the Google visiting authors programme.