Counterinsurgency was one of several books that seemed interesting and that I bought during the COVID-19 lockdown in 2020 which I am slowly working my way through.
David Kilcullen
David Kilcullen is a former Australian military officer, who is an academic working at University of New South Wales, Canberra. Back in 2005 he advised the US government for a year while it dealt with insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan. He has since been advising various companies about aspects of international studies.
Counterinsurgency
Counterinsurgency is a collection of his writings for military and academic journals. It covers everything from a tactical guide to officers dealing with local communities to the history of Indonesia post-independence and its efforts to combat East Timorese looking to become independent.
Kilcullen’s Counterinsurgency interesting to read for several reasons:
Accessible writing: he writes really well making his subject areas very accessible to enquiring minds. For an academic, it was refreshingly jargon-free and articulated complex situations simply.
His how-to guides for US military officers serving in Afghanistan gave me an insight that I previously didn’t have from the media coverage.
As someone who had worked on Indonesian market campaigns for Indofoods and Qualcomm, knowing more about this complex country was rewarding. Kilcullen provides an accessible window into two points in the post-independence history of Indonesia.
One of the key things that I took away from Counterinsurgency was the fragility of knowledge in organisations. Much of the work that Kilcullen is doing in the first part of the book was instilling hard-won knowledge that the world’s militaries had learned from TE Lawrence tormenting the Great Arab Revolt onwards including Vietnam, various American cold war campaigns, the British in Malaya and Northern Ireland.
Militaries put a lot of effort into capturing the history of conflicts and spend a lot of time on lessons learned. This is far more effort than organisations generally put into place to learn from the likes of marketing campaigns, yet Kilcullen’s writing was valuable because that knowledge seemed to be slipping through the cracks of militaries.
If you have an enquiring mind about world affairs and history, I can recommend Counterinsurgency as a good read. Other book reviews can be found here.
I read the 2025 US National Security Strategy (NSS) so you don’t have to when it came out at the end of November 2025. What’s interesting about these NSS documents is that they set a tone that will be difficult to turn around over the next five to ten years.
I have taken the document at face value as it mirrors many of the talking points of US politicians. I have looked at the document through three lens:
Ireland
European Union
UK
(I live in the UK, I am an Irish citizen and Ireland is part of the European Union).
Some of its key European diagnostics are accurate (but could be also said of the US):
Declining birth rates
Uncontrolled migration (the authors consider African and muslim migrants to Europe particularly problematic)
Economic stagnation (the US is in a similar place outside of the top performers of the NASDAQ)
Deindustrialisation (again a problem that is repeated in the US)
The recently released NSS from the Trump administration represents a an end to an American-led west. It replaces “collective security” with ‘transactional realism’ and targets the European Union’s current political trajectory as a ‘civilisational realignment’. By comparison Russia makes little to no appearance in the document and China is considered mostly in terms of economic power rivalry.
While the US has declared victory in major conflicts via aggressive unilateralism, it now seeks to dismantle “globalist” structures. For Ireland, the UK, and the EU, all are now facing challenges from the US as well as Russia, China and Iran.
European impact
The NSS outlines four pillars that directly impact transatlantic relationships:
The US views NATO as a burden-sharing network, not a permanent umbrella, and explicitly threatens to withhold support from “free-riders”.
“Reindustrialization” is the highest priority. The US will use tariffs to force supply chains home. it considers net zero efforts as an economic suicide act.
The US will bypass EU institutions to cultivate relationships with rightwing populist parties. It views Western Europe’s current migration and social policies as “civilizational erasure”.
A re-assertion of the Monroe Doctrine. The US claims total dominance over the Western Hemisphere and warns European powers against interfering there.
Impact & Mitigation Strategies
🇮🇪 For Ireland
The NSS explicitly mentions a “sentimental attachment” to Ireland. Dublin must ruthlessly exploit this cultural link to secure exemptions from new tariffs, bypassing Brussels where necessary.
Reframe Ireland not as an offshore tax hub, but as a ‘secure node’ in the American supply chain. Emphasise that Irish pharma is safer than Asian alternatives and relies on highly-skilled professionals.
Ireland’s military neutrality is a liability in this document. it isn’t in a defence agreement with the US and he country can’t meet the 5% spending target that the US expects of ‘allies’. Instead, it must heavily invest in cybersecurity and transatlantic cable protection, framing this as its contribution to “collective security” without violating neutrality.
Ireland needs to plan, which would take longer to execute; to have a version of Singapore’s poison pill or pufferfish defence strategy. But this would be adapted for Ireland’s own context and needs in order to maintain its neutrality and sovereignty.
🇬🇧 For the United Kingdom
The US questions whether demographic changes in the UK will make it an ally in the future. However, the UK is better positioned than the EU to pivot.
The NSS seeks “fair, reciprocal trade deals”. The UK should prioritise a bilateral Free Trade Agreement, offering alignment on US export controls (especially regarding China) in exchange for market access.
The UK cannot afford 5% GDP on defence immediately, but it can get closer than the EU. An option would be to position itself as the “unsinkable aircraft carrier” and the primary partner for the US “Golden Dome” missile defence project, solidifying the special relationship through technology transfer rather than just troop numbers.
The US Administration hates “regulatory suffocation”. The UK can aggressively deregulate its financial and tech sectors to mirror the US model, making it the preferred “docking station” for US capital in Europe.
Longer term the UK needs to de-risk critical parts of its economy from the US, and work with other European nations to think about what it would do to have a successful a non-US NATO if the NSS document goes to its natural conclusion.
🇪🇺 For the European Union
The Threat: The document is openly hostile to the EU project, viewing it as a mechanism that “undermines political liberty”. It seeks to encourage internal dissent by supporting right wing populist “patriotic parties”. The 5% defense target is designed to break the current European social contract model.
The 5% demand is likely a negotiating tactic to force 3% or 3.5%. The EU must immediately announce a massive, coordinated purchase of American military hardware at least in the short term, (while investing in European, friend-shored (Australian, Canadian, Korean, Japanese, Singaporean and Turkish) substitutive systems in the longer term.) The short term move buys tactical goodwill and addresses the immediate capability gap.
The US priority is winning the economic war with China. The EU has some leverage if it aligns 100% with US export controls and sanctions on Beijing. Brussels must trade access to the Chinese market for security guarantees from Washington in the short term.
The NSS attacks Europe’s “radical gender ideology” and “Net Zero” focus. (The origins of these beliefs are actually American in nature, a nuance the NSS authors fail to appreciate). To maintain relations, the EU Commission may need to de-politicise trade talks in the short-term, with a view to de-risking in the longer term. The short term trade focus purely on transactional economics and dropping social/climate conditionality in dealings with the US.
Summary
The 2025 NSS is a US roadmap for a post-European world.
Don’t appeal to “shared values” or “international law.” The NSS explicitly rejects “idealistic” foreign policy.
Offer concrete, transactional benefits: secure supply chains, purchase orders for US weapons, and alignment against China.
Move towards a European and friend-shored defence procurement and sustainment over the longer term, as the US may no longer be the arsenal of democracy in the future, if you take the NSS at face value.
Plan to replace specialist US systems over time as access and replenishment may diminish and have processes to takeover NATO governance in the absence of American leadership.
You can find the US National Security Strategy here.
November 2025 introduction – (28) in a state edition
I am now at issue 28, or as a bingo caller would put it ‘in a state’. In a state or in a right state usually carried a sense of trepidation in Irish households – it usually describes an odd emotion exhibited by the person being discussed.
It is often associated with stupor, shock, chaos, agitation or anxiety.
“There was a car crash just up the road; thankfully no one was injured but the driver was in a state.”
It could also be used as a tone of disapproval for a person’s grooming and outfit.
In Cantonese 28 has positive connotations and is interpreted as “easy to be rich” or “easy prosperity”. The pronunciation of ‘2’ (yi) sounds like ‘easy’ and ‘8’ (ba) sounds like ‘prosper’ (fa).
This edition’s soundtrack is from The Hideout, a former boutique that used to be based in Golden Square and specialised in Japanese streetwear brands like Neighborhood, A Bathing Ape, WTAPs etc. Each Christmas time they used to have this mixtape put together by Andrew Hale on heavy rotation. Since then it’s become a seasonal go to in Chez Carroll.
( Hale played keyboards for Sade. He was a member of Japanese experimental supergroup Water Melon (ウォーター・メロン) alongside Gota Yashiki, KUDO, Toshio Nakanishi aka Tycoon To$h, and provided soundtracks for computer games and films.) Ok, I will stop nerding out now.
Now we have a sound track, let’s get into it.
New reader?
If this is the first newsletter, welcome! You can find my regular writings here and more about me here.
Things I’ve written.
Mico + more things – Mircrosoft’s AI companion has a bit of Clippy and a bit of Willo the Wisp (who was the brand character of British Gas) to it. But as a fluent object it’s not bad.
Toyota FJ Land Cruiser + more stuff – Toyota’s genius move to launch a smaller footprint Land Cruiser with fantastic utilitarian details in the design. The downside is that we are unlikely to see any of them in the UK.
Books that I have read.
I have been reading my Dad’s copies of Gerald Seymour’s books back when I was a child. My friend Ian introduced me to his later works and character Jonas Merrick. Crocodile Hunter explains the back story why a caravan-loving middle-aged ‘underachieving’ MI5 officer had been given so much latitude. Merrick then becomes the metaphorical crocodile hunter of the title in a game of wits with an experienced veteran of the Syrian civil war and Iraq conflicts in the environs of Canterbury.
1929: The Inside Story of The Greatest Crash in Wall Street History by Andrew Ross Sorkin was a decade in the writing following on from his previous book Too Big To Fail about the 2008 financial crisis. Sorkin makes the story readable despite the book being chunky enough to be a door stop. He does so by telling the stories of the individuals involved. In doing so he also challenges many of our learned assumptions about the crisis. The timing of its release while concerns turn towards an AI driven stock market bubble gives it addition relevance.
As I was reading this article in the FT How this 31-year-old made $250mn in 30 months | FT – oil trading with Russian oil. A few things crossed my mind. Amongst them being that it sounded like a pitch for prospective series two of McMafia. Will the protagonist fall out of a window from a Moscow skyscraper?
Things I have been inspired by.
I managed to spend some time with my long time colleague Calvin Wong on a stopover before he headed to Portugal for Web Summit.
It might be merely a rationalisation of my own biases, after the later part of the 2010s being a lull in the creative web. 2025 seems to be spawning more creative things built on the web. My current favourite is Radiooooo shocking brand name, but an amazing site. You can navigate a map of the world, click on a country and listen to music from that country. Not only that but can select whether you are open to fast, slow tempo songs or ‘weird’. My current favourites are Japanese, Thai and Cambodian pop of the 1960s.
When visual gen AI was used to modify existing ads originally created by human experts, its performance fell short of the original ads.
When visual gen AI was used to create ads from scratch, those ads outperformed both the human expert–created and gen AI-modified ads.
When everything including the product package created by gen AI in the advertisement was associated with higher ad effectiveness.
But consumers still aren’t fans, when gen AI involvement in ad generation is disclosed, advertisement effectiveness decreases. Disclosure is becoming a legal requirement in many markets and cramping ad effectiveness.
These oddities could be down to how well their models performed with modified prompts, rather than a repudiation of human effort. And all of these nuances are likely to change as models are improved. This doesn’t mean that generative AI is the best advertising and packaging designers. But it does depend a lot on the aesthetic / taste of the human prompter even more.
20% growth every year since 2021 for client complaints about efficiency.
58% of what clients link efficiency to is non-operational. Efficiency, is a partnership quality rather than a production metric – kind of like the idea of synchronicity. Increasing ‘juniorisation’ of teams, hybrid working, and smaller budgets have created an operational squeeze, while automation and rigid systems stripped back the human touch that clients value most.
The chasm opening up between rising client satisfaction (currently 8.0) and declining team satisfaction (7.3) in their agency team threatens work quality, client retention and employee churn. The problems stem from agency culture: little agency leadership, recognition or care.
Chart of the month.
Ipsos did a 30-country survey to answer the question ‘Is Life Getting Better? comparing attitudes to 1975 versus 2025. Nostalgia is a great standby for trend reports as the past is constantly been repackaged.
What the Ipsos report hints at is widespread dissatisfaction with current political and economic systems in Europe, Latin America, North America, South Africa and many Asian countries. Part of this maybe down to what Ipsos termed ‘the middle class in crisis‘. The contrary outlier was South Korea.
As tough as the Korean economy is now, the country has made a huge step change over the past five decades: shaking off a military dictatorship and undergoing massive economic development.
The UK’s intense desire for nostalgia hints at a wider unease, what The New Statesman called the Netflixification of politics.
Things I have watched.
Apple TV+ have followed up Slow Horses this season with a second adaptation of a Mick Herron novel Down Cemetery Road. Emma Thompson is the protagonist unearthing a very British conspiracy bought about by a suspicious fire and abducted child in Oxford. It is made to the same high standard as Slow Horses and I have found it to be must-see TV.
Dominic Cooper plays a blinder in Apple TV+ series The Last Frontier. The tangled storyline of conspiracy, paranoia and secrets reminded me of vintage TV series like 24 and The X Files. What separates The Last Frontier is the detail, its scenic shots of an Alaskan winter are beautiful.
Useful tools.
Koolyz is a directory / portal of online tools that I found via Matt Muir’s excellent newsletter. It helps on all the finicky tasks like compressing PDFs or moving an image from one format to another. It is also worth looking at The Creative Cheat Sheet for visual inspiration, writing and presentation building tools.
I got to try out Hubspot‘s AEO grader here. It is a good starting point to understand how ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google Gemini ‘see’ and ‘understand’ your brand.
Finally LUMAscapes is a series of charts by LUMA that give you the main players in agencies, AI, OOH, martech and more categories as convenient PDFs.
The sales pitch.
I am currently working on a brand and creative strategy engagement at Google’s internal creative agency. I am now taking bookings for strategic engagements from the start of 2026 – keep me in mind; or get in touch for discussions on permanent roles. Contact me here.
Ok this is the end of my November 2025 newsletter, I hope to see you all back here again in a month. Be excellent to each other and get planning for Christmas. As an additional treat here is a link to my Mam’s recipe for Christmas cake – we usually make one in November. It is then allowed to sit prior to serving at Christmas. If looked after correctly it can keep for several months. I grew up with and love fruit cake but your mileage may vary.
Don’t forget to share if you found it useful, interesting or insightful.
Mico – A vibrant new way to talk with Copilot | Product Hunt – Strategy wise I have mixed feelings about it. People are already anthropomorphising LLMs and the full impact of that is still yet to be understood – I don’t think its universally good. However, we’ve already got there with Mico as a character. I imagine that fluent objects like Mico does make services stickier.
In this respect Mico looks like the kind of moral trap Meta, Bytedance have fallen into on their social media platforms.
Then there is the Clippy trauma now encapsulated as a drop of fleum – but that’s age bracketed so likely means nothing to younger cohorts.
On the other hand from a marketing effectiveness perspective, if Microsoft use Mico in brand advertising it might work well as a fluent object and boost their brand building performance. Reminded me a lot of British Gas’ Willo the Wisp character.
The 12th floor of 18 On Lan Street, a Ginza-style commercial building in Central, was handed over to Surplus Inc for HK$34 million (US$4.4 million) on Friday, according to Land Registry records. That represented a 65 per cent loss for the previous owner, Zhou Shubo, who bought the floor for HK$96 million in 2013.
Kanika Sam Ang was a director at Surplus, according to Companies Registry data. Sam Ang has been associated with the family of tycoon Tony Tandijono, who owns Cambodia-based President Airlines, Phnom Penh casino Holiday Palace and a travel agency in Hong Kong.
Gen Z Men So Scared of Getting Filmed They’ve Stopped Dating | Rolling Stone – It ends up fueling mistrust in many young men and can turn interactions into battlegrounds where boys feel they must protect their egos. Over time, empathy can go away and suspicion takes its place. Instead of feeling comfortable being genuine, sometimes they second-guess every word or message, wondering how it might be judged, shared, or mocked. But then it takes a turn and that’s why young men may retreat into online spaces that confirm the suspicions they have and help to reinforce negative stereotypes about girls. This causes a Cold War among genders where each side is suspicious of each other and doesn’t have empathy. In these divided spaces, interactions become games of defensive accusation and people grow untrustworthy of one another. – Failing is part of success and of life
Theft Bisect – via Matt Muir ‘This exists because, seemingly, the Met Police are too dumb to make this themselves’ – you can read an explanation as to the ‘why’ and the ‘how’ behind its existence here, but generally this is just a smart idea, simply-executed.‘
Chinese experts criticised the series of statements, saying they reflect some Australia politicians’ anxiety and bias toward China’s technological and military progress. Moreover, they said the spy chief’s remarks reveal an arrogance rooted in the belief that Western political system is superior – Global Times is a Chinese government published newspaper.
Software
ChatEurope – slow and would have been ok a few years ago
Nvidia faces Washington heat over alleged Huawei ties | DigiTimes – US lawmakers are ramping up scrutiny of China’s AI and semiconductor sectors, tightening oversight from corporate ties to capital flows to reinforce Washington’s edge in the global AI competition.
Sixt Halloween ad combines a Stranger Things aesthetic with a hard-hitting competition comparison at the core of the creative. I would put money on it that the production leaned heavily on generative AI. I’ve used Sixt previously and they were ok as a car rental company, they won my business many on price and location of their pick-up points for vehicles. It will be interesting if they can build this Halloween execution into a wider ongoing brand building campaign that turns Sixt into a car rental juggernaut.
How QRcode payments took off in India?
UX commentator Phoebe Yu did a really good video exploring why QRcode based payments took off in India. India has learned from and adopted some of the O2O experience in China and used it in a different context.
Jeep Grand Wagoneer ‘The Family’ advert
On one hand given how the current US administration relies on the support of the religious white, this advert is brave. I am also amazed they managed to hang a 3-minute film from one statement in a car review by Jalopnik.
All the best people are dogs
Life 360 have built a campaign around a banger of a human insight that all dog owners know. Their dog always owns a good deal of their human’s mental real estate, by latching on to that space Life 360 were looking to cut through Apple AirTag’s fame in the space.
Great ideas start on a Mac
There are several Apple films that I could have put up here. Aside from great craft, all these films have one other thing in common – too little media spend to actually get them seen by a relevant audience.
Keep thinking with Claude
Anthropic have come with a great brand anthem of a film. While it may have been produced with LLM generated video, it also shows the very human feature of great taste behind it. All of which fits into the idea of AI as collaborator.
