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.