David Kilcullen

This essay is a very thought-provoking look at ISIS from a true expert in the field of military counter-terrorism strategy. Kilcullen has worked as a strategic advisor on the ground in Iraq, Afghanistan and numerous other trouble spots. In this essay, he charts the birth of ISIS from the al Qaeda in Iraq insurgent group and their rise in Syria and in Iraq to the point where they are now a de facto state.

This is possibly the most contentious claim in his essay, and it forms the centrepiece of show more his recommendations on how to defeat them: stop treating them like insurrectionists or a terror network, and start making war on them as if they were a state with fixed boundaries to defend, supply lines to protect, etc.

It’s a hard argument to discuss, because people get emotive about it. Whenever I have tried to discuss this idea, I have encountered people who get outraged and accuse me of being an ISIS apologist, because they can’t bear the thought of ISIS being considered a country. Strange to think that there are people who would label someone like Kilcullen an “ISIS apologist”, but there you are. I’m pretty sure this level of unhelpful emotion is a direct result of the scare-mongering politics that ISIS inspires here in Australia.

Kilcullen’s final thought is that defeating ISIS as a state is going to take considerable political will “without surrendering our civil liberties or betraying our ethics”. It’s a shame that, in an essay published in an Australian journal, he failed to discuss the fact that this is exactly what Australian politicians are doing as part of their fear-mongering response to the ISIS threat. show less

An incredible, timely book. Kilcullen was a major participant in the formation of strategies used in our wars in the Middle East/Africa. He readily acknowledges the mistakes that "we" made; by concentrating on the theory of "disaggregation" (mainly going after the leaders of Al Qaeda, it was assumed that it would break up the group into smaller entities, which local the local government could deal with, but in reality it just dispersed the group to other areas and allowed them to start up show more new groups, including ISIS).
That our practices, such as "extraordinary rendition", undermined our standing as the "good guys", drove a wedge between us and the locals, and made it very hard to pressure other regimes into encouraging human rights (do as we say, not as we do). By shifting our focus from terrorism to Iraq, we alienated allies; and after our reasons for the invasion were proven falsehoods, it made it hard for others to trust our "intelligence". How (Rumsfeld) insistence on using the minimum force in Iraq was a disaster, our disarming of the Iraqi army and the Ba'athists created a large, potentially useful group into enemies (who ended up forming future terrorist organizations). Kilcullen goes so far as to likening "Bush's decision to invade Iraq to Hitler's invasion of Russia". By taking our eye off the Taliban and placing it on Iraq, it allowed them to form anew. How our actions worried Iran that "they were next", and pushed Iran into defending themselves through striving for nuclear weapons, and keeping Iraq and Afghanistan unstable (to keep us busy and not give us time/material to extend into Iran). How our actions and threats, unfollowed and disregarded when pushed (the use of chemical weapons in Syria would be a "game changer", and then we did nothing) encouraged regimes like Syria to conclude they had nothing to fear from us. How ISIS had evolved their strategies again an again, while we are stuck fighting them with old strategies and failed to adapt. How our timidity in the fight has opened the door to Russia to step-in and take over. How Obama's strategy of "retrenchment" (choosing to "leave" the war instead of ending it) has failed. How we cannot just choose to disengage and avoid the fight because we are tired (isolationist theory), because society today is so interconnected with travel, trade and interaction with the world.
Kilcullen's answer is that the solution is not simple, we have to admit that we messed up (the invasion of Iraq, our addiction to killing terrorist leaders to solve the problem, our withdrawal from Iraq and Afghanistan, opportunism in Libya, and passivity in dealing with Syria), and that until our strategy changes, these disasters will continue.
There is just so, so much information in this book, it will make your head spin. And wonder what in the world we should do, is there even a solution to the problem. Even so, the book is fascinating, extremely well written and documented, and flows very well. I highly encourage you to give it a try. show less

Out of the Mountains claims that the age of rural guerilla warfare is over. We heard this before in the sixties, you might remember. Kilcullen posits that future warfare will be in densely populated and connected urban littoral areas. He means big cities on the coast where everyone is busy tweeting everyone else, but it’s not his style to just come out and say that. Think Karachi, not Afghanistan or the Korean DMZ. Maybe.
Sometimes, it seems as if you have two authors here. On the one show more hand, there is Professor Kilcullen with a theory to promote. Not just a theory, but The Theory of Wars to Come. It isn’t that Kilcullen is wrong about the future nature of some guerrilla wars, but his dismissal of the likelihood of rural guerrilla warfare is absurd. For one thing, your enemy will fight you where you are least prepared to go. If you’ve locked down Karachi, they’ll head for the hills again. Curiously, Kilcullen doesn’t think drones/UAVs will be as useful in urban areas as they are in the countryside. Increasing miniaturization will probably see swarms of drones being used in urban warfare.
Besides being an academic, Kilcullen is a combat veteran of several conflicts. The most readable parts of the book are Colonel Kilcullen’s accounts of warfare that he has seen. He has an superb account of Somali militia tactics. His review of the Blackhawk Down battle in Mogadishu and the LeT attack on Mumbai are excellent. These two personae combine to provide an insightful overview of how groups (government, insurgent, criminal, and others) compete to control civilian populations.
This is a valuable book, if a bit weighed down by jargon. Unfortunately, its emphasis on one likely future path makes it the sort of book that staff officers latch onto to prepare for a war that never comes. show less

While a bit dated (written in 2015) as it deals with current affairs , the insightful description of the rise of ISIS in the Middle East and the lost opportunities by the west is very instructive. The author also gives not only criticisms but offers his opinions on both what should of happened and what can still be done to achieve better outcomes in the Middle East and related terrorism control.