023 - David Kilcullen
David Kilcullen is a soldier, strategist, diplomat, and author. He’s a scholar of guerrilla warfare, terrorism, urbanization, and the future of conflict.
His formative years were spent as an Australian infantry officer conducting peacekeeping and counterinsurgency missions in the wake of the Cold War. In 2004, he became a senior intelligence analyst and helped write a white paper on transnational terrorism. He left active duty in 2005 and is commissioned as a Lieutenant Colonel in the Australian Army Reserve.
In 2005 and 2006, David worked for the US State Department, serving as the Chief Strategist in the Office of the Coordinator for Counter-terrorism. His work took him to Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq, the Horn of Africa, and Southeast Asia.
In early 2007, David joined a group of experts including H.R. McMaster (who we will return to soon) on the personal staff of General David Petraeus. David served as the Senior Counterinsurgency Advisor until 2008. David also advised Condoleezza Rice in 2007 and 2008 as the Special Advisor for Counterinsurgency. David was a member of the 2008 review of the White House Afghanistan and Pakistan Strategy. From 2009 to 2010, he was the counterinsurgency advisor to NATO and the International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan.
He has also advised the British and Australian governments along with a variety of non-government institutions and companies. He was a senior fellow and a member of the advisory board at the Center for a New American Security and he was an Adjunct Professor at Johns Hopkins.
In 2010, he founded Caerus Associates, a consultancy that specializes in complex and frontier environments.
David has also written 5 books:
· The Accidental Guerrilla (2009)
· Counterinsurgency (2010)
· Out of the Mountains (2013)
· Blood Year (2016)
· The Dragons and the Snakes (2020)
Introduction to The Dragons and the Snakes: How the Rest Learned to Fight the West
The Dragons and the Snakes is like 3 books in one: (1st) it’s great historical introduction to some of the most volatile and important geopolitical fault lines of our time, (2nd) it’s a guide to the strategic and tactical shifts between state and nonstate opponents on the world stage, and (3rd) a big picture reflection on what the role of the military is.
As I prepared for this conversation, I listened to a ton of interviews and talks David has given. They were all excellent, and I highly recommend them. In particular, his Google talks and his discussion at the Australian Centre for Society and Armed Conflict’s Future Warfare conference are both great. I’d also like to shout out Hidden Forces, The Federalist Radio Hour, and Departures with Robert Amsterdam. Each of those conversations was incredibly interesting.
Between listening to interviews and reading the books, I would constantly find myself pressing pause or clicking into a new tab to do some background research. It was a really enjoyable process because it revealed a ton of ideas I hadn’t been exposed to.
The book was incredibly educational, insightful, and entertaining. I found myself laughing out loud numerous times, particularly near the end. It was a nervous, scary type of laughter! (Things like mentioning that “elected political leaders in democracies are not famous for their competence in managing complex situations over long time frames.”
Time Stamps
0:02:00 – Introduction
0:04:32 – Other talks by David you might enjoy (Google, Australian Centre for Society and Armed Conflict, Hidden Forces, The Federalist Radio Hour, and Departures with Robert Amsterdam)
0:07:35 – Nadia Schadlow & her book War and the Art of Governance (link above)
0:10:17 – Basis for the book’s name: CIA Director James Woolsey’s 1993 confirmation hearing testimony
0:14:16 – What exactly are “the dragons and the snakes?”
0:15:58 – The Gulf War: the blueprint for how not to fight the US
0:16:56 – Bookend #1: H.R. McMaster and the Battle of 73 Easting (precision, system-of-systems battlefield dominance)
0:19:12 – Second-order effects: the Gulf War forces an evolutionary response (Iran, China, and even US allies!)
0:22:13 – Bookend #2 “Dora Farms” (tactical excellence in the service of a blinkered strategy)
0:28:36 – Multi-disciplinary approach: using evolutionary biology as a basis for exploring strategy
0:32:10 – By becoming so dominant in 1991, we forced our adversaries to adapt or evolve
0:32:40 – Russia case study: Liminal Warfare & surfing the ambiguity threshold
0:40:55 – Adaptations to the modern media environment: impossible to keep things secret, but possible to sow confusion and exploit the intelligence OODA Loop
0:43:49 – Russian goal wasn’t to elect Trump but to create debate and disruption
0:48:15 – Russian strategy is like a Hollywood heist movie
0:49:50 – Connection to investing: super-high yield
0:51:44 – China case study: broadening the definition of war
1:07:17 – Reference Prisoners of Geography
1:08:32 – A huge theme in the book: the potential for misunderstanding
1:16:24 – North Korea case study
1:20:33 – Attempt to contain nuclear ambitions fall apart as we focus on Iraq and Afghanistan and in the aftermath of the “axis of evil” speech
1:34:50 – The three approaches the US can take going forward
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