Kilcullen @ Oxford University
The Changing Character of War programme's annual lecture @ Oxford, has David Kilcullen speaking on Monday 18th November 2013; the event is open to the public and the venue is the Examination Schools, High Street.
Link:http://ccw.history.ox.ac.uk/2013/10/...-lecture-2013/
The David Kilcullen Collection (merged thread)
Kilcullen Speaks: On COIN Going Out of Style, His Recent Book, Syria, and More
Kilcullen Speaks: On COIN Going Out of Style, His Recent Book, Syria, and More
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Kilcullen says: 'We’re worse off today than before 9/11'
Just found this long newspaper article by David Kilcullen, a COIN SME, on an Australian website and starting to read it:http://www.theaustralian.com.au/opin...4aee8e279aa009
Added: this link is without an obstactle (tks to Bill M. overnight: http://www.terrorismwatch.org/2014/1...terrorism.html
He opens with:
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After 13 years, thousands of lives and hundreds of billions of dollars, we’re worse off today than before 9/11, with a stronger, more motivated, more dangerous enemy than ever.
Whatever the reason — and there’s more than enough blame to go around, in many countries and on all sides of politics — the #result is that governments are suffering “task saturation”. So much is happening, simultaneously, in so many places that leaders are struggling to decide what to do, in what order. The danger is that we will engage in panicked, knee-jerk #responses rather than taking time to consider what an effective strategy looks like.
(Later) In short, what we’ve been doing has failed: we need a complete rethink. That rethink, I would suggest, needs to start with a threat analysis. What exactly is the threat we’re facing and how can we address it in ways that are cheap enough, effective enough and non-intrusive enough to be sustainable across the long term, without undermining the openness, democracy and prosperity that make our societies worth defending in the first place?
He does have some thoughts on a 'new' strategy, which on my first read appear to be "old wine in a new bottle" and just maybe aimed just at an Australian audience.
There is a 'Kilcullen collection' where this maybe merged to one day.
Guy Fawkes meets David Kilcullen
I have now re-read the original article, in which David K. refers to four threats - for Australia and others. Those threats are:
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domestic radicalisation, foreign fighters, the effect of Islamic State on regional and global jihadist groups, and the destabilising effect of conflict in the Middle East.
Guy Fawkes was a Catholic radical who in 1605 attempted to blow up the British parliament in London, effectively to decapitate the establishment and is marked each 5th November with bonfires, fireworks and in places more. This article links him to the contemporary scene:http://www.telegraph.co.uk/history/1...r-change.html?
Here are key passages reagrding domestic radicalisation:
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..the mobilising effect of overseas terrorist groups on people in our own societies — is the most immediate threat.....The randomness, unpredictability and copycat nature of these attacks, which require little preparation, give few warning signs, and are difficult to prevent, is what makes them so terrifying. Attackers are often disenfranchised, alienated, marginalised young people, frequently converts: society’s losers, who see radical Salafi-jihadist ideology as a way to be part of something big, historic and successful. They’re not really self-radicalised. Rather, they often access online terrorist materials (increasingly in English) for inspiration, instruction and training, or link up online with radicals who groom them for action.Defeating this threat is partly a matter of community policing to identify and engage at-risk individuals, and partly a matter of detecting and monitoring access to online forums, radicalisation networks, social media and online training materials.
Despite the fear these attacks create, police and intelligence agencies have a pretty good handle on this type of threat, but in the long term this brings a potential cost to civil liberties and community cohesion.
I have doubts that in reality anyone officially has a 'handle' on this problem, that includes the police and intelligence agencies. Too many of those id'd as 'at risk' here suffer from mental illnesses, not radicalism. 'Detecting and monitoring' sounds neat, it is not and for this threat threatens more of what we seek to defend.
Killcullen: State of fear outgrows insurgency label
David Killcullen has written a journal article on ISIS and 'The Age' has an extract today and he expects many will not like his viewpoint:
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Over time, I've come to believe that Islamic State (IS, also known as ISIS and ISIL) is more than any of these things. In my view, ISIS is fundamentally a state-building enterprise. Simply put, the Islamic State is, or is on the verge of becoming, what it claims to be: a state.
Typically he can hit home tersely:
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ISIS as a state has two critical military weaknesses. One is territorial, the other a question of personnel....This renders it highly vulnerable to interdiction: it's a "network state" that can be defeated piecemeal if sufficient pressure is brought to bear on the connections between its constituent cities.
Sure, ISIS uses exemplary violence as an instrument of policy and a means of terrifying its enemies, but so do plenty of states. As Audrey Cronin has persuasively argued, ISIS "uses terrorism as a tactic, [but] it is not really a terrorist organisation at all ... it is a pseudo-state led by a conventional army. And that is why the counterterrorism and counter-insurgency strategies that greatly diminished the threat from al-Qaeda will not work against ISIS."
I'd quibble with the term "pseudo-state", but I couldn't agree more with Cronin about the inapplicability of counterterrorism and counter-insurgency strategies.
Link:http://www.theage.com.au/world/isisi...6-gh37wb.html?
There is an extensive thread 'The David Kilcullen Collection (merged thread)', with 400 plus posts and 111k views and yes into which this may be merged one day:wry::http://council.smallwarsjournal.com/...ad.php?t=12934
The full essay is due out on May 20th, I expect it is behind a paywall:https://www.quarterlyessay.com/essay/2015/05/blood-year