David Kilcullen is back

[davidbfpo]

Professor David Kilcullen has been in the UK doing talks to promote his new book, partly as he has London-based publisher. The book is 'The Dragons and the Snakes: How the Rest Learned to Fight the West' and the publisher's summary

In 1993, a newly-appointed CIA director (James Wolsley) warned that Western powers might have 'slain a large dragon' with the fall of the USSR, but now faced a 'bewildering variety of poisonous snakes'. Since then, both dragons (state enemies like Russia and China) and snakes (terrorist and guerrilla organisations) have watched the US struggle in Iraq and Afghanistan, and mastered new methods in response: hybrid and urban warfare, political manipulation, and harnessing digital technology.

The Dragons and the Snakes is a compelling, counter-intuitive look at the new, vastly complex global arena. Kilcullen reshapes our understanding of the West's foes, and shows how it can respond.

Reviews by Stanley McChrystal and H.R. McMaster via: https://www.hurstpublishers.com/book/the-dragons-and-the-snakes/?mc_cid=cf858ac4f3&mc_eid=80d42c7c0a

Some of his key points have been made before, such as nation-states using non-state groups, electronic inter-connectivity, use of digital technology - with two good examples given in his IISS talk from Iraq / Syria and the Ukraine.

What was new IMHO was his opinion that "We have inadvertently bred a better terrorist", that 'precision strike' was no longer valid as others have adapted techniques to counter this approach and the significance of the Taliban's seizure of Kunduz (in 2015) shifting from the rural to the urban.

I thought there was a thread collecting posts on his views, if there is the search function fails. It also fails to find posts on his previous two books! There are two threads: both in 2007: "Petraeus / Nagl / Kilcullen approach to counter-insurgency is antiquated/misguided"
and Revisiting DR Kilcullen's piece on New Paradigms and the OSS