The David Kilcullen Collection (merged thread)

[davidbfpo]

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:

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:

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: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