Kilcullen's guide to counterinsurgency is working

The Australian:

DAVID Kilcullen answers to the most powerful woman in the world: Condoleezza Rice, the US Secretary of State. The Australian counterinsurgency expert is Rice's eyes and ears on the ground in Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, the Horn of Africa and in the corridors of Washington.

But when the invasion of Iraq was being planned, Kilcullen was one of a handful of senior military advisers in the coalition of the willing to voice a dissenting view. "I was one of a bunch of people ... who said 'Iraq is going to be a lot harder than you people seem to think, based on 20 years of experience doing it and studying it. It's going to take a lot more than you seem to be willing to commit."'

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Kilcullen is one of the most influential Australian military minds of his generation. He grew up on Sydney's north shore, the son of academics. He studied counterinsurgency as a cadet at Duntroon, served for more than 20 years in the Australian Army and was awarded a PhD in political science from the University of NSW for a thesis on Indonesian insurgent and terrorist groups and counterinsurgency methods. He has been a military adviser to the Indonesian Special Forces in counterinsurgency, taught counterinsurgency tactics at the British School of Infantry, and served in peacekeeping operations in Cyprus and Bougainville. Kilcullen also commanded an Australian infantry company in counterinsurgency operations in East Timor and trained and led East Timorese forces after the independence vote in 1999. He was a special adviser for irregular warfare to the 2005 US Quadrennial Defence Review and is Rice's chief strategist on counterinsurgency and counter-terrorism, working in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq, the Horn of Africa and Southeast Asia.

His no-nonsense guide to fighting insurgents, The 28 Articles: Fundamentals of Company-Level CounterInsurgency, is used by the US, Australian, British, Canadian, Dutch, Iraqi and Afghan armies as a training document.

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Kilcullen's philosophical approach to counterinsurgency overturned the prevailing orthodoxy. The goal was no longer finding and killing the enemy: it became protecting the population that supports the country's government, winning more and more people to that group and pushing the insurgents to the margins. "If you try to kill the enemy, you end up destroying the haystack to kill the needle," Kilcullen tells Inquirer. "But you can drive the insurgents away, like combing fleas out of a dog. And then you hard-wire them out of the environment."

Kilcullen faced a huge task in changing the mind-set of the entire US military. But he had an unexpected weapon on his side. "The Americans are extremely willing to hear new ideas and are very adaptive when they understand the need for something, but they don't like being lectured. The new counterinsurgency approach was really a Commonwealth approach but they didn't want to get lectured by the Brits. I'd love to think it was my naked raw talent, but I think I've benefited from the novelty factor of not being American and not being British, what I call the Crocodile Dundee factor."

Kilcullen had another ace up his sleeve. "Secretary Rice uses me as eyes and ears to cut through the spin. Part of it is that I'm not political. Not Democrat, not Republican. I have no party affiliation in Australia either, so I don't have to say, 'It's all going very well, Mr President.' I just tell it like it is."

Kilcullen says that the great strength of Americans is that they learn from their mistakes and when they do decide to do something, they make it happen. "It's a self-correcting system. There's been a whole sea change in the way the US army does business. The first year and a half in Iraq, the soldiers on the ground got zero counterinsurgency training. For most of 2005 they got some counterinsurgency training but there was no handbook or doctrine."

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There is much more.

One of the ironies of the new approach is that by protecting the people we are getting the intelligence we need to destroy the enemy. It is the tips from the people that are leading us to the weapons caches and the insurgents. they are showing us where to find the enemy and his logistics. To protect the people you have to have an adequate force to space ratio to cut off enemy movements in the neighborhoods. You also have to be in the neighborhoods full time to protect them.

The mistake of putting the troops in forward operating bases to sally forth and chase the enemy failed, but that is what the Democrats want to return to. It would be a tragic mistake to take their advice on a war we are winning by working with the people on a grass roots basis rather than a top down approach pushed by the Democrat control freaks.

Our objective of destroying the enemy is still being accomplished. We just have found a more effective means of accomplishing it. What is really important about the success of this operation is that it can reduce the number of wars like this we will have to fight in the future. the democrat policy of retreat and defeat will only mean more adversaries will use the methods of the enemy in Iraq.