David Kilcullen
Senior counterinsurgency advisor to General David Petraeus in Iraq,and chief counterterrorism strategist for the US State Department.
Monday 1 June, 12–1pm
HC Coombs Lecture Theatre, Building 8a, Fellows Rd, ANU
This lecture is free and open to the public. Please register attendance with ANU
Enquiries E: events@anu.edu.au T: 02 6125 4144
In the first few years of the post-9/11 era, the established models for fighting ‘small wars’ proved
distressingly ineffective against resilient insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan. As the insurgents fought
Western armies to a stalemate, it was clear that a new approach was necessary. Dr David Kilcullen, a
former Australian army officer, and one of the world’s most influential experts on guerrilla warfare,
became a key architect of the West’s revamped military strategy. As the senior advisor to General David
Patraeus in Iraq, Kilcullen’s revolutionary approach to counterinsurgency was an intellectual foundation
for ‘the Surge’ of 2007.
Kilcullen will uncover the face of modern warfare, illuminating both the global challenge, the ‘War
on Terrorism,’ and small wars across the world in Afghanistan, Iraq, Indonesia, Thailand, East Timor,
and Pakistan. He will explain that today’s conflicts are a complex hybrid of contrasting trends that
America has tended to conflate, blurring the distinction between local and global struggles, and
thereby enormously complicating the challenges. The West has continually misidentified insurgents
with limited aims and legitimate grievances—‘accidental guerrillas’—as members of a unified worldwide
terror network.
David Kilcullen is one of the world’s leading experts on guerrilla warfare and, rarely among his kind,
has a PhD (UNSW) in political anthropology. He has served in every theatre of the ‘War on Terror’
since 9/11 as special advisor for counterinsurgency to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, senior
counterinsurgency advisor to General David Petraeus in Iraq, and chief counterterrorism strategist for
the US State Department. He is a former Australian army officer with combat experience in South-East
Asia and the Middle East.