Out of the Mountains: The Coming Age of the Urban Guerrilla

353 Pages·2013·2.02 MB·English

by  David Kilcullen

Out
OF THE
mountains
This page intentionally left blank
Out
OF THE

mountains
THE COMING AGE OF THE URBAN
GUERRILLA
David Kilcullen

1
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford.
It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research,
scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide.
Oxford New York
Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi
Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi
New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto
With offi ces in
Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece
Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore
South Korea Switzerland Th ailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam
Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press
in the UK and certain other countries.
Published in the United States of America by
Oxford University Press
198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016
© David Kilcullen 2013
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the
prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law,
by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization.
Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent
to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above.
You must not circulate this work in any other form,
and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Kilcullen, David.
Out of the mountains : the coming age of the urban guerrilla / David Kilcullen.
pages cm
ISBN 978-0-19-973750-5 (hardback)
1. Guerrilla warfare. 2. Urban warfare.
3. Low-intensity confl icts (Military science)
4. Confl ict management.
5. Non-governmental organizations. I. Title.
U240.K493 2013
355.02(cid:99)18091732—dc23 2013014396
1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
c ontents

Acknowledgments vii
Introduction: Ambush in Afghanistan 3
1. Out of the Mountains 18
2. Future Cities, Future Th reats 52
3. Th e Th eory of Competitive Control 116
4. Confl ict in Connected Cities 169
5. Crowded, Complex, and Coastal 232
Appendix : On War in the Urban, Networked Littoral 263
Notes 295
Index 331

v
This page intentionally left blank
a cknowledgments
i called this book Out of the Mountains, but I might just as easily have
called it Back to the Future , since the issues I examine here—centered on
confl ict in the urbanized, networked littorals of an increasingly crowded
planet—were already well understood by the end of the last century.
Marine Corps general Charles Krulak said in 1996 that “the future
may well not be ‘Son of Desert Storm,’ but rather ‘Stepchild of Somalia
and Chechnya.’” Ralph Peters, Robert H. Scales, Alan Vick, Roger
Spiller, Russell Glenn, Paul Van Riper, John Arquilla, Michael Evans,
and Justin Kelly had all written extensively by the late 1990s on urban
operations in coastal cities. By 2000, Dave Dilegge—later a torch-
bearer for the insurgency of ideas through the Small Wars Journal —
had founded a community of interest around his U rban Operations
Journal . At the same time, Duane Schattle, Dave Stephenson, and
Frank Hoffmann were thinking through the challenges of urban
operations against hybrid threats. Military forces in several coun-
tries were expanding their amphibious and urban capabilities, while
police services, aid agencies, and some NGOs were considering gover-
nance and human security in marginalized urban areas. I myself had
written a series of papers on urban tactics and amphibious operations,
informed by the experience of late-1990s peace enforcement in coastal
environments.
vii
viii a cknowledgments
But much of this thinking on urban littorals, an already very well estab-
lished set of ideas by 2001, was sidelined by urgent military necessity aft er
the horrendous Al Qaeda terrorist attacks of 9/11. We found ourselves

(not by choice) involved in a landlocked, rural insurgency—far from
cities or coastlines—hunting guerrillas in mountain valleys, trying to
work with and protect the remote tribal communities in which they
nested and on which they preyed. As Iraq descended into chaos after
2003, we were drawn into intense urban counterinsurgency—but, again,
we were far from the coast. For a decade since then, the vibrant civilian
and academic discussion about future challenges in coastal megacities has
gone on without much input from those who have been fi ghting the war.
Bing West, with his closely observed studies of urban combat in Iraq, and
Lou DiMarco, with his survey of urban operations since Stalingrad, are
two outstanding exceptions to this rule—but even their work has had less
impact on the debate than it deserves.
Th at civilian debate, however, has been enormously productive. Diane
Davis, Stephen Graham, Jo Beall, Mitchell Sipus, Saskia Sassen, and Mike
Davis, among many others, have added immensely to our understanding of
development and confl ict in connected cities. Policing and crime thinkers
such as John P. Sullivan and Diego Gambetta, and urban sociologists such
as Sudhir Venkatesh have studied the challenges of criminal insurgency in
large cities and explored the ways in which underworld networks commu-
nicate. Institutions such as the World Bank, the United Nations, and the
Asian and African Development Banks, along with fi rms such as IBM and
McKinsey, have studied the problems of future urbanization. Universities
including the London School of Economics, the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology, Columbia University and the Harvard Graduate School
of Design, among many others, have established cities programs, while
think tanks such as the Brookings Institution (with its Global Cities Ini-
tiative) have examined the problems of urban growth, littoralization, and
connectivity. Architects such as Oystein Gronning and Eyal Weizman
have applied spatial design thinking to urban confl ict.
Now that the war in Afghanistan is beginning to wind down, it’s
time for the military to reengage with the challenge of irregular confl ict
in the urban littoral. When the dust eventually settles and our gener-
ation, the generation that fought the war, shakes itself off and turns from
the moment-by-moment challenge of the war to once again consider
a cknowledgments ix
the future environment, we’ll find that the same old challenges of the
urbanized littoral remain, but that much of what we thought we under-
stood has changed. Not only have enormous advances been made over
the last decade in cloud computing, complex systems theory, big data
analysis, remote observation, and crowd-sourced analytics—allowing new
insights into old problems—but vast amounts of real-time data are now
available to inform our thinking. Most important, the environment itself
has changed. Th e level of connectivity and networked interaction (among
populations all over the planet, and between and within coastal cities)
has exploded in the last decade, and it’s time to bring this new under-
standing to bear on the problems of urbanization and confl ict. What we
may fi nd—and what this book tentatively suggests—is that things aren’t
where we left them when we headed off into the mountains aft er 9/11.
In writing this book, I’ve benefi ted from the thinking and research of
all these individuals and institutions, and also from the unstinting and
generous help of friends, colleagues, and family across the whole world.
Professor Tammy Schultz read and carefully critiqued every chapter.
Dr. Erin Simpson kept me focused on the big issues and helped sharpen the
argument over many discussions in the fi eld and over the map. Greg Mills,
Oyeshiku Carr, John Pollock, Claire Metelits, Satish Chand, and Amit
Patel contributed foundational ideas, as did Leah Meisterlin, Steve Eames,
Nigel Snoad, Oystein Gronning, Antonio Giustozzi, Claudio Franco,
Andrew Exum, Gordon Messenger, and John Sullivan. Stacia George,
Alex Hughes, Jason Knobloch, Matt McNabb, Richard Tyson, and Will
Upshur at Caerus designed and led community-participative mapping
programs in some extremely challenging urban environments—and devel-
oped crowd-sourced analytics and remote observation tools that made it
possible to see the patterns discussed in this book. Likewise, Anna Prouse,
Nate Rosenblatt, Jacob Burke, and Omar Ellaboudy pioneered field
research techniques to map the virtual/human network overlaps that turn
out to be critical in this environment. Nate Rosenblatt, in particular, pro-
vided many insights and key sources that proved critical to understanding
the Arab Awakening, while Anna Prouse fearlessly walked the streets of
several hostile cities (not just in Africa) as we fi gured things out. Christian
Chung and Scott Long did the initial desktop analysis on Jamaica and
Sri Lanka that helped me to do eff ective fi eldwork later. Michael Stock,
Randy Garrett, Ben Riley, John Seel, Pat Kelleher, Nadia Schadlow, Marin