Showing all quotes that contain ‘David Kilcullen’.
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“If I were a Muslim, I’d probably be a jihadists’; another: Just because you invade a country stupidly doesn’t mean you have to leave it stupidly.”
― David Kilcullen
“Leon Trotsky said, “You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.”
― David Kilcullen, Out of the Mountains: The Coming Age of the Urban Guerrilla
“Insurgents make fish traps, as do militias, gangs, warlords, mass social movements, religions (Jesus, for instance, called his apostles to be “fishers of men”) and, of course, governments.3 Like real fish traps, these metaphorical traps are woven of many strands—persuasive, administrative, and coercive. Though each of the strands may be brittle, their combined effect creates a control structure that’s easy and attractive for people to enter, but then locks them into a system of persuasion and coercion: a set of incentives and disincentives from which they find it extremely difficult to break out.”
― David Kilcullen, Out of the Mountains: The Coming Age of the Urban Guerrilla
“The unified field theory that best fits the currently known facts is what I call the “theory of competitive control.” This is the notion that nonstate armed groups, of many kinds, draw their strength and freedom of action primarily from their ability to manipulate and mobilize populations, and that they do this using a spectrum of methods from coercion to persuasion, by creating a normative system that makes people feel safe through the predictability and order that it generates.”
― David Kilcullen, Out of the Mountains: The Coming Age of the Urban Guerrilla
“Since irregular combatants don’t have the combat power to stand up to government forces in a direct fight, they tend to hide, and thus to rely on cover and concealment. The concealment and protection afforded by complex environments help them avoid detection by security forces, letting them move freely and fight only when and where they choose. For this reason, guerrillas, bandits, and pirates have always flourished in areas where cover was good and government presence was weak. For most of human history, this meant remote, forested, mountainous areas such as the Afghan mountains discussed in the preface. But with the unprecedented level of global urbanization, this pattern is changing, prompting a major shift in the character of conflict. In the future environment of overcrowded, undergoverned, urban, coastal areas—combined with increasingly excellent remote surveillance capabilities (including drones, satellites, and signals intelligence) in remote rural areas—the cover is going to be in the cities.”
― David Kilcullen, Out of the Mountains: The Coming Age of the Urban Guerrilla
“In a free society, there’s clearly a balance to be struck between the risk of violence from insurgency, crime, or social chaos (nonstate violence, if you like) and the risk of state repression. This was exactly the problem in Iraq, with ordinary people caught between nonstate violence from Sunni extremists, on one hand, and state violence from the Shi’a-dominated Iraqi National Police, on the other. Could we, then, help a neighborhood become self-defending against all comers, making people both safer from nonstate violence and harder for the state to oppress?”
― David Kilcullen, Out of the Mountains: The Coming Age of the Urban Guerrilla
“Of course, in order to do this, here and there they had to kill some of the occupying forces and attack some of the military targets. But above all they had to kill their own people who collaborated with the enemy.”
― David Kilcullen, The Accidental Guerrilla: Fighting Small Wars in the Midst of a Big One
“Norton defined a feral city as “a metropolis with a population of more than a million people, in a state the government of which has lost the ability to maintain the rule of law within the city’s boundaries yet remains a functioning actor in the greater international system.”
― David Kilcullen, Out of the Mountains: The Coming Age of the Urban Guerrilla
“Nonstate groups step up to control key areas and functions, commerce continues (albeit with much corruption and violence), a black market economy flourishes, and massive levels of disease and pollution may be present, yet “even under these conditions, these cities continue to grow, and the majority of occupants do not voluntarily leave.”
― David Kilcullen, Out of the Mountains: The Coming Age of the Urban Guerrilla
“It manifests in diffuse and apparently random patterns of crime and violence, and in self-marginalization by city dwellers who see themselves as victims of social injustice and economic exclusion, standing apart from the mainstream—in the city, but not of it—yet still maintain a high level of connectedness both with other members in their group and with the ebb and flow of the city itself.”
― David Kilcullen, Out of the Mountains: The Coming Age of the Urban Guerrilla
“If the Mumbai raiders were like a parasite that infested the city and made it convulse, TF Ranger acted instead like a belligerent drunk in a bar brawl, poking someone in the eye and getting punched in return.”
― David Kilcullen, Out of the Mountains: The Coming Age of the Urban Guerrilla
“In an urban environment the SNA troops would adopt a variation on this approach, moving whenever possible on several parallel streets at once, picking up their bearings at each intersection in order to stay roughly level with each other. In this way, they achieved the classic tactical goal of moving dispersed but fighting concentrated.”
― David Kilcullen, Out of the Mountains: The Coming Age of the Urban Guerrilla
“Real fights are always messy and chaotic, and real fighters rarely do exactly what they’re supposed to do under fire. And yet any leader of irregular cavalry or light infantry (or, indeed, any mounted constabulary officer) of the past century would recognize these simple tactics.”
― David Kilcullen, Out of the Mountains: The Coming Age of the Urban Guerrilla
“Each dismounted fighter and each vehicle commander need only remember five basic rules. These rules define how the group fights at every scale (the individual, the dismounted squad, the vehicle, and the group of vehicles) and they never change, regardless of the terrain, the tactical situation, or the size of the engagement. They are: “Maintain an extended line abreast,” “Keep your neighbors just in sight, but no closer,” “Move to the sound of the guns,” “Dismount when you see the enemy,” and “When you come under fire, stop and fire back.” This”
― David Kilcullen, Out of the Mountains: The Coming Age of the Urban Guerrilla
“While the success of the Mumbai terrorists came in large part from the tactical and operational inadequacy of Indian law enforcement response, it is easy to imagine a small group of terrorists creating multiple centers of disorder at the same time within a major American city in same manner. An equally terrifying scenario is a Beslan-type siege in school centers with multiple active shooters. Paramilitary terrorists of this kind would aim for maximum violence, target hardening, and area denial—capabilities that many SWAT units would be hard-pressed to counter.43”
― David Kilcullen, Out of the Mountains: The Coming Age of the Urban Guerrilla