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Confronting a Global Pandemic in a Deteriorating Security Environment | David Kilcullen Yes, we have slain a large dragon, but we live March 12, 2020 now in a jungle filled with a bewildering variety of poisonous snakes. And in many ways the dragon INTRODUCTION was easier to keep track of. — James Woolsey Lt. Col. (res.) David Kilcullen is a theorist and practitioner of guerrilla and unconventional warfare and counterterrorism, with extensive operational experience over a 25-year career with the Australian and U.S. governments as an Army officer, analyst, policy adviser and diplomat. He served in Iraq as senior counterinsurgency advisor to U.S. General David Petraeus, was senior advisor to U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, and has served in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, Libya and Colombia. Kilcullen serves on the Board of Advisors at the Center on Military and Political Power at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. He's professor of international and political studies at the University of New South Wales, Canberra and is CEO and President of Cordillera Applications Group, a research and operations firm providing geopolitical analysis, remote observation, fieldwork and related support to government, industry and NGOs. He is the author of five prize-winning books on terrorism, insurgency and future warfare as well as numerous scholarly papers on urbanization, conflict and future warfare. Kilcullen received a PhD in politics from the University of New South Wales at the Australian Defense Force Academy in 2000. WHY DO I CARE? Only weeks after finishing Peter Zeihan’s book on the coming “global disorder,” I’m not quite sure where or how to rank “The Dragons and the Snakes.” I’ve never quite read a book like this before. It is steeped in military history and theory, which I am certainly no expert in. Much of what I’ve learned in the last year about the various militaries of the world, their formations, equipment, skillsets, etc., has come from my episode with Peter Zeihan. If I had to categorize this book somehow, I’d say that it is a manual for helping people understand the logic behind how modern war is waged and the perspectives that various actors in that war carry with them. Its historical overview provides a grounding for this analysis by telling us where we have been and how got here. Its theoretical framework forms a sort-of map that can help us understand where we are going. Unlike Zeihan’s, this book doesn’t spend much time on the Cold War or pre-Cold War period (it may reference either of these periods, mainly in passing). Kilcullen pulls from theories of evolutionary biology (including eusociality), anthropology, memetics, creative- destruction (Schumpeter), Minsky’s instability hypothesis, psychology, theory of mind, etc. The book’s central insight is that conventional 1 notions of military dominance (like the idea of full-spectrum dominance) are chimeras. “If there is one takeaway,” writes Kilcullen, “it is that the military model pioneered by US forces in the 1991 Gulf War—the high-tech, high-precision, high-cost suite of networked systems that won the Gulf War so quickly and brought Western powers such unprecedented battlefield dominance in the quarter century since then—is no longer working. Our enemies have figured out how to render it irrelevant, have caught up or overtaken us in critical technologies, or have expanded their concept of war beyond the narrow boundaries within which our traditional approach can be brought to bear. They have adapted, and unless we too adapt our decline is only a matter of time.” Ironically, the question of “who the enemy is” never seems to be raised by David. In this new world full of mass psychological warfare, non-state actors, and shifting national identities (Britain-EU, post-Soviet breakup, civil wars in the Middle East, etc.), this doesn’t seem like a question with a straightforward answer. In the end, this book does not seem to offer much in the way of solutions. Rather, it attempts to challenge any notions of permanence that may still linger in Western minds about the security landscape in which we find ourselves (even challenging notions of how nations behave or how to distinguish between nations and other militant organizations). The solution, if there is one to be found, is to “embrace the suck,” as David calls it. In his estimation, the United States and its Western allies and partners can no longer afford to evolve their systems largely in isolation of the rest of the world. They must embrace the forces of co-evolution, adaptation, and creative- destruction. They must learn to act a bit more like snakes, perhaps borrowing both from Russia’s use of liminal maneuvers and from China’s willingness to expand the surface area of conflict to include things like economic, information, and other forms of warfare. In essence, what David seems to be saying is that we are now in a truly Hobbesian world of “all against all,” and that to pretend otherwise (e.g. to pretend that we are the sovereign in an increasingly anarchic landscape). PERSONAL BACKGROUND Life Experience — Q: Can you give us a sense of who you are and how you got here, including your relevant military, intelligence, and diplomatic experience? Military History & Theory — Q: What do you love so much about military history and theory? Q: How did you get into studying this subject? Q: Was it an outgrowth of your service in the military? DRAGONS vs. SNAKES Why Dragons, Why Snakes? — Q: Where did this name come 2 from and what does it mean? Q: The proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and ballistic How did the ideas in this book missiles to carry them; ethnic and national hatreds that can evolve, borrow from, or add to metastasize across large portions of the globe; the those of your previous books: international narcotics trade; terrorism; the dangers inherent “The Accidental Guerilla,” in the West’s dependence on Mid-East oil; new economic “Counterinsurgency,” “Out of the and environmental challenges—these and a number of other Mountains,” and “Blood Year”? important threats to our security and our interests present Security Environment of the intelligence problems that are extraordinary in their 1990’s — Q: What was the complexity and difficulty. And these challenges, if unmet, can immediate aftermath of the decidedly affect our daily lives for the worse. Our two breakup of the USSR like? (e.g. surrounding oceans don’t isolate us anymore. Yes, we have Russian units leaving the service slain a large dragon, but we live now in a jungle filled with a vehicles, weapons, aircraft, and bewildering variety of poisonous snakes. And in many ways equipment, and setting up shop the dragon was easier to keep track of. — James Woolsey as commercial traffickers.) From a Woolseyan Era to the Modern Day — Q: Can you lead us through the transition from the “Woolseyan Era” or “Woolseyan Security Environment,” to the world of “Dragons and Snakes” of today? Q: How did we go from the “Highway of Death” to the high-water mark of “Dora Farms?” “The Western” Way of War — You use the capitalized term “Western” or “the West” to describe a particular military methodology, along with the group of countries whose warfighting style is characterized by that methodology. “In essence,” you write, “it is an approach to war that emphasizes battlefield dominance, achieved through high-tech precision engagement, networked communications, and pervasive intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR). It is characterized by an obsessive drive to minimize casualties, a reluctance to think about the long- term consequences of war, a narrow focus on combat, and a lack of emphasis on war termination— the set of activities needed in order to translate battlefield success into enduring and favorable political outcomes.” Q: Who is “the West?” Q: What is the “Western” approach to war? Q: What are the origins or roots of this military methodology? 3 Dragons Learning — Q: When did the Dragons start learning from us and what were the lessons they drew? (Was it as soon as the 1991 Gulf War?) Q: How did the Russians incorporate those lessons? Q: How did the Chinese incorporate these same lessons? Q: What about North Korea and Iran? Q: While these countries were learning from us, how were American policymakers learning from them (Were they even paying attention?)? Military Evolution in Post-Cold War Russia — Q: How has the Russian Federation evolved its warfighting methodology in the years since the fall of the USSR? (nuclear, conventional, asymmetric) Russia’s Wartime Evolution & The “New Look” — Russia’s wartime evolution in Chechnya and the Caucasus, plus the peacetime innovation of the New Look after Georgia, formed the basis for Russia’s resurgence. Q: How did the war in Georgia impact Putin and change the Russian military mindset? Q: Where did they do well, and where—like at the tactical level—did they do poorly? Q: How did the Georgian campaign prompt the need for Defense Minister Anatoly Serdyokov’s “New Look”? Q: What is the theory or set of theories that underpinned Russia’s military evolution? Theory of Liminal Warfare — Q: What are some examples of liminal warfare strategies in action? Q: How do we think about liminal warfare in special sense? You have written that “fostering a fragmented, polarized political and media environment can become a military objective in its own right, since it increases the scope for maneuver by widening the zone of ambiguity. Q: How important is it to foster ambiguity and why? Liminal Maneuver

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