“David Kilcullen is a former Australian army colonel, with a PhD in insurgency movements. He has been a counterterrorist adviser to the US and worked closely with Iraq War supremo, General David Petraeus, and US Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice. Kilcullen is critical of many aspects of the West’s strategy, post 9/11, which, he argues, led to the rise of Islamic State. He warns the global terrorist threat is now the new normal.”
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synthetic zerØ 
David Kilcullen has been a Senior Fellow of the Center for a New American Security and an Adjunct Professor at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins Universitym and the author of three books: The Accidental Guerrilla (2009), Counterinsurgency (2010), and Out of the Mountains (2013)
Kilcullen (2007) has argued for a deeper cultural understanding of the “conflict environment”, an approach he has called conflict ethnography: “a deep, situation-specific understanding of the human, social and cultural dimensions of a conflict, understood not by analogy with some other conflict, but in its own terms.”
> “Conflict ethnography is key; to borrow a literary term, there is no substitute for a “close reading” of the environment. But it is a reading that resides in no book, but around you; in the terrain, the people, their social and cultural institutions, the way they act and think. You have to be a participant observer. And the key is to see beyond the surface differences between our societies and these environments (of which religious orientation is one key element) to the deeper social and cultural drivers of conflict, drivers that locals would understand on their own terms (Kilcullen 2007).”
Kilcullen’s 2006 paper “Counterinsurgency Redux” questions the relevance of classical counterinsurgency theory to modern conflict. It argues from field evidence gathered in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and the Horn of Africa that:
In an interview with Spencer Ackerman of the Washington Independent in 2008:
“[I]n my view, the decision to invade Iraq in 2003 was an extremely serious strategic error. But the task of the moment is not to cry over spilt milk, rather to help clean it up: a task in which the surge, the comprehensive counterinsurgency approach, and our troops on the ground are admirably succeeding.”
“Complex Warfighting” (PDF). Australian Army Future Land Operational Concept (FLOC). 7 April 2004. http://www.quantico.usmc.mil/download.aspx?Path=./Uploads/Files/SVG_complex_warfighting.pdf
“Counterinsurgency Redux” (PDF). Survival (International Institute of Strategic Studies) 48 (4): 111–130. Winter 2006–2007.
Click to access counterinsurgency_redux.pdf
my interest in the failings of modern states and the subsequent return to tribalisms aside I’m taken by all of these sorts efforts to flesh out the theoretical-abstracted- modeling types views from on high (think Robert Strange McNamara ) by getting down and dirty in the midst of things, just wish analysts like this had the discipline to stick with those vital insights and avoid the temptation to pontificating on complexities beyond the particulars that they have negotiated.