2
" 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
3
" The future threat won’t be neatly divisible into the categories we use today (state versus nonstate, domestic versus foreign, or war versus crime). As the Mumbai, Mogadishu, and Kingston examples illustrate, future threats will be hybrid: that is, they’ll include irregular actors and methods, but also state actors that use irregulars as their weapon of choice or adopt asymmetric methods to minimize detection and avoid retaliation. Neither the concept nor the reality of hybrid conflict is new—writers such as Frank Hoffman, T. X. Hammes, and Erin Simpson have all examined hybrid warfare in detail. At the same time, Pakistan’s use of the Taliban, LeT, and the Haqqani network, Iran’s use of Hezbollah and the Quds Force, or the sponsorship of insurgencies and terrorist groups by regimes such as Muammar Gadhafi’s Libya, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, and the Soviet Union, go back over many decades. "
― David Kilcullen , Out of the Mountains: The Coming Age of the Urban Guerrilla
4
" Even though wars between nation-states might theoretically be considered “conventional,” so much of the world’s population is going to be living in coastal cities that all future conflict, including state-on-state conflict, will be pushed in an irregular direction—toward small-unit hit-and-run attacks, ambushes, use of snipers, bombings, and other tactics traditionally used by nonstate actors. This is because, as we’ve already seen in Mogadishu and Mumbai, urban environments tend to disaggregate and break up military forces. They break battles up, too—into a large number of small combat actions that are dispersed and fragmented, rather than a single large-scale engagement. "
― David Kilcullen , Out of the Mountains: The Coming Age of the Urban Guerrilla
5
" For example, the second battle of Fallujah, during the Iraq War, included 13,500 American, Iraqi, and British troops, opposed by somewhere between 2,000 and 4,000 insurgents, for a total of roughly 17,500 combatants. But the battle didn’t take the form of a single large combat action: rather, it was fought over forty-seven days between November 7 and December 23, 2004, across the entire city of Fallujah and its periurban districts, and was made up of hundreds of small and medium-sized firefights distributed over a wide area, each involving a relatively small number of fighters on each side.107 This disaggregating effect of urban environments is a key reason why even state-on-state conflict in the future will exhibit many irregular characteristics "
― David Kilcullen , Out of the Mountains: The Coming Age of the Urban Guerrilla
6
" Perhaps it had nothing to do with the Taliban and everything to do with perverse incentives created by rapid and uneven development in a tribal society whose economic, social, and agricultural systems have been wrecked by decades of war. No external aid is neutral: a sudden influx of foreign assistance creates a contracting bonanza, benefiting some at others’ expense, and in turn provoking conflict. Likewise, it creates spoils over which local power brokers fight for personal gain, to the detriment of the wider community, and can contribute to a sense of entitlement on the part of locals. Access to foreigners, who have lots of money and firepower but little time or inclination to gain an understanding of local dynamics, can give district power brokers incredibly lucrative opportunities for corruption. A tsunami of illicit cash washes over the society, provoking abuse, raising expectations but then disappointing them, and empowering local armed groups, who pose as clean and incorruptible, defenders of the disenfranchised, at least till they themselves gain access to sources of corruption.14 "
― David Kilcullen , Out of the Mountains: The Coming Age of the Urban Guerrilla
7
" The military implications are obvious, if difficult to act upon in today’s fiscal environment. There’s a clear and continuing need for Marines, for amphibious units and naval supply ships, for platforms that allow operations in littoral and riverine environments, and for capabilities that enable expeditionary logistics in urbanized coastal environments. Rotary-wing or tilt-rotor aircraft, and precise and discriminating weapons systems, will also be needed. There’s also a clear need to structure ground forces so that they can rapidly aggregate or disaggregate forces and fires, enabling them to operate in a distributed, small-unit mode while still being able to concentrate quickly to mass their effect against a major target. Combat engineers, construction engineers, civil affairs units, intelligence systems that can make sense of the clutter of urban areas, pre-conflict sensing systems such as geospatial tools that allow early warning of conflict and instability, and constabulary and coast guard capabilities are also likely to be important. The ability to operate for a long period in a city without drawing heavily on that city’s water, fuel, electricity, or food supply will be important as well, with very significant implications for expeditionary logistics. I go into detail on all these issues, and other military aspects of the problem, in the Appendix. "
― David Kilcullen , Out of the Mountains: The Coming Age of the Urban Guerrilla
8
" All that barbed wire, concrete barriers, checkpoints. You shut the city down. You stopped it flowing—put it on life support. You stopped people getting around to do what they had to do. You cut the violence, sure, but you did it by killing the city.” “All right,” I said, “you’re so smart, how would you have done it?” And Steve pointed out what every police officer, paramedic, traffic engineer, and social worker knows, and what should have been obvious to me all along: a city is a living organism that flows and breathes, and any public safety solution that no longer lets it flow is no solution at all. "
― David Kilcullen , Out of the Mountains: The Coming Age of the Urban Guerrilla
9
" The implications for civil government are equally obvious—expanding social services, city administration, and rule of law into periurban areas is clearly important, as are investments in infrastructure to guarantee supplies of fuel, electricity, food and water. Less obvious but equally important are investments in governance and infrastructure in rural areas, as well as efforts to mitigate the effects of rural environmental degradation, which can cause unchecked and rapid urban migration. Given the prevalence and increasing capability of criminal networks, police will need a creative combination of community policing, constabulary work, criminal investigation, and special branch (police intelligence) work. And local city managers, district-level officials, social workers, emergency services, and ministry representatives may need to operate in higher-threat governance environments in which they face opposition. The "
― David Kilcullen , Out of the Mountains: The Coming Age of the Urban Guerrilla
14
" 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
17
" I’ve written elsewhere in detail on the intellectual history of counterinsurgency, and on various critiques of the theory.120 For now, though, it’s enough to note that there is solid evidence that counterinsurgency, or COIN, can work if done properly, with sufficient resources, for long enough.121 But it’s also clear that COIN is not the answer to every question. Likewise, counterterrorism (ranging from the comprehensive “global war on terrorism” of President George W. Bush’s administration to President Obama’s unrestrained drone warfare) can help to temporarily suppress a particular type of threat, but it can’t do much about the broad and complex range of challenges we’re about to face. In fact, any theory of conflict that’s organized around dealing with a single type of enemy is unlikely to be very helpful in a conflict environment that includes multiple overlapping threats and challenges. "
― David Kilcullen , Out of the Mountains: The Coming Age of the Urban Guerrilla
18
" Instead, to deal with complex future conflicts, we’re going to need something more like a unified field theory: an approach that is framed around the common features of all types of threats (rather than optimized for the particular characteristics of any one type of threat) and considers the environment in toto as a single unified system. We’ll need to acknowledge that many security challenges in the future environment will be “threats without enemies,” which, by definition, are just not amenable to military solutions. And we’ll need to recognize that even when there’s an identifiable adversary—usually, but not always, a nonstate armed group—there are still no purely military solutions to many of the challenges we will encounter, meaning that disciplines such as law enforcement, urban planning, city administration, systems design, public health, and international development are likely to play a key part in any future theory of conflict. "
― David Kilcullen , Out of the Mountains: The Coming Age of the Urban Guerrilla
19
" This theory has been part of many people’s thinking about insurgency and civil war for a long time. But the cases we’ve examined in this chapter suggest that it applies to any nonstate armed group that preys on a population. It applies to insurgents, terrorists, drug cartels, street gangs, organized crime syndicates, pirates, and warlords, and it provides useful explanations and insights for law enforcement, civil war, and diffuse social conflict—not just for insurgency. I will suggest that we treat this theory (until another theory emerges that better fits the available facts) as a working model for dealing with future threats. "
― David Kilcullen , Out of the Mountains: The Coming Age of the Urban Guerrilla
