David John Kilcullen FRGS (born 1967) is an Australian author, strategist, and counterinsurgency expert and current president of the Cordillera Applications Group.

[4] Kilcullen was a senior counter-insurgency advisor to General David Petraeus in 2007 and 2008, where he helped design and monitor the Iraq War troop surge.

[6] Kilcullen has been a senior fellow of the Center for a New American Security[7] and an adjunct professor at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University.

"[9] Kilcullen has written six books: The Accidental Guerrilla, Counterinsurgency, Out of the Mountains, Blood Year, The Dragons and the Snakes: How the Rest Learned to Fight the West and The Ledger: Accounting for Failure in Afghanistan.

After twelve months of training in Indonesia, Kilcullen graduated from the Australian Defence Force School of Languages[13] in 1993 with an advanced diploma in applied linguistics.

In early 2007, Kilcullen became a member of a small group of civilian and military experts, including Colonel H. R. McMaster, who worked on the personal staff of General David Petraeus, the Commander of the Multi-National Force – Iraq.

[23] Kilcullen is an Advisory Board Member of Spirit of America, a 501(c)(3) organization that supports the safety and success of Americans serving abroad and the local people and partners they seek to help.

[24] In 2004, Kilcullen wrote Complex Warfighting, which became the basis of the Australian Army's Future Land Operating Concept, approved the next year.

The concept claims that future conflicts will feature asymmetric threats requiring land forces to be flexible, able to deploy quickly, and operate in urban terrain.

The paper calls for "modular, highly educated and skilled forces with a capacity for network-enabled operations, optimised for close combat in combined arms teams.

Thus, counter-insurgency strategies and tactics need updating to deal with a globalised movement like al-Qaeda, especially increasing participation and cooperation of many states' intelligence and police agencies.

Individuals' actions and the propaganda effect of a subjective "single narrative" may far outweigh practical progress, rendering counterinsurgency even more non-linear and unpredictable than before.

It first appeared as an e-mail that was widely circulated informally among U.S. Army and Marine officers in April 2006, and was subsequently published in Military Review in May 2006.

[29] It was later formalised as Appendix A to FM 3-24, the US military's counterinsurgency doctrine, and is in use by the US, Australian, British, Canadian, Dutch, Iraqi and Afghan armies as a training document.

"[31] In the same essay, "Religion and Insurgency," published in May 2007 on the Small Wars Journal, he expanded this view: The bottom line is that no handbook relieves a professional counterinsurgent from the personal obligation to study, internalize and interpret the physical, human, informational and ideological setting in which the conflict takes place.

He argues that successful counterinsurgency is about out-governing the enemy and winning the adaptation battle to provide integrated measures to defeat insurgent tactics through political, administrative, military, economic, psychological, and informational means.

In an interview with Spencer Ackerman of the Washington Independent in 2008, Kilcullen called the decision to invade Iraq "fucking stupid" and suggested that if policy-makers apply his manual's lessons, similar wars can be avoided in the future.

The question of whether we were right to invade Iraq is a fascinating debate for historians and politicians, and a valid issue for the American people to consider in an election year.

The piece responded to Andrew Bacevich's review[35] of Kilcullen's book, The Accidental Guerilla: Fighting Small Wars in the Midst of a Big One, and also addressed his criticisms of American administrations.

Kilcullen wrote:[M]y views have been on the public record for years, since well before I came to work for the government and since before I served in the field in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan.