27 Facts About David Kilcullen

David John Kilcullen FRGS was born on 1967 and is an Australian author, strategist, and counterinsurgency expert who is currently the non-executive chairman of Caerus Associates, a strategy and design consulting firm that he founded.

David Kilcullen is a professor at Arizona State University and at University of New South Wales, Canberra.

David Kilcullen was then a special advisor for counter-insurgency to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

David Kilcullen then attended the Australian Defence Force Academy and completed a Bachelor of Arts with honours in military art and science through the University of New South Wales and graduated as a distinguished graduate and was awarded the Chief of Defence Force Army Prize in 1989.

David Kilcullen took his army officer training at the Royal Military College, Duntroon.

David Kilcullen is fluent in Indonesian and speaks some Arabic and French.

David Kilcullen drew on ethnographic methods to research traditional systems of governance in East Timor and West Papua.

David Kilcullen's research centered on investigating power diffusion in Indonesia during the Darul Islam Era of 1948 to 1962 and the Indonesian Occupation of East Timor of 1974 to 1999.

David Kilcullen argues that counter-insurgency operations, whether successful or not, cause the diffusion of political power from central to local leaders and that populations are the major actors in insurgency and counter-insurgency dynamics.

David Kilcullen was commissioned as a lieutenant in the Australian Army and served in a number of operational, strategic, command, and staff positions in the Royal Australian Infantry Corps and Australian Defence Force.

David Kilcullen served in several counter-insurgency and peacekeeping operations in East Timor, Bougainville, and the Middle East.

David Kilcullen attained the rank of lieutenant colonel in the Australian Army and served as a staff officer in the Australian Defence Force Headquarters.

David Kilcullen left active duty in 2005 and is commissioned as a lieutenant colonel in the Australian Army Reserve.

David Kilcullen was seconded to the United States Department of Defense in 2004, where he wrote the counter-terrorism strategy for the Quadrennial Defense Review that appeared in 2006.

David Kilcullen worked in the field in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq, the Horn of Africa and Southeast Asia.

David Kilcullen helped design and implement the Regional Strategic Initiative.

David Kilcullen was the principal architect of the Joint Campaign Plan which guided the Iraq War 2007 Troop Surge.

David Kilcullen has served as the Special Advisor for Counterinsurgency to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in 2007 and 2008.

David Kilcullen was a member of the White House 2008 Review of Afghanistan and Pakistan Strategy.

David Kilcullen has been an adviser to the British Government, the Australian Government, and to several private sector institutions and companies.

David Kilcullen was a senior fellow and a member of the advisory board of the Center for a New American Security.

David Kilcullen is an Advisory Board Member of Spirit of America, a 501 organization that supports the safety and success of Americans serving abroad and the local people and partners they seek to help.

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

David Kilcullen's paper "Twenty-Eight Articles" is a practical guide for junior officers and non-commissioned officers engaged in counter-insurgency operations in Afghanistan and Iraq.

In 2010, David Kilcullen brought together his writings in his book Counterinsurgency and developed his understanding of counterinsurgency to address radical Islam's globalized threat.

David Kilcullen 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.

David Kilcullen argues that targeted killings with drone strikes in Afghanistan and Pakistan is a mistake.