Dr. David Kilcullen, who currently serves as senior counter-insurgency adviser to Gen. Petraeus and Multi-National Force Iraq, participated in a conference call with bloggers and reporters this morning. Kilcullen has a distinguished record, having served as chief counter-terrorism strategist for the U.S. State Department, senior analyst in Australia’s Office of National Assessments, and special adviser to the Pentagon for counter-terrorism during the 2005 Quadrennial Defense Review. He also blogs at the Small Wars Journal. The call lasted nearly 45 minutes, so I won’t try and cover everything that was discussed, but there will be a complete transcript and audio file posted here sometime today. So, a few highlights: A reporter from the San Antonio Express News asked Kilcullen “to elaborate one one of the accelerants–Iran. We understand the connection between the Iranian regime and the Shia extremist groups, but what’s perplexing to many of us is the dynamics between Iran and the Sunni extremists.” KILCULLEN: “I think it’s really important to understand as a sort of first thought that the groups that are fighting in Iraq, mostly are fighting for political advantage, and, in fact, if you look at the different groups that are fighting, some of them appear to be very different religiously–there are what look like far-right Sunni groups and what look like extremist Shia groups, but actually, you often find people that know each other in those groups and they sometimes cooperate on a tactical basis. If you think about it as a purely religious phenomenon, that’s confusing: why would extreme Shia cooperate with extreme Sunni? But the thing is, you gotta remember that every Iraqi has at least two identities. They’ve got a pre-2003 identity, from when before we arrived, and then they’ve got their current identity, under the environment that we’re in now. So a lot of these people know each other from Saddam days and they do tend to act like an old oligarchy that’s trying to preserve their interests. And you often find Shia and Sunni groups sort of tactically cooperating in some ways, or leaders in different groups knowing each other. So, first of all, it’s not quite as sharp a dichotomy between Sunni and Shia as you might think. The second point, Iran has a history of this and there’s a current pattern of Iranian behavior, both in Afghanistan, where they’re supporting the Taliban, who used to be their enemies, and in Iraq, where they’re supporting both Sunni and Shia groups in different ways. Essentially, what they’re trying to do is bog us down. Their strategy is to soak us up, make it hard for us to maneuver, get us, if you like, decisively committed here in Iraq and over in Afghanistan–to sort of achieve freedom of maneuver for themselves. So it’s Iranian national self-interest that’s involved here more than some kind of religious dynamic. If you see the Iranians as fundamentally Shia, you get the wrong answer. They are Shia, but what motivates their activity, I think a lot of the time, isn’t Shia politics, it’s Iranian influence, if you like, Persian interests. And so a lot of these guys who work with the Iranians may think that they are working on behalf of their faith, but they are actually essentially Persian stooges is how I would put it. And in the case of the Sunnis, it’s more of a tactical alliance of convenience where the Iranians believe there’s benefits, and various Sunni leaders who know them, or have contacts, will exploit that. And why wouldn’t you, if you know that someone’s offering to give you assistance?” I got in the last question. I asked Kilcullen about how airpower fits into the Coalition’s counterinsurgency operations–a topic that’s been much discussed, particularly by the Air Force, which appears to feel a bit marginalized by the Petraeus Doctrine: KILCULLEN: “Airpower is actually critical in counterinsurgency. I know that there’s a bit of a fight going on now between–what is it?–Army and the Marines, who wrote the field manual, 3-24, and the Air Force is kind of out there writing an alternative manual at this point. There’s actually been a lot of really good work done on this by RAND, a guy that I think is best-qualified to talk about this is a guy called Alan Vick at RAND, who’s been really a pioneer in thinking about working through airpower issues in counterinsurgency. I’m aware there’s this debate going on. I think here in Iraq, there’s a number of sort of airpower writ-large functions–air reconnaissance very important, aerial surveillance, both by manned and unmanned vehicles, is critical, it gives us this, if you like, unblinking eye that allows us to understand what’s going on in the environment; the use of fast air combat power for interdiction and strike is important, it’s more important in desert areas and underpopulated rural areas than it is in cluttered, sort of target-rich environments like in cities, where you can really do a lot of damage to the civilian population. So we don’t tend to use airpower heavily inside cities. Having said that, if we do need to, we certainly do draw on that capability. And we do tend to use sort of cannon and direct strafing activity, rather than necessarily going straight for the kill-box approach, where you deluge an area in high-explosive. I think the other really important function is transport and mobility. Obviously, I’m defining airpower broadly, but, you know, helicopter mobility, the ability to move around in fixed-wing airtransport aircraft really gives us an edge in terms of being able to react quickly when things happen. So, I think, there isn’t a lot of air to air combat in counterinsurgency, and I think, therefore, on the surface, it kind of seems like, well, what role does airpower have? But, actually, airpower’s got a critical role in surveillance, transport, targeting of precise targets, interdicting or isolating areas of the battlefield–it’s got a whole range of functions. It’s kind of sad that it’s been seen as a dichotomy between ground and air forces, because neither of those is as effective by itself as it is when it works with the other. There’s a real sort of symbiosis that you get from effective air and effective ground forces working together. And I think that’s what we’re actually doing here on the ground. It doesn’t always look that way from the doctrinal perch back in the States, but, you know, people work together on the ground to achieve a unified result.” I expect that you’ll soon be able to read more about the discussion at RedState, Blackfive, and Op-For.
