The always interesting blog at Small Wars Journal has a post up today from David Kilcullen, the chief counterinsurgency adviser to General David Petraeus. Kilcullen is the man in the middle of this new strategy to secure Baghdad and its environs…it ought to go without saying that his assessment has more value than those of, say, the New York Times, but before getting into the details, Kilcullen is compelled to actually spell it out: the surge-has-failed crowd doesn’t know what the heck they’re talking about.
This post is not about whether current ops are “working” – for us, here on the ground, time will tell, though some observers elsewhere seem to have already made up their minds (on the basis of what evidence, I’m not really sure). But for professional counterinsurgency operators such as our SWJ community, the thing to understand at this point is the intention and concept behind current ops in Iraq: if you grasp this, you can tell for yourself how the operations are going, without relying on armchair pundits. So in the interests of self-education (and cutting out the commentariat middlemen-sorry, guys) here is a field perspective on current operations.
Needless to say, you should go read the whole thing, and if you want a little more Kilcullen, the WWS got some answers from the Aussie adviser late last month. (HT Op-For)
