Guerrillas in the midst: why our next war will be fought in cities.

• Author: Brimley, Shawn
• Position: Out of the Mountains: The Coming Age of the Urban Guerilla - Book review

Out of the Mountains: The Coming Age of the Urban Guerilla

by David Kilcullen

Oxford University Press, 352 pp.

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Two years after former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates left the Pentagon, he bluntly told an audience of West Point cadets that "any future defense secretary who advises the president to again send a big American land army into Asia or into the Middle East or Africa should have his head examined." With U.S. troops home from Iraq and drawing down in Afghanistan--and as the recent debate concerning potential U.S. involvement in Syria underscores--the American people are decidedly uninterested in sending their young men and women again into combat overseas.

But as Leon Trotsky said, "You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you." The unfortunate truth is that however unpopular the cause or circumstance, the United States will encounter war again. It is therefore incumbent on America's leaders--both civilian and military--to prepare for what that future war might require. Those leaders ought to read David Kilcullen's new book closely.

Out off the Mountains: The Coming Age of the Urban Guerilla is an ambitious effort to describe how twenty-first-century conflict is migrating away from small mountain villages, farming areas, and frontier valleys of places like Afghanistan into sprawling cities like Mumbai or Mogadishu, where ubiquitous technology is enabling groups to establish networks of influence that are eroding the ability of governments to retain and exercise power and defend their citizens. Kilcullen could not have known just how timely and tragically prescient his new book would turn out to be. In the week before it was set for release, more than seventy people lay dead in an upmarket Nairobi mall, while al-Shabab, the al-Qaeda-affiliated Somali insurgent group, claimed responsibility for the attack and tweeted grisly details of the massacre.

A former Australian infantry officer with a doctorate in anthropology, Kilcullen has made quite a name for himself in recent years. Having worked for former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and also for former General David Petraeus during the height of the Iraq War, and then advising Petraeus and General Stanley McChrystal more recently in Afghanistan, Kilcullen now runs a consultancy specializing in understanding conflict in complex urban and rural environments. For those in the business of understanding conflict, Kilcullen is a well-known and...