David Kilcullen

In his third book, David Kilcullen takes us out of the mountains—away from the remote, rural guerrilla warfare of Afghanistan, and into the marginalised slums and complex security threats of the world's coastal cities, where almost 75 per cent of us will be living by mid-century. Scrutinising major trends—population growth, coastal urbanisation, and increasing digital connectivity—he projects a future of...

The first work to put forward a unified theory of how state and non-state threats now overlap and intersect. In 1993, a newly appointed CIA director warned that Western powers might have "slain a large dragon" with the fall of the USSR, but now faced a "bewildering variety of poisonous snakes." Since then, the dragons (state enemies such as Russia...

David Kilcullen is the world's foremost expert on this way of war, and in The Accidental Guerrilla, the senior counterinsurgency advisor to the Pentagon and architect of 'the Surge', surveys war as it is actually fought in the contemporary world. Colouring his account with gripping battlefield experiences that range from the jungles and highlands of South and Southeast Asia to...