Product Description 
MP3 CD Format 2014 has the potential to go down as a crucial year in modern world history. A resurgent and bellicose Russia took over Crimea and fueled a civil war in Eastern Ukraine. Post-Saddam Iraq, in many respects a creature of the United States because of the war that began in 2003, lost a third of its territory to an army of hyper-violent millennialists. The peace process in Israel seemed to completely collapse. Finally, after coalescing in Syria as a territorial entity, the Islamic State swept into northern Iraq and through northeastern Syria, attracting legions of recruits from Europe and the Middle East.\nDavid Kilcullen was one of the architects of America's strategy in the late phases of the second Gulf War, and also spent time in Afghanistan and other hotspots. In 
Blood Year, he provides a wide-angle view of the current situation in the Middle East and analyzes how America and the West ended up in such dire circumstances. This is an essential book for anyone interested in understanding not only why the region that the U.S. invaded a dozen years ago has collapsed into utter chaos, but also what it can do to alleviate the grim situation. 
 Review 
Direct, insightful, and frightening, this book will prepare readers to see through the misguided, simplistic solutions to the problems of Middle Eastern policy and Islamic terror so common in this election year.-- "Kirkus Starred Review" 
 About the Author 
Dr. David Kilcullen is the Chairman of Caerus Associates. Before founding Caerus, Dave served 24 years as a soldier, diplomat, and policy advisor for the Australian and United States governments. He was Special Advisor to the Secretary of State from 2007-2009 and Senior Advisor to General David Petraeus in Iraq in 2007. He is the author of bestselling books The Accidental Guerrilla and Counterinsurgency, both are used worldwide by civilian government officials, policymakers, military and development professionals working in unstable and insecure environments. His most recent book is Out of the Mountains.

Blood Year: The Unraveling of Western Counterterrorism

Politics & Social Sciences

David Kilcullen

Politics & Government

Tantor and Blackstone Publishing

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, both dragons (state enemies like Russia and China) and snakes (terrorist and guerrilla organisations) have watched the US struggle in Iraq and Afghanistan, and mastered new methods in response: hybrid and urban warfare, political manipulation, and harnessing digital technology. Leading soldier-scholar David Kilcullen reveals everything the West’s opponents have learned from twenty-first-century conflict and explains how their cutting-edge tactics and adaptability pose a serious threat to America and its allies, disabling the West’s military advantage. The Dragons and the Snakes is a compelling, counterintuitive look at the new, vastly complex global arena. Kilcullen reshapes our understanding of the West’s foes, and shows how it can respond.

Dragons and the Snakes

Sociology

C. Hurst & Co. Publishers Ltd.

The Accidental Guerrilla: Fighting Small Wars in the Midst of a Big One

History

Military

C. Hurst & Company

Counterinsurgency

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 environmental trends - population growth, coastal urbanisation - and increasing digital connectivity he projects a future of feral cities, urban systems under stress, and increasing overlaps between crime and war, internal and external threats, and the real and virtual worlds. Informed by Kilcullen's own fieldwork in the Caribbean, Somalia, the Middle East and Afghanistan, and that of his field research teams in cities in Central America and Africa, Out of the Mountains presents detailed, on-the-ground accounts of the new faces of modern conflict - - from the 2008 Mumbai terrorist attacks, to transnational drug networks, local street gangs, and the uprisings of the Arab Spring.

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

A key Australian participant in the battle against terrorism gives a riveting, up-to-date account of the rise of ISIS, and what it means.\nWe have seen a 'blood year' in the Middle East – massacres and beheadings, fallen cities, collapsed and collapsing states, the unravelling of a decade of Western strategy. We saw the rise of ISIS, the splintering of government in Iraq, and a brutal Syrian civil war that grows ever worse. What went wrong?\nIn this updated and vastly expanded version of his bestselling Quarterly Essay, David Kilcullen calls on twenty-five years' experience to answer that question. Kilcullen looks to strategy and history to make sense of the crisis. What are the roots and causes of the global jihad movement? What is ISIS? What threats does it pose to Australia? What does its rise say about the effectiveness of the War on Terror since 9/11, and what does a coherent strategy look like after a disastrous year?\nBlood Year is a vivid, urgent account of the War on Terror by a thinker who helped shape its strategy, and who witnessed its evolution on the ground.\n‘We're now in the fifteenth year since 9/11 and, horrible as it is to contemplate, we may be nowhere close to the end of the War on Terror. For a while, it looked like things were improving: we were getting on top of the threat. But that was before ISIS began crucifying children, before the Taliban came back out of the mountains to seize the cities, before the bodies began washing up on the beaches, before the first Russian cluster bomb fell on a Syrian village.’—David Kilcullen, Blood Year

Blood Year

Black Inc.

Scribe Publications

Soldier-scholar David Kilcullen shows what opponents of the West have learned during the last quarter-century of conflict.\nJust a few years ago, people spoke of the US as a hyperpower — a titan stalking the world stage with more relative power than any empire in history. Yet as early as 1993, newly appointed CIA director James Woolsey pointed out that although Western powers had ‘slain a large dragon’ by defeating the Soviet Union in the Cold War, they now faced a ‘bewildering variety of poisonous snakes’.\nIn this book, Killcullen explains what happened to the ‘snakes’ (non-state threats, including from terrorists and guerrillas) and the ‘dragons’ (state-based competitors such as Russia and China). He explores how enemies learn under conditions of conflict, and examines how Western dominance over a very particular, narrowly defined form of warfare has forced adversaries to adapt in ways that present serious new challenges to America and its allies.\nState and non-state threats have increasingly come to resemble each other, Kilcullen argues, with states adopting non-state techniques and non-state actors now able to access levels of precision and lethal weapon-systems once only available to governments.\nA counterintuitive look at this new, vastly more complex environment, The Dragons and the Snakes not only reshaped our understanding of the West’s enemies’ capabilities, but also shows how we can respond, given the increasing limits on US power.

The Dragons and the Snakes

When Americans think of modern warfare, what comes to mind is the US army skirmishing with terrorists and insurgents in the mountains of Afghanistan. But the face of global conflict is ever-changing. In Out of the Mountains, David Kilcullen, one of the world's leading experts on current and future conflict, offers a groundbreaking look at what may happen after today's wars end. This is a book about future conflicts and future cities, and about the challenges and opportunities that four powerful megatrends - population, urbanization, coastal settlement, and connectedness - are creating across the planet. And it is about what cities, communities and businesses can do to prepare for a future in which all aspects of human society - including, but not limited to, conflict, crime and violence - are changing at an unprecedented pace. Kilcullen argues that conflict is increasingly likely to occur in sprawling coastal cities, in peri-urban slum settlements that are enveloping many regions of the Middle East, Africa, Latin America, and Asia, and in highly connected, electronically networked settings. He suggests that cities, rather than countries, are the critical unit of analysis for future conflict and that resiliency, not stability, will be the key objective. Ranging across the globe - from Kingston to Mogadishu to Lagos to Benghazi to Mumbai - he offers a unified theory of "competitive control" that explains how nonstate armed groups such as drug cartels, street gangs, and warlords draw their strength from local populations, providing useful ideas for dealing with these groups and with diffuse social conflicts in general. His extensive fieldwork on the ground in a series of urban conflicts suggests that there will be no military solution for many of the struggles we will face in the future. We will need to involve local people deeply to address problems that neither outsiders nor locals alone can solve, drawing on the insight only locals can bring, together with outsider knowledge from fields like urban planning, systems engineering, renewable energy, conflict resolution, and mediation.This deeply researched and compellingly argued book provides an invaluable road map to a future that will increasingly be crowded, urban, coastal, connected - and dangerous.

Out of the Mountains

Audible Studios on Brilliance Audio

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by David Kilcullen. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by David Kilcullen

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by David Kilcullen. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Blood Year: The Unraveling of Western Counterterrorism

Dragons and the Snakes

The Accidental Guerrilla: Fighting Small Wars in the Midst of a Big One

Counterinsurgency

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

Blood Year

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

The Dragons and the Snakes

Out of the Mountains