The Dragons and the Snakes: How the Rest Learned to Fight the West. David Kilcullen. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2020.
Famed Prussian theorist Carl Von Clausewitz deplored theorists who “instead of giving plain, straightforward arguments” confused students by using language “crammed with jargon.”[1] Guided by the 2018 National Security Strategy, which catapulted near-peer competition atop America's list of strategic priorities, defense intellectuals are quickly proving Clausewitz’s staying power by using new verbiage to conceptualize America’s rising threats. Artificial intelligence, multi-domain operations, and near-peer competition replaced Population-centric Counterinsurgency (COIN), Money as a Weapons System, and other buzz words associated with the Global War on Terrorism (GWOT). Although the United States remains mired in both Iraq and Afghanistan, it is clear that there is a great desire to move on.
David Kilcullen with Afghan National Army soldiers (Mikhail Galustov)
Of the intellectuals born from the Global War on Terrorism, few helped popularize many of the conflict’s more memorable catchphrases than Australian infantry officer, David Kilcullen. Not many had their star rise as high either. He became an advisor to both General David Petraeus and Secretary Condoleezza Rice. He founded multiple consulting firms, which helped advise various agencies, like the DoD's now-defunct AFPAK Hands program. Alongside other luminaries, like John Nagl, Emile Simpson, Max Boot, and other so-called COINdinistas, these authors’ ideas helped steer America’s strategy in Iraq and Afghanistan[2]. Kilcullen’s expertise is founded on his fieldwork studying insurgencies in East Timor and Indonesia. His early works, like Counterinsurgency, The Accidental Guerrilla and “28 Articles: Fundamentals of Company-level Counterinsurgency,” were often included in pre-deployment reading lists and were part of the curriculum at both COIN Academies in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Kilcullen’s new book, The Dragons and the Snakes: How the Rest Learned to Fight the West, leverages his years of field research in Iraq and Afghanistan to examine how the West’s enemies adapted towards the Western way of war. Kilcullen frames the last twenty years by adopting former CIA Director James Woolsey’s language used to surmise the post-Cold War environment. In 1993 during testimony to a Select Committee on Intelligence of the United States Senate, Woolsey praised the United States for slaying the Soviet Union, which he described as a Dragon. However, he warned that terrorism, weapons proliferation, and other threats loomed over the horizon, which he described as snakes. Kilcullen argues that while the United States focused on snakes, specifically Al Qaeda and the Taliban, Russia and China watched, adapted their strategy accordingly, and now represent a new, evolved threat to the post World War II international order. In short, China and Russia are the new Dragons, and the United States must focus its attention on them.
Kilcullen, currently a professor at Arizona State University, joins a growing chorus of intellectuals who have sounded the alarm over America's inability to counter near-peer competitors.[3] Kilcullen argues that the snakes and the dragons evolved in the age of air supremacy, restrictive legal and political constraints, ubiquitous surveillance, and the proliferation of smart handheld technology. The first few chapters of the professor's crisp 250 pages truly stand out.[4] Kilcullen has a penchant for adeptly using the language of science to examine the fields of war. Indeed, in Accidental Guerilla, Kilcullen likened the spread of insurgent groups to a virus that penetrates friendly ecosystems.[5] These groups infect villages by bonding to their culture and mores, causing the West to use airpower to extinguish the virus, which often results in civilian casualties and new accidental guerrillas.
In his latest treatise, the Aussie echoes these sentiments, by demonstrating that the United States often created more agile and lethal insurgent groups. For example, he shows that early American pressure on Pakistan to target Al Qaeda in the Federal Administered Tribal Area led to the creation of the Pakistani Taliban. He deftly views this battlefield through the prism of “predation models” that theorizes that both predators and prey adapt specific traits from cycles of violence.[6] Thus, from the initial Pakistani incursion a loose band of local tribes learned to fight the conventional Pakistani Army. After years of drone strikes, the Pakistani Taliban became a fitter, more decentralized terrorist group capable of surviving repeated decapitation strikes.[7] In short, Kilcullen provides a deeper dive into battlefield Darwinism.
The problem, however, is that Kilcullen’s anthropological background leads him to invent new vernacular that is not necessary. Nowhere is this more clear than in Kilcullen’s description of the Russian use of liminal warfare. Kilcullen apologizes for imposing a new term on the reader, but insists the concept is distinct enough that it adds to understanding of Russia's strategy.[8] Unfortunately, the former infantry officer is sadly mistaken. According to Kilcullen, liminal warfare “exploits the character of ambiguity” as it is “neither fully overt nor truly clandestine” because it “rides the edge” of detectability and thus “exploits legally ambiguous spaces and categories.”[9] Recent war college graduates would likely use the same terminology to describe grey zone operations, hybrid warfare, asymmetric warfare, or the Gerasimov Doctrine, though perhaps not as eloquently.
Kilcullen’s liminal warfare problem underscores the overarching issue with his book: there is not much new ground covered. After nearly two decades playing whack a mole in Iraq and Afghanistan, the concept of a thinking, learning enemy is etched in stone. While Kilcullen concisely summarizes Russia and China's post-Cold War evolution, most national security professionals are aware that both near-peer competitors have keenly observed the Western way of war and crafted their strategy to exploit its vulnerabilities.
These problems manifest themselves in his chapter on the Chinese Dragon. Kilcullen argues that China's conceptual envelopment expands beyond the western concept of war. This idea of conceptual envelopment may result in strategic miscalculation by both sides. Again, this line of argument has been explored before, especially in Graham Allison’s Destined for War. Nevertheless, Kilcullen explores Chinese evolution from its painful little war with Vietnam in 1978 to the fielding of today's People’s Liberation Army. However, his analysis of China's Vietnam War is not entirely accurate. While there is no doubt that the Vietnamese bloodied their historic rival's nose, China achieved its strategic goals of blunting Soviet ambition in South East Asia, while simultaneously tying itself closer to the United States.[10]
It should not be surprising the Chinese view war differently than the West. Any student of war who has read Sun Tzu or Clausewitz can attest to that. Kilcullen should have instead analyzed how Confucianism, Sun Tzu's Art of War, and the Chinese concept of Shih influenced China’s evolution instead of muddying the waters with unnecessary vernacular. By digging into China’s rich past, he could have provided some context behind their idea of conceptual envelopment. Understanding how your opponents view of history shapes its world view certainly helps mitigate the chances for strategic miscalculation. Instead, readers are forced to juggle a myriad of new terms like vertical and horizontal escalation, conceptual envelopment, and fitness landscape.
Battle between Byzantine Emperor Heraclius and the Persians, in a fresco by Piero della Francesca (Wikimedia)
It is not until the book's penultimate chapter that Kilcullen explores the West’s possible strategies against the Dragons. He dismisses the options of trying to maintain the unipolar moment and accepting the West’s eventual decline, instead favoring “Going Byzantine,” a reference to the eastern Roman Empire. Kilcullen argues that the United States and its western allies should heed the Byzantine Empire’s strategy that allowed it to survive and thrive after Rome’s division in 390 AD. According to Kilcullen, the West can do this by honing in on small-footprint operations backed by advancement in certain key technologies that are smaller and cheaper to maintain. In short, the United States should evolve, become more comfortable with hybrid operations, liminal warfare, and stop seeing the military as a solution to every foreign policy struggle. It is unfortunate that this solution was not fleshed out. Instead of spending only five pages on this intriguing concept, a book centered on using the Byzantine Empire’s strategy would have offered a fresh approach for national security practitioners.
Despite the never-ending use of new, complicated terminology, Kilcullen’s book is of value, especially for readers who are new to today’s complex battlefield. His use of Snakes and Dragons as a heuristic model is pithy, and his exploration of the evolution of insurgent and terrorist groups is fascinating. David Kilcullen is an erudite, multi-disciplinary scholar with astute observations. Nevertheless, Dragons and Snakes is not on the same level as his earlier books.
Will Selber is a United States Air Force Foreign Area Officer with extensive experience in Iraq and Afghanistan. The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not reflect the official policy or position of the U.S. Air Force, the Department of Defense, or the U.S. Government.
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Header Image: The Nine Dragon Wall in the Beihai Park, Beijing (Wikimedia)
Notes:
[1] Clausewitz, Carl von, Michael Howard, Peter Paret, and Bernard Brodie. 1984. On War. Page 169. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.
[2] John Nagl. 2014. Knife Fights: A Memoir of Modern War and Practice. Penguin Books; Emile Simpson. 2012. War From the Ground Up: Twenty-First Century Combat as Politics. Oxford University Press; Max Boot. 2013. Invisible Armies: An Epic History of Guerrilla Warfare from Ancient Times to the Present. Liveright.
[3] Wang, Dennis. 2020. Reigning the Future: AI, 5G, Huawei, and the Next 30 Years of US-China Rivalry. New Degree Press; McMaster, H.R.. 2020. Battlegrounds: The Fight to Defend the Free World. Harpers.
[4] Kilcullen, David. 2020. The Dragon and the Snakes: How the Rest Learned to Fight the West. Page 66-112. Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press.
[5] Kilcullen, David. 2009. Accidental Guerrilla: Fighting Small Wars in the Midst of Big Ones. Oxford University Press.
[6] Kilcullen, Accidental Guerrilla, 54.
[7] Kilcullen, David. 2020. The Dragon and the Snakes: How the Rest Learned to Fight the West. Page 55-56. Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press.
[8] Kilcullen, David. 2020. The Dragon and the Snakes: How the Rest Learned to Fight the West. Page 150. Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press.
[9] Kilcullen, Accidental Guerrilla, 119.
[10] Henry Kissinger. On China. Pages 370-376. 2011. London, England: Penguin Press.