Counterinsurgency Guru Joins Obama's 'Farm Team'

David Kilcullen, the Australian counterinsurgency guru, is joining a think tank that is likely to punch above its weight in shaping national security policy during the next administration.
In December, Kilcullen leaves his current post at the U.S. Department of State -- where he serves as special advisor for counterinsurgency to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice -- and joins the Center for a New American Security. CNAS, co-founded by last year by former Clinton administration officials Kurt Campbell and Michèle Flournoy, is a small outfit compared with the American Enterprise Institute or the Brookings Institution. But as Yochi Dreazen of the Wall Street Journal observed earlier this week, it is shaping up as a "top farm team" for the new administration. Flournoy is one of the top members of Obama's defense transition team; she may be in line for high-ranking post at the Pentagon.

Spencer Ackerman has an apt description of CNAS: "Obama's Pentagon-in-waiting." It's also home to folks like John Nagl, Vikram Singh and Nathaniel Fick, all prominent thinkers on irregular warfare.

Kilcullen was a top counterinsurgency advisor to Gen. David Petraeus, and was part of a small team that cooked up the “surge” strategy. He spent months in the field evangelizing the principles of counterinsurgency to units in the field. He also penned the influential "Twenty-eight Articles: Fundamentals of Company-Level Counterinsurgency" (money quote: "Counterinsurgency is armed social work"). More recently, he led an effort to draft of a "government-wide" counterinsurgency guide, a sort of COIN handbook for civilian policymakers.
Wired