David Kilcullen

David John Kilcullen FRGS (born 1967) is an Australian author, strategist, and counterinsurgency expert who is currently the non-executive chairman of Caerus Associates, a strategy and design consulting firm that he founded. He is a professor at Arizona State University and at University of New South Wales, Canberra.

From 2005 to 2006, he was chief strategist in the Office of the Coordinator for Counterterrorism at the U.S. State Department. Kilcullen was a senior counter-insurgency advisor to General David Petraeus in 2007 and 2008, where he helped design and monitor the Iraq War troop surge. He was then a special advisor for counter-insurgency to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. Kilcullen has been a senior fellow of the Center for a New American Security and an adjunct professor at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University. Highly critical of the decision to invade Iraq, he is on record as saying "There undeniably would be no ISIS if we had not invaded Iraq." Kilcullen has written six books: The Accidental Guerrilla, Counterinsurgency, Out of the Mountains, Blood Year, The Dragons and the Snakes: How the Rest Learned to Fight the West and The Ledger: Accounting for Failure in Afghanistan.