Complex Warfighting In 2004, Kilcullen wrote
Complex Warfighting, which became the basis of the Australian Army's Future Land Operating Concept, approved the next year. While not strictly limited to counter-insurgency, it stated that counter-insurgency and other non-traditional actions were going to compose a greater part of warfare in the 21st century. and then a shorter version appeared in the
Journal of Strategic Studies in 2005. The paper argues that
al-Qaeda is best understood as a "global Islamic insurgency" that seeks to promote its
takfiri version of
Islam and increase its role in the world order. Thus, counter-insurgency strategies and tactics need updating to deal with a globalised movement like al-Qaeda, especially increasing participation and cooperation of many states' intelligence and police agencies. is a practical guide for junior
officers and
non-commissioned officers engaged in counter-insurgency operations in Afghanistan and Iraq. The paper's publication history is an illustration of new methods of knowledge propagation in the military-professional community. It first appeared as an e-mail that was widely circulated informally among
U.S. Army and
Marine officers in April 2006, and was subsequently published in
Military Review in May 2006. Later versions of it were published in
IoSphere and the
Marine Corps Gazette, and it has been translated into Arabic, Russian, Pashtu and Spanish. It was later formalised as Appendix A to FM 3-24, the US military's counterinsurgency doctrine, and is in use by the US, Australian,
British,
Canadian,
Dutch,
Iraqi and
Afghan armies as a training document.
Conflict ethnography Kilcullen has argued in most of his works for a deeper cultural understanding of the conflict environment, an approach he has called conflict ethnography: "a deep, situation-specific understanding of the human, social and cultural dimensions of a conflict, understood not by analogy with some other conflict, but in its own terms." In the same essay, "Religion and Insurgency," published in May 2007 on the
Small Wars Journal, he expanded this view:
Counterinsurgency In 2010, Kilcullen brought together his writings in his book
Counterinsurgency and developed his understanding of counterinsurgency to address radical Islam's globalised threat. He argues that successful counterinsurgency is about out-governing the enemy and winning the adaptation battle to provide integrated measures to defeat insurgent tactics through political, administrative, military, economic, psychological, and informational means. ==Positions on American policy==