Out of the Mountains: The Coming Age of the Urban Guerrilla - Book Review by Shawn Brimley, Washington Monthly.
… Out of the Mountains: The Coming Age of the Urban Guerilla is an ambitious effort to describe how twenty-first-century conflict is migrating away from small mountain villages, farming areas, and frontier valleys of places like Afghanistan into sprawling cities like Mumbai or Mogadishu, where ubiquitous technology is enabling groups to establish networks of influence that are eroding the ability of governments to retain and exercise power and defend their citizens. Kilcullen could not have known just how timely and tragically prescient his new book would turn out to be. In the week before it was set for release, more than seventy people lay dead in an upmarket Nairobi mall, while al-Shabab, the al-Qaeda-affiliated Somali insurgent group, claimed responsibility for the attack and tweeted grisly details of the massacre.
A former Australian infantry officer with a doctorate in anthropology, Kilcullen has made quite a name for himself in recent years. Having worked for former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and also for former General David Petraeus during the height of the Iraq War, and then advising Petraeus and General Stanley McChrystal more recently in Afghanistan, Kilcullen now runs a consultancy specializing in understanding conflict in complex urban and rural environments. For those in the business of understanding conflict, Kilcullen is a well-known and influential expert…