S2 Book Club: Out of the Mountains

hello again everyone and welcome back to the underground today we're going to continue our book club series by taking a look at out of the mountains the coming age of the urban Gorilla by David kill Cullen today I'm going to have to stick with the audio only format because my desk is a little bit cluttered uh at the moment for from some of the projects I'm working on so we'll just make the best of it and discuss some of the themes from the book now for those of you who actually made it through this book uh congratulations uh this is uh not exactly an easy feat uh reading kill Kullen is not really something that most people are fond of doing K Cullen is one of those authors where the titles sound really great the covers of the books look really awesome and they're really great if you want your picture taken uh reading a book uh so that you can look a lot smarter than you actually are but once you read uh once you get into the book it is exceptionally frustrating and uh that's not to you know to put kill Cullen down or anything like that after all he's one of the most uh influential policy makers of the past uh 40 years or so make of that what you will but uh just right up front it's not a challenging read if you're looking to get into something like this uh fortunately the ideas contained within are very very simple but first let's talk a little bit about the author like I mentioned uh David Kil Cullen is a very influential writer in the counterinsurgency space uh he was really one of the driving factors behind one of the earlier theories from a few years ago uh called basically the the small Wars Theory or the low intensity conflict model of of warfare and to summarize that very briefly basically as the generations of warfare transitioned right you know the first gen second gen third gen and finally moved into more of a fourth generation model counterinsurgency right uh as that sort of theory started to develop we had experiences like the tail end of Korea I guess you could say definitely Vietnam for sure and sort of the the Iraq Wars in some regards uh sort of coming to a crescendo with the occupation of Iraq uh and the Insurgency that resulted from that and of of course not to forget uh the basically the entirety of the Afghan war from about the year 20002 2001 around 9/11 right up until about I don't know maybe 2015 2013 something like that one of the bigger like Doctrine pushes you know the hot new topic was this small Wars uh Theory this low intensity conflict basically that a lot a lot of Doctrine writers were saying look hey the the days of raml uh driving his tanks through the desert and and uh driving tanks through the French Countryside that's that's not going to happen anymore we're not going to have any more D-Day we're not going to have any more large Market Garden amphibious or Airborne operations we're not going to do things like we used to in the past the fiascos in Vietnam kind of showed us that look hey you know we're not going to be fighting along a front lines so much anymore we're going to be fighting smaller lower intensity conflicts basically proxy wars proxy wars are going to be the new thing we're going to be supporting the Kurds in Northern Iraq as long as it's convenient we're going to be supporting the uh separatist groups in Syria as long as they're taking the fight to Assad we're going to be fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan until it becomes uh rapidly apparent that Isis are the worst Kids on the Block so we're going to start uh taking out Isis for the Taliban but we see how kill Kullen is Right Center Stage for a lot of this line of thinking now if I were to tell you this description a few years ago I'm sure a lot of heads would nod around the room that small Wars insurgencies proxy wars things that are not going to involve B-52s things that are going to involve really just a team of advisers this seems an awful lot like the way Warfare is going if I'm seated in a nice mahogany conference room or seated in a nice Auditorium listening to some guy in a suit and tie uh talk about how Warfare is going to go this makes an awful lot of sense so that's the perspective that we have to come out this book from because this book was published in 2013 right at the absolute peak of counterinsurgency uh thinking and small War Wars and low intensity conflict kind of thing so you must remember that when I lay some criticism on kill Cullen and and his peers uh I'm also laying it on myself uh to some degree because that's what everyone was thinking along those lines at that time now the very next year uh something happened uh that caused a lot of us to change kind of our our ways of thinking with regards to this uh small Wars Theory not that it's wrong uh not that it's you know completely off base but maybe we need to aain the idea of doing something else and that event was the 2014 invasion of Crimea now a lot of people saw this coming at the time but it was kind of the unspoken thing you didn't really want to talk about it this kind of shaped a lot of things moving forward so we kind of got a taste in 2014 of what happened in 2022 so this is why a lot of us covered the initial invasion of Ukraine in 2022 because we saw it coming from 2014 years prior uh it was absolutely uh within the Playbook of of what Russia was was going to do and unfortunately it was also within the Playbook of what NATO was going to do but I guess we can talk about that another day the reason that I wanted to bring this up in in frame things this way is because Kil Cullen's history right uh people are still reading his books a lot of policy makers are are still married to the idea of small Wars they're still married to the idea of low intensity conflict and insurgencies and things like that which you see in the NATO response to the Ukraine invasion in 2022 which was probably not the best way of looking at things you have to remember keeping the author in mind of this particular book David kill Cen was a senior adviser for General David Petraeus he was also a very prominent advisor uh in a a decently public role uh serving under Secretary of State condalisa rice at the time so I'm sorry if some of those names uh bring back some really bad memories from uh uh for some of you out there but uh reading this book uh out of the mountains you can see the faces of the likes of Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld on virtually every single page so so a somewhat unpleasant reminder uh of how the United States Doctrine really didn't work so well uh in the early 2000s now struggling to keep things relevant and uh on topic here the book itself out of the mountains can really be summarized uh in just a few sentences Kil Cullen makes the argument in a few hundred pages that future conflicts are more likely to be low intensity and largely fought in loral or Coastal very very poor very impoverished and population dense Urban centers or cities right and one of the major aspects of this sort of conflict is going to be what he calls competitive control uh of the local population some of us may know this term a little bit more clearly as hearts and Minds uh basically that a non-state actor an Insurgent group or a political movement of some kind something that is not affiliated with a government government in a situation where there maybe isn't a government is going to try to struggle to maintain positive control over a populace their feelings their thoughts all of this occurring within a very densely populated city another aspect kill kullin kind of brings into this a little bit of seasoning on top of this is the idea and I think this is a good idea uh the idea that a city is a functioning living biological organism basically that a city is not just a collection of streets and buildings but it is an entire culture of it in and of itself this means that the US military can't just roll in like the place is Saigon and just you know lock the place down it's not going to work like that the the Insurgent uh for lack of a better term uh is going to always possess the ability to influence the population in ways that an invading force uh can't right and because the invading Force always handles things very very poorly this is not going to go very well for the invading Force because they're going to end up recruiting more insurgents then they are going to be stopping simply by putting up roadblocks and things like that now some of you out there uh May understand and are probably screaming about the fact that this is probably the most obvious conclusion that has ever hit military Doctrine and and I would agree reading this book is mildly infuriating at times um most of the time because the the assumptions and the lessons learned even in 2013 were learned about 10 years too late uh so if Kil Cullen had actually like said this stuff in 2003 2005 maybe after it became very apparent uh after the the uh seizure of Baghdad that things were not going so well and that we were slipping into this dangerous thing called a an Insurgency if kill Cullen had said this stuff then this would have made an awful lot of sense uh and it probably would have done a lot of good however you know again hindsight is 2020 so we don't want to criticize him too much for thinking these things uh many years ago uh the thing is that it it may be obvious for us today but in 2013 it was not obvious to the senior leadership of the military and unfortunately it should have been obvious about 10 years prior to that so there's a little bit of hey you know what don't don't rag on him too much because like we know this stuff now in 2024 but we didn't know this stuff in 2013 my argument is we should have known this stuff by 2013 because it was very obvious that this was not going well both in Afghanistan and in Iraq in 2013 but any anyway that's just my my own personal thought on that this kind of leads into again I don't want to just be complaining about the book but this does lead into one of the bigger lessons that I personally learned from this book is that look don't read this book with the assumption that the information in it is correct I mean factually fine you know David kill Kullen is is a great researcher and you'd be really hardpressed to find factual errors in his book however the stuff that's missing is is completely ridiculous like not once did Kil Cullen ever like address the fact that you know maybe we shouldn't be going to war in these places in the first place and maybe the CIA started this War uh in the first place so all of these uh nice little cute terms like hybrid threats and contingent actors and uh bending the curve and operational continuity and environmental discontinuity yeah I'm sure these these terms sound really good if you're writing for Rand and you're trying toh start the Vietnam War but you know looking back man it's like look I'm just I'm just some you know dumb low-level analyst here and pardon me for thinking that that this highlevel policy probably isn't the most effective you know I'm just sitting here driving my keyboard and I can tell you you know you can say all these things and you can even be right it's just that man look the the the Spooks across the hall are going to cause you more problem than not because good grief we're fighting ourselves half the time anyway and that's kind of the biggest lesson that I got out of this book is that look you know reading this for factual accuracy and for this is how Doctrine is done is probably not the best best uh way to read this book read this book if you're going to read it read it from the perspective of this is what congressmen are reading this is what senior defense analysts and Senior defense officials are reading this is the kind of stuff they're writing too but this is the kind of thinking that they are doing right when they're planning Wars this book is about 15 years behind the curve which is honestly on are for most military Doctrine kill Cullen is a little bit ahead of his time in that he actually is is able to foresee hey you know what maybe we shouldn't be leaning too much on this whole low intensity conflict idea because in in typical defense fashion rather than find a case study that supports their idea uh kullin at times in this book will find a case study that kind of disproves everything he's just said but instead of saying you know what maybe we need to look at this a different way he doubles down on his idea and says no no no no really the data is wrong and and uh you know culture has no effect on any of this so what this means for those of you who probably haven't read the book is that senior defense officials right around I would say right around the time of this book uh right around the time of 2010 2013 all the way up until 2019 we're making a lot of really really dumb decisions that some of us uh knew at the time was a dumb decision but because there were a lot of common sense thinkers that were not being listened to and there was the military-industrial complex to feed we could see literally in real time the US military Doctrine shifting to something nonsensical and like I mentioned earlier the 2014 invasion of Ukraine really put the Pumped the brakes for for a lot of us on this whole idea of small Wars uh there was man we had so many papers being written I can I can tell you the there were so many papers being written on the instability of mad and how Vladimir Putin is in control of nuclear weapons and he just invaded another Nation without using nuclear weapons and we did not have a nuclear war and yet nuclear weapons were supposed to prevent this kind of thing from happening right mutually assured destruction you launch nukes I'm going to launch nukes as well you invade Poland I'm going to Nuke you and then we're all just going to you know basically hold loaded revolvers to each other's heads and that's going to be the kind of uh policy decision from say 1950 until uh I don't know the early '90s or so well you know 2014 comes around and we've got Little Green Men showing up in Ukraine and you know the Eastern areas of the the donet and the luhansk and places like that oh and especially Crimea you know Little Green Men start showing up all over the place uh you know Russian advisors or or or Separatists right remember we all remember that uh confusion but it's 2014 and remember the United States is trying to gear up for 2016 you know political election year and they're not really looking at things clearly because most Generals in 2014 and to this day they're just politicians in uniform they're they're not really looking at shaping policy for a military benefit they're looking to shape policy for a financial benefit so you know Russia rolls tanks into Crimea and says hey this this is ours now and everybody freaks out for a little while and a lot of papers get written and everybody just kind of ignores it you know it's one thing entirely to say hey look we should not have invaded Afghanistan because we should have looked at what the Russians did in the 80s and realize they got their butt kicked in Afghanistan and that these people are not the kind of people you want to mess with man this this Empire goes all the way back to to Alexander the Great you know this is not a something to be taken lightly so it's one thing to not understand or learn from you know Russia's mistakes when we went into Afghanistan however it's an entirely different thing to look back and say dude you were a sergeant during the 2014 invasion of Ukraine you're maybe a first sergeant now and you've actually got a little bit of taste to command and you're still making stupid mistakes in 2024 after Ukraine has been invaded for a couple of years and you're not changing hardly anything so that's probably the biggest thing to come out of this book is is just a a very very sharp and very clearly outlined and highlighted flashing neon sign of uh we need to not be behind the times by 15 years like we have been in the past everybody and their cousin in 2013 listened to kill Cullen and what did we have we had the US Marine Corps removing main battle tanks from their armament we had everybody in the Army scale scaling back Airborne operations and and going to the Afghanistan model which is what helicopter assault Force Landing ship Shooks and Blackhawks at some Podunk Village in the middle of nowhere and just going with that kind of thing for a while we're not we're not planning to drop hundreds of Airborne dudes out of the backs of c130s or anything else over you know Open Fields in Europe or so well guess what's actually happening what did Russia do look they launched that Russia has launched some of the largest Airborne operations in history in Ukraine and you know a lot of Airborne guys were paying a lot of attention to that but like military leadership wasn't really thinking too much it's only like after a couple years after Ukraine has basically lost this war and NATO has lost this War uh that we realize oh boy uh maybe maybe we should have like kept some stuff going you know maybe we should have uh maintained those airfields in the South Pacific because of what's going on in China right now you know it's it's kind of an interesting way of looking at things and this book is definitely highlighting that because in 2013 if the US military and Senior defense officials are thinking in terms of well you know counter Insurgency is kind of an important thing bro you are a decade behind the times because you were you were getting spanked in Iraq and Afghanistan for about a decade and that's how long it took for you to learn this lesson now the guys on the ground the soldiers on the ground realized it but unfortunately soldiers on the ground even I would say probably even on star generals don't really have that much influence over National level policy so again for kill Cullen to write this book and everything in it in 2013 you know 2010 2013 era uh and say these things it's like well no duh I mean so that's why it's kind of you know interesting to read this book and think ah okay it took the US government 10 to 15 years to realize that counter insurgencies are uh are are kind of important and the whole idea bringing it back to to Cullen's thesis of conflicts being in you know Coastal networked and overwhelmingly Urban cities did this really play out um one of the more Sinister uh interpretations of this book and which I don't disagree with is that this is the line of thinking that's going to be used here at home and that's kind of the uh reading between the lines kind of thing that you have to do is look the US military the US defense industry the military-industrial complex is preparing and has prepared for a counterinsurgency they developed an awful lot of technology in Iraq and Syria and Afghanistan and that Doctrine has got a has got a home to go to it's going to have to be used somewhere to justify its existence and here at home this is probably going to be the way that it is kill Cullen really uh gets at this uh when he talks about a lot of the favellas in South America Central America he talks a lot about Kingston Jamaica and basically how crime syndicates kind of run the area and how it's not necessarily going to be a counterinsurgency fight but it's going to be more of like a criminal Adventure you know I read those passages and I think ah okay they're preparing for Detroit or or they're preparing for New York or something like that and that's kind of the the way where my mind tends to go now that observation might spark an idea and that is that hey uh reading the doctrine of a potential adversary is valuable because it gives you an idea of how they're thinkings but the problem with that is that if you're looking for this book and if you're expecting this book to provide a model for what shall I say domestic operations may look like uh for the US military or anybody really uh this book doesn't really talk about it so much uh this is not a blueprint for anything and uh you're not really going to get that much knowledge from it it's a good idea it's a good idea I will say uh to read what your leaders are reading that's why books are put on reading lists and that's why I have on our reading list an awful lot of books I don't agree with uh because you need to be reading the books of the people who are making policies because if you consume what they are consuming from your prepared citizen perspective you'll have a better idea as to what they're going to do however with this book it didn't really work out so much which is why I put it on the list I was hoping that this would uh work out a little bit better but you don't really get a good idea of this because kill Cullen's a very challenging read and it's hard to kind of cherry-pick these little nuggets of of wisdom out of there wrapping things up with kind of the the the final ideas of this book I think the things in this book that are not said at the end are probably more helpful because this book really kind of pins the tail in the donkey of fourth generation Warfare and the author at the time had no understanding of the concept of fifth generation Warfare but he does talk around it passively almost it's almost like I can see into the mind of like uh Daniel Abbott who wrote the the handbook of fifth generation Warfare and I can see him reading this book and I can see him thinking all right Kil Cullen is is getting at something here but he's grasping at straws and he's he's trying to like trying to grab smoke out of the air and a lot of the data that he's seeing doesn't really add up so maybe just maybe we need a new model for thinking about things because a lot of the time uh when we get into the counter Insurgency space we we stretch things Beyond uh the the simple you know Insurgent model and one of the ways that kill Cullen kind of mentions this which which sets up the fifth generation Warfare idea just exquisitly is one idea technology and really social media so Kil Cullen basically wraps the book up and saying hey look social media Facebook Twitter these things are going to be vastly more efficiently used by an Insurgent Force than say an occupying military force and because of that we're kind of screwed from a nation state perspective so we can see how this is is very much the birth of the idea of fifth generation Warfare how it's not quite 5gw is not quite Insurgency with scop sprinkled over the top that's not that's not it at all it's it's really hard to Define it's like trying to nail Jello to the wall you can't really Define fifth generation Warfare I mean you can get close but man you got to use a lot of words to get there and in 2024 where no one in America believes anything is real anymore well I mean everybody thinks they're living in a simulation or it's all you know super fake and everything is just not real and all information is is intended to be consumed or something like that I can see that he anticipated and and many others anticipated as well that technology hey it's going to important I don't think they realize how crippling it's going to be and how crippling it already is for civilization it is absurd uh how much technology and the the flow of information has just become absolutely uncontrollable and these Grand campaigns are really everywhere it's so multi-domain uh which is why it's tiring a lot of times and and it's it the situation can seem very very hopeless a lot of the times when it comes to living here in the United States these Grand information operations controlling information campaigns I don't think anyone even kill Cullen could have anticipated how how crippling it is to the average citizen you know granted there's some element of all right look scops are are supposed to be uh they're not the the goal of the scop is not the continuation of the scop but in fifth generation Warfare it might be why are you trying to trick someone well U because we're trying to get them to do something or think something but in our modern times you know we step out of the pages of kill Cullen and we realize wait a minute you know why is this military operation ongoing well just for the hell of it basically why is this scop being pushed why is this narrative being pushed well just because they can there's no real end goal for some of it now for a lot of it it is and unfortunately we can't really talk about a lot of that because well you know there's censorship concerns and all that but but when it comes to out of the mountains we we um we realize that this is probably not the best way of thinking of things in terms of strictly counterinsurgency it's just so hard to Define you have to literally live it and it's not something that policy makers can't understand even the title of this book is an extreme case of just just palpable irony because the title of this book is a quote from none other than Osama Bin Laden in which Kil Kullen details how Bin Laden said Hey look you know now that we've started the war with the West we need to find our way out of the mountains because they're coming here and we need to find ways of of moving to you know Bin Laden didn't say this specifically but the in the inferences Bin Laden was trying to move to to cities and uh move to more population dense areas because he knew that counterinsurgency tactics would force him out of the mountains as we all know the extreme irony of this is Bin Laden did move out of the mountains and he was killed out of the mountain mountains so if he had stayed in the mountains maybe things would have been a little bit different so just a little bit of food for thought that only a couple of years after the publication of this book yeah that's right Bin Laden came down out of the mountains and uh he was killed there so kill Cullen uh tends to lead to a little bit more highlevel philosophical uh thoughts on a lot of what the US military did because you know the first reaction that you get if you read tell any Soldier to read this or or or anybody who's not like a field grade officer and still in the military I'm sure they would probably agree with most of the stuff in this book uh but uh for those for the for the guys who were you know there in 2003 or 2005 in Iraq Baghdad all that kind of stuff uh these guys are going to read this book and be very very angry uh because to think and and for me it's a little embarrassing to think that man I was part of this machine that believed this you know and believe that this was the way forward and at the time even in 2015 it was it was was very clear that uh this was not working out so well so this is a really good book uh if you wanted to read some of the vignettes if you're looking for uh a counterinsurgency perspective on a lot of uh different events everything from like you know the London riots to uh Mumbai terrorist attacks uh Karachi burning basically uh you know Nairobi all kinds of stuff like that is in this book um the conclusions are are are hard to understand a lot of times most of the time I had to kind of read things five or six times before I understood what Kil Cullum was trying to say uh but anyway it's it's a good book if you want to read that but like I mentioned you and I and I don't mean to be overly negative in this by by any means I just think that this is this book is more of a symbol than anything so yeah an interesting conclusion I think to to read a book uh from the Petraeus era of uh Iraq and uh Afghanistan and think uh immediately to the Future and to how some of the things in this book a lot of the doctrine didn't play out a lot of the threats were misinterpreted and and things like that and and uh a lot of times we read stuff like this and we just immediately go to the Future and start seeing how this is going to develop so I'm not saying this book is worthless by any means um I think that it's challenging to read and I I probably wouldn't recommend it for most people but like I mentioned it really is a a sort of poetic symbol for where the United States has been and and where we're going so but you know now that we've read it I think that uh we we we've got a good understanding for you know some things that probably didn't work out so well you know um understanding the model for how nation states can can bring uh conflict to basically just one city you know like a Mogadishu kind of situation that might be helpful uh for some cities here in the United States you know especially for for understanding how the US uh might react to that sort of thing but we all know that that's you know the solutions and the um examples that were cited in in this book don't really represent what's going on in America you know the culture alone being completely and utterly alien is uh probably a bigger Factor than than anything else but again not super terrible not super great uh you know in in years past I've I've rated this book higher than I think that it should have been I thought much much more highly of kill Cullen and uh these books uh than I than I do today um which I guess is sort of inevitable but um some of you might find it interesting it's a fairly short read but it still took me longer than I thought I it would to get through it but I do think that it does set us up more more clearly for uh branching outside of our comfort zones and learning about things that you know maybe we thought we already knew you know um I'm sure a lot of people will read this book and recognize things like uh for instance right here in the introduction alone I I was I was there uh I was there in a few of these districts and um and it's very interesting to read that sort of thing from a a very very different perspective so once again thank you all for for sticking with my random collection of thoughts and uh I'm glad we got through this one and we will move on to the next so thank you all for listening and we will see you next time and as always fight in the shade