Out of the Mountains: The Coming Age of the Urban Guerrilla Author: David Kilcullen | Language: English | ISBN:
B00DY3FFMS | Format: PDF
Out of the Mountains: The Coming Age of the Urban Guerrilla Description
In Out of the Mountains, David Kilcullen, one of the world's leading experts on modern warfare, offers a groundbreaking look ahead at what may happen after the war in Afghanistan ends. It is a book about future conflicts and future cities, about the challenges and opportunities that four powerful megatrends are creating across the planet. And it is about what national governments, cities, communities and businesses can do to prepare for a future in which all aspects of human society-including, but not limited to, conflict, crime and violence-are rapidly changing.
Kilcullen analyzes four megatrends--population growth, urbanization, coastal life, and connectedness-and concludes that future conflict is increasingly likely to occur in sprawling coastal cities, in underdeveloped regions of the Middle East, Africa, Latin America and Asia, and in highly networked, connected settings. He ranges across the globe, from Kingston to Mogadishu to Honduras to Benghazi to Mumbai. Mumbai exemplifies the trend: a coastal megacity, terrorists based in nearby Karachi exploited new forms of connectivity to direct a horrific terrorist attack. Kilcullen also offers a unified theory of "competitive control" that shows how non-state armed groups, drug cartels, street gangs, warlords--draw their strength from local populations, providing useful ideas for dealing with these groups and with diffuse social conflicts in general. But for many of the struggles we will face, he notes, there will be no military solution. We will need to involve local people deeply to address problems which neither outsiders nor locals alone can solve. These collaborations will interweave the insight only locals can bring, with outsider knowledge from fields such as urban planning, systems engineering, alternative energy technology, conflict resolution and mediation, and other disciplines.
Deeply researched and compellingly argued, Out of the Mountains provides an invaluable roadmap to a future that will increasingly be crowded, urban, coastal, connected-and dangerous.
- File Size: 921 KB
- Print Length: 351 pages
- Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA (September 3, 2013)
- Sold by: Amazon Digital Services, Inc.
- Language: English
- ASIN: B00DY3FFMS
- Text-to-Speech: Enabled
X-Ray:
- Lending: Enabled
- Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #29,998 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
- #9
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > History > Military Science - #31
in Books > Politics & Social Sciences > Politics & Government > International & World Politics > Security - #59
in Books > History > Military Science
- #9
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > History > Military Science - #31
in Books > Politics & Social Sciences > Politics & Government > International & World Politics > Security - #59
in Books > History > Military Science
Unlike the majority of other reviewers, I did not fall in love with this book. It's good and worth a read, but nothing spectacular. I'm not sure it is even an important book (interesting, yes; important, not so sure).
For starters, I don't think there's anything truly new in the book (something the author pretty much admits to in the first few pages). Mr. Kilcullen's spends (in my uncorrected, advance copy) 265 pages (not including an appendix and notes) telling the reader that future conflict will - more often than not - take place in urban areas (by 2050, more than 3/4 of the world's population will reside in an urban setting), that most urban areas are situated within 12 miles of a coastline (hence, littoral), and that these urban/littoral setting will be ultra-connected. In short, future conflict will take place in a "Blade Runner" environment and thus is something that works to the (dis)advantage of both sides. Mr. Kilcullen also reminds us that the world is not binary (i.e., us vs them), but multi-agenda'd. Finally, Mr. Kilcullen states that in future conflicts the line between lawful conflict and criminal activity will be blurred and our comfortable Westphalian view of the "nation-state in conflict" will be displaced by a reality where the enemy is a non-state entity. I'm not finding anything new here (except for the 20th century, seems this is how the world has always been [again, something the authors admits to in the first few pages]). Not to be cheeky, but :yawn:.
While the book is informative, accessible, and well-written it is not what one should expect from an academic publishing house (in this case, Oxford University Press).
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