BY TIM SHORROCK
APRIL 19, 2015/UNPUBLISHED
True to the playbook of the DC warmaking-for-profit industry, David Kilcullen launched a consultancy, Caerus Global Solutions, to monetize the counterinsurgency movement. By 2010, he had flipped the advisory work he did for Generals McChrystal and Petraeus into a stream of lucrative contracts from the Pentagon, the State Department, USAID, and the NATO-led International Assistance Force in Afghanistan. When I finally caught up with him, he called me a “conspiracy theorist.”
On a chilly day in March 2015, David Kilcullen, a former Australian Army officer and the highest-ranking foreigner in America’s national security pantheon, arrived at the Ronald Reagan International Trade Center in downtown Washington, D.C. He was there for a conference on the “future of war” sponsored by the New America Foundation, one of the city’s most powerful think-tanks, and knew his subject well.
During the Bush “surge” in Iraq, Kilcullen was the senior counterinsurgency adviser to Army General David H. Petraeus. Two years later, when President Obama followed Bush’s lead in Afghanistan, he held the same job for General Stanley McChrystal, the former commander of the secretive Joint Special Operations Command. His experiences in the war zones, and his voluminous writings on guerrilla warfare, made him a celebrity – “a rock star in national security circles as a guru of counterinsurgency,” the military blog Danger Room declared in 2011.
Kilcullen, who has the air of an academic and the icy glare of a killer, blended easily with the 300 security experts, uniformed military scholars, and private terrorism specialists invited to the conference. His fellow speakers included the late Senator John McCain, who frequently quoted Kilcullen in speeches about the war in Afghanistan, and Michelle Flournoy, who had championed Kilcullen’s ideas as an Assistant Secretary of Defense for President Obama and was briefly considered by President Biden for Secretary of Defense. CNN’s Peter Bergen, New America’s vice president and one of Kilcullen’s biggest fans, presided over much of the day.
The bipartisan nature of the event was an apt symbol for the transition America has made from a country reeling from a terrorist attack on its “homeland” in 2001 to a nation deeply committed to seemingly “forever wars” from Yemen to the Philippines. And there was no doubt that Kilcullen’s counterinsurgency tactics had played an important part in that experience.
COUNTERINSURGENCY IN VIETNAM
COIN, as it’s often called, is a military strategy dating back to Vietnam and the Korean War, that was designed to win over “hearts and minds” in a conquered land through economic incentives, social projects, political mobilization and brute force. Kilcullen called it “armed social work,” while Petraeus, its patron saint, had a grander vision: “the new American Way of War.” Its adherents referred to themselves as “COINdinistas,” using the faux-leftist terminology they adopted to set them apart from the military establishment.
But COIN’s day has long passed. Around 2012, the White House and the Pentagon made a decisive shift in tactics away from the massive “boots on the ground” required for COIN operations in favor of counterterrorism missions carried out by the Special Forces, CIA drone strikes, and proxy armies such as Saudi Arabia and Egypt. Today, with Iraq and Syria partly occupied by the radicals of the Islamic State, U.S. forces in Afghanistan still mired in war with the Taliban, and the Special Operations Command deeply engaged in Africa, the drone-heavy strategy pursued by President Obama and CIA Director John Brennan has become the name of the game.
Kilcullen himself seemed to recognize that. While COIN was the key to stabilizing Afghanistan, he told the conference, “it won’t work again.” The U.S.-trained armies in Iraq and Afghanistan, he added, should “take COIN and rip it up, forget what the Americans taught them and use their own creativity.” He was even complimentary of the Taliban, once his most fearsome enemy. If ISIS decides to take on the Taliban in Afghanistan “they’ll get crushed,” Kilcullen predicted. “I’d like to see the tactics they used on us used on ISIS.”
But if the “future of war” conference symbolized how much U.S. strategy had changed, Kilcullen represented another transition: the enormous shift in U.S. military and intelligence forces from a public, state-run army to a virtual joint venture with the private sector. Despite the evident failures of COIN, Kilcullen, like a chameleon, has easily made the transition from counterinsurgent to counterterrorist, not as an analyst but as a contractor – and a very successful one at that.
In 2010, Kilcullen founded a company called Caerus Global Solutions Inc. Defined as a “strategic design consultancy,” Caerus provides “big data” analytical and visualization tools to the Pentagon, the State Department, U.S. security and intelligence agencies, as well as multilateral organizations such as the World Bank.
The company is similar in mission and philosophy to the many private contractors in Washington founded by retired generals, Navy SEALs and intelligence officers. But it stands out for the way it has ridden the shift from winning over local populations with COIN tactics to the multi-front, high-tech warfare of today.
Under Kilcullen’s guidance, Caerus made a specialty out of fusing open-source field research with classified intelligence to create software tools for the U.S. government to track what he calls “illicit networks” – a classification that can include anybody from the Tsaernev brothers to the Medellin drug cartel. Most of its work was funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the technology wizard of the Pentagon. TK MORE ON DARPA AND ITS IMPORTANCE TO KILCULLEN – IT’S HIS BIGGEST CLIENT, AND HIS OFFICES IN VIRGINIA ARE 2 BLOCKS FROM DARPA HQ.
“You don’t need to be sending spies to the Hindu Kush anymore,” Kilcullen told a crowd of COIN enthusiasts and U.S. AID workers who came to hear him at a New America event in 2013 (moderated by none other than Peter Bergen). “But first you have to find out what’s happening on the ground. And I find it’s almost impossible to do that without looking at a Big Data model. And at Caerus, we’ve tried to specialize in that.”
Caerus’ signature product is an analytic tool that combines open source research with classified intelligence. It was first developed for General Petraeus in 2011, when Caerus, using DARPA funds, built and managed an elaborate surveillance system called Nexus 7 that collected information from ordinary Afghans at health centers, markets, and other gathering places. Caerus then combined it with signals and metadata analyzed by the National Security Agency as well as classified imagery downloaded from military satellites and drones to help Petraeus and other commanders determine the “stability” of the country and plan their exit strategy.
According to documents obtained by The Nation, Caerus managed the “field presence” of the Nexus 7 program and developed “innovative assessments and visualizations” for some of the U.S. command’s most important units in Afghanistan. “Our approach and findings are routinely briefed at the highest levels in both Kabul and Washington,” Caerus boasted in a contract pitch to a consortium led by SAIC, one of the nation’s largest intelligence contractors.
Once Nexus 7 was up and running, Kilcullen started a special unit for classified operations called Caerus Analytics to provide intelligence tools to Special Forces and U.S. intelligence agencies in their global hunts for terrorists, pirates, and drug cartels. Because he was a foreign citizen, Kilcullen appointed Erin Simpson, his protégé, to manage that unit.
Simpson, who is now CEO of Caerus Global’s operating arm, Caerus Associates, has one of the highest security clearances attainable in the U.S. government. Her Top Secret/SCI status gives her access to virtually the entire panapoly of U.S. intelligence, including NSA signals intelligence and metadata, classified imagery, and raw CIA reports. She and Kilcullen recruited a staff of young, brash analysts from the Marines, the Special Forces, U.S. AID, Booz Allen Hamilton, and the Washington think-tanks and universities that serve as training grounds for the national security elite.
In recent years, Caerus employees have been dispatched all over the world for U.S.-government financed “stability assessments,” including in Pakistan, Somalia, Columbia, Nigeria, Liberia and Honduran – all countries where the United States has a substantial military presence. Recently, Caerus personnel have been involved in clandestine operations in Syria and Libya, funded by the U.S. government, to identify local insurgents and resistance groups who might be friendly to the United States and therefore worthy of military support.
Kilcullen, meanwhile, is occasionally called on to testify in Congress on Syria and other hot spots, and in recent months has become a major advocate in Australia for expanding its military alliance with the United States in the fight against ISIS. “This is, and will be, a multi-generational struggle against an implacable enemy, and the violence we’re dealing with in the Middle East and Africa is not some unfortunate aberration – it’s the new normal,” he wrote in The Australian last November.
Amazingly, Kilcullen is doing all of this beneath the radar screen of some of its largest clients. “Holy shit,” explained Phil Hay, the head of communications for the World Bank’s Africa region, when I ask if the Bank knew that Caerus was involved in counterinsurgency and intelligence operations. “I’m pretty bloody sure we would have known that.” The Bank, with the U.S. Institute of Peace, funded a Caerus project in Liberia to “map” crime, risk and land use disputes for the Liberian National Police and other “community” entities.
All this sounds familiar to people who’ve been following Kilcullen and his role in the national security industry. “Global counterinsurgency is his thing,” said C. Christine Fair, a professor in the Peace and Security Studies Program at Georgetown University and a former political scientist at the RAND Corporation. “I think Caerus is really the intellectual version of Blackwater. Basically, they do these assessments that make themselves absolutely indispensable and provide their client what they want—in this case, what they want to know.”
But behind his image is one of the slickest and most successful profiteers of our time.
*****
The war on terror changed the very nature of how the United States deploys its forces. New demands for intelligence collectors, translators, analysts, social scientists and logistics managers created massive, lucrative opportunities for private interests. The expansion was especially apparent in Afghanistan.
In December 2007, there were 25,000 American troops in that country, compared to 36,000 contractors. Six years later, that ratio had reversed, and the number of U.S. troops stood at about 66,000 compared to a total contracting force of 108,000. About a third of them work for the Pentagon: the Department of Defense currently employs over 40,000 contractors in Afghanistan. In contrast, the current U.S. mission there, called “Resolute Support,” involves about 12,000 troops.
Amazingly, even the counterinsurgency was outsourced. When McChrystal took over as commander in Afghanistan in 2009, he set up a shadow general staff called the Counterinsurgency Advisory Assistance Team that was known as CAATS. The commander: David Kilcullen. The concept “was to provide high end contractors, with unique experience and credibility, to assist and assess for McChrystal as he implemented the new COIN strategy,” Douglas Ollivant, a former NSC Director for Iraq who worked for Kilcullen on the team, wrote last year (Ollivant is now a fellow at New America).
In the years since, contracting has gone far beyond conventional warfare. Private companies are now integral to covert operations carried out by JSOC and the Special Operations Command. Remember the Arabic translator on the Navy SEAL team that captured the Maersk Alabama, as portrayed in the Tom Hanks film Captain Philips? He was employed by Mission Essential Personnel (MEP) of Chantilly, Va., the largest provider of cleared linguists to the Pentagon – and an contracting partner of Caerus.
Companies like these represent “an entirely new set of actors” in U.S. wars, said a former high-ranking Army general and who saw the expansion of contractors close up as a diplomat in Afghanistan.
“Some of them are making a fortune at being the COIN proponents, the COIN analysts,” he said. “There’s a group that’s made a fortune through homeland security which also blends and merges in some instances with these expeditionary campaigns. There’s other groups out there that are providing all kinds of military services, from logistics to convoy protection to you name it. These groups are not well-known, they’re murky, and they’re out in the shadows. And the explosion in their use, not only in theaters of war but in developing doctrine and ideas, is very dangerous.”
What’s most dangerous, critics of the contracting industry, is that the profit motive has overtaken mission as a factor in American policy.
“One of the saddest footnotes to this war are the opportunists who saw it as a way to make money,” said Tony Shaffer, a retired Army lieutenant colonel with a background in Special Operations. The national-security apparatus is riddled, he said, with programs whose only purpose it to “create opportunities for contractors. These are people who’ve become much more loyal to the corporate bottom line than what’s best for the American people.”
****
Kilcullen refused to comment for this article. Last year, after I had spent months trying to arrange an interview with him, I introduced myself at a Washington forum where he had spoken about his company’s operations in Syria. He told me, quite emphatically, that neither he or anyone on his “team” would answer any questions about Caerus or his career as a “COIN guru.” But his silence was not entirely unexpected: like the NSA discovered two years ago, he once had an Edward Snowden in his midst.
Not long ago, a trusted source of mine put me in touch with a former Caerus employee who had a collection of documents he wanted to leak. He was alarmed about the possibility that classified information was being mishandled at Caerus (Kilcullen, he noted, had applied for U.S. citizenship but remained a foreign national) and didn’t trust any of the safeguards established by the Obama administration to protect intelligence whistleblowers working for contractors. After I promised him confidentiality, he gave me a thumb drive loaded with internal Caerus documents.
They included teaming agreements and correspondence with its prime contractors; details about Caerus’ procedures to protect classified information; and statements of work from the Pentagon, the State Department and U.S. AID spelling out Caerus’ obligations as a contractor. Another section was loaded with presentations Kilcullen had prepared on counterinsurgency and the Arab Spring for the RAND Corporation, the Pentagon think-tank where he was a consultant for several years. The drive also included a set of PowerPoint presentations Caerus and DARPA had prepared for the Special Operations Command and other agencies to market their “big data” programs. Using the documents as a guide, I set out to find out exactly what Kilcullen and Caerus were about.
*****
Dave Kilcullen was born in 1967 and raised in Sydney, where his parents were academics who regularly attended antiwar demonstrations protesting Australia’s involvement in Vietnam. But he went the opposite direction and joined the Australian Army, rising to the rank of lieutenant colonel. Later, he obtained a PhD in anthropology.
“When it comes to cultural understanding in high-impact security environments, he brings a lot to the table,” says a former State Department official who first met Kilcullen while working for the UN in East Timor. “His writing is accessible, but his academic credentials are good. But he also has credibility going outside the wire.”
During the 1990s, while on assignment with the Australian army in West Java, Kilcullen encountered and studied Islamic resistance groups to the central government in Jakarta. His experience in Indonesia shaped his thinking about how imperial powers could neutralize guerrilla movements elsewhere in the Muslim world.
That eventually brought him to the attention of Paul Wolfowitz, a former U.S. ambassador to Indonesia and one of the architects of the invasion of Iraq. In 2004, at a time when the insurgency there threatened to derail his neocon dream of easy conquest, Wolfowitz “borrowed” Kilcullen from the Australian government to provide his expertise to the Pentagon. He never left.
Kilcullen’s connection at the Pentagon was John Nagl, a retired Army Lt. Colonel then serving as Wolfowitz’s top aide and the author of one of the seminal books on counterinsurgency, Eating Soup With a Knife. During the 1990s, he and Petreaus were the leading lights of a group of military officers and human rights advocates who tried to synthesize a new strategy for confronting insurgencies.
“There was a constellation of different groups—the ‘expert class,’ mainstream journalists, and a policy contingent of liberal interventionists—who wanted intervention to work,” said Gian Gentile, a West Point professor and author of the recently published Wrong Turn: America’s Deadly Embrace of Counterinsurgency, of the COIN revival movement.
The COINdinistas searched for lessons and models in the British suppressions of a communist-led rebellion in Malaya in the 1950s, the French attempt to defeat an indigenous uprising in Algeria during the 1960s, and the U.S. intervention in El Salvador in the 1980s. They also looked back fondly to the counterinsurgency strategy led by the Army, the CIA and U.S. AID in South Vietnam in the late 1960s.
With Kilcullen’s assistance, they came up with a formula to “outgovern” the enemy by providing enough economic and social assistance to persuade the masses of people caught in the middle (the proverbial “third force”) that the government chosen for them by the United States is superior to anything offered by the “enemy,” be it the Viet Cong or the Taliban.
The movement culminated in 2006 at a famous conference co-sponsored by General Petreaus and Sarah Sewell, who was then the director of Harvard’s Carr Center for Human Rights Policy (in 2013 she joined the Obama administration as undersecretary of state for civilian security, democracy, and human rights).
Kilcullen gave a keynote speech and slides that were well received. The meetings led directly to the drafting and publication of the famous Army-Marine “COIN Field Manual” that became the basis for U.S. counterinsurgency policy in both Iraq and Afghanistan. Kilcullen was a major contributor, and also wrote the civilian handbook that was used by the U.S. Agency for International Development and its many contractors to manage the “nation-building” efforts in those countries.
In 2007, Kilcullen was hired by the State Department, where he served as counterterrorism adviser to Condoleezza Rice until 2009. For a while, he roamed the world as a kind of COIN ambassador. (A U.S. diplomatic cable obtained by WikiLeaksdescribes Kilcullen at a briefing in Paris pushing “French officials to understand the utility of counter-insurgency methods to contain and fight” the terrorism threat).
When he returned to Washington for good in 2011, he’d become the toast of the warrior class and the darling of the national-security media.
From the Washington Post to Danger Room, reporters turned to him as the embodiment of a new American kind of war that would incorporate humanitarian values into its core by eschewing firepower for social projects and separating hard-core terrorists and jihadis from “accidental guerrillas” who just wanted to be left alone—a Kilcullen innovation that’s also the title of his most popular book.
Thomas E. Ricks, the former military correspondent for the Post, was one of his biggest champions. In a gushing 2009 article in Foreign Policy, he lionized Kilcullen as the “Crocodile Dundee of Counterinsurgency” who had “worked to steer the former Bush administration towards COIN from the inside.”
Equally enthralled was Spencer Ackerman, a military blogger who opposed the Iraq War and is now a national security reporter for the Guardian. In 2007, he helped created Kilcullen’s image as a maverick by quoting him denouncing Bush’s war as “fucking stupid.” Then, in dozens of articles over the next four years, he championed Kilcullen as the key figure behind “The Counterinsurgents,” the title of a mammoth series on the COIN revival movement he completed just before Obama’s inauguration.
“Kilcullen was about making stricter distinctions between those who needed to be confronted militarily and those who didn’t,” Ackerman told me. Back in 2008, when he chronicled the COIN counterinsurgency movement, “I considered Kilcullen to be by far the most intellectually dexterous of this crowd,” he added. “His writings were probably the most direct about counterinsurgency as – and he probably wouldn’t use this term – an imperial foreign policy. And that was getting short shrift in the media.” Ackerman made sure it didn’t.
In May 2009, Kilcullen sparked another wave of sympathetic coverage when he co-authored a New York Times op-ed calling for a moratorium on drone strikes in Pakistan. Ackerman championed him in his newsletter (TK QUOTE), sparking the interest of MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, who granted Kilcullen several obsequious interviews in the lead-up to the expanded war in Afghanistan. Since then, he has been a frequent guest on Charlie Rose, Tavis Smiley, National Public Radio and, of course, MSNBC. In 2013, David Ignatius, the Washington Post’s resident intelligence expert, identified Kilcullen on a list of a “new generation of thinkers” who will shape U.S. policy over the next decade.
*****
All this time, Kilcullen was not only making money from contracting; he was actively proselytizing for an expanded war in Afghanistan as a senior fellow for the Center for New American Security.
CNAS was founded by two veterans of the Clinton administration, Michelle Flournoy and Kurt Campbell, who sought to “reclaim the pragmatic center in the national security debate” by promoting a more hardline brand of foreign policy. For a time, it was known as “COIN Central,” and since its creation it was funded by some of the nation’s largest defense contractors. They include giants like SAIC, Booz Allen Hamilton, Northrop Grumman and Raytheon, as well as dozens of smaller, focused firms, such as DynCorp, L-3 MPRI, DRS, ManTech and MEP. All of them have played a direct role in the counterinsurgency war, and several of them, including MEP and SAIC, have close ties with Kilcullen and his company
“CNAS was a golden opportunity to stand up something that would allow Democrats to be tough, to be hawkish, to be smart again about war,” Matthew Hoh, a former Marine who served in Iraq and resigned from the State Department to protest President Obama’s excalation in Afghanistan in 2009, told me. “The attitude was, we’re not Republicans, we’re not Bush’s people, we’re smarter, we’re more capable, and we won’t make the same mistakes they did—we’ll just do it better.” In 2009, Flournoy left CNAS to join President Obama’s Defense Department. She was replaced by Kilcullen’s old COIN friend, John Nagl, who brought the Australian in as a senior fellow.
That was how Kilcullen became the primary author of a CNAS paper called “Triage” that endorsed a “truly population-centric COIN” in Afghanistan to be supported by a “civilian surge” led by U.S. AID. It was presented in grand fashion at CNAS’s annual meeting on June 11, 2009, at Washington’s opulent Willard Hotel, where General Petreaus himself was the guest of honor. When McChrystal was hired by Obama to oversee the surge, Kilcullen was again brought in as a senior adviser; they carried out the plans spelled out in “Triage” to the letter. “The core of that mission was, in fact, counterinsurgency, albeit with fairly tight geographical and time limits,” Robert Gates said in Duty, his book about his years as Secretary of Defense
Throughout this time, “the media were cheerleaders,” recalled Hoh. “They were swayed by the narrative about Afghanistan, that we somehow there doing great things, that it was a conflict that could be divided between good and bad sides. There was a blind eye to what was occuring and the reality of the situation. Then there was the celebrity – they loved Petreaus, they loved McChrystal, they loved the access.”
But there was a dark side that Kilcullen’s admirers either missed or chose to overlook. In Iraq, Petreaus and Kilcullen brought in former U.S. Special Forces personnel who had fought the dirty war in El Salvador to create what effectively became U.S.-funded death squads. They recruited some of the same Sunni groups who had initially led the insurgency and, in the process, killed many Americans, to go after the fighters who endangered the Iraqi government. Journalist Peter Maass, in a famous article in the New York Times Magazine, described the tactics as “the Salvadorization of Iraq.”
The late Michael Hastings, who covered the war for Rolling Stone, summarized the lessons of the “surge” in 2011. “We took the Shiites’ side in a civil war, armed them to the teeth, and suckered the Sunnis into thinking we’d help them out too,” Hastings wrote in BuzzFeed. “It was a brutal enterprise – over 800 Americans died during the surge, while hundreds of thousands of Iraqis lost their lives during a sectarian conflict that Petraeus’ policies fueled.”
But anyone paying attention should have known this side of Kilcullen. In his autobiography, he casually brags about how, during the 1990s, he was an adviser to Kopassus, a dreaded unit of Indonesia’s Special Forces that carries out counterterrorism and intelligence operations. But he never mentions that this unit had a reputation of extreme brutality going back decades (its record was so bad that Congress, by large bipartisan majorities, banned U.S. training of Indonesian soldiers for over ten years).
Kilcullen’s fans also ignore his fondness for the U.S. counterinsurgency effort in Vietnam, which culminated in the Phoenix Program, the CIA’s notorious capture-and-kill operation that assassinated over 25,000 Vietnamese guerrilla fighters and underground organizers. In 2004, he proposed a “Global Phoenix Program” to fight the broader war on terror – an idea that was warmly embraced by Peter Bergen in 2009 as something “thoughtful students of the global war on terror” should advocate.
In articles in military magazines, Kilcullen has argued that Phoenix was “unfairly maligned.” In reality, he claimed, it was a “civilian aid and development program, supported by targeted military pacification operations and intelligence activity to disrupt the Viet Cong infrastructure.” That, in essence, is what he’s dedicated himself to since his experience with Petreaus in Iraq.
****
When Kilcullen arrived in Baghdad 2007, he and Petraeus sought to identify the warring parties, including Al Qaeda’s networks and its affiliated gangs, using a sophisticated combination of field research, human intelligence, and electronic surveillance. He described his tactics to a Google Ideas forum on “Illicit Networks, Terrorists and Proliferators” in 2012.
In a presentation that can still be viewed on You Tube, Kilcullen said that he had been “mapping the environment” of Baghdad and other cities “and working with the community, [using] cell phones, GPS, radio communications, and mapping the network.” This was then “married up with access to data, handheld mobile technology and police and law enforcement techniques.” But he left out a critical detail.
We now know that, through Petraeus, Kilcullen had access to massive amounts of Iraqi intelligence from the NSA. Last year, in an attempt to counter the criticism of domestic spying generated by the Snowden leaks, a top NSA official told the Los Angeles Times that by 2005, it was “able to collect, sort, and make available details of every Iraqi insurgent email, text message, and phone-location signal in real time.”
These techniques of mapping “illicit networks” became the basis for Kilcullen’s operations at Caerus, which expanded from identifying Al Qaeda cells in the Levant to networks of all kinds throughout the world: insurgents in Afghanistan, drug cartels in Central America, and warlords in the Horn of Africa. And despite his claims that these “mapping” techniques as benign attempts to help local communities, Caerus documents make clear they can also have lethal consequences.
“DARPA is interested in tools and techniques to exploit big data for operational use,” Caerus wrote in a Pentagon proposal obtained by The Nation. “A hyper-local approach to collecting, mapping, and exploiting this data could pay large dividends to special operations forces, HUMINT [human intelligence] collectors, and members of the interagency engaged in defeating illicit networks.”
Kilcullen founded Caerus in 2010 by flipping his COIN advisory work for McChrystal, NATO and the Central Command into a stream of lucrative contracts from the Pentagon, the US-NATO International Security Assistance Force known as ISAF, the State Department, and U.S. AID. Nearly all of his early work was to train U.S. and NATO commanders and officers in counterinsurgency tactics. In 2011, his first year in business, the company tallied $4.5 million in gross sales, with 97 percent of the work coming from DoD contracts, the Defense Contracting Auditing Agency reported in a 2012 audit.
Kilcullen’s initial staff came from the contracted CAATS team he headed for McChrystal. His top executive was Erin Simpson, who had worked with Nagl and Kilcullen on the COIN manual and was just earning her PhD in Political Science from Harvard. From 2010 to 2013, the two of them paid regular visits to Afghanistan under a $2.2 million contract with DARPA, primarily to consult with U.S. and NATO commanders in Kabul.
Another early project was to design and manage a $15 million AID program measuring stability in Afghanistan, which was also a key task of the counterinsurgency effort (the project, called MISTI, still provides much of Caerus’ revenue). Kilcullen’s connection here was U.S. AID’s Office of Transition Initiatives, which has funded its work in Central America. OTI is a unit of the State Department that operates overseas much like the CIA did during the Cold War. Since 2008, it’s been a primary vehicle for U.S. intervention in war-torn “conflict zones,” and was State’s action arm for the counterinsurgency in both Iraq and Afghanistan. Last year, it was exposed by the Associated Pressfor secretly running a contracted program in Cuba designed to stir up a local “Arab Spring” with a fake Twitter program.
OTI “is the closest thing to an organization structurally designed to deal with the environments of the past five years,” Kilcullen said in a public speech in 2013. According to a Caerus document obtained by The Nation, many of Caerus’ staffers “have worked directly” for OTI “developing policy, implementing field programs, and managing program evaluations focused on stabilization goals and objectives.” (At a recent forum on Syria, half the audience appeared to be OTI staffers, who listened to Kilcullen with quiet reverence.)
The scope of the Caerus work in Afghanistan was breathtaking. According to one company document, Caerus was charged with defining and measuring “the overall conceptual design” of political and economic stability in Afghanistan. “For DARPA, we’ve processed existing data sources in non-traditional ways and effectively tested 50-year old standing COIN theories, modified them, and help adapt operations accordingly,” they claimed.
They also forged important corporate alliances. One of its prime contractors for the Nexus 7 program in Afghanistan was Data Tactics Inc., a major player in “Big Data.” It was founded in 2005 to focus on “the unique problems of data management” faced by intelligence agencies. Its speciality is analyzing signals intelligence (a list of skills on its website includes data mining and link analysis) as well as geo-spatial and imagery intelligence. Data Tactics was recently acquired by L-3 Communications, one of the the NSA’s biggest contractors.
The other prime on Nexus 7 was Sotera Defense, an NSA contractor with close ties to its former director, Keith Alexander. At one point, the Sotera-Caerus “Nexus7 Team” had a total of 44 full-time staff assigned to the program at DARPA’s headquarters in Arlington. Among their tasks was providing intelligence to the Drug Enforcement Agency, which has a “Taliban Drug Trafficking Operations” office in Afghanistan, and a US Marines signals battalion unit (neither Data Tactics or Sotera would comment).
A document called “More Eyes,” written in December 2010 by DARPA (with distribution limited to Pentagon employees and “U.S. DoD contractors only”) shows the depth of the surveillance. It shows that the Caerus team was gathering all kinds of personal social data, such as intelligence on conditions in medical clinics. It also went into regional agricultural schools to “report on developments in rural areas” to “inform stability operations.”
This program, which is partly classified, is still operational. DARPA confirmed that Nexus 7 is ongoing, and said it uses “big data analytics” to “make sense of vast amounts of heterogeneous data collected from defense intelligence and open-source information and in the battleground environment.” Caerus is still involved, one of Kilcullen’s prime contractors told me.
The ability to analyze NSA data proved fruitful. Caerus documents also show that the company has the capability to sift through metadata obtained by the NSA – a widespread practice that was fully exposed in the first documents leaked by Edward Snowden. In 2014, Caerus was bidding with Mission Essential – where Kilcullen served as two years on the advisory board – on a $1.6 million contract under consideration by the Defense Intelligence Agency. Under the contract for a “Combat Intelligence Augmentation Team,” Caerus proposed to provide a small crew of analysts, including an expert in “SIGINT metadata” as well as experts in counterinsurgency and human intelligence.
In March 2015, MEP won a TK DIA contract, but the DIA could not say if Caerus was one of the subcontractors. Still this document is the first proof I’ve seen that contractors have the ability to sift through NSA metadata.
By 2013, Caerus also began to view its DARPA projects as a passport to deeper work with U.S. military commands outside of the Middle East and Africa. One PowerPoint slide prepared by Caerus for DARPA claims that, by using the Nexus 7 program, U.S. Special Forces could “coordinate global intel for GWOT,” including in “Iran, Yemen, Bahrain [and] northern Mali.” In another, DARPA proposed to provide Nexus 7 to the United States Southern Command, which is responsible for all U.S. military operations in Central and South America.
A Pentagon OFFICIAL who viewed these presentations said it was “not unusual” for contractors to write pitches like this for military agencies. “DARPA’s job is to look at the need of our commands, and contractors know their product the best,” she said. The Pentagon or SOCOM would neither confirm or deny if the programs were being used by the secretive Special Forces command.
But Caerus’ programs are used far and wide. In Africa, Caerus helped develop intelligence analysis tools to be used by U.S. forces in future wars. These tools, called “XGEO,” combine all forms of intelligence, including imagery and signals, and were developed under a contract with the Pentagon’s Irregular Warfare Support Program, which develops counterterrrosim strategies for the Army. According to a $800,000 contract with a technology office controlled by the Secretary of Defense, XGEO built on “current field deployments in Liberia, Nigeria and anticipated future deployments elsewhere in Africa.”
Caerus has also been operating in Central America for the State Department’s OTI division. In 2012, according a U.S. AID contract, Caerus “was sought out by US AID” for a “big data” project to map out “illicit networks” in Honduras and use the “counterinsurgency methodology” it developed in Afghanistan to track how organized crime and drug cartels were responsible for the escalating violence in the country. The project was subcontracted through Creative Associates, a Washington-based contractor that also works for AID in Yemen and Libya – the same company that managed OTI’s “Cuba Twitter” project exposed by the AP.
But the project, and Caerus’ public postings about it, fails to address a root cause of Honduran violence: the U.S.-backed military coup of 2009 that overthrew its elected president, and the ensuing policy by the Obama administration to pour millions of dollars into Honduras to train its police and army. I showed the OTI documents to Adrienne Pine, an assistant professor of anthropology at American University who spent the last year teaching at the National Autonomous University of Honduras. Kilcullen “completely ignores the impact of militarism” on violence,” she said of the project. “This is all about erasing memories of the coup.”
Caerus’ latest project, funded by an unidentified U.S. “aid agency,” creates detailed surveys of the opposition groups fighting the Assad government in Syria, and looks very much like a roadmap for U.S. intervention if the U.S. got involved militarily. The Caerus data – collected primarily from Syrians in the city of Alleppo – is widely used by media organizations, including The New York Times. It’s unclear if they know that the information might come from intelligence agencies; {NYT comment TK. ]
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Even as Kilcullen’s influence grew and his intelligence work expanded, he began to attract scrutiny from Pentagon investigators responsible for protecting national-security secrets and classified information. As an Australian officer working at a senior level of the U.S. military, his access to intelligence in Iraq and Afghanistan was covered by Australia’s membership in the “Five Eyes” group of countries that cooperate closely on NSA surveillance. But something appears to have gone wrong with Kilcullen’s security clearances and the way his foreign-owned company has handled classified information over the past five years.
The trouble began in 2011, when Kilcullen was the subject of a massive story in Danger Room about Nexis 7 – the only time before this article that the program was disclosed in public. The article, which ran on July 21, 2011, identified Kilcullen as Nexus 7’s “intellectual godfather.” The disclosure apparently made his role in the program untenable. It “caused a lot of tension at DARPA,” said a contractor still involved in the program. “That’s when the whole split of his company occurred.”
Ten days after that piece was published, according to Caerus corporate documents filed in Delaware, Kilcullen changed the structure of his company to include a new division for classified work, Caerus Analytics. That required Kilcullen to submit his company to a strenuous audit conducted by the Defense Security Service, a Pentagon agency that oversees defense contractors under “foreign ownership, control and influence,” a process known as FOCI. In December 2012, the two Caerus units signed an elaborate agreement to keep their operations separate and ensure that foreign owners couldn’t “adversely affect the performance of classified contracts.” The agency added: “Once Dr. Kilcullen’s citizenship has been granted, the company will no longer be operating under FOCI.”
But that never happened. Last year, I got a tip from another contractor that the DSS was involved with Caerus again. “There’s been some spillage,” one of Kilcullen’s business partners told me, using a term that would indicate that classified information had gotten into the wrong hands. The report was confirmed by DSS spokeswoman Cindy McGovern.She said her agency was engaged in an “all agency effort” to ensure that proper controls were in place at Caerus to protect classified information. In particular, it was concerned about the facility security clearance held by Kilcullen’s intelligence unit, Caerus Analytics. It “is not authorized to store or process classified information at their location,” she said.
The DSS reports to the Deputy Secretary of Defense for Intelligence. That position is currently held by Michael G. Vickers, who from 2007 to 2011 was a top adviser on counter-terrrorism to the Pentagon as Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations and Low Intensity Conflict. It took a very careful line with Kilcullen and said he himself was not under investigation. Because he is a foreign national, however, DSS said it has no jurisdiction over him or his foreign-owned entity.
Robert Conley, an industrial security specialist at the University of Washington who worked for the DSS for 26 years, explained that both DARPA and DSS would be concerned about spillage of classified information from Caerus as well as export-control rules on selling advanced surveillance systems to foreign parties. “There is a plethora of advanced technology that can’t be released, even to our closest allies like Australia,” said Conley, who once blew the whistle on what he considered DSS’s lax oversight of defense subcontractors (his complaint was upheld by the Pentagon’s Office of Inspector General.) “That’s especially true when you get into intel, counter-intel, and technology revolving around how that’s done and how it’s collected. We don’t share that with anyone.”
In any case, the Pentagon’s intervention in Caerus had an immediate affect. Within 24 hours of my interview with DSS, Kilcullen apparently resigned as CEO and was replaced by his longtime protégé, Erin Simpson. Oddly the change was only noticeable on the Caerus website, where Simpson was suddenly identified as the CEO of Caerus Associates. For months afterward, the company said nothing in public about its executive changes, which also included the resignations of two of Kilcullen’s top deputies. For a while, all references to Kilcullen’s executive role at Caerus, as well as his biography, were scrubbed from the website. Simpson, now CEO, would not respond to numerous emails and phone calls asking for comment.
Until Kilcullen’s resignation, DARPA had refused to comment directly about his work for the agency except to say he was not a “prime” contractor. But after the DSS involvement became clear, the agency issued a second statement. It emphasized that Kilcullen had never been a “DARPA employee” and has only been invited to speak at “unclassified, DARPA-sponsored gatherings at the agency and outside locations.” The agency was clearly distancing itself from its longtime Australian subcontractor, who has been working with the agency on sensitive intelligence projects since 2010.
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I finally got my chance to question Kilcullen when he spoke at a public event on Syria. After a carefully controlled question and answer period where only a few people were called upon, I went up to Kilcullen and introduced myself as the reporter who’s been seeking to contact him. He responded aggressively and angrily. Asked if he would agree to an interview, he responded in a hostile tone, “not really, no.” I followed up: was there a problem with classified information at Caerus? “There is not.” His eyes glaring, he tersely explained that his position at the company remains unchanged.
Pressed to explain why DSS might have intervened at Caerus, Kilcullen ridiculed me for even raising the issue. “I don’t see you as a real reporter,” he said. “I view you as a conspiracy theorist.” Apparently to this Australian contractor, who is used to a decade of worshipful coverage from the Washington media, factual inquiries about his company and its operations are out of bounds. The day after that confrontation, DSS confirmed that it was still engaged in an “oversight role” at Caerus due to its concerns over the company’s “compliance with their FOCI mitigation agreement.”
It remains to be seen how the DSS actions will affect Kilcullen’s future in the contracting business. Caerus Associates, the company’s operating arm, appears to be thriving under Simpson, and recently started hiring for positions that require security clearances (that was suspended for about a year). TK – DETAILS OF CAERUS CURRENT OPS Simpson herself has become a minor celebrity in the Washington media, especially among its tight-knit military press corps. She was recently named to Foreign Policy’s elite “Top 100 Twitterati,” and is at the center of a network of reporters and analysts at such places as Daily Beast, BuzzFeed, the Center for American Progress and (especially) CNAS, who interact frequently on Twitter. At the New America conference where Kilcullen spoke, she dutifully “live tweeted” much of the two-day affair.
So the Caerus money continues to flow. But the global COIN strategy its owner has been pushing for so long, both in government and in the private sector, is no longer a viable alternative. “The counterinsurgency moment has passed, and it’s been rejected both in the political and the military realm,” Andrew Bacevich, a professor at Boston University and one of Kilcullen’s most vociferous critics, told me. “Back when the Petreaus reputation was at its height, there was an element that persuaded itself that global counterinsurgency somehow provided the template for future national security policy. But since then the bloom is off the rose.”
Christine Fair, the Georgetown professor, questions why Kilcullen and other advocates of failed strategies continue to thrive. ‘Look, I can’t even get my brain around the moral turpitude that this industry is,” she told me. “It’s like there’s no accountability for these same people who provided the strategy that did not work. Why are they still getting grants? No one calls them out.” Since Kilcullen refused to talk, I passed those comments by Andrew Exum, a Marine veteran who worked closely with him at CNAS (Exum, who worked on McChrystal’s assessment team, was the co-author of “Triage”).
In a brief but tense interview, Exum – who has been a recent guest on Chris Hayes’ show on MSNBC – responded that suggestions of “war profiteering” were “pretty ugly things” to say. “If they wanted to make a lot of money,” he said of Kilcullen and Simpson, “they could do it in the private sector, in a place like Goldman Sachs.” “They do this because they believe in it and because they enjoy it.” Exum is now employed by the Boston Consulting Group, where Flournoy, his former boss at CNAS, is a senior executive.
The best explanation of COIN I could get was from Gian Gentile, the author who led an Army combat brigade in Baghdad after the invasion and was an early dissenter to the doctrine. He said COIN failed because of an essential conceit. “It’s all premised on a false strategy that a foreign occupying force like the U.S. Army and Marines could put itself on the ground in a relatively short amount of time and do nation-building at the barrel of a gun and outgovern other groups in that place,” he told me. “For us to make that work” in Iraq and Afghanistan, “we’d have to stay there for generations. We’d basically have to do British imperialism at the second half of the 19th century.”
The conclusion is obvious. Despite all claims about a new style of warfare, Kilcullen’s company is clearly on the side of the global corporations, global financial institutions and mining companies that are the economic underminning for the American Empire. The Caerus website used to describe some of these clients, but that page was taken down after the DSS imbroglio. But I kept a copy; among Caerus’ corporate clients in 2014 were a “Fortune 500 energy company,” a “global telecom company” and a “major multinational with thousands of workers operating in conflict areas worldwide.”
Or take his projects in Liberia. In 2012, according to the Caerus website, Caerus used these programs to assist two European mining companies negotiate with local villages over extraction rights – proving, Caerus claims, that its engagement programs offer “a path to long-term profit maximization.” One of its staffers on the project is now an adviser to AmLib United Minerals, a privately-owned gold mining venture headquartered in Monrovia.
Kilcullen’s personal activities drive the point home. Last year, he delivered the keynote address to a “Global Water Summit” in Paris, an annual conference funded by a dozen multinational corporations involved in privatizing water resources around the globe. “I invited Kilcullen because I think that if people start to think about water as a security issue rather than a social issues, they will take it more seriously,” Christopher Gasson, the organizer, told me.
And since 2012, Kilcullen has been a senior adviser to the Brenthurst Foundation, a private philanthropy and aid group funded by the Oppenheimers, South Africa’s wealthiest family. “This is essentially your corporate reformers who lobbied against apartheid to ensure it didn’t disturb vested interests,” said William Minter, the author of King Solomon’s Mines Revisited, a classic 1987 book on western economic interests in southern Africa. In the end, Kilcullen’s career is not a record of a humanitarian, but of a militarist.
“What Kilcullen does is behind the thin veneer of an imperial gaze,” said Hannah Gurman, an assistant professor at NYU and the author of A People’s History of Counterinsurgency. “He’s all about building empire.”