"Twenty-Eight Articles" Company level counterinsurgency - by Dr.David Kilcullen

(from wikipedia)
Kilcullen's paper "Twenty-Eight Articles"^[23] 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.^[24] It was later formalized 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.^[25]

Conflict ethnography[edit]

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."^[26] In the same essay, "Religion and Insurgency", published in May 2007 on the Small Wars Journal, he expanded this view:

The bottom line is that no handbook relieves a professional counterinsurgent from the personal obligation to study, internalize and interpret the physical, human, informational and ideological setting in which the conflict takes place. Conflict ethnography is key; to borrow a literary term, there is no substitute for a "close reading" of the environment. But it is a reading that resides in no book, but around you; in the terrain, the people, their social and cultural institutions, the way they act and think. You have to be a participant observer. And the key is to see beyond the surface differences between our societies and these environments (of which religious orientation is one key element) to the deeper social and cultural drivers of conflict, drivers that locals would understand on their own terms.^[26]

(david kilcullen, dave kilcullen, 28 articles, 29 articles, company  level, counterinsurgency, coin, syrria, kobani, kobane, kurds, kurdish, ayn al aran, Dr. David Kilcullen, syria)