The west is, in conventional military terms, kind of unmatched and unmatchable. Yet people have figured that out and are adapting. And learning from each other. I think the key differences though, are that state actors, the dragons, are copying techniques from the snakes,. whereas non state actors are actually getting capabilities and lethality levels that you used to have to be a nation state to have.
This month will mark a year since the Taliban takeover of Kabul in August 2021 and the chaotic withdrawal of western forces from Afghanistan. In this archive discussion from 2020, we discuss the nature of past Western interventions and the guerrilla warfare resistance that has followed with David Kilcullen, former soldier, diplomat, and senior counterinsurgency adviser for the US during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. He joined Carl Miller, Research Director at the Centre for the Analysis of Social Media at the think tank Demos, to discuss his book: The Dragons and the Snakes: How the Rest Learned to Fight the West.
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