David Kilcullen – The Cipher Brief

David Kilcullen
Former Special Advisor for Counterinsurgency to the U.S. Secretary of State

David Kilcullen is the former Special Advisor for Counterinsurgency to U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in 2008 after serving as senior Counterinsurgency Advisor, Multinational Force – Iraq in 2007. He was Chief Strategist in the U.S. State Department’s Counterterrorism Bureau, the lead author for the U.S. Government Counterinsurgency Handbook, and founded the ISAF Counterinsurgency Advisory Assistance Team in 2009 in Afghanistan, where he served as advisor to Commander ISAF and on the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Afghanistan program. Kilcullen is now CEO and President of the research and operations firm Cordillera Applications Group and a Senior Fellow in the Future of War Program at New America, a Washington D.C. think-tank.. He is the author of Out of the Mountains: The Coming Age of the Urban Guerrilla (Oxford University Press, 2013).

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John Pereira

John Pereira retired from the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) after serving for 30+ years, including as Deputy Director and then Director of the CIA's Directorate of Support. John is currently Senior Vice President for Strategy and Operations at AECOM.

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