There’s no shortage of stories about how civilians used technology to help tip the scales against Muammar Gaddafi’s army during the Libyan uprising. But few are as powerful as the one told by former U.S. military advisor Dr. David Kilcullen at last week’s Kilcullen added that ships off the coast of Libya even used the pins as guideposts when launching strikes against Gaddafi’s soldiers.

That wisdom of the community is what drives Kilcullen’s latest venture, according to U.N. estimates) and projected sea level rises. “We can say to open developers and to communities, in the next 20 years, with a very high degree of confidence, this is where the supermarkets need to go, this is where the population’s going to be, this is where the roads need to go. There’s actually an ability to understand what’s coming down the track.”

Beyond the commercial benefits of anticipating where to build businesses and infrastructure, handing local populations the tools to map their own lands also carries importance from a social justice perspective. Kilcullen says this empowers civilians to stand up to governments and international corporations that collude to grab land rightfully belonging to the community. “Where I think it’s most important, is in giving this community a much stronger voice in negotiating with the government and negotiating with international businesses,” Kilcullen says. “International businesses come in, and they want to take land and the government’s like, ‘Sure, you can have that land,’ but the community doesn’t have a leg in that discussion because there’s no map of where they live. So it’s all just blank as far as anyone’s concerned. Now they can say, ‘Oh no, this is the map that we built as a community and this is what we recognize as land ownership in this area.'”

Before starting Caerus, Kilcullen had spent much of his adult life working within or alongside military forces. He began his 25-year career as an infantryman in the Australian army before coming to the U.S. State Department in 2005 to work on counterinsurgency and counterterrorism measures. Two years later, he became the Senior Counterinsurgency Advisor to General David Petraeus, commander of the Coalition Forces during the Second Iraq War.

“I came out of Iraq with a real conviction that we tend to think that a bunch of white guys turning up with a solution fixes all the problems. It doesn’t work like that. You actually have to really build a collaborative relationship with the people on the ground if you want to have any hope of understanding what’s going on.”

Because he was hired by the Bush administration, Kilcullen’s contract with the U.S. military ended on January 20, 2009 when President Obama took office. Having missed the opportunity to run an Australian ranger unit as he’d originally planned, and having developed a taste for how emergent, relatively cheap technology could be used to solve problems in war-torn areas, Kilcullen decided to take a step back from the structured, hierarchical worlds of the military and politics.

“Frankly I was having much more fun working in the tech space and in small team environments in the field,” Kilcullen says. “I realized that, yeah, you can make a lot of money as a consultant, sort of a Beltway Bandit, but it’s soul-destroying.”