Once the Shower Posse established itself as an international drug trafficking network, it freed itself from its original dependence on the JLP, allowing it to become a semiautonomous power center within Kingston. Again, this seems to have happened entirely unconsciously, through a process of evolution. At the same time that the posse kicked free of the control of its erstwhile political masters, both of the major Jamaican political parties were making efforts to clean up election violence, reduce urban organized crime, and professionalize and depoliticize the police. These efforts further alienated groups such as the Shower Posse from their former sponsors. At the same time, the negative externalities of the gangs’ offshore drug trafficking and racketeering businesses brought American, Canadian, and British law enforcement down on the Jamaican government, pressuring the government to move against the gangs. Despite the still-close political relationships between Christopher Coke and JLP leaders at the city and national levels, this pressure was ultimately enough to force the Jamaican government to move against him.
When it did, Coke’s influence through the normative system he’d created in his district (“the System,” which Charles and Beckford observed at first hand) allowed him to mobilize people to resist the government incursion, rally local gang allies to support him, and centralize weapons, ammunition, and building materials to turn Tivoli Gardens into an urban fortress. It took a full-scale military effort, lasting weeks and leaving many dead and injured, to clear Tivoli Gardens and arrest Coke. Yet the underlying patterns of urban exclusion, social marginalization, and residential garrisons in Kingston remained in place after the military crackdown ended, meaning that the potential for future conflicts of this kind remains.
Fascinating as this example of urban conflict may be in its own right, there seems to be a broader implication here: as the planet urbanizes, as populations centralize in coastal cities, and as increasing international connectivity enables globalized communication and population movement, this kind of local/transnational, criminal/military hybrid threat—which John P. Sullivan has insightfully labeled criminal insurgency, “a global form of neo-feudalism linked together by cyberspace, globalization, and a series of concrete ungoverned zones”—may affect vastly more cities on the planet than it already does.100
IV. Hybrid, Irregular, and Nested
The three examples we’ve explored here offer several insights into the future of conflict at the city level, and it’s worth quickly noting them before we move on.
Same Threats, Different Environment
Taken as a whole, an obvious characteristic of the future threat seems to be that it will be irregular. Military analysts use the term irregular warfare to describe conflicts that involve nonstate armed groups: combatants who don’t belong to the regular armed forces of nation-states. More broadly, the term irregular methods (sometimes asymmetric methods) describes techniques such as terrorism, guerrilla warfare, subversion, and cyberwarfare, which typically avoid direct confrontation with the military power of governments. Instead, like the Somali militias engaging TF Ranger in Mogadishu, these methods pit a nonstate armed group’s comparative advantages of stealth, small size, distributed command and control, and local knowledge against conventional militaries, which, though large and powerful, tend to bog down in complex terrain such as cities, jungles, or mountains.
As we noted in Chapter 1, state-on-state conflict has always been relatively rare, and it is getting rarer. At the same time, irregular warfare has historically been and will probably continue to be the main form of organized violence across the planet.101 We can therefore expect that nonstate armed groups will keep choosing irregular methods to confront nation-states. A renewed U.S. focus on conventional threats as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan wind down would only reinforce this tendency, since America’s unprecedented military supremacy means that no enemy in its right mind would choose to fight the United States conventionally, and this pushes all potential adversaries—state or nonstate—in the direction of irregular methods. Meanwhile, operations involving nonstate groups—from humanitarian assistance and disaster relief to peacekeeping, evacuation, military assistance, and (somewhat less often) counterinsurgency and stabilization operations—are happening just as often as in the past. This means that conventional militaries, police forces, aid agencies, and NGOs will keep coming into frequent contact with nonstate armed groups.102
Proxy groups sponsored by foreign states (such as the LeT terrorists in Mumbai) will also adopt irregular methods. In particular, governments that acquire nuclear weapons, which allow them to deter conventional attacks, may be emboldened to use proxy warfare against an opponent. This might well be the case if Iran acquires a nuclear weapon, and it has certainly already occurred with North Korea and with Pakistan, the alleged sponsor of the Mumbai attack. As a recent study pointed out:
After becoming an overt nuclear power, Pakistan has become emboldened to prosecute conflict at the lower end of the spectrum, confident that nuclear weapons minimize the likelihood of an Indian military reaction. In the wake of nuclearization, substate conflict expanded dramatically. In 2001, the Pakistani operation [during the Kargil crisis] was enabled by the protective nuclear umbrella ensuring that India’s conventional response would be constrained. Similarly, groups that were previously limited to the Kashmir theater expanded into the Indian hinterland following the 1998 nuclear tests.103
All this suggests that the most prevalent future security threats will come from nonstate armed groups, or irregular actors, and from state and nonstate groups using irregular methods. This isn’t new: it’s the environment that will be different, not the threat.
The typical environment for irregular conflict in the past has been a remote, rural one—mountains, forests and jungles, villages and farms. Examples of urban guerrilla warfare do exist, including the battle of the Casbah in Algeria in 1957, the battle of Grozny during the First Chechen War, the battles of Jenin and Nablus during the Second Palestinian Intifada (all of which are described below), and of course the fighting in Baghdad and other Iraqi cities that I mentioned earlier. But as a proportion of the whole, irregular warfare has historically been much less common in cities than in rural districts.104
Since irregular combatants don’t have the combat power to stand up to government forces in a direct fight, they tend to hide, and thus to rely on cover and concealment. The concealment and protection afforded by complex environments help them avoid detection by security forces, letting them move freely and fight only when and where they choose. For this reason, guerrillas, bandits, and pirates have always flourished in areas where cover was good and government presence was weak. For most of human history, this meant remote, forested, mountainous areas such as the Afghan mountains discussed in the preface. But with the unprecedented level of global urbanization, this pattern is changing, prompting a major shift in the character of conflict. In the future environment of overcrowded, undergoverned, urban, coastal areas—combined with increasingly excellent remote surveillance capabilities (including drones, satellites, and signals intelligence) in remote rural areas—the cover is going to be in the cities.
One implication of this is that nonstate armed groups—because of heavier urbanization and greater connectedness—will be increasingly able to draw on the technical skills of urban populations whose access to and familiarity with advanced technologies greatly enhance their military potential. At the low end of the scale, these might include weapons systems and dual-use technologies (such as TV remote controls repurposed as triggers for roadside bombs, or industrial solvents repurposed as chemical weapons—both actual examples from Iraq). At a higher level, urban populations can access factories and workshops (as in Libya in 2011, when technically skilled but militarily inexperienced rebels used workshops around Benghazi to build and modify weapons and vehicles). Or—like the Syrian rebels, who built a homemade armored vehicle that used a videogame controller to manipulate a remotely m
ounted machine gun, and linked external cameras to a flat-screen TV to help the driver see without gaps in the armor—urban populations can turn consumer entertainment gadgets into military systems.105 This is the high end of the scale, and these are obviously high-tech examples, but such systems need not be high-tech to be effective: the same Syrian rebels also built medieval-looking catapults, trebuchets, and slingshots using ordinary urban materials, then used them to launch highly effective homemade bombs and rockets over the rooftops of Aleppo.106
Hybrid Threats
I discuss all these examples in more detail in Chapter 4, but for now the main point is that they highlight the second major characteristic of the future threat: namely, that it will be a hybrid in which different threat categories increasingly merge.
The future threat won’t be neatly divisible into the categories we use today (state versus nonstate, domestic versus foreign, or war versus crime). As the Mumbai, Mogadishu, and Kingston examples illustrate, future threats will be hybrid: that is, they’ll include irregular actors and methods, but also state actors that use irregulars as their weapon of choice or adopt asymmetric methods to minimize detection and avoid retaliation. Neither the concept nor the reality of hybrid conflict is new—writers such as Frank Hoffman, T. X. Hammes, and Erin Simpson have all examined hybrid warfare in detail. At the same time, Pakistan’s use of the Taliban, LeT, and the Haqqani network, Iran’s use of Hezbollah and the Q uds Force, or the sponsorship of insurgencies and terrorist groups by regimes such as Muammar Gadhafi’s Libya, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, and the Soviet Union, go back over many decades.
In the future, though, we’re likely to see many of the methods of proxy or nonstate conflict being used under conditions of interstate war as well. Even though wars between nation-states might theoretically be considered “conventional,” so much of the world’s population is going to be living in coastal cities that all future conflict, including state-on-state conflict, will be pushed in an irregular direction—toward small-unit hit-and-run attacks, ambushes, use of snipers, bombings, and other tactics traditionally used by nonstate actors. This is because, as we’ve already seen in Mogadishu and Mumbai, urban environments tend to disaggregate and break up military forces. They break battles up, too—into a large number of small combat actions that are dispersed and fragmented, rather than a single large-scale engagement. For example, the second battle of Fallujah, during the Iraq War, included 13,500 American, Iraqi, and British troops, opposed by somewhere between 2,000 and 4,000 insurgents, for a total of roughly 17,500 combatants. But the battle didn’t take the form of a single large combat action: rather, it was fought over forty-seven days between November 7 and December 23, 2004, across the entire city of Fallujah and its periurban districts, and was made up of hundreds of small and medium-sized firefights distributed over a wide area, each involving a relatively small number of fighters on each side.107
This disaggregating effect of urban environments is a key reason why even state-on-state conflict in the future will exhibit many irregular characteristics—especially if a state adversary adopts irregular methods. This would very obviously be true in the hypothetical case of a war with Iran, given Iran’s use of proxies and irregular forces across its region and beyond. Even the most stereotypically conventional scenarios—say, a war on the Korean Peninsula—wouldn’t remain conventional for long. The North Korean military, for example, would almost inevitably be defeated in a conventional fight, and could be expected to resort to guerrilla and irregular methods (as well as using its weapons of mass destruction) almost immediately. Even if North Korea collapsed without a major conflict, in such a hypothetical scenario the need for stabilization and humanitarian operations would be immense and protracted.
And in the even more far-fetched hypothetical case of war with China—a conflict sometimes seen as primarily a maritime, sea-air battle—the fighting would in fact almost certainly take an irregular, urban, coastal turn. As we saw in the last chapter, China is more than 51 percent urbanized and its urban centers are clustered along its coastline. Chinese officers literally wrote the book on irregular tactics (the 1998 classic Unrestricted Warfare, by Senior Colonels Q iao Liang and Wang Xiangsui of the People’s Liberation Army).108 Chinese officers have also, undoubtedly, been watching U.S. debates over air-sea battle, military funding, and protracted conflict, and noting the difficulties that Americans (like any other military force in history) have experienced in large-scale, long-duration stabilization and counterinsurgency operations in places such as Afghanistan and Iraq. Unless they’re stupid—and the evidence suggests the opposite—Chinese war planners would be considering a strategy of drawing an adversary into a protracted struggle, to soak invading forces up in the urbanized littoral. This may well be a major adjunct to any anti-access, area denial, or maritime combat strategy they might adopt. All this suggests that even a future hypothetical war with China—as unintended as that may be—would actually not be the purely conventional force-on-force scenario some have seemed to suggest, but would quickly devolve into the mother of all messy, irregular fights in a complex, urban, coastal environment.
In more general terms, the environment for future conflict is clearly shifting. The four megatrends of population growth, urbanization, littoralization, and connectedness suggest that conflict is increasingly likely to occur in coastal cities, in underdeveloped regions of the Middle East, Africa, Latin America, and Asia, and in highly networked, connected settings. Adversaries are likely to be nonstate armed groups (whether criminal or military) or to adopt asymmetric methods, and even the most conventional hypothetical war scenarios turn out, when closely examined, to involve very significant irregular aspects.
The military implications are obvious, if difficult to act upon in today’s fiscal environment. There’s a clear and continuing need for Marines, for amphibious units and naval supply ships, for platforms that allow operations in littoral and riverine environments, and for capabilities that enable expeditionary logistics in urbanized coastal environments. Rotary-wing or tilt-rotor aircraft, and precise and discriminating weapons systems, will also be needed. There’s also a clear need to structure ground forces so that they can rapidly aggregate or disaggregate forces and fires, enabling them to operate in a distributed, small-unit mode while still being able to concentrate quickly to mass their effect against a major target. Combat engineers, construction engineers, civil affairs units, intelligence systems that can make sense of the clutter of urban areas, pre-conflict sensing systems such as geospatial tools that allow early warning of conflict and instability, and constabulary and coast guard capabilities are also likely to be important. The ability to operate for a long period in a city without drawing heavily on that city’s water, fuel, electricity, or food supply will be important as well, with very significant implications for expeditionary logistics. I go into detail on all these issues, and other military aspects of the problem, in the Appendix.
The implications for civil government are equally obvious—expanding social services, city administration, and rule of law into periurban areas is clearly important, as are investments in infrastructure to guarantee supplies of fuel, electricity, food and water. Less obvious but equally important are investments in governance and infrastructure in rural areas, as well as efforts to mitigate the effects of rural environmental degradation, which can cause unchecked and rapid urban migration. Given the prevalence and increasing capability of criminal networks, police will need a creative combination of community policing, constabulary work, criminal investigation, and special branch (police intelligence) work. And local city managers, district-level officials, social workers, emergency services, and ministry representatives may need to operate in higher-threat governance environments in which they face opposition.
The implications for businesses, civil society, and the public go well beyond the rather narrowly scoped conflict-related considerations I’ve just described. As mentioned in Chapter 1,
the environmental shifts I’ve described are, in essence, a “theory of everything” in the sense that the megatrends identified here will affect every aspect of life on the planet in the next few decades, not just conflict. McKinsey’s Urban World program and the IBM Smarter Cities project are two examples, among many, of holistic attempts by private industry and civil society to consider the future of the city, and thereby to anticipate and address the full range of future issues that cities will confront.109 Using the urban metabolism and city-as-system approaches I described earlier may allow planners to identify emergent patterns in a complex urban flow, make sense of the system logic of a city, understand the relationships among complex problems that may appear unrelated on the surface, and thus to design tailored interventions. As I discuss in Chapter 5, such interventions must involve a co-design element in order to be effective. They would need to begin in a consciously experimental way, seeking to reveal the interactions between different parts of systems, but would rapidly increase in effectiveness as each intervention generates new data that enhances the next.
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