“How many Taliban do you think we killed?” one of the drivers asked his gunner as they sat smoking. I was five feet away, leaning back against the riverbank to take the weight off my assault vest, and taking a long drink from my Camelbak. “I don’t know, five to seven? We’ll know for sure when we get back and clear the site.” “How do you know they were Taliban?” I asked the soldiers, who both seemed to be in their early twenties. They looked at me. “Dude, they were shooting at us.” “Fair enough. (Location 134)
That day in Dara-i Nur was just one of many days in the field when I’ve felt a sense of dissonance about our reliance on “pure” or binary theories that are framed around the nature of a specific threat group—in this case, a feeling that, for all its power in explaining certain types of conflict, counterinsurgency as a paradigm didn’t quite fit the facts on the ground, and did not quite cover the full range of what we were experiencing. I first wrote about this in 2005, and again in 2006, but over time this feeling has grown stronger. (Location 315)
Note: binary stories and the difficulty of catching up in terms of military tactics.
businesses, and governments, our collective sense of unease has grown. More and more, existing models simply don’t explain the full range of events we see on the ground. I’ve explored several frameworks, searching for ways to explain the complex patterns of violence we see in our work. (Location 323)
For various institutional reasons, governments, military forces, law enforcement agencies, and even (perhaps especially) university faculties tend to prefer theories of conflict framed around a single threat—insurgency, terrorism, piracy, narcotics, gangs, organized crime, and so on. This approach—which results in well-known concepts like counter-terrorism, counter-insurgency, counter-piracy and so on—might be fine in a binary environment, where one government confronts one threat at a time, but in the real world—the world of complex, adaptive social systems such as cities, trading networks, and licit or illicit economies—there never has been, and never will be, a single-threat environment like this. (Location 335)
I realized that the idea I was examining—a concept that took into account the four emerging megatrends of population growth, urbanization, littoralization, and networked connectivity—wasn’t really a theory of conflict at all. It was much broader than that. (Location 348)
This is because these megatrends will affect all aspects of life on the planet in the next twenty to thirty years, not just conflict. And communities, companies, and cities that understand these trends, learn how to mitigate the risks they pose, and develop ways to maximize the opportunities they offer are quite likely to thrive in the future environment, while others may go under. My hope is that the reflections that follow, while often tentative or speculative, will at least help to begin a discussion on which others can build. (Location 350)
The completed “Haussmann system” transformed central Paris from a wild, jungle-like thicket into a formal, manicured garden: (Location 412)
Note: de nerval!
also seeing like a state
the detritus ended up in belleville
became communards
This pattern of frequent irregular warfare—the military term for conflict that involves nonstate armed groups—seems to be totally independent of policy makers’ preferences. (Location 459)
In particular, research on demography and economic geography suggests that four megatrends are driving most aspects of future life on the planet, including conflict. These are rapid population growth, accelerating urbanization, littoralization (the tendency for things to cluster on coastlines), and increasing connectedness. (Location 491)
If we add the potential for climate-change effects such as coastal flooding, and note that almost all the world’s population growth will happen in coastal cities in low-income, sometimes unstable countries, we can begin to grasp the complex challenges that lurk in this future environment. (Location 493)
As I wrote while preparing to deploy to Iraq in January 2007, almost half of all combat incidents at that time happened within the Baghdad city limits, in a purely U.S.-Iraqi operational sector.14 Thus Americans and Iraqis experienced sustained, heavy urban combat, but most others—with the sole significant exception of the British in Basra—were lucky enough to miss this experience, either because they didn’t send combat troops or because their soldiers were in more rural, less violent areas outside the capital. (Location 507)
Thus, just as climate projections don’t say much about tomorrow’s weather, projections of current trends say little about future wars. But they do suggest a range of conditions—a set of system parameters, or a “conflict climate”—within which those wars will arise. This is because, as the anthropologist Harry Turney-High suggested more than thirty years ago, social, economic, political, and communications arrangements influence war making so profoundly that “warfare is social organization.” (Location 527)
These are population growth (the continuing rise in the planet’s total population), urbanization (the tendency for people to live in larger and larger cities), littoralization (the propensity for these cities to cluster on coastlines), and connectedness (the increasing connectivity among people, wherever they live). (Location 540)
This growth won’t continue indefinitely: global population is expected to level off at somewhere between 9.1 and 9.3 billion humans on the planet by about 2050. (Location 551)
Still, that’s a lot of people—about a twelve fold increase in just three centuries. (Location 552)
In 1800, for example, only 3 percent of people lived in a city with 1 million inhabitants or more; by the year 2000, 47 percent of the global population lived in cities this size. (Location 554)
In 1950, there were only 83 cities with populations over 1 million; by 2007, there were 468. By April 2008, the world had passed the 50 percent urbanization mark, and in December 2011, the world’s most populous nation, China, announced that it had reached a level of 51.3 percent urbanization. (Location 555)
By 2050, roughly 75 percent of the world’s population will be urbanized. In more immediate terms, about 1.4 million people across the world migrate to a city every week.23 (Location 561)
Already in 2012, 80 percent of people on the planet lived within sixty miles of the sea, while 75 percent of large cities were on a coast.27 Of twenty-five megacities (cities with 10 million or more inhabitants) at the turn of the twenty-first century, twenty-one were on a coast or a major river delta, while only four (Moscow, Beijing, Delhi, and Teheran) lay inland. (Location 584)
However large or small littoral zones may be, the interaction among mutually influencing sea, land, air, and cyber spaces makes such zones highly complex systems that are vastly more dynamic than the sum of their parts. (Location 595)
There is nothing obviously “coastal” about a remote, landlocked airstrip, far from the sea, in the middle of the Afghan desert. Yet the seizure of FOB Rhino was an outstanding example of littoral warfare—enabled by capabilities such as extended-range helicopters, air-to-air refueling, long-range communications and surveillance, and deep-penetration special operations. Modern naval forces can thus bring areas far from the sea into the littoral influence zone: the whole of Southeast Asia, the entire Mediterranean basin, and large parts of Australia, Africa, South America, and Central America are thus “littoral” in this sense, even when far from the sea. (Location 610)
In the Mediterranean basin alone, the urban coastal population grew by 40 million between 1970 and 2000, and three-quarters of that growth was in North Africa and the Middle East. (Location 616)
Indeed, in transitional and periurban areas (the informal settlements, slums, and townships that aggregate around the margins of cities and absorb a high proportion of new immigrants from the countryside) people can connect with national and international information flows to an unprecedented degree, however ineffective their government. (Location 633)
For example, a 2011 study found that Somalia, a country that has experienced near-anarchy and state collapse for twenty years, has rates of cell phone usage approaching 25 percent—far greater than its neighbors, including relatively well-administered Ethiopia—and that there has been a remarkable proliferation of telecommunications companies offering “inexpensive and high-quality services (Location 635)
Some of them are closely connected with the remittance industry.”34 This vibrant remittance system is another major indicator of the connectivity between coastal cities such as Mogadishu, Somalia’s largest urban area, and the Somali diaspora (roughly 800,000 people worldwide—about 10 percent of the total Somali population). (Location 639)
Of course, people who live in rural areas without cellphone coverage can’t access these connectivity-enabled overseas sources of support. Thus, greater access to global systems of exchange—something that’s available only from well-connected urban locations—has become a major reason for people to migrate to cities, increasing the pace of urbanization. (Location 646)
This is just one part of a broader pattern of economic change, driven by increasing global connectedness, that has seen investment by diaspora networks replace agricultural surplus as one of the main drivers of rural-to-urban migration in low-income countries. (Location 649)
And because large transportation nodes (such as airports, container hubs, or seaports) are often in transitional or periurban areas and tend to draw much of their workforce from these areas, periurban populations are closely connected with international trade and with transportation and migration patterns, both internal and external. (Location 673)
This means that the apparently marginalized populations of the new coastal urban sprawl aren’t really marginal at all: on the contrary, they’re central to the global system as we know it. (Location 677)
Lagos has the population of a megacity but the infrastructure of a midsized town. The city has only sixty-eight working traffic lights, making traffic “a force of nature” (Location 697)
Note: Tho this has changed
By 2020, 13 of the world’s 25 megacities, most of them situated in coastal areas, will be in Asia and the Pacific. (Location 710)
Floods are already the most common natural disaster in the heavily urbanized Mediterranean basin, for example, and by far the most frequent natural disaster to which aid agencies and donors such as the World Bank have to respond—and as more people cluster in coastal cities, this will only increase. (Location 716)
Another side effect of the combination of climate change, coastal urbanization, and connectedness is a rise in infectious disease. Several studies have correlated slum settlements (particularly those created through rapid unplanned urbanization) with increased risk of insect-borne diseases such as malaria.48 Infectious diseases are more prevalent in urban areas, and seasonal flooding—which happens more often in coastal cities, of course—has been suggested as a major cause of increased disease transmission risk.49 At the same time, megacities create global population-mixing effects, and this makes traditional local-level approaches for disease surveillance, response, and public communication much less effective.50 People who live in transitional or periurban areas interact with residents of the densely populated urban cores where they work, and with users of public transportation systems, airports, and seaports. Combined with the global transmission belt of increased worldwide air and sea travel, and greater connectivity across the planet, this creates pathways for the extremely rapid global spread of infectious or exotic diseases—something that was seen in recent pandemic influenza episodes and in cases of bird flu. (Location 718)
Note: Disease
In a more general sense, “as societies urbanize and modernize, so their populations become ever-more dependent on complex, distanciated systems … to sustain life (water, waste, food, medicine, goods, commodities, energy, communications, transport, and so on).”54 Food insecurity resulting from urban expansion is thus just one facet of a pervasive urban problem: reliance on complex infrastructure subsystems with many moving parts, all of which have to work together for society to function, and which require stable economic and political conditions. (Location 740)
Perhaps the most severe impact, however, is that many cities risk running out of water as they expand into the catchment areas from which they traditionally drew their supply. This problem will only get worse as populations swell and urban settlements cover rainfall catchments and exhaust the replenishment capacity of river systems, pushing cities further from clean groundwater sources. (Location 753)
Note: I mean its happening in st albans
That is, cities cannot exist without those inputs—urbanites require clean air, water, food, fuel, and construction goods to subsist while urban industries need materials for production purposes. (Location 798)
In modern times, the idea of urban metabolism was repopularized by Abel Wolman’s 1965 article “The Metabolism of Cities,” and his notion that researchers can understand a city as a system by looking at its metabolic flows, via what is known as a material flow analysis, (Location 806)
It’s usually applied to the ecological sustainability of cities (that is, the way cities use and transform inputs of water, carbon, air, food, and fuel, then deal with the resulting waste products). The idea is that urban systems need enough carrying capacity to absorb, process, and deal with inputs and to process (metabolize) waste products, otherwise toxicity develops in the system and it begins to break down. (Location 808)
In recent years, though, people have started applying this concept more broadly, looking at nonmaterial flows and systems in cities as a way to examine the “relationships between social and natural systems, cities and their hinterlands (both immediate and global) and sustainability and social justice in urban areas.” (Location 811)
rural-to-urban migration—driven by rural problems such as environmental degradation, energy poverty, famine, drought, or conflict—as one side of a population flow system that connects the city to its hinterland and creates a need for the city to deal with a complex array of problems such as informal settlements; economic, governance, and transportation overstretch; pollution, traffic, and border security; and food, water, fuel, and electricity shortages. (Location 831)
this kind of systems model can help us understand how the city transforms nonmaterial flows and how it deals with by-products such as crime, conflict, social injustice, or political unrest. (Location 835)
It allows us to understand how coastal cities (in particular, the ports and airports that connect them to the outside world) function as exchange mechanisms that connect rural populations with urban ones, and local networks with international networks. (Location 837)
In this model, a coastal city’s ecosystem lies at the center of a larger pattern of flows, with rural factors in the city’s local or international hinterland—things such as environmental degradation, poor rural infrastructure, and rural conflict—prompting population flows into the urban area, which in turn contribute to rapid urbanization. (Location 841)
San Pedro Sula—the second city of Honduras— (Location 857)
The 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. (Location 944)
But the trends are clear: more people than ever before in history will be competing for scarcer and scarcer resources in poorly governed areas that lack adequate infrastructure, and these areas will be more and more closely connected to the global system, so that local conflict will have far wider effects. (Location 947)
As the urban metabolism model suggests, and as discussed in greater detail in Chapter 5, we can break such approaches down into supply-side interventions (which help ameliorate some of the causes of rapid, unplanned urbanization and thus relieve some of the pressure on a city and its infrastructure), demand-side interventions (which help improve the city’s resiliency and thus its ability to cope with the pressures on its systems), and framing system interventions (which seek to alter the context within which the city develops, by changing its interaction with larger national and transnational systems). (Location 955)
The second major feature of the attack was that the attackers exploited networks of connectivity within and between the two coastal megacities of Karachi and Mumbai. As I mentioned earlier, it’s possible that Captain Solanki of the Kuber didn’t resist the terrorists because he thought they were smugglers, part of a broader network of contraband trading, drug smuggling, and human trafficking in the sea space around Mumbai, an illicit enterprise in which Solanki himself may have engaged in the past, and which—even if he wasn’t personally involved—would have appeared to him as just part of the normal background environment. (Location 1150)
The locals who saw the team land might also have believed the terrorists were smugglers or illegal immigrants, while the manager on duty at the Leopold Café initially mistook them for backpackers, part of a busy traffic of low-budget tourists that flows through the area. (Location 1155)
It’s worth noting once again that dark networks—flows of people, money, goods, and information that lie outside the view of law enforcement and government authorities—are, in themselves, neither good nor bad, and their existence creates a venue for a wide range of beneficial, neutral, or (in this case) harmful activities. (Location 1157)
In order to use national-level assets such as the MARCO and NSG teams, the state government had to approve their deployment and agree to cede control over the incident sites to central government organizations, a process that took almost six hours to negotiate, delaying the national response; (Location 1186)
Note: Sheeeesh
The attacks didn’t involve weapons of mass destruction or particularly high-tech equipment. (Location 1189)
Likewise, the raiders used no unusually sophisticated or specialized communications devices: they employed commercially available phones and off-the-shelf GPS devices, and pulled much of their reconnaissance data from open-source, online tools such as Google Earth. They did, however, display an excellent standard of preparation and reconnaissance, and extremely good skills in sea movement, coastal infiltration, and small-boat handling, techniques that are obviously optimized for littoral environments. They clearly understood the urban-littoral dynamics of Mumbai—the systems logic of the way the city worked—and used this knowledge to their advantage. (Location 1195)
Indeed, Mumbai was a further demonstration of a long-standing trend, sometimes called the democratization of technology, in which nonstate armed groups are fielding highly lethal capabilities that were once the sole preserve of nation-states. (Location 1221)
Obviously enough, this approach wouldn’t have worked without significant help from active or retired members of the Pakistani military, so Mumbai is rightly seen as a hybrid state/nonstate attack. Equally obviously, though, the attack could only have occurred in a highly networked, urban, littoral environment—precisely the environment that’s becoming the global norm. (Location 1231)
feral city as “a metropolis with a population of more than a million people, in a state the government of which has lost the ability to maintain the rule of law within the city’s boundaries yet remains a functioning actor in the greater international system.” (Location 1240)
In urban metabolism terms, these are cities whose flows have overwhelmed the carrying capacity of their internal systems: the problem is not collapse (a lack of flow, as it were) but rather a superabundance of uncontrolled flows, and the toxic by-products arising from the city’s failure to absorb and metabolize them. (Location 1247)
The London riots also suggest that the idea of a peripheral settlement or population (which we’ve so far been using mainly in a spatial sense, meaning people or districts that are located on the edge of town) can be broadened to include people who are marginalized or excluded in an economic, political, or cultural sense, even if they live in the physical center of a city. In this reading, which is of course extremely familiar to anthropologists or urban sociologists, the “urban core” of a city isn’t just the older, more central, downtown part of its built environment but also its economically, politically and culturally dominant terrain, the part of the city system that accumulates value at the expense of a periphery. (Location 1269)
Note: This seems a bit of a stretch to meopinion. lt stretches the model too far and by applying it to non-feral cities you run the risk and then applying the of seeing it everywhere same solution everywhere. it should be said that the metabolism model does seem like a sensible one.
The Bakara market in the center of town had a monetary exchange, where the Somali shilling—a currency that has survived without a state or a central bank for more than twenty years—floated freely on market rates that were set and updated twice daily. (Location 1311)
(Anna, a civilian journalist by training, has eight years of continuous war zone experience in Iraq, working for the International Committee of the Red Cross, running a field hospital in Baghdad, then commanding the Italian provincial reconstruction team in Nasiriya; she tends to shrug off a little light mayhem as just part of an honest day’s work.) (Location 1321)
They also highlight the differences between true, autonomous urban swarm tactics (as practiced in Somalia) and the superficially similar remote-control system used by the Mumbai raiders. (Location 1512)
They are: “Maintain an extended line abreast,” “Keep your neighbors just in sight, but no closer,” “Move to the sound of the guns,” “Dismount when you see the enemy,” and “When you come under fire, stop and fire back.” (Location 1568)
The Somali approach is also a very different solution to the same problem that led Lashkar-e-Taiba to adopt its remote-node command model for the Mumbai attack: (Location 1598)
Note: Presume here that he’s talking about Qat and the flow of the city.
This is obvious if we note that—in common with other organisms—the history of an urban organism is physically recorded in its structure, (Location 1608)
Mogadishu today, like any other city or organism, embodies a physical record of its history. (Location 1610)
“If Mogadishu occupies an ambiguous space in our minds and hearts,” Farah wrote, “it is because ours is a land with an overwhelming majority of pastoralists, who are possessed of a deep urbophobia. Maybe this is why most Somalis do not seem unduly perturbed by the fate of the capital: a city broken into segments, each of them ruthlessly controlled by an alliance of militias.” (Location 1612)
Before independence, huge numbers of Somalis, who could best be described as semi-pastoralists, moved to Mogadishu; many of them joined the civil service, the army and the police. It was as if they were out to do away with the ancient cosmopolitan minority known as (Location 1617)
“Xamari,” Xamar being the local name for the city. (Location 1619)
Neither of these groups was welcomed by a third—those pastoralists who had always got their livelihood from the land on which Mogadishu was sited (natives, as it were, of the city). (Location 1621)
Note: This is fascinating. IT moves away from the Grecian conception of man as an animal of the polis. IT assumes that in some cases city dwellers do in fact grow their own food.
They were an influential sector of the population in the run-up to independence, throwing in their lot with the colonialists in the hope not only of recovering lost ground but of inheriting total political power. (Location 1622)
“Flag independence” dawned in 1960 with widespread jubilation drowning the sound of these ominous threats. It was another thirty years before they were carried out.74 (Location 1625)
Note: Amazing quote on the multilayered tiers of migrant groups.
.
“a phenomenon that repeats itself: rural people, driven by economic distress or lack of security, move into the main cities, settle in the outlying districts, enter before long into relations or forge common links with elements of the urban poor, who are themselves often earlier migrants from the countryside, and together they challenge the old established classes.” (Location 1633)
This same cyclic flow seems to have been present in Mogadishu’s evolution. Indeed, Farah’s and Batatu’s analyses turn on its head one common interpretation of Somali history: namely, the idea that the intergroup competition, corruption, winner-take-all abuse of defeated opponents, and clan-based violence that Mogadishu experienced after the fall of the Barre regime in 1991 was primarily a symptom of state collapse. The popular notion is that this chaos emerged after Barre’s rule fell apart under the pressure of war, drought, and economic collapse. On the contrary, in Farah’s telling, it was the pattern of fragmented urbanization (producing marginalized garrison communities with patron-client connections to political leaders) and rapid population growth (with the resultant lack of resilience and carrying capacity in the city’s metabolism) that produced the violence and instability that eventually destroyed the state. In this version of events, Mogadishu didn’t become a feral city because the state collapsed; rather, the state collapsed because the city was already feral. Mogadishu’s very structure created a political and social space for the city’s own destruction at the hands of “a cast of borderline characters posing as city-folk leading armed communities of marginalised nomads. … The savageries visited on the city’s residents [were] masterminded by urbophobics already installed in Mogadishu, which for hundreds of years has lain under the envious gaze of people who hated and feared it because they felt excluded from its power politics.” (Location 1643)
garrison district is the Jamaican term for an urban or periurban “neighborhood whose members are armed by the leader of the community, and also a neighborhood that is loyal to and affiliated with one of the major Jamaican political parties … in the case of Tivoli Gardens, the Jamaica Labour Party (JLP).” (Location 1724)
The symbiotic relationship between political leaders and their armed partisans—each influencing the other, each limiting the other’s options, and each demanding support from the other—literally created the city’s physical landscape. (Location 1746)
If Mogadishu was a feral city—in Nuruddin Farah’s phrase, “a city broken into segments, each of them ruthlessly controlled by an alliance of militias”—then Kingston had evolved into something that could scarcely be called a city at all: from a distance, it might look like a single contiguous stretch of urban terrain, but in fact it was a balkanized patchwork of entrenched strongholds perpetually at war with each other. (Location 1755)
The don acted as a mediator and resolver of disputes, liaised with police and city authorities to manage violence and crime, and became an intermediary for the distribution of government handouts—jobs, housing, welfare benefits, contracts—to the population. (Location 1762)
While some people in these communities accepted the system only through fear of violence, most did so willingly “because of the perception that this is swift justice, because of conformity pressures, and because of the influence of group solidarity and communal identity.” (Location 1775)
these districts are intensively governed—just not by the government. (Location 1794)
marginalization, economic inequality, and exclusion of the population in these areas rendered them periurban, in the sense that they were on the periphery of the city’s politico-economic core, even though their physical location was close to the city’s center. (Location 1801)
Immediately after independence, the creation of the garrison communities cemented the dependent position of the marginalized urban poor and redrew the city’s landscape into a patchwork of competing fiefdoms. This blocked the city’s flow and made it next to impossible for successive Jamaican governments or city administrators to develop urban systems able to handle ongoing population growth, rapid urbanization, and increasing international connectedness. (Location 1810)
The dons’ connectedness to the Jamaican diaspora—and to the transnational protection racket it enabled them to run—began to free them from dependence on local politicians, (Location 1821)
The Mumbai example embodies the high-end threat of terrorism or state-sponsored proxy warfare, with a fully external actor disrupting and convulsing a megacity by infesting its internal flows; (Location 1854)
Mogadishu symbolizes the low-end threat of urban ferality, with fully internal actors—the populations of excluded and marginalized districts—forcing parts of a city to de-modernize and regress, collapsing the state, then fighting over what remains. (Location 1855)
Tivoli Gardens, on the other hand, exemplifies a hybrid internal/external pattern in which governments and nonstate armed groups develop a symbiotic relationship that both creates and destroys the physical city and generates a transnational version of a traditional protection racket. (Location 1857)
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. (Location 1908)
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. (Location 1917)
This isn’t new: it’s the environment that will be different, not the threat. (Location 1924)
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. (Location 1925)
But as a proportion of the whole, irregular warfare has historically been much less common in cities than in rural districts. (Location 1928)
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. (Location 1930)
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. (Location 1933)
Note: The key here is “undergoverned”:
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. (Location 1936)
Or—like the Syrian rebels, who built a homemade armored vehicle that used a videogame controller to manipulate a remotely mounted 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. (Location 1941)
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. (Location 1988)
precise and discriminating weapons systems, will also be needed. (Location 1991)
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. (Location 1991)
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. (Location 1993)
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. (Location 1995)
expanding social services, city administration, and rule of law into periurban areas is clearly important, (Location 1998)
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. (Location 1999)
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. (Location 2002)
Note: Is this a sales pitch?!
Another insight is that military operations have immense destructive effects on cities, so military “solutions” to problems in future urbanized environments may be no solution at all. (Location 2015)
This form of movement, described by the military as “infestation,” seeks to redefine inside as outside, and domestic interiors as thoroughfares. (Location 2038)
Governments such as that of the United States that draw sharp distinctions between warfare and law enforcement and between domestic and overseas legal authorities will experience great difficulty, and may find it impossible to act with the same agility as irregular actors who can move among these artificial categories at will. (Location 2074)
Capabilities that combine policing, administration, and emergency services, backed up with military-style capabilities so that police can deal with well-armed adversaries—capabilities traditionally associated with constabulary, gendarmerie, carabinieri, or coast guard forces—may be more effective against these hybrid threats than civil police forces alone, and less destructive than unleashing the military. (Location 2077)
illicit activities will nest within licit systems and processes, (Location 2081)
Because of the connectedness among threat networks, periurban communities, and city systems, it will be virtually impossible to target a dark network without also harming the community within which it nests. (Location 2085)
threats can nest within international and national systems, including international transportation networks, financial networks such as the remittance industry, and even humanitarian assistance systems. (Location 2088)
Because threat networks often nest within essential licit flows, it can be virtually impossible to shut them down. For example, as the investigative journalist Matt Potter showed, drawing from official and academic sources as well as local eyewitness accounts, some (though, of course, by no means all) of the same air charter companies that operate humanitarian assistance flights into drought-stricken or conflict-affected areas such as the Horn of Africa also smuggle weapons, drugs, and other contraband. Humanitarian aid workers and NGOs are perfectly well aware of this, but neither they nor the governments involved in relief efforts can shut down these trafficking flows, since it would mean an end to the movement of humanitarian assistance cargo. (Location 2095)
In fact, any theory of conflict that’s organized around dealing with a single type of enemy is unlikely to be very helpful in a conflict environment that includes multiple overlapping threats and challenges. (Location 2109)
Fake “elders,” who specialize in negotiating with foreigners, travel from district to district, giving villages a front man who looks the part and can extract money, contracts and concessions from international troops or aid agencies, while the real elders hang back or hide. (Location 2187)
Note: lol
Taliban leaders saw their role as restorative (rescuing jihad from the hands of rapacious commanders who were using it for their own ends) and judicial (halting the conflict-fueled breakdown of society by installing their interpretation of Islamic law).” (Location 2220)
Predictability is the basis for secure dispute resolution and thus for social stability—something that’s deeply attractive to a population buffeted by decades of instability and desperately worried about the future. (Location 2268)
As Professor Stathis Kalyvas pointed out in his groundbreaking 2006 study, The Logic of Violence in Civil War, we tend to intuitively assume that insurgents become strong in a particular area because people support their cause or agree with their ideology, but actually the exact opposite is the case. (Location 2289)
In irregular conflicts (that is, in conflicts where at least one combatant is a nonstate armed group), the local armed actor that a given population perceives as best able to establish a predictable, consistent, wide-spectrum normative system of control is most likely to dominate that population and its residential area. (Location 2322)
implying that traditional counterinsurgency notions, including “hearts and minds” (the belief that populations can be swayed if their conscious choices are influenced), may need a rethink. (Location 2334)
we can define a normative system as a set of rules that is correlated with a set of consequences. (Location 2422)
But two characteristics must always be present: the actor must always be armed (that is, it must have the capacity to inflict violence as part of its spectrum of sanctions) and it must always be a group (some form of collective entity), not just an individual. (Location 2432)
Migdal argued that you could understand state effectiveness by measuring capability across four clusters (or subsystems) of government activity—“the capacities to penetrate society, regulate social relationships, extract resources, and appropriate or use resources in determined ways.”64 (Location 2788)
They value predictability, even at the expense of overall profit, (Location 2945)
Scott argues that populations on the margin typically prefer the kinds of patron-client relationships that we observed in Tivoli Gardens—predictable arrangements whereby better-off members of a community sponsor its weaker members—even though such relationships are often exploitative, (Location 2952)
population survival strategies in these environments fall into seven basic categories: fleeing, passivity, autarky, hedging, swinging, commitment, and self-arming. (Location 2978)
We might also note that populations tend to factor into their risk calculus the degree of violence an armed group is likely to inflict as punishment for changing sides. (Location 3030)
We’ve already discussed how the traditional notion of a “littoral area” has expanded to the broader idea of a “littoral influence zone,” taking account of the reach of modern weapons and mobility platforms such as cruise missiles or extended-range ship-borne helicopters, which can extend littoral warfare well beyond coastlines themselves. (Location 3129)
As Pollock notes, this unrest is taking place against the backdrop of trends we have examined already. The “elderly regimes of the Middle East and North Africa are unwilling to leave the stage, yet unable to satisfy the political and economic demands of a demographic youth bulge,” he argues. “Around two thirds of the region’s population is under 30, and youth unemployment stands at 24 percent. Inevitably, the rapidly changing landscape of media technology, from satellite TV and cell phones to YouTube and Facebook, is adding a new dynamic to the calculus of power between the generations.”24 (Location 3271)
This alliance had enormous military potential for conflict in cities—but its power rested on the twin pillars of electronic connectivity (which connected Taks with Ultras and broke down barriers among rival Ultra groups) and virtual-human network overlap (the meshing of real-world and cyber relationships), which allowed online networks connecting city-dwelling activists to map onto human networks that connected Tunisian cities with rural towns and villages. (Location 3349)
The immediate trigger was the self-immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi—a fruit vendor in the central Tunisian town of Sidi Bouzid who, on December 17, 2010, doused himself in paint thinner and struck a match in protest against police corruption and harassment—but the reaction to Bouazizi’s act drew on a deep reservoir of frustration and resistance that had been fed over many years by a cycle of protests and violent regime repression. (Location 3353)
Indeed, Egypt is today one of the major crossing points for the underwater fibre-optic cables that interconnect the regions of the globe.” (Location 3446)
Again, however, as in Tunisia, an intense escalatory synergy developed when real-world trusted human networks, based on residential and family loyalties and local allegiances, meshed with virtual social networks. (Location 3528)
In terms of competitive control theory, the protestors (especially the Ultras) had shown sufficient capability at the coercive end of the spectrum to defeat the police in a straight fight, and because the police could no longer rely on the military (the ultimate coercive sanction on which the government’s entire normative system rested) the regime as a whole was now being outcompeted, leaving the protestors in control of the cities. (Location 3623)
Benghazi has impressive art deco and midcentury modern buildings, open squares, wonderful beaches, an important harbor, and a historic claim to greatness. But the city is run-down after decades of official neglect, unplanned urbanization, and rapid population growth. Outside the urban core, streets are muddy and filled with rotting trash, and only the main roads are paved.119 The city has one sewage treatment plant, built more than four decades ago. “Waste is just flushed into the ground or the sea, and when the water table rises in winter, the streets become open cesspools.” (Location 3927)
The shabiha, in a pattern that mirrors the other examples we have explored, were drawn largely from gangs of marginalized street youth, criminal networks, and organized thugs who operated in poor, marginalized “garrison districts” in Syrian cities and often had close patron-client relationships with regime officials. As the uprising escalated, the shabiha became a key irregular auxiliary force, which the regime regularly employed in order to intimidate the population. (Location 4046)
All the examples I have cited from Syria tend to suggest that although the war is far from over, it’s showing many similarities to the other Arab Spring conflicts we’ve examined in this chapter. In particular, enhanced digital connectivity—along with urbanization, the democratization of both weapons technology and communications technology, and the emergence of virtual theaters made possible by social networks and the Internet—seems to be enabling something approaching full-scale social netwar in Syria. (Location 4156)
Note: really? looks like syria doesn’t fit the model. rural v city. little littoral fighting. no great global interconnectedness.
Mafias will control immense zones outside the law (this is already the case) in Rio, Lagos, Kinshasa, and Manila. Formerly rural people, with a few members of the privileged classes, will be the primary organizers of new social and political movements demanding very concrete changes in people’s lives. (Location 4250)
Like 80 percent of cities on the planet, Dhaka is in a littoral zone. The vast majority of its people live less than forty-two feet above sea level, making the city extremely vulnerable to coastal flooding. Floods in 1998 put 60 percent of Dhaka’s districts underwater, killed more than a thousand people, and caused more than US$4 billion in damage. (Location 4301)
If, on the other hand, Bangladesh experiences any sea level rise, the effects will be catastrophic—five feet of rise would put 16 percent of the country’s land area and upwards of 22 million people underwater, prompt massive refugee movement, and leave vast areas of cropland too salty to farm.16 It doesn’t take much to generate five feet of water—during Hurricane Sandy in November 2012, for example, lower Manhattan experienced a storm surge almost twice that height, while Hurricane Katrina generated a storm surge more than five times as high in Mississippi.17 (Location 4306)
more than six billion people across the planet own cellphones (that is, about two billion more than have access to clean water or toilets)— (Location 4346)
we’ll probably see strong operational continuity (frequent irregular and unconventional warfare, stabilization operations, humanitarian assistance, and disaster relief, with rare but dangerous instances of state-on-state conflict). (Location 4364)
But we’ll also see a sharp environmental discontinuity: the future environment (crowded, coastal, urban, connected) will be so different from Afghanistan (remote, landlocked, rural) that we’ll have to consciously reconsider much of what we think we know about twenty-first-century conflict. (Location 4366)
But as a proportion of the whole, wars in remote, mountainous, landlocked places such as Afghanistan will get rarer by comparison to urban littoral conflicts, simply because wars happen where people live, and people will be overwhelmingly concentrated in coastal cities. (Location 4388)
Note: i mean - don’t wars happen outside where people live? with sieges and long-term conflict possible in urban landscapes. or rather there is a mixture between the two.
These teams have found that in these poorly serviced and barely governed periurban settlements, basic spatial relationships and flows are highly contested, which makes them extremely hard (and sometimes very dangerous) to map. This underlines another basic insight, namely, that self-aware ignorance—a constant realization that outsiders don’t understand how things work, and therefore need to experiment, test hypotheses, start off small, and seek local context—is a crucially important mental discipline if we want to be effective. (Location 4455)
Note: cadastral stuff
For this reason a pure bottom-up approach, which privileges local insight over outside knowledge, where you “just ask a local,” isn’t the answer, either. (Location 4479)
A group that creates predictability and consistency by establishing a normative system of rules and sanctions is thereby defining a safe behavioral space for people afflicted by terrifying uncertainty, and the safety that system creates will attract that population. (Location 4496)
As Robert Bryce has argued, the organizing principle for a green future is density. (Location 4529)
But these resources aren’t evenly distributed, and it’s the unequal (or, more accurately, the perception of unjust) allocation of resources that creates conflict. (Location 4540)
Without the field component, a crowd-sourced crisis map is just an unverified guess; without the crowd-sourced map, the field team can only produce unstructured data. (Location 4682)
the ability to prevail at the coercive end of the spectrum is the foundation for everything else, since without that ability, administrative and persuasive efforts (however excellent) are moot. (Location 4824)
And because, as we’ve seen, cities disaggregate combat—reducing even large battles to a series of small, fleeting, short-range engagements—dominating the coercive end of the spectrum implies the ability to prevail in close combat. (Location 4831)
Rather, such an enemy would almost certainly try to suck opposing forces into the complex, urbanized littoral, where the presence of noncombatant civilians would impose restraints on the kinds of weapons they could use, an enemy’s local knowledge would become a key advantage, and a cluttered littoral environment would allow enemy forces to hide and strike at will. (Location 4891)
But when you start thinking about conflict in this zone in practical terms, it’s clear that there are in fact nine intersecting spaces in which military maneuver needs to take place, perhaps simultaneously or in close synchronization. These include the seabed, the submarine environment, the sea surface, and naval airspace (airspace over the sea), which together make up the maritime domain; the land surface, subterranean space, and supersurface space (to include tunnel systems, canals, sewers, basements, exterior street-level surfaces, building interiors, high-rise structures, and rooftops), making up the land domain; the airspace domain; and the domain of cyberspace. (Location 4920)
Hyperlocal context, the sort of open-source (but denied-area) information that relies on insider insights, will be essential here, and this information will need to be time-stamped and geospatially located in order to make sense. (Location 5024)
Thus, one of the main frustrations of operating in this environment will be the fleeting and distributed nature of combat engagements, where the enemy is rarely if ever seen, fights can be over in seconds, and you always seem to get to the scene of an incident just a little too late. (Location 5037)
These kinds of joint air-land-sea insertions are known in Australian parlance as “entry from air and sea” (EAS) and in U.S. doctrine as “joint forcible entry operations.” They’ll probably be more common than Incheon-style surface assaults in future conflicts. (Location 5102)
Marines would launch from ships over the horizon (about twenty-five miles offshore) (Location 5118)
In the decade since OMFTS was first proposed, it’s become even clearer that rapid urbanization in the littorals, the development of advanced antiaccess/area-denial (A2AD) technologies (such as sea mines and area-denial munitions) by some adversaries, and the lack of funding for OMFTS may render the idea of bypassing urban coastal areas moot. (Location 5127)
This system makes authority inversely proportional to knowledge. (Location 5270)
Contrast this with the jurisdictional or incident-command method used by some police and emergency services. Under this model, the commander first on the scene is designated as incident commander. As other units arrive, their commanders place themselves (regardless of rank) under control of the incident commander, who continues to run the incident until it comes to a natural break point or he hands it off—which he may do at any time by choice, or procedurally when the incident reaches a certain size and complexity. (Location 5275)
Direct protection is the ability to survive a hit; indirect protection is the ability to avoid being hit in the first place. (Location 5286)
And, as discussed in Chapter 4, urban populations that have basic familiarity with industrial tools and consumer electronics, plus Internet connectivity, can quickly pick up the necessary knowledge and skills to produce IEDs from scratch. This can be seen in trends in IED usage, which averaged 260 incidents per month outside Iraq and Afghanistan in 2010.58 From January to November 2011, also outside Iraq and Afghanistan, there were 6,832 IED events globally, averaging 621 per month—a huge increase from the previous year.59 These incidents caused 12,286 casualties in 111 countries and were perpetrated by forty regional and transnational threat networks. This isn’t just an international trend: of those totals, 490 events and 28 casualties were in the United States, according to the U.S. government’s Joint IED Defeat Organization.60 (Location 5318)
To protect themselves, small teams in a future urbanized environment will need to move inside a “triple bubble” comprising three layers of defense: organic capabilities and techniques that reside in the team itself (including counterambush and countersniper capabilities), resources it can draw from its parent unit (mortar and artillery fire, counter-IED, high-risk search, and signals intelligence), and force-level capabilities (including shipborne counterbattery fire, air defense, and cybersecurity). (Location 5338)
Six defensive disciplines will define these bubbles: counter-IED, counterambush, countersniper, counterfires (i.e., protection against mortars and rockets), counterdrone (increasingly necessary as nonstate groups field their own uninhabited aerial systems), and cyberdefense. (Location 5342)
(driven by the democratization of weapons and communications technologies (Location 5369)
Sunni Muslim honorific mullah usually refers to a local religious leader, who may or may not have completed formal religious studies. The term maulawi normally refers to someone who has completed a full course of study at a recognized madrassa, (Location 5880)
