Out of the Mountains (19 page)

What I find interesting and distinctive about Tivoli Gardens is not that it was a slum area that fell under the control of a nonstate armed group linked to political elites. There are literally dozens of examples of this kind of district, in virtually every rapidly urbanizing city on the planet. No, what's interesting here is the way that the Shower Posse outgrew its masters, and that this happened through a sort of unconscious, unplanned, organic process of evolution. The posse built a normative system to control inhabitants in Tivoli Gardens, but in doing so, it became part of a pattern of escalating violence that traumatized Jamaica in the
1960
s and
1970
s. People fled this violence (taking advantage of the fact that they lived close to Kingston's port and airport, which were next to the garrison and which connected Jamaica to the outside world) and thus contributed to a flow of Jamaican emigrants to North America and Europe. This—entirely accidentally, as far as I can tell—created a dark network of external connections between Jamaicans abroad and the Shower Posse at home, and the posse was entrepreneurial and opportunistic enough to see this network's potential as the basis for a transnational protection racket. Once the drug economy boomed in the eighties, the posse was able to reverse the flow of its external network, so that instead of siphoning money inward from the diaspora, the network now enabled a two-way flow—drugs flowed out, money and weapons in. Shower Posse gangs (and others originating from Kingston's garrison districts) emerged among the Jamaican diaspora in Toronto, New York, and London, thus spreading patterns of violence and crime, which had originated in Kingston's lack of urban capacity, to cities across the world.

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 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.
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.