Out of the Mountains (20 page)

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.

Beyond Military Urbicide

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.

It's a hard fact of life that armies kill cities. We've already seen how Ambassador Oakley, negotiating after the battle of Mogadishu, warned Somali leaders that large-scale military intervention in their city would inevitably kill it. The destruction sustained by Tivoli Gardens during Operation Garden Parish was on a far smaller scale, yet the engagement of the JDF inevitably brought far greater disruption, death, and damage than previous police-led operations had done. Even in Baghdad in
2007
, in an operation designed to save rather than destroy the city, we made people safe but only, to use Steve Eames's phrase, by “putting the city on life support.”

We could think of classical examples such as the battles of Stalingrad in
1942
, Warsaw in
1944
, or Berlin in
1945
, all of which inflicted immense and enduring damage on the cities involved. More recently, in irregular conflicts, Marines in Hue City during the
1968
Tet offensive in Vietnam engaged in heavy urban fighting, while the Russian army more or less flattened the city of Grozny during the First Chechen War of
1994
–
96
.
110
The Russians—after losing many troops during their failed New Year's Eve assault of December
31
,
1994
—spent most of January
1995
shelling, mortaring, and bombing the city before moving in to systematically destroy it block by block.
111
The U.S. Marine Corps in Iraq, during the two battles of Fallujah in April and November
2004
, took extraordinary measures to avoid this kind of wholesale destruction, yet the city still suffered immense damage and dislocation.

The ethics of military proportionality and protection of noncombatant civilians become extremely important in conflicts involving nonstate armed groups in urban terrain. In the Palestinian Territories, for example, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) have used armored bulldozers and heavy artillery in towns including Jenin and Gaza, and Israel has been criticized for its policy of punitively destroying the houses of suicide bombers (which IDF spokesmen argue is an important deterrent) and for demolishing Palestinian homes it claims have been built illegally.
112
Yet in the extremely densely populated, heavily urbanized Palestinian Territories, even “normal” IDF combat maneuvers can involve massive damage to the fabric of a city, as the Israeli architect Eyal Weizman pointed out in May
2006
in his description of the battle of Nablus four years earlier:

During the battle soldiers moved within the city across hundreds of metres of “overground tunnels” carved out through a dense and contiguous urban structure. Although several thousand soldiers and Palestinian guerrillas were manoeuvring simultaneously in the city, they were so “saturated” into the urban fabric that very few would have been visible from the air. Furthermore, they used none of the city's streets, roads, alleys or courtyards, or any of the external doors, internal stairwells and windows, but moved horizontally through walls and vertically through holes blasted in ceilings and floors. This form of movement, described by the military as “infestation,” seeks to redefine inside as outside, and domestic interiors as thoroughfares. The IDF's strategy of “walking through walls” involves a conception of the city as not just the site but also the very medium of warfare—a flexible, almost liquid medium that is forever contingent and in flux.
113

This IDF tactic of moving within the actual fabric of the city's buildings, burrowing into the concrete and brick of the urban environment itself, takes notions of infestation, nesting, and property destruction to an entirely new level. An Israeli commander interviewed by Weizman described his unit as moving “like a worm that eats its way forward, emerging at points and then disappearing.” Weizman also quotes a Palestinian mother on the effect of such tactics on the local civilian population:

Imagine it—you're sitting in your living-room, which you know so well; this is the room where the family watches television together after the evening meal, and suddenly that wall disappears with a deafening roar, the room fills with dust and debris, and through the wall pours one soldier after the other, screaming orders. You have no idea if they're after you, if they've come to take over your home, or if your house just lies on their route to somewhere else. The children are screaming, panicking. Is it possible to even begin to imagine the horror experienced by a five-year-old child as four, six, eight, 12 soldiers, their faces painted black, sub-machine-guns pointed everywhere, antennas protruding from their backpacks, making them look like giant alien bugs, blast their way through that wall?
114

John P. Sullivan, to whom I'm greatly indebted for these insights, quotes Weizman at length in his writings on what he, like others including Stephen Graham, calls “military urbanism”—the response to urbanized threats that turns cities into fortresses and populations into denizens of occupied territory. This has the extremely negative side effect of shutting down a city's flow, or even physically destroying the city itself, in order to save it from an external threat, as in the famous words of a U.S. Army major in Vietnam, who said of the 1968 battle of Ben Tre, “It became necessary to destroy the town to save it.”
115

Lest we imagine that such actions are a thing of the past, we should remember that in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, military urbicide—the “deliberate destruction of the urban fabric”—has at times been a United States policy also, albeit on a smaller scale than that of Grozny or the Palestinian Territories. Mark Owen, in
No Easy Day
, his account of the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, describes an operation against an Iraqi insurgent weapons facilitator in Baghdad in
2005
, in which his team was unable to subdue the target and ended up using cannon fire from an armored vehicle, plus a thermobaric demolition charge, to destroy an entire two-story home in a densely populated Baghdad neighborhood.
116
Dozens of similar operations took place in
2006
,
2007
, and
2008
, leaving significant damage across the city.

More recently, in early
2011
Paula Broadwell drew controversy when she approvingly reported the total destruction of the village of Tarok Kolache in Arghandab district of Afghanistan's Kandahar province. The village had been occupied by Taliban fighters and laced with improvised explosive devices that caused numerous U.S. casualties; as a consequence, rather than engage in the difficult and dangerous task of clearing the village, on October
6
,
2010
, the U.S. Army approved the use of heavy artillery and aircraft to destroy the village, dropping just under fifty thousand pounds of ordnance on the area and totally leveling it. Although the operation allegedly caused no civilian casualties, and the same unit followed up with a massive reconstruction program that commanders expected to take up the entire remainder of their combat tour in the area, the notion that an American counterinsurgency force in
2010
would literally destroy a village in order to save it led to intense criticism.
117

If we want to move beyond military urbanism and urbicide, we need to think much more creatively about ways to secure urban environments. As I've suggested, focusing on cities as systems, exploring ways to expand the carrying capacity and improve the flow of the urban metabolism, may be important preventive measures. But—as discussed in Chapter
1
—historical patterns of intervention suggest that military forces will still be dragged into these environments on a regular basis, responding to problems (as in Tivoli Gardens) that have spiraled beyond the capacity of civilian government to handle them.