Out of the Mountains (42 page)

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.
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You don't need to believe in human-caused climate change to recognize that this is a problem. Even if you assume no climate change effects whatsoever, the city will become steadily more vulnerable over time, as more people move to low-lying areas in the next generation. 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.
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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.
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As the evening rush hour gets under way on Dhaka's waterfront, across the world the sun is rising through the smoke haze over La Rocinha, in the South Zone of Rio de Janeiro. La Rocinha is the largest
favela
in Brazil, a crowded hillside slum less than a mile from the sea, with a population of
350
,
000
people. Before it became a shantytown in the
1930
s, the area was a farming community (
rocinha
means “little farm”), growing vegetables and flowers for Rio's markets. Today those commodities have to be trucked in from farms further out, adding to the city's legendary traffic flow. La Rocinha was occupied in
2011
by Brazilian special operations police and military police trying to control crime and drug trafficking in Rio—yet another coastal megacity that has grown rapidly in the last decade and today has a population of more than
12
million. Despite being economically marginalized and politically excluded, people in La Rocinha are highly connected: cellphones are common, most houses have satellite dishes and TV antennas, Internet usage is high, many bloggers and citizen journalists are active in the neighborhood, and there are local community radio and TV stations.
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As there's no work in the actual
favela
, the vast majority of people in the district who do have jobs go to work in Rio, meaning that the district is very connected—as a source of labor—to the economic life of the city. Today it's occupied by the
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th Pacification Police Unit, which has deployed seven hundred paramilitary police in nine fortified patrol bases throughout La Rocinha, along with a hundred surveillance cameras that monitor movement. Patrols roam the narrow streets on foot and by motorcycle, working the areas between outposts and checkpoints, in an operational pattern that looks a lot like a police-led version of urban counterinsurgency, Baghdad style. Pacification of the
favela
has driven violent crime underground, but it feels—to at least some residents—little short of military occupation and urban warfare against the poor.
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On the other side of the Atlantic from Rio, it's midday on Africa's west coast, in the flooded ruins of Makoko, part of the Lagos waterfront. Makoko is (or rather, was) a famous
120
-year-old shantytown built on stilts over a lagoon, and until recently it was home to
250
,
000
people. The government demolished it with only seventy-two hours' warning, against strong community opposition, in August
2012
. Violent clashes broke out with residents as the authorities began cutting down homes with chainsaws.
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Nigeria's government is trying to “unclog the city and spur economic growth,” and clearing waterfront slums—where families have lived for generations, albeit without written title to their houses—is part of this effort.
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“Built on a swamp, Lagos is fighting for survival. Ceaseless migration is strangling it. City fathers foresee the doubling of the population to
40
m within a few decades, which would make it the most populous city in the world.”
22
But in the attempt to renew the city, it's the people of urban, coastal, marginalized districts that suffer most. Around the time that Makoko was being demolished, up the coast from Lagos, the cities of Conakry, Freetown, and Dakar (capitals of Guinea, Sierra Leone, and Senegal, respectively) were suffering a huge cholera epidemic. It was caused by the lethal combination of nonexistent sewage systems, lack of clean water, overstretched public health services, heavy rains, and coastal floods that inundated waterfront slums, spreading disease across their parent cities. The connectedness among cities along the West African coast quickly helped spread the epidemic across the region.
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I could continue this coastal tour at length, but the overall point is clear: the same patterns exist in littoral cities across the entire developing world. As well as occurring simultaneously in different cities, these problems—from poverty and social unrest to gang warfare, organized crime, insurgency, terrorism, and even out-and-out civil war—can coexist in one city at the same time. Feral cities are emerging in some countries, and feral districts have arisen in many cities. Acute violence exacerbates deeper, chronic issues, making every other problem worse and harder to get at. In the words of Mike Davis, the world is becoming a “planet of slums,” with “more than
200
,
000
slums on earth, ranging in population from a few hundred to more than a million people” and the emergence of “‘megaslums' . . . when shantytowns and squatter communities merge in continuous belts of informal housing and poverty, usually on the urban periphery.”
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The periurban world is also, as we've seen, highly connected: as of early
2013
, more than six billion people across the planet own cellphones (that is, about two billion more than have access to clean water or toilets)—and problems in one place can rapidly escalate and spread to others.
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This, then, is the suite of problems—framed by the megatrends of population growth, urbanization, littoralization, and connectedness—that will define the environment for future conflict, and for every other aspect of life, in the next generation. How do we react to this? How should we think about the coming environment, how can we prepare for it, and what can we do about it?

That depends on what the word
we
means in that sentence. In cities under stress, there's no inclusive “we,” no single unified society, but rather a complex shifting ecosystem of players cohabiting in segregated communities with competing interests, clashing cultures, and differing perspectives. Are we Baron Haussmann, trying to manicure an urban jungle, or Victor Hugo, lamenting the loss of people's autonomy? Are we the Jamaican constabulary, or the population who get their law and order from the gang dons of the Kingston garrison communities? Are we the community organizations trying to mitigate violence in San Pedro Sula, the businesses making clothes in its outskirts, or the workforce in those factories? Or are we the American public, buying clothes and cocaine, both of which stage through Honduras on their journey to the U.S. market, supporting the deportation of Honduran gang members (and thus both funding and fueling San Pedro Sula's astronomical murder rate), while tut-tutting as if we had nothing to do with it? Are we the entrepreneurs who run businesses (licit, illicit, or both) from La Rocinha, or the police working to pacify the place? Are we the Western militaries, diplomatic services, and aid agencies wondering how to operate in this environment if, God forbid, we find ourselves dragged into it? The examples discussed in previous chapters suggest insights for several of these groups, and the rest of this final chapter outlines some of these insights—not as definitive conclusions, but as tentative hypotheses that will need a lot of further testing. Before examining specific insights, though, it makes sense to put forward some overall observations.

II. “Bending the Curve”

The first, most obvious insight is that whatever the future of conflict may be, most of the time it won't be much like Afghanistan. Given the historical patterns I mentioned in Chapter 1, 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). 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.

How, for example, will drones and satellites operate over urbanized spaces where we can see any house from the outside—but not know who lives in it, or what's moving in the sewer systems underneath it, or in the covered laneways that link it with other houses under the urban canopy? The capacity to intercept, tag, track and locate specific cellphone and Internet users from a drone already exists, but distinguishing signal from background noise in a densely connected, heavily trafficked piece of digital space is a hugely daunting challenge. How will special operators or strike aircraft engage targets in the same tenement or shack system as thousands of innocent bystanders? These people won't long remain bystanders if we go in hard after a target and disrupt their lives in the process. How will heavy armored vehicles maneuver in streets that are three feet wide? How will battalions and brigades do population-centric counterinsurgency in cities so gigantic they could soak up a whole army and hardly notice? How will expeditionary logistics function, in cities that can barely feed or water themselves or supply their own energy needs, let alone fill logistics contracts to support an external military force? How will offensive cyberoperations help against virtual swarms of hackers when disrupting an urban population's electronic connectivity turns out to be one of the most provocative things you can possibly do? All these things will demand hard and wide-ranging thought. (Some detailed ideas on these issues, and others, are in the Appendix.)

Don't get me wrong: the counterinsurgency era is far from over, much as people might want it to be—historical patterns suggest that Western countries will almost certainly do large-scale counterinsurgency again, probably sometime in the next decade or two, whether we want to or not. So it's absolutely imperative that military forces retain the lessons and skills they've learned in those conflicts, yet simultaneously figure out how to do such operations in the megaslums of tomorrow—a tall order indeed. Mountain warfare, with its extreme demands on troops and equipment, is also far from a thing of the past: mountain campaigns will most certainly happen again. Specialist mountain troops (such as France's outstanding Chasseurs Alpins, who so distinguished themselves in Afghanistan), light infantry (such as the American
10
th Mountain Division), and airborne (parachute) or air assault (helicopter-borne) forces will remain essential because of their ability to infest a landscape, move quickly across broken and complex terrain, engage with a population, and get right up close and personal with a determined enemy. As the world gets ever more littoral, Marines will, if anything, become even more the force of choice for the complex expeditionary operations in which they specialize.

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. We may be doing the same kinds of operations as today, but the places where we'll be doing them will be radically different. Versatility and adaptability—being able to work in the widest possible variety of environments, perform the widest possible range of missions, and transition rapidly and smoothly between terrain and mission types—will therefore be much more important than optimizing for any one scenario. Terms such as
full-spectrum
,
versatile
, and
adaptable
are often used as a way to avoid making hard choices about capability trade-offs: by optimizing for everything we optimize for nothing. But, as Chapter
1
showed, even though we can't predict specific future conflicts (akin to predicting the weather), we can make informed judgments based on projections about the future conditions and circumstances under which these conflicts will take place (understanding the climate). That future conflict climate, as we have seen, will be coastal, networked, and overwhelmingly urban—so we need to orient ourselves toward, rather than optimizing solely for, conflict in connected cities.

This leads to my second overall observation, which is that security thinkers need to start treating the city as a unit of analysis in its own right. Dominant theories of international relations take the nation-state as their basic building block. Western governments talk of “national security”; there are “country teams” in our embassies and “country desks” in our diplomatic services, intelligence organizations, and aid agencies. This national-level shorthand (“Indonesia,” “Pakistan,” “Nigeria,” “India,” “China”) lumps together huge and diverse areas of enormous countries as if they were single, indivisible units and flattens out the crucially important variations among population groups within them. Yet Jakarta and Merauke, Karachi and Q
 
uetta, Lagos and Kano, Mumbai and Hyderabad, or Shanghai and Urumqi could hardly be more different from each other, and each of these cities contains dozens of distinct population groups who also differ dramatically. We need to bring our analysis down to the city and subcity level, understanding communities and cities as systems in their own right (perhaps, via the flow-modeling approach I've described in this book, treating cities as biological or natural systems). We need to understand how a city's subsystems and subdistricts fit together as well as how that city nests within and interacts with regional and transnational flows and networks. Much of the work to enable this approach has already been done in the urban studies, ecology, systems engineering, political geography, and architecture communities—it's partly a matter of taking models that already exist in other disciplines, bringing them into the national security field, building on them, plugging in new variables, and looking closely and creatively at the results. In this respect, the political science community may perhaps be able to help, applying recent research on modern and medieval city-states as an organizing framework—doing for coastal cities what Antonio Giustozzi did for Afghanistan's city-states in his magnificent study of Afghan warlord state-building,
Empires of Mud
.
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