I've blogged numerous times on the great urban-political divide that has fueled our seemingly irreconcilable differences here in the United States. Our Founding Fathers were deeply suspicious of urbanites, making sure that concentrations of city-folk could never supplant (out-vote) the great farm owners, often vast tracts of land heavily dependent on slave labor. Voting districts, how U.S. Senate seats are determined (Montana with a million residents has the same two Senators accorded to California with thirty-eight million people)… all favor rural population dispersions over urban. Unlike Europe, where political power is concentrated in the large cities, the United States gives all that power to states. It’s how Donald Trump defeated Hillary Clinton even though he lost the popular vote by a whopping three million votes.
Subsistence farming is too rapidly succumbing to climate-change disasters. Where mechanization is possible, as food sources are being locked up by global powers (especially China), modern farming techniques are doing to farm labor what automation (now driven by artificial intelligence) is doing to blue collar resource extraction and manufacturing here in the United States. These forces are pushing increasing populations into cities, already overloaded with too many people and too few economic opportunities to support that influx of unskilled labor. Insurgencies also push decimated people into cities. Even for those with specialized training and high education, the future lies in cities and not in rural districts. Kids in Iowa go to college there but have to leave to apply their new skills.
This trend toward increasing urbanization – everywhere – is also posing some pretty stiff challenges to militaries all over the world. Kim Jong-Un knows that one nuclear/hydrogen bomb in any number of US cities can produce well over a million fatalities. The mere existence of big cities offers terrorists and rogue states opportune targets. That leverage is at the core of their ability to wreak havoc and maximize their kill zone. Even a lone wolf, with no ties to a larger organization, can choose from any of many people-rich targets.
The pervasiveness of guns, based on rural values, has made big cities particularly target-rich environments for those “good guys with a gun” who become “bad guys with a gun” with no clear advanced warning. And for pure “bad guys,” it’s nothing more than an inviting shooting gallery. Folks on farms and hunters in forests are amazingly different than an angry city-dweller with hate on his mind and long guns with tons of freely available ammunition at his beck and call.
But as cities become the focal point of political power and wealth, they are also the hot military targets that define victory or failure. As ISIS fades into the shadows to ply their more traditional terrorist trade, the shambles of the cities they once held loom large. (Raqqa is pictured above) Who will pay for reconstruction in such war-torn sites? And more importantly, how do modern armies deal with this new phase of urban warfare? Formal military assaults. Insurgencies. Organized crime. Terrorist attacks. Deranged killers looking for targets. Cops? Soldiers? Cops with military assault weapons and vehicles? Robots and drones?
And in today’s world, the increasing proliferation of ultra-violence has made too many of us unmoved by reports of genocide and the deaths of innocents. We’re jaded and calloused. What’s worse, too many of these violent players, particularly insurgents (even often the armies sent to defeat them) and organized crime are rather totally indifferent to “collateral damage.” Many of these “bad hombres” perfectly willing to use innocent civilians as human shields, each side blaming the other for the carnage. Old police and military tactics are changing to deal with this urban challenge. Precision and selectivity become increasingly critical in this new battlefield.
The October 22nd The Cipher Brief explains: “Waning are the days of the Maoist blueprint of rural insurgents pillaging small peripheral villages and seeking refuge in the hard terrain of mountainous caverns, dense forests, or expansive deserts. Soon terrorist and insurgent groups will mount operations from crowded slums and ritzy skyscrapers – not just in a dense urban landscape, but in coastal megacities that pose a unique challenge for which the U.S. military largely remains unprepared.
“The United Nations estimated in 2016 that some 55 percent of the world’s population lives in urban areas, which will grow to 60 percent by 2030. There are 512 cities of at least one million inhabitants around the world, and this too is expected to grow to 662 cities by 2030.
“Over the same time period, the number of megacities – or overlapping urban landscapes home to at least 10 million residents – is expected to grow from 31 to 41 – many of which are emerging in the developing world which will soon be economic, political, and cultural centers of gravity in the international political order…
“Urban warfare, however, is not just a future phenomenon – though the characteristics of it are changing. Entire armies have faced off in cities before – the Battle of Stalingrad in 1942, for example. Similarly, civil wars have involved devastating aerial and artillery sieges of entire cities housing those fighting in opposition to their governments, including battles such as Russian and Syrian 2016 air campaigns over Aleppo, Russian operations against Chechen separatists in Grozny in 1995, or Serbian bombardment of Sarajevo in 1992.
“But simply leveling a city to the ground does little to actually address the rumblings of insurgency – it could even reinvigorate discontent and insurgent efforts. Such operations require a close combat presence on the ground – a necessity the Israeli army continues to encounter in their operations in the densely crowded Gaza Strip. Perhaps a harbinger of the challenges to come with urban counterinsurgency is the French campaign in Algiers in the 1950s – leading to an estimated 350,000 Algerian civilian deaths and the cascade of decolonization.
“Furthermore, megacities such as Lagos, Cairo, Karachi, Dhaka, Johannesburg, Luanda, Dar-es-Salaam, Kinshasa, and Mumbai will be global economic hubs, with some being home to major ports, financial centers, or critical industries on which the rest of the world relies. Merely laying siege to neighborhoods within these megacities in order to route [sic] out insurgents is not a strategically sound option and evacuating millions of innocent civilians prior to fighting is a logistical nightmare. Battles in these hubs will have significant economic and political ripple effects, as the Syrian migrant crisis currently facing Europe shows.
“Wars of the future will not be fighting for cities, but rather fighting within them. Counterinsurgency of the future will take place in peripheral slums, along narrow backstreets, and among a metropolis of civilians going about their days.
“U.S. military operations in Mogadishu, Sadr City, Fallujah, and more recently Sirte provide insight into the challenges of operating in these environments, but on a much smaller scale. Importantly, megacities are not just big cities, but a unique and constantly adapting system of systems, where the casual link between destabilizing neighborhoods rippling across the city and into the region and the world is difficult to determine.
“Perhaps the defining characteristic of the future of counterinsurgency in megacities is the omnipresence of innocent civilians. This creates a number of implications – most notably the risk of collateral damage that could undermine the counterinsurgency efforts…
“While ‘danger close’ tactical drone strikes and aerial reconnaissance may have enabled the street-to-street fighting in Sirte, such operations will be severely limited over expansive megacities. The threat of civilian casualties is often too high, even for many precision-guided munitions with limited blast radius, and buildings and layers of infrastructure often obscure a clear overhead view… Furthermore, the danger of inadvertently causing harm to a city’s bystanders ‘limits not only the choice of weapons, but also the choice of allies,’ said [Vanda Felbab-Brown, a Senior Fellow in the Center for 21st Century Security and Intelligence at the Brookings Institution].
“‘If local militias or warlords are recruited for counterinsurgency operations, the formal counterinsurgent forces need to be ready and willing to disarm them after the campaign’s completion and promote accountable, equitable, and non-discriminatory governance,’ she added.
“Insurgent groups will also be able to establish mutually beneficial relationships with local groups, such as organized criminal networks. As they are already operating out of global economic centers with the necessary infrastructure, these criminal networks will provide access to established illicit trafficking routes for weapons and other vital supplies – such as perhaps commercial drones, explosives, or even biological or chemical agents – as well as a consistent means to fund their operations locally.
“While the advantage of heavy weaponry a counterinsurgent force has enjoyed in the past will become limited in megacities, ground forces, such as tactical counterterrorism units or special operations forces, will encounter related challenges as a result of the physical terrain within a burgeoning metropolis. Urban canyons between skyscrapers with vantage points from windows and rooftops along bustling narrow networks of streets and alleys increase avenues of approach for insurgents to ambush troops, all while hindering the counterinsurgent’s line of sight. Subterranean layers such as subways and sewers only further this problem, allowing militants to attack and disappear at will…
“While urban insurgents are now able to leverage commercial technologies such as Google Earth satellite imagery and small hobby drones capable of aerial reconnaissance for maneuver, targeting, and explosives delivery, there are new technologies being developed for counterinsurgents as well. What is particularly necessary, are tools to differentiate insurgents hiding among millions of residents in order to detect and preempt their operations.
“New technologies at the disposal of counterinsurgents “include sophisticated biometric, facial recognition, and biochemical sensing systems to detect explosive residues or track individuals in crowded spaces, as well as big-data techniques to monitor and respond rapidly to subtle but detectable changes in an urban environment,” said [David Kilcullen, the former Special Advisor for Counterinsurgency to the U.S. Secretary of State].
“‘They include new counter-sniper, counter-IED, and counter-drone technologies, techniques for emplacing and employing mesh-networks of ground-based and airborne sensors, and new organizational structures – smaller, more modular but better protected units that can more effectively operate in urban areas,’ he added.” We are unprepared, and our generals know that. As much as they cry for large and expensive weapon systems, from rapidly-becoming-obsolete large target naval ships (like aircraft carriers) to aircraft designed for large-nation-to-nation warfare, there does need to be a new emphasis on the true wars of the future. Now!
I’m Peter Dekom, and I so wonder if our Commander in Chief has the slightest understanding of the world he has to deal with.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment