Out of the Mountains (46 page)
What I've described isn't theory. It's what our teams do, all over the world, in conflicts and crises in half a dozen different cities. They focus on resilience rather than stability, on enhancing connectivity and building predictability, on helping local communities figure things out themselves. Is it perfect? Absolutely not: it doesn't always work, it depends utterly on local commitment and talent, and it's imperfect, like any other approach. But when it fails, it fails quickly and cheaply, it doesn't involve turning someone else's society upside down because of things that seemed to us like a good idea at the time, and it doesn't invoke Colin Powell's “Pottery Barn rule” of international intervention: “if you break it, you own it.” Most important, the co-design methodology isn't an answer to a problem: it's just a set of ways to think toward solutions. Can it work in a high-threat, chaotic, urban conflict environment? Absolutelyâand, in fact, when I think back to times when what we've done
has
worked in conflict zones, including in very high-threat counterinsurgency environments such as Baghdad, it's always been because of something akin to this approach. Locals bring the leadership and the insight that outsiders lack, outsiders bring the technical support that fills the locals' gaps, and someone (the less coercively, the better, but nonetheless)âsomeone provides the security that lets the whole thing work.
Given the dense, urban, coastal, networked environment where populations will live, and where governments, businesses, communities, and military and police forces will operate in the future, we're really going to need these kinds of participatory design-based approaches to solving strategic problems. That is, external interveners in these environmentsâwhether “external” in the sense that they're foreign governments, or merely in the sense that they come from a different part of town or are members of a different communityâneed to begin with a conscious acceptance of their own ignorance about the environment. Outsiders need to accept that, initially at least, they don't understand exactly what is going on, and therefore they have few useful insights about what needs to be done.
To me, the co-design approach that I've outlined here makes vastly more sense than trying to bring in state-based, government-driven solutions to every problemâto govern every piece of ungoverned space on the planet, or to turn every society into a mirror of our own. Q
Â
uite apart from being authoritarian and coercive, that kind of unilateralism is just too expensive, time-consuming, and difficult to be achievable. Even if it did work, this sort of approach would be problematicâit would turn Western governments, in particular, into a global version of Baron Haussmannâbut the fact is that it doesn't work anyway: we simply don't have the money, the persistence, or the military will to make it happen.
The alternative, the kind of co-design approach I've described here, involves local people directly and intimately in a participative way, designing solutions to their own problems, but not left to sink or swim on their own. It looks for ways to combine local insights with outside expertise, and recognizes that neither outsiders nor locals alone can solve (or even understand) many of these problems.
In the crowded, complex, connected urban environment of the future, instead of what James C. Scott has called the “high modernist” absolutism of centralized planning or the unilateral and ill-informed prescriptions of outside designers or (worse) outside military interveners, there's a clear need to apply collaborative methods: approaches that seek the hypercontextualized insight only locals can bring, yet also draw on outsider knowledge from fields such as urban planning, geosocial information systems, user experience design, big-data analysis, and industrial systems design. These methods can help us treat the coastal city as a system and allow people to look for intervention or impact points to move that system in a positive, more resilient direction. The same sensing methods can also stimulate, illuminate, reveal, and map the “dark networks” that nest within the dense human and political thickets of the urban environment, and can provide the international monitor, the “Web as witness,” that gives people an essential sense of security.
IV. Conclusions
We've covered an enormous amount of ground here, not all of it bad, but much of it complex and confronting. This isn't the place to summarize what I've written, since you can always turn back and look at each section or chapter for relevant insights. But I do want to make three very brief, concluding points.
First, none of what I've written about in describing the future environment is a prediction. This is not how the future world will be or has to be. There will be unexpected shocks, black swans, and events (both good and bad) that will change this projection. And that's all it is: just a straight-line projection of current trends, based on data currently available, that suggest where conflict on the planet may be heading, given its current course. This projection suggests a high degree of continuity in the things that militaries, aid agencies, diplomatic services, city governments, and other organizations in this space will be expected to do. But it also suggests a very sharp discontinuity in the environment, which will be increasingly, and intensively, urban, coastal, crowded, and connected. Because we have the data, because we can see the projection, we can change the outcomeâwe can bend the curve, ideally in the direction of greater resilience, unlocking the adaptive resources that are already present in the cities under stress that we have discussed here. But if we can't prevent violenceâand history suggests that, at least some of the time, we won't be able toâthen we need to be ready to prevail in the complex, messy, lethal business of irregular warfare in urban, networked littorals: not as an end in itself, but as a means to create the predictability and order, the feeling of safety, that can allow collaborative problem solving to have some chance of success.
The second concluding insight, and forgive me for sounding a little Zen here, is that the project isn't the project. The
community
is the project. In David Lean's classic
1957
movie
The Bridge on the River Kwai
, a demoralized unit of British prisoners is building a bridge over a river in Thailand, part of a strategic Japanese railroad. They're laboring, under atrocious conditions, beneath the murderous tyranny of the prisoner-of-war camp commandant, Colonel Saito. Saito and the British battalion commander, Colonel Nicholson (played, in his greatest-ever role, by Alec Guinness), engage in a near-fatal struggle for control over working conditions. Having won the struggle against authority andâin essenceâregained command of his men, Nicholson then proceeds to design a new and better bridge, moves the site to a more suitable spot, reorganizes the labor shifts to make the work more efficient, and begins demanding hard work and dedication from the men. He has essentially taken over the project. The medical officer, Major Clifton, puzzled that Nicholson, who so nearly died resisting Saito, is now working the battalion so hard in order to help Saito achieve his mission, confronts him. I paraphrase, but in essence Clifton says, “What the hell is going on? What we're doing is helping the Japanese. Why are you working the men so hard, doing such a good job, on a project that's only helping the enemy?” Nicholson replies, and again I paraphrase: “You don't get it: the project isn't the bridge, the project is the
battalion
. The men are demoralized, prisoners, without hope, without morale. The bridge is just a means to an end: we're using the bridge to rebuild the battalion. If we didn't have the bridge to hand, we'd have to make up some other projectâbut we're using what we have, as a way to recover the cohesion and morale that we'd lost.”
Now, life is not a Hollywood movie, nor yet the excellent French novel by Pierre Boulle on which David Lean's movie is based. But in this one respect, I do believe that life imitates art. In societies under stress, where basic systems have broken down and the very social compact that binds people together is under strain, the project we need to undertake is not the bridgeâor the road, or the banking system, or the sanitation system, or whatever. The project is the community. The specifics of projects that people undertake in the chaotic coastal slums we've been discussing are actually less important than the community cohesion, sense of solidarity, and common purpose that those projects generate. These are not side effects of a successful projectâthey
are
the project.
The war in Afghanistan is not yet over, and even when Western troops leave, it won't truly end: we will need to remain engaged, not least because we have friends there who have committed to us, and vice versa. But as we turn our attention back to the world after Afghanistan and Iraq, and as the dust of the last decade settles, we need to remember what we were doing before
9
/
11
. At that time, a whole community of people was thinking hard and writing extensively about the civil and military problems of conflict in urbanized, complex, heavily populated littorals. The military dropped out of this conversation sometime after
2003
, when the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq really kicked off. For a decade since then, the discussion has gone on without much input from those who have been fighting the war. Companies like IBM, Google and McKinsey, several universities, and a number of think tanks have thought through most of the problems of urban growth, littoralization, and connectivityâbut often without enough well-informed thought on the implications for conflict, or a systems perspective on how that conflict will affect, and in turn be affected by, the emerging environment of coastal megacities.
It's time for the generation who fought the war to take what they learned in the hills and valleys of a landlocked conflict, and apply it to a challenging new environment; it's time to think about the implications of the coming age of urban, networked, guerrilla war in the mega-slums and megacities of a coastal planet. It's time to drag ourselvesâbody and mindâout of the mountains.
Appendix
On War in the Urban, Networked Littoral
I've saved much
of the most specific and technical discussion about future war for this appendix, which talks about how military organizations might find themselves getting sucked into conflict in urban, networked littoral areas, what things may be like when they do, and how they'll need to organize, equip, and operate so as to prevail there. These ideas aren't just relevant to military leaders and planners, thoughâas previous chapters have shown, this sort of thing is unfortunately going to be everyone's business, in one way or another.
As we think about war in the urban, networked littoral, it's essential to first recognize the rather obvious point that many future problems will have no purely military solutions. Rapid unplanned urbanization, lack of governance capacity, limited economic opportunity, youth unemployment, or shortages of energy, water, and sanitationâall of which, as we've seen, can be city-killersâcan't be fixed simply by the judicious application of some magic formula of kinetic force. Armies, in particular, have a tendency to destroy cities, as we saw in Chapter
2
, and bringing large numbers of troops or police into places like Tivoli Gardens or La Rocinha may just give people more opportunities to be shaken down and intimidated. Many threats in future cities will be what have been called “threats without enemies”âthere'll be nobody to fight, nothing to kill.
But that doesn't mean armed forces (and, by extension, armed law enforcement, including constabulary, gendarmerie, border security, and coast guard organizations) don't have a critical role. On the contrary: as our discussion of competitive control theory showed in Chapter
3
, 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. To paraphrase the Vietnam War adviser John Paul Vann, security might only be
10
percent of the problem, or it might be
90
percent, but whichever it is, it's the
first
10
percent, or the
first
90
percent. If you fail to create a basic minimum level of security and predictability for ordinary people on the street, it doesn't matter what else you try to do, because none of it is ever likely to happen.
1
Likewise, unless you can control surface problems of violent conflict, it's impossible (or at least dramatically more difficult) to get to the underlying issues that need to be addressed in order to build a city's resilience.
And because, as we've seen, cities disaggregate combatâreducing even large battles to a series of small, fleeting, short-range engagementsâdominating the coercive end of the spectrum implies the ability to prevail in
close combat
. (Close combatâsometimes called close-quarter battleâcan occur on land, at sea, or in the air, and involves two-way fights that happen well within maximum visual or sensor distance. If you can shoot farther than you can see, and someone's shooting back, you're in a close-combat situation.) Another way of putting it is that to do anything in a contested, urbanized environment, you must first establish
persistent presence
, and to establish that presence you have to prevail (or deter, by proving you
can
prevail) in a fight. That fight, by definition, will be a close fight because of the way cities create close-range, distributed, fleeting engagements. Before we break this idea down in more detail, it's worth explaining how the military mightâdespite everyone's best intentionsâbe dragged into this kind of combat.
Getting Drawn In
It's tempting to focus on
conflict prevention
to the exclusion of conflict as such. We like to think of ways to prevent problems, to stop tensions from spiraling into open conflict or to defuse limited conflicts before they escalate into larger ones. Military officers, in particular (probably because they know exactly how ugly war can be), have a strong tendency to prefer prevention. Prevention is important and valuable: military planners, diplomats, and peace workers have produced excellent programs in this field in recent years, covering issues including border security, rule of law, security sector reform, law enforcement assistance, dispute resolution and mediation, and human rights advocacy. All Western countries and many international institutions engage in these efforts, which deserve continued support from policy makers and the public. Prevention is far better than cure, and often vastly cheaper.
But ultimately, conflict prevention is like fire prevention. Preventing fires is important, and any city government would be insane not to focus a lot of attention on hazard reduction and risk mitigation. But we pay firefighters to
fight
fires. Fire departments have valuable roles in prevention, but their core business isn't prevention, it's response: fighting fires when they break out, putting them out as quickly and safely as possible, stopping them from spreading. Likewise, we pay militaries to fight when prevention fails, and to win when they fight. Armed forces have valuable preventive and deterrent roles, but their core business is war. Thus, the rest of society expects the military to think carefully about how to fightâeven, or perhaps especially, in the most extreme and awful circumstancesâand for this reason it's not acceptable to just look at the complex future environment and mutter, “Well, conflict in coastal cities is messy and complex, so our plan is to avoid it.”
Unfortunately, for too long that
was
the preferred responseâground forces planned to bypass cities, navies focused on blue-water operations against peer adversaries, air forces liked to think about strategic air interdiction (although air planners such as John Warden did develop a systems modeling approach for cities), and amphibious operations revolved around bypassing strongpoints and going where the enemy wasn't. That won't be an option in the future, when the coastal zone of an entire continent may be one giant megaslum, when most of the world's population will be concentrated in coastal cities, and when the enemy will be wherever we go, in part because it will be our very presence that turns some locals into enemies. We need to be thinking hard and unsentimentally about what to do when we find ourselves in an urban, networked, littoral conflict.
There are literally dozens of ways in which militaries might get pulled into conflicts like this, but here are just a few scenarios to consider. First, armed forces may find themselves in humanitarian assistance, disaster relief, or noncombatant evacuation operations (pulling civilians out of conflict or disaster zones) that escalate into conflict. Think of the work of the United States, Australian, and allied forces, with thousands of troops and dozens of aircraft and ships (including the aircraft carrier USS
Abraham Lincoln
) providing water, electricity, medicine, and food to coastal cities damaged in the
2004
Indian Ocean tsunami, working closely with civilian aid agencies and NGOs, and remaining in place for months to help societies rebuild. Ships remained alongside for lengthy periods, providing electricity and water to stricken towns, and ships (including the hospital ship USNS
Mercy
) provided emergency medical care.
2
In some placesâSri Lanka, for example, and Acehâthis brought Western forces into preexisting conflicts, where local governments were fighting globally networked insurgencies. No major conflict erupted between interveners and local militants in this case, but it's easy to see how such humanitarian missions might escalate into combat. That's exactly what happened in Mogadishu in
1993
, for example. Humanitarian assistance in conflict zones is never neutral: in helping one group, we always hurt another, and this can lead to violenceâas in the Afghan ambush I described in the introduction. Likewise, pulling civilians out of combat zones (as the U.S. Navy did in
2006
, evacuating almost fifteen thousand Americans from Lebanon during the Israel-Hezbollah conflict discussed in Chapter
3
) brings Western forces into ambiguous conflict environments where mistakes can escalate quickly into lethal combat.
3
A second scenario can arise when governments are giving long-term assistance (sending military advisors, special operations forces, law enforcement support, or civilian development aid) to cities that are experiencing conflict. There are many examples of foreign advisors being kidnapped, held for ransom, or used as bargaining chips in local conflicts, and of special operations forces having to go in and rescue them. In remote, rural settings, these operations are dicey enough, but in crowded urban environments there's immense potential for things to go wrong, creating noncombatant casualties that provoke further conflict, or resulting in a rescue force getting pinned down or captured, prompting another, larger rescue, and thus creating an escalating spiral of conflict.
4
A third scenario is peacekeeping or peace enforcement. As urbanization continues, and the populations of developing countries continue to concentrate in coastal cities, any kind of population-centric operationâincluding peacekeeping, peace enforcement, and mass atrocity responseâis by definition going to be urban and coastal, too. Even where policy makers' intent is to resolve a conflict, monitor a truce, or police a cease-fire, putting peacekeepers into an urban conflict zone amounts to laying out an attractive array of targets for terrorist groups, local insurgents, street gangs, organized crime, or just commercial kidnapping networks, and this can force peacekeepers into combat at short notice. In fact, the very idea of peacekeeping becomes problematic when there's no structured peace to keep, no stable peacetime environment to return to, and no consistent set of actors to work withâmeaning that peacekeeping probably needs a rethink for the future conflict environment. Likewise, military forces may find themselves dragged into messy urban conflicts after state collapse or civil war, as the international community intervenes to prevent loss of life or ensure a particular outcome (as we saw in Libya in Chapter
4
).
Of course, armed forces may find themselves in urban littoral conflicts in conventional state-on-state war, too. As discussed in detail in Chapter
2
, just because a conflict starts out conventional doesn't mean it will stay that way (think Iraq), and several scenariosâincluding the more or less hypothetical cases of war with China, North Korea, or Iranâinvolve urbanized terrain, coastal cities, and constricted littoral sea space. It's unrealistic to imagine that an enemy in this scenario would stick to the open sea and air, where it will be easy for an advanced navy or air force to detect targets and apply its complete range of high-tech weapons systems. 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.
Finally, because of the increasingly dense networks of connectivity among cities and populations across the planet, expeditionary operations (where the military goes overseas to fight) may bring retaliatory attacks in home territoryâmost probably, again, in major citiesâthat will draw public safety organizations and military forces into lethal situations in urban areas. There have been several instances where members of immigrant communities engaged in attacks against Western citiesâeither ordered or indirectly inspired by nonstate armed groups in their countries of origin.
5
Enhanced connectivity has led to the spread of networked diaspora populations and the emergence of dark networks (discussed in Chapter
2
) such as the Shower Posse's transnational extortion racket. This points to an increasing threat that we might call “diaspora retaliation,” where adversaries hit back at an expeditionary military through diaspora networksâstriking the homeland directly as a means of influencing political leaders to call the troops off. Any country that engages in military operations in a part of the world from which it has an immigrant population now needs to take this possibility into account. At the same time, of course, democracies mustn't tar all immigrants with the same brush, or deny due process to citizens of foreign descentâand countries can leverage the talents, local knowledge, and connections of diaspora networks to help conduct more effective engagements overseas. All this will demand careful and balanced handling, and may dissuade some governments from overseas interventions altogether. But it clearly means that expeditionary operations bring with them a risk of domestic insecurity and increased threat to major cities.
The Multidomain Challenge
Thus, there are many ways in which military and law enforcement organizations might be drawn into crowded, coastal, urbanized conflicts. What will the environment be like when they get there? Well, it will be maddeningly complex, for a start.
In
1997
, the Commandant of the United States Marine Corps, General Charles C. Krulak, coined the idea of “three-block war” to describe the complexity and danger of urban asymmetric fighting, where Marines would engage simultaneously in combat, peacekeeping, and humanitarian operations, all within three city blocks.
6
As I noted in the acknowledgments at the start of this book, Krulak's notion was briefly influential in the Marines but was thrust aside by concepts such as counterinsurgency and stabilization operations as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan escalated.
7
Three-block war has been criticized on conceptual and practical grounds by thinkers including Frank Hoffman, John Agoglia, Walter Dorn, and Michael Varey because it doesn't cover the full range of operations in complex urbanized environments or because it's ill suited to be an overarching strategy (which, as Dorn and Varey note, Krulak never intended it to be).
8
I would offer a different comment: three-block war does a great job in underlining how complex, ambiguous, and rapidly changing the urban conflict environment will be (which was clearly Krulak's intent), but it mainly covers the ground tactical domain; an urbanized, littoral conflict will be vastly more complex even than this.