Out of the Mountains

by David Kilcullen

  The next key trend in that environment is littoralization—an unwieldy word that just means the tendency for things to cluster on coastlines. Urban growth isn’t evenly spread: rather, cities are concentrated in coastal (littoral) areas, within a few dozen miles of the sea. Already in 2012, 80 percent of people on the planet lived within sixty miles of the sea, while 75 percent of large cities were on a coast.27 Of twenty-five megacities (cities with 10 million or more inhabitants) at the turn of the twenty-first century, twenty-one were on a coast or a major river delta, while only four (Moscow, Beijing, Delhi, and Teheran) lay inland.28 By 2010, of the world’s ten largest cities, all but two were on a coastline or coastal delta.29

  Alongside the generic meaning of littoral as “coastal,” the term littoral zone has a specific military meaning, defined by available weapon systems. In a military sense, a littoral zone is the portion of land space that can be engaged using sea-based weapon systems, plus the adjacent sea space (surface and subsurface) that can be engaged using land-based weapon systems, and the surrounding airspace and cyberspace. In other words, a littoral zone is the sea space you can hit from the land, the land you can hit from the sea, and the airspace and cyberspace above both. Obviously enough, the area you can hit depends on the weapon you’re using, so as weapons get more capable and longer in range, the size of the area defined as “littoral” grows accordingly. Also, obviously, areas that are littoral for a military with long-range weapons and strike platforms may not be so for another military with shorter-range systems. However large or small littoral zones may be, the interaction among mutually influencing sea, land, air, and cyber spaces makes such zones highly complex systems that are vastly more dynamic than the sum of their parts.30

  The presence of ever-larger cities in this zone, with increasing population density, more intensive land usage, heavier ground movement, and busier air and sea traffic, makes an already complex system even denser and more complicated. For this reason, operations in littoral zones are very different from either continental (entirely land-based) or maritime (purely sea-air) operations. The practical effect of all this is that a huge proportion of the world’s population now lives in what we might call the “littoral influence zone”—a zone that, depending on available weapons, can stretch more than a hundred miles inland, and twice that distance offshore.

  One illustration of this occurred on the night of November 25, 2001, when Marines commanded by then Brigadier General James Mattis seized America’s first base in Afghanistan. This daring operation was the longest helicopter raid in history. It involved a night flight of 689 kilometers (370 nautical miles), from a ship at sea, by an assault force of Marines in troop-carrying helicopters, supported by attack helicopters and air-to-air refueling tankers. A team of Navy SEALs went in, four days before the assault, to conduct covert reconnaissance. The SEALs took real-time photographs of the site and emailed them back to the personal computers of planners on board the USS Peleliu, an amphibious assault ship operating in the Arabian Sea off the coast of Pakistan.31 On the night of the raid, troop-carrying helicopters launched from Peleliu, refueled in midair en route to the objective, and captured the site—an airstrip in southern Afghanistan, later known as Forward Operating Base (FOB) Rhino—without opposition. Once the strip was secured, transport aircraft brought in follow-on troops and expanded the Marines’ foothold. There is nothing obviously “coastal” about a remote, landlocked airstrip, far from the sea, in the middle of the Afghan desert. Yet the seizure of FOB Rhino was an outstanding example of littoral warfare—enabled by capabilities such as extended-range helicopters, air-to-air refueling, long-range communications and surveillance, and deep-penetration special operations. Modern naval forces can thus bring areas far from the sea into the littoral influence zone: the whole of Southeast Asia, the entire Mediterranean basin, and large parts of Australia, Africa, South America, and Central America are thus “littoral” in this sense, even when far from the sea.

  At the same time, patterns of coastal urbanization suggest that the number of people on the planet who live in this littoral influence zone is very high and growing fast. In the Mediterranean basin alone, the urban coastal population grew by 40 million between 1970 and 2000, and three-quarters of that growth was in North Africa and the Middle East.32 The Maghreb (Muslim northwest Africa), in particular, has exceptionally high rates of coastal urbanization, “striking examples being Libya (85 percent), Tunisia (70 percent), Morocco (51 percent) and Turkey (52 percent).”33 The two most urbanized of these countries (Tunisia and Libya) were also the most heavily affected by revolutions during the Arab Spring of 2011, while the uprisings in Egypt occurred almost entirely in a triangle of cities that all lie within a hundred miles of the sea, squarely within the littoral influence zone of the Mediterranean.

  These uprisings also saw the use of cell phones, social media, and text messaging as organizing tools, along with cross-pollination among activists in neighboring countries and the involvement of international media (all of which are described in detail in Chapter 4). This highlights the third major trend in the future environment: the world’s newly urban populations are highly connected and networked.

  This connectedness is both an internal and external feature of coastal cities, and it’s an entirely new phenomenon. As I noted in the introduction, factors such as population growth and coastal urbanization were very well understood in the 20th century—in the 1990s, many military theorists and urban planners were writing and speaking about the planet’s emerging urban littorals. But this was in the pre-cellphone area, before Internet access became common in the developing world, before satellite TV was widespread. What’s new today is the entirely unprecedented level of connectedness that these tools allow—and this changes the picture in some very important ways. In particular, connectedness has expanded dramatically, and is continuing to expand, not only within coastal cities but also between them and their hinterlands, from city to city, and between home populations and global networks, including diaspora populations.

  If you fly in a helicopter above any coastal city or slum settlement in the developing world, the most obvious rooftop feature is the forest of satellite dishes, TV antennas, and radio masts. This is just the most prominent visual indicator of how connected these areas are becoming. Indeed, in transitional and periurban areas (the informal settlements, slums, and townships that aggregate around the margins of cities and absorb a high proportion of new immigrants from the countryside) people can connect with national and international information flows to an unprecedented degree, however ineffective their government.

  For example, a 2011 study found that Somalia, a country that has experienced near-anarchy and state collapse for twenty years, has rates of cell phone usage approaching 25 percent—far greater than its neighbors, including relatively well-administered Ethiopia—and that there has been a remarkable proliferation of telecommunications companies offering “inexpensive and high-quality services . . . including internet access, international calls, and mobile connectivity. Some of them are closely connected with the remittance industry.”34 This vibrant remittance system is another major indicator of the connectivity between coastal cities such as Mogadishu, Somalia’s largest urban area, and the Somali diaspora (roughly 800,000 people worldwide—about 10 percent of the total Somali population).35 As one visitor to Mogadishu noted in 2011, “older parts of the city were falling apart, but the people there were still connected to the outside world via satellite dishes that were installed on roofs that leaked. In fact, one of my most enduring memories of Mogadishu is that of satellite dishes everywhere, even in areas that were heavily-controlled by militia.”36 This connectivity lets urban Somalis tap into global networks for the exchange of money and information, allows them to engage in trade, and lets them pursue legitimate business (such as mobile phone companies).37

  Of course, people who live in rural areas without cellphone coverage can’t access these connectivi
ty-enabled overseas sources of support. Thus, greater access to global systems of exchange—something that’s available only from well-connected urban locations—has become a major reason for people to migrate to cities, increasing the pace of urbanization. This is just one part of a broader pattern of economic change, driven by increasing global connectedness, that has seen investment by diaspora networks replace agricultural surplus as one of the main drivers of rural-to-urban migration in low-income countries.38

  The same connectivity that drives diaspora investment and licit trade, of course, also enables illicit flows such as people smuggling; the trafficking of weapons, drugs, and other contraband; piracy; and terrorism. One example of an illicit flow is charcoal export from Somalia—an environmentally devastating activity that destroys precious tree cover in sparsely vegetated semidesert areas. The United Nations banned the trade in February 2012, due to its connection with interclan violence and the Shabaab terrorist group: clans were basically fighting each other for the right to burn off Somalia’s few remaining trees and sell the ashes to foreigners. This destructive trade exploits the connectedness among coastal cities in the Horn of Africa, throughout the Arabian Gulf, and in the Red Sea. It relies on Somali and Arab coastal shipping and on groups such as Shabaab, which seek access to funds and are willing to trade (on any basis, licit or illicit) in order to get it.39 In a failed state—as Somalia was for the past two decades—concepts such as “illicit networks” ring hollow anyway, since no authority exists to declare things licit in the first place.

  In a deeper sense, networks themselves, by definition, are neither licit nor illicit. Behavior may be licit or illicit; networks just are. People self-organize in networks of all kinds, and they use those networks to engage in complex hybrid patterns of illicit and licit behavior. In this context, in common with researchers such as Sean Everton, I prefer to think of “dark networks”—dark in the sense that they are invisible to the naked eye.40 We might think of them as subterranean rivers of connectivity that run below and between the elements of the world we see. They can’t be observed directly unless we do something to stimulate the network, drawing a detectable response that illuminates it. The mere fact that a network is “dark” just means it’s not immediately visible—a systems characteristic that implies no value judgment on what the network does. In particular, the fact that a network is dark doesn’t mean it’s nefarious, nor that it’s engaged in harmful activity: indeed, in the real world, dark networks engage in many kinds of activities, beneficial, neutral, and harmful, all at the same time. Understanding the presence of these networks, their multipurpose nature, and the way their flows intersect is one of the key things we need to do if we hope to understand the future environment.

  Obviously enough, urbanization increases connectedness: as rural-to-urban migration continues, the newly urbanized populations that cluster in periurban settlements around an older city core may look marginalized (they literally live on the city’s margins, of course, and they may be sidelined in economic and social justice terms), but electronic communications, media, and financial systems connect them with people in their home villages and with relatives and friends overseas. And because large transportation nodes (such as airports, container hubs, or seaports) are often in transitional or periurban areas and tend to draw much of their workforce from these areas, periurban populations are closely connected with international trade and with transportation and migration patterns, both internal and external. This is especially true in coastal cities: as the economic geographer Gordon Hanson argues, “when joined with globalization and developments in export-led manufacturing, coastal ports and nearby cities have greater access to international markets, thus providing key advantages for economic growth.”41 This means that the apparently marginalized populations of the new coastal urban sprawl aren’t really marginal at all: on the contrary, they’re central to the global system as we know it.

  At the city level, workers from periurban areas often do the menial, manual, technical, or distasteful work that keeps an urban core functioning, and they sit astride key communication nodes that connect a city to the external world as well as to its food, energy, and water supplies. Wealthy neighborhoods tend to rely on services provided by workers who can’t afford to live in the upscale areas where they work, and who thus commute from outlying or transitional areas. Periurban areas therefore represent a kind of social connective tissue between a country’s urban centers and its rural periphery, connect that periphery to international networks (much as, say, the port facilities in the coastal city of Karachi connect Pakistan’s hinterland with the enormous Pakistani diaspora), and at the global level play a connective role in patterns of transportation, migration, finance, and trade. This exact phenomenon, as we shall see in Chapter 4, lay behind the rapid spread of uprisings during the Arab Spring.

  Getting Swamped

  Taking these four megatrends together, we can see a clear pattern. Rapid urban growth in coastal, underdeveloped areas is overloading economic, social, and governance systems, straining city infrastructure, and overburdening the carrying capacity of cities designed for much smaller populations. This is likely to make the most vulnerable cities less and less able to meet the challenges of population growth, coastal urbanization, and connectedness. The implications for future conflict are profound, with more people competing for scarcer resources in crowded, underserviced, and undergoverned urban areas.

  Lagos, capital of Nigeria, is one city that exemplifies both the positive and negative aspects of this kind of rapid urban growth. As the visiting journalist Josh Eells noted in May 2012:

  In the past five years, Lagos has exploded. Current estimates put the population somewhere between 15 and 18 million, with an annual growth rate of around 6 percent—one of the fastest-growing cities on the planet. By 2025 it’s expected to top 25 million, making it the third-largest city in the world, after Mumbai and Tokyo. The result is a place stretched to its breaking point: a Dickensian conurbation of overcrowded slums and nonexistent services. It’s also in some ways a city of the future: what happens when democracy, industrialization, and unchecked population growth collide in the developing world.42

  Lagos has the population of a megacity but the infrastructure of a midsized town. The city has only sixty-eight working traffic lights, making traffic “a force of nature”—“Lagosians have words for traffic the way Eskimos have words for snow: congestion, logjam, lockdown, holdup, gridlock, deadlock, and the wonderfully evocative go-slow. Horror stories abound: police attacking motorists with bullwhips, taxi drivers getting into fistfights, angry commuters backing over policemen with their SUVs.”43

  It’s not all bad: Lagos is also a city with an amazing capacity for community-driven innovation and self-organization. It has radio stations that specialize in reporting traffic, crime, and road conditions in particular districts, drawing on self-synchronized networks of motorists and road users who text and dial in, to create locally tailored networks that help people navigate complex conditions safely.44 Lagos is Spanish for “lakes,” of course, and the city is an exemplar of the future in this way, too: it’s built around a series of coastal swamps, low-lying islands, and lagoons—and no part of the city is more than sixteen feet above sea level. The implications for Lagos of climate change and a rise in sea level are thus potentially profound.

  The Asian Development Bank estimated in 2011 that drought, desertification, and soil salinity, exacerbated by climate change, will prompt millions of rural people to migrate to cities over coming decades across Asia and the Pacific alone. As the bank’s researchers noted, “the region is home to more than 4 billion people and some of the fastest growing cities in the world. By 2020, 13 of the world’s 25 megacities, most of them situated in coastal areas, will be in Asia and the Pacific. Climate change will likely exacerbate existing pressures on key resources associated with growth, urbanization and industrialization.”45 A growing body of research is
emphasizing the implications of climate change for coastal urbanization, where the slightest rise in sea level can cause major disruption.46 Whether or not you believe in human-made climate change, the fact is that even without any sea level rise, coastal urbanization will, by definition, put more of the world’s population at risk of flooding, creating greater demand for flood-related disaster relief (as we’ll see in the case of Dhaka, Bangladesh, in Chapter 5). Floods are already the most common natural disaster in the heavily urbanized Mediterranean basin, for example, and by far the most frequent natural disaster to which aid agencies and donors such as the World Bank have to respond—and as more people cluster in coastal cities, this will only increase.47

  Another side effect of the combination of climate change, coastal urbanization, and connectedness is a rise in infectious disease. Several studies have correlated slum settlements (particularly those created through rapid unplanned urbanization) with increased risk of insect-borne diseases such as malaria.48 Infectious diseases are more prevalent in urban areas, and seasonal flooding—which happens more often in coastal cities, of course—has been suggested as a major cause of increased disease transmission risk.49 At the same time, megacities create global population-mixing effects, and this makes traditional local-level approaches for disease surveillance, response, and public communication much less effective.50 People who live in transitional or periurban areas interact with residents of the densely populated urban cores where they work, and with users of public transportation systems, airports, and seaports. Combined with the global transmission belt of increased worldwide air and sea travel, and greater connectivity across the planet, this creates pathways for the extremely rapid global spread of infectious or exotic diseases—something that was seen in recent pandemic influenza episodes and in cases of bird flu.51