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 territory—most probably, again, in major cities—that 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 cities—either 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 networks—striking 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 descent—and 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.
In Chapter 1, I gave a general definition of a littoral zone as an area where the influences of land, sea, airspace, and cyberspace overlap. But when you start thinking about conflict in this zone in practical terms, it’s clear that there are in fact nine intersecting spaces in which military maneuver needs to take place, perhaps simultaneously or in close synchronization. These include the seabed, the submarine environment, the sea surface, and naval airspace (airspace over the sea), which together make up the maritime domain; the land surface, subterranean space, and supersurface space (to include tunnel systems, canals, sewers, basements, exterior street-level surfaces, building interiors, high-rise structures, and rooftops), making up the land domain; the airspace domain; and the domain of cyberspace. All these domains are in play in a littoral operation, and not just in state-on-state conflict: nonstate armed groups have fielded weapons and forces in all nine of these spaces, too. Colombian drug cartels, for example, have used submarines and semisubmersibles for narcotics trafficking (and possibly people smuggling); the Tamil Tigers built a fleet of small, fast attack boats; several insurgent groups have created air capabilities including drones and remote-controlled aircraft; terrorists employed vessel-borne bombs against the USS Cole in 2000 and the MV Limburg in 2002; and subterranean operations have long been common in urban fighting. Likewise, in Chapter 2 we noted that Lashkar-e-Taiba’s raid on Mumbai was only one of several sea-based raids of this kind, and by no means the first.
The intersection of these nine spaces—each with complex problems in its own right—poses intricate coordination challenges and creates an enormously cluttered environment that hampers intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance. This exponentially increases the difficulty for commanders in understanding and maneuvering through littoral zones. It also makes it harder to integrate the effects of the remote warfare capabilities discussed in Chapter 4 (such as drones, cyberwarfare, or special operations) that are virtually, rather than physically, in theater. When we consider the different, often conflicting legal authorities that apply to civilian populations and combatants, to traffic within and outside territorial seas and airspace, and to military, law enforcement, emergency management, customs, and border security agencies, the challenges are even more complex.
Second, the littoral battlespace will be extremely heavily populated. This is obvious enough in the land domain, with civilians living (in their millions) in megaslums or large cities. But it’s also true of seaspace and airspace. I frequently hear army officers (and sometimes marines) comment that since people live on land, the land domain is populated, while the maritime and airspace domains are not. That’s true in one sense—obviously enough, Homo sapiens is a terrestrial mammal, so if you want to decisively defeat a human enemy or control a population, you need to engage people where they live, on land. But if you look at the stunning satellite images of global air, land, and sea traffic patterns produced by Felix Pharand-Deschenes for the Cartography of the Anthropocene project, it’s clear that air and sea space—with thousands of coastal ships and small boats, hundreds of aircraft, and permanent installations such as offshore terminals and oil rigs—is densely inhabited.9
This imposes severe constraints on targeting, the use of weapons systems as well as radar and sonar, and rules for stop-and-search. It also makes fast littoral maneuver extremely difficult. The Sri Lankan navy, for example, during the Tamil insurgency, found itself in a densely populated coastal environment. Dozens of small, fast, heavily armed Sea Tiger raiding craft were able to hide among the thousands of fishing boats, cargo vessels, and passenger ferries operating along Sri Lanka’s coastline.10 This allowed the Tigers to move people, weapons, and supplies from point to point along the coast, extract forces from encirclement, insert raiders to strike population centers at will, run smuggling operations, and position mother ships far out at sea as mobile bases. It proved extremely difficult to defend large warships against small, fast-moving vessels that could dart in and out of coastal coves and inlets, hide in civilian traffic, and approach within striking distance without detection.11 In order to defeat this threat, ultimately the Sri Lankan navy had to develop innovative new tactics, deploy a swarm of small craft of its own (the 4th Fast Attack Flotilla), acquire a new radar system to distinguish Tiger vessels from fishing boats by their speed and acceleration, and target the Sea Tigers’ mother ships.12
This need to operate in heavily trafficked coastal waterways isn’t unique to counterinsurgencies. For example, as land routes from Mexico into the United States have become harder to use over the past several years, smugglers have begun to bypass the land border, using small boats to smuggle people and drugs into California. This has required greater U.S. Coast Guard activity, as well as riverine and harbor security operations in large coastal cities such as San Diego.13 Police forces in Los Angeles County and even farther north have had to account for this littoral threat.14 Likewise, in 2011, Brazilian police were forced to form a
new antipiracy task group, to operate on the Amazon basin in Brazil’s northern Pará province. The task group is a rapid-response force that includes fifty police officers and eight armed vessels, aimed at a growing pattern of piracy in inland waterways.15 While Pará is primarily rural, attacks have occurred in urban canals and harbors, including the port of Manaus, capital of Amazonas province—a city of almost two million that lies several hundred miles inland on the Amazon, the world’s largest hydrographic basin.16 Similar police and coast guard forces have been created in cities around the world, reflecting another aspect of the environment: the urban riverine.
Most coastal cities include inland waterways—rivers, canals, and inlets, as well as harbors, offshore terminals, and docks. This overlap between sea and land environments means that riverine capabilities—such as U.S. Special Operations Command’s special boat teams (SBTs), and naval special warfare capabilities in general—are vital for expeditionary forces that need to maintain themselves in a littoral city for any length of time. SBTs represent the high end of the spectrum, with their ability to quickly deploy swarms of small, armored, shallow-draft, extremely heavily armed attack craft known as special operations craft–riverine (SOC-R). These are fast, quiet, highly maneuverable mini-gunboats that can move at up to forty knots in as little as twenty-six inches of water and can be carried and air-dropped by C-130 cargo aircraft, to be inserted anywhere in the world at short notice. This gives SBTs an ability to insert and extract teams, provide supporting fire, gather intelligence, act as a command and communications platform, evacuate wounded, bring in supplies, and move forces along shallow, restricted waterways.17 All these capabilities are needed in urban riverine environments, where buildings typically come right to the water’s edge (giving adversaries hard cover and letting them overlook waterways from concealed and elevated firing positions) and where small boats and other river traffic pose constant hazards. SOC-Rs and their special warfare combatant–craft crewmen (SWCCs) saw considerable urban combat in Iraq, including on the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers in and around Baghdad and in Basra.18 SEALs and SWCCs worked closely together, often with helicopters and drones in support, and sometimes with combat swimmers and mini-submersibles (known as SEAL delivery vehicles), creating a highly effective but small and agile integrated sea-air-ground team.19
Many military forces have realized that to operate in an urban littoral they’ll need similar capabilities. In Basra, British Special Boat Service (SBS) teams and members of 539 Assault Squadron Royal Marines operated rigid-hulled inflatable boats (some of which were armored) in urban canals and harbors, getting into many close-combat fights in the city’s inland waterways.20 The SBS also operates SEAL delivery vehicles, and U.S. Marines (who also maintain a special operations riverine capability) formed a special task force that operated riverine assault craft in engagements on Iraq’s inland lakes and rivers. Across the world, in Scandinavia’s heavily indented coastline, Swedish coastal forces have long operated armored fast combat craft known as CB-90s, which can maneuver in restricted fjords and around coastal islands and ports; provide suppressive fire, surveillance, and radio communications; and insert or extract up to twenty-one fully armed infantry.21 Several countries (including Malaysia, Mexico, Brazil, Greece, Norway, Germany, and the United States) have acquired CB-90s for coastal operations, including constabulary and law enforcement. Many of these countries field CB-90s in urban canals and harbors.
Harbors point to another major challenge in the urban littoral: the risk posed by industrial zones that contain hazardous materials or destructive forces. These include chemical plants, power stations (sometimes nuclear), petroleum refineries, fuel storage areas, and bulk loading terminals. Hazards can occur accidentally—before or during a conflict—or be deliberately triggered by an adversary. The most notorious example of this kind of accidental hazard, and the worst industrial disaster in history, was the December 1984 Bhopal disaster, in which a pesticide factory in the city of Bhopal, capital of India’s Madhya Pradesh province, released thirty-two metric tons of toxic gas into urban shantytowns and slums, killing more than fifteen thousand people and leaving half a million with long-term health problems.22 Emergency services were overwhelmed, and public safety across Madhya Pradesh was compromised, with refugee flows disrupting neighboring towns. Public unrest due to dissatisfaction with the government’s response prompted a security crackdown that triggered further violence.23 Almost thirty years later, the cause of the disaster has still not been fully settled—an investigation sponsored by the plant owner, Union Carbide, concluded that a disgruntled worker could have sabotaged a pesticide storage tank, while another theory is that poor maintenance procedures by a cleaning crew led to the release.24
Whatever the cause, it’s clear that this kind of disaster can both trigger military involvement (in a cleanup, humanitarian response, or security operation in the aftermath of an incident), and dramatically exacerbate the difficulty of such an intervention. It can also occur during an ongoing military operation, after a force is already in place, putting both local civilians and intervening military personnel in grave danger. In a harbor city, there are also risks from seaborne cargo (ships carrying explosives, fuel, or other dangerous goods) that can cause immense damage not only to ports but also to the wider city—as in the devastating 1917 Halifax explosion or the 1947 Texas City disaster, each of which involved cargo explosions on ships in harbors that killed thousands of people and devastated enormous urban areas.25 These accidents occurred outside combat zones; the risk may be even worse in a conflict, in cities experiencing crises that prevent industrial workers from conducting maintenance or attending to safety issues, or simply in places that lack appropriate infrastructure. This means that armed forces in the urbanized littoral will need to be able to protect and decontaminate themselves, help the public, manage mass population movement and possible panic, and continue operations under conditions of chemical, biological, radiological, or nuclear contamination, even if there’s no clear enemy present or the only likely adversary is a nonstate armed group.
Indeed, in this environment, nonstate armed groups will be both the most likely enemies and the most likely allies for an intervening force. The enemy part is obvious, the alliance aspect perhaps less so. As discussed in Chapter 3, competitive control isn’t a one-way process in which armed actors dominate a passive, supine population—on the contrary, unarmed populations intensively manipulate the armed groups in their midst. Intervening forces in chaotic environments quickly receive offers of help from a variety of local people, who offer logistical support, suggest themselves as guides or auxiliaries, or offer to organize the population. This is even more common in urban areas, with educated populations, than in rural settings. Of course, local alliances aren’t necessarily bad, but they do impose an obligation to be wary of being manipulated or used to settle local scores, and to carefully vet potential allies. Any outside intervener who takes on a local partner becomes tainted by that partner’s baggage—local feuds going back over generations, things that happened in the immediate run-up to intervention, or family affiliations all now attach, inadvertently and perhaps unconsciously, to the outside actor. In every operation of this kind in which I’ve been involved, we’ve always developed relationships early on that we regretted later, once we came to understand local players’ backgrounds. The entire Human Terrain System was established to address this problem in Iraq and Afghanistan, but in each case we’d already allied ourselves with local actors with negative baggage, or summarily rejected offers of help from others (such as the Iraqi tribal sheikhs who offered to work with the coalition in 2003) who later proved crucial to our efforts.
This suggests that pre-conflict sensing—trying to understand as much as possible about a given environment before it gets into crisis, so that we know the relationships among different actors in the society, understand the extent of different groups’ territorial control or popular support, and can track flows and patter
ns in cities and towns that explain their systems logic—will be critically important. Hyperlocal context, the sort of open-source (but denied-area) information that relies on insider insights, will be essential here, and this information will need to be time-stamped and geospatially located in order to make sense. It will be too late to surge knowledge and understanding, or the trust that comes from it, once a crisis is already under way. In a connected world, this kind of pre-conflict sensing need not involve anything intrusive or underhand—no nefarious sneaking around or spying—since most of what we need to know is open-source information, is already being gathered and published by local people and civil society organizations, or is well known to diasporas in our own countries. Triangulating among various groups’ perceptions and gathering on-the-ground information to correlate with and corroborate remote sensing data will still be a requirement, but this is vastly easier today than at any time in the past.
When nonstate armed groups in urban areas do become our enemies, we can expect to see the same kinds of swarm tactics discussed in Chapter 2, as well as the networked collaboration between online and street-level groups examined in Chapter 4. We will encounter small, lightly equipped, fast-moving groups of adversaries who can operate on water, on land and possibly in the air, can move through the city by “infesting” it (as discussed in Chapter 2), and can synchronize actions across multiple groups and wide areas using cellphones, text messages, Twitter feeds, and visual signals. They will engage superior forces using hit-and-run tactics, will hide in the complex physical terrain of a city, will target the population rather than security forces, and will exploit complex human and informational terrain to avoid getting pinned down in a straight fight that they might lose. Thus, one of the main frustrations of operating in this environment will be the fleeting and distributed nature of combat engagements, where the enemy is rarely if ever seen, fights can be over in seconds, and you always seem to get to the scene of an incident just a little too late. In Krulak’s terms, this will be three-block war, but on one block.
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