The Future of War?: Expect to see urban, connected, irregular 'zombie' conflicts

By
David Kilcullen


Best
Defense future of war entrant

Thinking about future wars starts with
understanding current trends that are shaping conflict. Here are a few to
consider.

The first two are urbanization and population
growth. Since the industrial revolution, world population has shot up, from 750
million in 1750, to 3 billion in 1960, to 7 billion today. By mid-century there
will be 9.5 billion people on the planet, 75 percent of them in large cities.
Most will be coastal (80 percent of people already live within 50 miles of the
sea), with the fastest growth in the least developed parts of Africa, Asia, and
Latin America. The next 30 years could see 3 billion new urban-dwellers in the
developing world. The planet's most fragile cities may have to absorb the same
number of people that it took all of human history to generate, across the
entire globe, right up until 1960.

Edgar Pieterse, head of the Africa Center for
Cities, talks of "dramatic, disruptive change in only one generation" while the
urban theorist Mike Davis has written of an emerging "planet of slums" -- and
it's a fair bet that this will affect conflict, making wars even more coastal
and urban than they've always been, and further blurring the boundaries between
crime and warfare.

A newer, more disruptive trend is the explosion
in connectivity that has occurred in the same areas of the developing world
over the past decade. In 2000, for example, fewer than 10 percent of Iraqis had
cellphone reception, while Syria, Somalia, and Libya had no significant
cellphone systems at all -- Syria had just 30,000 cellphones for 16 million
people, while Libya had only 40,000. Ten years later, there were 10 million
cellphone subscribers in Iraq and 13 million in Syria, while Internet and
satellite TV access had massively expanded. Nigeria went from 30,000 cellphones
to 113 million in the same decade.

Connectivity has huge effects on conflict:
democratizing and weaponizing communications technology, and putting into the
hands of individuals a suite of lethal tools that used to belong only to
nation-states.

In August 2011, for example, in the Libyan
coastal city of Misrata, school children used mobile phones to mark Gaddafi
regime sniper positions on Google Earth, allowing French warships off the coast
to target them. In the same battle, rebels used smartphone compass apps and
online maps to adjust rocket fire in the city's streets. Syrian fighters use
iPads and Android phones to adjust mortar fire, and video game consoles and
flat-screen TVs to control homemade tanks. Snipers use iPhone apps and cellphone
cameras to calculate, then record, their shots.

The technology writer John Pollock has
brilliantly described the role of online activists in the Arab Spring, not only
for political mobilization, but also for logistics and tactical coordination --
as in April 2011 when Libyan rebels, at night in the open field, planned an
assault on a rocket launcher via a multinational Skype hookup. None of this
would have been possible a decade ago.

This democratized connectivity will
increasingly allow distant players to participate directly in conflicts. For
nation-states, we see this "remote warfare" trend in the Predator remotely
piloted aircraft, which can be flown from the other side of the planet through
satellite uplinks. But non-state groups can play the same game: In 2009, Iraqi
insurgents pointed ordinary satellite TV dishes at the sky, then used
Skygrabber, a $26 piece of Russian software, to intercept the Predator uplink.
The guerrillas had hacked the Predators's control system, far easier than
shooting down the actual aircraft.

There are constants in war, alongside these new
trends. Most wars are, and have always been, "irregular" -- conflicts where a
major combatant is a non-state armed group. Over the past 200 years, only about
20 percent of wars were state-on-state "conventional" conflicts -- the other 80
percent involved insurgents, militias, pirates, bandits, or guerrillas. Indeed,
interstate conventional war, though incredibly dangerous, is happening less and
less frequently, though irregular wars and intrastate conflicts remain common.

Irregular conflicts tend to be "zombie wars"
which keep coming back to life just as we think they're over. Iraq is a case in
point: By late 2009, through urban counterinsurgency, partnership with
communities, and intensive reconciliation efforts, U.S. forces had severely
damaged al Qaeda and brought civilian deaths to the lowest level in years: Only
89 civilians were killed across all of Iraq in December 2009, down from over 1,000
per month in mid-2008, and a shocking 3,000 per week in late 2006. But rapid
and complete U.S. withdrawal in 2010 -- combined with sectarian politics and
the reinvigoration of al Qaeda through the Syrian war -- pulled the rug from
under local communities, reviving a conflict that a succession of U.S. leaders,
on both sides of politics, have been incorrectly claiming was over ever since
May of 2003. Likewise, in places like Afghanistan, Colombia, Somalia, Congo,
the Central African Republic, Mali, and Sudan, current outbreaks are not new --
rather, they're revivals of generations-old conflicts that keep coming back.
Colombia's FARC rebel movement, for example, turns 60 in 2014.

A final constant worth mentioning is what we
might call "conflict entrepreneurs" -- fighters who aren't so much trying to
win a war, but prolonging it to generate wealth or authority in fragmented
societies. Somali clans, Afghanistan's Haqqani network, and gangs like Kenya's
Mungiki or Mexico's Zetas fall into this category: They fight not for victory,
but to keep conflicts going for their own benefit. Turning conflict
entrepreneurs into stakeholders in stability is a huge and daunting task.

What does all this suggest about future war?
Well, as America and its allies pass -- thankfully -- away from an era of
large-scale intervention in overseas counterinsurgencies, it's tempting to
think that each year's crop of new irregular wars is just so much background
noise that we can afford to ignore. Unfortunately, that's not true anymore, if
it ever was: In an increasingly urbanized, massively connected world, where
empowered individuals and non-state groups will access communications and
weapons technology that used to be the preserve of nation-states and future
conflicts will leap international boundaries, we ignore these conflicts at our
peril.

One crystal clear lesson for future war emerges
from the last decade. This is that unilateral intervention in other people's
wars is not the way to go -- and neither is large-scale counterinsurgency
which, though doable, is extraordinarily difficult, and far from desirable in
humanitarian, financial, or political terms. Interventions, particularly
counterinsurgencies, must be an absolute last resort. But ignoring future
conflicts doesn't work either -- urban, zombie, irregular crime-wars, that leap
national boundaries and feature non-state groups with technology and
connectivity only states used to have, will spread rapidly, sucking in
surrounding regions, as Syria is doing now, and as Afghanistan did before 9/11.

Dr.
David Kilcullen is a former Australian soldier,
diplomat, and policy advisor for the United States and other governments. He is
the founder and non-executive chairman of Caerus
Associates ,
a research and design consultancy, and the author, most recently, of Out
of the Mountains .