The future is urban.
By 2030, urban areas are expected to grow by 1.4 billion, with that growth occurring
almost entirely in the developing world.
Cities will account for 60% of the world's population and 70% of the world's GDP.
The urban environment will be the locus where drivers of instability will converge.
It is the domain that by the year 2030, 60% of urban dwellers will be under the age of
18.
The cities that grow the fastest will be the most challenged as resources become constrained
and illicit networks fill the gap left by overextended and undercapitalized governments.
The risk of natural disasters compounded by geography, climate changes, unregulated growth
and substandard infrastructure intersect to frustrate humanitarian relief.
Growth will magnify the increasing separation between rich and poor.
Religious and ethnic tensions will be a defining element in the social landscape.
Stagnation will coexist with unprecedented development as impoverishment, slums and shanty
towns rapidly expand alongside modern high-rises, technological advances and ever-increasing
levels of prosperity.
This is the world of our future.
It is one we are not prepared to effectively operate within and it is unavoidable.
Mega cities are complex systems where people and structures are compressed together in
ways that defy both our understanding of city planning and military doctrine.
It is an ecosystem that demands a highly agile and adaptive force to successfully operate
within.
Infrastructures will vary radically, with concentrations of high-tech transportation,
globally connected air and seaports, contemporary water, utilities and waste disposal, intermixed
with open landfills, overburdened sewers, polluted water and makeshift power grids.
Living habitats will extend from the high-rise to the ground-level cottage to subterranean
labyrinths, each defined by its own social code and rule of law.
Social structures will be equally challenged if not dysfunctional, as historic ways of
life clash with modern living, ethnic and racial differences are forced to live together
and criminal networks offer opportunity for the growing mass of unemployed.
This becomes the nervous system of non-nation state, unaligned individuals and organizations
that live and work in the shadows of national rule.
Where physical domains can be seen, digital domains will have limitless potential to breed
and expand without limit.
Digital security and trade will be increasingly threatened by sophisticated illicit economies
and decentralized syndicates of crime to give adversaries global reach at an unprecedented
level.
This will add to the complexities of human targeting, as a proportionally smaller number
of adversaries intermingle with a larger and increasing number of citizens.
The scale and density of these domains is daunting.
In a city of 10 million, where you hold the support of 99% of the population, the remaining
1% represents a threat of 100,000.
It is an environment of convergence hidden amongst the enormous scale and complexity
of the megacity.
These are the future breeding grounds, incubators and launching pads for adversaries and hybrid
threats.
Linked globally, these are man-made labyrinths that provide refuge and movement across the
vast sections of these cities where alternate forms of governance have taken control.
The advice of doctrine from Sun Tzu to current field manuals has provided two fundamental
options.
Avoid the cities or establish a cordon to either wait out the adversary or drain the
swamp of non-combatants and engage the remaining adversaries in high intensity conflict within
them.
Even our counterinsurgency doctrine, honed in the cities of Iraq and the mountains of
Afghanistan, is inadequate to address the sheer scale of population in the future urban
reality.
From the streets of Ahen to the citadel in Wei, we have defeated adversaries who attempted
to use urban terrain to their advantage.
Urban conflict is written deep into the army's histories.
But in tomorrow's conflict, these megacities are orders of magnitude greater in complexity,
and our current options do not meet strategic ends.
Our future operations must allow us to rapidly return the city to the people.
They will be too large and complex to isolate or cordon in their entirety, yet our soldiers
will have to operate within these ecosystems with minimal disruption and flow.
Our current and past strategies can no longer hold.
We are facing environments that the masters of war never foresaw.
We are facing a threat that requires us to redefine doctrine and the force and radically
new in different ways.
The future army will confront a highly sophisticated urban-centric threat that will require that
urban operations become the core requirement for the future land force.
The threat is clear, our direction remains to be defined, the future is urban.
