“If the natural utilization of productive forces is impeded by the property system, the increase in technical devices, in speed, and in the sources of energy will press for an unnatural utilization, and this is found in war. The destructiveness of war furnishes proof that society has not been mature enough to incorporate technology as its organ, that technology has not been sufficiently developed to cope with the elemental forces of society.” Walter Benjamin, “The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction” Illuminations [New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1968]: 242.

Urban Operations: Contemporary architect/urbanists like to praise the wild unruly nature of urban growth, believing that order will emerge spontaneously from a city’s chaotic condition. An unbounded expanse of urban substance has erased from their minds any desire to impose a rational plan or regulatory control over the disorganized urban terrain. It is impossible for them to conceptualize the future of cities when all differences, identity and tradition have been discarded in the dust bin of outmoded practices. If the architect/urbanist can no longer sustain the idea of projective city plans, or theorizing about urban development and population characteristics in emerging nations, this is not so for the US military which over the last decade has developed a strange juxtaposition of urban planning procedures, geographical imagination and military strategies termed ‘military operations on urbanized terrain’ or ‘urban operations’. It has long been an assumption of military planners that fighting in urban areas has its pitfalls. In repetitive citations, almost all the military journal articles placed under review in order to discover what is meant by ‘urban operations’ make reference to the ancient master of war Sun Tzu who advised as early as 500 B.C that

“the worst policy is to attack cities. Attack cities only when there is no alternative ... [T]hose skilled in war ... capture his [enemies’] cities without assaulting them and overthrow his state without protracted operations.”

Modern sensibilities chafe at widespread collateral damage and killing of noncombatants that urban warfare necessarily entails. Yet urban operations seem unavoidable and inevitable and so the ‘transformation in military affairs’ is concerned not only with how to operate on urban terrain but how to deploy the most highly advanced information technology to guarantee that strikes are swift, collateral damage minimized, and violence sanitized. In fact urban operations and net-centric warfare are so intimately intertwined in the minds of military strategists that one can not be described without the other. It is hoped that information technology will bring about the virtualization of war carried on at a safe distance with minimal casualties inflicted except on the enemy where accurate records seem not to be kept. (In the Gulf war 270 Americans lost their lives, in the Mogadishu raid 18 Americans were killed, in Kosovo campaign no lives were lost; there are no accompanying lists for enemy losses).

Perhaps the 1991 Gulf war was the last war to be fought on a traditional battlefield, planned and strategized on two-dimensional maps. Carried out in its purest form, as a war on a sand table in open terrain, it may have been the last war in which cities such as Kuwait City, Baghdad, Tel Aviv, while under attack, were incidental to the planning of military strategy. Operation Desert Storm proved that high-tech capabilities of air power are not only dominant but decisive. While Iraqi military leadership learned that fighting a conventional war in the wide-open spaces of the Arabian Peninsula was a hopeless strategy. It is now assumed that warfare is information-based, giving technological superiority to the force that can collect, process and disseminate an uninterrupted flow of information yet deny its adversary the ability to do the same.

Operation Iraqi Freedom in 2003 was the first serious test of this assumption. Beginning in the spring of 2002, the US army began to collect and archive all relevant national imagery and commercial digital terrain data for Iraq: data on vegetation, water resources, elevations and size of buildings, satellite imagery, and maps of all varieties, etc. Correlated databases provided a common operating picture of the battlefield and enabled the US Army to achieve a stunning victory over the Iraqi army.

During the invasion of Iraq, US military commanders constantly gathered and analyzed intelligence on the enemy in real time from many different sources. About 3,000 commanders shared ‘a tactical intranet’ with a map overlay, which always let everyone know where everybody was. They could offer an operational assessment down to the level of the corps. Special forces with cellphones provided news that was used to stop demolitions of oil wells or dams; they monitored enemy signals, used imagery and GPS as the leading source of tactical intelligence. A ‘warfighting web’ linked Air Force Space Command with ground forces equipped with 100,000 GPS receivers, one each to most squads of nine soldiers or five Marines. Soldiers on the ground, however, were left without the ability to receive much less process such complicated data flows during the fluid and rapid tempo of combat operations. Just taking a few seconds to check or retrieve data could produce error and sudden tragedy. Nevertheless and in spite of these drawbacks, the belief remains unshaken that US technological superiority will guarantee military dominance on any geographical terrain.

It is not the US military that desires to fight in cities where its technological supremacy may become useless. To counter US military superiority, especially that of aerial warfare and overhead surveillance, the Iraqi enemy developed innovative modes of ‘attack’ or unconventional responses that avoided directly confronting the wall of US military might. They selected a strategy of chaos hoping to achieve victory by avoiding defeat. Their key objective is to convince the US that no clear solution or end-state is possible except the cessation of chaos. The US military may have decapitated Saddam’s regime, but in the aftermath ‘insurgents’ or ‘urban guerillas’ understood that the asymmetrical power of US technological superiority could be thwarted even neutralized by taking refuge in complex and uncertain urban terrains. They quickly moved the battlefield into Iraq’s sixteen largest cities, which together hold 70% of the country’s population. The conclusion is simple as one military commander put it: “We have seen the future war, and it is urban.” The days of warfare defined by Carl von Clausewitz as fought on open fields between two symmetrical armies are over. Warfare once again has entered the city.

Three data sets underscore the impact worldwide urbanization has had on US military operations. United Nations population statistics and urban growth rates project that population growth between 2000 and 2030 will be concentrated in urban areas. Sometime within the next two decades one out of two people will live in urban environments, and one out of two will live in ‘water stressed’ areas. By the year 2054 it is projected the world’s population will reach the 9 billion mark. Sixty percent of these people will live in Asia, 20% in Africa, only 7% in Europe. In addition, documentation by the Heritage Foundation on the number of military units assigned to countries between 1950 and 2003, plus data collated by the Defense Departments on U.S. military responses to oppositional situations around the world between 1990 and 2002 combine to yield an overall picture that US military engagement in rapidly urbanizing areas of the world is dramatically increasing.

Thus the US military understands that future warfare will not only be fought on urban battlefields, but since it considers itself to be a ‘force-projection power’ is likely to face adversaries on foreign soil, amidst alien and possibly unfriendly noncombatants in unknown and complex urban terrains. It is easy to conclude that the complexity of urban systems, their vulnerable infrastructure and volatile populations have become a new focus for military strategists. Whether for military or peace-keeping engagements, whether to calm ethnic clashes or stabilize competition for resources and suppress criminal anarchy, urban operations require revolutionizing military operations to deal effectively with complexity, uncertainty, and chaos. It is essential now to answer two vitally important questions: is it possible to seize and control a city without reducing it to rubble and what strategies are necessary to achieve military success on urban terrain?

The military bases their strategy for urban operations on two major assumptions. In order to take a city apart, one has to first know how to put it together, to understand the relative importance of its component parts and how these interact. Urban geography and processes of urbanization must be studied and known. Without any architects/urbanists noticing, a shadow system of urban research has been established and funded by the military. Military advisers now suggest that students of urban warfare study the highly related but little explored literature of urban design, city planning and municipal management. Analytical insights must then be brought to bear on military strategies because the process of planning a city and strategies of urban warfare are closely related. The vastness of built-up areas of cities make uniform application of assets and forces ineffective unless military advisers understand at what points of the cityscape they should focus and how much pressure they can apply. The second assumption is that urban warfare has a long history, and this history must also be studied, the advantages and disadvantages of specific urban designs on strategies must be understood, and lessons drawn from forces facing similar problems and effecting similar or different solutions.

Nevertheless, cities still present major barriers to warfare and have conventionally been viewed as an inferior kind of military terrain, usually a distraction from the main military effort. Wars are seldom won in cities, and it has long been assumed the moment an army crosses the line between landscape and cityscape, the terrain quickly turns against the invaders transforming routine operations into operations that are anything but routine. Cities and armies are antagonistic to each other: for the army a city offers opportunity for unopposed violence and plunder, for the city the army is a monster, bent on its annihilation.

Modern military operations on urban terrain reach back to the 19th century to the time when cities expanding in population burst beyond their protective walls. For example, the last wall around Paris, the fifth system of fortification, was built in 1840-41; built as much for protection against invaders as it was for defense against internal disorder. In fact the deterrent effect of these fortifications seems to have been ineffective. Marshal Bugeaud-d’Isly was well aware after the year of revolutions in 1848 that the military had to be trained to combat civil discord in the streets of Paris, to overcome the troop’s paralysis when confronted with a milling crowd of agitators, malcontents and delinquents revolting against the rule of law and usurping the sacred name of ‘the people’. Bugeaud knew that time was essential in ‘the war of the streets’: that every hour given to the agitators enabled them to raise their barricades, perfect their lines of command and communication, even augment their morale. Plans must be prepared to guard the major symbolic locations, always under attack in civil unrest, major points such as the Hotel de Ville, the national Assembly, or the Tuileries. And plans must be developed to occupy in advance principle houses that commanded a view along several streets, guarding major arteries and bridges that serviced a district day and night. Each house must be conceived as a permanent small fortress, provided with food, water, ammunition and manned around the clock so that at the slightest provocation soldiers could pierce the wall of resistance, break down barricades, repave streets and care for the wounded. With prudent foresight insurgents would never gain the advantage of time, be allowed to rebuild their barricades at night, or retake terrain that had been abandoned.

Yet Paris remained the classic city of rebellion and revolution haunted its present and future throughout the 19th century. Three monarchies, three republics, and two empires would be overthrown in just over eighty years. No doubt threat of insurrections yet to come was in the mind of Napoleon III when he commissioned Baron von Haussmann in the 1860s to modernize the city. Haussmann’s improvements made sure that working class neighborhoods where barricades had once been erected were demolished as he pierced major new boulevards through pockets of urban resistance, allowing military troops to circulate with ease, and water, air and light to cleanse unsavory conditions. Such aggressive ‘haussmannization’ making rubble in the streets an everyday reality only cemented the link between revolution and urbanization and raised the specter of dramatic disruptions and reconfigurations yet to come. The fall of the empire in 1870 and the bitter military defeat of France by the Prussians closed the century of revolutionary combat in the streets.

Instead the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 and the storming of Paris [1870-1871] introduced the modern age of siege warfare. The French had been routed in a series of field battles, Napoleon III had been deposed by a popular uprising, and the city was surrounded by the German Third Army, so it was expected that Paris would soon capitulate because its seething populace bottled up within the city would bring about its own demise. But quite to the surprise of General Helmuth von Moltke, the chief of the Prussian Great General Staff, nothing like that took place. Instead French irregulars were attacking Germans lines of communication outside the city from the rear while the meagerly armed forces and citizen soldiers inside Paris were planning for a long and self-sacrificing resistance. They hoped to lure the Germans into the city where they would be entrapped. The Germans on the other hand had no intention of storming Paris, but expected that rioting and mutiny within the irregular French army would bring the city to the negotiating table. To hasten such inevitability, the Germans decided to force Paris to surrender by hunger alone. Intended results were not immediate so the impatient Germans began to bombard the city. For one month they sent three to four hundred shells per day with little damage or results except to improve the morale of the French.

There was no military reason for this bombardment: French ratios were low and starvation threatened. The Germans, however, believed that time was against them. As war dragged on and the French both inside and outside the city kept up their resistance, European opinion began to turn against Germany and in favor of France. Although the resistance had little hope of breaking the siege and reversing the German military success, still von Moltke understood that winning on the battlefield itself was a thing of the past unless an invading army was willing to reduce a city to rubble. A new dawn of urban warfare had been born: henceforth battles were fought to create conditions in which war would be won on the tables of diplomacy. Pounding the city will bombs would hasten this result. Thus armistice was soon declared, and on the 1st of March 1871 German troops entered the city of Paris.

With the advent of airplane as a new instrument of warfare during WWI, military strategists began to imagine how battles might be won by air power alone. While considering plans for the future development of Moscow in 1930, Le Corbusier was strikingly aware that a formidable new menace threatened all urban existence. Lieutenant Colonel Vauthier had just given him a copy of his book entitled The Aerial Danger and the Future of the Country. .Le Corbusier understood that the air would be the new theater of military operations and that the threat of aerial warfare emanated not only from explosive projectiles that could destroy a city’s built structures, but also from poison gas and chemical warfare that could asphyxiate its inhabitants, and from flammable liquids that could spread a firestorm beyond imagination. A city could be destroyed all at once. But it just so happened, quite without realizing it, that Le Corbusier had already provided a necessary defense against this new danger of aerial warfare in his studies for Urbanisme [1925] and in his book Precisions [1930].

He proposed the construction of housing in reinforced concrete, a material strong enough to withstand the impact of bombs and was fireproof. He also proposed these structures be isolated in great open spaces, that housing, commerce and industry be located in separate zones, and that the entire built surface of the city be reduced. These were essential conditions needed to lessen the exposure of built structures to aerial attack but also to contain the spread of any conflagration. To avoid the disaster of poisonous gas, his proposal for suppressing meager courtyards and narrow corridor streets, along with the provision of wide open spaces and housing raised on piloti, would allow sufficient wind and water from protected hydrants or large open air swimming pools to cleanse the air. Le Corbusier asked Colonel Vauthier to speak at the fifth CIAM congress gathering in Paris in 1937 to discuss the problems of housing and leisure. From the triple viewpoint of explosive projectiles, firebombs, and poisonous gases, he explained, it was necessary to reconsider architecture and urbanism. Such defense measures, decreed for the safety of urban citizens, would ensure the realization of rational town-planning schemes. “Or, vice versa, in rationalizing a plan for the city ...., to save her from the shameful chaos into which she is now plunged, we shall automatically satisfy the need for aerial defense.”

Le Corbusier’s rational town planning schemes, however, were never implemented and so were of no help to save London, the world’s largest city in 1940, from the first aerial siege in history. Earlier that year, the Luftwaffe had raided the port of Rotterdam, killing a thousand citizens and destroying some 20,000 buildings, creating sufficient havoc to bring about a Dutch surrender. So it was expected that the Battle of Britain, an aerial bombardment of defenseless civilians, would be fought and won or lost as the result of air attacks alone. London brought a check to this optimistic belief. For five weeks the Germans flew 12,000 sorties over the city but Londoners quickly adapted to even the most destructive raids. The underground ‘Tube’ stations quickly turned into bomb shelters where some 100,000 people sought safety every night. Nothing like the projected casualties – physical or psychological -- were ever generated. Although gas was expected to play a major role in aerial attacks, the worst problems came from fire and unexploded bombs which inhibited emergency services and public traffic from operating effectively. Aerial siege continued until early May 1941, when the German army finally understood that “London’s fundamental cohesion, the city’s capacity to function as a highly integrated metropolis, was not irreparably damaged by the German air campaign for one reason: physical destruction was not the same as systems destruction.”

The damage wrought on London was little compared to the havoc wrecked by Allied bombers sent against German and Japanese cities: 79 % of Bremerhaven was destroyed, 75% of Hamburg, and 50% of numerous other cities. Tokyo suffered the most destructive aerial attack: 83,000 were killed and more than fifteen square miles of its city center destroyed. Nevertheless no city in WWII was every completely subdued by air attack to the point that it stopped functioning, including Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The cities attacked were too big to be eradicated completely, even if their heart had been annihilated. WWII taught the military that urban complexity worked to the advantage of a large city: complexity meant redundancy of basic operations. Knock out one aspect of its functioning, such as part of its transport system, it would quickly divert traffic to other parts of the system. A complex city remained robust absorbing destruction and continuing to function as an urban entity.

Yet nuclear warfare with its strategy of massive retaliation questioned the very ‘survivability’ of cities. US deterrent strategists decided that cities over 100,000 in population would be the logical targets of a nuclear war, only their size and economic importance justified the use of expensive atomic weaponry. They thought in terms of ‘city busting’: cities would receive the direct hit and would absorb it in such a manner that damage would not spill over to ‘survival areas’ while the ensuring destruction would take care of other ‘social problems’ as well. Defense planners after 1960 were adamant about the necessity to sacrifice the city. So it was argued “any effort to defend the American city by protecting its residents from attack is extremely dangerous to the national security. All analysts agree that such efforts (“hardening” the city) will be interpreted by the Soviet Union as an offensive move on our part, that is, as a sign that we are preparing for a ’first strike’.” The official US plan was to move people away from target cities, or suggest they move themselves, before a nuclear attack. Not surprisingly middle class suburbs were built in the 1950s, followed by the upper-middle class relocating to small towns beyond the urban fringe, and into ex-urbia by the 1980s. The postwar investment in highways, and disinvestment in rail transport, the breakup of a centralized phone system into smaller companies and cellular phone operators, the rise of personal computers and the worldwide web, can all be interpreted as preparation for nuclear attack on the congested center of cities. Left behind in the center of cities, the urban population would be wiped out along with its substandard housing, impoverished neighborhoods, crime ridden streets, high mortality rates, etc. The threat of the bomb and the policy of ‘city busting’ obviously generated paradoxical effects.

With the end of Cold War brinkmanship in 1991, the tumbling of walls and renting of iron curtains, nuclear deterrent strategies became anachronistic. Some other phantasm had to be conjured up because the nature of the aggressor had changed and with it the framework of military engagement. Kazakhstan, a recent breakaway state from the former Soviet Union, became the first ‘Muslim’ state to possess nuclear capability in December of 1991. In addition to this new fear of terrorists with weapons of mass destruction, megacities had burst upon the scene with their challenge of complexity and uncontrollability, and a new city built by information had arisen as well.

Air-land battles assume their primary objective is to throw the enemy off balance with a powerful blow from an unexpected direction and to follow this up with other strikes so that the enemy can not recuperate. The doctrine was tailored for fighting the Soviets in NATO Europe, but was also deployed in the first Gulf War. Currently the military deploys an ‘operational strategy’ that conceives of a military campaign as a “highly coordinated sequence of interrelated tactical actions that would move one’s war toward the attainment of strategic objectives. … The operational art presupposes also that all action is always under one’s positive control even in the extremities of violence that the modern battlefield is sure to produce.” Not only must all military actions be synchronized over space and time but in addition the challenges of an urban campaign have to be met.

Contemporary cities are daunting environments that must be analyzed and understood by an invading army: they contain a maze of urban canyons and underground tunnels that restrict troop movement, change the rules of engagement, and diminish technological superiority. Buildings and man-made constructions superimposed on the terrain block lines-of-sight essential for deploying precision weapons; they interrupt radio frequencies and make GPS satellite positions difficult to obtain. Since the enemy controls the location of the conflict on what they consider to be friendly terrain, the invading force is required to maneuver in long columns along fixed routes, alleyways and dead-ends with increased exposure from multiple points of attack without the ability to concentrate their firepower. These are the same streets and alleyways that offer the enemy routes of escape into which they can vanish. The invaders, moreover, have to operate within buildings, with no prior knowledge of their layouts; and are exposed to guerrilla tactics such as ambushes, kidnappings, booby traps, sniper fire and improvised explosive devices. This calls for a new type of verticalized warfare visualizing the urban terrain in all three dimensions from underground tunnels to the high ground of rooftops, from surface street level to urban airspace. Solids must be seen through as if they no longer block lines of sight, buildings must be visualized from inside and soldiers must be able to assess what the invisible enemy is up to and decide if and when they need to strike.

This has caused the US military to theorize about the complexity of cityscapes and the behavioral characteristics of urban populations. They have devised strategies of parallel not serial urban warfare, conceptualized the enemy as an organism with self-organizing and mutating behavior, and considered complex group movements to be modeled on flocking algorithms. The military has improved its urban mapping and simulation techniques for training soldiers for real-time operations. In short, the military is dealing with cities the way a planner once might have done: reaching backwards to Ludwig von Bertalanffy’s General Systems Theory of the 1950s, and forward to conceptualize cities as systems – actually systems within systems -- whose parts can be manipulated and controlled by understanding the complex interrelationships between different levels within the system as a whole.

Ground troops tend to think of cities as buildings, physical forms such as skyscrapers, houses, airports and harbors. Focused on ‘terrain’, they are likely to classify cities by their differences and assume that fighting in Munich would be more difficult than in Mogadishu. The later so called ‘primitive’ city, however, was able to foil an international intervention while Munich was beat into submission after the fiercest war in history. The key variable in cities is not just their physical structure but the complex behavior of human populations within the urban terrain. It is the complexity of people, like the citizens of Paris, which enable cities to withstand siege lasting months or years unless their ability to survive is disorganized.

Hence the military has started to classify different types of cities based on the behavioral characteristics of their population. This typology of ‘human architecture’ is only a starting point, a rough outline of the operational environment that awaits any occupying or stabilizing force. It is construed as an early warning system of some of the intractable problems that may lie ahead. The first type of city is called a hierarchical city where chains of command operate within broadly accepted rules of law – like American cities. These cities, with their united citizenry and accepted chain-of-command, can provide intensive resistance to an attacker yet once occupied can be the easiest to govern as soon as the population recognizes the benefits of collaboration. The cities of Germany and Japan after WWII were examples of this type—their population fought fiercely but once defeated, was easy to govern and to reconstruct.

The second type of city is called a multicultural city and displays contending systems of custom and belief. These cities are cockpits of struggle aggravated by ethnic divisions and struggles for dominance. Power is diffused with partisans adhering to specific chains of command which are spread across ethnic networks, religious organizations, or terrorist groups. These cities squander their creative power, and tend to be intolerant of inter-communal exchange. Devoid of a shared community of values or experience in cooperative ventures, this type of city is unstable and ultimately self-destructive. The preeminent example is Jerusalem, where order is maintained only by force of the most powerful faction, inflaming the hatred of those excluded from power. Other examples can be drawn from South African cities under apartheid, the massacres of Hindus and Muslims on the Indian subcontinent, or cities in the collapsed Soviet empire. From a military standpoint a multicultural city may be easy to conquer, if not totally destroyed by the hegemonic group, but difficult to administer since compromise is literally unthinkable and a hardening of divisions between the contending groups an inevitable result.

The third type of city is labeled a tribal city and is growing in number. Cities of this type present the most difficult urban environment for military operations. Based on differences of blood or blood-based allegiances, these ethnic conflicts are the most intractable and merciless. It is difficult for outsiders to discern, yet alone fathom the depth of hatred within clan fighting. Such conflicts as seen in Mogadishu, Kilgali, Karachi, or former Yugoslavia, represent a shift from slaughter between civilizations to slaughter of neighbors, from imperialist genocide to genocide against familiars. The military considers the tribe to be a basic killing organization with no will to compromise, or advantage to be achieved through cooperation. Tribal cities set up many ‘inscrutable’ obstacles for urban operations and are the most perplexing of city types. They may, however, become the predominant place of US military engagement in the 21st century.

This simple typology is set up by the military to drive home a basic point: in urban operations the center of gravity for attack, “those characteristics, capabilities, or sources of power from which a military force derives its freedom of action, physical strength, or will to fight,” is never a presidential palace, or a television station, or a bridge or barricade. Not physical objects, then, but something located inside the people and among the actions of the population. In urban operations, adversaries to the US military are not only military actors, but can also be crowds, political or economic leaders, criminal groups, terrorist organizations, etc.

Cities offer the adversary the support of large and presumably friendly noncombatant populations which they can manipulate to their advantage. Thus, for example, the Egyptian defenders of Suez City in 1973 were able to rely on friendly noncombatants as couriers when other methods of communication were cut. The Israeli forces had no such option. Or Grozny in the winter of 1995: most Chechens were fighting in a city they had known since childhood. Working at night they laid mines, carried supplies and ammunition to the front, moved through back alleys, sewers and basements. Circling around the Russians they forced them to cling to their armored vehicles which they mistakenly thought offered some sort of security.

Thus it may not be surprising that strategists of urban operations focus on the psychological characteristics of populations and seek to evaluate the potential value of deception as an asymmetrical strategy of the underdog. Clausewitz noted in 1873: “[t]he weaker the forces that are at the disposal of the supreme commander, the more appealing the use of cunning becomes.” Deception is a deliberate ploy meant to induce misperception in another. When utilized in conflict and war, its aim is to effect, confuse even destroy an enemy’s decision-making process and as such becomes an integral component of intelligence operations. The classic arsenal of deception involves disinformation and camouflage. Given the importance of navigation and orientation in urban terrain a major aim of disinformation is directed at mapping or navigational skills. For example the Soviets deliberately deployed cartographic disinformation affecting all maps of cities during the Cold War. Thus detailed street maps of Moscow failed to identify major thoroughfares or locate important buildings making distances difficult to estimate and locations hard to pinpoint.

Perhaps cities enhance and even facilitate the deployment of deception, trickery and guile because the US military has utilized deception to throw the enemy off target. Thus in the first Gulf War the US sought to convince Saddam Hussein that the Coalition’s intension was to conduct its main offensive by attacking central Kuwait. It assumed the Iraqi’s normal response to being attacked would be to counter-attack where it was struck. In order to lure Saddam into assuming that the US had begun to strike, the military broadcasted tank noises over loudspeakers, set up dummy tanks and artillery pieces and simulated radio traffic so that its real intent to swing west of Kuwait and make a direct attack on Iraq was masked. Again in Operation Iraqi Freedom, the enemy following media reports planted by the US military was caught off guard by a sudden attack because they expected a long aerial war to be followed by a ground war. They did not expect a brief air attack nor the start of a ground war while the 4th Infantry Division was still in the Mediterranean. The US military played mind games as well by intentionally wrecking Saddam Hussein’s information ‘feedback loop’. If Saddam could not trust the information he was receiving, if he did not know what was happening on the battlefield, then he would not know if his soldiers were carrying out the war he had scripted. The initial air strikes on Saddam, and the highly publicized reports that information of his whereabouts was obtained from some of his trusted officers, were intended to unnerve other subordinates and disturb his lines of communication.

Whether deployed by enemy or invader, deception in urban terrain must be carefully planned and monitored lest it be discovered and collateral damage the consequence. The US military must be trained to perceive and counter enemy deceptive efforts through urban exercises and simulation models; its intelligence analysts must be able to discern signals from noise, and they must develop and know how to operate reliable and credible intelligence collection technology. The unrivaled advantage of the US in information technologies allow it to deploy deceptive practices never thought possible before: “[i]n short, although a massive frontal assault may bloodily turn an enemy out of a prepared position in the city, if a well-orchestrated deception can accomplish the same thing without a shot being fired, does it not present a powerful resource to be tapped?”

Network Centric Warfare: Network Centric Warfare conceptualizes the field of military operation as systems that are distributed, highly robust and dynamic, quick to evolve and adapt their behavior to ad hoc situations. Linked together via information technology, a network translates global governing principles into local rule sets, which in turn are governed by a deep understanding of battle force dynamics and urban environments. These systems encourage self-synchronization, connection and recombination at the lowest possible echelons, so that learning via feedback takes place throughout the network and local challenges are met with innovative procedures across the operational spectrum. Basically net-centric warfare conceptualizes US forces working as nets on the net, with data processing units at a distance operating as staff support through ‘reachback’ and ‘feedforward’.

Mathematicians call a ‘network’ a collection of links and nodes, but they are not all equally robust or adaptable. A ‘chain’, for example, links nodes together one at a time, like a string of pearls but is a brittle structure, not densely connected or clustered. Hence its links can be cut easily and its operational potential destroyed. A maximally connected network is high in redundancy with more than one way to connect all nodes together and thus is a robust system. Losing one or more links will seldom lead to catastrophe but the amount of communication required between nodes during an emergency can send this network into ‘synthetic epilepsy’. Recent research in the topology of networks has led to the discovery of a new class of networks: these have a few nodes with large number of links (the commanders), a few moderately linked nodes (the airpower), and large number of minimally linked nodes (the men on the ground). They are extremely robust networks; their hubs can easily be relocated, reconnected with only a few relinkages and therefore they are good candidates for logistical networks in complex environments like cities.

Thus the assumption of network-centric operations is that with accurate and detailed real-time information, highly complex groups will organize naturally from the bottom up, generating self-synchronized operations that avoid top down directive command. Such assumptions of behavior are modeled on flocking algorithms simulating the behavior of birds in flight. Autonomous units are programmed to avoid crowding their flock mates; always steering towards the average heading of the entire flock (i.e. one bird’s movement makes use of information regarding the location, speed and direction of three or four closest members of the flock.). Flocking behavior thus emerges from a few simple rules allowing for an effective coordination of actions without overt communication of intentions from top-down control. This is ideal for troops on the ground allowing them to adapt in real-time to the maneuvers of other unit members intent on achieving a common goal; it allows for a fluid flow of the virtual flock over terrain, and again leads to emergent properties and self-organizing efficiencies not attainable with top-down control.

Robust networks are dependent on digitized, interactive forms of communication – such as instant video-feeds, satellite hook-ups, overhead surveillance systems, global mapping procedures, distributed computer profiling and more. In Operation Desert Storm it took two days for target planners to photograph a targeted object, confirm its coordinates, plan the mission and deliver it to the bomber crew. Operation Iraqi Freedom achieved real-time imaging of targets with photographs and coordinates transmitted electronically to aircraft already in flight. In Desert Storm, commanders located the movement of their troops on maps with grease pencils utilizing information from radio reports. In Iraq, commanders viewed real-time displays directly on their computer screens.

It is currently assumed that persistent intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance [ISR] will achieve near perfect knowledge, will facilitate faster decision-making at all levels of command and will remove uncertainty in war. When net-centric warfare is fully deployed, it is expected that a given enemy target will be unable to move, disperse, or break contact with the focused intelligence system which in theory will deny it any kind of sanctuary. In this imaginary geography, there will be no point on the map of a city that is not under cover of intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance with every force element, no matter how small, constantly collecting data and ‘publishing’ it over the military Internet.

Of course this assumes that a wide range of geospatial information is extracted ahead of military engagement and then used to build as consistent a picture as possible of enemy networks, from imagery to electronic signals. The objective is to put a cursor over the target. Thus it is essential that military planners map a city down to its street addresses, feeding as much information on strategic buildings and sites into a database so that during operations this preplanned playbook can be shared among air planners, aircrews, and ground forces as they work towards a common goal. But this assumes surveillance machinery that operates well ahead of military engagement.

It is just as critical to obtain real-time overview of the battle space during urban operations, allowing ground forces with direct feeds via satellite back to command centers to obtain a full-motion video perspective of the street battle. Data from airborne sensors lets troops virtually ‘see’ around corners and over buildings, even to watch insurgents setting up mortars. There is both a grand view of the battlespace --- its air defenses, threat radars, the disposition of enemy forces, ground moving targets and enemy communications --- gathered from satellites and various platforms and more targeted micro-views collected by ground fighters and unmanned aerial vehicles. For example, ‘haystack gatherers’ collect vast amounts of data in a single gulp, while ‘needles’ gather more targeted information. The network remains sensitive to new sources of information as they arise, and new ability to pipe data without request to users who may need it. The system anticipates “what the warfighter needs before he needs it, just by virtue of knowing historical approaches and data.” It is expected that the future network will be both self-forming and self-healing showing when a satellite will become available and when a reconnaissance aircraft can be diverted to examine a pop-up point of interest.

Centers of gravity have always been a vital part of military strategy, now the flow of information into and out of a city, or the cybernetic signature of a city, becomes a new center of gravity in urban warfare with the strategy to cut the lines of communication as swiftly and definitively as possible so that the enemy’s ability to act will be curtailed. Hence one of the tools of analysis is to think of the urbanized, operational world as a complex self-organizing system, one that evolves and mutates over time and thus is highly adaptable to a variety of complex environments. In other words, the same conceptualization of self-organizing systems used to re-conceptualize US military operations in net-centric warfare is also applied to the enemy and the city. These are both -- to borrow the vocabulary from biological systems theory – believed to be autopoietic systems which achieve maintenance and stability over time.

This leads the military to a concept of ‘parallel war’ considering the enemy to be a system or organism with five organizational components: 1/ field military operations at the periphery; 2/ masses of civilians who are not direct combatants; 3/ transportation infrastructure providing organic essentials; 4/ organic essentials and productive capacity; and 5/ at the center, the leadership controlling the entire system. These components are called ‘five concentric rings’ and like a fractal, each of the rings contains all five components within it. Air attack is thus focused simultaneously on the key nodes or ‘centers of gravity’ within each of the rings. This contrasts with serial warfare where each ring is engaged in turn; moving from the periphery into the center and it makes a sequential flow of command obsolete.

Although parallel aerial warfare was attempted in WWII, most often aerial targets were set serially -- ball-bearing factories, then submarine pens, petroleum containers, airfields, rail and road networks. Parallel warfare attacks all decisive points in each ring simultaneously. The object is to destroy or render dysfunctional those targets causing a loss of the ‘system’s organic capabilities’. The bolt that runs through all the rings and holds the system together is ‘information’ – the most critical point to destroy, control and influence. By cutting off the supply of information, or so it is assumed, the system’s war fighting responses can be paralyzed causing the entire organic system to go into shock.

Yet parallel warfare depends on airpower which is a blunt instrument for urban warfare; its primary purpose is to act swiftly and critically turning buildings into rubble. It considers the enemy to be a set of targets and when all the targets have been hit, it assumes that war will cease. Making rubble is an old idea in urban operations, precision targeting the new and this relies increasingly on what can be called intelligence closework and ‘street smarts’. A precision target is an embedded component of network-centric warfare in which a computer network provides an integrated picture of the battlefield shared across all levels of the urban operation from the commander to the individual soldier on the street. Network-centric operations constantly free back to the common center via real-time surveillance and TV ‘live-feeds’ information on the status and location of friendly forces, enemy forces, and other actors, which are subsequently rendered as icons on a map and displayed on a computer screen or eventually on a ‘data wall’ where the tap of a cursor on a particular target in the territory of interest will immediately download all available information on that site. It tells the commander you have the Global Hawk here, U-2 there, and recommends he move assets over there or notify special operations 48 miles away, etc. Network-centric warfare has a kind of futuristic hallucination to it and assumes that the US not only will control the land, sea, air and space over which its forces and communications travel but will maintain a robust ability to keep thousands of interactive systems operating in parallel and functioning in unison.

The military’s concern, however, is that situational awareness and coordinated logistics even in short-range communications can be difficult at best in urban terrain. It is well understood that degradation of electromagnetic propagation in cluttered environments makes net-enabled operations complicated, that satellite links, wireless networks, and data-links all compete for frequency spectrum and that GPS coverage is generally limited to open areas. Still it is expected that reliable airborne platforms or high ground relay stations and improved portable aerostat technology will soon provide deployable, reliable and secure communication services so essential to attain the superiority of net-centric warfare. Even if there are limits in reality, the military assumes these will dissolve into air by conjuring future technical performances into existence. Its ‘technophiliac’ performances are accumulative, both self-enhancing and self-reassuring.

War Games or preparation for Urban Operations: Obviously network-centric warfare demands elaborate training and simulation before military engagement. In order to understand how the superiority of information can be utilized on the ground making urban operations more effective, the military conducts training sessions with digitized simulation models of urban terrain. Such experimental war games test, or will test when they are fully developed, the military’s ability to isolate and control the urban battlespace using precision strike weapons systems and situational understanding via network sensors. Played in real time, they allow players to coordinate joint maneuvers from supportive forces.

One such simulation model, labeled the “Urban Resolve Experiment”, is based on cutting-edge modeling and simulation technologies. It considers three features of any given city: a complex man-made terrain superimposed on a natural terrain; a large and densely distributed population; and physical and service infrastructures. These three features interact turning any given urban terrain into complex and dynamic systems of systems The synthetic environment of this war game is a representation of a three-dimensional real world urban terrain of more than 1.8 million discrete buildings, 65,000 of which have the capacity for interaction with combatant players who can enter a building, maneuver inside and view the street outside. Weather conditions, traffic flows of civilian vehicles and pedestrian movements, even parking lots, are integrated into the model. More than 110,000 person-entities are simulated; about 35, 000 displaying ‘culturally-appropriate’ behaviors. City streets and highways are affected by culturally specific traffic flows; for example pedestrian presence increases around mosques at appropriate times for daily prayers.

A soldier is placed within any building contained in the program of the simulation model and provided with a virtual reality scene generator that presents a view of the interior of the presidential palace in Baghdad, for example, and locates the palace on a precisely drawn relief map of the city, and the room on a floor plan of the building. He can visualize and understand all locational data inside and outside, down the street and through the buildings. The players of such war games deploy sensors designed to enhance their line of sight, able to detect and track targets that move in and out of sight, to pick targets out of a dense background clutter, to discover concealed targets, and to discern military targets from civilian look-alikes.

The actions of players are coordinated through parallel processors working together on a supercomputer. Large computational tasks are broken down into clusters, parceled out to different processors, and reassembled quickly – thus simulating real-time network-centric warfare. This urban warfare simulation model greatly enhances the players’ ability to gain situational awareness of where the enemy is located, what he is doing and what he might do in the future. It enhances commanders’ view of how to shape the battlespace to their own advantage, how to understand key linkages and relationships in joint operations, and to understand the long-term implications of tactical decisions and maneuvers. It is hoped that such advanced knowledge and training procedures will lead to the minimization of collateral damage and the avoidance of culturally sensitive urban sites when battles do occur. So it is assumed: “[e]arly understanding of the cultural and geographical dimensions of an urban environment, along with precision engagement, eases the movement to stability operations.”

Homeland Security: Lest the reader think that the developers of net-centric systems theory are focused only on military engagement in foreign territory, the approach comes back to the US via the politics of homeland security. After the terrorists’ attack on the 11th of September 2001, the nature of warfare mutated into a full blown Global War on Terrorism.. Now it is feared the success of al Qaeda’s relatively low-cost, highly organized and synchronized operation able to hijack four commercial jetliners and wreck havoc on a city and a nation will likely inspire other adversaries to attempt similar ‘asymmetrical’ assaults. Securing the homeland, particularly congested areas of population and the infrastructure of cities, against such terrorist enemies has become a major priority, one in which a new vulnerability becomes apparent.

If Net-centric warfare is sanitized virtual warfare because it is warfare at a distance giving America a false sense of technological superiority and a false promise to dominate in any military engagement – its twin is mirrored by the fear of failure to achieve security on the American homeland. This permanent fear provokes the US to work through the dark side of impending catastrophe: suspending international laws governing the conduct of war, imposing security measures that violate civil rights, and engaging in a state of war against anyone that threatens its security.

Terrorism generates the desire for security yet simultaneously fuels ever more insecurity and uncertainly. The fear is accumulative that the military might not be able to guarantee internal control over saboteurs -- rogue states, insurgents, terrorists --- a fear that the media’s constant replay of disasters and real-time coverage of battle zones only fuels. As Agamben has noted “[t]he thought of security bears within it an essential risk. A state which has security as its sole task and source of legitimacy is a fragile organism; it can always be provoked by terrorism to become itself terroristic.”

Like the military’s urban operations, the war against terror focuses on the city and the technology of communication as the space of transgression. It applies the same conceptualizations to defensive operations as it does to force projective operations against terrorists. Thus homeland defense is also a war against information technology, the same technology that is supposed to guarantee superiority and success in net-centric warfare. In other words, information, so essential in keeping the dream of net-centric warfare afloat and operable, turned upside down becomes a nightmare of the greatest vulnerability. Because of the terrorist’s effective deployment of personal computers linked to the Internet, spiraling fears now center on the personal computer’s awesome capacity and precarious power roughly equivalent to the entire computational power of the US Defense Department in the mid-1960s.

Evidence seems to suggest that plans for the 9-11 attack were organized via the Internet and that the al Qaeda network of cells continues to communicate with each other across continents using Internet-based phone services. It has used the Internet to send encrypted intelligence reports on potential targets in the US; it has gathered digitized imagery on these sites plus maps and diagrams on essential features so that it can virtually simulate catastrophic failure. Given al Qaeda’s cellular, dispersed organization, one able to decentralize ‘battle orders’ over its mobile and mutating network, the US military can not fight these virtual strategists with conventional means. The war against the global network of terrorist organizations armed with laptop computers is not properly speaking a war but lies more in the realm of a protracted hunt based on intelligence work. Terrorists do not seize or hold territory, they do not engage the military in combat, and they often reveal impressive regenerative powers after being attacked. Instead as the White House defines it: “[t]he terrorist threat is a flexible, transnational network structure, enabled by modern technology and characterized by loose interconnectivity both within and between groups.”

It is just this specter of ‘modern technology’ that returns to haunt the vulnerability of homeland security. Al Qaeda as a global insurgency has been able to turn the tables on net-centric warfare moving the battlefield into cities, deploying information and disinformation as a weapon against American security, and instilling constant fear that the terrorists whoever they are may strike again, anywhere at anytime. The terrorists’ global reach and staggering multiplicity, with different types of organizations and separate geographical locations, requires a counter-attack able to sever their communication links that constantly morph and change. Thus the global war on terrorism is be likened to walking through a maze whose walls are constantly rearranging as one walks.

Ironically the Internet originally designed for American defense intelligence in the 1970s, but now transformed into a global communication system, in the hands of terrorists who seek to do harm to America becomes a digital menace. The Internet offers all terrorists an effective command and control mechanism to coordinate and plan future attacks; it allows them to hide behind its anonymity, playing a shell game to cover up their identities and whereabouts. The US government can not censor or filter the Internet as they have done with newspapers coverage and television broadcasts, allowing the Internet to easily serve as the terrorists’ media and tool of empowerment. Terrorists can broadcast their version of events, publish their sabotage handbooks, spread their fatwas [decisions on applying Muslim law], recruit new members to their cause, solicit donations and amplify all sorts of propaganda and disinformation through chat rooms, websites and various bulletin boards. Certainly 9-11 was planned as a media event and its effect has been to generate within Americans not only fear but a sense of extreme vulnerability.

Terrorists understand the guerrilla tactics of cyber-warfare – to deform, distort, confuse, steal even cut the links of communication and feedback and send the enemy system into shock. Hence the Patriot Act of 2001, an effect of terrorism, has added to its lists of intelligence matters computer crimes and has legitimized the use of enhanced electronic surveillance procedures, the interception of communication in computer hacking cases, and the acceptance of an array of evidence gathered electronically on those suspected of intent to cause damage. But a sense of security is thwarted by a growing awareness that wherever the terrorists are they can guide and plan their worldwide operations via the Internet without the need of physical meeting or even knowing who their recruits might be. Cyber-operations are just as distant and virtual as Urban Operations and they engender undemocratic means to stem their potential damage.

Trapped within the labyrinth of cyber-warfare, there is no end to the US hallucinations – an open society guaranteeing freedom of the press and information can never be secure enough when this same public information becomes a lethal weapon in the hands of the enemy. How easy it would be for terrorists to conduct word searches of newspaper articles trying to find vulnerable spots in the US defense system: after newspapers articles, for example, reported that attempts to ship contraband through checkpoints at the Cincinnati airport were successful at least 50% of the time, a terrorist might consider that city to be a good embarkation point for its next operation. Noting other newspaper reports that Canadian garbage trucks to the US receive little or no scrutiny, gaps along the 45th Parallel might be exploited to the terrorists’ advantage. And imagine what terrorists might do when they learn from the media that New York City’s allocation of money from the Federal government to fight terrorism has been severely cut. Terrorists can also study how the US collects, analyzes and responds to information, they can interrupt this chain to introduce false information and then measure the US intelligence response to find weak spots in its security net, or the type of technology used to uncover their encrypted false plans. The fears are recurrent that attacks by cyber-terrorists against digital property and information systems might bring down airplanes, destroy the stock market, knock out the power grid, reveal Pentagon secrets, not to mention spread viruses via Internet-connected computers. The politics of security – or the war against terrorism --- breeds an endless number of nightmare zones where the US feels vulnerable and insecure and is forced to react. The consequences are cumulative and hallucinatory: drawn into traditional assumptions about warfare, that one attacks after being attacked, a response creates more reason for terrorists to react. And so the spiral grows, vulnerabilities increase and reactions propel with no hope of winning the war on terrorism.

Conclusions: No matter how much fantasy is involved and how many debates even within the US military over the feasibility of network-centric warfare, or technological omnipotence and worldwide military domination, it has been a very long time since simulation models, experimental design and planning procedures, plus the latest communication technology and geographical imagination have been applied to peacetime urban operations in order to develop strategies for civilian populations – to enhance their quality of life or to understand the effects of different urban policies and plans. Priorities have clearly gone awry in the 21st century as the defense budget for 2007 climbs over a $550 billion mark.

Paul Virilio described the fall-out of events surrounding the explosion of the nuclear power plant in Chernobyl as a triptych of accidents. First came the substance accident [the event of the power station explosion]; then the knowledge accident [nuclear physicists were outstripped by the accident]; and finally the consciousness accident [no insight into this event, the event exceeded consciousness].

The same we might say has taken place with respect to cities of Iraq and other rapidly urbanizing and highly contentious sites – there is the accident or the collateral damage of war that lays waste to a city’s terrain; there is the knowledge accident where plans for demolition are present while those for reconstruction absent, and there is also the consciousness accident, impossible for most of us to understand the military tactics of urban operations seen daily via real-time feedback over a variety of communication channels. Does overexposure dull sensibilities so that we are unable to fathom the reality of such accidents and events?

Military strategists are more pragmatic and realistic, eager to deploy all the knowledge they can glean about cities, the history of urban design and how this effects urban operations, plus all the information technology and systems theories available. All of this knowledge is grist for the mill of urban operations as they prepare to wreck havoc on cities that stand in their path. They appear to be the chief purveyors of the accident of urban events.

The third accident, that of consciousness seems to have stunned architect/urbanists into silence –even though there are enormous consequences to bear for their decision do nothing about cities, to ignore and even to celebrate their unformed condition. The results of neglect can be catastrophic, as the Chernobyl accident revealed. All the while, the military studies an array of urban theory, develops and deploys information technologies so that war is sustained at a distance, severing the ties that bind consciousness to reality.

Perhaps this is the reason for this ramble through the recent history of urban operations and net-centric warfare. Neglect, confusion, mental disarray, failure of words, a sense of helplessness, even irony amongst the architect/urbanists are all accidents of consciousness. The casualties hardly need repeating: they are the world’s cities, especially the poorest ones or those that sit astride valuable resources. The effects are inevitable: the reduction of buildings to rubble, the collateral damage of citizenry, the transgressions of international law, and the escalating war on terrorism and anxieties of vulnerability that feed ever accumulating desires for security. Without acts of consciousness to stop this madness, to become proactive and engaged in urban planning to improve the living condition of cities around the world, then the military will continue to believe in its ‘force-projection power’ and its global domination. Yet there is no technological fix, never a guaranteed security of net-centric warfare, only growing awareness that the war on terrorism can not be won on the battlefield and that cities and their citizens are the inevitable collateral damage.

NOTES
“Military Operations on Urbanized Terrain [MOUT]” htpp://www.globalsecurity.org/military/ops/mout.htm
There is great need for improving preparations for urban combat. The US Army's Field Manual 90-10, Military Operations in Urbanized Terrain [MOUT], issued in 1979 still trained troops for military engagement in small towns and villages, not major metropolitan areas. It was recently revised to FM90-10-1.
James Der Derian, “Virtuous/Virtual Theory” International Affairs 76, 4 [Oct., 2000]: 771-788.
Col. Richard Szafranski, USAF. Chap 5 “Parallel War and Hyperwar: Is Every Want a Weakness?” Air & Space Power Chronicles
Ralph Peters, “Human Terrain of Urban Operations” Parameters (Spring, 2000): 4 – 12; P. H. Liotta, “Chaos as Strategy” Parameters (Summer 2002): 47 – 56; John A Gentry, “Doomed to Fail: America’s Blind Faith in Military Technology,” Parameters (Winter 2002-2003): unpagenated.
There were as well text-messaging systems and chat rooms on the classified military intranet system --- used so often they threatened information overload and allowed rumor-spreading to be rife.
John Ferris, “A New American Way of War? C4ISR in Operation Iraqi Freedom, a Provisional Assessment,” The Centre for Military and Strategic Studies, The University of Calgary (January 24, 2003): unpagenated. C4ISR:= command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance.
Liotta, “Chaos as Strategy”.
Peter W. Wielhouwer, “Preparing for Future Joint Urban Operations: The Role of Simulation and the Urban Resolve Experiment.” Command and Operations Group, USJFCOM/J9 (2004).
Wielhouwer, “Preparing for Future Joint Urban Operations”.
Scott Gerwehr and Russell W. Glenn, The Art of Darkness: Deception and Urban Operations (Arroyo Center: The Rand Corporation, 2003).
Roger J. Spiller, “Sharp Corners: Urban Operations at Century’s End” Combat Studies Institute [2001]: unpagenated.
Stephen Graham, “Urbanisation and Empire: The US Military Confronts Global South Cities,” (unpublished paper, 2005?); Russell W. Glenn, “Managing Complexity During Military Urban Operations: Visualizing the Elephant. (Arroyo Center: Rand Corporation, January 2004): 2-3.
Spiller, “Sharp Corners”: unpagenated.
Maréchal Bugeaud, La Guerre des rues et des maisons (c1851) (Paris: Jean-Paul Rocher, 1997)
Spiller, “Sharp Corners”: unpagenated.
Le Corbusier, ‘Commentaires rélatifs à Moscow et à la ‘Ville Verts’ FLC A3-1-65 12-03-1930 “Communication observations of Colonel Vauthier, 5th Congress CIAM,” FLC D2 [11].
Le Corbusier, Sur les Quatre Routes (Paris : NRF Gallimar, 1941) [English Translation : The Four Routes (London : Dobson, 1947) : 51
Spiller, “Sharp Corners”: unpagenated.
Spiller, “Sharp Corners”: unpagenated.
Dean MacCannell, “Baltimore in the Morning … After: On the Forms of Post-Nuclear Leadership” Diacritics 14, 2 (Summer, 1984): 32-46.
MacCannell, “Baltimore in the Morning”: 40.
Roger Luckhurst, “Nuclear Criticism: Anachronism and Anachorism,” Diacritics 23, 2 (Summer, 1993): 88-97.
Spiller, “Sharp Corners”: unpagenated.
Spiller, “Sharp Corners”: unpagenated.
Philip Misselwitz and Eyal Weizman, “Military Operations as Urban Planning,” in Territories Islands, Camps and Other States of Utopia (Berlin: KW – Institute for Contemporary Art, 2003): 278; Lieutenant Colonel David W. Sutherland, “Systems Approach to Urban Operations” School of Advanced Military Studies. AY 02-03
Peters, “The Human Terain of Urban Operations”
Peters, “The Human Terrain of Urban Operations”.
Quoted in Sutherland, “Systems Approach to Urban Operations”: 30.
Gerwehr and. Glenn, The Art of Darkness: 9.
Gerwehr and Glenn, The Art of Darkness: 2.
Clausewitz [1873]. Quoted by Gerwehr and. Glenn, The Art of Darkness: 10.
Gerwehr and Glenn, The Art of Darkness: 15, 18-19.
Gerwehr and Glenn, The Art of Darkness: 20.
Gerwehr and Glenn, The Art of Darkness: 34.
Glenn, “Managing Complexity During Military Urban Operations”.
Gerwehr and Glenn, The Art of Darkness: 59.
Jeffrey R. Cares, “Distributed Adaptive Logistics,” Information Age Warfare Quarterly 1, 1 [Winter, 2005]: unpagenated.
Ferris, “A New American Way of War?”
Cares, “Distributed Adaptive Logistics”: unpagenated.
New tools are also needed to meet the challenges and necessary support for Urban Operations. DARPA’s special projects is developing a low-altitude airborne sensor system [LAASS ]--- to find and target underground tunnels and facilities and ISIS [not specified] – the ability to track the movement of individuals for months enabling the military to reveal webs of connection between people and facilities, group meetings, unusual deployments. DARPA is also attempting to create strategic mapping system that would offer troops detailed maps of the inside of buildings without entering buildings by utilizing wall-penetrating RF [not specified] radiation, plus the ability to sense and track activity within the structure by focusing on Doppler-shifted signals due to personnel movement and activity within a structure. The system would have to be portable, fast and integrated with other systems; sending back signals in real-time and returning with mapped information. DARPA is also interested in developing barrier materials that can be rapidly deployed by troops in the field, blocking routes with hardening foam that expands rapidly blocking doors or roadways; yet can easily be opened by troops with chemical solvents. Or the use of slippery materials preventing enemy vehicles from gaining traction – oil or Teflon products work on asphalt, but not on dirt or gravel and they need to be neutralized. Troops on the ground need to detect then neutralize bombs at a distance, bombs made from a variety of energetic compounds—DARPA has remote RF-based triggering devices but it needs to develop triggering devices that are not RF-based such as low power microwave emitter that can survey a crowd and detect a suicide bomber or electromagnetic pulse generator used to short circuit electronics [These need too much power and space, plus a truck to carry the equipment] Alternatively: rapidly deployable blast shields, directing the blast once detonated away from personnel, like a rigid foam that is strong enough to deflect blast, can be stored in a compact container and rapidly deployed. Paul Benda, “Assured Urban Operations”
Derian, “Virtual War/ Virtual Theory”; Stephen Graham, “Urbanisation and Empire: The US Military Confronts Global South Cities,” [unpublished paper, 2005?].
Lt. Gen Harry D. Raduege Jr. “Net-Centric Warfare is Changing the Battlefield Environment,” www.stsc.hill.af.mil (January, 2004).
Major David W. Pendall, “Persistent Surveillance and its Implications for the Common Operation Picture,‘ Military Review [Nov-Dec, 2005]: 41 – 50.
Lt. General William T. Hoabbins, the Air Force’s deputy chief of staff for warfighting integration. Quoted by John A. Tirpak “The Network Way of War,” Air Force Magazine 88, 3 (March, 2005):26-31.Quote on page 28.
Spiller, “Sharp Corners”: unpagenated.
Szafranski, Chp 5 “Parallel War and Hyperwar”.. Szafranski argues that Parallel War is not a new strategic conception or a new theory but has gain currency and is now being advanced by airpower advocates to enhance the power of aerial warfare.
Organisms are autopoietic; that is, they struggle to preserve themselves and evolve over time. Yet parallel warfare is aimed at the initial organism, not the evolved one. Contrary to the assumption, damage to the organism’s information systems may deplete its ability to feedback how much damage was achieved hence other parts of the organism may not realize the system’s paralysis nor behave as paralytic.
Acting in coordination with offensive operations on the ground, the technological superiority of airpower can back troops up by providing surveillance of the battlespace in real time, precision air strikes directed from the ground and command centers, plus airlift support. Rebecca Grant, “The Fallujah Model,” Air Force Magazine 88, 2 (Feb, 2005): unpagenated; Tirpak “The Network Way of War”. Yet airpower is limited against ethnic cleansing such as in former Yugoslavia, peacekeeping in Somalia, and stopping genocide in Rwanda. It is also not effective against ‘third wave’ information technology, such as distributed laptops which enable command and control centers to move about, even to offshore sites or nonbelligerent states. Miniaturization of satellite receivers and transmitters adds to the targeting challenge. And dual – use technologies confound the problem: i.e. fermentation centers are needed for making beer, but also for biological weapons production, GPS has both military and civilian uses.
Nancy J. Wesensten, Gregory Belenky,. Thomas J. Balkin, “Cognitive Readiness in Network-centric Operations” Parameters (Spring, 2005): unpagenated; Tirpak, “The Network Way of War”.
Gentry, “Doomed to Fail:”
“The Challenge of Command and Control in Urban Operations,” Search Defense Update 1 (2006): 1 – 7.
Perhaps it is not surprising that the Normal Bel Geddes, who is best remember for being the designer of the GM “Futurama’ model at the 1939 World’s Fair in New York was also an inveterate war game player and prolific collector of information about military strategy and war maps. “Towards the close of the [first] World War M. Geddes was host every week to a group of military and naval men – Admirals, Generals and Strategists of the War College – who played this war game far into the night. It took six months to complete one ‘game’ or session. At the time the U. S. War Department had ordered from Mr. Geddes, duplicates of his war game to be made and placed in every cantonment and training camp for the instruction and training of recruits. NBG. 45 Box 23 Folder 402.1 “Suggested material for war to be sent to prospective clients “: p. 2. Memo Sept 27, 1939.

In the mid 1930s Bel Geddes designed a project for recording the world’s great battles, utilizing slow motion color photography with narrative soundtracks, a method similar to animated motion pictures. The area of operations would be described on a layered relief map with various types of terrain made visible. River, plains, forests, meadows, marshes, railroads, paved and dirt road, shoal and deep water marked its surface. The camera, for the most part stationary, focused on the map from an aerial perspective and was able make close-up and distance shots. Exhaustive research of each battle would be carried out before the movie was to be shot. NBG.4 Box 1994 Folder 179.1 “A project for recording the world’s great battles [1935].

Bel Geddes continued his interest in war games, designing in 1939 a model war map of northwestern Europe. This giant relief map, scaled one inch to eight miles, covered the entire terrain from south of Cairo to north of the Baltic Sea, all of the Black Sea and off the coast of Ireland. It was built in sections, with the Western Front, an area of about 250 square miles, built first. He planned to make photographs of the model available to newspapers so that readers could follow daily coverage of the maneuvers of war, tracking all fronts, translating obscure and vague communiqués into on the spot images of the battle action. A board of expert strategists would meet daily, culling over foreign news and explain the meaning of government communiqués and various military strategies. NBG. 45 Box 23 Folder 402.1 “War Map” Office Minutes Meeting, Sept 27 1939.

In 1944 Bel Geddes’ War Maneuver Models was giving a showing at MoMA. As spectators look down on the map from a runway above the gallery floor, model makers from Geddes’ office were seen building the woods on either side of a river, moving trees and other vegetation in place. Miniature tanks, jeeps, trucks, command cars, boats and other vehicles all modeled to scale and in exact detail, were constructed in sterling silver. Soldiers and officers of the opposing forces with rifles and other equipment appeared in white metal, soft enough to be twisted into realistic positions as they were placed on the field of action. There were four time-lapse phases to this display, each taking several days to complete: opposing forces drew up on either side of the river and engaged in artillery dual; next pontoon bridges were put in place under gunfire and smoke, third the first bridge was completed and close action fighting begun; and finally after the second brigade was built, invaders crossed over in force. Each phase was photographed then reassembled for the next phase. On the opposite side of the runway, an enormous sea model of the South Pacific Theater was on display. [see Life Magazine close to Jan 26, 1944] NBG 47 Box 35 Folder 499.1.2.3. :”MoMA’s War Maneuver MOdels Shown at the Museum of Modern Art [Jan 26, 1944].NBG>47 Box 35 Folder 499.1.2.3.
There are limit to war games. Sensors may track physical things that move and activities that have electromagnetic signatures, but they cannot identity enemy motives nor assess the importance of the data they gather. Electronic networks, moreover, are highly vulnerable to technical and operator-induced failures, they can be easily jammed or intercepted, and are open to attack And network centric warfare tends to focus on commander support, the protection of forces on the ground and the carrying out of specific missions. Gentry, “Doomed to Fail”.
Peter W. Wielhouwer “Preparing for Future Joint Urban Operations: The Role of Simulation and the Urban Resolve Experiment,” USJFCOM/J9 [2004]
Wielhouwer, “Preparing for Future Joint Urban Operations”.
Wielhouwer, “Preparing for Future Joint Urban Operations”: 16.
Robert J. Pratt, “Invasive Threats to the American Homeland,” Parameters (Spring, 2004): unpagenated.
Bülent Diken, “The comedy of [t]erros” http://comp.lancs.ac.uk/sociology/soc******
G. Agamben. Quoted by Diken, “The comedy of [t]erros”.
Liotta, “Chaos as Strategy”: 51.
Jeffrey Record, “Bounding the Global War on Terrorism,” Strategic Studies Institute monograph (December, 2003): unpagenated.
Defined by “National Strategy for Combating Terrorism” The White House [September 2002]:1. Quoted by Record, “Bounding the Global War on Terrorism”: 12.
Timothy L. Thomas, "Ál Qaeda and the Internet: The Danger of “Cyberplanning” Parameters [Spring, 2003]..
Thomas, “Ál Qaeda and the Internet”.
Thomas, “Ál Qaeda and the Internet”.
Paul Virilio Unknown Quantity (New York: Thames & Hudson, 2003): 201-202.