Out of the Mountains (6 page)

Also, in both Iraq and Afghanistan, the heaviest fighting was far from coastlines. Afghanistan, of course, is landlocked, and the parts of Iraq that saw the worst of the conflict were also a long way from the coast. Again, the British experience in the Faw Peninsula (discussed in the Appendix) and in the coastal city of Basra was the sole important exception to this pattern. It was an exception that proves the rule, though, since it only emphasized how rare coastal fighting has been for Western forces in twenty-first-century conflict so far. But the urban littoral will indeed be the arena for much of future conflict, simply because it will be where most people live, according to currently available data.

Imagining Future War

These data don't permit specific predictions, of course—only general projections based on current trends. It's absolutely certain that there will be outliers, shocks, and nonlinear shifts. There will be disruptive technologies, political discontinuities, and “black swans.”
15
Specific future wars will undoubtedly happen in a range of environments and conditions, and landlocked rural mountainous areas will of course continue to see a share of conflict proportional to their share of population. It's just that, since the population of the planet is shifting from rural to urban areas, that proportion will be a diminishing part of the whole.

Thus, just as climate projections don't say much about tomorrow's weather, projections of current trends say little about future wars. But they do suggest a range of conditions—a set of system parameters, or a “conflict climate”—within which those wars will arise. This is because, as the anthropologist Harry Turney-High suggested more than thirty years ago, social, economic, political, and communications arrangements influence war making so profoundly that “warfare
is
social organization.”
16
Thus, the specifics of a particular war may be impossible to predict, but the parameters within which
any
future war will occur are entirely knowable, since wars are bounded by conditions that exist now, and are thus eminently observable in today's social, economic, geographic, and demographic climate.

If we accept this idea, along with the fact that war has been endemic to roughly
95
percent of all known human societies throughout history and prehistory, it follows that warfare is a central and probably a permanent human social institution, one that tends (by its very nature as a
human
activity) mainly to occur where the people are.
17
This is especially true of nonstate conflicts (guerrilla, tribal, and civil wars, or armed criminal activity such as banditry and gang warfare), which tend to happen near or within the areas where people live, or on major routes between population centers.
18
And it follows that since the places where people live are getting increasingly crowded, urban, coastal and networked, the wars people fight will take on the same characteristics.

We can summarize the conflict climate in terms of four drivers, sometimes called megatrends, that are shaping and defining it. These are
population growth
(the continuing rise in the planet's total population),
urbanization
(the tendency for people to live in larger and larger cities),
littoralization
(the propensity for these cities to cluster on coastlines), and
connectedness
(the increasing connectivity among people, wherever they live). None of these trends is new, but their pace is accelerating, they're mutually reinforcing, and their intersection will influence not just conflict but every aspect of future life.

Population growth and urbanization are closely related. More and more people are living in larger and larger cities, and the greatest growth is in the low-income (sometimes poorly governed) areas of Asia, Africa, and Latin America that are least equipped to handle it. This is easy to see if we just look at the numbers. At the start of the industrial revolution in
1750
, world population was about
750
million. This population took
150
years to double, reaching
1
.
5
billion in
1900
. It then doubled again in only
60
years, to reach
3
billion by
1960
. This, of course, represents a sharp increase in population growth—one that occurred despite the enormous effects of the two world wars, which between them killed more than
70
million people.
19
Population growth kept accelerating after
1960
, with the world population doubling yet again in only
39
years, to reach
6
billion by
1999
, and adding another billion in just one decade to reach a total (in
2012
) of about
7
.
1
billion. This growth won't continue indefinitely: global population is expected to level off at somewhere between
9
.
1
and
9
.
3
billion humans on the planet by about
2050
.
20
Still, that's a lot of people—about a twelve fold increase in just three centuries.

As population has grown, urbanization has accelerated. In
1800
, for example, only
3
percent of people lived in a city with
1
million inhabitants or more; by the year
2000
,
47
percent of the global population lived in cities this size. In
1950
, there were only
83
cities with populations over
1
million; by
2007
, there were
468
. By April
2008
, the world had passed the
50
percent urbanization mark, and in December
2011
, the world's most populous nation, China, announced that it had reached a level of
51
.
3
percent urbanization.
21
India, with the second-largest population on the planet, will not only overtake China's population by
2025
but will also undergo a radical shift in settlement patterns, going from approximately two-thirds rural in
2012
to two-thirds urban by
2040
. Some Indian population centers will become megacities, and “according to one vision, India's entire western seaboard could turn into a single conurbation . . . within two decades India will probably have six cities considerably bigger than New York, each with at least
10
million people.”
22
By
2050
, roughly
75
percent of the world's population will be urbanized. In more immediate terms, about
1
.
4
million people across the world migrate to a city every week.
23

This unprecedented urbanization is concentrated in low-income areas of Asia, Latin America, and Africa. Cities are expected to absorb
all
the new population growth on the planet by
2050
, while simultaneously drawing in millions of migrants from rural areas. And this growth will be “concentrated in the cities and towns of the less developed regions. Asia, in particular, is projected to see its urban population increase by
1
.
7
billion, Africa by
0
.
8
billion, and Latin America and the Caribbean by
0
.
2
billion.”
24
What this means is that population growth is becoming “an urban phenomenon concentrated in the developing world.”
25

To put it another way, these data show that the world's cities are about to be swamped by a human tide that will force them to absorb—in just one generation—the same population growth that occurred across the entire planet in all of recorded history up to
1960
. And virtually all this urbanization will happen in the world's poorest areas—a recipe for conflict, for crises in health, education, and governance, and for food, energy, and water scarcity.
26

I should mention that many places affected by rapid urbanization happen to be majority-Muslim, and that
takfiri
extremists—successors and imitators of Osama bin Laden—will undoubtedly keep threatening their own societies and the world at large. Indeed, the freedom from repression that emerged from the Arab Awakening—in itself an entirely positive thing—may have prompted a spike in violence in these parts of the world, at least for the time being. Thus the Muslim world certainly won't be spared the disruption we're discussing here; indeed, it may experience more conflict and unrest than other parts of the planet. But the challenges I'm describing will dwarf the terrorist threat of the last decade. If a city's infrastructure is collapsing—overwhelmed by a rapidly growing population, unplanned slum development, political instability, violent crime, conflict, disease, increased vulnerability to natural disaster, and shortages of energy, food, and water—then the fact that extremists are also out there will of course be highly unpleasant and dangerous, but it will be far from the main threat. Groups such as Al Qaeda will still exist and will pose a danger that needs to be dealt with one way or another. But the main cluster of threats, both for individuals (sometimes known as threats to
human security
) and from a collective standpoint (threats to
public safety
or
national security
), will come from the environment itself, not from any one group in it.

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

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

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

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