Military Review English Edition November-December 2015 | Page 14

transform that advantage into a favorable lasting outcome.
Conflictual coexistence hinges on the ability to be a continuous, amorphous, and regenerative nuisance to the opponent. Popular support is the source of that ability because it
provides access to the protest potential of the population.
Actually, violence in urban conflict remains crude
and primitive. However, its effectiveness does not result
from the casualties and damage it engenders but from
the cost of the measures to contain it. Improvised explosive devices and ambushes are effective not because they
kill the opponent’s soldiers but because they force that
opponent to carry out patrols with a combat package
of armored fighting vehicles, unmanned aerial vehicle
surveillance, artillery, and close-air support rather than
with a couple of soft-skinned police cars. On the other
hand, instruments of urban contention, such as mass
demonstrations, strikes, barricades, and terrorist attacks,
remain adequate and hardly evolve at all. A French
revolutionary leader of 1789 if somehow teleported
from Paris to Cairo amidst the masses on Tahrir Square
in 2011 would have recognized and understood everything that was going on there instantly. However, he or
she would have been totally unfamiliar with the methods
used to get those masses there in the first place.
Field Manual 3-24, Counterinsurgency (2006),
explained that “people support the source that meets
their needs.”18 For rural people, that source may be
their land, their own skills, the produce and fire wood
in their barns, and the friends, relatives, and clan members they can rely on in times of hardship. Politics and
administration hardly matter to their daily lives. None
of this applies to present-day urban citizens. In megacities, basic necessities such as security, shelter, water,
food, and energy depend on administrative structures
such as first responders, utility providers, public works,
and social assistance organizations. Urbanization
creates an insatiable demand for administration.
Electricity, running water, and telecommunications
were nonexistent in 1800 but are considered essential
in 2015. And, the skills of urban individuals are only
meaningful within the context of employment and
trade in the socioeconomic space shaped by city governance. Therefore, urban dwellers are very susceptible
to signs of political and administrative improvement—
however biased the source that delivers them.
The urban mood is malleable. Organizations that bring
the comforts of urban necessities such as running water,
12

electricity, or trash collection to shanty towns are almost
certain to gain the support of people living there. Likewise,
civil society activists who campaign against corruption
stand a good chance of mobilizing the skilled urban youth
that demand access to upward social mobility based on
merit rather than favoritism. To take advantage of the urban susceptibility to political and administrative improvement, urban-based belligerents mobilize city dwellers
by providing them with comfort, hope, and anger. Their
ability to do so has increased exponentially in the last four
decades because of two important developments: global
fundraising and unlimited communication.
Global fundraising allows urban-based belligerents
to be an asset rather than a burden to the population.
Several modern activist movements organize administrative structures for urban services and social
assistance parallel to those of the government. They
finance these structures by raising money abroad.19 The
increasing numbers of migrants and the development
of accessible international money transfer systems will
only accelerate this trend.
Unlimited communication is a recent but quickly
progressing development. Inhibitors such as cost, range,
bandwidth, and censorship used to limit the communication capabilities of nonstate actors. Up until the 1980s,
rulers could restrict their people’s media diet to stateowned radio stations, television channels, and newspapers.
Those times are over. The ever-increasing performance of
privately owned information and communication systems
has resulted in a situation wherein even the smallest
organization can address an audience of millions. The
Iranian Revolution of 1979 provides an early illustration
of this evolution. Revolutionary rhetoric on audiocassettes
played a critical role in the overthrow of the Shah.20 The
Arab Spring and the color revolutions proved that activist
organizations are able to mobilize millions of people,
provided they come up with messages and images that
resonate with the target audience’s hope and anger.
In conjunction, violence remains an essential part
of conflictual coexistence, but successful urban-based
belligerents keep its use low and simple. Intense and
sophisticated violence requires skilled fighters and
real-time command and control. Both are difficult to
come by and—as rare and valuable assets—are vulnerable to surveillance, target acquisition, and precision
strikes. Moreover, high-intensity combat depopulates
urban areas, as happened in Grozny. By contrast, low
November-December 2015  MILITARY REVIEW