Q Thank you very much. Yes, indeed. I think it's the issue of cities and conflict is as relevant today as it was perhaps 5000,
5016 years ago when, you know, if I remember my history lessons well,
you know, as you know, the whole written history began when as we've become in cities, we're fighting for control of each other.
And the city state was was the rule of the day in that in that region.
And 5000, 16 years later, I think cities still haunt us as kind of daunting areas for operations, security,
conflict and puzzles policy makers in in how to apply force in those in those areas be
that military is or as you said and or the low intensity more non-state armed groups.
Units. So for law enforcement agencies urban security missions often means leaving their comfort zones in hyper violent cities of Central America,
Mexico, Brazil, Colombia.
Police forces are quickly deployed to counter sudden surges in armed violence by well-equipped and organised criminal groups.
For military forces, the main challenge of cities has been, until very recently,
how to increase the lethality of soldiers in order to increase both their speed and deterrence capability in those areas.
The difficulties of the urban environment for state combatants is legendary.
Despite the military surge for this increased speed and mortality dense and chaotic, sprawling developing world,
cities have often defeated modern armies in a comprehensive study of urban warfare by the U.S. Strategic Studies Institute in 2011.
The urban is described as an unhappy domain of armed forces.
Are army companies or rifle companies fighting to take control of city blocks
usually take an average of 30 to 40% of casualties during a 12 hour fight.
So such casualties, such level of casualties and stress, usually random.
This compound is completely unusable after these fights.
Despite that,
strategic thinking about cities has been rare and some of the efforts made to understand how modern armies could fit their increasingly heavy tanks.
RoboCop, like soldiers and their heavy calibre weapons into city streets, have relied on the promise of technology.
So in 1999, the U.S. Army began an urban warrior program.
The name kind of says it all. It's about the transformation of the current infantry soldier into a truly lethal urban warrior.
Equal parts men and a machine. I'm quoting that directly from them.
Since then, of course, the emphasis is on fabulous technologies such as integrated helmet, assembly, subsystems,
thermal weapons sites and unmanned ground vehicles has greatly diminished in strategic documents on cities.
Recent urban engagements in Ukraine, Iraq, Syria had been, as I said, as unpredictable and destructive as always.
The Urban Warrior Program from the 1990s did nothing to change the famous pattern of militaries avoiding urban warfare as much as possible,
especially since the World War Two, the conduct of so-called military operations in urban terrain.
And will you? I don't know if they see this mode or mode.
UTI is due marked by failures or disastrous victories.
The U.S. Strategic Studies Institute reminds us that the French victory in Algiers after happened after widespread human rights violations there,
and the growth in the Russian victory in Grozny happened after the Russians basically destroyed the entire city and depopulated it.
So perhaps we haven't learned much, much in this past 5000 years.
So far, there's not much in the way of changing character of war in my presentation.
So in order to win my free lunch, I should probably start to see what is really, really changing.
And I do think that the role of cities as sites of armed conflict is changing and increasing.
And I think if you have been looking to the whole, you know, recent literature on urban fragility, urban law enforcement and urban armed forces,
use of armed forces, I think if it is a consensus that cities are increasingly important for for for all these sectors.
So I think this stems from the developing world.
Urbanising at unprecedented speed and in unprecedentedly chaotic fashion,
developing countries will concentrate almost all of the two and a half billion new urban dwellers expected by 2050.
Africa that is beset by various types of armed conflict, will see three fold increase in its urban population by 2050.
Some fragile and conflict afflicted countries are already struggling to implement governance
and manage the demands of metropolitan citizens will be at the forefront of this trend.
Nigeria, DRC, the global population living in slums, will grow by 500 million people by 2030.
Both local authorities and top level strategic thinkers have had to address this challenge of unmanaged growth in recent years.
Protracted violence has become an increasing feature in the sprawling urban areas of the developing world.
Latin America, which has had an early urbanisation process, now has 41 of the world's 50 most violent cities,
according to a ranking that came out just last week by a mexican NGO.
The tools applied to fight organised crime and cities have moved disturbingly into paramilitary territory.
Honduras has created a military police force. Mexico has created its gendarmerie, which is also a kind of paramilitary style force.
Guatemala has created hybrid military civilian task forces.
Rio has its military police. Military thinkers have also tried to freeze urban complexity head on.
The U.S. Army, in a notable change from the Urban Warrior Project of the late 1990s,
is now conducting a mega-city instead study project, which draws heavily from urban studies.
And to some extent, law enforcement and criminology.
Emphasising emphasise the context of the urban environment so that the different elements, the non-military elements that compose the cities.
Indeed, one military thinker actually from Australia who criticised the U.S. Army's study
on megacities is that it was too narrow and instead called for the inclusion of,
quote, military history, human geography, sociology, city planning, architectural design,
municipal management procedures, criminology, policing, and the employment of emergency services, unquote.
The point that is relevant for our purposes is that the character of urban armed conflict is changing.
Militaries and armies in particular are learning that facing irregular non-state forces in dense grids of narrow streets is too costly,
costly and usually not sustainable in the long term.
At the same time, the convergence of rapid urbanisation and state weakness has created ample space for ingrown threats,
such as the criminal groups that are born and raised in the urban territories, which they now challenge.
That is what Robert Muga, an academic on urban fragility in Rio, calls endemic urban violence.
I would add that alongside criminal groups such as the Harley School Cartel in Mexico or the rat command in Rio,
endemic violence is also erupting in other contexts, such as, for instance, peacekeeping missions,
which have been consistently challenged by gangs, militias and insurgent groups in environments such as Mogadishu,
in Somalia, Burundi, in the Central African Republic, and Port-Au-Prince in Haiti.
Although these forms of endemic violence vary tremendously in their routes, character and dynamics,
they have displayed a tendency for urban forms of armed conflict to resist pressure by militaries and paramilitary paramilitary forces alike.
Authorities are finding themselves more and more tied to the nitty gritty use of robust urban security responsibilities.
Cities have increasingly been caught in a cycle of low intensity conflict that has frequently blurred the distinctions between warfare,
peacekeeping and law enforcement. Although I am not saying that the three are equal, they are different.
On one hand, armed forces from the Americans in Iraq to peacekeepers in Mogadishu have learned the difficult way
that cities is still stubbornly defying the strategic assumptions at the core of these agencies.
So cat and mouse games, instead of the size of victory, confusing urban battles against gangs and militias,
that of peacekeeping and equally confusing urban battles against gangs and militias.
Instead of classic law enforcement.
With the protracted character that urban conflict has taken, using force in cities becomes not only an operational issue, but a strategic one.
That is an important distinction. Urban warfare operations are often undertaken both by military or local civilian forces,
with a view on achieving the defeat of an opponent within the shortest possible amount of time,
especially given the costs of this type of operation and the unpopular character of force deployment in densely populated areas.
The medium to long term reality is that armed violence and conflict tend to spread out through a considerable amount of time,
often irrespective of the success or lack thereof of any particular security operation.
So think of Fallujah. That was. In Iraq.
That was the setting of not one but two costly battles for the U.S. Army just to be taken years later by the Islamic State.
Think of security operations in Mexico, Central America, Brazil,
where the deployment of military and paramilitary forces underwent anarchy from
exceptional to permanent measures in the propensity for cities to prolong armed violence.
Calls for a broader view of cities as sites of security policies.
It requires a strategic view and is not just missing it.
John Sullivan, our Los Angeles career police officer and counterterrorism expert, suggested in 2011 a theory of urban strategy.
This is something that remarkably is absent from both policy and academic documents.
Strategies for specific aspects of global security landscape have been put forward regarding the air, the sea and more recently, the cyber domain.
My my institute itself has released a book recently on strategy for Cyber Power.
So there are strategies for many domains of of of armed force.
However, the development of an urban strategic thinking has been hampered by the heterogeneous character of armed conflict in cities,
which can vary a lot as as I have just, just said.
And also, both military and law enforcement forces have had few incentives to strategically think about protracted conflicts in cities,
because both of them saw the urban conflicts as being outside of the remit or outside of their areas of interest.
However, things are changing. In 2010, 2002, the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff launched its first ever Joint Urban Operations Doctrine,
and the Brazilian Army published a few years ago an operational and doctrinal document on what it calls guaranteeing law and order,
after it became clear that deployments to sprawling slums would not disappear anytime soon.
A strategic view on cities means a view somewhat distanced from individual, short term policy objectives.
Even if you consider urban security purely through the military dimension,
something that even the purely military studies are trying to get away from,
but even if you consider it purely military,
then looking at specific short term deployments would technically constitute a tactical or the best an operational view.
And indeed, this is how multiple official doctrinal documents released with an urban focus have defined
themselves as operational guidelines or exploratory documents for operating cities.
That again, brings us back to the historical inheritance of urban thinking cities as alien,
hostile and frequently dystopian environments where a heavily armed force should
be carefully introduced and withdrawn as quickly and surgically as possible.
This view looks at the urban context as a necessary evil in order to avoid operational
mishaps or a repeat of the Russian disaster in Grozny or the American one in Mogadishu.
So the alternative to an operational and short term view of cities requires less emphasis on the adversary, the kinetic aspect of operations.
If you want to go tactical and more on urban dimension, in this case the urban strategic dimension,
it is remarkable how some really in-depth studies are conducted by think tanks,
military or otherwise, ignore the focus on cities as systems, which has been perhaps prevailing view of cities since at least the 1950s.
I will go through the cities as systems framework a little bit and then explain how I
see it fitting within my ideas of utility of force in urban strategic environments.
So these systems approach, as I said,
kicked off in the fifties and sixties when systems and other fuels like became sexy and popular within biology and cybernetics and others.
As one recent review of the issue by the University College London puts it, cities fit the systems characterisation admirably.
So the traditional approach of looking at policies there through a structural focus on organising the physical space in a
linear way gave way to the systems framework a more fragile and complex entity that requires more subtle interventions.
At this basic. At its basic, this approach looks at cities as composed of sets of patterns,
of three sets of elements tied together through sets of interactions held together by feedback patterns.
So think of spatial connections like burrows linked by traffic.
But also many studies have proposed systems of innovation, systems of human capital,
systems of employment and so on, all within the broader urban system.
But security has been absent from this debate. My.
Just why that is so is that security strategy is usually considered within the national levels of policymaking.
The powers that be, if you will.
An example is that the minds of the people as it organises some of the world's largest defence and security conferences and local policymakers,
local decision makers are usually absent from these debates, and I think that it they should be included.
But as I said, this is this is starting to change.
John de Boer, the United Nations University, has been vocal about the inclusion of a systems lens to interpret urban policies,
especially for the context of fragile or post-conflict countries, which of course, are of high urgency for the U.N.
This lens is a starting point for an understanding of the urban strategic environment.
Systems models for cities can be applied and in fact have been applied several times to
display or test shifts of each node within the system in response to different inputs.
It is also useful to better understand the drivers and dynamics of change.
Let's think of fluid and dynamic contexts of violence,
where the balance of power between actors change relationships like alliances and enmities change.
The amount of manpower, vehicles, equipments that view the policymaker have might fluctuate.
And system perspective. Sorry, a system perspective puts change at the core of its policy analysis.
The whole point of systems is that its elements are constantly interacting and influencing each other through feedback.
In fact, one of the recent trends in the whole systems debate is that cities are in fact not in equilibrium,
but frequently in the equilibrium and actually, or at least far from a perfect equilibrium.
The main point for now is that a systems perspective helps us understand the
different elements of a complex environment and the relationships between them.
So now I want to lay out briefly what I see as a strategic environment, since I'm talking about an urban strategic environment.
Here I also build a pre-existing literature, of course, from strategic studies.
In reading some of this literature with systems and urban plans.
I kind of saw how the two are indeed similar in many ways.
Strategy and systems strategies usually viewed as a relation of subject, and as Sir Laurence Friedman puts it in a great recent book.
It's about maintaining a balance between ends. Ways and means alongside objectives and methods.
Also in explaining why strategy is more than a plan.
So Lawrence lays out the linearity, usually meaning to the idea of a plan versus the complexity of strategy.
When actors affect the two other, frustrate each other's plans and interact with often opposing interests and concerns.
In a curious echo of the more recent discoveries of urban systems,
so Lawrence warns would be strategist that there is rarely an orderly movement to goals set in advance.
Relationships are the core of the strategic environment.
Strategic environment is understood as the realm in which leadership interacts with other actors to advance the well-being of the state.
The words relationships and interactions come up quite a lot when you read on strategic environments.
One common feature in military studies of cities is the recognition that it is
fundamentally different from what the sites of armed forces such as deserts and seas.
So I think there is plenty of school for us to explore the concept of urban strategic environments.
For instance, what are the actors in the system and how they are interacting with each other?
The nodes to be analysed within the system, however,
include not only the networks of criminal or insurgent groups that usually concern security authorities,
but also the productivity, transportation, infrastructure and even cultural elements of the city.
Such and such an approach take cities and the complex systems that they are instead of sites for specific operations.
Therefore, urban services, infrastructure,
stakeholders and flows of traffic and information can be incorporated as parts of a system that reacts to security inputs.
More importantly, this view allows us to distinguish between the force that is used to stabilise the system and the force that disrupts the system.
Here I reach my main point about the utility of force in cities.
When you look at the environment as a system,
you are looking at something that is immensely more fragile and connected than other operating environment, such as deserts and seas.
There are many more connections and relationships in the urban system.
Therefore, the application of force can can often destabilise the system, something that in the system jargon is called disruption.
So the presence of cities as systems seems compatible with initial lessons learned from instances of urban armed conflict that I mentioned previously.
And I'm sure you are familiar with protracted, protracted,
complex problems involving anti-crime deployments in Latin America or peacekeeping missions in Africa, in cities more than in other environments.
Security interventions can cause violent reactions,
especially when conducted in the absence of stabilising policy tools due to the complexity and unpredictability of complex systems.
It is preferable to shape elements of the system more surgically than to attempt broad control in order.
In other words, the less foreign elements you apply into a complex system, the more stable it will be.
Therefore, it is up to the strategists to identify the nodes within the system where he can deploy
his resources in a way that will generate the most desirable and achievable end result.
For our purposes, it means that instead of controlling or attempting to control the whole of a city through massive deployments of force,
it might be preferable to identify actors, institutions and services that can help shape the strategic environment in a positive way.
Now, because urbanisation is proceeding at a rapid pace in developing or fragile settings,
some countries have already conducted experiments in urban security and stabilisation
that have interfered with the urban system in different forms and levels of intensity.
Cities that have experienced sharp drops in their homicide rates show a shift from disruptive use of force raids,
incursions, a predominantly kinetic approach to more comprehensive and stabilising policies.
These can be understood as a process of trial, error and learning in urban strategic environments.
Fortunately, this approach has gained some visibility in recent years and is starting to spread over the western slopes.
If we take two cities that have become key studies in urban security change in South America, with the scenario in Brazil and Medellin,
Colombia, we observe not only tactical changes towards a less aggressive posture, but also a conceptual change.
Armed forces are armed force with that by the military or by the various paramilitary
or police agencies is to be applied in order to support a broader stability effort.
This is hardly a groundbreaking discovery, but its practical application had eluded Latin American cities,
even as they struggle for decades with endemic armed violence.
So we don't have time to go through these examples in much detail.
But very briefly, first met regime, which was first in time as well in relation to real,
the start of the law enforcement shifts there helped stabilise the city can be traced to the early 2000,
when mediation played an important role in the U.S., supported efforts to turn the tide against guerrillas and drug cartels.
The armed forces were used with extensive support from Black Hawk helicopters to Occupy Keys lands known locally as communities.
The influx of military and police forces in the city succeeded in expelling most of the guerrilla groups
and was followed by agreements in the criminal underworld that allowed for a temporary instability.
This opportunity was seized by local authorities.
We implemented policies that are now famous building libraries, schools, cable cars to connect the slums into the broader city.
Bulldog Tactical works inside the most fragile communities.
The overarching aim was to use a broad range of state tools,
including a limited amount of armed force to stabilise volatile communities and create the conditions for longer term development.
I study off by University of Georgia,
concluded that the communities connected by public transportation works saw a 66% drop in homicides between 2003 and 2008.
The Foundation for this Peace Building Initiatives was a significant reinterpretation of urban law enforcement.
The police received state of the art technology to connect its outposts, place to guard the slums in other places of the city.
When I visited in late last year, I visited the security secretary and called my attention that not the technology.
That was also very impressive, but the variety of people that were involved in monitoring and planning the urban security there.
So to me, the greatest security change he made was not the technology it acquired,
but the successful integration of different civilian and military institutions around the world.
Stabilising the city system today, joint patrols and operations by army and police, supported by surveillance aircraft from the Air Force are routine.
The model of joining forces in creating the stability necessary for broader development attracted the attention of all the cities,
most notably Rio de Janeiro.
There we see a very different background, but also remarkable similarities in the application of military law enforcement and peace building measures,
and then equally significant reassessment of the role of force.
The example of Rio is essentially is especially interesting because it applied some of the
lessons from engaging to a much larger scale in a metropolitan area with 11 million inhabitants,
whereas media has 2 million inhabitants or slightly more than that.
And also a situation of endemic violence in Rio have been the status quo since at least the 1980s.
So, like managing the slums or favelas have historically lacked effective state presence, public services and infrastructure.
Again, we don't have time to go through the background of the of the criminal threats there.
But I assure you it's this qualifier, if not more than in Beijing,
as some of you might know from watching Narcos or but faced with the challenge of implementing
two major sporting events in a city where criminal gangs actually control swaths of territory.
The Government of Rio is started in 2008, a pacification program in slums consisting of permanent police presence,
followed by improvements in public services and peacebuilding initiatives.
The state used its military police force, considered one of the world's most experienced forces in urban operations,
with varying degrees of support and involvement by the Army and Navy to retake the slums from criminal groups and occupy them.
It slum chosen to host the pacifying force as they came to be known, hosted a permanent base for the Pacifying Police Unit.
Or it would. This was in stark contrast with the preceding approach prevailing for decades of conducting
occasional raids with armoured vehicles in search of high value targets and with heavy firepower.
One of the main shifts that took place in the manner in which authorities viewed the aims of the security effort,
the old objective of dismantling drug gangs was called a utopia by the security secretary and father of the pacification programs.
Somebody on a tram, securing key spaces in order to pave the way for all their state institutions became the real aim of the new strategy.
So I'm coming to my conclusion now, and I know that I've done a quite vast exploration of the urban globe.
But this week, examples to me show a path towards the strategic assessment of cities as systems.
The changes there stemmed not only from a shift in the use of force,
but more importantly from a reassessment of the role of force in achieving security results in cities.
So the utility of force in cities is not just, you know, these examples, but the cities themselves promote that reassessment.
When you visit Rio and Medellin and the changed approach to secure part of the narrative of modernisation and change,
these cities had a long time to learn from their own mistakes.
And there were several mistakes. As I'm sure you know, if if we look closely at the periods of changing their security postures,
we can see that there was indeed a shift in the understanding of force with a break from the past kinetic approach,
which is what I'm calling disruptive force to a holistic approach with law
enforcement and military agencies married to development and peacebuilding policies,
what I'm calling a stabilising force.
All of these, as I said, came not centrally at all, but as a result of a hard won understanding of the urban strategic environment,
the usefulness of studying these cases and developing this understanding of the urban strategic environment,
in my view, stems from the urbanisation trends in all the developing regions.
Latin America is currently the most urbanised of all the developing regions or subregions,
with 80% of its population live living in cities in Asia and Africa.
These numbers are way below, but they are growing fast and even faster than in Latin America during the 20th century.
So the understanding of the utility of force within systems, I think will become even more important in the coming years.
Thank you.