In a recent article, Anthony King, the
Chair of War Studies at Warwick University, stresses the importance of centring
focus on the topic of Urban Insurgency.[1] This peaked my interest,
initially, after reading King’s latest book – an excellent read – which adds to
the literature reinforcing the claim that urban warfare has indeed become the
norm modality of warfare in the contemporary era, i.e. as part of a broader
phenomenon of the urbanisation of life and ‘the political’.[2] He states that over the
course of this century thus far, the past two decades, urban insurgencies have
become a major concern for both scholars and practitioners alike. It will be
the purpose of this piece to explore King’s article, critically laying out and
investigating both his central argument and the evidence he presents to arrive
at his claims. What is the objective of King’s article however?
What King seeks to do is address a
lacuna in the insurgency literature, “exploring the connection between the size
of state forces and the prevalence of urban insurgency”. Essentially, King
claims that the contraction of military forces in past decades has played a significant
role in enabling the rise of urban insurgencies. This is so, King contends, as historically,
in the twentieth century, when states possessed larger armies, they were able
to dominate urban areas undergoing insurgency through sheer force of numbers
alone. However, “as forces have downsized, states have struggled to control
urban areas, allowing insurgents to operate inside cities with a freedom that
was once denied them.” Subsequently, it is the purpose of his article to lay
out and evidence this claim, that “The
contraction of state forces has amplified the effects of demography and
asymmetry” in relation to urban warfare and insurgency.
In order to elucidate the connection
between declining force size and the rise of urban insurgency, King’s article
is roughly bifurcated into two sections. The first demonstrates that urban
insurgencies were in fact very common in the twentieth century, despite some
contemporary claims to the contrary that Urban Insurgency is a phenomenon that
is born of this century. In the second part, the article turns to examine the
twenty-first century, exploring force ratios in Iraq and Syria to show how the
relative deficiency of state forces indeed facilitated insurgencies to hold
urban terrain in both cases. This stark contrast to the previous era is then
explored and analysed.
Force Size and Urban Insurgency
Significantly, King begins his work by
exploring the very notion of how demography and an assessment of urban
insurgency can indeed go hand in hand. He states: “Demography and asymmetry are
plainly key factors in explaining urban warfare in the twenty-first century”.
This is, without a doubt, a trait that many works on the topic explore, not
least in the wider conflict literature broadly. For instance, in her now
seminal ‘New and Old Wars’ and in her latest co-authored work on urban
insurgency, Mary Kaldor explores the role that demography has plaid in relation
to the drawn-out nature of conflicts – specifically in the case of the 1990s
Balkan wars and those of the twenty-first century Iraq and Afghanistan theatres
in the former.[3]
Despite this, King contends, “successful
urban insurgencies were rare in the twentieth century” and “It is something of
a conundrum that they were not more common or successful.” Interestingly, King
frames his discourse on demography and urban insurgency asking why it was that
although such insurgencies did indeed occur in the previous century, they were
so unsuccessful? Especially given how ideologically driven or fundamentalist in
nature a number of such insurgencies indeed were. What made the twentieth
century different?
The first point that is highlighted is
the distinction between the outcome of the process of urbanisation in the
twenty-first century and that of the twentieth. Rightly so, “Many scholars have
argued that the urban environment is optimal for concealment and protection”,
more so now than ever in the past, given the vast scale of urban-sprawls that
have occurred amidst other phenomena and processes of expansion, growth and
development running parallel to this; globalisation for a somewhat obvious
instance. Such a process of swelling and evolving urbanisation provides the
site for urban insurgency to thrive, in a similar manner to the way that warm
temperatures provide the optimal conditions for cultures to grow and thrive in
micro-biology labs.
In order to discuss this, King cycles
through a handful of illustrations. “For instance, the favelas in Brazil are
almost impenetrable to the security forces, since each consists of a dense maze
of streets. Wars in Syria and against Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS)
show how insurgents have been able to build formidable urban strongholds
against state forces. Nevertheless, it is not true that states always struggle
to defeat insurgents in urban areas.”
It cannot be solely due to the
proliferation of advanced weaponry, and the development of technology broadly,
King argues. As although these factors are significant, broadly speaking, state
forces tend to hold the advantage, as the gulf between state and insurgent
capabilities is generally becoming wider - i.e., in terms of technological
capabilities, the distinction between those of state forces and insurgents is
becoming increasingly asymmetric. Subsequently, we can claim that: “Neither
does the proliferation of advanced weaponry and information communications
technology alone explain why insurgents have thrived in cities in the past two
decades.”
“The question then”, in King’s frame, “is
not so much why insurgents have more advanced weaponry now, but rather why
urban insurgents today have been able to create no-go urban enclaves more
easily than their counterparts in the twentieth century.” This is an important
question to ask as, in the past, large state security forces were able to swamp
urban areas, generating force densities in contested neighbourhoods that made
it impossible for insurgencies to operate freely. Now however, state forces
have the technological upper-hand, generally, but are not able to put down
insurgencies in a number of cases. Thus, what has changed? It is here we see
King reveal the central operation of his investigation: to explore “whether,
in the past two decades, urban insurgency has become more common and serious
substantially because state forces have contracted.”
Twentieth-Century Urban Insurgencies
In contradistinction to commentators
such as David Kilcullen, who contend that urban insurgency has phenomenally
manifested out of the past two decades alone, King wishes to show that “urban
insurgency was a constant feature of the twentieth century”.[4] In order to do this, he
undertakes a short horizon scan of urban insurgencies in the twentieth century,
recalling those in Palestine, Malaya, Kenya, Cyprus, Algeria, Oman, Yemen,
Vietnam and Northern Ireland.
Ultimately, what he finds is that there
are a certain series of patterns and qualities that commonly unite
twentieth-century insurgencies. King states that:
“In most campaigns, there was very
significant urban fighting. Insurgents frequently operated in cities and towns,
and some terrorist cells were highly successful. Nevertheless, in each case the
rural insurgency predominated; the urban guerrilla was, at most, a supporting element
of the uprising. The regime was strongest in towns and cities; the security
forces dominated there. It was, therefore, hard for insurgents to gain a
foothold in urban areas, or to mount successful operations from them.”
Subsequently, we can see that out of his
horizon scan, identifying shared qualities of urban insurgencies in the
Twentieth-Century, King emphasises that their lack of success in comparison to
their rural cousin concerns the ability
for state security forces to dominate the urban territory. In this regard, it
became a herculean task for the urban insurgent or insurgency group to gain a
foothold in the urban space; requiring a conceivably successful contestation of
such a space with state security forces. This leads King to ask why insurgents,
on the whole, avoided urban spaces in the twentieth century.
Why Did Guerrillas Avoid Cities in the
Twentieth-Century?
A figure that King visits to answer this
question is the Spanish guerrilla fighter Abraham Guillén, who became intellectual
mentor of Uruguay's revolutionary Movement of National Liberation – the Tupamaros.
In his ‘Strategy of The Urban Guerrilla’, Guillén sketches out both the
benefits and a philosophical grasp of urban insurgency, understanding the urban
guerrilla as a primary revolutionary subject, whilst equally drawing on its difficulties.[5] King centres focus here,
as: “For Guillén, the city offered a unique political advantage. As long as
they did not tether themselves to a location, the guerrillas could remain
anonymous, thereby evading detection and arrest.”
This is significant, King reveals,
because from within the situations and frameworks of twentieth-century
insurgencies and insurgency literature, urban guerrillas were able to recognise
and overcome the weakness of traditional insurgencies, naturally more rural. Here,
in the urban area, “They [Urban insurgents] were able to mobilize the citizenry
without exposing themselves or the people to government repression.”
Leading on from this, King displays how Guillén
fully accepted that a territorial strategy must fail, precisely as state forces
were at their strongest in towns and cities. Here, in the urban area, “security
forces would always have enough troops to counter such an offensive”. This is
what King is arguing has changed, that the ratio of urban insurgent groupings
to state security forces has adapted in favour of the urban insurgent, limiting
numerous states’ capabilities to counter such insurgencies.
“For all his advocacy of the urban as
not just the primary theatre of insurrection, but the only necessary one,
Guillén ultimately admitted how difficult it was to mount and sustain a
revolutionary campaign in the urban domain in the twentieth century. States’
security forces were so numerous that it was simply impossible for insurgents
to operate effectively in this environment, so close to the seat of government,
its police stations, barracks, courts and prisons.” Belfast during ‘The
Troubles’ is the example that King provides of this.
After Bloody Friday, the British
government commanded the armed forces to bring Londonderry and Belfast under
control; this was the case especially in relation to Belfast’s so-called
‘no-go’ areas, which were to be eliminated. This was to be called ‘Operation
Motorman’ and, regarding the self-constructed aims of the British government,
was a success as it left the provisional IRA with no choice but to
fundamentally adapt its approach to insurgency. Having lost the battle for the
cities, following the British army’s diluvial presence, ‘Provisional IRA’ cells
were left with no alternative but to fight their war of attrition and continue
to challenge the British security services in the countryside alone.
“The Troubles show that in the twentieth
century, while urban guerrillas often played an important role, they were
always extremely vulnerable to counter-action by massive state forces, which
were normally able to drive them out of cities.” This, King asserts, is what
must be addressed if we are to grasp why urban insurgencies have become more
successful in the twenty-first century than in the twentieth – as the ability
for security services to ‘flood’ an urban area under an insurgency has become
greatly limited with the reduced size of security forces broadly. This becomes
the task of his next section, to lay out the empirical evidence for such a
claim.
Force Size and the Twenty-First-Century
Insurgency
“The insurgents of the post-war period
emphasized the difficulty of mounting an urban insurgency; there were simply
too many security forces. Counter-insurgents of the same era also fully
acknowledged that force ratios played an important role in their operations.”
The end of conscription or national
service has had an effect here, King argues. “Force ratios have been inverted
in the twenty-first century. For western states, the main reason for this is
obvious. From the early nineteenth century until the end of the twentieth,
western states tended to rely on conscription to generate mass forces when they
required them.” In the Russo-Ukrainian war currently, is Russian national
service and conscription having an effect? Perhaps, we can see this in the case
of Mariupol? Or are there other factors, both conceptual and behavioural, that
distinguish this case from others?
Interestingly, it is here that King unpacks one of the most significant claims to his hypothesis: “No matter how effective individual units have been in comparison with their twentieth-century, often conscripted predecessors in Kenya, Algeria and Malaya, western forces have operated at a major disadvantage; they have lacked the numbers required to pacify urban areas.” This he goes on to exemplify through discussions of the Iraq war, which demonstrated this issue clearly in the cases of Baghdad, Ramadi and, most famously, Fallujah, whereby the insurgency in the Iraq War saw not only some of the most intense combat but also some of the most unethical practices the war manifested. Equally, King examines the current Syrian Civil War in this regard, specifically in the cases of Aleppo, Homs, Idlib and Raqqa.
King goes on to explore his thesis through his use of ‘Table 1’, whereby he calculates the ratio of security forces to urban population during city-based counter-insurgency operations since 1950.
What we see here is King’s thesis laid
bare in statistical format. Ultimately, Table 1 shows that as state security
forces have contracted and, therefore, force densities have declined in
comparison with the twentieth century, insurgents have been able to operate
more freely in cities as urban population has generally increased. For example,
the average urban population to security force ratios between 1945-1990 (the
second half of the twentieth century) King averages at 49:1, i.e., for every 49
individuals of an urban population experiencing an insurgency, there was 1
state security counter-insurgent. In the twenty first century thus far, this
average ratio is far, far higher - increasing from 49:1 to 149:1. Such a
difference has largely had an effect on state counter-insurgency operations in
urban areas.
Conclusion: Urban Counter-Insurgency in
the Future
In his conclusion, King gives us five
important takeaways from his article.
Firstly - “The rise of the urban
insurgent can certainly be explained in part by the huge increases in the size
of cities, so that their vastness quite overwhelms the security forces. Slums
are ideal home bases for urban gangs; such areas are almost impenetrable for
the security forces.”
Secondly – “There is also an additional,
often ignored, factor that helps explain why the urban guerrilla has become
such an important actor in contemporary conflict: the contraction of state
forces. State forces are tiny in comparison to those of the twentieth century.”
“Within cities, no-go areas have emerged
which are very difficult for the security forces to penetrate or clear. This has
allowed insurgents to procure and use more sophisticated, heavier weaponry and
to engage in more ambitious military operations. In consequence we see the
appearance of the chronic inner-urban standoff which has been such a feature of
twenty-first-century urban conflict.” Mariupol is perhaps an example of this, which
seems to have ended in the mass-bombardment of the urban area and, significantly
on an ontological level, the total erasure of the urban itself. This we saw in
the case of Aleppo, where harrowing drone footage after battle displayed a
ghost town, where by 2017 over 36,000 buildings were damaged beyond repair or
destroyed and the war had generated an estimated 15 million tonnes of rubble in
the city alone.[6]
The state has greater firepower and propensity to destroy, so instead of
entering the ‘no-go’ territory of insurgence, the state simply changes the
ontological condition of the urban from a constellation of architecture and
technologies for living - to that of a concrete corpse itself, unable to
sustain life.
“The question for state forces, which
are likely to have to deal with urban conflicts either at home or abroad in the
next decade, is: how are they to offset the problem of their declining force
sizes?”. This, without any doubt, will more than likely be answered with
technology. The asymmetric gulf of
military hardware and capability between state-security forces and insurgents
will be pried even further open in order to combat this. We can see this
already in relation to drone warfare, which, despite being expensive – where some
drones [Global Hawks] can cost up to and over $18,591 an hour – is not
technology that lends itself to reverse engineering or make-shift replication by
bottom-up insurgency or guerrilla movements.[7] This connects to King’s
third important point.
Thirdly – “Nevertheless, in the past two
decades, disruptive informational and remote technologies have become
commonplace in urban conflict.” However, numbers are still likely to be
crucial, irrespective of technological adaptation and capabilities by state security
forces.
Fourthly: “In the past two decades,
states have also employed a second technique to offset declining troop numbers:
proxies.” For Russia this has become the norm, especially in Ukraine and Syria.
Perhaps we see this more so today, at least in the European sphere, no more so than
in the claim that Putin has recruited some 16,000 Syrians to fight with Russia
in Ukraine for a return of $7,000.[8] Naturally, such claims may
be the result of mis/disinformation, as is often the case in the contemporary
era.[9] However, the rationale
would be to enlist proxy servicemen to not only offset declining troop numbers,
but to do so with servicemen who have experience in urban combat and
insurgency, as should be expected in Ukraine as cities will become the site of
Battle in both zones occupied and not; Mariupol being the prime example.
Finally, in conclusion, the overall
thesis King etches into black and white is enunciated perfectly at the close of
his piece. Here he states, clearly, that:
“The
urban insurgency has become an increasingly common phenomenon in the past two
decades and is likely to remain an important feature of future warfare, not
only because of the demographics or the asymmetric advantages of cities, but
also because state forces themselves have declined so radically. Downsized
state forces, probably augmented with disruptive technologies and supported by
proxies, will contest urban areas with insurgents in the coming decades.
Indeed, the contraction of military forces makes the urban insurgency ever more
likely in the near future.”
[1] Anthony King. (2022). ‘Urban Insurgency
in the Twenty-First Century: Smaller Militaries and Increased Conflict in
Cities’. International Affairs, 98(2): 609-629. All unreferenced
quotations are taken from this source.
[2] Anthony King. (2021). Urban Warfare
in The Twenty-First Century. Cambridge: Polity Books; Stephen Graham. (2010).
Cities Under Siege: The New Military Urbanism. London: Verso. p.16. My
mind is also drawn to: Mary Kaldor and Saskia Sassen. (2020). Cities at War:
Global Insecurities and Urban Resistance. New York: Columbia University
Press; Ari Jerrems. (2020). ‘Theorising International Urban Politics’. Millennium:
Journal of International Studies, 49(1): 105-116; Neil Brenner. (2019). New
Urban Spaces: Urban Theory and the Scale Question. Oxford: Oxford
University Press; Sara Fregonese. (2019). War and the City: Urban
Geopolitics in Lebanon. London: I.B. Tauris.
[3] Mary Kaldor. (2012). New and Old Wars.
Third Edition. Cambridge: Polity Press [specifically Chapters 3 and 7]; Mary
Kaldor and Saskia Sassen. (2020). Cities at War: Global Insecurities and
Urban Resistance. New York: Columbia University Press.
[4] David Kilcullen. (2013). Out of the
Mountains: The Coming Age of the Urban Guerrilla. London: Hurst.
[5]
David Hodges. (1973). The Philosophy
of the Urban Guerrilla: The Revolutionary Writings of Abraham Guillén. New
York: William Morrow. p. 234, 250.
[6] Iain Overton and Jennifer Dathan. (17th
December 2019). ‘Syria in 2020: the Deadly Legacy of Explosive Violence and its
Impact on Infrastructure and Health’. reliefweb.int. https://reliefweb.int/report/syrian-arab-republic/syria-2020-deadly-legacy-explosive-violence-and-its-impact#:~:text=A%202019%20study%20by%20REACH,level%20of%20harm%20as%20Homs
(Accessed 9th July 2020).
[7] Sebastien Roblin. (20th
April 2020). ‘The Air Force Wants to Cut Surveillance Drones—Here’s Why That
May Be A Mistake’. forbes.com. https://www.forbes.com/sites/sebastienroblin/2020/04/20/the-air-force-wants-to-cut-surveillance-drones-a-think-tank-argues-thats-a-mistake/?sh=56f8de524e69
(Accessed 9th July 2022).
[8] BBC News. (30th March 2022).
‘Ukraine War: The Syrians Signing Up to Fight for Russia’. bbc.co.uk., https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/world-middle-east-60931180
(Accessed 9th July 2022).
[9] Pierre Boussel (23rd June 2022)
‘Syrian Mercenaries in Ukraine: Delusion or Reality?’. Carneigieendowment.org.
https://carnegieendowment.org/sada/87382
(Accessed 9th July 2022).