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Intelligence and National Security

ISSN: 0268-4527 (Print) 1743-9019 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/fint20

Counterinsurgency agent networks and
noncombatant-targeted violence

Britta Stime

To cite this article: Britta Stime (2017) Counterinsurgency agent networks and
noncombatant-targeted violence, Intelligence and National Security, 32:1, 107-125, DOI:
10.1080/02684527.2016.1210770

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/02684527.2016.1210770

Published online: 26 Jul 2016.

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IntellIgence and natIonal SecurIty, 2017
Vol. 32, no. 1, 107–125
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02684527.2016.1210770

ARTICLE

Counterinsurgency agent networks and noncombatant-targeted
violence

Britta Stime

School of Politics, International Studies and Philosophy, Queen’s university Belfast, Belfast, uK

ABSTRACT
In counterinsurgency, agent networks are double-edged swords. They are
useful tools for degrading insurgent influence and protecting the population.
However, they also endanger the population in some ways, as we have
seen with mass executions of suspected agents and agent misdirection of
raids. Identifying how/why this occurs is critical for developing intelligence
practices to more effectively implement COIN strategies. This exploratory
study uses three recent counterinsurgency cases – for which significant
secondary open-source agent network documentation is available – to
identify, describe, organize and analyse patterns of noncombatant-targeted
violence associated with human intelligence networks. Identified cases
of noncombatant-targeted violence in Operation Enduring Freedom –
Afghanistan, Operation Iraqi Freedom, and the – Israeli–Palestinian conflict
are used to develop a theoretical framework that models intelligence-related
violence incentivization, which also draws from theoretical literature on
human intelligence, civil war violence, police states, community policing,
and the sociology of betrayal.

Agent networks are an essential feature of counterinsurgency (COIN) operations. They are extremely
important tools for disrupting and degrading insurgent networks and protecting the population.
However, they are double-edged swords. Agent networks may also inadvertently motivate corollary
violence against noncombatants. For example, intelligence officers lament that, in Afghanistan and Iraq,
they lose noncombatants ‘all the time’ whom they recruit to act as agents;1 on 22 August 2014, HAMAS
carried out a summary execution of 18 Palestinian noncombatants on suspicions of spying;2 and the
Islamic State has repeatedly released videos of beheadings of alleged agents.

Thousands of noncombatants have been severely injured or killed by coercive recruitment tactics,
covert and clandestine activities, unauthorized criminal conduct by agents, targeting operations based
on poorly validated human intelligence (HUMINT), counterintelligence preventive violence and pun-
ishment violence.

Surprisingly, despite the evident dangers of agent networks in COIN and their double-edged effects
on securing populations, discussion of agent network-associated violence in the intelligence literature is
extremely limited. Most literature on this topic is prescriptive, dealing with how to expand and improve
HUMINT collection.3 Normative literature on the subject evaluates human rights dilemmas involving
security forces and their agents.4 The literature does not, however, investigate the broader, systemic
incentives of agent networks that may inadvertently induce noncombatant casualties.

CONTACT Britta Stime stimebritta@gmail.com

mailto:stimebritta@gmail.com

http://www.tandfonline.com

108 B. STIME

Agent network-associated noncombatant casualties have likely eluded academic investigation
because they are often not visible, or viewed as arbitrary, incidental, or necessary evils of wartime
intelligence collection that are not directly attributable to the incumbent government. Additionally, the
individuals killed tend to be citizens of marginalized groups, such as foreigners and those considered
traitors. This depoliticizes and deprioritizes their deaths.

This research shows that agent network-associated noncombatant casualties occur in patterns, cor-
relating with systemic incentives induced by agent network recruitment and operation. Agent networks
motivate all categories of actors in a conflict (i.e., the incumbent government, agents, noncombatants,
and insurgents) to use violence to promote or neutralize agent acquisition5 and handling.6 These incen-
tive structures7 for noncombatant-targeted violence8 follow an intelligence war framework as actors
compete for access. This theoretical framework is presented in the proceeding sections.

Due to the lack of access to classified data, the assertions herein are based on open sources. This may
limit the reliability and generalizability of the conclusions of this research;9 however, the importance
of opening this subject to unclassified academic discussion compels the researcher to meet these
methodological challenges with research that provides a preliminary examination of agent networks
and noncombatant casualties.

Agent networks in COIN

Agent networks

The literature uses a diverse array of terms to refer to agents: informants, informers, sources, human
sources, local sources, assets, national security assets, spies, collaborators, contributors, and local
national employees, inter alia. These terms are commonly used interchangeably, even though they
sometimes refer to different categories of actors. For example, informant and spy are often used inter-
changeably; however, spy usually refers to a person who provides information10 to a foreign intelligence
service, while informant generally refers to someone who provides information to a domestic intelli-
gence/investigative or law enforcement organization. The use of the terms source and asset have grown
increasingly common, because of a conscious effort by intelligence and law enforcement agencies to
employ more neutral or positive labels. This study uses the word agent, because agent and asset are the
most widely-used terms by foreign intelligence services. Agent also denotes one of the most common
terms used to describe a broader collection of these individuals: agent network.

While the term agent networks (also referred to as human source networks and informant networks)
is routinely used in intelligence manuals, it is not explicitly defined. Based on the information in these
manuals,11 agent networks can be described as a subcategory of collaborators or denouncers12 (general
terms referring to people who give information to the incumbent government along a formality contin-
uum running from people who volunteer information,13 to people who are recruited, trained and paid
by intelligence collectors).14 Intelligence organizations intentionally develop agent networks through
multiple contacts with individuals they identify, target, recruit, and handle. While here the primary focus
is on incumbent-developed networks, many other actors develop agent networks.15

Political-military utility

Agent networks are critical political-military tools in COIN. They serve as low-cost force multipliers –
relative to the average trained, salaried soldier – that mirror insurgent advantages and combat insurgent
strategies. A single intelligence officer operating in a new Area of Operation (AO) may expand his/her
coverage through networks of agents who, like insurgents, hide among civilian populations; operate
agilely, transnationally, in decentralized networks, and with few to no bureaucratic procedures; leverage
local knowledge and relationships; and are less restricted by the laws of war.16

These unique capabilities help government security forces build a detailed pattern of life picture,
locate high-profile insurgents (referred to as high-value targets), receive alerts of the presence of mines

INTELLIgENCE AND NATIONAL SECURITy 109

or improvised explosive devices and ambushes, monitor local populations, and characterize the oper-
ational environment.17

State security forces often use agents as targeting scouts in neighborhoods, captive lineups, and raids.18
The rumored presence of agents has a psychological impact on civilian populations, aiding separation of
insurgents from their civilian support base, the first key tenet of COIN.19 The known presence of agents
sows suspicion and demoralization within organizations.20 It can also create the perception of popular
support for the incumbent government while simultaneously delegitimizing the insurgent’s cause.21

Finally, agents are also used as agents provocateurs to conduct covert and clandestine activities (e.g.,
torturing suspects, placing homing devices for drone strikes, committing extra-judicial killings, sabo-
taging insurgent operations, entrapping conspirators in law enforcement-monitored crimes, provoking
internal dissension, and swaying insurgent decisions).22

Noncombatants vs. insurgents vs. agents

For the purposes of this paper, noncombatants refers to law-abiding civilians who are not integrally
involved in the insurgent movement. The term insurgents is used to refer to those civilians who are
unlawful combatants, actively involved in the insurgent movement. Agents operating on behalf of the
incumbent, like insurgents, are also civilians who are unlawful combatants. They may not wield weapons
or directly partake in violence, but they actively deal in lethal information. Agents are recruited from
within insurgent groups and noncombatant civilian communities. Insurgents and agents use the civilian
population as a cover. They hide among and endanger a particular population, group or demographic
by exposing them to violence used for intelligence, targeting, and counterintelligence purposes.

It is important to note the clear distinction between recruiting an insurgent versus a noncombatant
to work as an agent. The recruitment of an insurgent only exposes an existing combatant (and the insur-
gent group that is his/her cover) to additional possibilities of intelligence-, targeting-, and counterintel-
ligence-related violence. Conversely, the recruitment of a noncombatant as an agent transforms him/
her into an unlawful combatant, making the individual a legitimate target of violence, and potentially
exposing the individual’s noncombatant community or demographic to intelligence, targeting, and
counterintelligence-related violence.23 For this reason, while the theory presented in this study focuses
only on modeling violence targeted at noncombatants, it also sometimes includes violence targeted
at noncombatants-turned-agents, as these targets often overlap.

Incentives for violence

Intelligence war framework

Intelligence is a competition for access, commonly referred to as an intelligence war, in which actors
struggle to gather intelligence while preventing their opposition from doing the same through coun-
terintelligence strategies and tactics. In the context of COIN HUMINT, this is manifested as the struggle
to access the population (who possesses valuable information) through the development and oper-
ation of agent networks. Agent network development refers to agent recruitment (acquisition). Agent
network operation refers to agent handling (i.e., the use of agents for intelligence collection, insurgent
identification and location, covert and clandestine activities, and population control). This HUMINT war
framework is illustrated in Figure 1.

This paper focuses on the left side of Figure 1: incumbent HUMINT gathering and insurgent counter-
intelligence activities.24 In this context, as the incumbent vies to develop and operate agent networks
(illustrated with the light gray downward-pointing arrow on the left), the insurgents and civilian pop-
ulations sympathetic to their cause struggle to counter the development and operation of incumbent
agent networks (illustrated with the dark gray, upward-pointing arrow).

Actors may use violence against noncombatant populations for intelligence and counterintelligence
purposes according to the logic of this intelligence war framework.

110 B. STIME

Violence against noncombatants in the intelligence war framework

Available evidence suggests that the competition for access to HUMINT may incentivize all categories
of actors in an insurgency setting to employ violence to promote and to counter the development and
operation of agent networks within the population.

All actors in a COIN conflict – the incumbent, agents, noncombatants, and insurgents – are both
instigators and targets of violence. Literature often misinterprets political violence based on the false
premise that only the traditional state and insurgent actors actively participate in a conflict, while
noncombatants simply get caught in the middle of the fighting. However, Stathis Kalyvas’ theory25 of
violence in civil war shows how political violence in civil conflict is a joint venture involving the incum-
bent, the insurgents, the noncombatants and the agents alike (which he generalizes as ‘denouncers’).

When we analyse violence against noncombatants associated with the incumbent’s agent networks,
we see that, in accordance with Kalyvas’ theory, all the categories of actors in the conflicts use violence
(among many other methods of influence) to drive intelligence and counterintelligence. The incumbent
uses violence against noncombatants to develop and operate agent networks. The incumbent’s agents
use violence while they are being recruited and handled. The noncombatants use violence to counter
the development and operation of agents within their communities.26 And, finally, the insurgent group
and its agents (groups which are combined, because they are indistinguishable in the literature) employ
violence to counter the development and operation of incumbent agent networks.

This research indicates that the development and operation of agent networks by the incumbent
motivates six patterns of violence, categorized as: coercion, covert and clandestine activities, unau-
thorized crime, misdirected targeting, preventive violence, and punitive violence. Figure 2 provides a
theoretical framework for conceptualizing these six patterns of violence. Each pattern correlates with
the actor and its incentive (developing and operating agent networks vs. countering the development
and operation of agent networks).

These six patterns of violence against noncombatants follow a systemic logic of incentives; each is
described and analysed below, using open-source literature on intelligence incidents from the three
selected case studies previously mentioned.

Patterns of violence against noncombatants and systemic motivation

Research design and cases

The presented theory of noncombatant-targeted violence associated with COIN agent networks (shown
in the previous diagram) was developed through an analysis of three high-profile COIN cases that

Figure 1. Human intelligence war framework.

INTELLIgENCE AND NATIONAL SECURITy 111

exhibit significant documentation of casualties associated with intelligence practices: OEF-A, OIF and
the Israeli–Palestinian conflict.

Israeli military and intelligence assets in the Israeli-Occupied Territories and the allied coalition forces
involved in Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) between Afghanistan
and Pakistan have developed extensive agent networks. These agent networks, comprised mostly
of noncombatants-turned-agents and minimal insurgents-turned-agents (due to a lack of access to
insurgents), have functioned as crucial HUMINT collection resources, insurgent identifiers and locators,
proxies for covert and clandestine activities, and social control mechanisms.

In OEF-A and OIF, specially-trained HUMINT collectors (as part of HUMINT collection teams HCTs)27
were forward deployed to the peripheries of hostile AOs to develop agent networks.28 Through daily
close contacts with locals and refugees,29 cordon-and-search operations,30 block-by-block neighborhood
searches, traffic checkpoints, and official liaison with a few trusted host nation law enforcement and
intelligence organizations,31 soldiers identified potential contacts for intelligence officers to recruit as
agents.32 In many cases, HUMINT collectors also used trusted local civilians as handlers (or principal
agents) of their own sub-agent networks33 to augment their recruitment efforts. Similar to the Israeli
internal security service’s (SHABAK) Palestinian agent networks, these agent networks helped the
intervening forces collect HUMINT, identify insurgents within lineups of detainees and locate them in
neighborhoods, prevent ambushes, and implement neighborhood systems of block control.34

The SHABAK uses elaborate agent networks of Palestinians from all spheres of public life in the
occupied territories. These networks originated from mass arrests prior to and during the 1967 Six-Day
War. The SHABAK has since greatly expanded these agent networks to include informers within the
Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and other designated terrorist organizations, but also civilians
in universities, unions, councils, and other realms of civil society. The SHABAK uses Palestinian agent
networks to gather intelligence on Palestinian underground cells and their activities to predict and
thwart potential terrorist attacks, to prevent the Palestinian population from consolidating around the
PLO, and to disrupt nation-building processes.35

For each of these three selected cases, instances of violence against noncombatants associated
with HUMINT were identified, described, actor-attributed, and traced to their purported purpose. As
illustrated in Figure 2, these patterns of violence, across all three cases, have been collated by actor and
purpose. In the following six sections, each pattern of violence identified is (1) described, (2) explained
according to systemic incentive structures induced by agent network recruitment, and (3) illustrated
using select examples from the three analysed cases. Each section is labeled according to the pattern’s
typology (Actor, Type, Purpose): the Actor(s) directly implementing the violence; the Type of violence

Figure 2. actors and agent network development/operation violence framework.

112 B. STIME

targeting noncombatants; and the Purpose of the violence (agent network development, operation,
counter-development, or counter-operation).

Incumbent coercion in network development

In order to develop agent networks, the incumbent sometimes uses coercion: violence, the threat of
violence, deception, and the promotion of conditions that restrict access to basic needs.36 States use
coercion to recruit noncombatants and insurgents who would not otherwise voluntarily agree to act as
agents;37 coercion changes the individuals’ circumstances and decision calculus in favor of spying. The
incumbent may also use coercion to compel an already-recruited agent to perform certain espionage
and covert or clandestine operations that he/she would not otherwise agree to do.38 Through coercion,
the incumbent converts an individual into an unlawful combatant (or into a more involved unlawful
combatant) against his/her will. This study includes deception in the coercion definition, because this,
too, turns a noncombatant into an unwitting or unwilling agent, thus exposing the individual to punitive
violence for an action to which he/she had not knowingly consented. For example, the case of Alan
Bani Odey in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict: the SHABAK tricked him into murdering his cousin; he was
subsequently sentenced to death.39 Finally, while this study does not discuss morality in spying, it is
important to note a moral distinction between the coercive recruitment of a noncombatant versus an
insurgent; transforming a noncombatant into an agent and potential target of violence against his/her
will is of greater moral significance than exposing an insurgent combatant to additional possibilities
of violence as an agent.

As one would expect, volunteer agents are widely considered more reliable than agents who are
coerced into their role.40 However, voluntary agents can be scarce, especially when insurgent organi-
zations adeptly deter spying with extremely violent methods. The highly-volatile nature of COIN and
high strategic utility of agents incentivizes the incumbent to use coercive recruitment methods to build
its networks in the absence of other viable options.41

As of this date, there are no publicly-available data to estimate the frequency of such coercive
practices in COIN. However, this study found many confirmed instances of incumbent use of coercive
methods to recruit and run agents, similar to the cases described above. This is consistent with findings
of earlier studies, such as Marx’s 1974 survey of US police agent recruitment, which is very similar to COIN
agent recruitment. Marx showed that six of 15 agents (40%) were recruited through coercive methods
(only legally-acceptable coercive methods – threat of imprisonment and deception through agent
provocateurs – not violence or threat of violence, as this is prohibited in liberal Western democracies).42

There is significant evidence suggesting that incumbents in OEF-A, OIF, and the Israeli–Palestinian
conflict have used coercion to recruit and run agents. Israel has used and threatened recruitment targets
and/or the targets’ families with violence, imprisonment, torture, blackmail, misleading rumors con-
demning individuals as agents, and the confiscation of travel permits required for work and medical care.

According to Morad Jadalah, a researcher with ADDAMEER, a prisoners’ rights organization in the
West Bank, Palestinians are coerced through arrests, at checkpoints, and during raids. Cook reports:

Long jail terms and the use of administrative detention – imprisonment on secret charges – are the most obvious
threats, but there are other ways to pressure Palestinians in detention, says Jadalah … The interrogators may beat
them, or threaten to beat or rape their mother or sister, or arrest a close relative … They may even threaten to spread
rumours that the family are already acting as agents.43

There have also been reports of Israeli military and intelligence assets blackmailing homosexual
Palestinians into working as agents, since this revelation could result in their murder.44 In addition,
Jadalah and co-authors Cohen and Dudai describe how the SHABAK has leveraged access to work
permits and medical care to recruit agents. Jadalah explains:

They usually already know something about the family, so they can threaten, for example, to revoke the father’s
work permit … In other cases, the Israeli security services may offer inducements. Israel controls most people’s lives,
including their ability to work and move around. Between 30 and 40 per cent of adults are unemployed. That gives
Israel the leverage it needs to recruit collaborators.45

INTELLIgENCE AND NATIONAL SECURITy 113

Coalition intelligence assets in OEF-A and OIF are reported to have used similar forms of coercive
recruitment. Highly-valued potential agents (both insurgent and noncombatant) were threatened with
detention in guantanamo Bay or with transfer to foreign security services with a history of human rights
abuses. These individuals were sent to these locations to be further coerced if they initially declined
to inform.46

Incumbent covert and clandestine activities in network operation

State security forces sometimes use agents for covert and clandestine activities: un-attributable, unpop-
ular, or illegal violent acts, colloquially referred to as ‘dirty tricks’ or ‘dirty work’. Here, the focus is on the
use of agents for covert and clandestine paramilitary operations and lethal action, although covert and
clandestine operations encompass all operations meant to be plausibly deniable or conducted in secret.
A few examples of the use of agents for covert and clandestine activities involving violence include
sabotaging insurgent operations, provoking internal dissension, swaying insurgent decisions, torture,
extra-judicial killings, and placing homing devices for drone strikes.47 There is significant evidence of
Israeli, Afghan- and Iraqi-directed covert and clandestine operations by agents, especially for the place-
ment of electronic homing devices for drone strikes and for torturing insurgent suspects and sources.

Incumbents use agent networks for covert and clandestine operations because they are plausi-
bly deniable. The incumbent can ‘obfuscate responsibility of the state for certain types of operations’
through agent networks.48 It is important to note that covert and clandestine activities include forms
of violence with a greater potential to generate noncombatant casualties, because the incumbent is
initiating operations that it would not be inclined to – or would be unable to – perform overtly for fear
of political and/or legal ramifications.

While government agencies do not confirm their use, there is significant reported evidence of intelli-
gence agencies employing agents to place electronic homing beacons, nicknamed patrai in the Middle
East, to direct predator drone strikes on insurgent targets.49 Increased reliance on HUMINT for targeting
will likely increased in use due to insurgent measures to counter signals intelligence (SIgINT)-driven
targeting.

Israeli military and intelligence assets have allegedly used Palestinian informers to torture terrorist
subjects; Cohen and Dudai write:

A common practice in Israeli police, military and SHABAK interrogation facilities is using informers, known as ‘birds.’
These informers introduce themselves as activists and force them [the terrorist subjects] to prove that they are not
collaborators by telling who they are, what they did and who were the people that sent them on their missions …
‘[B]irds’ also torture the detainees that refuse to disclose information.50

The use of agents to torture is evidenced in a 2013 case involving Palestinian prisoner Arafat Jaradat.
Mr. Jaradat died while in detention at Megiddo prison in central Israel. His relatives claim his death
resulted from harsh interrogation tactics carried out by the SHABAK and by Palestinian prisoners work-
ing as agents.51

The SHABAK has also used agents to carry out extra-judicial killings. Returning to an example used in
the Coercion section, the SHABAK booby-trapped the car of Palestinian agent Bani Odeh and requested
that he lend it to his cousin. Unsuspecting, Odeh did so, and his cousin was killed in the explosion.52
By employing an agent for this operation, the SHABAK was attempting to portray it as an apolitical
murder, thus obfuscating its political nature and sidestepping Israel’s legal and political responsibility.

Agent unauthorized crime in network development

The incumbent sometimes must protect agents from sanction for their criminal activities in order to keep
the agents operating in the field. This indirectly precipitates casualties by subjecting noncombatants
(as well as insurgents on occasion) to violence that might have been prevented had the perpetrator
not been informing for the incumbent and thus been detained according to legal, law enforcement
procedures upon his/her first criminal offense. Agents sometimes commit three general categories

114 B. STIME

of crimes: (1) low-level authorized crimes legally deemed essential for the maintenance of their cover
as participating informers,53 (2) unauthorized crimes that are permitted by the handlers through the
obstruction of justice, and (3) unauthorized crimes that are not permitted by their handlers.54

Around the world, agents have committed extrajudicial killings and torture without the consent or
directive of their handlers. This is often mislabeled in the news media as collusion (which is a component
of violence through covert and clandestine activities), because unauthorized crime can mix with covert
and clandestine operations on a continuum of security force awareness of and complicity with such
acts (i.e., when they further national political objectives).

The available sources did not indicate evidence of unauthorized crimes in OEF-A, OIF, and the
Israeli–Palestinian conflict. However, the existence of this pattern of violence against noncombatants
is probable, because the use of immunity is a commonly-practiced and generally-accepted recruitment
technique in these cases. People with privileged access who have committed a crime are targeted,
turned, and released into the public with the possibility of – and, often, tendency to – commit further
crimes. Documentation of unauthorized crime in the selected cases is scarce because these intelli-
gence wars are recent and ongoing; thus intelligence and legal documentation is still closely guarded
to protect sources and methods. Unauthorized crimes, however, proved to be extremely prevalent in
the Northern Ireland Troubles, a case with similar actors and HUMINT collection practices.55 Further
research on this pattern of violence is warranted.

Agent-misdirected targeting in network operation

Agents sometimes provide false information about their targets. Conspiratorially and unwittingly, they
misidentify individuals as targets who, in actuality, are not. As a result, the incumbent carries out tar-
geted violence against people whom it would not have necessarily targeted had the information been
validated.

Most, though not all,56 intelligence acquired from agents is cross-checked against other intelligence
sources before the incumbent acts upon it. Intelligence packages for kinetic57 targeting are usually
composed of at least a combination of SIgINT and HUMINT; satellite imagery, drone surveillance, and
communications matrices (such as the National Security Agency’s (NSA) geo Cell program)58 inform and
validate HUMINT collection and agent operations (agent identification of insurgents, descriptions of
relationships, and location of targets).59 However, HUMINT is very difficult to verify at times, and SIgINT
can falsely appear to confirm agents’ claims.60 Marx explains this in theoretical terms: ‘[the secrecy of
the agent’s role] gives the [agent] an advantage over his employer, who in any given instance may
find it hard to assess the accuracy of the information he gets’.61 This of course, must take into account
intelligence agencies’ use of source and content ratings that, over time, help handlers assess the validity
of each source’s information.

Informing is a component of noncombatant ‘denunciation’, which Kalyvas theorizes is often done
‘maliciously’ (self-servingly) and not just ‘politically’ (pursuing only the same political purposes as the
political actor to which the information is supplied).62 In his theory of political violence and noncom-
batant involvement as information sources, Kalyvas theorizes: ‘denunciation turns the production of
selective violence into an outcome jointly produced by political actors and noncombatants’.63 He also
notes that false denunciations are common: ‘individuals are tempted to settle private and local conflicts’
by supplying the incumbent with false or misleading information.64

Agents misdirect targeting by supplying misinformation (unintentionally false information) and
disinformation (intentionally false, misleading information) to the incumbent, which informs kinetic
targeting. Often, agents just want to collect their compensation without supplying real or certain infor-
mation, or they have personal, local tribal, or political motives to intentionally mislead the incumbent
to attack their own targets.

Agents intentionally mislead their handlers for political motives driven by the goals of the insurgent
or by local, tribal power competitions. Sometimes, agents act as triple and re-doubled agents. Agents
that have been doubled pretend to act as agents for the incumbent when, in fact, they are actually

INTELLIgENCE AND NATIONAL SECURITy 115

working for the insurgent. They supply information meant to deceive the incumbent in order to afford
the insurgent a political or strategic advantage.

Agents also act on behalf of their tribes and tribal leaders, falsely accusing members of rival tribes
as ‘insurgents’. Intelligence practitioners in OEF-A and OIF have expressed frustration that agents (tribal
leaders included) are commonly using this tactic. For example, in Mosul, Iraq, American forces asked
their Shia agent to identify insurgents from a lineup; all chosen were Sunni.65 Finer quotes two American
soldiers in Afghanistan who acknowledge this form of disinformation: ‘they want to get everyone who’s
not in their tribe’ and ‘we almost never get anything good from them [the agents] … I think they just
pick people from another tribe or people who owe them money or something’. As the second soldier
notes, agents also supply disinformation in order to carry out violence through the incumbent that
would fulfill a personal vendetta.

Intelligence personnel have expressed concern about agents providing false information about
potential targets simply to reap the monetary rewards from the incumbent and/or to direct incumbent
violence at personal enemies. As Callam observes: ‘the lack of multiple intelligence sources also inhibits
the ability of drones to accurately identify targets. Local agents are notoriously unreliable and can exploit
the attacks for personal gain by pointing drone attacks toward personal rivals’.66 Malicious information
supplied by agents is not always false; it may also be true, even though it was divulged with ulterior
motives. For example, a 13-year-old Iraqi, whom American soldiers nicknamed ‘Steve-O’, informed on
his father who had been abusing him and became an American war ‘hero’.67

Evidence suggests that disinformation is pervasive in the OEF-A, OIF, and Israeli–Palestinian conflict
cases. Said Riegle, who runs a private intelligence firm that worked in Iraq and Afghanistan, observed
that only ‘about half’ of the information from agents was reliable.68 Israel also reports extremely low
reliability of Palestinian agent tips, attributed to HAMAS’ strategy of flooding the system with disinfor-
mation to obscure true information and provoke the government to commit politically costly errors.

Mayer writes that Israel’s unmanned airstrikes in the Palestinian territories are ‘more exacting’ than
the US’ in Iraq and Afghanistan. Despite this, an Israeli news agency notes that Israeli airstrikes are often
misguided by faulty intelligence:

In the past, Israel has blamed HAMAS for civilian casualties, saying the group uses schools, mosques and residen-
tial areas for cover while carrying out attacks. But cases of mistaken identity or faulty intelligence have also been
known to result in civilian casualties.69

Human Rights Watch also reports70 that attacks included bombings of noncombatant locations (e.g.,
homes and farm groves). For example, a strike on 21 November 2013 killed a 48-year-old farmer, Talal
al-Asaly and two of his children, Ayman, 19, and Abeer, 11, in northern gaza while working in their
garden. Another drone strike two days earlier killed Ibrahim al-Astal, 48, and his nephew, Omar al-Astal,
14, in the southern area of Khan younis. In each case, residents said they did not observe Palestinian
militants trying to fire missiles nearby, the usual target of such Israeli strikes.71 On 22 August 2014, an
Israeli airstrike aimed at the chief of HAMAS’ military wing killed the leader’s wife and two of his children.
Analysts assert that, based on the accuracy of this airstrike, Israel’s military would almost certainly have
needed HUMINT to direct it.72

There is a significant number of accounts suggesting that incumbent raids and airstrikes in OEF-A
and OIF have been executed using poorly validated HUMINT. Writing on OIF, Kahl observes:

Too often, raids have been based on dubious intelligence gleaned from agents seeking to settle scores. And when
soldiers and marines have encountered armed resistance from families seeking to defend their homes, they have
sometimes responded [in hindsight] with disproportionate force.73

Finer also records an instance in which American forces rounded up hundreds of villagers identified as
insurgents by a Shia agent in Mosul, Iraq. He quotes a student who was among those detained: ‘your
source is not good, these are all innocent men … we are all Sunnis. That is why he [the agent] chose
us. He is Shia’.74 In an interview with Semple, a member of the US Army’s Tactical HUMINT Team in Iraq,
acknowledged that they needed to ‘rein in’ their agents, because they were ‘fingering, like, 25, 30 at a
time … they want to get everyone who’s not their tribe’.75 Declassified US Army records also describe

116 B. STIME

a case in 2006, in which US forces killed an Iraqi noncombatant when they raided the wrong house
identified by two agents as the home of a member of an explosively formed penetrator (EFP) cell.76

Airstrikes in OEF-A have been similarly misguided. Mayer explains: ‘the strikes are only as accurate
as the intelligence that goes into them. Tips from agents on the ground are subject to error, as is the
interpretation of video images … local agents, who also serve as confirming witnesses for the airstrikes,
are notoriously unreliable’.77 This claim is echoed by Callam78 and demonstrated in a number of unofficial
‘close calls’ and botched cases. A former CIA officer recalls a time when he barely held off an airstrike
directed by his superiors and based on the HUMINT supplied by his Afghan agent:

They scrambled together an élite team … We caught hell from headquarters. They said ‘Why aren’t you moving on
it?’ when we insisted on checking it out first. It turned out to be an intentionally false lead.79

Mayer also records cases in which airstrikes on invalid targets were actually carried out:
In September [2009], a NATO air strike in Afghanistan killed between seventy and a hundred and twenty-five peo-
ple, many of them civilians, who were taking fuel from two stranded oil trucks; they had been mistaken for Taliban
insurgents. (The incident is being investigated by NATO.) According to a reporter for the guardian, the bomb strike
… left such a tangle of body parts that village elders resorted to handing out pieces of unidentifiable corpses to
the grieving families, so that they could have something to bury. One Afghan villager told the newspaper, ‘I took
a piece of flesh with me home and I called it my son’.80

In addition, it is estimated that the campaign to kill Baitullah Mehsud took 16 missile strikes, resulting
in 207–321 additional deaths over 14 months.81 Amnesty International also records a number of cases
in which only noncombatants were killed in drone strikes.82 Based on the organization’s investigation, it
is unclear what source(s) of intelligence led to these cases, although it is highly probable that HUMINT
was a significant element.

On the other hand, it should be noted that a recent survey of FATA residents found that approximately
64 per cent of locals living with drone strikes believe that they accurately target militants, and greater
than 66 per cent believe that most of the non-militant civilians who do die in drone strikes are militant
sympathizers or radicalized collaborators.83

Insurgent and noncombatant-led preventive violence for network counter-development

Insurgents and noncombatant civilian communities publicly maim and kill suspected agents with the
expressed purpose of deterring others from informing. The primary target of counterintelligence vio-
lence is a particular demographic population (usually a civilian community or the insurgent’s own per-
sonnel) that identifies with the secondary target, the violently punished suspected agent. This strategy
incorporates especially brutal tactics, as it inflicts suffering for a broader psychological effect to advance
counterintelligence objectives. It sends a clear message to the primary audience: do not inform.

Incumbent agent network development motivates counter-network violence by noncombatant
civilian communities and insurgents. It is extremely difficult to identify agents once they are turned.
Thus, it is strategically favorable to deter people from becoming agents in the first place. According to
Kalyvas’ theory of the political economy of denunciation, the supply of denunciations is constrained
by: ‘the likelihood of retaliation faced either by the denouncer or by the local committee that vets
denunciations’.84 It is in the interest of the actors that would be threatened by the presence of agents
to publicize the high likelihood of retaliation against agents. They employ excessively violent measures
to discourage would-be informers. The victims of counterintelligence violence often have nothing to
do with incumbent agent networks. Not only does this not detract from the strategy’s effectiveness,
it actually enhances it. People are deterred from providing any sort of information to any incumbent
representative for fear of being used as a violent propaganda example against spying. This strategy
deters spying, makes it easier to identify agents talking to authorities, and further separates the pop-
ulation from the incumbent.

Preventive violence analysed in the three cases indicates that both insurgents and local communities
deter informing. In the literature, preventive violence is often labeled ‘terrorism’ when performed by

INTELLIgENCE AND NATIONAL SECURITy 117

insurgents and ‘public executions’ or ‘demonstrations’ when performed by noncombatant communities.
Why is it in the interest of communities to deter informing? They, too, often consider agents a threat
for largely three reasons: (1) the community may be sympathetic to the insurgent influence, (2) the
presence of agents may be viewed as a liability that exposes the community to misdirected incumbent
targeting driven by agents’ personal motives, and (3) agent presence may be feared to provoke insur-
gent counterintelligence preventive and punishment violence against innocent community members
misidentified as agents.

Numerous examples of preventive violence (by both civilian communities and insurgent groups)
exist in each case study. For example, on 2 December 2012, HAMAS killed six suspected civilian collab-
orators, in addition to the convicted agent Fadel Shalouf, and paraded their bodies through the streets
of gaza City.85 More recently, on 22 August 2014, HAMAS executed at least 18 Palestinians suspected
of informing for Israel. They were executed in public with warnings to the public scrawled on the walls
to the effect that these people were ‘traitors’ who had ‘given information to the enemy’.86 HAMAS also
posted graphic photos of their executions and the aftermath online.

Counterintelligence units in North Waziristan, called the Haqqani Khurasan, cover their faces with
balaclavas and wear black tunics with Khorasan Mujahedin in Urdu scrawled across the back. They travel
in slow-moving caravans of cars with tinted windows weeding out suspected agents.87 Reports indicate
that they abduct and torture suspected agents, often with scalding, boiling water and iron rods; bodies
are usually dumped on roadsides with scraps of paper that warn civilians against the consequences
of spying for Western forces.88 Between 2009 and 2011, the Khurasan have carried out at least 250
public executions of Pakistani civilians declared agent suspects.89 This number is a minimum estimate,
because evidence suggests that civilians are so scared of the Khurasan that everyone refrains from
reporting public executions to state authorities. For example, no one reported a daylight execution
of three men in a bazaar in the village of Maktab, in which one man was shot 10 times in the face and
chest and a Khurasan operative yelled to the crowd, ‘Whoever tries to help the Americans and spies
for them will face this!’90 State authorities became aware of this incident four months later when they
captured a videotape of it.

The Khurasan broadcast warnings to Pakistani civilians, telling them that they will fight agents ‘before
we fight the Americans’.91 A Western reporter described videos of sham trials and executions of sus-
pected agents:

Accused tribesmen are abducted from homes and workplaces at gunpoint and tortured. A sham religious court
hears their case, usually declaring them guilty. Then they are forced to speak into a video camera … [O]ne accused
agent says into a video camera: ‘I am a spy and I took part in four attacks’, said Sidinkay, a young tribesman who
said he was paid US$350 to help direct CIA drones to their targets in Pakistan’s tribal belt. Sweat glistened on his
forehead; he rocked nervously as he spoke. ‘Stay away from the Americans’, he said in an imploring voice. ‘Stay
away from their dollars’. The videos end in execution by hanging, beheading or firing squad … ‘Spies, your days
are numbered because we are carrying out raids’, chants the video soundtrack.92

Al Qaeda’s sister organization in Afghanistan, Ittehad-e-Mujahedeen Khorasan,93 has also filmed and
published these sorts of sham trials online, in which the accused are found guilty and beheaded.94

Civilian communities also use methods of intimidation to prevent locals from informing. For exam-
ple, Shadid reports on a case in Iraq in 2003, in which a village required a father to publicly execute
his son for being an informant.95 His son’s information had led to the detainment of 400 residents by
US forces. The boy, Kurbul, had a bag over his head while he pointed out guilty parties in a line-up for
American forces, but the villagers recognized him by his hand and sandals. Shadid writes that even
local children chanted rhymes about him: ‘masked man, your face is the face of the devil’. Another
example from the National Public Radio (NPR)96 describes how HAMAS had widespread community
support for removing Khulud Badawi’s husband, a suspected agent, from prison in gaza City before his
final court appearance that day to appeal the spying charges. Badawi, along with five other suspected
spies, were somehow taken from prison without a trial, shot in broad daylight, and dragged through
the street behind motorcycles.

118 B. STIME

Insurgent and noncombatant-led punitive violence for network counter-operation

Insurgents and noncombatant civilian communities counter agent operations through punitive vio-
lence. Punitive violence and preventive violence (from the previous section) often overlap, since
punishment of suspected agents (no matter how inaccurate) usually also serves to deter those who
witness the event.97 As in preventive violence, both noncombatants and insurgents perform punitive
violence.

Frequently, agents have been killed for their role as betrayers, an especially stigmatized activity.98 In
nearly every culture, death is considered the proper punishment for informing, like treason. For exam-
ple, a senior Pakistani Taliban commander explains: ‘in every civilized society, the penalty for spying is
death’.99 Similarly, an Iraqi noncombatant asserts: ‘It’s justice … in my opinion, he deserves worse than
death’.100 In the Israeli-occupied territories, Cohen and Dudai observe that agents are targets of commu-
nity anger and punishment ‘because they are a serious threat to collective social values and interests,
binding the community and establishing a sense of sovereignty’.101 Palestinian agents are often killed in
mob beatings, their families are usually forced to disown them, and communities shun their families.102

US military intelligence personnel in OEF-A and OIF have reported extremely high rates of agent
mortality. ‘We are losing agents all the time’, lamented one anonymous senior Western intelligence offi-
cial, speaking with a reporter.103 Just how frequently agents have been killed in these theatres has not
been disclosed, however, not only because of the sensitivity of the information, but (disconcertingly)
also because security services often do not know how many have been killed.104

According to one US intelligence officer, in 2010 the Taliban discovered that a group of recent high
school graduates in Afghanistan’s ghazni province had been feeding information to the Americans. The
youths were arrested, and around 10 of them were hanged.105 In another instance, in 2007, the Taliban
discovered a US-paid agent – a poppy farmer – was acting as a handler for several other Afghan agents.
The Taliban demanded that he summon all of his agents together and said that if they repented, their
lives would be spared; instead, everyone in the vicinity was killed.106

Insurgents and civilian communities often kill noncombatants who are suspected, but actually inno-
cent, of informing. This phenomenon is due to the problem of identification of unlawful combatants.
Additionally, the inaccuracy of punitive violence simultaneously serves a deterrent purpose; punishing
a suspected agent not only eliminates the threat, it also scares witnesses from acting in any way that
even vaguely resembles spying for fear of false accusation. For this reason, it is noted that preventive
and punitive violence overlap.

Evidence in all three cases indicates that noncombatants are often killed without proper investigation/
trials because of insurgent and community suspicion. This was the case with Rabhi Badawi (described
in the Preventive Violence section), who was taken from prison prior to his trial and executed.107 Human
Rights Watch condemned HAMAS for conducting a ‘summary execution’ of 18 suspected agents on 22
August 2014.108 Hughes and Tripodi observe that suspicion killings are also extremely common in OEF-A
and OIF cases. They write: ‘the experience in Iraq or Afghanistan would suggest that if a Western soldier
stops to talk to a local, he may easily arouse suspicions that leads to the latter’s murder’.109

Fearing that paid agents direct NATO strikes, the Taliban in Afghanistan has repeatedly performed
violent purges of suspected spies without trial or using sham trials.110 They have performed summary
executions of tens of agents at a time. For example, one Taliban commander in Afghanistan claimed:
‘we have arrested about 60 or 70 spies, and we killed many of them’.111 Other insurgents claimed to
have hanged 17 suspected spies in just the previous week.112 It is estimated that the counterintelli-
gence Khurasan unit in the FATA has performed at least 250 assassinations and public executions of
suspected spies.113 An American military official observed: ‘when we conduct a raid on a Haqqani leader
… [the Khurasan] go in and massacre people’.114 The danger of mistaken punitive violence is reflected
in Waziri public opinion; Frau observed that there is a pervasive fear among Waziri civilians of being
falsely accused of spying by local Taliban.115

Notably, an Iraqi mayor describes the problem of community-driven inaccurate elimination of agents,
while speaking with Washington Post reporter Shadid:

INTELLIgENCE AND NATIONAL SECURITy 119

Sitting in a chair and holding a cup of sweet tea, the mayor expressed frustration. Suspicions have become so
common that more than 100 Muslim clerics met last week and issued a statement that not all Iraqis working with
US forces should be considered informers. ‘Whenever somebody talks to the Americans’, he said shaking his head,
‘they think he’s an agent’.116

Residents were carrying out punitive killings of suspected agents with unsettling inaccuracy in his town.
The inaccuracy of punitive violence caused by the ‘identification problem’ of agents is a common theme
across all three cases, among both insurgent organizations and civilian communities.

Conclusion

Through an exploratory analysis of COIN HUMINT activities in OEF-A, OIF, and the Israeli–Palestinian
conflict, this research has identified six patterns of violence against noncombatants associated with
COIN agent networks – coercion, covert and clandestine activities, unauthorized crime, misdirected
targeting, preventive violence, and punitive violence – that follow an incentive structure embedded
in the intelligence war framework.

While agent networks are essential tools for COIN operations, in some ways they indirectly motivate
corollary violence against the civilian population. In OEF-A, OIF and the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, agent
networks have functioned as crucial HUMINT collection resources, insurgent identification and location
tools, proxies for covert and clandestine activities, and social control mechanisms. At the same time,
they have inadvertently incentivized all the conflict actors – the incumbent, agents, noncombatants,
and insurgent group – to employ violence against noncombatants in the competition for access and
intelligence.

Collateral damage is an unfortunate, unavoidable necessary evil in COIN operations, particularly in
a complex civil war environment in which the civilians are often peripherally or integrally involved in
the conflict. HUMINT operations are necessary to build a detailed intelligence picture and find, fix and
finish the insurgents, but operations in pursuit of this political objective do not always align with the
principle of civilian protection. HUMINT collection is an ugly business that sows mistrust within pop-
ulations, generating first, second, and third degree effects that must be carefully identified, assessed,
and balanced against strategic advantages of agent network use.

This research provides a theoretical foundation for better understanding these direct and indirect
effects on civilians, focusing on the issue of violence. There is an urgent need for further research into
the sociological and psychological effects of COIN HUMINT operations, and how an incumbent (along
with intervening militaries) may tailor intelligence policies and practices to alter incentive structures
and diminish noncombatant-targeted violence associated with agent networks.

Notes

1. Riechmann, “Coalition Informant Plays Both Sides.”
2. Lynfield, “Israel–gaza Crisis.”
3. See Costa, “Phoenix Rises Again”; Miska, “Protecting Soft Networks”; Macgaffin, “Clandestine Human Intelligence”;

Hung, “Optimization-Based Selection of Influential Agents”; gallagher, “Human Intelligence in Counterinsurgency”;
Beall, “The HUMINT Heresies”; Baker, “HUMINT-Centric Operations”; Berman et al., “Can Hearts and Minds be
Bought?”; Butler, “Killing Cells.”

4. Moran, “Evaluating Special Branch”; Moran, From Northern Ireland to Afghanistan; Cohen and Dudai, “Human Rights
Dilemmas in Using Informers.”

5. Intelligence term for agent recruitment.
6. Intelligence term for running (training, financing and operating) an agent after he/she has been recruited.
7. Defined as systems of motivating influences.
8. In this paper, the product of noncombatant-targeted violence is noncombatant casualties, defined as killed and

injured noncombatants and noncombatants-turned-agents.
9. In this way, this research confronts the same research challenge faced by the first academic to study political

informers, gary Marx. See Marx, “Thoughts on a Neglected Category.”
10. For the purposes of this paper, information refers to raw data (unanalysed, unprocessed, and unvalidated) from

any source. Intelligence refers to analysed, processed and validated information from any source. Additionally,

120 B. STIME

intelligence is generally classified due to the nature of collection methods, security of the source, and the potential
impact on national and local security.

11. See greer, Supergrasses; Hewitt, Spying 101, 33; US Army, Human Intelligence Collector Operations; UK Army,
Counterinsurgency Operations; UK Ministry of Defense, Joint Doctrine Publication (JDP) 2–0.

12. See Kalyvas, The Logic of Violence in Civil War.
13. ’Single-event’, ‘one-time contact’ or ‘volunteer’.
14. ’Multiple-event’, ‘formal contact’, ‘developed source’ or ‘long-term penetration source’.
15. Including, inter alia: insurgent groups, criminal groups, and foreign governments.
16. galula, “Counter-Insurgency Warfare,” 1–12; Kalyvas, The Logic of Violence in Civil War, 89–91; Tomes, “Relearning

Counterinsurgency Warfare,” 17–18; Duyvesteyn and Angstrom, Rethinking the Nature of War, 101; Kitson, Low
Intensity Operations, 71.

17. US Army, Human Intelligence Collector Operations, s.3–1; UK Army, Counterinsurgency Operations, s.B-6–12;
Mumm, “Crowdsourcing,” 59; US Army, Intelligence and Electronic Warfare Support, s.5–1; McFate, “Anthropology
and Counterinsurgency,” 37; Hoffman, “The Logic of Suicide Terrorism,” 6–7; gallagher, “Human Intelligence in
Counterinsurgency,” 1.

18. See Khatchadourian, “The Kill Company”; youssef, “Fear of Informants has Stoked Climate”; Finer, “Informants Decide
Fate of Iraqi Detainees”; Shadid, “For an Iraqi Family”; Ware, “Chasing the ghosts.”

19. See ‘block control’ strategy in US Army, Counterinsurgency Operations, s.204:3–31, 3–7; Israeli agent networks in
Cohen and Dudai, Human Rights Dilemmas in Using Informers, 231–3; Hughes and Tripodi, “Anatomy of a Surrogate,”
8; Hewitt, Snitch!, 6, 95–122.

20. UK Army, Counterinsurgency Operations, s.10–30; Kirk-Smith and Dingley, “Countering Terrorism in Northern Ireland,”
565; Moloney, A Secret History of the IRA, 315.

21. Hewitt, Snitch!, 98.
22. Marx, “Thoughts on a Neglected Category,” 402–42; Kirk-Smith and Dingley, “Countering Terrorism in Northern

Ireland,” 556, 564–5; Hewitt, Snitch!, 7–18, 33–4; UK Army, Counterinsurgency Operations, s.A-4–9; Moran, “Evaluating
Special Branch,” 20; Burds, “Agentura,” 129–30; Cohen and Dudai, “Human Rights Dilemmas in Using Informers,” 237.

23. See Bellaby, “What’s the Harm?,” 115–16.
24. Focusing only on the left side of this framework does not imply that insurgents are only reactive to incumbent

activities, nor does it imply a moral justification of insurgent activities as such. As depicted in the diagram, the
incumbent and insurgent group(s) alike act both proactively and reactively.

25. Kalyvas, The Logic of Violence in Civil War.
26. The reason for this will be explained in the Punitive Violence section.
27. For a full description of HCTs, see US Army, Human Intelligence Collector Operations. HCTs are part of Special Forces

and intelligence units from groups such as the British Joint Support group (JSg) (an elite group within the British
Army Intelligence Corps and the successor of the FRU in Northern Ireland), the American Joint Special Operations
Command (JSOC), and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

28. See Elite UK Forces, “Elite Intelligence Operatives, Joint Support group”; Central Intelligence Agency, “On the Front
Lines”; US Army, Human Intelligence Collector Operations, s.3–21.

29. This was one of the primary purposes of ‘Operation Close Encounters’ and census conduction in Iraq. See Crider,
“Inside the Surge”; Keirsey, “Reflections of a Counterinsurgency Company Commander,” 74.

30. See Clark, “The Vital Role of Intelligence in Counterinsurgency Operations”; Hoffman, “The Logic of Suicide
Terrorism”; Crider, “Inside the Surge,” 8.

31. A common theme in the literature is concern over insurgent infiltration of HN law enforcement and intelligence
agencies. This endangers agents and creates supply lines of misinformation that decreases overall HUMINT
reliability and endangers SSFs. See gallagher, “Human Intelligence in Counterinsurgency”; Otterman, “IRAQ.” In such
circumstances, intervening forces set up new, reliable intelligence organizations and identified locations for new
police outposts. See Kitson, Low Intensity Operations, 74; Clark, “The Vital Role of Intelligence in Counterinsurgency
Operations.”

32. Agent recruitment operations are referred to as agent networks ‘human source contact operations’ (SCOs) or
‘source operations.’ See US Army, Human Intelligence Collector Operations; US Army, Tactics in Counterinsurgency.

33. For example, see the poppy farmer anecdote in the Punitive Violence section of this chapter. Also, Crider writes: ‘this
man was already running a network of 10 other individuals in Doura and areas south of Baghdad … this source
provided information to us … even better, the information that he and his sub-sources provided allowed us to
detain 10 targets.’ See Crider, “Inside the Surge,” 13.

34. Block Control: dividing a community or populated area into zones where a trusted resident reports on the activities
of the population. See US Army, Counterinsurgency Operations FM (Interim) 3–07.22, 3–31.

35. Cohen and Dudai, “Human Rights Dilemmas in Using Informers,” 231–3.
36. See Cohen and Dudai, “Human Rights Dilemmas in Using Informers,” 233–4; Hewitt, Snitch!, 70–1, 133; Marx,

“Thoughts on a Neglected Category,” 414.
37. Coercive recruitment is widely considered ineffective for long-term agent management; thus, it is usually a last

resort, once other voluntary recruitment methods are deemed implausible.

INTELLIgENCE AND NATIONAL SECURITy 121

38. See Cohen and Dudai, “Human Rights Dilemmas in Using Informers,” 238; Perry, “Repugnant Philosophy.”
39. See Cohen and Dudai, “Human Rights Dilemmas in Using Informers,” 238. This case is further described in a

subsequent section of this paper: Incumbent Covert Action for Network Operation.
40. Burkett, “An Alternative Framework for Agent Recruitment,” 11; Marx, “Thoughts on a Neglected Category”; Charney

and Irvin, “A guide to the Psychology of Espionage.”
41. Security Awareness Division, “Security Awareness in the 1980s,” 13; Cohen and Dudai, “Human Rights Dilemmas

in Using Informers”; Perry, “Repugnant Philosophy.”
42. Marx, “Thoughts on a Neglected Category,” 414.
43. Cook, “Spotlight Shines on Palestinian Collaborators.”
44. O’Connor, “gay Palestinians are Being Blackmailed.”
45. Cook, “Spotlight Shines on Palestinian Collaborators.”
46. Hewitt, Snitch!, 133–4.
47. See Kirk-Smith and Dingley, “Countering Terrorism in Northern Ireland,” 556, 564–5; Hewitt, Snitch!, 7–18, 33–4;

UK Army, Counterinsurgency Operations, s.A-4–9; Moran, Evaluating Special Branch, 13–14, 20; Burds, “Agentura,”
129–30; Cohen and Dudai, “Human Rights Dilemmas in Using Informers,” 237.

48. Jamieson and McEvoy in Dudai, “Informers and the Transition in Northern Ireland,” 34.
49. See Walsh, “Drone War Spurs Militants”; Callam, “Drone Wars.”
50. Cohen and Dudai, “Human Rights Dilemmas in Using Informers,” 237.
51. Tait, “Family of Palestinian Man.”
52. Ibid.
53. i.e., insurgent informers who are actively involved in the crimes and/or war activities on which they themselves

are providing information.
54. Moran, “Evaluating Special Branch,” 12, 14.
55. See Stevens in Moran, “Evaluating Special Branch,” 13–15, 20; Brown, Into the Dark; Bamford, “The Role and

Effectiveness of Intelligence,” 600–2; Ingram and Harkin, Stakeknife, 82–93; Moran“Evaluating Special Branch,”
14;“Police Ombudsman for Northern Ireland.”

56. See, for example, the case recounted by the CIA officer in Afghanistan, recorded by Mayer in “The Predator War.”
57. As opposed to intelligence packages for non-kinetic targeting, such as for influence operations.
58. Scahill and greenwald, “The NSA’s Secret Role”; Rowley, Dirty Wars.
59. See Callam, “Drone Wars”; Major (Redacted) to the Commander of 1st BCT, 10th MTN, Camp Liberty, Iraq; Finer,

“Informants Decide Fate of Iraqi Detainees”; Mayer, “The Predator War”; Kahl, “How We Fight,” 83, 85; Walsh, “Drone
War Spurs Militants.”

60. Kalyvas, The Logic of Violence in Civil War, 174; gallagher, “Human Intelligence in Counterinsurgency,” 1–2; Bamford,
“The Role and Effectiveness of Intelligence,” 590; Mayer, “The Predator War”; Callam, “Drone Wars.”

61. Marx, “Thoughts on a Neglected Category,” 420.
62. Kalyvas, The Logic of Violence in Civil War, 178.
63. Ibid., 176.
64. Ibid., 173.
65. Finer, “Informants Decide Fate of Iraqi Detainees.”
66. Callam, “Drone Wars.”
67. “How a Boy Named Steve-O Became a Secret Weapon.”
68. Riechmann, “Coalition Informant Plays Both Sides.”
69. Myer, “The Predator War.”
70. Human Rights Watch, “gaza.”
71. Associated Press, “Rights group.”
72. King, “After Israeli Airstrikes.”
73. Kahl, “How we Fight,” 83
74. Finer, “Informants Decide Fate of Iraqi Detainees.”
75. Semple, “US Forces Rely on Local Informants.”
76. Major (Redacted) to the Commander of 1st BCT, 10th MTN, Camp Liberty, Iraq.
77. Mayer, “The Predator War.”
78. Callam, “Drone Wars.”
79. Mayer, “The Predator War.”
80. Ibid.
81. Ibid.
82. Amnesty International, Northern Ireland; Amnesty International, Will I Be Next?
83. Shah, “Drone Blowback in Pakistan.”
84. Kalyvas, The Logic of Violence in Civil War, 192.
85. Rudoren, “Collaboration in gaza Leads to grisly Fate.”
86. King, “After Israeli Airstrikes.”
87. Rodriguez, “Pakistani Death Squads.”

122 B. STIME

88. Ibid.
89. Rivera et al., “Militants Turn to Death Squads.”
90. Ibid.
91. Shadid, “For an Iraqi Family.”
92. Walsh, “Drone War Spurs Militants.”
93. Ibid.
94. youssef, “Fear of Informants has Stoked Climate.”
95. Shadid, “For an Iraqi Family.”
96. Harris, “In gaza, Hamas Targets Palestinian Informants.”
97. Walter, Terror and Resistance, 23.
98. See Akerström, Betrayal and Betrayers.
99. Walsh, “Drone War Spurs Militants.”
100. Shadid, “For an Iraqi Family.”
101. For a theory about community secrecy and identity that is commonly cited in literature on agents and betrayal,

see Simmel, “The Sociology of Secrecy,” 37.
102. Shirwood, “Palestinian Collaborator.”
103. Riechmann, “Coalition Informant Plays Both Sides.”
104. Riechmann, “Coalition Informant Plays Both Sides”; Shadid, “For an Iraqi Family.”
105. Moreau, “Taliban Seeks Vengeance in Wake of WikiLeaks.”
106. Smith, “Insurgents Blame Paid Informants.”
107. Harris, “In gaza, Hamas Targets Palestinian Informants.”
108. Lynfield, “Israel–gaza Crisis.”
109. Hughes and Tripodi, “Anatomy of a Surrogate,” 9.
110. youssef, “Fear of Informants has Stoked Climate.”
111. Smith, “Insurgents Blame Paid Informants.”
112. Ibid.
113. Rivera, “Militants Turn to Death Squads.”
114. Ibid.
115. Frau, “The ‘Living Under Drones’ Report.”
116. Shadid, “For an Iraqi Family.”

Acknowledgements

Special thanks to Dr. Jon Moran and Professor Mark Phythian of the University of Leicester, Dr. Andrew Thomson of Queen’s
University Belfast, Colonel James F. Powers Jr. (US Army, Retired) of the Joint Special Operations University, Dr. David
Spencer of the US National Defense University’s William J. Perry Center for Hemispheric Defense Studies, and the Oxford
Research group’s Remote Control Project.

Notes on contributor

Britta Stime is a defense and communications consultant with the Rendon group. This paper reflects her personal analysis
and research, and does not represent the work or opinions of the Rendon group or its clients. She holds a master’s degree
in Violence, Terrorism and Security from Queen’s University Belfast, and a bachelor’s degree in International Relations and
Spanish from gonzaga University.

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Abstract

Agent networks in COIN
Agent networks
Political-military utility
Noncombatants vs. insurgents vs. agents
Incentives for violence
Intelligence war framework
Violence against noncombatants in the intelligence war framework
Patterns of violence against noncombatants and systemic motivation
Research design and cases
Incumbent coercion in network development
Incumbent covert and clandestine activities in network operation
Agent unauthorized crime in network development
Agent-misdirected targeting in network operation
Insurgent and noncombatant-led preventive violence for network counter-development
Insurgent and noncombatant-led punitive violence for network counter-operation
Conclusion
Notes
Acknowledgements
Notes on contributor
References

vol.36:2 summer 2012

The City as a System:
Future Conflict and
Urban Resilience

David J. Kilcullen

introduction

A decade of messy wars is creaking to a close. American troops have left
Iraq, Osama bin Laden is dead, and the conflict in Afghanistan is entering
a new phase. The U.S. Government’s attention is shifting away from these
wars, while many Americans—even some members of Congress—have
already checked out.

President Obama highlighted this shift in his strategic guidance to
the Defense Department in January 2012. “As we end today’s wars,” he
wrote, “we will focus on a broader range of challenges and opportunities,
including the security and prosperity of the Asia-Pacific:1

“In the aftermath of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the United
States will emphasize non-military means and military-to-military
cooperation to address instability and reduce the demand for signifi-
cant U.S. force commitments to stability operations. U.S. forces will
nevertheless be ready to conduct limited counterinsurgency and other
stability operations if required, operating alongside coalition forces
wherever possible. Accordingly, U.S. forces will retain and continue

dr. david Kilcullen is a Non-Resident Senior Fellow at the Center for a New American
Security. He served in the Iraq War as Senior Counterinsurgency Adviser to General David
Petraeus during the 2007 “surge” and in Afghanistan as Counterinsurgency Adviser to the
NATO International Security Assistance Force during 2009-2010. He was also a member
of the White House review of the Afghanistan-Pakistan strategy in 2008, and served as an
advisor to the Bush and Obama administrations. His publications include The Accidental
Guerrilla (2009), Counterinsurgency (2010) and Out of the Mountains.

the fletcher forum of world affairs

vol.36:2 summer 2012

to refine the lessons learned, expertise, and specialized capabilities
that have been developed over the past ten years of counterinsurgency
and stability operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. However, U.S. forces
will no longer be sized to conduct large-scale, prolonged stability operations.
[emphasis in original]”2

Leaving aside the inconvenient reality that the Afghan war is far
from over, this guidance reflects a large dose of wishful thinking. It can be
summarized, only slightly unkindly, as saying that since Americans hated
the experience of military occupation in Iraq and Afghanistan—and hope
never to do it again—we don’t plan to engage or prepare for these types
of conflict. Instead, we will structure our forces for the wars we want to
fight—the military will be “smaller and leaner, but will be agile, flexible,
ready, and technologically advanced. It will have cutting edge capabili-
ties, exploiting our technological, joint and networked advantage.”3 This
sounds a little like the U.S. military that romped to an incomplete victory
in the 1991 Gulf War, yet proved ill-suited to irregular conflict in Iraq and
Afghanistan, a mismatch that cost many lives and dollars and demanded
heroic feats of adaptation under fire.

Of course, the policy shift makes fiscal and political sense given today’s
economic problems. But its projection of future needs ignores historical

patterns in U.S. overseas interven-
tions. On average, the United States
has conducted one major peacekeeping,
counterinsurgency, or stabilization
operation every 25 years, and a small
or medium-sized one every five to ten
years over the past century and a half.4

This pattern appears to be inde-
pendent of policymakers’ partisan affil-
iation or personal preferences. Indeed,
presidential desire (or lack thereof) to
undertake stability operations appears
to have no detectable impact on the

frequency of interventions. President Lyndon Johnson considered Vietnam
a distraction from his domestic goals, yet presided over an escalation
that drew almost 600,000 U.S. troops into the war at its peak in 1968.
President Bill Clinton came into office with a domestic focus and a desire
to avoid overseas nation-building entanglements. He delayed commit-
ting troops to the Balkans, and avoided a U.S. military commitment in
Rwanda altogether, scarred by a failed humanitarian operation in Somalia.

On average, the United States
has conducted one major
peacekeeping, counterinsurgency
or stabilization operation
every 25 years, and a small or
medium-sized one every five to
10 years over the past century
and a half.

vol.36:2 summer 2012

the city as a system: future conflict and urban resilience

Yet he ultimately sent troops to Bosnia, Kosovo, Macedonia, Haiti, Liberia,
and elsewhere. President George W. Bush, who as a presidential candi-
date opposed stability operations and “nation-building,” nevertheless led
the United States into its largest military intervention since Vietnam, its
largest nation-building effort since World War II, and the largest NATO
stabilization operation ever.

More broadly, we might ask how well President Obama’s stated
policy tracks with what is known about the future conflict environment,
the sorts of wars we might need to fight, and whether we want to or not.
To answer this, we must first examine that environment, and the threats we
might encounter.

the Future environment: urbAn, littorAl, And connected

Just as climate predictions say nothing about tomorrow’s weather,
predictions about the conflict environment say little about specific future
wars. However, they do suggest a range of conditions—a set of systemic
parameters—within which future conflict will arise, even though outliers
will still occur and specifics will be hard to predict. The available evidence
suggests that three main drivers (sometimes called “megatrends”) will
shape the conflict environment over the next few decades. These are:

n urbanization (the accelerating tendency for humans to live in cities),
n littoralization (the propensity for these cities to cluster on coast-

lines), and
n connectedness (the increasing connectivity—especially networked

connectivity—among populations, wherever they live).
None of these trends is new, but their pace is accelerating, they are

mutually reinforcing, and their intersection will influence not just conflict
but every aspect of life on Earth in coming decades.

Population Growth and Urbanization

More people are living in larger cities, and the greatest growth is in the underdevel-
oped areas of Asia and Africa that are least equipped to handle it.

At the start of the Industrial Revolution in 1750, the world’s popula-
tion stood at 700 million. This figure doubled 150 years later, reaching 1.5
billion people in 1900. The population had doubled again by 1960, this
time taking only sixty years to reaching 3 billion, despite the effects of both
World Wars. Population growth continued to accelerate, with the popula-
tion doubling again in thirty-nine years to 6 billion by 1999, and adding

the fletcher forum of world affairs
vol.36:2 summer 2012

another billion in just one decade to reach today’s total of 7 billion. The
United Nations currently predicts that there will be 9.1 billion humans on
the planet by 2050.5

As the world’s population has grown, the pace of urbanization has
been accelerating. In 1800 only three percent of people lived in a city of one
million or more; by the year 2000, it was forty-seven percent. In 1950 there
were only eighty-three cities worldwide with populations over one million;
by 2007 there were 468. In April 2008, the world passed the fifty percent
urbanization mark, and in December 2011 the world’s most populous
nation, China, announced it had reached a level of 51.3 percent urbaniza-
tion. Richard Saul Wurman estimates that “the world’s urban population
will double every 38 years … today’s urban population of 3.2 billion will
rise to nearly 5 billion by 2030, when three out of five people will live in
cities. By 2050 two-thirds of the world’s population will live in cities.”
Wurman argues that “the rise of supercities is the defining megatrend of
the 21st century.” Roughly 1.4 million people across the world migrate to
a city every week. 6

This unprecedented urbanization is concentrated in the least devel-
oped areas of Asia, Latin America, and Africa. The United Nations noted
in 2009:

“Between 2009 and 2050, the world population is expected to
increase by 2.3 billion, passing from 6.8 billion to 9.1 billion… At
the same time, the population living in urban areas is projected to
gain 2.9 billion, passing from 3.4 billion in 2009 to 6.3 billion [in]
2050. Thus, the urban areas of the world are expected to absorb all the
population growth expected over the next four decades while at the
same time drawing in some of the rural population. …Furthermore,
most of the population growth expected in urban areas will be concen-
trated 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. Population growth is therefore becoming largely an
urban phenomenon concentrated in the developing world.”7

To put it another way, these data show that coastal cities are about to
be swamped by a human tide that will force them to absorb—in less than
40 years—almost the entire increase in population across the whole planet
in all of recorded human history up to 1960. Furthermore, virtually all of
this urbanization will happen in the world’s least developed areas, by defi-
nition the poorest equipped to handle it: a recipe for conflict, and crises in
health, education, governance, food, energy, and water scarcity.

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the city as a system: future conflict and urban resilience

Littoralization

These new cities are concentrated on the world’s coastlines.

This urban growth is not evenly spread. As we consider its geograph-
ical distribution, it is clear that urbanization is clustered in littoral (that is,
coastal) areas, within a few dozen miles of
the sea. Already, in 2012, eighty percent
of humans on the planet live within
sixty miles of a coast, while seventy-five
percent of large cities are on a coastline.8

In the Mediterranean basin alone,
between 1970 and 2000, the urban
coastal population grew by 40 million
people, with three quarters of that
growth occurring in North Africa and the
Middle East.9 This led to the “progres-
sive creation of megacities on a European
scale (Barcelona, Marseilles, Rome,
Athens, Genoa, Naples, Alexandria) or a
world scale (Cairo [with] 15-16 million
inhabitants, Istanbul [with] 13-14 million inhabitants). This should not
obscure the fact that the Mediterranean coast also harbors eighty-five cities
with a population of between 300,000 and 1 million inhabitants.”10 Olivier
Kramsch, the distinguished human geographer, has described this process
of urbanization and littoralization in the Mediterranean as one that has been
mirrored in many parts of the developing world:

“It is instructive to view the region itself as a highly urbanized area,
one currently [in 2006] flanked by thirty cities each containing over 1
million inhabitants. A prominent feature of this pattern of urbaniza-
tion, particularly accentuated in the recent period, is the heightened
concentration of cities and population along the strips of land directly
abutting the sea, as opposed to the hinterlands of nation-states (the
former commonly referred to as “littoralization”). Measured as a
percentage of national population, the countries of the Maghreb
in general demonstrate high rates of urban littoralization, striking
examples being Libya (eighty-five percent), Tunisia (seventy percent),
Morocco (fifty-one percent) and Turkey (fifty-two percent).”11

It is worth noting that the two most urbanized and littoralized of
Kramsch’s examples (Tunisia and Libya) were the most affected by popular
revolutions during the Arab Spring of 2010-2011, while the uprisings in
Egypt during the same period occurred almost entirely in the urban littoral

As we consider its geographical
distribution, it is clear that
urbanization is clustered in
littoral (that is, coastal) areas,
within a few dozen miles of
the sea. Already, in 2012, 80
percent of humans on the planet
live within 60 miles of a coast,
while 75 percent of large cities
are on a coastline.

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vol.36:2 summer 2012

triangle formed by the cities of Cairo, Alexandria and Port Said, all of which
lie within one hundred miles of the sea.

The use of cell phones, flash mobs, web-based social media, SMS
organizing tools, the leveraging of diasporas, and the international media
during the Arab Spring highlights the third driver of the future conflict
environment: the new coastal cities are highly connected and networked.

Connectedness

Coastal cities are networked internally, connected to the rural hinterland, and
linked with ethnic diaspora populations and global networks.

If you fly in a helicopter above any large coastal city in the developing
world—Mogadishu, Lagos, Karachi, Basra, or Tripoli; or above a slum
(like the enormous La Rocinha favela outside Rio de Janeiro, or the Tivoli
Gardens district in Kingston, Jamaica)—the most obvious rooftop feature
is the forest of satellite dishes, TV antennas and radio masts. This is just
the most prominent visual indicator of the connectedness of urban areas.

Indeed, in peri-urban areas (the slums and townships around the
margins of growing cities, which account for a high proportion of new
immigrants from the countryside) people can connect with national and
international information flows to an unprecedented degree, irrespective of
how effective their governments are in providing such services. For example,
a 2011 study found that Somalia, a country that has been experiencing near-
anarchy and state collapse for twenty years, has rates of cell phone usage
approximately equal to its neighbors, including well-administered Ethiopia:

“Market forces, particularly the thriving telecommunications
industry, are certainly the most influential factor—and the same is
true of the lively, privately owned radio sector… despite the ongoing
violence, there has been a remarkable proliferation of telecom compa-
nies, offering inexpensive and high-quality services in the areas
where they operate, including internet access, international calls, and
mobile connectivity. Some of them are closely connected with the
remittance industry, represented by companies such as Dahabshiil,
the owner of Somtel.”12

Connectivity between populations in cities like Mogadishu, Somalia’s
largest urban area, and the Somali diaspora (numbering 812,700 people world-
wide and representing almost 9.3 percent of the total Somali population)13
allows urban Somalis to tap into global and regional networks that pass money
and information, engage in trade, and pursue legitimate business. The same
networks enable illicit activity like the smuggling of people, weapons and

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the city as a system: future conflict and urban resilience

drugs, piracy, terrorism, and charcoal exporting (an environmentally devas-
tating activity banned by the United Nations in February 2012 due to its
connection with the Shabaab terrorist organization).14 Indeed, in a failed state
like Somalia, concepts like “illicit networks” are rather hollow—networks
themselves are neither licit nor illicit.
Rather, people self-organize in networks
and engage in a complex hybrid of illicit
and licit behavior that rides the connect-
edness of coastal urban areas.

But greater connectedness is just
the tip of the iceberg: the new urban
populations may appear marginalized
(they literally live on the city’s margins,
and may be sidelined in economic terms),
but cell phones, the internet, radio, tele-
vision and financial networks such as
banking and remittance systems connect
them with people in their home villages,
and with relatives and friends overseas.
And because large transportation nodes (airports, inter-modal logistics hubs,
container terminals, free trade zones, and sea ports) are often located in peri-
urban areas from which they draw their workforce, peri-urban populations
are closely connected with international trade, and with transportation and
migration both internally and externally.

This means that the apparently marginalized populations of the new
urban sprawl are not marginal at all, but rather central to key aspects of the
global system as we know it. At the level of the city itself, workers from
peri-urban areas often perform the menial, manual, or distasteful work that
keeps their city functioning, and they sit astride key communication nodes
that connect that city to the external world as well as to its food, energy, and
water supplies. Wealthy neighborhoods, often in city cores, rely on services
(public transport, cleaners, shopkeepers, food servers, maintenance staff,
police, firefighters, medical personnel, and ambulance drivers) from workers
who cannot afford to live where they work, and thus commute from peri-
urban areas. The same peri-urban areas represent social, connective tissue
between a country’s urban centers and its rural periphery, and connect that
rural periphery to international networks (much as, say, the port facilities in
the coastal city of Karachi connect Pakistan’s hinterland with the enormous
Pakistani diaspora). Similarly, at the global level, these areas play a connec-
tive role in patterns of transportation, migration, finance, and trade.

Indeed, in a failed state like
Somalia, concepts like “illicit
networks” are rather hollow—
networks themselves are neither
licit nor illicit. Rather, people
self-organize in networks and
engage in a complex hybrid
of illicit and licit behavior
that rides the connectedness of
coastal urban areas.

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vol.36:2 summer 2012

the city As A system

Rapid urbanization creates economic, social and governance chal-
lenges while simultaneously straining city infrastructure, making the

most vulnerable cities less able to meet
these challenges. The implications for
future conflict are profound, with more
people fighting over scarcer resources
in crowded, under-serviced, and under-
governed urban areas.

Consider, for example, the inter-
action between climate change and
coastal urbanization. Rural environ-
mental degradation prompts migration
to coastal cities, putting more people in
low-lying regions, where the slightest
rise in sea level can cause major disrup-
tion. Indeed, the Asian Development
Bank estimated in 2011 that drought,
desertification, and soil salinity, exacer-
bated by climate change, will prompt

millions of rural people across the Asia-Pacific region to migrate to cities
over the coming decades:

“Geography, compounded by high levels of poverty and population
density has rendered Asia and the Pacific especially vulnerable to the
impacts of climate change. The region is home to more than 4 billion
people and some of the fastest growing cities in the world. By 2020,
13 of the world’s 25 megacities, most of them situated in coastal
areas, will be in Asia and the Pacific. Climate change will likely exac-
erbate existing pressures on key resources associated with growth,
urbanization and industrialization.”15

The food security effects are equally severe, as pollution from coastal
urbanization imperils fish stocks, and peri-urban areas surround city cores
whose infrastructure is scaled for populations far smaller than they now
support. This newly settled peri-urban land was once used for farms, market
gardens and orchards, but as cities expand into this space, the distance
between the city core and its food sources increases significantly. Food must
now be produced further away and transported over ever-greater distances,
increasing transportation and refrigeration costs, raising fuel usage and
carbon emissions, exacerbating traffic problems, and creating “food deserts”

Rapid urbanization
creates economic, social and
governance challenges while
simultaneously straining city
infrastructure, making the
most vulnerable cities less able
to meet these challenges. The
implications for future conflict
are profound, with more people
fighting over scarcer resources
in crowded, under-serviced and
under-governed urban areas.

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the city as a system: future conflict and urban resilience

in urban areas. Likewise, many cities are running out of water, a problem
that will only increase as populations swell, and as urbanization covers rain-
fall catchment areas, pushing cities further from their water sources.

The growing size and complexity of cities also strains the infrastruc-
ture of governance and security; police, district administrators, courts,
hospitals, schools, and maintenance services. In particular, government pres-
ence can be extremely limited in peri-urban areas, allowing the emergence
of safe havens for criminal networks or non-state armed groups, or creating
a vacuum filled by local youth, who do not lack for grievances arising from
their new urban circumstances or from their home villages. Even in devel-
oped cities like Paris and London, rioting, youth unrest, and crime in peri-
urban districts reached significant levels on several occasions over the past
decade. In underdeveloped regions, the problem is even worse.16

It is useful to think of urban migration from the rural hinterland—
driven by rural environmental degradation, energy poverty or conflict—as
the supply side of a population-flow system whose demand side includes
the problems of urban overstretch, crime, scarcity, and conflict. The city is
a system which, in turn, nests within a larger national and global system,
with coastal cities functioning as an exchange mechanism that connects
rural hinterlands with urban populations, and with international networks.
We can represent this graphically, along with the key trends we have been
discussing, as follows:

the city As A system

the fletcher forum of world affairs
vol.36:2 summer 2012

In this model, the coastal city is the center of a larger system, with rural
factors in the city’s hinterland—including environmental degradation, poor
rural infrastructure, and rural conflict—prompting rapid urbanization.
This creates ad hoc peri-urban settlements where slums and shantytowns
displace land formerly used to provide food and other services to the city,
and cover the rainfall catchment area for the city’s water supply. The city’s
growth puts its infrastructure under stress so that both the old urban core
and the new peri-urban areas experience weak governance and increased
levels of crime, urban poverty, unemployment and conflict. Shortages of
food, fuel, electricity and water exacerbate these problems. In turn, the
city’s connectedness allows its population to tap into licit and illicit activi-
ties offshore, and to connect with global networks, including diaspora

populations, an interaction that affects
both local and international conflict
dynamics.

The data suggest that this is the
environment in which future conflict
will occur. This is not a futuristic
prediction, but rather a projection of
trends that are evident now, and an
assessment of their effects on cities as
they exist today. There will certainly be
outliers—wars in desert and mountain
terrain, and state-on-state “conven-
tional” war—but this analysis outlines

the system parameters within which future conflict is likely to occur
and suggests that the majority of such conflict seems likely to be urban,
networked, and littoral.

the Future threAt: irreGulAr, hybrid, And nested

Within this environment of connected, developing-world coastal
cities under stress, likely threats to the wellbeing of cities and communi-
ties across the planet can be summed up in three similarly broad concepts:
irregular actors and methods, hybrid threats, and nested networks.

Irregular actors and methods

The primary threat will be from irregular actors (non-state armed groups) and ir-
regular methods (those that avoid directly confronting our military strength).

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the city as a system: future conflict and urban resilience

Military planners use the term “irregular warfare” to describe conflict
against non-state armed groups: combatants who do not belong to the regular
armed forces of nation-states. More broadly, the term describes methods
(terrorism, guerrilla warfare, cyber war) that the international commu-
nity considers irregular. These methods typically call for avoiding direct
confrontation with the military power of governments. Instead, they pit the
irregular’s competitive advantages of stealth, small size, tactical initiative
and local knowledge against conventional militaries, which though large
and powerful, tend to lose their agility and situational awareness in the
complex environment of overcrowded, under-governed, urban coastal areas.
Non-state armed groups include insurgents, terrorists, pirates, smugglers,
gangs, bandits, and organized crime networks, but may also include the
state sponsors of such groups, or government organizations (usually special
forces and intelligence services) who adopt similar methods themselves.

Irregular threats are the most likely (though not necessarily the most
dangerous) in the future conflict environment. Irregular warfare, including
civil war, is the commonest and most
widespread form of conflict, accounting
for roughly eighty-three percent of wars
since 1815, and there is no reason to
suspect that this pattern will change in
the future.17 Non-state armed groups
will continue to choose asymmetric
methods to confront more militarily
powerful nation-states. The renewed
U.S. focus on conventional warfare
will only reinforce this tendency,
since America’s unprecedented mili-
tary supremacy means that no rational
enemy would choose to fight the United States using conventional means.
Moreover, networked and overpopulated coastal cities will experience
conflict among civil populations (ethnic groups, socio-economic classes, and
immigrant communities) and between those populations and state represen-
tatives (police, the military, emergency services, and local administrators).
Proxy groups, sponsored by foreign states or their representatives, will also
adopt irregular methods as formal interstate warfare continues to decline
and states use asymmetric methods to further their interests.

One recent example of this new pattern of conflict is the November
26, 2008, Mumbai attack in which members of a non-state armed group (the
Pakistani terrorist organization Lashkar-e-Taiba) carried out an appallingly

Irregular warfare, including
civil war, is the commonest
and most widespread form of
conflict, accounting for roughly
83 percent of wars since 1815,
and there is no reason to suspect
that this pattern will change
in the future.

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vol.36:2 summer 2012

effective seaborne raid on India’s largest city, killing 164 people and wounding
308 over a three-day period, in several widely dispersed locations. The raiders
exploited seaborne economic networks and legitimate traffic patterns by
inserting themselves into a coastal fishing fleet to cover their approach to
the target. They landed from the sea in the urban core of Mumbai city, but
allegedly received assistance from a reception party operating in the city’s
peri-urban areas. They drew on support from (allegedly “retired”) members
of the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), who trained them prior to
the attack and continued to act as mentors, supporters, and coaches during
the raid. Handlers in Pakistan walked individual terrorists through specific
actions step by step over satellite phones, monitored Indian news channels
and the Internet, and used Google Earth for targeting. The terrorists and
their sponsors monitored the progress of the attack in real-time via Twitter.18
On the Indian side, overstretched police and counterterrorism units took a
long time to react to the size and complexity of a seaborne terrorist attack
targeting several locations simultaneously in a cluttered downtown coastal
area. They were also hampered by the need to seek bureaucratic approval from
distant officials in the capital city, New Delhi.

In Mumbai, then, a hybrid organization involving both state and
non-state actors, attacked national and international targets, and lever-
aged both local and remote networks for support. Combined with the diffi-
culties of an overstretched public safety and policing infrastructure in a
heavily populated, highly complex, networked urban littoral environment,
Mumbai may represent one future face of conflict.

Even under conditions of interstate war between major powers—
wars that might in theory be called “conventional”—the fact that such a
high proportion of the world population lives in coastal cities will tend to
push future conflict in an “irregular” direction, toward small unit hit-and-
run attacks, ambushing, sniping, bombings, and other tactics tradition-
ally used by non-state actors. This would very obviously be the case in the
event of war with Iran, given Iran’s use of proxies and irregular forces across
its region and beyond. Even the most stereotypically “conventional” cases,
such as a war on the Korean Peninsula or a hypothetical conflict between
the United States and China, would not remain conventional for long.
North Korea would almost inevitably be defeated in a conventional fight,
and could be expected to resort to guerrilla and irregular methods (as well
as weapons of mass destruction) almost immediately. Even in the event of a
rapid North Korean collapse, the requirement for stabilization and human-
itarian operations would be immense and protracted. And in the even more
unlikely case of war with China, a conflict that neither the United States nor

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the city as a system: future conflict and urban resilience

China appears to want, the war would also almost certainly take an irreg-
ular turn. China is now more than fifty-one percent urbanized, its largest
urban centers are clustered along its coastline, and Chinese officers literally
wrote the book on irregular tactics, defining the future of the country’s
national security strategy (the classic
1998 treatise Unrestricted Warfare by
Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui of the
Chinese People’s Liberation Army).19

In the future, non-state armed
groups—because of greater connect-
edness—will also draw on civilian
populations whose access to advanced
technologies greatly enhances their
military potential. These technologies
may include both weapons systems and
dual-use technologies (such as infrared
or radio remote control devices repurposed as triggers for roadside bombs,
or industrial chemicals repurposed as chemical weapons; both used in Iraq).
In addition, urban and peri-urban populations can access factories and
workshops where they can fabricate weapons and other technologies (as in
Libya in early 2011, when technically skilled but militarily inexperienced
rebels used workshops in coastal urban areas around Benghazi to build and
modify weapons and vehicles).

Hybrid Threats

Different threat categories—state and non-state, military and criminal, conven-
tional and asymmetric, local and global—will increasingly merge.

As mentioned in the previous section, because major powers are likely
to maintain their superiority in conventional conflict, all future adversaries
(whether states or non-state armed groups) will continue to have strong
survival-based incentives to adopt irregular and asymmetric methods.

But the future threat is not likely to be divisible into neat categories
(irregular versus regular, state versus non-state, domestic versus internal
,or military versus law enforcement). Like the Mumbai example, it will
be hybrid, including irregular actors and methods, but also state actors
who use irregulars as proxies, or adopt asymmetric methods to minimize
detection and avoid retaliation from other states. This is nothing new;
Pakistan’s use of the Afghan Taliban and groups like Lashkar-e Taiba,
Iran’s use of Hezbollah and the Quds Force, and the sponsorship of dozens

In the future, non-state armed
groups—because of greater
connectedness—will also draw
on civilian populations whose
access to advanced technologies
greatly enhances their military
potential.

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vol.36:2 summer 2012

of insurgencies and terrorist groups by regimes like Muammar Gadhafi’s
Libya, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, and indeed the Soviet Union, go back over
many decades.

But besides the state/non-state overlap, the future hybrid threat will also
bring intersections between criminal and military actors and between domestic
and international threats. For example, there is evidence of strong connectivity
among piracy syndicates, organized crime networks in Europe, and Somalia’s
al-Shabaab insurgency.20 Clans and criminal networks, in Mogadishu and in

rapidly urbanizing Somali coastal areas
like Kismaayo and Haraadhere, draw
little distinction between their military
and political activities on the one hand,
and their business interests (both legiti-
mate and criminal) on the other. Conflict
entrepreneurs—like crime networks that
set up refugee camps around Mogadishu
to divert humanitarian assistance into
the black market or to Shabaab—operate
along a continuum ranging from legiti-
mate business, through illicit activity,
outright crime, terrorism, and insur-
gency.

Governments like the United
States that draw sharp legislative
distinctions between warfare and law
enforcement, and between domestic
and overseas authorities, cannot operate

with the same agility. Capabilities that combine policing, administration,
and emergency services with sufficient military capability to deal with
well-armed non-state adversaries—capabilities traditionally associated with
constabulary, Gendarmerie, Carabinieri, or coast guards—are likely to be more
effective against these hybrid threats than conventional armies or navies.

Nested Networks

Future threats will be nested in the complex urban littoral environment, illicit ac-
tivities will nest within licit networks, and local threat networks will be nested in
networks at the regional and global levels.

Under these circumstances, threat actors will be able to nest within
a complex environment, avoiding detection by remaining beneath the

Capabilities that combine
policing, administration
and emergency services with
sufficient military capability
to deal with well-armed
non-state adversaries—
capabilities traditionally
associated with constabulary,
Gendarmerie, Carabinieri
or coast guards—are likely
to be more effective against
these hybrid threats than
conventional armies or navies.

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the city as a system: future conflict and urban resilience

“clutter” of dense urban development and overpopulation. Because of the
connectedness among threat networks, peri-urban communities and the
broader systems on which the city runs, it will be virtually impossible to
target a threat network without also harming the community within which
it nests, and this will deter some governments while making it harder for
those who do act to eliminate these threats.

One recent example of this type of network was found in 2010 in
Kingston, Jamaica, where a transnational gang, the Shower Posse, headed
by Christopher “Dudus” Coke, operated from a stronghold in the overpopu-
lated and under-governed coastal urban slum of Tivoli Gardens. The gang is
responsible for offshore drug and weapons trafficking as far afield as Toronto,
New York, and New Jersey, and Mr. Coke was wanted for extradition by the
United States on narcotics conspiracy charges. However, his gang was so
deeply nested within its environment—providing community services and
benefits to the local population in Tivoli Gardens, and allegedly with allies
among the authorities in some parts of the Jamaican establishment—that
penetrating the district became a major military undertaking. In response,
the Jamaican Defence Force (JDF) conducted a detailed study of counter-
insurgency methods in Afghanistan,21 received training from Canadian and
U.S. specialists, and acquired advanced technologies such as surveillance
drones and communications intercepts.22 Beginning in May 2010, the JDF
mounted a major military effort, provoking significant community back-
lash and unrest, with the resulting state of emergency leading to over 500
arrests and 73 lives lost. The JDF engaged in over several weeks of intensive
stabilization and control operations before finally capturing and extraditing
Mr. Coke in June 2010.23 The connectedness of Tivoli Gardens with the
rest of Kingston, as well as with national and international financial, polit-
ical, business, and criminal networks, meant that the effort to extradite
a single crime boss from an urbanized, networked, littoral environment
quickly evolved into something more like counterinsurgency and stabiliza-
tion operations than law enforcement.

As well as nesting in the urban environment, networks can nest
within legitimate international and national systems, including interna-
tional transportation networks, financial networks such as the remittances
industry, and even humanitarian assistance programs. For example, as the
investigative journalist Matt Potter has uncovered from a range of official
and academic sources, as well as local and eyewitness accounts, some of the
very same air charter companies that operate humanitarian assistance flights
into drought-stricken or conflict-affected areas such as the Horn of Africa are
also involved in smuggling weapons, drugs, and other contraband for illicit

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vol.36:2 summer 2012

networks. Humanitarian aid workers and NGOs are well aware of this, but
both they and the governments involved in relief efforts are unable to shut
down these trafficking networks, since these are the very same networks on
which they rely in order to move their humanitarian cargo.24

imPlicAtions

This analysis of the future conflict environment suggests that the recent
U.S. shift away from protracted stabilization and counterinsurgency opera-
tions toward conventional conflict, conflict prevention and military-to-mili-
tary assistance, is somewhat unrealistic. American policymakers, not for the

first time, have expressed a strong pref-
erence for avoiding messy conflicts like
those of the past decade. Nonetheless,
as we have seen, policymakers’ prefer-
ences seem to have little effect on the
frequency of overseas interventions, a
historical pattern which suggests that
the United States is likely to undertake
one major stabilization or counterinsur-
gency operation (on the scale of Iraq,
Afghanistan, or Vietnam) every genera-
tion, and smaller operations (on the scale
of Bosnia or Kosovo) every five to ten
years, for the foreseeable future.

While this pattern is likely to
endure, the environment in which
such interventions occur is shifting.
The three megatrends of urbaniza-
tion, littoralization, and connectedness
suggest that conflict is increasingly
likely to occur in coastal cities, in
underdeveloped regions of the Middle
East, Africa, Latin America, and Asia,
and in highly networked, connected
settings. Adversaries are likely to be
non-state armed groups (whether crim-
inal or military) adopting asymmetric

methods. Even the most conventional hypothetical war scenarios will turn
out, when closely examined, to involve very significant “irregular” aspects.

American policymakers, not for
the first time, have expressed a
strong preference for avoiding
messy conflicts like those of the
past decade. Nonetheless, as
we have seen, policymakers’
preferences seem to have
little effect on the frequency
of overseas interventions,
a historical pattern which
suggests that the United
States is likely to undertake
one major stabilization or
counterinsurgency operation (on
the scale of Iraq, Afghanistan,
or Vietnam) every generation,
and smaller operations (on
the scale of Bosnia or Kosovo)
every five to ten years, for the
foreseeable future.

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the city as a system: future conflict and urban resilience

Whether irregular or state-based, adversaries in the future conflict
environment will exhibit hybrid characteristics (combining state and non-
state, domestic and international, military and criminal, and licit and illicit
elements) and will be able to nest within the complexity of urban environ-
ments, as well as within legitimate national and international systems.

The implications for the U.S. military are reasonably obvious,
although difficult to act upon in the current fiscal environment. Capabilities
such as Marine amphibious units and naval supply ships, as well as facili-
ties for expeditionary logistics in urbanized coastal environments, are fairly
obvious requirements, as are rotary-wing or tilt-rotor aircraft, precise and
discriminating weapons systems, and the ability to rapidly aggregate or
disaggregate forces to operate in a distributed, small-unit mode, while
still being able to concentrate their mass quickly against a major target.
Combat and construction engineers, civil affairs units, intelligence systems
capable of making sense of the clutter of urban areas, and constabulary
(gendarmerie) and coast guard capabilities are also likely to be important.
The ability to operate for a long period of time in a city without drawing
heavily on that city’s water, fuel, electricity, or food supply will also be
important.

Many of the implications for civilian agencies of government are also
obvious; the ability to expand social services, city administration, and rule
of law into peri-urban areas are clearly important, as are investments in
infrastructure to guarantee supplies of fuel, electricity, food, and water.
Less obvious, but equally important, are investments in governance and
infrastructure in rural areas, as well as efforts to mitigate the effects of
rural environmental degradation that cause unchecked and rapid urban
migration. Given the prevalence and increasing capability level of threat
networks, policing capabilities will need to embody a creative combina-
tion of community policing, constabulary work, criminal investigation and
special branch (or police intelligence) work, potentially in close collabo-
ration with the military. Local city managers, district-level officials and
ministry representatives may need capabilities that allow them to operate
in higher-threat, and opposed-governance environments.

The implications for business, civil society, and the general public go
well beyond either of these rather narrowly scoped considerations. In the
first place, the environmental shifts outlined above represent far more than
a future theory of conflict—indeed, they are a “theory of everything” in the
sense that the three key megatrends identified here (urbanization, littor-
alization, and connectedness) will affect every aspect of life on the planet
in the next few decades. Caerus Associates’ systems design approach for

the fletcher forum of world affairs
vol.36:2 summer 2012

developing urban resiliency and mapping conflict25 and the IBM Smarter
Cities project26 are two examples of businesses and civil society organiza-
tions taking a holistic approach to the city as a system, and thereby seeking
to anticipate and address the full range of future issues that cities will
confront.

More broadly, the city-as-a-system approach described earlier can
be applied as a methodology to identify how complex problems that may
appear unrelated—rural soil salinity, urban crime, piracy, and diaspora-
sponsored terrorism, for example—interact with each other in the context
of a given city or threat network. Taking this approach may allow planners
to identify emergent patterns within the complex system of a relevant city,
make sense of the system logic, and begin to design tailored interventions.
These would begin in a consciously experimental way, seeking to iden-
tify and reveal the complex interactions between different parts of systems,
and among systems nested in larger systems, but would rapidly increase in
effectiveness as each experimental intervention would generate new data
that would enhance the effectiveness of the next.

city-As-system intervention Points

As the diagram above shows, we might further break such interven-
tions down into supply-side interventions, (which ameliorate drivers of
rapid urbanization and thus relieve some of the pressure on the city and
its infrastructure), demand-side interventions (which improve the city’s

vol.36:2 summer 2012

resiliency and thus its ability to cope with the pressures on its systems),
and framing-system interventions (which seek to alter the context within
which the city develops, by changing its interaction with larger national
and transnational systems).

conclusions

In conclusion, given the difficult last decade of wars, stabilization,
and expensive nation-building efforts, it is perfectly natural that U.S. polit-
ical leaders and the public are turning away from these types of activities,
as shown by the recent policy shift toward conventional warfare capabili-
ties, and away from those needed for large-scale, long-term stabilization
and counterinsurgency. While there is an obvious and sensible political
and financial basis for the administra-
tion’s current approach, it neverthe-
less fails to account for the historical
pattern of frequent U.S. overseas inter-
ventions going back to the middle
of the nineteenth century or earlier.
Given the overwhelming conventional
military superiority of countries like
the United States, it seems likely that
any rational potential adversary (state
or non-state) will continue to pursue
irregular and asymmetric methods, so
that the demand for these types of operations is unlikely to diminish any
time soon. In any case, as we have seen, policymakers may or may not have
any particular desire to get involved in this messy form of intervention, but
this seems to have no impact on the frequency with which the military is
called upon to do it.

More broadly, the future conflict environment is likely to be charac-
terized by rapid population growth, increasing urbanization, accelerating
littoralization, and greater connectedness. Thinking of the city as a system
seems to make the most sense as a way to understand this environment,
and the irregular, hybrid, and nested threats that we are likely to encounter
within it. The implications for the military and for civilian government
are fairly obvious, but in broader terms a city-as-system approach may also
allow urban planners, city managers, businesses, and communities them-
selves to understand their environment and develop tailored interventions
to deal with it.

the city as a system: future conflict and urban resilience

… policymakers may or may
not have any particular desire
to get involved in this messy
form of intervention, but this
seems to have no impact on
the frequency with which the
military is called upon to do it.

the fletcher forum of world affairs
vol.36:2 summer 2012

We are still likely to experience wars between nation-states, and
conflict in remote areas such as mountains, jungles, and deserts will still
undoubtedly occur. But the trends are clear: more people than ever before
in history will be competing for ever-scarcer resources in poorly-governed
areas that lack adequate infrastructure. These areas will be more and more
closely connected to the global system, so that conflict will have imme-
diate and wider implications. The future is hybrid and irregular conflict
combining elements of crime, urban unrest, insurgency, terrorism, and
state-sponsored asymmetric warfare—more Mumbai, Mogadishu, and
Tivoli Gardens—and we had better start preparing for it. n

endnotes
1 United States Government, Sustaining U.S. Global Leadership: Priorities for 21st Century

Defense, Defense Strategic Guidance, January 2012, 3, (Accessed February 12, 2012).

2 Ibid., 12 (emphasis in the original).
3 Ibid., 5.
4 Punctuated only by major conventional wars, large-scale interventions involving irregular

warfare, stability operations or counterinsurgency have occurred approximately once every
25 years in U.S. history since the Mexican War of 1846-48. They included the Indian Wars
against Native American peoples throughout the second half of the 19th Century, the
Philippine Insurrection of 1899-1902, the Banana Wars in the Caribbean in the 1920s and
1930s, the Vietnam War, and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Even major “conventional”
wars during this period, including the Civil War, the First and Second World Wars, and
the Korean War involved significant elements of stability operations and nation building.
In terms of minor stability interventions, the Defense Science Board Summer Study of
2004 highlighted a long-standing five-to-seven-year cycle of intervention in stabilization
and reconstruction operations, imposing an increasing burden on the U.S. military. See
Defense Science Board, 2004 Summer Study on Transition To and From Hostilities, (Accessed 12 February 2012).

5 This estimate represents the median prediction of the United Nations population
progression model, as reported in United Nations, Department of Economic and Social
Affairs, World Population Prospects: the 2010 Revision, online at , accessed 15 February 2012

6 Casey Kazan, “Sprawl! Is Earth Becoming a Planet of Supercities?” The Daily Galaxy, June
24, 2009, (accessed April 16, 2012).

7 United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, World Urbanization Prospects:
the 2009 Revision, p. 1, .

8 See United Nations Environment Program, Cities and Coastal Areas, (Accessed February 22, 2012

9 Olivier Kramsch, “Towards a Mediterranean Scale of Governance: Twenty-First Century
Urban Networks across the ‘Inner Sea,’” in Barbara Hooper and Olivier Kramsch, eds.,
Cross-Border Governance in the European Union (London: Routledge 2007), 200.

vol.36:2 summer 2012

10 French Republic, Parliamentary Office for Scientific and Technical Assessment, The pollu-
tion in Mediterranean: current state and looking ahead to 2030, Summary of the report by
M. Roland Courteau, Senator of Aude, online at (Accessed February
22, 2012).

11 Kramsch, loc. cit.
12 Iginio Gagliardone and Nicole Stremlau, Digital Media, Conflict and Diasporas in the Horn

of Africa, Mapping Digital Media Program of the Open Society Foundations, December
2011, 9-10.

13 World Bank, Migration and Remittances Factbook 2011, quoted in Gagliardone and Stremlau,
op. cit. 12.

14 See “UN Bans Trade in Charcoal from Somalia” in The East African, February 25, 2012,
(accessed April 16, 2012).

15 See Asian Development Bank, Climate-Induced Migration in Asia and the Pacific,
September 2011, (Accessed April 16, 2012).

16 Widespread rioting and civil unrest in outlying and peri-urban areas struck Paris (and
several other French cities) in 2005 and again in 2007 and 2010, while large-scale rioting
and looting occurred in parts of London in 2011.

17 See David J. Kilcullen, Counterinsurgency, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010),
xi-xii.

18 Onook Oh, Manish Agrawal and H. Raghav Rao, “Information control and terrorism:
Tracking the Mumbai terrorist attack through twitter”, Information System Frontiers 13:
33-43 (2011), (accessed April 16, 2012).

19 Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui, Unrestricted Warfare (Beijing: PLA Literature and Arts
Publishing House, February 1999).

20 Matt Potter, Outlaws Inc.: Under the Radar and On the Black Market with the World’s Most
Dangerous Smugglers (New York: Bloomsbury, 2001).

21 See, for example, Major Wayne Robinson, Eradicating Organized Criminal Gangs in Jamaica:
Can Lessons be Learnt from a Successful Counterinsurgency? (Quantico, VA: US Marine Corps Staff
College Dissertation, 2008), (Accessed April 25, 2012).

22 Richard Drayton, “From Kabul to Kingston: Army tactics in Jamaica resemble those used
in Afghanistan – and it’s no mere coincidence,” The Guardian, June 13, 2010,
(accessed April 16, 2012).

23 Horace Helps, “Toll from Jamaica violence rises to 73”, May 27, 2010,
(accessed April 16, 2012).

24 Potter 2001, 139-144
25 Caerus Associates’ “Ideas from Caerus,” (Accessed

March 10, 2012).
26 IBM’s “Smarter Cities,”

view/index.html> (accessed March 10, 2012).

the city as a system: future conflict and urban resilience

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