The document discusses the US military's "urban turn" and its attempts to optimize warfare strategies for urban environments through new technologies. It outlines 4 key aspects: 1) reconfiguring urban spaces, 2) mobilizing simulations and collective training, 3) enhancing surveillance systems to "unveil" cities, and 4) pursuing robotics and autonomous weapons. However, the author argues this urban focus says more about domestic politics and techno-fantasies than effective strategy, and full control of cities is unlikely due to their unconquerable nature. The military seeks vertical visibility and tracking through persistent surveillance and simulated training to dominate battlespaces, but cities remain politically and physically contested zones.

1. Dreams of Omniscience:
Urbanization and the US ‘Revolution in Military Affairs’
Stephen Graham
Newcastle University

2. I Dreams Frustrated? Urbanization and the US
‘Revolution in Military Affairs’ (RMA)
“It is now possible to use America’s military might with a
greatly reduced chance of suffering friendly casualties or
equipment loss. The reduction of American casualties
afforded by the marriage between stealthy aircraft and
precision guided munitions has had a profound effect on
America’s willingness to intervene militarily. The military
must also adapt to its new role as a tool of choice, rather
than a tool of last resort” (O’Mara, 2003)

3. Vertical and Imperial Omniscience in an
Ageographical World?

4. Effects-Based Operations

6. Asymmetric/ Unrestricted/
Fourth Generation Warfare

9. Full spectrum operations: ‘MOOTW’

11. From Battlefields to ‘Battlespace’
• ‘Fourth generation’, ‘networkcentric,’ ‘non-traditional,’
‘assymetric’, ‘full spectrum’
warfare
• ‘Battlespace’ is “deep, high, wide,
and simultaneous: there is no longer
a front or a rear” (Blackmore,
2005)
• Multi-scalar: nano to planetary
• Nonlinear, ‘swarming’ forces
operating within and through cities,
infrastructures, spaces across
transnational scales
• All terrain a ‘battlespace’ within
permanent state of exception and
hyper-militarisation: ‘new normal’
• Collapse of military-civil distinctions

12. Global South Cities as Prime Battlespaces
“For Western military forces,
asymmetric warfare in urban areas
will be the greatest challenge of this
century. The city will be the strategic
high ground – whoever controls it
will dictate the course of future
events in the world” (Dickson,
2002)
US: 26 conflicts: 1984 and 2004: 21
have involved urban areas; 10 have
been exclusively urban

13. ‘Feral’ Cities in the ‘Non-Integrating Gap’

14. But Fast-Growing Cities
Seen as Interrupters
of Global and Vertical
Networked Omniscience
“In simple terms walls tend to get in the way of
today’s battlefield communications and sensor
technologies” (Hewish and Pengelley, 2001)
“The technologies traditionally ascribed to the
current Revolution in Military Affairs phenomenon
will have negligible impact on Military Operations in
Urban Terrain” (Harris, 2003)

15. RAND: A Consequent
‘Urbanization of Insurgency’
“Opposition forces will
camouflage themselves in the
background noise of the
urban environment.
Weapons hidden beneath a
cloak, in a child’s carriage, or
rolled in a carpet, can get
past security personnel
undetected” (DIRC 1997)

16. Forced Proximity and Groundedness
• Ralph Peters: ”The long term trend in openarea combat is toward overhead dominance
by US forces. Battlefield awareness [for US
forces] may prove so complete, and
‘precision’ weapons so widely available and
effective, that enemy ground-based combat
systems will not be able to survive in the
deserts, plains, and fields that have seen so
many of history’s main battles.” The United
States’ “enemies will be forced into cities and
other complex terrain, such as industrial
developments and inter-city sprawl” (1997).
”The long term trend in open-area combat’, writes the leading U.S. ‘urban
warfare’ commentator, Ralph Peters (1996, 6), “is toward overhead dominance
by US forces.” As a result, he predicts that “Battlefield awareness [for US forces]
may prove so complete, and ‘precision’ weapons so widely available and
effective, that enemy ground-based combat systems will not be able to survive in
the deserts, plains, and fields that have seen so many of history’s main battles.”
As a result, Peters argues that the United States’ “enemies will be forced into
cities and other complex terrain, such as industrial developments and inter-city
sprawl” (1997, 4). Grau and Kipp, (1999 4), concur, suggesting that:
“urban combat is i ncreasingly likely, since high-precision weapons
threaten operational and tactical manoeuvre in open
terrain.
Commanders who lack sufficient high-precision weapons will f ind
cities appealing terrain […], provided they know the city better than
their opponent does and can mobilize the city’s resources and
population to their purposes.”

17. Scale Mismatch:
Megacities vs Professional Army

25. Popular Orientalism: Intrinsically Devious Cities

28. Military-Industrial-Entertainment Complex:
Participative and Immersive Simulation

34. II Dreams Reclaimed? The ‘Urban Turn’ in the RMA
the perception
“The time has come to change
that the high-tech US war machine fights at a
disadvantage in urban areas” (Houlgate, 2004)
“Urban areas should become our preferred
medium for fighting. We should optimize our
force structure for it, rather than relegating it
to Appendix Q in our fighting doctrine,
treating it as the exception rather than the
norm. It is time to tell Sun Tzu to sit down.
Instead of fearing it, we must own the city” Lt.
Col. Leonhard, US Army (2003)
Focus of military technoscience moves from
ageographical and global networked power to
microgeographical treatment of urban spaces

35. 1. Reconfiguring urban space
Cities not a mere backdrop:
“Contemporary urban warfare plays
itself out within a constructed, real or
imaginary architecture, and through
the destruction, construction,
reorganization, and subversion of
space.” (Weizman, 2006)

43. 2. Mobilising The Simulacral Collective

46. A Reverse Urban Beauty Contest

48. Manuel Chaves, who runs the special effects suite built
into the urban warfare site at Fort Wainwright, Alaska:
“We have a wide variety of special effects smells we
can do. For instance coffee, apple pie, dead bodies,
burning rubber, diesel fumes. I can do nine different
buildings, nine different smells. Generally, if it’s a
burning building, we put something really nasty in there
like burning bodies.”
•

49. RAND (2006) on Playas, New Mexico: “The architecture
of the abandoned town [should be] modified to include
walled compounds of the type that US troops in Iraq and
Afghanistan must at times isolate and clear.”

50. Yodaville ‘Urban Target Complex’, Arizona

52. Digital/Hybrid Simulations of ‘Target’ Cities

53. 3D Virtual Reality
Surveillant-Simulations
e.g. Virtual Iraq

55. Peopling: The ‘Crowd Federate’

58. Hybrid Simulations: ‘Augmented Reality’

60. Simulated Future Insurgencies:
‘Urban Resolve’ - Jakarta/ Baghdad 2015

62. 3. Unveiling Orientalised Space:
Surveillance Systems for
‘Unconventional War Targets’
• Defense Science Board (2004) US forces need another
“Manhattan Project” for tracking and locating targets in
‘assymetric’ urban warfare to “locate, identify and track
people, things and activitiesin an environment of one in a
million”

65. Jordan Crandall: ‘Armed Vision’:
“Tracking is an anticipatory form of seeing”

67. Combat Zones That See:
Persistent Urban Surveillance
• Observing ‘change’ rather than ‘scenery’
• Identify purported notions of urban ‘normality’ against the
‘abnormal’ behaviours and patterns that can then be assessed as
targets.
• CTS “explores concepts, develops algorithms, and delivers
systems for utilising large numbers (1000s) of algorithmic video
cameras to provide the close-in sensing demanded for military
operations in urban terrain.”
• “Will produce video understanding algorithms embedded in
surveillance systems for automatically monitoring video feeds to
generate, for the first time, the reconnaissance, surveillance, and
targeting information needed to provide close-in, continuous,
always-on support for military operations in urban terrain”

69. Unmanned Aerial Vehicles and Radar Airships

71. The ‘Visibuilding’ Programme

77. 4. Dreams of Robotised War

79. Armed Ground Robots
• 2025”.

80. Gordon Johnson, Leader,
‘Unmanned Effects’, US Army’s ‘Project Alpha’:
“if it can get within one meter, it’s killed the person
who’s firing. So, essentially, what we’re saying is that
anyone who would shoot at our forces would die.
Before he can drop that weapon and run, he’s probably
already dead. Well now, these cowards in Baghdad
would have to play with blood and guts every time
they shoot at one of our folks. The costs of poker went
up significantly. The enemy, are they going to give up
blood and guts to kill machines? I’m guessing not”

81. ‘Smart Dust’: Fantasies of Robotised Urban War
“Several large fans are stationed outside
the city limits of an urban target that
our [sic] guys need to take. Upon
appropriate signal, what appears like a
dust cloud emanates from each fan. The
cloud is blown into town where it
quickly dissipates. After a few minutes
of processing by laptop-size processors,
a squadron of small, disposable aircraft
ascends over the city. The little drones
dive into selected areas determined by
the initial analysis of data transmitted by
the fan-propelled swarm. Where they
disperse their nano-payloads.”
Defense Watch 2004

82. “After this, the processors get even more busy. Within minutes the
mobile tactical center have a detailed visual and audio picture of
every street and building in the entire city. Every hostile [person]
has been identified and located.
Unmanned air and ground vehicles can now be vectored directly to
selected targets to take them out, one by one. Those enemy
combatants clever enough to evade actually being taken out by
the unmanned units can then be captured of killed by human
elements”

83. “Behind the fighters, military police and
intelligence personnel process the inhabitants,
electronically reading their attitudes toward the
intervention and cataloguing them into a
database immediately recoverable by every fire
team in the city (even individual weapons might
be able to read personal signatures, firing
immediately upon cueing. Smart munitions track
enemy systems and profiled individuals. Drones
track inhabitants who have been ‘read’ as
potentially hostile and ‘tagged’”
Defense Watch, 2004

84. Conclusions
• The ‘Urban’ Turn in RMA is a distillation of stark
bio/geopolitics of exception, technophiliac
ideologies of permanent war, sci-fi omnipotence
fantasies + supply-push
• Complex intersections of imaginative geographies,
popular geopolitics, surveillance, simulation and
entertainment
• Cities ‘battlespace’; residents ‘targets’; war=forced
and persistent reorganisation of urban space
• Technophiliac and robotic fantasies especially
seductive to politicians and theorists of ‘NetWar’
and RMA after Iraq: The Pentagon’s idea of the
‘Long War’

85. But…
• Highly contested within US military (especially after Iraq)
• Unlikely to begin to reach levels of military effectiveness
and control in what are essentially unwinable wars/
unconquerable cities
• As with all imaginative, colonial geographies, ‘urban’
turn in RMA says much about domestic urban fantasies,
political economies and preoccupations
• ‘Insides’ and ‘outsides’ blur together: simulationsurveillance-corrections-military complex; Katrina as
‘urban operation’; biometric ‘gating’ of Iraqi cities ;
similar surveillance/simulation technologies for
‘homeland’ cities
• RMA “tells us more about Modern Western society than
it does about any objective assessment of military
options” Jeremy Black

86. Above all a (Geo)Politics of Verticality Visibility,
Tracking and (Attempted) Unveiling

87. The Politics of Response