“When the Army looks to the future, it sees cities,” armytimes.com reports. “Dense, sprawling, congested cities where criminal and extremist groups flourish almost undetected by authorities, but who can influence the lives of the population while undermining the authority of the state. And the service is convinced that these ‘megacities’ of 20 million or more people will be the battleground of the future.” Paging Alex Jones! I assume the Army’s preparing for mega-city warfare in cities outside the U.S., and that U.S. soldiers would refuse to “pacify” American conurbations, but capability is capability. Check out the Army’s big city game plan . . .
Its annual Unified Quest war game, the Army gamed out a scenario in which it would put boots on the ground.
The Army team fought through what it envisions a battle in a massive city would look like around 2030. The impetus for U.S. action was a humanitarian disaster caused in part by the breaking of a dam, which broke down critical parts of the local state apparatus, while armed groups jumped into the fray to further destabilize the situation.
The Red Team representing these groups did several things to test the players representing the Army, including evading U.S. technological superiority by using anti-access techniques, conducting malware-like and electronic warfare attacks, and “expanding these battlegrounds into other contested spaces like organized crime and politics,” said ARCIC chief Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster.
McMaster said one of the primary aims of the game was to generate ways to “extend the reach of the [infantry] squad so the squad can see and fight over a wider area” than it can now. That tracks with other Odierno initiatives in recent years to make infantry squads more lethal and more autonomous.
Are we having fun yet? While the Army is preparing to fight terrorists or terrorist armies or terrorist nations embedded in big cities, who gets to define terrorists when – not if – when we experience another large scale attack on the “homeland”?
“The emergence of unregulated cities, or zones of disadvantage where traditional rule of law models do not apply, within otherwise functional cities, provides a potential haven for organized crime, terrorists and insurgents, from which they can organize and launch operations,” the analysis concluded.
Escape from New York? Or shelter in place?