Westgate Mall Attacks: Urban Areas Battleground of the 21st Century
Westgate Mall Attacks: Urban Areas are the Battleground of the 21st Century by David Kilcullen, The Guardian.
Things aren't where we left them when we headed off into the mountains after 9/11. When the hangover clears, and the generation that fought in Afghanistan and Iraq comes home from these wars, we'll find that much of what we thought we understood has changed. The future (crowded, coastal, urban, connected) will be so different from Afghanistan (remote, landlocked, rural) that we'll have to reconsider much of what we think we know about 21st-century conflict.
Attacks like this week's siege in Nairobi reinforce what we've already seen in places like Mumbai and Karachi: that urban environments, including complex pieces of urban terrain like shopping centres, hotels and industrial facilities, are the battlegrounds of the future. And the urban siege, with its commando-style tactics and guerrilla infiltration of a big city's ebb and flow, is increasingly the tactic of choice for a wide range of adversaries…
