Urban / City Warfare (merged thread)

[Mike Innes]

but there is some GIS stuff coming from Google that is supposed to mimic these type of questions pretty close.

Interesting point. I'm not a GIS specialist, but I see it increasingly being used for conflict modeling. Where things get tricky, at least for this technoramus, is figuring which tools to use for which environment. I keep harping about terrain complexity, but I don't think there's any avoiding the issue - developing some sort of framework understanding of it is the whole point of what we want to do with the Terrain Complexity Lab.

To wit, from the new COIN FM (p. B-10):

Terrain analysis in COIN includes the traditional examination of terrain’s effects on the movement of military units and enemy personnel. However, because the focus of COIN is on people, terrain analysis usually centers on populated areas and the effects of terrain on the people. Soldiers and Marines will likely spend a great deal of time in suburban and urban areas interacting with the populace. This is a three dimensional battlefield. Multistory buildings and underground lines of communication, such as tunnels or sewers, can be extremely important. Insurgents also commonly use complex natural terrain to their advantage as well. Mountains, caves, jungles, forests, swamps, and other complex terrain are potential bases of operation for insurgents.

But this is the really interesting one (p. 3-15):

Insurgents often seek to use complex terrain to their advantage. Collection managers do not ignore areas of complex terrain. In addition, insurgents use “seams” between maneuver units to their advantage. (Seams are boundaries between units not adequately covered by any unit.) Collection managers must have a means of monitoring seams in order to ensure the enemy cannot establish undetected bases of operation.

And finally, from he who guided the crafting of the COIN FM, Gen. David Petraeus:

We used to just focus on the military terrain... now we have to focus on the cultural terrain.

Battlefield sim, or battlespace sim, would have to take into account all these esoteric considerations and operating planes. Theoretically, there are all sorts of postmodern perspectives that have poked at this - witness Foucault, Virilio, Baudrillard, Der Derian. Interesting to see the technology, at least bits and pieces of tech innovation, evolving and accumulating to the point where a "closed world" (imagine all this shiny digital kit applied, but in a surveillance society or global COIN context) becomes increasingly possible. These sims aren't the same as tracking technologies, but as predictive tools, they precede the tracking, and would therefore facilitate it.