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MALE SPEAKER: Thanks for being here everybody.
We're very lucky today to have David Kilcullen as our guest.
And by the way, before I forget, I
want to give a special shout out to the men
of the 23rd marine regiment who are here as our guests.
Thank you for your service.
David Kilcullen is a counter insurgency expert.
He first, at least, came to my attention
as part of the surge in Iraq in 2007,
but his resume goes much deeper than that.
Today, he's going to talk about what he's doing nowadays,
which involves some work with Google, actually, on Syria.
He's been adviser to General David Petraeus and Condoleezza
Rice and is now operating a consulting service in Virginia
where he deals with all sorts of interesting stuff, which
he'll be happy to tell you about.
So please give a warm welcome to David Kilcullen.
DAVID KILCULLEN: Thank you.
It's actually great to be here on such a beautiful day in San
Francisco.
I was talking to a guy last night.
He said the problem with San Francisco is it makes you lazy.
I was like, what do you mean?
He was like well, yesterday I woke up,
and I had all this work to do, but then I thought,
I think I'm just going to go for a hike with my wife.
And I blew off the whole-- and I'm like,
I can totally see that.
Every time I get off the plane in California,
I'm like, why don't we live here again?
So thank you for spending an hour of a beautiful day inside
with me when you could be out doing a bunch of other stuff.
Obviously, I just wrote this book, which is why I'm here.
But I thought what I would do is just hit up
some of the main ideas in the book
rather than try to give you a full download,
and then maybe in Q&A we can kick those around, and discuss
some of the main stuff that comes out of it,
and see what you guys are most interested in talking about.
I began writing the book in September of 2009
after getting ambushed in Afghanistan.
It's not the first, or in fact, the last time that I've been
ambushed in Afghanistan, but this particular one
was interesting.
It was the classic late afternoon ambush scenario
that you get in Afghanistan, because most of Eastern
Afghanistan has a very, very narrow set of valleys that
have settlement patterns of-- basically people live
in the bottom of the valleys.
Nobody lives on the mountains themselves,
and there's usually only one road running down
the middle of each valley.
So if you go up that valley in the morning,
essentially everyone in that whole community
knows exactly where you're going to be at 4 o'clock
in the afternoon.
You're going to be driving down the valley.
And in fact, Afghan families have ambush spots
like families in the Chesapeake Bay
have fishing spots or families out here.
They don't have to go through the full complex planning
process that an infantry small unit does
when it decides to do an ambush.
They basically say hey, Abdul.
Get to the ambush spot.
Because they have three or four of them already picked out.
In fact, I was in another ambush earlier in my career
in Afghanistan where we actually found old 303 ammunition
from British rifles that went out
of service in the 19th century up in these firing positions
on either side of the road, so they'd obviously
been using this ambush site for some considerable time.
But I'm in the middle of this ambush, and I think to myself,
this is a pretty bad ambush.
I've become a bit of an involuntary connoisseur
over the years, and I actually used
to teach ambushing at the tactics school
when I was captain.
So I'm like, if these were my students on the battle course,
I would have failed them for their ambush plan.
It was just very badly put together.
It didn't come-- it just didn't work.
Anyway, we get to the bottom of the valley,
and I'm talking to my driver of my Amrep, which
is like a big armored garbage truck
that we drive around in Afghanistan.
And the driver says to gunner, hey,
how many Taliban guys do you reckon we killed?
And I was like, well, how do you know they were Taliban?
And they were like, dude, they were shooting at us.
And it took me a little while.
I was actually on the helicopter ride back afterwards.
But I began to think maybe this attack had actually nothing
to do with the Taliban.
And when I started to think about what we've
been doing in that valley for the preceding two or three
years, and the way that we laid down a series of projects
to help the community, and how that had actually dis-empowered
other people in the community and created
a big imbalance of resources going into some villages
and into others, I started to realize that actually there's
a lot more that meets the eye in a place like Eastern
Afghanistan around stuff like contracting,
and around denial of access to services,
and the way that people interact with this giant tsunami
of contracting and aid money that comes into Afghanistan.
About 14 times the size of the total Afghan government budget
is our aid programming in Afghanistan.
And I began to write this book, trying
to think beyond the paradigm of counter insurgency,
and for those people that are in the military, that's
like anathema.
Like, what?
Dave Kilcullen?
Didn't you write a book on counter insurgency?
Yes, but it's just a book, and we have this paradigm
that we built, because it helped us to win a conflict in Iraq,
and it helped us to win a variety
of smaller fights in other places.
But that doesn't mean that it's dogma,
and that's the answer forever.
Like any other human model or mental picture
of an environment, all it is is a systematic oversimplification
of very complex reality.
And over time, when you start to see
data that don't fit with your model,
it's time to update the model.
And so what I've been doing over the past three or four years
is thinking beyond that and actually
reaching back into some work that I previously
did when I was in the Australian military looking
at urbanized environments, and I'm
going to talk about that a lot in a minute,
but I just want to set the context.
Ever since 9/11, the military in particular, but also
aid agencies, diplomatic services,
a variety of other organizations have
gotten really good at the kind of stuff
that I was doing in Eastern Afghanistan when
I got shot up in 2009.
Remote environments, tribal communities,
landlocked countries like Afghanistan,
the work that we do in little remote frontier outposts
has become, I think, dramatically better quality
than it was a decade ago.
But if you look at the environment
that we've been operating in, its very specific.
Afghanistan's a very diffuse conflict.
The conflict mostly happens in rural environments,
not in the cities.
It happens in this land locked, mountainous arid, not
very heavily populated environment.
And most importantly, it's a very low bandwidth,
low conductivity environment.
Most people don't have the ability
to tap into an extensive cellphone network, or access
to the internet, or any of the sorts of things
that we take for granted in the modern urban world.
So as I was researching the book,
I started to think to myself, what's
going to happen after Afghanistan?
Now, it's become fashionable in the politics world
and the foreign policy discussions
in Washington to act like the war in Afghanistan
is already over, like we don't currently
have all these troops out there fighting and dying
on the ground, or diplomats doing the work they're doing,
or aid agencies or other people doing
the hard work in Afghanistan, like that's all finished.
Actually, our friends are still out there doing
this stuff on the ground, and I think
it's really important to not forget that.
That said, it's pretty clear that the conflict
is going to start winding down in the next year or two,
and it's worth asking yourself what
does the future environment look like?
Does it look like Afghanistan, or does it
look like something else?
And a lot of the book is my exploration of that question.
When I look at the future environment, what I see
is a very high degree of what you
might call operational continuity.
The stuff that we do, we will keep
on doing mostly that kind of stuff
in the future environment.
As an example of that, if you go back in US military history
to about the middle of the 19th century around the time
of the Mexican War, and you start a timeline then,
and you run it forward to now, you
find a really, really consistent pattern in US military history
where we do a large scale or long duration irregular warfare
campaign about once every 20 to 25 years,
and we do small ones on a scale of Kosovo, or East Timor,
or Sierra Leone about once every 5 to 10 years in between.
And that patent is not only very consistent
and appears to be totally unaffected by policymakers'
preferences.
So beginning of last year, President Obama
gave direction to the US military
where he said we're going to get out
of the business of doing large scale, long duration
stabilization operations or counter insurgencies.
He said we're not going to structure the force for that
anymore.
Turns out President Clinton said basically the same thing
in 1992.
Candidate George W. Bush said the same thing in 2000.
President Johnson said the same thing in 1964.
You can run this back, and you'll
find about seven presidents in the 20th century alone making
basically the same comment, and it
has zero effect on how often we get
into these kinds of conflicts.
Across the planet since the end of the Napoleonic Wars,
roughly 80% of all conflict has been intrastate--
that is within communities, within one country-- or it's
involved a non-state armed group like pirates, or insurgents,
or some other kind of combatant that is not a nation state.
So that is in fact-- that's the typical environment that we
operate or the stereotypical type of work that we do.
But the environment that we've operated in the past
is not the environment that we're going to look at.
So operational continuity but a strong environmental
discontinuity between what's coming
and what we've been doing in the last decade,
this landlocked remote rural environment.
Now, American forces, particularly the army
and the Marine Corps were very heavily involved
in urban fighting in Iraq.
So talking to an American audience,
it's easy to think that actually we have a lot of experience
globally in urban operations.
That's actually not true.
There were 50 countries in Iraq, 51 in Afghanistan,
but only one of those that it was involved
in any significant urban fighting
was the American military in Baghdad.
When I deployed to Baghdad in-- I'm
sorry-- and Ramadi and all the other areas
around that in the American sector.
When I deployed to Baghdad in February of 2007, at that time,
more than 50% of total combat action in the war in Iraq
was happening inside Baghdad city limits,
which is a purely US theater.
Everybody else engaged in the conflict
was out in more remote rural environments,
where frankly there was a lot less violence going on.
So for most of the 50 countries that we're in Iraq,
normal is not urban.
Normal is farms, little villages, rural districts,
not a lot of fighting, more like peacekeeping and stabilization.
And for everybody that went to Afghanistan,
you're dealing with this rural diffuse environment.
But looking forward, I see four big trends
that are actually changing the environment
and will shape how we operate or where we operate in the future,
and those trends are population, urbanization, littoralization--
which is just the tendency for things to cluster
on coastlines-- and then most importantly electronic
network connectivity.
Now, those first three trends are old.
They've been around for at least 200 years since the beginning
of the European Industrial Revolution.
They're also very well understood
in the military in particular.
Let me just talk about them briefly before I
go to what I think is the more important one,
which is connectivity.
So, population growth, at the beginning of the US Industrial
Revolution in 17-- sorry, the European Industrial
Revolution in 1750, the total population of the planet
was about 750 million people.
It took 150 years for that population
to double through the first century
and a half of industrialization and the invention of things
like new ways to think about irrigation, new ways
to think about crops, concentration of population
in urban environments, improvements in public health.
All those sorts of things led to this population growth process
that began in the middle of the 18th century.
By 1900, we were at 1.5 billion people,
so we doubled the population of the planet in about 150 years.
We then doubled that population again in only 60 years by 1960,
so we get to 3 billion people on the planet in 1960.
And it's worth noting that that second doubling happened
during the same time frame as both world wars
and a major influenza pandemic across the entire planet, which
between them killed about 150 million, mainly
young and healthy people.
So despite that, we saw this doubling by 1960 to 3 billion.
The population then doubled again by the year 2000
to 6 billion, and in just the dozen years since then,
we've added slightly more than a billion people.
So today, were looking at around about 7 billion people
on the planet.
Projecting that forward is not a matter of simple prediction,
it's a matter of looking at the demographic bell curve,
and where people are right now, and where the population growth
is likely to take us.
But the Bureau of Economic and Social Affairs at the UN
and a bunch of other organizations
that look at the stuff project that by the middle
of the century we're looking at something
like 9.5 billion people on the planet,
so about another 2.5 billion people between now and 2050.
There is a projection that the population's
going to top out at around that level
and stay at essentially 9.5 billion by 2050.
That's based on certain assumptions
about what happens to birth rate when GDP increases,
and they may not actually play out.
So we're looking at least 2 1/2 billion more people
on the planet in our generation.
The second factor, though, is urbanization.
So if you go back again to the beginning of the Industrial
Revolution and you think about the population
of the planet at that time, roughly 2%
of people on the earth in 1800 lived
in a city of a million or more.
By 1900, it was 10%.
By 1960, it was 25%.
By April of 2008, it was 50%.
We're currently sitting somewhere north
of 50% urbanization on the planet,
so roughly half the people on the planet
live in a city of a million or more.
Again, the same projections suggest that by 2050 we'll
be looking at somewhere between 65% and 75% urbanization.
So somewhere around the current population of the planet--
7 billion people-- will be living in a large city
by the middle of the century.
Interestingly, that urbanization process
is not only going to account for all the gross population
growth on the planet.
It's also going to account for a lot of people
leaving rural environments and moving
to the cities between now and the middle of the century.
So actually the urban environment
is going to grow by roughly 3 billion people between now
and the middle of the century.
Roughly 1 1/2 million people per week migrate from a country
area to a city, so roughly the same number of people that it
took all of human history until 1960 to generate across
the entire planet are going to move to cities within the next
30 years.
Edgar Peters, who's the head of the Africa City
Center in Cape Town in South Africa,
says we're looking at dramatic disruptive change in just one
generation because of that urbanization and population
growth.
That's not all, though.
Those urban environments will not
be evenly distributed across the surface of the earth.
They'll be almost entirely in the developing world
in low and middle income countries.
This is not a phenomenon that we see
in Europe and the United States.
It's a phenomenon of sub-Saharan Africa, that Mediterranean
basin, South Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean.
It's not evenly distributed.
It's developing world cities.
And those cities are overwhelmingly
located on coastlines for reasons of basic physics.
When you want to move heavy large stuff around,
for all of you in history and still now,
it's been a hell of a lot easier to move that around by water
than on land.
So cities have tended to cluster against large bodies of water
on rivers, on major river deltas, lakes,
or on coastlines.
Already today, 80% of people on the planet
live within 50 miles of the sea.
And of course, we're dealing with what systems theorists
would call sensitivity to initial conditions here.
So as urbanization takes place, it's
not happening against the background
of an evenly distributed human population.
Cities are already on coastlines,
so as people move to existing cities,
they're going to be moving to coastlines.
So we're going to see a population that's
incredibly clustered in urban environments in third world
cities on coastlines.
Obviously, that changes the environment
in which we operate, but actually the military well
understood this stuff 25 years ago.
So a marine general called Krulak
wrote about a thing called a three block war in the 1990s,
and he had guys like Ralph Peters and Robert Scales--
and these are all military theorists
that I'm mentioning-- who really focused on the problems of what
we call the urban littoral back in the 1990s.
And I read some stuff on this.
It was pretty well understood in the community at that point.
But what's happened is the military
since 9/11 has been dragged off into this other environment.
Now, I wouldn't call Afghanistan a geographical fluke.
There are deserts, and mountains, and jungles
where conflict is going to occur in the future,
but because conflict tends to happen where
people live and the general parameters
of human civilization shape the parameters within which
conflict happens, the majority of conflict on the planet,
like the majority of everything on the planet,
is going to happen in third world
coastal cities by the middle of the century.
And I can talk more in detail in the Q&A
if you like about the data that supports that.
But what's really interesting to me is not these old trends.
They've been around for a long time,
and they're well understood.
What's interesting is the new trend, which is connectivity.
Now, I'm talking to a bunch of people at Google,
so I probably don't need to go into the level of detail
on this that I have with some of the other folks
that I've spoken to, but just a couple of data points.
In the year 2000, there were 30,000 cellphones in Nigeria.
Today, there are 113 million.
Last year, I spent some time walking around Mogadishu
engaging with the community there
on some work we were doing, and Mogadishu
is a city that survived for 20 years
without a government or a central state.
24% of people that live in Mogadishu
own and use a cell phone.
There are four major cellphone companies.
Internet access from Mogadishu is actually a lot easier
than from parts of the United States
if you want to talk to people, because you're very closely
geographically connected to the international undersea cable
network.
There's a market in the middle of Mogadishu called the Bakaara
Market, which was the scene of a big gun battle
about 20 years ago.
On the ground floor of that market
is a currency trading exchange where
people are on the internet and on their cell phones,
and they're trading the Somali Shilling, which
is the currency again that survived for 20 years
without a central bank.
It floats on international exchange rates.
It gets updated five times a day,
and the traders on that floor punch out a SMS text message
to everybody that trades in the city five times
a day with the current exchange rate.
And so you have all these traders
out there on their cellphones all the time
tapping into a global patent of commerce.
And one of the things we're seeing
is that access to the international networks
of trade, things like remittance flows,
arbitrage, the movement of currency
or the movement of goods around the planet
has overtaken agricultural surplus
as a major driver of city growth.
So Mogadishu is not a city that can
be sustained by the rest of the Somali economy.
The reason that it's there and it's that big is it's
a trading city.
It's always been there, but now it's
not just a trading city that sends charcoal to Yemen,
or sends cart around the rest of the country,
and engages in basic commodities trading.
It's also a trading city that's international,
because you have 800,000 Somalis in the international diaspora,
and they're connected to the 7 1/2 million Somalis that live
in the country in a way that just never was possible before.
Another example, we mentioned Syria earlier.
Until 2000, there was virtually no internet, no satellite,
television, and no cell phone access in Syria.
Hafez al-Assad, the president of Syria from the 1970s,
came from peasant stock.
He was a bit of a Luddite.
He wasn't that interested in allowing Syrians to connect
to the rest of the world for a variety of obvious reasons,
and he essentially denied access to all this connectivity
until his death in 2000.
His son, though, Bashar al-Assad,
was a bit more of a computer nerd.
He was the president of the Syrian Computer Society
before becoming president.
He was a bit of a AV club guy at college.
He was quite interested in this issue of connectivity.
Ironically, under their previous regime,
you could get a satellite dish, but you did that
by getting it on the black market
from the Syrian military who would happily sell you one
and then track all your usage of that satellite dish thereafter.
But after 2000, there was this period known as the Damascus
Spring when Bashar al-Assad through open electronic
connectivity, and we saw this massive surge
in cell phone usage, in internet access,
in access to satellite television.
And actually if you look at the other cities
and other countries involved in the Arab Spring,
you see a very, very similar pattern
of this explosion of connectivity after 2000.
When the uprising came in 2011, that fundamentally
changed the way that the conflict developed in Syria.
Unlike the 1980s when the regime was
able to crush one city at a time because people didn't know what
was going on, this time people were
able to talk to each other.
And the uprising spread across about half a dozen cities
on the first day, and it reached 20 cities
in the first two weeks.
And so the regime was not able to get ahead of the curve
this time.
The other critical difference that we've
seen in all the Arab Spring conflicts
is the way that a tech savvy connected population that
is able to access technical instructions but also
physical manufacturing facilities
can rapidly generate weaponry and capabilities
that just weren't available even a decade ago.
And we can talk in more detail in Q&A if you like about that.
But I'll just give you one example.
In the Aleppo area-- which is in northern Syria--
last year, a bunch of guys in the Syrian free army
downloaded a bunch of instructions off the internet
and started producing their own mortar systems, which
they used Google Android phones to control.
They used the compass app and a variety of calculation tables
to decide where they're going to fire those mortars.
They look at Google Earth as a way of targeting,
and they'll use access to the internet
to basically pass messages back and forth on Twitter
to control the fall of shot.
But also they downloaded instructions
that enabled them to build their own army vehicles,
so in a backyard factory in Aleppo
last year, a bunch of guys made this thing called al-Shams,
which is their lightweight tank that has many mono chassis.
It's about 6 feet long and about 3 1/2 feet wide.
It's controlled with a Game Boy console from inside,
and you look at a flat screen television.
It doesn't have a turret, which is actually
the most complicated piece of an armored vehicle to build.
Instead, it has a remote control weapon station
where they basically a robot electric motor that
controls the 7.62 millimeter machine
gun that sits outside the turret.
And you've got a series of armored video cameras
that can be replaced if they get broken that
allow the thing to basically run through a Go Pro
to a Game Boy controller, and the guy
drives it around the streets of Aleppo
using basically home consumer entertainment
technology to control it.
When I showed it to a bunch of army guys earlier this year,
they said to me, well, why would you take all that technology
and put it into this tiny little army vehicle that's
only 3 feet wide and 6 feet long and it can't fight
another tank, because it only has a machine gun?
Well, the reason is because tanks can't get down
streets in a place like Aleppo.
A Bradley armored fighting vehicle is about 16 feet wide,
so is an Abrams tank.
They're not getting that.
They're not going to get into that environment,
and it doesn't need a big gun.
It needs a small machine gun for fighting infantry,
because it's not going to be dealing
with large armored vehicles.
So this is actually a very smart technical adaptation
of consumer electronics with basically well understood
internal combustion engine and the application of fire
in an urban environment.
But what's interesting about this is not the technology
itself.
It's the way that all these people concentrated
in an urban environment with a high degree of connectivity
have actually democratized military technology
on the ground.
And the way these conflicts have developed
is very different from how previous irregular warfare
conflicts developed.
I have case studies in the book on that stuff
and on things like the Mumbai attack
where the Lashkar-e-Taiba terrorists from Pakistan
used Twitter as their control feed
to actually control the attack and used downloads of Google
Earth to understand the flow of the city and how to attack it.
I have a bunch of other case studies.
Probably the most interesting to me
is actually the way that Jamaican drug gangs in Kingston
have used urban planning decisions made in the 1960s
to create these Garrison districts around the outside
of the city and control international drug
trade from slum areas around the capital city of Jamaica.
But let me finish by talking about I think what's
more germane to this discussion, which is how do we model
and understand cities under stress.
Because if I'm right about the future,
then the future environment is going
to be one of cities that are experiencing
this tsunami of inflow of population, and information,
and money, and drugs, and weapons that
come about through rapid urbanization.
And it's worth thinking about how do we model and understand
those and how do we think about resiliencies to address
those problems going forward.
So briefly on that, in looking at this in the book,
I go back to Karl Marx, weirdly enough.
So Marx-- whatever else he may have been--
was a social scientist who's looking at European cities
100 years after the beginning of that Industrial Revolution
process that I was talking about earlier.
So in the 1850s, Marx is looking at Paris, and Berlin,
and London, and he's saying what is it about these cities that
gives rise to the environment of urban squalor
that is famously written about by people
like Victor Hugo and Charles Dickens.
What is it that gives rise to that?
And he talks about what he calls a metabolic rift.
So that people that are used to living
in a rural environment, where most of the people that you
rely on for day-to-day survival are people that you're either
related to or you know personally.
And you're in this organic structure,
you then find yourself in a large urban environment
where everything's depersonalized,
and you now rely on these large institutionalized distanciated
systems that are essentially lots of moving parts
that all have to work together, or the whole thing falls over.
And he talks about how that creates this social rift
in the way that people look at each other,
but it disassociates them from the means of survival.
This idea sits fallow in urban planning for about 100 years,
and then a guy called Abel Wolman picks it up
in the 1960s, who was an urban planner,
and he writes an article that's actually
very seminal in urban ecology where
he talks about the metabolism of cities.
And Wolman's argument is pretty straightforward.
It's like if you imagine your body
as a system with various inputs and intakes of water, fuel,
food, and so on that come into your body,
and there are transformative processes
that result in energy and biomass and so on.
But they also result in toxins that
have to be metabolized and dealt with.
And if your body doesn't have the carrying capacity,
the metabolic systems in place to deal with those toxins,
then you're going to get sick.
He says you can apply the same idea to a city.
It has various inputs and inflows
and has various transformative processes,
and if the inflows overwhelm the carrying capacity
of the system, then you're going to see the emergence of toxins
that are going to result in stuff like pollution-- air
pollution, water pollution, and so on.
Now, this idea is very common now
in urban ecology in the physical sense, carbon, water,
air, how these things flow through an urban system.
And there are models that we use,
and there are material flow analysis systems
that we apply to understand that.
What I've done and what a lot of other people
have done in looking at cities in the last 10 or 20 years
is to do what I would call a non-material flow analysis.
So instead of looking at water or carbon,
we'll look at information, and money, and people, and weapons,
and drugs, and say does the city have the carrying capacity
to deal with those flows, or is it in fact getting overwhelmed.
And when you apply those kinds of models
to cities under stress, it turns out
you can start looking at them in a very different way,
and I can give you again some examples in Q&A from places
we've worked in Africa and Latin America to understand
how a city can be seen as essentially
a patent of intersecting flows rather than just
a piece of organized terrain.
Modeling that, we have found what
relies on a combination of big data, remote observation
of honest signals from the urban environment with field teams
that can understand what's beneath that data.
So we did a lot of work initially in Afghanistan,
and then subsequently in Syria, and in much of other places
in looking at environments that are under stress
and trying to understand what was going on
by remote observation.
After a while, we realized that that doesn't actually
give you the answer you're looking for.
It's like looking at a jungle canopy from above.
You can see the trees, but you don't know what's underneath.
And it turns out that you have to put a field
team on the ground to figure out what
is the delta between the observed data
and what you can see on the ground
before you can start to make predictive analysis about what
you're looking at.
So I'll give you one example, and unfortunately, Google
doesn't come into this story, because you guys charge
for use of Google Earth data.
But we used Open Street Map, which
is the Wiki version of Google Earth
to work with a series of communities, mainly
women's groups and a violence observatory
in a large African city on a coastline that
has a number of slums that are experiencing
a really high degree of violence.
Now, why women?
One of the reasons that women are
really important in this environment--
there's actually two reasons.
One is because they are consistently
excluded from the analysis.
So when you go and start looking at environments on the ground,
typically you end up speaking with elite class
urban males that speak English, which
is a pretty small subset of the environment
actually when you want to understand
what's really going on.
But much more importantly in my view
is that something like 80% of the people
that own businesses and employ people in slums
are actually women, and the reason for that
is pretty obvious.
A lot of these slums don't have a lot of jobs.
Like if you live in la Rocinha which
is a favela outside of Rio, you aren't
going to work in la Rocinha.
You're going to work downtown where the rich people need you
to sweep streets, and run the airport traffic, baggage
handling system, or drive taxis.
That's where the work is if you're a guy in la Rocinha.
If you want to work in the favela,
and you want to run a business, so you want to employ people,
then you're probably part of this network
of women small business owners that are actually
pretty common in these environments.
So we worked with these women's groups
to understand threat and risk in their slum.
And if you think about it, when you
walk through an urban environment,
you don't know if you're going to be mugged,
but you do know if it is going to happen,
it'll probably be over there.
There's just something about the environment
that tells you that it's risky.
And we built a map which essentially reflected
the community's perception of risk
in different specific areas within a slum.
And it's interesting when you compare that to the police data
that the police have-- which is again remote observation--
you would think that the government
of a large African city would know what's
going on in its environment.
Mostly they don't.
You can look at these things, and you
can identify any building off of Google Earth,
but if you talk to somebody from the government,
it's pretty rare for them to be able to tell you
what that building is.
Even if they know what the building is,
most of these streets don't have street names.
There are no house addresses, so there's
no way to record that information.
So we built these special models of where
the community felt unsafe, and we began looking at them.
We realized that actually these places have a visual signature.
There's something about them that's different,
the size of houses, the number of bins in a given
distance of road, how wide the streets
are, the density of urban lighting.
There's a whole variety of things
that make these areas look different,
and often humans can't tell that, but machines can.
And when you back up to a lot of scale model or large scale
picture, just a satellite image of a city,
you can start to pick these environments off the map,
because you know what you're looking for,
because you've done the field work.
So just the big data is not enough,
and just the field work is not enough.
The magic happens at the connectivity
between field teams that understand the environment who
are almost always entirely indigenous local inhabitants
of that environment and people sitting remotely
who can understand the bigger large end perspective.
And so a lot of what we do now in places in Africa,
and Latin America, and the Middle East
is founded on an idea that we co-ed design
where we bring a small external team with certain kinds
of technical or functional knowledge
into an environment where they work closely
under the direction of the local community.
And I'm going to take this back to warfare.
I really first experienced that in Iraq
when we finally began to turn around
what we'd been doing in Iraq.
And I'm going to end with this story,
and then I'll throw it open to questions.
When I first went into Iraq in 2006, we were in free fall.
3,000 civilians were getting killed in just Baghdad city
alone e every week.
That's a 9/11 every week.
By September of 2007, we'd reduced that
to the point where a few people getting killed was a bad night.
100 was a terrible week.
95% reduction in violence in just
a seven month period in Iraq.
How did we do that?
It wasn't because we had this great new counter insurgency
manual.
That helped.
I wasn't because we had a president who was very engaged.
Although, we wouldn't have been able to do it without that.
But actually it was because we finally did something
that we never really done before,
which is to actually start talking to the Iraqis
about how to defend their neighborhoods.
So before that, we had typically gone
into an Iraqi neighborhood, and we would swept the locals out
of the way, and we'd say sit down, shut up.
We have the answer to your problem.
We're going to back up this democracy truck.
We're going to unpack the solution,
and you guys will be very happy with the result.
And what had happened was not that.
What had happened was a city that had basically torn itself
apart for those 12 to 18 months before the surge began.
And in that time, interestingly the period
when we backed off from Baghdad, a lot of local security
councils had emerged, and people had
started to create these little security groups that
decided we're going to figure out
how to defend our own community and they had actually
gone out and put in place a whole series of systems,
not just physical systems, but reporting systems,
and information management systems,
and ways of understanding their environment,
which they had used to survive through most of 2006.
So when we finally went back in the spring of 2007
and began to reengage with Baghdad,
this time we sat down with people,
and we said tell us what you've been doing for the last year,
and what's worked, and what hasn't worked,
and what you need some additional help on,
and what we should just not touch,
and you give us this design brief
of what we should build to support
your security in your environment.
And initially they were like, what?
Because I actually had a meeting with some guys in a place
called Sadr City where they were like, what?
You want to know what we think?
They were like, dude, we've been working
with the Coalition for four years.
You're the first person that's ever asked us
what we think about how to secure our district.
And they were very, very suspicious.
When we finally began to do this stuff-- and it wasn't just me,
it was people all over Iraq-- they got religion.
Because they saw that we really were serious.
We were really going to listen to what they wanted to do,
and we're going to work with them.
And we engaged in this process of co-design,
and we actually designed stuff together
to build a solution that would work for them.
Now, there's companies here in San Francisco like IDEO,
for example, that have this idea down
in terms of participatory development and urbanization,
and they understand stuff like human centered design
as a way of engaging with communities
that are under stress to try to build a better solution.
My challenge to them and what our company's been doing
has been trying to figure out how do you
do that when people are shooting at you.
How do you do that when it's so violent that you can't just
sit down with people and say hey man, what should we do?
What are the ways you can observe
that environment remotely, and how can you
have field teams working the ground
to try to build-- what for want of a better term
I would call-- peace and resilience in environments that
are just not stable by definition.
These cities are growing at such a rate that our traditional way
of thinking about the problem, which is to bring stability,
to stabilize-- as the IMF has it ,
or to bring stability operations as the military talks about is
just not going to work.
If you were born in Daka in 1950,
you would have been born in a city of 400,000 people.
Today that city's 12 million.
It's going to be 25 million by the middle of the century.
It's not a stable system.
Stability is a systems characteristic.
Resiliency is a characteristic who's act is in the system.
Rather than trying to hold back the tide of rapid urbanization,
we need to be focusing on how to teach people to swim,
and that's a lot of what most people that
are working in this environment are now doing.
So US Aid and a lot of the other aid agencies
have now a resiliency agenda for how
they're going to bring the kind of systems
to communities that allow them to be
resilient in the face of rapid change.
And I think circling back to that Afghan ambush, that's
what we need to be looking at going forward,
not remote rural mountainous environments where you don't
have a lot of connectivity, and you
don't have a high population density.
We've become really, really good at operating
in that environment in the last decade,
but the future environment is not that.
It's big cities on coastlines in the developing
world with an enormous degree of connectivity,
and there's a massive upside set of opportunities
to lift people out of poverty, to bring all kinds of benefits
to communities that don't have them now,
to actually generate peace as this thing from just
the absence of conflict.
That opportunity is there alongside a huge set
of risks that will confront us if we don't deal
with this massive population tsunami that's bearing down
on coastal cities in the next generation.
So let me stop there and summarize
by saying we need to get our heads out of the mountains,
and start thinking about this future urban environment.
And I'm going to throw the floor open to questions,
so I don't know how you want to run.
If you guys want to nominate, and we'll go from there.
AUDIENCE: When we were speaking earlier,
you had talked about inoculating cities with some resiliency
as they're going through this rapid growth.
Could you talk a little bit more about that please?
DAVID KILCULLEN: So great point, Chris.
So, we're not just talking about cities that are there now.
One projection by the Indian Institute
for Human Settlements-- which is like their heart organization--
is that the entire west coast of India
is going to be one single giant conurbation by 2040.
So large slums will fill in the currently existing space
between existing cities.
There's a guy called Mike Davis out in Hawaii
who's written a number of really good books, one which
is called "Planet of Slums" where he projects that we're
going to see this giant slum spoil fill
in the space between existing cities.
So there's paradoxes that a lot of the problems of urbanization
that we're going to see in the next generation
are going to happen in cities that aren't there yet,
because they haven't happened yet.
And so part of this is about getting ahead of the curve
and thinking about what do these kinds of environments
need to channel them into a pathway of urban development
that's going to result in a different future.
And I'm trying in the book not to predict a dystopian view.
If you want that, go read "Snow Crash"
by Neal Stephenson, which is 15 years old,
but it's all there in California.
So this stuff's been figured out as a dystopian vision already.
What I'm doing is making a projection
based on current data and saying it
doesn't have to be that future.
It can actually be different.
And I think it's about thinking about where will cities grow to
and what happens when rapid unchecked urban growth acretes
around an existing city.
So you get this donut shaped or horseshoe shaped ring
of terrain that clusters around an existing city,
but it didn't used to be empty terrain.
That's where the city grew its food.
It's where the water catchment area was.
It's where a lot of the transportation roots
come through.
So you have this ring of slums that
emerge around a city that separates
the city from the sources of all those critical commodities,
the inflows of the metabolism that it needs to survive.
And these are areas where you don't
have a lot of government presence.
You don't have a lot of government services.
And so non-state armed groups often
emerge and end up controlling these environments,
and they don't just smuggle drugs.
They actually provide governance services in these environments.
And it's typical of governments to look at these as a threat.
I don't see them that way at all.
These are people who are engaging in stuff
that the government either can't or won't
do that the population needs.
They're actually fulfilling a central function
to the existence of the city, but what
it means if you're an urban politician downtown
is there's now a ring of territory that's
like a gauntlet around the city, and all the supplies
that the city needs to survive have
to run that gauntlet every day, and there's
a non-state armed group, a malitia, or a communitarian
group that's sitting astride that.
And you're going to have to deal with that group,
because if you don't, they can shut the city down.
So I think it's stuff like that.
It's understanding how do we enable urban growth
in a way that isn't going to generate
the kind of urban exclusion, and marginalization,
and political disposition of these people
that then creates the ground in which all this stuff takes
place.
And for the military guys, how are we
going to operate in giant cities like this which
could absorb a marine regiment or an army division and not
even notice?
It's going to have to be different from the traditional
way that we've thought about operational maneuver
from the sea or maneuver operational
in a littoral environment, because it's just so big now
that you're looking at a whole different space.
A lot more to talk about on that,
but I think getting ahead of the curve
is about predicting where the problem is going
to be in cities that haven't even happened yet
and how do you understand the resiliences that prevent
this kind of symptoms from developing
and to stop them in their tracks.
AUDIENCE: Thanks for coming.
Let's see.
Max Boot spoke here recently.
He's the author of the book on guerrilla warfare.
And at one point he said-- I think
I'm quoting him right-- that urban areas were not
very friendly for guerrillas, and his reason
was that it's too exposed.
You can't have meetings and organize.
You can't do rifle practice.
Clearly you disagree.
Do you think that's a factor, or [INAUDIBLE]?
DAVID KILCULLEN: Well, I think Max was just
a great book in his latest book, and I
have a lot of respect for his point of view.
And I think if you look at the big sweep of history
of guerrillas, which is what he's doing in the book,
he's right that traditionally guerrillas don't operate
in cities and haven't had a great degree of success
in cities.
And the reason for that is guerrillas
go to where the cover is.
They go to where they can hide.
And for most of human history, that's
been mountains and jungles, but today we
have foliage penetrating radar that can see through jungles.
And we've got drones that can sit on top of a mountain range
24 hours a day and tell you where the bad guys are.
There's not a lot of cover in the rural environment anymore.
The cover is in the cities.
And there's another key idea that
comes in here, which is the idea of legibility.
So there's a great guy up at Yale
called James C. Scott who's a professor.
I don't think you can be a professor of [INAUDIBLE]
studies, but that's basically what he is.
And he wrote an awesome book called
"Seeing Like a State" where he talks about how
what governments try to do is they
try to make environments legible,
so they can read and interpret.
And if you work in Google, you basically work
in a giant legibility project, trying
to make the entire planet legible so the people can
understand that and do things with it.
There are huge parts of the planet that are not legible,
and most of those places now are in cities.
They're not in well developed well designed cities.
They're in these clusters of slums
where there's no street addresses,
and there's no house numbers, and you can spot a building
from space, but you don't know what's there,
and there's no way to understand who lives there.
Now that we have things like GDELT-- the global database
of events, language, and tone-- which
has been built for about 15 years or so,
and we have Twitter feeds that we can geolocate.
There's things that are emerging that allow us to make cities
more legible than they'd been in the past.
But I believe the balance has shifted
so that the urban environment is now
the safer environment for irregular operators compared
to the countryside.
That doesn't mean we won't see conflict in the mountains
and in the jungles.
We most definitely will.
But irregular conflict tends to happen where people live.
The vast majority of people are going
to be in urban environments, and the city now
is the area where you've got more
cover than the rural environment.
So I think Max is right as a historical statement about what
the history of irregular conflict has been,
but I think we're at a watershed where going forward we're
going to see increasing preponderance of this kind
of conflict happening not in downtown cities,
but in slums and in this ring of uncontrolled illegible
territory around the outside.
AUDIENCE: So you talk about where
you think the slums are going to grow and try to get ahead
of it, but it seems like any service you do in that area
before the slums is just going to draw
the people there and bring the slum sooner.
If you put schools and parks, you're
just going to end up with slums at the schools and parks.
How do you get ahead of it?
The real problem is just too much people
with not enough jobs.
DAVID KILCULLEN: Right, that's a great point.
In fact, there's a woman called Sheela Patel who
runs an organization called SPARC in Mumbai who
makes this point.
She says the government has decided not to provide services
to people in slums, because they think
it's going to attract people to the slums.
One of the great examples of that is sanitation.
So the Indian government says that an acceptable level
of sanitation is one toilet per 50 people.
Right now it's one toilet per 600 people
in many of the slums in Mumbai.
And she says as if people moved to slums
just because they want access to a toilet.
There's plenty of places to crap in the woods.
Actually people are moving to cities
because of economic opportunity.
And I also think-- and we see this
in a number of places-- because of the connectivity
differential between rural environments
and the urban environment, if now
the way that you make your money is by access
to a globalized economy and you need connectivity
to do that and there's a connectivity differential
between the rural environment where you don't have
that connectivity and the urban environment when you do,
then one of the major reasons why people are moving to cities
is because that's where the Wi-Fi is.
That's where the internet is.
That's where the density of cell phone coverage
is that allows you to tap into that environment.
So I think that tells you that there
are three ways to really address this.
One is to attack the supply side,
to do things in the rural environment that
make it better for people that are there so that they don't
decide we're going to pick up and move to urban environments
at quite the same rate.
So more rural Wi-Fi, better access to cell phones
in the countryside, water, sanitation, education, conflict
resolution in the kinds of conflicts
we were talking about here that will still
happen in the rural environment, there's
a supply side problem of how do you address
people deciding to move to the city.
Then in the city itself, there are all these resiliency
interventions that you can undertake in order
to make it hard of a conflict to break out,
to create ways to resolve that conflict quicker,
and to bring in the kinds of services that prevent conflicts
from developing in the first place.
So they're the demand side, or how do you
increase the carrying capacity of an urban system in such
a way that it can handle the flow?
But then ultimately, though,
AUDIENCE: I think nothing we can do
is going to stop the giant tendency of populations
to move to urban environments.
It's more about helping people cope better
with the environment they find themselves
in than about turning off the tap.
AUDIENCE: I just have trouble seeing how to grow resiliency
when it means a slum is stronger because more people live there.
I mean, that's resiliency in the anti-fragile sense.
You get stronger because more people come.
I don't see how to do that.
DAVID KILCULLEN: There's actually-- well,
you should buy my book then, because there's
a lot of case studies in there.
In the last chapter, I look at several examples of things
that I think suggest ways to think about this.
I would just say I'm not suggesting
that I have the answer.
What I'm doing is pointing to two things.
One is there's this problem out there which
we need to be thinking about, and I
think that actually in the urban studies
environment and actually a lot of people in the data science
community, people are already thinking about that.
But the military's been sidetracked
into this other environment for the last decade,
and as we come back out of that environment,
I think we have to put that conversation back together
again and have people that really understand military,
and law enforcement, and all those kinds
of other kinds of operations in the environment,
reengage with a debate that's actually
moved on a lot in the last 12 years
while we've been busy in Afghanistan.
And the other thing that I think it is to reemphasize
is you have littoral, because being on a coastline
is different from being in a city elsewhere.
Just one example of that, last year
for the first time in history, there
was a simultaneous outbreak of cholera in four West African
countries during the monsoon season,
and the reason for that is people
have moved to slums on the outskirts of these cities.
A lot of those slums are built on stilts over the sea.
They don't have sanitation.
There was a tidal storm surge that pushed a lot of sewage
from these slums into the inland water system and infected lots
of people with cholera, but all these cities
are connected with each other through coastal shipping
and air transportation so that the infection spread nearly
simultaneously.
There's a very interesting study by the World Health
Organization where they look at how air travel in particular
completely invalidates our traditional way of handling
infectious disease.
If you have the right incubation period
and you posit the idea of a continued air traffic system,
it can be around the entire system
before the first patient gets sick.
So instead of having breakout in one country and you then
contain that, you can have simultaneous outbreak
in basically every continent except Antarctica because
of the way the air transportation system works.
Who runs baggage handling systems in most of the world?
Who is the workforce in most airports?
It's people that don't live in the rich districts downtown.
It's people that live in the slums around the outside.
So I think this is the sort of stuff where
we need to be really engaging to think about how do we get ahead
of the curve, and maybe we can.
Maybe you're right.
I hope that's not true, but it's at least worth
thinking about it I think.
AUDIENCE: Hey, thanks for coming.
I wanted to ask about if we have this large population
growth over the next 30 years, have all these people moving
into cities and then simultaneously
from other people, particularly like futurists like Peter
Diamandis and such who have these ideas that talk about
well, we'll have more and more technology.
We'll have to stop worrying about low level agriculture
so much as more of that's-- we'll just say-- automated.
So I was wondering if you had any thoughts on what the job
or what the working situation looks like for people
in these cities as we get these giant populations.
DAVID KILCULLEN: Yeah, I've looked
at that in a little bit of detail,
but not actually as much as I would like to.
I think there's a whole additional study here
that's not only focused on employment,
but it's focus on the intersection of various things
that the aid and development community takes for granted.
So, I had an interesting discussing with the Gates
Foundation last year about maternal health and infant
mortality.
And of course, if you're running a private philanthropic
organization, you have to define what your field of action
is going to be, and if that's your field of action, that's
where you're going to focus.
But the fact is if you come up with effective maternal health
and infant mortality programs now,
you better have an education plan for five or six
years from now, and you better have an employment
plan for 18 years from now, or you're
going end up with what happened to the Libyans
where the Libyans did a great job in the '70s and '80s
improving public health, which resulted in a youth
bulge, which resulted in a lot of people hitting college age.
And the Libyan education system was well
developed for making people literate,
giving them skills in English, and helping them become very
politically aware, but it was really bad at generating people
that had skills that were relevant to the Libyan economy,
which is basically oil and gas.
So you had this massive number of expats doing those jobs,
and a lot of people coming out of Libyan colleges
ended up working for the civil service,
because basically they just created
this giant public service in order
to absorb all these people that didn't have usable skills.
Then you had these government departments that were basically
just jobs programs and didn't exist
to provide any service to the community,
so you had this breakdown of trust between the government
and the population and this giant underemployment
challenge.
And that was the recruiting pool from which
people sprung in 2011 against the regime when they began
seeing places like Dubai and Kuwait
on the television, which they'd never had access to until 2003.
And they're like, hang on a second,
how come those guys are living like that,
and we're living like this?
So I think that issue is critically important,
figuring out the intersections of all these different programs
and how they work together.
I think-- and this is just my point
of view based on not a huge amount of data,
but just based on observing a lot of these cities--
there's a lot of jobs out there that
are emerging through self-synchronization
at the local level.
So if you want to go on your Google mapping app,
and you live in Lagos, and you want to check the traffic,
it's useless, because it's red all the time.
Lagos seems to have words for traffic
like Eskimos have words for snow.
There's so many people there.
It's the infrastructure of a medium
sized town with a population the size of Australia basically.
And it's always red.
But, there are about 25 different local level radio
stations that only broadcast for a few blocks
where people call in and tell the radio
DJ what's going on with traffic, and you
don't go on Google to find out traffic.
You just change-- people have written up
on their window the frequencies of these local radio stations,
and they just change from one to another as they move through.
And they've basically self-synchronized
their own traffic information system
based on totally analog means in that environment.
So there's a lot of those kinds of things.
And there's also a cognitive elite,
which is not the machine.
It's the marriage of machine and human
that's actually driving forward a lot
of the economic development in places that we see.
I can talk about that offline if you want,
because it's a whole other discussion.
But then there's a lot of people that are basically dispossessed
because of this change, and what happens to those people
will drive a lot of what happens in these environments I think.
AUDIENCE: Thank you.
MALE SPEAKER: Thanks for coming.
Let's have a warm hand for David Kilcullen.
DAVID KILCULLEN: Hey, thank you for having me.