It may not be worth the billions in dues that we pay, but the United Nations does perform a few useful functions, among them producing some interesting reports. The latest of these is The State of World Population 2007 from the United Nations Population Fund. The news is summarized in the first few paragraphs of the introduction:
In 2008, the world reaches an invisible but momentous milestone: For the first time in history, more than half its human population, 3.3 billion people, will be living in urban areas. By 2030, this is expected to swell to almost 5 billion. Many of the new urbanites will be poor. Their future, the future of cities in developing countries, the future of humanity itself, all depend very much on decisions made now in preparation for this growth.
While the world’s urban population grew very rapidly (from 220 million to 2.8 billion) over the 20th century, the next few decades will see an unprecedented scale of urban growth in the developing world. This will be particularly notable in Africa and Asia where the urban population will double between 2000 and 2030: That is, the accumulated urban growth of these two regions during the whole span of history will be duplicated in a single generation. By 2030, the towns and cities of the developing world will make up 81 percent of urban humanity.
The report notes, even-handedly, that the implications of this shift for social policy are mixed: “The current concentration of poverty, slum growth, and social disruption in cities does paint a threatening picture. Yet no country in the industrial age has ever achieved significant economic growth without urbanization. Cities concentrate poverty, but they also represent the best hope of escaping it.” The rest of the report looks at how to alleviate the negative consequences and accentuate the positive.
But from a military standpoint the picture is much bleaker. Its implications can be summed up in one acronym that our armed forces dread: MOUT (Military Operations on Urban Terrain). And if you want to know why it’s dreaded within the military, simply think of the American experience fighting in cities such as Hue in 1968 and Fallujah in 2004. Both were ugly battles with heavy casualties, because urban environments negate much of our firepower advantage.
The only way to try to avoid a block-by-block struggle is to simply wipe out the entire city, which is what we did to numerous German and Japanese cities in World War II. But that’s not something we seem willing to do anymore, at least not given the stakes in places like Iraq or Vietnam. In any case, even unrestrained use of firepower is not a foolproof strategy—the Germans leveled Stalingrad but still faced a tough fight against dug-in Russian defenders who used rubble as fighting positions. The same thing happened more recently to the Russians in Chechnya—they leveled Grozny, but still had to fight their way into the city.
The U.S. Army knows how unpleasant such fights can be, so it tries to avoid them wherever possible. That helps to explain why the last version of the U.S. Army’s Field Manual 90-10 (Military Operations in Urbanized Terrain) was issued in 1979. A new edition is in the works, and it can’t come soon enough, given these trends in global population. American soldiers in the 21st century will be doing much of their fighting in places that resemble the alleys and streets of Baghdad more than they do the desert where the 1991 Gulf war was fought.
